05/20/2021
In his work Inner Experience, Georges Bataille says that “[w]e are not everything. We only have two certitudes in this world, that and that of dying”.[1] This may seem weird to many who have read Bataille because of the fact that Bataille often claims that knowledge is impossible to have. There is no contradiction. Bataille believes that these two things are known by all beings because of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. Within the schema of the master-slave dialectic, beings differentiate themselves from Being, and their very being is constituted by a fear of death. This means that all beings must firstly know that they are not everything in order to be as they couldn’t want to be if they already were and this is because “MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE”[2] and secondly know death because their existence is predicated on a fear of death.
Bibliography
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014.
— — — . 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, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall. (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2014), 4.
[2]: 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), 171.
