05/28/2021
In “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Georges Bataille says that the Gnostic conception of matter was “matter as an active principle having its own eternal autonomous existence as darkness … and as evil”.[1] This is to say that matter, for the Gnostics, is matter as evil because darkness is nothing more than a principle of evil, as is mud.[2] Thus, we have opened up the term ‘matter’ that is within Bataille’s economy of epistemic expenditure to many conceptual parallels. Eroticism, transgression, sovereignty, etc. all represent evil — thus they exist as distinctly materialist.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr.. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
References
[1]: Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 47.
[2]: Ibid., 20.