Georges Bataille

[StudentMI]

Is anyone here familiar with Bataille’s bizarre philosophy? I’m reading a book by him at the moment and it’s interesting.

 

[Dolphin]

I am not familiar but I do enjoy philosophical theories from time to time. What is it about?

 

[StudentMI]

So, it’s hard to summarize. The book is basically about taboo and the implications of breaking such. It’s the first thing I’ve ever read by him. And I know transgression plays a big part in his philosophy. But he seems to want to have taboos and break them at the same time. It’s a little hard to follow at times but interesting nonetheless.

The ideas that he and a few other philosophers or artists espoused, almost a kind of finding of the sacred through excess, against the backdrop of twentieth century Europe on the brink of, during and after the abyss, interest me. Even though they were wrong. Interestingly he and a colleague, Pierre Klossowski, were both at one time in Catholic seminaries but abandoned the faith.

 

[StudentMI]

Bataille on the Kinsey Reports.

By exonerating our sexual life from every trace of guilt science has no chance of seeing it for what it is. Our ideas are clarified but at the cost of being blinkered. Science with its emphasis on precision cannot grasp the complexity of the system in which a few factors are pushed to extremes when it rejects the blurred and indistinct realities of sexual life.