ABSTRACT
Bataille does not transmit a philosophy, but rather a delirious negative evangile: ‘death can be tasted’. Monotheism has always pre-emptively reconstructed this message: ‘you mean it can be known.’
Whatever else Bataille’s Method of Meditation might be, it is also the violent contamination of Cartesianism. The title itself is compacted from Descartes’ Discourse on Method and his Metaphysical Meditations, perhaps his principal texts. The reference is not incidental, since Descartes is a limit-point of isolation, and in Inner Experience Bataille explicitly discusses him in such terms. Descartes sought to know God, and to make use of this knowledge philosophically. In this way a certain theological suppression of religion is consummated, with the philosopher sealing himself definitively within the prison of representation.
