Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille

Author:Georges Bataille
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Writing, Literary Criticism, Philosophy, History
ISBN: 9780141965970
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 1957-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

THE POETRY OF SADE’S DESTINY

We can hardly be surprised that such a strange and difficult truth was first revealed in a splendid and astonishing manner. The possibility of consciousness is its fundamental value, but it could never stop referring to the background which it symbolised. How could this nascent truth have lacked poetic splendour? Without poetic splendour it would never have had its human scope. It is moving to establish that a mythical plot should be connected with that which finally reveals the depths of myths. It took a revolution – the crash of the gates of the Bastille – to deliver Sade’s secret to us. He had the misfortune to live this dream, whose obsession is the soul of philosophy, the unity of subject and object. The identity is in the transcendence of the limitations of beings, of the object of desire and the subject which desires. Maurice Blanchot rightly said that Sade ‘had managed to make his prison the image of the solitude of the universe’, but that this prison, this world, no longer bothered him since he had ‘banished all other creatures from it’. Thus the Bastille, where Sade did his writing, was the crucible in which the conscious limitations of being were slowly destroyed by the fire of a passion prolonged by powerlessness.

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