the secrets of a sovereignty which
let us get beyond the servility of any subject.
It is about celibate love in its sublimation
and the transgressions against the workers’ taboos
and the secrets of its mysticism of sin.
It is about missionary love in its mission
and the secrets of sacrifice even of
the sacrifice of literal meaning in Proust’s poetry.
It is about purgatorial love in its purification
and the secrets of the violence that justice demands.
It is about loving love and the God who is Love
and the secrets of the gift in its pure giving.
For Bataille the nine great secret things
help us better understand agape’s nine unique traits.
He learned this from Kierkegaard, Nietzsche,
and all the great Catholic mystics.
Bataille had his Predecessors
Bataille was a great student of comparative philosophy
and that took him deeply into comparative mysticism.
Most of all he loved Nietzsche and he understood
with him that many gods have died including
the gods of Descartes, of Kant and of Hegel,
of Luther, of Calvin and of Henry VIII.
He saw how, in 1881, Nietzsche had his great conversion
and came to be a child-like believer in Jesus
with his “Yes and Amen” for the eternal return of all existence.
He came to appreciate also the literary work of Kierkegaard
whose pseudonymical writings all led up to the Works of Love
in which he explains the agape of Jesus
and the logic of its reconciliation
in loving the other as more important than oneself.
Bartaille himself converted to Catholicism
and even studied to be a priest and came
to greatly love the works of St. John of the Cross
and St. Theresa of Avila and of St. Ignatius of Loyola.
But he did not like dogmatic servitude
which he felt at times the church imposed upon him.
So he left all servility to become a sovereign person.
He also made a great study of Hinduism
and of Buddhism and he mistrusted their mysticisms
which led to the loss of the sovereign person
and did not bring about the end of the caste system
which kept millions enslaved in servitude.
Bataille, like Nietzsche, is a Franciscan
with Scotus’ metaphysics of excess
and Ockham’s nominalistic scepticism.
But with Nietzsche, Bataille lives this out
in the play of a dancing ecstasy.
Bataille had His Followers
We will see how Julia Kristeva greatly appreciated
Goerge Bataille, which she explained in nine ways:
1) Bataille and Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Revolution
2) Bataille and Kristeva’s Poetic Revolution
3) Bataille and Kristeva’s Semiotic Revolution
4) Bataille and Kristeva’s Sexual Revolution
5) Bataille and Kristeva’s Women’s Revolution
6) Bataille and Kristeva’s Philosophic Revolution
7) Bataille and Kristeva’s Scientific Revolution
8) Bataille and Kristeva’s Christian Revolution
9) Bataille and Kristeva’s Political Revolution
We will also study in detail in just what way Michel
Foucault appreciated Bataille so much in nine ways:
1) Bataille, Foucault, and the Heart of Divine Love
2) Their Notion of Animal and Human Sexuality
3) And of Transgression and the Sacred
4) In the Play of Limits and Transgression
5) Transgression can even be Glorious
6) And can help us discover the forgiving God
7) And can be an Affirmative Postmodern Leap
8) So that Bataille and Foucault are Men of Prayer
9) As Transgression takes them beyond Hegel
Bataille had His Critics
Several great philosophers took Bataille very seriously
and it is interesting to think about why great existentialists
like Sartre and Marcel would have been opposed to him
while postmodernists like Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva
valued him so much and got so much from his thought.
We will think about this in detail and see why Sartre
even though he was a great existentialist philosopher was
opposed to Bataille’s altruistic ethics which Bataille
explained in terms of mysticism and the agape of Jesus.
Sartre thought of Bataille as arguing for an altruistic
ethics and yet as very unethical in his promiscuity.
He saw Bataille as writing about mystics like St. John
of
