1AC Mysticism

Someplace
A field of flowers
Rousing under remnants of the dawn:
Out there! from death, I rose
Above the silent many
A distant will-o'-the-wisp
Reflecting under airs of minor ninths
How rich the ambience they threw!

What theme of prosody
Had rendered me?
Tho silent were its words:
A broken soul in pulsing pain
Thou mustnt guess what goes behind
The sick and ghostly screen of war!

In sallow-grey and other ashen hues,
Disrobed of warming flesh
That reassures the bones,
A twisted pose
Portrayed my physicality
Not unlike the carcass of a prey;

But as a cloud of thought, I mused,
Exacerbating woes
Collected in a life dispatched
In freely flowing blood,
Conferring crimson shades
Upon the arid lakes aflood
With glorious tides of nascent buds
Begetting innocence.
And as we glowed in ruddy shades,
I asked: What future lies ahead?
What terror trades?
Slaughter 11 (Mark Slaughter, 2011, Upon the Arid Lakes http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/upon-
the-arid-lakes/, CP)

Poetry is a form of mystical experience that lays waste to the resources of articulation. Our
performance is the eye of the storm, the slippage into intoxication, a black sun, a lack, a laceration, a
holy communication that opens up affirms a politics of the sacred
Land, 92 (Nick, Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 202-204, CP)
As if the confusional cyclone of poetry had already laid waste the resources of articulation, Rimbaud says that he
cannot explain himself, just as two years later in A Season in Hell he will write: I understand, and not knowing how to explain
myself without pagan words, I would rather be silent [R 304]. This is not to say that words come to an end, but
only that discourse ceases to dominate them. The motor is not discursive competence, but the vacant
eye of the storm. In a further letter, this time to Paul Demeny, dated the 15th of the same month, Rimbaud repeated the phrase a
deregulation of all the senses *R 10+ (only the emphasis is changed), the phrase I am an other, and the rhetoric of the pote maudit from the
Izambard letter, stressing the necessity of intoxication, suffering, and exile: The poet makes himself a visionary by a long,
immense and rational deregulation of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness: he
searches himself, he [the poet[ exhausts all poisons in himself, in order to preserve only their
quintessences. Unspeakable torture where he has need of all faith, all superhuman strength, where he becomes
among everyone the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed oneand the supreme scholar!
Because he arrives at the unknown, since he has cultivated his soul, already rich, more than anybody! He arrives
at the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them! Let [the poet] him die as [it]
he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things: other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the
horizons where the other collapsed! A method or an antimethod, the will to chance, a voyage into loss of
control, this impossibility is the desolate core of poetry, a space of slippage. To slip is not to plan, to work,
to struggle. I have a horror of all trades. Masters and workers, all peasants, ignoble. The hand at the quill just as the hand at the
plough *R 301+. Rimbaud confesses that he is lazier than a toad *R 301-2+, without decency, an alien to the civilization of toil. I have never
