“Don’t take our word for it! Alas, we’re not all that logical. We say God - though in reality God is a person, a particular individual. We speak to him. We address him by name - he is the God of Abraham and Jacob. We treat him just like anybody else, like a personal being...”

“So he’s a whore?”

“____________________________________”

This work is turgid with concepts structured like thicket bushes, with terms such as ‘summit’, ‘chance’, ‘risk’, ‘impalement’, ‘laughter’ and ‘theopathy’ bristling with contradictory value judgements. We have here limit concepts that induce a pendulum to continually swing between anguish and unbridled joy, clinging on to a minute prospect of naked chance. Us, the race of gamblers, not being able to recognise the permeable border between eroticism and ascetic mysticism - of a God we make a whore out of, a God weak due to his immutable nature.... never taking a chance (and chance, against the vicissitudes of time, being the most affable thing) - we are forever lacerated by attempts to communicate with one another, by trying to tell one another about the labyrinthine logic of the summit we each clamour towards.

I believe this work, in conjunction with Virilio’s Speed and Politics, really does provide a bulletproof anthropology, a perfect assessment of the current state of affairs. Speed and Politics has a macroscopic lens which becomes hyper focused in Bataille’s own interior monologue, with the fraught tension of occupied France being the backdrop of these contemplative diary entries seeing Bataille pushing toward the beyond of his particularlity, attempting to affect an abortive summit toward a transcendent nothingness.

This book’s a real beauty. ( )

Bataille usa Nietzsche para continuar a delirar na sua busca do ser. Mas é uma busca tingida pela individualidade, do indivíduo contra o espírito gregário. Daquele que rejeita o ocultamento de ser, quando este dá origem a algo, a uma forma de encarar as coisas, a uma criação que se estabiliza em redes de significados e ganhos. Então o ser é uma espécie de nada, sem vantagem, sem recompensa. Bataille vê isso em Nietzsche, na afirmação da chance surgida da junção do eterno retorno e do super-humano. Não torna o super-humano um humano melhor porvir, mas o porvir eterno do humano, que afirma e se perde na chance.

Ademais, forma extremamente excêntrica. Mistura de análise, diálogo, com um memorando de citações de Nietzsche, artigos de 2 páginas e um debate. ( )

Articulated well what I'd been feeling/thinking about Nietzsche and the void he and Hume unveil in metaethics.

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