| Title | : | Inner Experience |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0887066356 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780887066351 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 244 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1943 |
Inner Experience Reviews
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If you're not familiar with how Hegel, Nietzsche and Marx are connected and how the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois era needs to be transcended before one can fully grasp the freedom of individual sovereignty and make the social revolution, you may not have a clue about what Bataille is working towards with INNER EXPERIENCE. My suggestion is to get a shaman to help you navigate a heavy psychedelic experience AFTER reading and fully grasping Marx's VALUE, PRICE AND PROFIT, Hegel's Introduction to THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and Nietzsche's THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA. Otherwise, you can take my shortcut:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNnkyt...
Always keep in mind that Bataille was familiar with the Surrealist treatment and use of Freud's psychological insights and that he was living in Paris during heyday of the Popular Front, Stalinist domination of the ideological left. -
Weird and difficult text. The moments of lucidity in his otherwise dark and obscure prose are jaw-dropping.
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I find that inner experience is a movement toward not a singular experience, but a communal experience situated beyond discourse and any intellectual project. Bataille is one of the 20th century's most thought provoking thinkers and "Inner Experience" is perhaps one of the most important writings from the interwar period of Europe, being published in 1943. By and large, "Inner Experience" is a poetic meditation dealing with individual insufficiency. Impotent and stupid humanity is always trying to possess & to know, to understand and scientificly, establish a methodology of understanding; but, then of course everything is subsequently categorized. Through inner experience the individual eventually is effaced and becomes part of the unfolding of time: being is remaining the self in the ocean of life. I feel that when reading this book the words tend to dissolve and so does the notion of the "I." I liked it, probably should read the rest of Summa Atheologica and then write another review.
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'When I solicit gently, in the very heart of anguish, a strange absurdity, an eye opens itself at the summit, in the middle of my skull.
This eye which, to contemplate the sun, face to face in its nudity, opens up to it in all its glory, does not arise from my reason: it is a cry which escapes me. For at the moment when the lightning stroke blinds me, I am the flash of a broken life, and this life—anguish and vertigo—opening itself up to an infinite void, is ruptured and spends itself all at once in this void.
The earth bristles with plants, which a continuous movement carries from day to day to the celestial void, and its innumerable surfaces reflect the entirety of men laughing or rent apart back to the brilliant immensity of space. In this free movement, independent of all consciousness, the elevated bodies strain towards an absence of limits which stops one's breath; but although the agitation and inner hilarity are lost unceasingly in a sky as beautiful, but no less illusory than death, my eyes continue to subjegate me through a commonplace link to the things which surround me, in the middle of which my steps forward are limited by the habitual necessities of life.' -
This book is borderline incomprehensible, but reading it itself is a profound experience.
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«[...] 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.”»
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This writing is the echoes of a cry. A cry of anguish, of the human that is bound and binding in its humanity, its thought, its knowledge. It cries out from the depths of itself, from out of alterity - the cry to the other to sacrifice themselves as well, and so communicate some difference, something subversive that discourse cannot convey. The passion over the guilt of humanity, the oppression that we are, and that empties us. An exigency for sacrifice rends us from within, and we cannot but cry out in anguish. Such, perhaps, is what the inner experience calls one to.
Ecce homo. -
I heard somewhere that after reading The Gay Science, Bataille felt at a loss. How could he write anything that Nietzsche had not already written? I often feel that way reading Bataille himself.
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Uno de los libros más arduos que leí en mucho tiempo y el primer tomo de un proyecto de tres tomos muy ambicioso: la Suma Ateológica de Georges Bataille, una de las mentes más complejas e interesantes que dio Francia el siglo pasado..
En este primero tomo, el que corresponde a La experiencia interior, Bataille busca describir el misticismo quitando la idea de Dios como fin último de trascendencia. Para decirlo burdamente: si hay algún dios implicado en el éxtasis, es una experiencia mística; y si no hay divinidad, ese éxtasis recibe la nomenclatura de experiencia interior. Bataille busca salir de sí y dar cuenta de lo que implica esa desnudez y al mismo tiempo traza las vías que considera necesarias para llegar a ese éxtasis (o qué elementos estuvieron implicados en esa experiencia: la poesía, la risa, la tragedia, la angustia. El salirse de si mismo y vivir soberanamente en la risa, en la poesía, en la tragedia y en la angustia es acercarse un poco más a la idea de Nietzsche de vivir a conciencia como deicidas, la gran broma del siglo de asumirnos como inventores de esa trascendencia y dejar de poner excusas y volvernos soberanos de nuestros propios actos.
