Prolific writer produced novels, criticism, poems, economic and political treatises, and philosophical and anthropological essays. He embraced transgressive and erotic subject matter, and founded several journals and literary groups in his lifetime. He edited the journal Documents from 1929-1930, which aimed to push Surrealist ideology, and though he was initially drawn to the Surrealist group, Bataille soon fell out with André Breton.
Bjrk has been quoted as saying that Bataille was a major inspiration for her. The broken eggs featured heavily in her Venus as a Boy music video are a homage to the theme of eggs in Story of the Eye.
I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction.
Though the immediate impression of rebellion may obscure the fact, the task of authentic literature is nevertheless only conceivable in terms of a desire for fundamental communication with the reader.
TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE. . . I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think. . . You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON—WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS. —Theory of Religion,I think that knowledge enslaves us, that at the base of all knowledge there is a servility, the acceptation of a way of life wherein each moment has meaning only in relation to another or others that will follow it.
To others, the universe seems decent because decent people have welded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, people savor the "pleasures of the flesh" only on the condition that they may be insipid.
Above all human existence requires stability, the permanence of things. The result is an ambivalence with respect to all great and violent expenditure of strength; such an expenditure, whether in nature or in man, represents the strongest possible threat. The feelings of admiration and of ecstasy induced by them thus mean that we are concerned to admire them from afar. The sun corresponds to that prudent concern. It is all radiance gigantic loss of heat and light, flame, explosion; but remote from men, who can enjoy in safety and quiet the fruits of this cataclysm. To earth belongs the solidity which sustains houses of stone and the steps of men (at least on its surface, for buried within the depths of the earth is the incandescence of lava).
Sovereignty, loyalty, and solitude.
The fact is, that what de Sade was trying to bring to the surface of the conscious mind was precisely the thing that revolted that mind From the very first he set before the consciousness things which it could not tolerate.
The emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence is death.
Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.
Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us. .
