Wednesday, February 02, 2005

The accursed share 3

Following Bataille's description of economy in industrial societies, I feel as if I both understand Calvinism and have read Marx. Both are bogus assertions, but that is how taut his winding persuasions actually are. He describes ideas with analogies drawn from broad summaries, creating movements on the periphery of consciousness that nevertheless - like the gestalt of a carefully drawn but out-of-focus background - flow solidly into consciousness as an after effect.

One of the most beautiful sentences encountered so far - in the context of capitalism's stress on the enterprise of things, the products of surplus energy, that moreover gives rise to the worker's servitude to things as opposed to God (who was the predecessor of things), and to himself as a thing:
"The advantage was clear, in minds always quick to grasp the real object, of allowing intimacy to recede beyond the threshold of consciousness." (p. 136).

Indeed. And doesn't this make me think? Bataille has always had an unusual view of the nature of intimacy, whether between persons or of man with himself, as in this case. In Inner Experience - as elsewhere - he takes this idea into strange territory by speaking of the wound, and inner experience as a deliberate attempt to impale the self - rupture the self - in order to experience life as a self-sacrifice over time.

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