Weird Mysticism : Philosophical Horror and the Mystical Text (9781683932888) by Baumgartner Brad

Author:Baumgartner, Brad
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Pub Inc
Published: 2012-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bataille’s work thus seeks a communal re-incarnation of the sacred, taking us into that very oblivion, to replace this privative (or lost) sacredness by resituating the human being within the immanence of sacred, within very context of the death of God. As such, ontological and mystical concerns are paradoxically (un)bolstered by evocations of the impossible, placing the human being at her very limits with the intent of causing a total loss of self, for one cannot reach the non-place[13] of sovereignty without facing the terror before the absence of God.

We can conclude from this call for an absent God that, no matter how well readers succeed in generating meaning from the text, they are in fact incapable of knowing fully the mystical experience that produced the so-called content of the text.[14] Bataillean horror can thus be properly called ineffable, unveiling through the written text a failure on behalf of speech to adequately describe or reckon his mystical experience. It is a horror which tries to express the inexpressibility of a limit-experience in which affect and ontology excessively collide. However, and contradictorily so, this failure is also its true strength, for in losing himself at the limit of himself, Bataille sees that which was never seen.

As we have noted, Bataille’s weird mysticism evokes perverse actualizations which demonstrate that a denuded view of the self, one freed of ego-laden clichés, needs to be constantly reinvented and practiced. Ordinary language fails when it comes to conveying the limit-experience of the human, so he opts for an ontologically inventive and semantic union with the beyond. Offering up intense melodramas of self only to ultimately reject and annihilate them, Bataille repeatedly invents new methods to discourse about the ineffable, formulating cosmic modes of thought that blur the distinction between self and world, helping us to think through, not dwell in, the divisions among affect, intellect, and ontology. In the next section, then, we will identify yet another way in which Bataille draws upon and yet reworks mystical discourse, namely through his highly nuanced and negatively indexed practice of writing poetry.

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