Georges Bataille - Experience Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

View all Georges Bataille Quotes
The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.

Georges Bataille
Inner experience … is not easily accessible and, viewed from the outside by intelligence, it would even be necessary to see in it a sum of distinct operations, some intellectual, others aesthetic, yet others moral. … It is only from within, lived to the point of terror, that it appears to unify that which discursive thought must separate.

Georges Bataille
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.

Georges Bataille
It is through an intimate cessation of all intellectual operations that the mind is laid bare. If nor, discourse maintains it in its little complacency. … The difference between inner experience and philosophy resides principally in this: that in experience, … what counts is no longer the statement of wind, but the wind.

Georges Bataille
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.

Georges Bataille
By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least of meditated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere up to now, that of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of an origin, of any confession whatever. This is why I don't like the word mystical.

Georges Bataille
Experience is, in fever and anguish, the putting into question (to the test) of that which a man knows of being. Should he in this fever have any apprehension whatsoever, he cannot say: I have seen God, the absolute, or the depths of the universe ; he can only say that which I have seen eludes understanding —and God, the absolute, the depths of the universe are nothing if they are not categories of the understanding.

If I said decisively, I have seen God, that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.

Georges Bataille