Es un texto árido y por momento fragmentario. Me costó especialmente su lectura cuando Bataille utiliza el método que descubre en sí mismo.
De todos modos a tanta aridez el autor me regaló pasajes poéticos de lo más bello que leí con lo que compensa. Tomaré aire y en unos días me adentraré en la lectura del segundo tomo: El culpable/ El Aleluya. -
O primeiro livro de Bataille que li foi O erotismo. A obra é realmente brilhante, impecável. Por isso, comprei a Suma Ateológica, para entrar mais à fundo na obra de Bataille.
A experiência interior é o primeiro livro da Suma, escrito em 1943, ou seja, 14 anos antes da publicação d'O erotismo. No Postscriptum (1953), Bataille já fala sobre algumas mudanças que seu pensamento passou nesse período de 10 anos.
Diferente d'O erotismo, A experiência interior é carregada de um estilo embriagado e desesperado, deprimido e em revolta. Beirando a literatura, aqui não se encontra a mesma análise sistemática d'O erotismo: a busca aqui é pelas alusões ao não-saber, a recusa à submissão do pensamento. É um processo magnífico. A experiência da leitura consegue aproximar o leitor do êxtase que Bataille se refere: é propriamente meditação. A experiência da angústia e do riso, narradas por Bataille, são especialmente vívidas. Não se trata de um frio tratado de filosofia pura, mas uma virulenta meditação em busca da experiência do impossível.
Confesso que o estilo d'O erotismo me agrada mais: ainda não se trata de um tratado de filosofia pura, mas o esforço de uma "voz firme" é a real força de Bataille. Ainda assim, o "balbucio" d'A experiência interior é um êxtase divino, nos extremos da angústia e do riso. -
Not lucid. But very lucid.
Reminded me of Blue of Noon a lot of times throughout the pages. The two books seemed like a verification of each other. -
Whatever theories were held forth in this book are muddy and do not bear repetition, at least by someone like me. They are tensions, a series of alternating moments of resignation and defiance, a true "dance about architecture", as Zappa would have it. Naturally, the content of this book can be laid out and discussed, but it would feel like a cruel affront to Bataille and his supposed aims, at least if such discussion was without the fierce burning of the heart and the uncontrollable feel to expand as a being, through however thorny nebulae.
This is a maddening work that makes you question all the movements inside me. I fell prey to it and I didn't even dare to explain some of the things to myself, in case I might have simply assigned a description on my experience and thus consigned it into the discursive realm. It's not exactly a work that will easily walk beside oneself for years on end, but it was utterly irresistible in the moment I was reading it.
The presence of Bataille was palpable and so full that that alone would have made this work a crowning achievement. But Bataille also offers a gateway into the unknown (which, incidentally, is what he called knowledge). And he shows that there is conviction and courage in someone to approach that unknown - unknown qua unknown, a [] without mental commentary or dramatis personae. He will not do it out of provocation or pettiness, but in the throes of a thrusting, compulsive movement that propels him onwards like a laughing Nietzsche.
Of course, I'm not completely gullible or charmed by Bataille. I do not understand his adamant insistence on anxiety and suffering as the necessary forms of the inner experience, nor do I underwrite an innate desire to be everyone. Yet I do understand the principle of insufficiency, or rather I can feel it, and I am in complete agreement in that the fullness of experience is to be sought after... But in communion, perforce; why, that's occult...
...!
Yet again I've read something I've hoarded a million impressions about yet haven't managed to grasp anything with clarity and composition. But reading Bataille has almost convinced me that this is hardly a deficiency—there is no necessity to bask in the vast plaza of clarity, not when the inner experience is at issue. I am in no way obligated to renounce my reading or my manner of reading as obscure or denigrate myself as a restive flipflopper of a reader. If I did so, I would be setting myself in the common furrows of my mental commentary and continue to sow the same seeds, hating the worker, blaming the tools and anathematising the climate. However, there are times when one needn't sow at all. -
This is a veritable prayer book, at times brilliant (like the night--the eye of a human being that becomes awful), at times frustrating guide to supplication in the profound absence of God.