been of this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of the race who sings under torture; I do not understand the
laws, I am a beast: you fool yourselves *R 308+. An explorer of the sacred, traversing wildernesses beyond piety
or sense, charred by the flame of the impossible, Rimbaud treads the edge of the maze, scraping away his tight European skin.
* * * I am of an inferior race to all eternity [R 304]. Religion. * * * The mobility peculiar to the labyrinthreal cosmic
motion or liquidationis not confined by the scales, instead it finds a shaft of facilitation passing from
one to another, a slippage (glissement), the full consequence of which is an illimitable dispersion across the
strata: communication through death. A strangely stationary mobility therefore. It is not that journeys are lacking in Batailles
writings, merely that they radiate from a transition in profundity, from which they derive their futility and abortiveness. These static voyages
can be undertaken by invalids in bed; Tropmann in the last two sections of Maternal Feet in The Blue of Noon *III 425-39], Henri in Julie [IV 57-
114+. The Wait in The Abb C. *III 316-19+ describes Charles and ponine in bed, glued together by the horror of Charles apparently impending
murder at the hands of the giant of butchery (another Henri) who ponine counts amongst her lovers. The narrator of the first part of The
Impossible declares himself: prey to fear in my bed *III 113+. Meanderings in extension remain trapped in the maze,
unless they cross over into a blind slippage into death *III 29+, this slippage outside oneself that
necessarily produces itself when death comes into play [II 246]. A slippage produces itself [V 113], we do
not do so, a chasm opens, chaos (=0), something horrific in its depth, a season in Hell that slips immensely into the
impossible *III 77+, the intensity and intimacy of a sensation opened itself onto an abyss where there is
nothing which is not lost, just as a profound wound opens itself to death [IV 248]. Poetry is this slippage
that is broken upon the end of poetry, erased in a desert as beautiful as death [IV 18]. There is no
question of affirmation, achievement, gain, but only a catastrophe without mitigation compared to which
everything is poverty and imprisonment. I would love to forget the ungraspable slippage of myself into corruption *III 227+.
Corruption is the spiritual cancer that reigns in the depths of things [IV 261]. My heart is black ink my sex
is a dead sun [III 87]. Life decomposes into filth as it explores the vicarious death of the universe. In no case
does the heterogeneous belong to any scale, since it is exactly the irruption of decomposability. Heterogeneous (base) matter
blood, sperm, urine and vomit *I 24+is characterized negatively in relation to every possible stratum of
elemental organization, which is why it resists the discourse on things. Vomit, excrement, and decomposing flesh [it]
do[es] not proffer unproblematic solidity or comprehensible form, but rather quasifluid divisibility, imprecise consistency, multiple, insufficient,
and evanescent patterns of cohesion. All of which are mixed with words slimed with sanctity. To write is to investigate chance [VI
69], but the explosive excess that breaks in a black foam of poetry is not merely a risk, because risk
implies the possibility of a benign outcome. It is a ruin without limits *III 75+, the submission of man to
[blank] *II 247+. Excess is venom.

