Abstract

This dissertation considers the theme of mysticism in the work of Georges Bataille . Bataille's interest in mysticism, which begins with a series of personal mystical experiences in the 1920s, first finds expression in a number of articles in the 1930s, then, more explicitly, in L'Experience interieure . Chapter 1 of the dissertation addresses the relation between the mystical, or "inner" experience and the question of ethics. The ecstatic experience of the mystic was perceived by a number of Bataille's contemporaries--notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Jules Monnerot--as a dubious foundation upon which to construct a moral system. An analysis of the 1944 debate between Bataille and Sartre and Bataille's early, unfinished Manuel de l'Anti-chretien reveals that Bataille's insistence on the primacy of experience over Reason aims at overcoming the pervasive strain of Kantianism in a thinking of morality still bound to Christian values. To the ethics of transcendant values he opposes an "impossible" religion predicated on essentially Nietzschean values. Chapter 2 turns to the problem of language: if the mystical experience exceeds the apprehensive capabilities of consciousness, to express it discursively is necessarily to betray its essential unknowability. Bataille refuses the temptation of renunciation, and insists upon articulating his experience without recourse to linguistic mystification. In confronting the tension between experience and representation, Bataille is led to experiment with language in radical ways: rejecting both philosophic and poetic discourse, he strives to reverse language's habitual function, i.e. to make sense of the world, and to invent a mode of expression that coincides with the meaninglessness of the mystical experience. The final chapter offers a reading of Madame Edwarda, stressing Bataille's attempt to communicate his experience textually while avoiding the "seche traduction verbale" that the written word implies. Interpretation of a set of religious metaphors allows us to relate Bataille's project to the divine act of creation. The argument proceeds from interpretations of Bataille and experience offered by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida, Maurice Blanchot and others