Bataille - Literature And Evil Other ... Exclusive - Georges

Blake is Bataille’s great liberator. His “Proverbs of Hell” (“The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”) are a direct echo of Bataille’s concept of dépense (expenditure). Blake’s evil is merely the energy that the moral law has repressed. Bataille celebrates Blake as the prophet who understood that the tyrant and the priest invent “good” to enslave the life force. Literature, in Blake’s hands, becomes a blasphemous liturgy.

Bataille begins with Wuthering Heights . For him, Heathcliff is not a romantic anti-hero but a sovereign being. The evil in Brontë’s novel is the radical refusal to compromise. Heathcliff’s cruelty is the expression of an absolute passion that cares nothing for social survival. Bataille sees in Catherine Earnshaw a figure who desires to be “evil” in order to escape the banality of goodness. Brontë’s genius, he argues, lies in showing that love and destruction are inseparable. Georges Bataille - Literature and Evil other ...

The realm of childhood, expenditure, eroticism, and the "Pleasure Principle". Blake is Bataille’s great liberator

In the history of Western thought, literature has often been assigned a noble, if not moral, function: to instruct, to elevate, and to console. From Aristotle’s catharsis to Matthew Arnold’s “sweetness and light,” the written word has been a tool for taming the savage heart. Then came Georges Bataille (1897–1962)—librarian, economist of the accursed, mystic of the profane, and philosopher of the gutter. With his incendiary 1957 collection of essays, Literature and Evil ( La Littérature et le Mal ), Bataille turned this entire tradition on its head. Bataille celebrates Blake as the prophet who understood