This years resolution calls upon us to debate about increasing development or exploration into the
Earths oceans without discussing the underlying structures that allow for Ocean striation to manifest
itself in the first place. Thus we affirm mystical experience as the site for challenging hegemonic
ideologies that seek to instrumentalize all aspects of existence.

This debate round is a question of our methodological orientation towards the self. Instead of
focusing on the legal institutions and executive decisions that influence things like killing, detention,
cyber operations, and ultimately macropolitical warfare, we choose to write violence, affirming a
state of internal warfare that tears down the very fabric of identity
Irwin 02 (Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, Exercises in Inutility, pg 130 133, 2002, CP)
I see nothing but a succession of cruel splendors whose very movement demands that I die. [... ] I picture
myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in accord with the world, at once as the prey and as a jaw of
TIME which kills without ceasing and without ceasing is killed. (557-58) Internalizing death, the mystic
forges an "accord with the world," whose rhythm of cyclical transformation "summer and winter"
demands the constant annihilation of existing beings ("explosive consumption of all that was") to make way for new
life ("joy in existence of all that comes into the world" [557]). Ecstasy surges through a savage but celebratory fusion in
which the person dissolves into this vast impersonal movement. The depiction brings together (unstably yet grippingly) Hegelian-Kojevian
visions of a grand historical struggle absorbing individual destinies in its dialectical advance and Nietzschean notions of exuberant violence,
cyclical return, and heroic amor fati.13 Bataille insists that "if there is reason to employ the word 'mysticism' on the subject of 'joy before
death,' " one must not infer that the practice he describes shares more than a "resemblance of the affective order" with the mystical traditions
of established religions. " 'Joy before death' belongs only to him for whom there is no beyond" (BOC I, 554). The
"timid saintliness" of the traditional religions, "which had first of all to be sheltered from erotic
excesses," has lost its power irrevocably. "It is only a shameless, indecent [impudique] saintliness that brings
a sufficiently happy loss of self" (554). Paradoxically, the embrace of death means the end of fear and
suspicion of the body, a new and passionate affirmation of life. Joy before death "means that life can be
glorified from the root to the summit. It denies meaning to all that is intellectual or moral beyond, substance,
God, immutable order, or salvation. It is the apotheosis of what is perishable, apotheosis of the flesh and alcohol as well as the
trances of mysticism" (554). The self-annihilation of the Heraclitean meditator has the dithyrambic exuberance of a
Dionysian festival, a "great festival of blood" in which the meditator contemplates "myself destroying
and consuming myself ceaselessly within myself" (BOC I, 556). Death is not craven surrender, powerlessness,
collapse, but an apotheosis, a luminous explosion, a surge of energy in which the meditator's own "violent
decision" becomes "act and power [puissance]'''' (553). Death is an act of virile triumph, barely (if at all) distinguishable
from "erotic excesses" (554). Martin Jay has pointed to the way in which the images of Bataille's "Heraclitean Meditation" recall the
shattered landscapes and sensory chaos of the First World War.14 The ravaged battlefield and its violence are actively internalized in Bataille's
meditation. The landscape of war forms the theater for a sacrificial destruction of the self, a "practice"
rehearsing the "frozen instant of my own death" (556), in anticipation of the real death promised to
millions in the apocalypse only months away. In "The Practice of Joy before Death," mystical sacrifice and war appear
inseparably intertwined, if not simply identical. The meditator employs war consciously as a "stimulant of
the imagination," summoning within himself the destructive energies that will soon be unleashed across
Europe in real combat. "I picture a human movement and excitation whose possibilities are without limit: this
movement and this excitation can only be appeased by war" (J3OC I, 557). But simply to contemplate war is
not enough. Even to "undertake" a war (443) no longer seems sufficient. As the Heraclitean meditator, Bataille
declares: "i MYSELF AM WAR" (557). It would seem hard to imagine a more enthusiastic and unlimited embrace of war than the
total identification Bataille proclaims. Yet the stance adopted in "The Practice of Joy before Death" is in reality hardly unequivocal. Bataille
revels in a deployment of sanguinary images, offering violence and destruction as themes for "ecstatic
contemplation" (BOC I, 553). But the violence Bataille speaks of seems not to exclude but to embrace a
strange, "annihilating" peace: "I abandon myself to peace to the point of annihilation. [... ] II enter into
peace as into an obscure unknown. / I fall into that obscure unknown" (555). Bataille extols aggressive action, seeing
"ecstatic contemplation and lucid knowledge accomplishing themselves in an action that cannot fail to
become risk" (553). Yet the nature of this action is mysterious: "The power [puissance] of combat is
accomplished in the silence of all action" (555). War is the ostensible setting (and substance) of the mystic's
bliss. Yet the Heraclitean meditator never imagines attacking and killing others. It is himself he envisions
"covered with blood, broken but transfigured" (557). The meditative warrior is his own only victim. ("I
picture myself destroying and consuming myself ceaselessly within myself in a great festival of blood"
[556].) The objectives of this mystical struggle seem out of line with those of ordinary military campaigns. The meditator's war aims
not at the sadistic exuberance of triumph and conquest, but at the "frozen instant of my own death"
(556). But isn't war supposed to be about winning? And doesn't winning mean killing other people? Perhaps not. Bataille cautions that war is
too complex to be "reduced to an expression and a means of development for some ideology, even bellicist."
On the contrary, "A war overflows [depasse] in all directions the contradictory 'slogans' that are pronounced
concerning it" (550-51). War is too important to be entrusted to the warriors.

