Inner Experience

by Georges Bataille, Stuart Kendall

Overview

Originally published in 1943, Inner Experience is the single most significant work by one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. It outlines a mystical theology and experience of the sacred founded on the absence of god. Bataille calls Inner Experience a "narrative of despair," but also describes it as a book wherein "profundity and passion go tenderly hand in hand." Herein, he says, "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy take shape."

Bataille's search for experience begins where religion, philosophy, science, and literature leave off, where doctrines, dogmas, methods, and the arts collapse. His method of meditation, outlined and documented here, commingles horror and delight. Laughter, intoxication, eroticism, poetry, and sacrifice are pursued not as ends in and of themselves but as means of access to a sovereign realm of inner experience.

This new translation is the first to include Method of Meditation and Post-Scriptum 1953, the supplementary texts Bataille added to create the first volume of his Summa Atheologica. This edition also offers the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes, along with an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438452364
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	09/01/2014
Series:	SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Pages:	317
Sales rank:	453,811
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Georges Bataille (1897–1962), a medievalist librarian by training, founded the College of Sociology and the secret society Acéphale. He was equally famous for his contributions to French literature, art criticism, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. Bane of theologians, existentialists, and surrealists during his lifetime, he became an essential reference for the poststructuralist generation of French intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of modern and contemporary art and design, critical theory, poetics, and theology. He is the author of the critical biography Georges Bataille and the editor and translator of four other books by Bataille, including Guilty, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction: A Debauchery of Thought

Inner Experience

Foreword

Part One: Draft of an Introduction to Inner Experience

1. Critique of Dogmatic Servitude (and of Mysticism)
2. Experience, Sole Authority, Sole Value
3. Principles of a Method and of a Community

Part Two: Torture

Part Three: Antecedents to the Torture (or the Comedy)

I Want to Carry My Person to the Pinnacle
Death Is in a Sense a Deception
The Blue of Noon
The Labyrinth (of the Composition of Beings)
"Communication"

Part Four: Post-Scriptum to the Torture (or the New Mystical Theology)

1. God
2. Descartes
3. Hegel
4. Ecstasy
5. Fortune
6. Nietzsche

Part Five: Manibus Date Lilia Plenis

Gloria in excelsis mihi
God

Method of Meditation

Foreword

Part One: Contestation

Part Two: Decisive Position

Part Three: Nudity

Post-Scriptum 1953

Notes
Index of Names

Editorial Reviews

"English readers will now be able to appreciate what many consider Bataille's finest work, undoubtedly one of the outstanding texts of modern French writing, just as they will be able to fill a major gap in the history of post-structuralist thought. Whereas Bataille may be the acknowledged forefather of such figures as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, this centrality is often not appreciated by American admirers of the latter." — Michele Richman, University of Pennsylvania

"I consider the publication in English of Inner Experience to be of great importance and long overdue. It is only recently that many have come to recognize Bataille's profound influence on a number of the most important contemporary French thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Kristeva—an influence much more important than that of existentialists such as Sartre or Camus." — Allan Stoekl, Yale University

"We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book. — Georges Bataille, from the Preface

From the Publisher