ABSTRACT
For Bataille the impossible or the unavowable, to use Blanchot's term, while being themselves exposure, resist the total exposure into the pure openness of relations. The term 'compulsion' would name the exposure to the other, paradoxically, since the notion of a compulsive exposure forces the affirmative movement of compulsion together with the passivity of exposure. Perhaps the compulsion, the drive, is to communicate that exposure, the experience of exposure, in a form, in a writing, which would be adequate to it, adequate to its excess and its incommensurability, ruining communication as the exchange or recognizable meanings. Bataille communicates a compulsion then, the excessive movement of a drive, beyond the will to be recognized; compulsion is not the effect of the will. The compulsion which drives Bataille's thought would be the drive to remain resolutely in exposure, despite the all too human efforts to retreat from it.