It is particularly relevant on the War Powers Resolution to interrogate the way in which traditional
warfare operates. We must reject calls to political and ideological projects which inevitably rely on a
principle of urgency and action. It is this construction of the project which allows for the worst forms
of violence and forecloses the possibility of inner experience.
Irwin 02 (Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, Exercises in Inutility, pg 139 140, 2002, CP)
Bataille's first criticism of Jiinger's description of warfare concerns an epistemological "privilege" that the author of La Guerre, notre mere, has
failed to acknowledge. Jiinger's mystico-aesthetic contemplation was only made possible by the "horrible 'slow motion' of the War of 1914."
The stasis of combat in the trenches "alone permitted [Jiinger's] 'contemplation' of horror and of himself
and this mysticism" (BOC VII, 253). Most soldiers in "classic wars" have no opportunity, even if they had the
desire, to savor the quasi-religious aspects of combat evoked in Jiinger's narrative. The "too rapid rhythm" of war prevents
the participants, in all but the most exceptional circumstances, from "deepening" the experience (2,53).
Behind the historically idiosyncratic nature of Jiinger's selfcontemplation lurks a conflict that Bataille considers more fundamental. This
concerns the relationship between war, mysticism, and the categories of action and utility. The military is and must be
dominated by the principle of action, by the mode of behavior that in Inner Experience Bataille will designate as the
project (BOC V, 59-60). "The army has only an active life. And one does not imagine 'contemplative' soldiers"
(BOC VII, 251). "Action and decision spur the rapid rhythm of wars and the immediate forgetting of all
horror. The conqueror must go quickly: he subordinates what he does to the result." And in war, Jiinger's
rapturous proclamations notwithstanding, it is the result that matters, not the intensity of the
participants' experiences. "Terror and horror increase ecstasy, but they reduce the chances of destroying
the enemy" (254-55). Powerful emotions are of interest in a military context never as ends in themselves,
but only insofar as they facilitate or hinder the attainment of strategic objectives, insofar as they render
men more or less efficient as fighting machines. The subordination of all efforts to a defined goal endows
war with a globally rational, purposive structure, despite the irrational violence that seethes in combat
on a moment-by-moment basis. Wars are fought to be won. The overarching objective gives a sense to
the sacrifices demanded of individuals and dulls the horror that would otherwise envelope them." [I]n
battle one approaches horror with a movement that overcomes it: action and the project linked to
action permit one to go beyond [depasser] horror. This going beyond gives to action, to the project a
captivating grandeur, but the horror in itself is denied" (BOC V, 58). This denial, Bataille wants to claim, belongs
inevitably to the modern practice (if not to the "idea" [ML, 2,90]) of war. War functions in the modern world by
presenting itself precisely not as unlimited horror, but as a necessary instrument for the attainment of
practical ends (the continuation of politics by other means, in Clausewitz's formula). Only under the most
anomalous circumstances is war's claim to utility unmasked, and then only fleetingly. This is why Bataille addresses to
Jiinger a rather stunning reproach: "Nothing can stand against a natural law of things: war does not want to be
deepened and the lyricism of horror suits it badly [la guerre ne veut pas etre approfondie et le lyrisme de I'horreur lui
convient mal]" (BOC VII, 253-54).

Our advocacy inserts the toxin of the impossible into political and philosophical discourse. Our
relationship to war and violence should not be one of rationally coordinated political predictions and
thesis, but rather a mystical inner experience that allows us to challenge hierarchical forms of
domination that manifest themselves in totalitarian oppression. This is a precondition to political
communication.
Irwin 02 (Alexander Irwin, Saints of the Impossible, Exercises in Inutility, Pg 162 164, 2002, CP)