What it addresses is nothing less than the all too familiar feeling of insufficiency rousing in the dregs of our being, the impossible drive to BECOME EVERYTHING, to occupy the summit of BEING, while at the same time retaining our discontinuity, our autonomy.
Hence we are each condemned to suffer as a particle of anguish suspended in the void.
There is no solution, no salvation, except maybe in communicating our contagion to others in an exercise of negative atheology.
Thus Bataille urges us to invest in EXPERIENCE and EXPERIENCE alone, to kneel before its sole authority and value, to recognize its sovereignty (suspending scientific, philosophical, religious and even mystical sufficiencies, everything that reeks of what he condescendingly labels as "project"- a postponement, life put off until later), and offer ourselves up to the UNKNOWN which it delivers.
At this point any perceptive reader will not be too shocked to learn that scarcely anything positive can be stated about what INNER EXPERIENCE is, lest we succumb to the temptation to put darkness to the service of the light (spiritual desolation revitalizes one's faith, the staple of mysticism, beginning with Dionysus the Areophygite), as non-knowledge merely neutralizes knowledge claim to self sufficiency, it does not subvert, upend or otherwise endeavor to usurp its place.
Nonetheless Bataille assures us that it is distinguished from absolute nothingness by "more than does a world of a thousand colors" (125).
Indeed, "non-knowledge communicates ecstasy", but one has to first crash on the shores of the end of the limit of the possible.
Woe unto all who approach this book expecting to be edified. -
[Edição francesa da coleção TEL Gallimard, 1978].
É realmente impressionante a capacidade de um homem da primeira metade do século XX na casa dos seus 30 anos de soar quase tão edgy quanto um pré-adolescente de 13 anos que escreve letras de Nine Inch Nails no caderno da escola. Apesar disso, eu aprecio por vezes a violência poética de Bataille (v. p. ex. os primeiros parágrafos de "O Azul do Céu")
As conversas sobre os santos católicos, tortura chinesa e êxtase (quase tudo da terceira parte) foram interessantes, mas a nível teórico eu realmente não consigo levar nada aqui muito a sério. Se você tiver qualquer interesse, basta apenas a seção "O Labirinto" e se você se sentir mais afim o resto da terceira parte assim como a quarta parte (até a segunda digressão) podem lhe ser agradáveis.
Como o autor, eu me sinto demasiado tomado por uma angústia sufocante (e por uma enorme dor de cabeça) após encarar esse livro e portanto me sinto forçado a acabar essa resenha por aqui até retornar do meu estado de êxtase e escrever mais meio parágrafo e parar de novo. Eu espero jamais ter que olhar o vazio nesse céu novamente.
E - por Deus! - não se aproxime d'O Suplício. -
took me over a year to read….an extremely difficult but rewarding experience. There are some parts of this that I understood intuitively and other parts that went totally over my head. Most of this is fleeting impressions, stream of consciousness, images and feelings which do go along way in describing the transcendental, ecstatic states at the core of this.
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3.5/5
A bit repetitive -
Deus, escute esse homem, por favor, ele clama!!
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To try to name the unnamable, to communicate the incommunicable, to dwell in the presence of absence, the gaping néant, the dark emptiness of unknowing... That is the question.
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engaged w/ it here:
http://www.5cense.com/15/410.htm -
DNF; deeply and truly hated it; it reminded me of The Book of Disquiet, which I also DNF and deeply and truly hated.
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La caduta suppone come uno slancio l’atteggiamento di comando dei corpi in piedi. L’erezione, tuttavia, non ha il senso della rigidità militare; i corpi umani si drizzano sul suolo come una sfida alla Terra, al fango che li genera e che sono felici di respingere nel nulla. La Natura che partoriva l’uomo era una madre morente: dava l’essere a chi, con la sua venuta al mondo, ne segnò la condanna a morte. Ma come la riduzione della Natura a un vuoto, così pure la distruzione di colui che ha distrutto è implicata in quel moto di insolenza. La negazione compiuta della Natura da parte dell’uomo – il quale si eleva al di sopra di un nulla che è opera sua – rinvia direttamente alla vertigine, alla caduta nel vuoto del cielo. Nella misura in cui non è rinchiusa dagli oggetti utili che la circondano, l’esistenza sfugge, in un primo tempo, alla servitù della nudità solo proiettando nel cielo un’immagine invertita del suo denudamento. In questa formazione dell’immagine morale pare che, dalla Terra al Cielo, la caduta sia invertita dal Cielo all’oscura profondità del suolo (del peccato); la sua vera natura (l’uomo vittima del Cielo splendente) resta velata nell’esuberanza mitologica.
