Georges Bataille was a French writer and intellectual who was active in the early 20th century. He was a major figure in the French avant-garde and wrote extensively on topics such as philosophy, literature, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. His works often explored themes of transgression and excess, and sought to challenge and disrupt traditional social and cultural norms.
What is the most famous quote by Georges Bataille ?
Eroticism differs from animal sexuality in that human sexuality is limited by taboos and the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of these taboos. Desire in eroticism is the desire that triumphs over the taboo. It presupposes man in conflict with himself.
— Georges Bataille
What can you learn from Georges Bataille (Life Lessons)
- Georges Bataille teaches us to embrace the unknown and to accept that life will always be unpredictable. He encourages us to take risks and to live with passion and intensity, rather than simply existing.
- He also reminds us to be open to new experiences and to challenge our preconceived ideas and beliefs.
- Lastly, he encourages us to be mindful of our mortality and to make the most of our time on this earth.
The most pioneering Georges Bataille quotes that are free to learn and impress others
Following is a list of the best quotes, including various Georges Bataille inspirational quotes, and other famous sayings by Georges Bataille.
A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.
Not every woman is a prostitute, but prostitution is the natural apotheosis of the feminine attitude.
It is clear that the world is purely parodic, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.
The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.
Life has always taken place in a tumult without apparent cohesion, but it only finds its grandeur and its reality in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.
Entirety exists within me as exuberance in empty longing in the desire to burn with desire.
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes.
That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
Provocative quotes by Georges Bataille
How cruel my suffering is,—no one is more talkative than I am!
The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.
Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.
Sanity is the lot of those who are most obtuse, for lucidity destroys one's equilibrium: it is unhealthy to honestly endure the labors of the mind which incessantly contradict what they have just established.
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.
To place oneself in the position of God is painful: being God is equivalent to being tortured. For being God means that one is in harmony with all that is, including the worst. The existence of the worst evils is unimaginable unless God willed them.
To choose evil is to choose freedom, emancipation from all restraint.
Obscenity is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession, with the possession of a recognized and stable individuality.
I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
Quotations by Georges Bataille that are transgressive and existential
The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility.
A judgment about life has no meaning except the truth of the one who speaks last, and the mind is at ease only at the moment when everyone is shouting at once and no one can hear a thing.
You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Existence as entirety remains beyond any one meaning and it is the conscious presence of humanness in the world inasmuch as this is nonmeaning, having nothing to do other than be what it is, no longer able to go beyond itself or give itself some kind of meaning through action.
Life is whole only when it isn't subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom.
When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.
It betrays at the same time, through morbid reflexes, a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and criminal debauchery.
By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men's attention.
We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.
We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge.
Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it.
Sacrifice is nothing other than the production of sacred things.
The preceding criticism justifies the following definition of the entire human: human existence as the life of "unmotivated" celebration, celebration in all meaning of the word: laughter, dancing, orgy, the rejection of subordination, and sacrifice that scornfully puts aside any consideration of ends, property, and morality.
Each of us is incomplete compared to someone else -- an animal's incomplete compared to a person... and a person compared to God, who is complete only to be imaginary.
The anguish of the neurotic individual is the same as that of the saint.
The neurotic, the saint are engaged in the same battle. Their blood flows from similar wounds. But the first one gasps and the other one gives.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.
The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.
Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.
The great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and impose silence on the multitudes.
Philosophy finds itself to be no longer anything but the heir to a fabulous mystical theology, but missing a God and wiping the slate clean.
Naturally, love's the most distant possibility.
It seems impossible, in fact, to judge the eye using any word other than seductive, since nothing is more attractive in the bodies of animals and men. But extreme seductiveness is probably at the boundary of horror.
I teach the art of turning anguish into delight.
In what will survive me I am in harmony with my annihilation.
Eroticism is assenting to life even in death.
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
[Nietzsche's doctrine of the eternal return] is what makes moments caught up in the immanence of return suddenly appear as ends. In every other system, don't forget, these moments are viewed as means: Every moral system proclaims that "each moment of life ought to be motivated." Return unmotivates the moment and frees life of ends.
Eroticism cannot be entirely revealed without poetry.
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? – A violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?
Eroticism is the approval of life unto death.
What causes [fragmentation] 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 generally isn't 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.
Literature ... is the rediscovery of childhood.