This parti pris of responding to a brutal political and military situation with a mystico-literary self-stylization constitutes the force and
originality, but also, for some, the deeply unsatisfying ambiguity of Bataille's mystical subversion. Understanding Bataille's concerns in this way
shows, in any event, why Bataille's position with respect to the violence of the war could only be enacted/
communicated performatively. What Bataille sought to present was not a set of ethical propositions or
rationally coordinated political theses, but rather a style of life that, considered as a (lacerated but living) whole,
offered an alternative to the values and forms of existence that had found their culmination in
totalitarian oppression and war. The life of mysticism and expenditure Bataille proposed could not, he claimed, be
adequately described in the language of philosophical, social scientific, or political discourse. This mode
of life could only be grasped in its realization (performance) in the existence of an exemplary being: the mystical
writer, Bataille himself. Distancing himself from the "professorial" attitude of academic philosophers like Heidegger, whose "method remains
glued to results," Bataille affirmed: "what counts in my eyes is the moment of ungluing [decollement]. What I teach (if
it is true that...) is an intoxication, not a philosophy. I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman"
(BOC V, 218 note; ellipsis in original). Bataille was convinced that the meditational method and more broadly the mystical style of
existence he made available through his writings opened the route to a concrete experience of the heterogeneity
and sovereignty of the self and thus laid the groundwork for genuine freedom. The inner experience of
freedom remains the precondition of any meaningful deployment of freedom in the public, political
world. And if freedom can be understood in Kantian terms as autolegislation, then mystical writing initiates autonomy by
showing people that they carry the supreme law within themselves, by teaching them to experience
themselves as their own law (a law constituted through endless contestation). "Man is his own law if he strips himself naked before
himself. The mystic before God had the attitude of a subject. Whoever places being before himself has the attitude of a sovereign" (BOC V,
278). The "naked" sovereign of inner experience, "knowing that he will die" (278), finds freedom tempered
with the awareness of radical vulnerability and contingency, thus making freedom inseparable from
"compassion" (273), or as Bataille will later write, from a tragic "loyalty" (BOC XI, 541-45). Without the sacrificial knowledge
of its own penetration by death, the self's exercise of freedom would inevitably become an "exercise of
power" over others (BOC V, 221). Instead, inner experience is a sacrificial "conquest" of the self "for others"
(76). Sovereignty is not static governance but tireless "revolt" (221). Through an unruly mixture of steamy confession,
dense philosophical analysis, histrionic bluster, parodic prayers, lachrymose lamentation, "mimicry," and irony, Bataille's textual
mysticism undermines or overflows the conceptual structures on which the logic of domination relies. It
attacks utility, rationality, hierarchical order, and identity. By affirming a useless inner experience as in
itself "sole authority, sole value" (BOC V, 18), mysticism challenges the right of coercive political systems to
claim ultimate value and unlimited authority for themselves. By introducing through "autosacrificial"55 writing
the toxin of the impossible into calculations of human meaning, Bataille sought to reach the
"underside" of language and human experience, to uncover the "nakedness" of irreducible anguish that
philosophy and political theory had sought to conceal, and to "annul the effects of totalizing discourse,"
both in the philosophical and in the political realms.56

You should endorse our politics of the sacred as a site for value creation, divorcing yourself from
fascist and policy obsessed behavior that attempts to desperately seal the blister from within.
Land 92 ( Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 140-141)

