Georges Bataille Erotism Quotes

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance.

Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism — to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.

To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilised man, violence is silent. Civilisation and language grew as though violence was something outside. But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.

Let me stress that in this work flights of Christian religious experience and bursts of erotic impulses are seen to be part and parcel of the same movement.

The taboo does not banish the transgression but, on the contrary, depends upon it, just as the transgression depends on the existence of the taboo: “The transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it

In essence, love raises the feeling of one being for another to such a pitch that the threatened loss of the beloved or the loss of his love is felt no less keenly than the threat of death. Hence love is based on a desire to live in anguish in the presence of an object of such high worth that the heart cannot bear to contemplate losing it. The fever of the senses is not a desire to die. Nor is love the desire to lose but the desire to live in fear of possible loss, with the beloved holding the lover on the very threshold of a swoon. At that price alone can we feel the violence of rapture before the beloved.

The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim.

От само себе си се разбира, че развитието на еротизма с нищо не е външно за областта на религията, но тъкмо християнството, противопоставяйки се на еротизма, е осъдило повечето религии. В някакъв смисъл християнската религия е може би най-нерелигиозната.

Nous nous approchons du vide, mais ce n'est pas pour y tomber. Nous voulons nous griser de vertige et l'image de la chute y suffit.

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of our extravagance. We want to feel as remote from the world as we can. As remote as we can: that is hardly strong enough; we want a world turned upside down and inside out. The truth of eroticism is treason. De Sade’s system is the ruinous form of eroticism. Moral isolation means that all breaks are off; it shows what spending can really mean. The man who admits the value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. The respect of man to man leads to a cycle of servitude that allows only for minor moments of disorder and finally ends the respect that their attitude is based on since we are denying the sovereign moment to man in general.

Tutku, onu hisseden için bedenlerin arzusundan daha şiddetli bir anlam taşıyabilir. Beraberinde mutluluk umutlarını getirmesine rağmen tutkunun kargaşa ve rahatsızlığa neden olduğunu hiçbir zaman unutmamalıyız. Mutlu tutku bile o kadar şiddetli bir karışıklığa neden olur ki mutluluk haz duyulmasını sağlamadan önce çok büyük olduğu için karşıtına, yani acıya benzer. Tutkunun özü, iki varlığın süreksizliğini mükemmel sürekliliğe dönüştürmektir.

Anguish is what makes humankind, it seems; not anguish alone, but anguish transcended and the act of transcending it.

If I were to be asked what we are, I should answer: 'We are the door to everything that can be, we are the expectation that no material response can satisfy, no trick with words deceive. We seek the heights. Each one of us can ignore this search if he has a mind to, but mankind as a whole aspires to these heights; they are the only definition of his nature, his only justification and significance.

As for the fact that Simone dared to piss on the corpse, whether in boredom or, at worst, in irritation: it mainly goes to prove how impossible it was for us to understand what was happening, and of course, it is no more understandable today than it was then. Simone, being truly incapable of conceiving death such as one normally considers it, was frightened and furious, but in no way awestruck. Marcelle belonged to us so deeply in our isolation that we could not see her as just another corpse. Nothing about her death could be measured by a common standard, and the contradictory impulses overtaking us in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving us blind and, as it were, very remote from anything we touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless.

He preferido ser poco inteligible antes que inexacto

No soy un hombre de ciencia en el sentido de que hablo de experiencia interior, no de objetos; pero, en el momento en que hablo de objetos, lo hago como los hombres de ciencia, con el rigor que es inevitable.