ABSTRACT
The fictive and the literary do not run parallel to the theoretical in Bataille’s writing, it is perhaps better to think of them as dramatizing the untruth of theory, if the relation is to be theorized at all. One might say that at the level of writing theory is a constricted species of fiction, in the same way that the actual constricts possibility (but what matters is the impossible). It is thus that one would acknowledge that epistemic factors are secondary to textual generativity, in a manner that has come to be described as ‘postmodern’. Even in Bataille’s terms, insofar as a Freudian lexicon might be adequate to them, it could be persuasively suggested that it is only when a narrative is rigorously disciplined by the reality principle that a theoreticization emerges in consequence, whereas the unfettered movement of the primary process is of a spontaneously literary character. Literature is not primordially a matter of effort, any more than love or dying are. Theory-on the other hand-is work.