Fascism is not so much a symptom of political desperation, as of libidino-religious numbness, a kind of anti-poetry on the
streets. Like all policy-obsessed behaviour patterns it is rooted in the humanist dead-end characterized
by hysterical struggle for autonomy: self-determination, national self-management, master-races,
autarkyall attempts to seal the blister from within, to hide from the ocean. The thought that there might
be a political response to fascism makes me laugh. Shall we set our little fascism against their big one?
Organize ourselves, become disciplined, maybe we could make ourselves some smart uniforms and
stomp about in the street? Politics is the last great sentimental indulgence of mankind, and it has never
achieved anything except a deepened idiocy, more work, more repression, more pompous ass-holes
demanding obedience. Quite naturally we are bored of it to the point of acute sickness. I have no interest at all in
groping at power in the blister. What matters is burning a hole through the wall. Bataille was not immune to the
political charade, but even his short period of reality-process politicking during 1935-6when he was deeply involved with the journal Contre-
Attaque and its project of radicalizing the Popular Frontis mapped in the labyrinth. The Contre-Attaque mobilization into militant
action against fascism, militarism, and capitalism, the Popular Front in the Street *I 402+, stumbles in a maze of composition
and decomposition. War with Germany is a futility because *t+he process of decomposition which has been slow during the course of the last
war will begin in France from the beginning of the next *I 330+. In his 1933 essay on The Psychological Structure of Fascism Bataille
outlines a reemergent theological impulse in which the heterogeneous or decompositional element is
deployed paradoxically as an operator of social integration, tending to the fascist state as a secularized
divine order. The quasi-fascist undertow of his own politicized workwhich he laments in a text from 1958has less to do with the
exultation of violence, than with its concession to counter discipline: What decides social destiny today is the organic creation of a vast
composition of forces, disciplined, fanatical, capable of exercising an implacable authority in the day to come. Such a composition of
forces must group together all those who do not accept the course to the abyssto ruin and to warof a
capitalist society without head and without eyes*I 380+. Capital is a headless lurch into the abyss, an
acephalic catastrophe. What Bataille recoils from at this moment is not the claustrophobic managerial profanity of capital, but its
psychotic flow into ruin: We see that the masses of humanity remain at the disposal of blind forces which
dedicate them to inexplicable hecatombs *I 402+. The vocabulary of such writings does not jar against the deep currents of his
slide into the sacred, but its evaluative impulse is almost wholly reactive; a tawdry Leninist voluntarism fixated upon control. I think of these
1930s texts as parodic, they are humorous and lively, a definite advance upon the austere preachings so prevalent on the left. They are, in any
case, at best a joke. Who is more attentive than Bataille to the vacuity of manifestos, programmes, policy
statements, declarations of commitment? The destruction of language is not my act [fait] but does not
have a place in me except by destroying me, like the act of the moment which has suppressed me (I speak
now but in vain) *IV 167+. The impossible is the basis of being [III 41]. To write is poverty and captivity if it is not wreckage upon
the impossible, because the impossible is not a margin, a fissure, a border-zone, but an immensity compared to which the possible shrivels to
the edge of nothing. I even believe that in a sense my stories clearly attain the impossible *III 101], and that is why
they matter, why The Blue of Noon is of immeasurably greater importance than the Contre-Attaque posturings, why in contrast to Sadewho
sought an impossible freedom *IX 242+Lenin is a ranting dwarf.IMPOSSIBLE! she cried *IV 51+, read or work? it was impossible *IV 59+.
The Hatred for Poetry, renamed The Impossible, exempts Baudelaire and Rimbaud from the complacency of words that resign themselves to
the cramped box of the possible. Insipid lyricism vaunts itself as another possible type of language, a type that is
elevated, beautiful, ethereal. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry, in the end, accepts poetry *III 218+. Bataille
vomits, but the poetry of Baudelaireor that of Rimbaudnever inspires that hatred in me *III 513+, and from the start Batailles reading of
Nietzsche insists thatunlike the language of fascismNietzsches texts are labyrinths, with no hint of the
directive, no politics [I 450-2], only the voyage into the impossible, the will to chance. Utter confusion.
Those moments, he said, where everything is divine, because everything is impossible. (Impossible above all to
explain, to speak) *IV 146+. Only when human relationships collapse in darkness and pain is there worth. Between
her and me there was never anything possible *IV 233+. At first, death surrounds us with an endless silence as an island is
surrounded by water. But there, precisely, is the unsalable. What importance have words which do not pierce this
silence[?] What importance in speaking of *the+ moment of the tomb [moment de tombe], when each word is
nothing for as long as it has not attained the beyond of words[?]


Reject any claims to knowledge or truth. To attempt to know anything beyond yourself requires the
negation of the place in which you currently resides. All knowledge is self effacing, however our
Affirmative allows for an endless oscillation and enjoyment of that process
Bataille 45 (Georges, On Nietzsche, 1945, CP)

