Georges Bataille – A Dating Profile

About Me

(The beginning is tough. My way of telling about these things is raw. But this is how it has to be, there is no beginning by scuttling in sideways. I continue... and it gets tougher.)

I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened by anything sexual. [But] stripping naked is the decisive action. Nakedness offers a contrast to self-possession, to discontinuous existence, in other words. (The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still.) Virility is nothing less than the expression of this principle: when a man no longer has the force to respond to the image of desirable nudity, he recognizes the loss of his virile integrity. And just as virility is tied to the allure of a nude body, full existence is tied to any image that arouses hope and terror.

I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl my own age, at the beach in X. As of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty."

At present bad luck reaches me from all directions. Moreover I'm unreasonable... ... and from time to time ridiculously nervous (my endlessly challenged nerves sometimes give way - and do not do a half-bad job of it when they do). "Money burns a whole in my pocket" when I gamble. Excited by the betting, I dedicate myself to gambling. My weakness worries me.

I loathe monks. For me, turning away from the world, from chance, from the truth of bodies is shameful. No greater sin exists. (I love irreligiousness, the disrespect involved in risk taking and gambling.)

I'm ashamed of myself. There's something soft about me, easily swayed... I'm not young anymore.

When I review my own memories... out of all the various objects glimpsed in early childhood, the most fear-inspiring architectural form was by no means the church... but rather large factory chimneys... I was not hallucinating when, as a terrified child, I discerned those giant scarecrows, which both excited me to the point of anguish and made me run sometimes for my life, the presence of a fearful rage. That rage would, I sensed, later become my own, giving meaning to everything spoiling within my own head and to all that which, in civilised states, looms up like carrion in a nightmare.

What I love in the person I love - to the point of wanting to die from this love - isn't some individuated existence but the universal aspect of that person. Love is simple, uncomplicated.
The bottom line is: Anyone and everyone is part of me. For those I'm attached to, I'm a provocation. I can't stand seeing them forget the chance they would be if they took the risks.
There exists, in fact, a unique moment in relation to the possibility of me - and thus the infinite improbability of this coming into the world appears. For if the tiniest difference had occurred in the course of successive events of which I am the result, in the place of this me, integrally avid to be me, there would have been "an other."

First Date

The communication of two individuals occurs when they lose themselves in sweet, shared slime... Sexual pleasure (concealing itself and provoking laughter) comes closest to the essence of majesty.

Yesterday evening drank two bottles of wine with K. The night a wonderland in moonlight and storm. Forest - night - pools of moonlight along a road through the trees - on the embankment little phosphorescent patches. Striking a match - portions of worm-eaten branches inhabited by glowworms. Never knew happiness was so pure, so wild and dark.

(Continue? I meant to. But I don't care now. I've lost interest. I put down what oppresses me at the moment of writing: 'Would it all be absurd? Or might it make some kind of sense? I've made myself sick wondering about it...' I began writing with no precise goal, animated chiefly by a desire to forget, at least for the time being, the things I can be or do personally.)

Bibliography

Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.

---, My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, Trans. Austryn Wainhouse, London & New York: Marion Boyers, 1989.

---, On Nietzsche, Trans. Bruce Boone, St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1992.

---, Story of the Eye, Trans. Joachim Neugroschel, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987.

---, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, Ed. Allan Stoekl, Trans. Allan Stoekl             with Carl R. Lovitt & Donald M. Leslie Jr, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, & Robert Desnos, Encyclopædia    Acephalica, Ed. Alastair Brotchie, Trans. Iain White, London: Atlas Press, 1995. 

Troy Bordun in unemployed and living in Montreal. Besides lecturing at philosophy conferences, he has published short fiction in the Toronto-based In My Bed Magazine.

SHELFLIFEMAGAZINE : issue #010