lightning-like loss

"what happens - pure happiness - is insignificant. and philosophy will always prefer sadness, which at least means something or suffers in any case from not doing so. philosophy speaks to a need for meaning, it respects it, it answers it. sadness allows empathy, it can be understood and shared. we make sense and understand each other through it. togetherness bathes in sadness. this is the keynote of every communion." -denis hollier

"throughout the course of guilty, bataille more often suggests the horror of being satisfied, the horror of satisfaction, than the delights of satisfied desire: 'desire desires not to be satisfied.' true desire is a desire for desire, not satisfaction. it always stages the emptiness of satisfaction." -denis hollier

all following quotes from guilty, by georges bataille

"with a shot of gin
a night of rowdiness
stars fall from the sky

drinking heavily from sky's thunder
heart shattered by lightning
i burst into laughter"

"the search for truth isn't my strong point (mainly i mean the phrases expressing it). but this is the issue i have to consider now: that, more than the truth, it's fear i'm after. fear opened by a dizzying fall. fear reached by possibly unlimited movements of thought."

"shouting in the throes of passion, lost in widening depths around which lightning plays, can it really matter to us what is at the bottom of an abyss?. . . determination not to become weak when a single truth is clear - that attempting to enclose what's there in intellectual categories is the same as being reduced to a proud inability to laugh"

"at this moment umwissenheit - desirable non-knowledge - becomes an expression of hopeless wisdom. reaching the limit of its development and longing to be 'put to death', thought rushes precipitously to the arena of sacrifice. and just as an emotion grows similarly until sobs burst it apart, thought's fullness takes it to the point of being blown down by the wind, and contradiction rages at last."

"for each being, you have to find the place of sacrifice, the wound. a being can only be touched where it yields."

"not to communicate signifies exactly the bloody necessity of communicating."

"perpetual instability is more boring than adhering strictly to a rule, and only what's in existence can be made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to be sacrificed. the more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or sacrifice that can result. . . the desire for ecstasy can't exclude method. i don't see why people object to this. method means doing violence to habits of relaxation. . . method means swimming against a current. your humiliation comes from the current; the means of going against it would seem pleasant even if they were worse."

"ecstasy is communication between terms (these terms aren't necessarily defined), and communication possesses a value the terms didn't have: it annihilates them. . . what's requisite for communication is a defect or 'fault'. communication enters like death through a chink in the armor. what's required is an overlapping of two lacerations, mine, yours."

"no greater desire exists than a wounded person's need for another wound."

"what's 'communicated' (from this site to a person and from a person to this site) is lightning-like loss. the need to go astray, to be destroyed is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth, and has nothing to do with what we call substance."