"'Life." I said. "is bound to be lost in death, as a river loses itself in the sea, the known in the unknown"
(Inner Experiena). And death is the end life easily reaches (as water does sea level). So why would I wish to
turn my desire to be persuasive into a worry? I dissolve into myself like the sea-and I know the roaring
waters of the torrent head straight at me! Whatever a judicious understanding sometimes seems to rude, an inunense folly
connected with it (understanding is only an infinitesimal part of that folly), doesn't hesitate to give back. The certainty of
incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of
books. Since appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather
than a development of lucid thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is
also the sum of the misunderstandings it occasions. So why exhaust myself with efforts toward
consciousness? I can only make fun of myself as I write. (Why write even a phrase if laughter doesn't immediately join me?) It goes
without saying that, for the task. I bring to bear whatever rigor I have within me. But the crumbling nature of thinking's
awareness of itself and especially the certainty of thinking reaching its end only in failing, hinder any
repose and prevent the relaxed state that facilitates a rigorous disposition of things. Committed to the casual
stance-l think and express myself in the free play of hazard. Obviously, everyone in some way admits the
importance of hazard. But this recognition is as minimal and unconscious as possible. Going my way unconstrained. unhampered. I
develop my thoughts, make choices with regard to expression-but I don't have the control over myself that I want. And the actual dynamic of
my intelligence is equally uncontrollable. So that l owe to other dynamics-to lucky chance and to fleeting moments of relaxation-the minimal
order and relative learning that I do have. And the rest of the time . . . Thus, as I see it my thought proceeds in harmony with its
object, an object that it attains more and perfectly the greater the state of its own ruin. Though it isn't
necessarily conscious of this. At one and the same time my thinking must reach plenary illumination and
dissolution . . . In the same individual, thought must construct and destroy itself. And even that isn't quite right.
Even the most rigorous thinkers yield to chance. In addition, the demands inherent in the exercise of thought often take me
far from where I started. One of the great difficulties encountered by understanding is to put order into thought's interrelations in time. In a
given moment, my thought reaches considerable rigor. But how to link it with yesterday's thinking? Yesterday, in a sense, I was another person,
responding to other worries. Adapting one to the other remains possible, but . . . This insufficiency bothers me no more than the insufficiency
relating to the many woes of the human condition generally. Humanness is related in us to nonsatisfaction. a nonsatisfaction to which we yield
without accepting it, though; we distance ourselves from humanness when we regard ourselves as satisfied or when we give up searching for
satisfaction. Sarue is right in relation to me to recall the myth Of Sisyphus, though "in relation to me""' here equates to "in relation to
humanity," I suppose. What can be expected of us is to go as far as possible and not to stop. What by contrast.
humanly speaking. can be criticized are endeavors whose only meaning is some relation to moments of completion. Is it possible for me to go
further? I won't wait to coordinate my efforts in that case-I'll go further. I'll take the risk. And the reader. free not to
venture after me, will often take advantage of that same freedom! The critics are right to scent danger
here! But let me in turn paint out a greater danger, one that comes from methods that, adequate only to
an outcome of knowledge, confer on individuals whom they limit a sheerly fragmentary existence-an
existence that is mutilated with respect to the whole that remains inaccessible. Having recognized this, I'll defend
my position. I've spoken of inner experience: my intention was to make known an object. But by propelling this vague title, T didn't want to
confine myself sheerly to inner facts of that experience. It's an arbitrary procedure to reduce knowledge to what we get
from our intuitions as subjects. This is something only a newborn can do. And we ourselves (who write) can only
know something about this newborn by observing it from outside (the child is only our object). A separation
experience, related to a vital continuum (our conception and our birth) and to a return to that continuum (in our
first sexual feelings and our first laughter), leaves us without any clear recollections, and only in objective
operations do we reach the core of the being we are. A phenomenology of the developed mind assumes a coincidence of
subjective and objective aspects and at the same time a fusion of subject and object.* This means an isolated operation is admissible only
because of fatigue (so, the explanation I gave of laughter, because I was unable to develop a whole movement in tandem with a conjugation of
the modalities of laughter would be left suspended-since every theory of laughter is integrally a philosophy and. similarly, every integral
philosophy is a theory of laughter . . .) . But that is the point though I set forth these principles, at the same time I must
renounce following them. Thought is produced in me as uncoordinated flashes, withdrawing endlessly
from a term to which its movement pushes it. I can't tell if I'm expressing human helplessness this way, or my own . . . I
don't know. though I'm not hopeful of even some outwardly satisfying outcome. Isn't there an
advantage in creating philosophy as I do? A flash in the night-a language belonging to a brief moment . . .
Perhaps in this respect this latest moment contains a simple truth. In order to will knowledge, by an indirect expedient I
tend to become the whole universe. But in this movement I can't be a whole human being since I submit
to a particular goal. becoming the whole. Granted. if I could become it, I would thus be a whole human
being. But in my effort, don't I distance myself from exactly that? And how can I become the whole without becoming a
whole human being? I can't be this whole human being except when I let go. I can't be this through
willpower: my will necessarily has to will outcomes! But if misfortune (or chance) wills me to let go, then
I know I am an integral whole humanness. subordinate to nothing. In other words. the moment of revolt
inherent in willing a knowledge beyond practical ends can't be indefinitely continued. And in order to be
the whole universe, humankind has to let go and abandon its principle, accepting as the sole criterion of
what it is the tendency to go beyond what it is. This existence that I am is a revolt against existence and
is indefinite desire. For this existence God was simply a stage-and now here he is, looming large, grown
from unfathomable experience. comically perched on the stake used for impalement.