Il movimento stesso con cui l’uomo rinnega la Terra-Madre che lo ha generato apre la via all’asservimento. L’essere umano si abbandona alla meschina disperazione. La vita umana si presenta allora come insufficiente, oppressa dalle sofferenze o dalle privazioni che la riducono a vanitose brutture. La Terra è ai suoi piedi come un rifiuto. Al di sopra di essa il Cielo è vuoto. In mancanza di un orgoglio abbastanza grande per presentarsi in piedi davanti a tale vuoto, essa si prostra faccia a terra, con gli occhi inchiodati al suolo. E, nella paura della libertà mortale del cielo, afferma tra sé e l’infinito vuoto il rapporto tra schiavo e padrone; disperatamente, come il cieco, essa ricerca una consolazione terrorizzata in una ridicola rinuncia.
Al di sotto dell’alta immensità, divenuta da mortalmente vuota opprimente, l’esistenza, che il denudamento respinge lontano da ogni possibile, segue nuovamente un moto di arroganza, ma, questa volta, l’arroganza la oppone allo splendore del cielo: profondi moti di collera liberata la sollevano. E non è più la Terra, di cui essa è il rifiuto, che la sua sfida provoca, è il riflesso nel cielo dei suoi terrori – l’oppressione divina – a diventare oggetto del suo odio.
Opponendosi alla Natura, la vita umana era divenuta trascendente e rinviava al vuoto tutto ciò che essa non era: in compenso, se questa vita respinge l’autorità che la teneva nell’oppressione e diviene essa stessa sovrana, si scioglie dai legami che paralizzano un movimento vertiginoso verso il vuoto. -
Woah - that's all I can muster in summary: woah. An invigorating investigation of interiority, of course, I thought, it will be contradictory and inscrutable. Even this concession could not have prepared me for the sheer unwieldiness of this text.
I came to Bataille first in his aesthetic treatise on the erotic, Erotism. That work explained for me why death looms so large in our understanding of the sensual. Encompassing religion, art, and philosophy, Bataille presents a unified theory of sexuality and sacrifice, arguing that the two are inextricably linked. In Inner Experience, Bataille explores the labyrinth of self and comes to a similar conclusion. To truly know oneself, we must die to ourselves. Just as the desire for pleasure contains an opposite drive for death, the desire for knowledge and autonomy harbors a deep want of non-knowledge, of the inexplicable. Inner Experience, Bataille's shorthand for a whole range of mystical states of being, helps us approach that void of existence. To try to put it in any more complicated words or to simplify it down into a more clear summary is to do violence to Bataille's project. All I can say is that I loved the experience of reading it while simultaneously wondering if I really understood what he was actually getting at. In my mind, that's a worthwhile endeavor. If you feel similarly, I highly recommend. -
An extremely moving and powerful text, one which does not allow any break from the journey it brings the reader on. Any discrete statement made about this would ultimately miss the point. The internal result of reading this text transcends any thought one can mediate via language concerning it. Worth reading!
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Felsefenin üstadlarını bilmeden bu kitabı okumak çok zor. Bilmediğim için sürekli Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer ve felsefe akımları arasında mekik dokudum. Yazarın kelimelere verdiği anlamları çözmeye çalışmak daha zordu. Bu çabamın nihayetinde kitabı birazcık olsun anladım mı peki? Hayır!!!
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Annihilation is the correct term to describe this book. Annihilation of spirit and mind. Have I found out about Bataille's 'sovereignty'? To a certain extent, yes. It is according to Bataille himself, an obscure book so if you do not trust me, at least trust the author.
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Une description fièvreuse, saillante et non-linéaire de la composante la plus intime et extrême que peut receler l'existence. On la sent rédigée au milieu de la nuit, avec angoisse. À lire en plusieurs fois, comme la Bible, en y revenant inlassablement, ou bien d'une traite, en partageant la fièvre
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This is a weird, difficult book. I do not know precisely what to think about it, perhaps that being Bataille’s point all along. Reading it is a strong experience, though.
