ABSTRACT
There is a sense in which Bataille’s works-as works-are not especially ‘difficult’. They are, indeed, no more problematic than the words we use to tranquillize ourselves against love and dying (against the passion to die). One could very easily ‘understand’ Bataille whilst protracting a decent and productive life. There is even a necessity to do this, which it would be hypocritical to wholly disown. One might avoid being merely interested in these texts, yet it is still possible that the agitation which remained would be dissolved into those little lazinesses and indecencies with which we meagrely spice our domesticity. It is for this reason (reason itself) that I feel I understand Bataille’s obsessiveness, his repetition, his reluctance to leave us with what has already been so clearly said. It is for this reason too that any book making it easier to understand Bataille is written contra him. The gurus of writing will of course say that we should be quite without regard for ‘Bataille’, as if the failure of authorialism were properly replaced by a textualist triumph. After all, who would not rather be faced with a life or a production, when the alternative to either is wreckage? How uselessly cruel it is then to suggest that Bataille’s repetition is a scream provoked by what becomes its own meaninglessness, and, less even than this, an echoing involution into abortion.
