Frases de Georges Bataille

“A muchos el universo les parece honrado; las gentes honestas tienen los ojos castrados. Por eso temen la obscenidad. No sienten ninguna angustia cuando oyen el grito del gallo ni cuando se pasean bajo un cielo estrellado. Cuando se entregan 'a los placeres de la carne' lo hacen a condición de que sean insípidos.”

“Continuaba cuestionando los límites del mundo, al ver la miseria de quien con ellos se conforma, y no pude soportar por mucho tiempo lo fácil de la ficción: yo le exigía la realidad, me volví loco.

Si mentía, me quedaba en el plano de la poesía, de una superación verbal del mundo. Si perseveraba en una denigración ciega del mundo, mi denigración era falsa (como la superación). En cierto modo, mi conformidad con el mundo se profundizaba. Pero al no poder mentir a sabiendas, me volví loco (capaz de ignorar la verdad). O al no saber ya, para mí solo, representar la comedia de un delirio, me volví loco pero interiormente: viví la experiencia de la noche.

La poesía dio simplemente un giro: escapé por ella del mundo del discurso, que para mí se había convertido en el mundo natural, entré con ella en una especie de tumba donde la infinitud de lo posible nacía de la muerte del mundo lógico.

Al morir la lógica, daba a luz locas riquezas. Pero lo posible evocado no es sino irreal, la muerte del mundo lógico es irreal, todo es turbio y huidizo en esta oscuridad relativa. Puedo burlarme de mí mismo y de los demás: ¡todo lo real carece de valor, todo valor es irreal! De allí esa facilidad y esa fatalidad de deslizamientos en los que ignoro si miento o estoy loco. La necesidad de la noche procede de esa situación desafortunada.

La noche no podía sino desviarse de todo ello.

El cuestionarlo todo nacía de la exasperación de un deseo, ¡que no podía abocar al vacío!

El objeto de mi deseo era, en primer lugar, la ilusión y no pudo ser más que en segundo lugar el vacío de la desilusión.”

“Lo serio, la muerte y el dolor fundan la verdad
obtusa. Pero lo serio de la muerte y el dolor es la servidumbre del pensamiento.”

“La poesía, en un primer impulso, destruye los objetos que aprehende, los restituye, mediante esa destrucción, a la inasible fluidez de la existencia del poeta, y a ese precio espera encontrar la identidad del mundo y del hombre. Pero al mismo tiempo que realiza un desasimiento, intenta asir (captar) ese desasimiento. Y lo único que le es dado hacer es sustituir el desasimiento a las cosas asidas (captadas) de la vida reducida: no puede evitar que el desasimiento pase a ocupar el lugar de las cosas.”

“La poesía no es un conocimiento de sí, y menos aún la experiencia de un lejano posible (de lo que anteriormente no existía) sino la simple evocación con palabras de posibilidades inaccesibles.”

“La evocación tiene sobre la experiencia la ventaja de una riqueza y de una facilidad infinita pero aparta de la experiencia (esencialmente paralizada).

Sin la exuberancia de la evocación, la experiencia sería razonable. Comienza a partir de mi locura, si la impotencia de la evocación me asquea.

La poesía abre la noche al exceso del deseo. La noche que han dejado los estragos de la poesía es en mí la medida de un rechazo —de mi loca voluntad de desbordar el mundo—. También la poesía desbordaba ese mundo, pero no podía cambiarme.

Mi libertad ficticia aseguró ante todo que no destruía la ley de lo dado por la naturaleza. Si me hubiera conformado, me habría sometido con el tiempo a la dimensión de lo dado.”

“El tiempo no significa más que la huida de los objetos que parecían verdaderos.”

“The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth.”

“Nothing is more necessary or stronger in us than rebellion.”

“The sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.”

“I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.”

“A kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.”

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaining it.”

“We have in fact only two certainties in this world—that we are not everything and that we will die. To be conscious of not being everything, as one is of being mortal, is nothing. But if we are without a narcotic, an unbreathable void reveals itself. I wanted to be everything, so that falling into this void, I might summon my courage and say to myself: “I am ashamed of having wanted to be everything, for I see now that it was to sleep.” From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist.”

“I don't want your love unless you know i am repulsive, and love me even as you know it.”

“Incredible nervous state, trepidation beyond words: to be this much in love is to be sick (and I love to be sick).”

“In what will survive me
I am in harmony
with my annihilation.”

“Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.”

“Extreme seductiveness is at the boundary of horror”

“Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.”

“The owl flies, in the moonlight, over a field where the wounded cry out.

Like the owl, I fly in the night over my own misfortune.”

“Indeed, the direction of the future is only there in order to elude us.”

“We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.”

“You perhaps now know that desire reduces us to pulp.”

“The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a neutral image of life, that life's intimacy does not reveal it's dazzling consumption until the moment it gives out.”

“It is clear that the world is purely parodic, in other words, that each thing seen is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.
Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection, an effort at total identification has been made, because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another; all things would be visibly connected if one could discover at a single glance and in its totality the tracings of Ariadne’s thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.
But the copula of terms is no less irritating than the copulation of bodies. And when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy.
Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.”

“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”

“The warrior's nobility is like a prostitute's smile, the truth of which is self-interest.”

“But a sort of rupture-in anguish-leaves us at the limit of tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.”

“I enjoyed the innocence of unhappiness and of helplessness; could I blame myself for a sin which attracted me, which flooded me with pleasure precisely to the extent it brought me to despair?”

“The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind… From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.”

“Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commrnce from that point on.”

“[Zarathustra] never abandoned the watchword of not having any end, not serving a cause, because, as he knew, causes pluck off the wings we fly with.”

“The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is as differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape (chimpanzee, gorilla, orangutan or gibbon).”

“The advance of intelligence diminished, as a secondary consequence, the “possible” in a realm which appeared foreign to intelligence: that of inner experience.
To say “diminished” is even to say too little. The development of intelligence leads to a drying up of life which, in return, has narrowed intelligence. It is only if I state this principle: “inner experience itself is authority” that I emerge from this impotence.”

“In previous conditions, extreme states came under the jurisdiction of the arts… People substituted writing (fiction) for what was once spiritual life, poetry (chaotic words) for actual ecstasies. Art constitutes a minor free zone outside action, paying for its freedom by giving up the real world. A heavy price!”