Action mutilates the totality of our existence. Instead we choose to laugh to death
Bataille 45 (Georges Bataille, The Dark Lord amongst other things, philosopher, On Nietzche, 1945,
Pantheon Books, pg xxvi-xxvii)

Nonetheless, I dont want my Inclination to make fun of myself or act comic to lead readers astray. The basic problem tackled in this
chaotic book (chaotic because It has to be) is the same one Nietzsche experienced and attempted to resolve in his workthe problem of
the whole human being. The majority of people. he wrote. are a fragmentary, exclusive image of what humanity is: you have to add
them up to get humanity. in this sense, whole eras and whole peoples have something fragmentary about them; and it may be necessary for
humanitys growth for it to develop only in parts. It is a crucial matter therefore to see that what is at stake is always the idea of producing a
synthetic humanity and that the inferior humans who make up a majority of us are only preliminaries, or preparatory attempts whose
concerted play allows a whole human being to appear here and there like a military boundary marker showing the extent of humanitys
advance. (The Will to Power) But what does that fragmentation mean? Or better, what causes it if not a need to act that specializes us and
limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to be for the general interest (which normally Isnt true), the activity that
subordinates each of our aspects to a specific result suppresses our being as an entirety. Whoever acts, substitutes a particular
end for what he or she is, as a total being: in the least specialized cases it is the glory of the state or the
triumph of a party. Every action specializes insofar as it is limited as action. A plant usually doesnt act, and isnt
specialized; its specialized when gobbling up flies! I cannot exist entirely except when somehow I go beyond the stage
of action. Otherwise Im a soldier, a professional, a man of learning, not a total human being. The fragmentary state of
humanity is basically the same as the choice of an object. When you limit your desires to possessing political power, for
instance, you act and know what you have to do. The possibility of failure isnt importantand right from the start, you insert
your existence advantageously into time. Each of your moments becomes useful. With each moment, the possibility
is given you to advance to some chosen goal, and your time becomes a march toward that goalwhats
normally called living. Similarly, if salvation is the goal, Every action makes you a fragmentary existence.
I hold onto my nature as an entirety only by refusing to actor at least by denying the superiority of
time, which is reserved for action. Life is whole only when it isnt subordinate to a specific object that
exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom. Still, I cant choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for
freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for mebecause within me I cant confuse the state of entirety with my
struggle. Its the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle against a particular oppression,
that has lifted me above a mutilated existence. Each of us learns with bitterness that to struggle for
freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves. Ive already said it; the practice of freedom lies within evil, not
beyond it, while the
struggle for freedom is a struggle to conquer a good. To the extent that life is entire within me, I cant
distribute it or let it serve the Interests of a good belonging to someone else, to God or myself. I cant acquire
anything at all: I can only give and give unstintingly, without the gift ever having as its object anyones interest. (In this respect, I look at the
others good as deceptive, since if I will that good its to find my own, unless I identify it as my own. Entirety exists within me as
exuberance. Only in empty longing, only in an unlucky desire to be consumed simply by the desire to burn
with desire, is entirety wholly what it is. In this respect, entirety is also longing for laughter, longing for
pleasure, holiness, or death. Entirety lacks further tasks to fulfill.)