Georges Bataille: the experience of being as the critique of ontology

The work of a French writer and thinker Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is an attempt of radical criticism of sense - criticism ofontology (understanding of being) from the point of view of the experience of being or fundamentally ontological aesthesis. Bataille designatesthis aesthesis as inner experience, experience of the impossible, ecstasy, etc. The notion of experience itself needs a radical revisionin the context of Batailles critique of sense. This experience can no more be described in the terms of transcendental intentionality -this is not the orientation towards something, which is making that something its own theme - this is the experience of non-knowledge(non-savoir). This experience-limite, as Maurice Blanchot called it, can no longer be experienced in the first person - rather it signifies theslip out of the limits of self, and in this respect it proves to be allied with the impossible experience of death. Moreover, this ontologicalaesthesis is almost the direct expression of the being itself or the gesture of the intrinsic to the being itself transgression - that is the beingthat exceeds itself, decomposes its own logos, and pierces through its own limits. The being or God, according to Bataille, is justsuch an absolute, unrestrainable, and unbearable ex-cess. Batailles critique of sense takes the form of a series of paradoxical disciplines:base materialism, scatology, heterology, sacred sociology, general economy, atheology (a peculiar mysticism of nonknowledge).Principal figures of these disciplines are the matter of our analysis, which is aimed at reconstruction of the general course ofBatailles criticism of ontology. The subject of our special interest is the question of ethical side of this criticism. What grounds can make thedestruction of sense - this paradoxical project against project - an ethical task - something due or obligatory in a sense? The propersense of this paradoxical movement, as we suppose, is not a mere result of the impossibility of escaping from sense. The radical way toground the critique of understanding of being is the one that Bataille designates as hyper-morality. This is truly a paradoxical ethics -affirming the moral necessity of the immoral, the imperativity of transgression - the ethics of sovereignty or being without delay. Nevertheless,in the person of Bataille we have one of the most uncompromising sorts of the ontological ethics of correspondence that runs through thewhole history of the Western thought - from the ancient precept to become what you are to the Heideggerian genuineness in respondingthe call of being. But, in case of Bataille, the being no longer gathers itself in logos, and the correspondence to the ontological presenceof absence has no more logos as its proper measure.

Keywords

Authors

References