ABSTRACT
Bataille’s encounter with Nietzsche’s writings in 1923 was, he says in an ‘Autobiographical Note’,2 ‘decisive’. What was decisive for Bataille was Nietzsche’s account of the ‘death of God’, the impossibility of believing in access to a position transcendent to the human condition from which ‘the truth’ about the world and life could be pronounced. But for Bataille, Nietzsche’s claim that in this revelation there appeared the opposite ‘ideal’ of the overman, a form of life which would be the creating of its own value, a conception based on the notion of the artwork which is its own law, remained complicit with the religion and metaphysics he wished to overturn. It was the further promulgation of a justified goal, even if its justification lay in the absence of an absolute. It represented the appropriate form for a human life which recognized it could not look outside itself for justification. In this way, it constituted an extension of rational goal-oriented life now liberated from the idea of a transcendent justification. But for Bataille the revelation of the unbelievability of the absolute follows from the structure itself of our experience of life and the world which shows us as divided or ‘torn’, desiring at the same time both selfhood and its annihilation, and so drawn, but not as to a purpose or goal, towards the annihilation of the conscious, articulate identity we take ourselves to be. In this way, ‘The superman or Borgia side of things is limited and vainly defined in relation to possibilities whose essence is a going beyond the self.’3 Exposure to the seduction of such possibilities was the result of the reflection that showed us the absolute’s impossibility: ‘No doubt I have more than Nietzsche dwelled upon the meaning of the night of non-knowledge (the ‘‘death of God’’).’4
