ESSAY
BY ADRIAN GARGETT
4: 48
It is 4: 48 in the morning. Let us say one is "intoxicated"-an impoverishedcipher for all those terrible things one does to one's nervous system in the
depths of the night-and writing is "impossible"-although one still thinks, even
to the point of terror and psychosis. What does this mean as an episode in the
real history of the spirit, to die without trace? Where has it strayed to?
Imprisoned memories prowl through the dark. Fuck it. They scatter like rats in
the echo. Ashes drift in the back of the skull.
An extraordinary lucidity, frosty and crisp in the blackness, but paralyzed;
lodged in some recess of the universe that clutches it like a trap. A wave of
nausea is accompanied by a peculiarly insinuating headache, as if thought itself
were copulating unreservedly with suffering. Panic. I blink. Everything vanishes
into the shadows, hint of predatory cat's eyes. The dust settles thick. The
metallic hardness of intellect seems like a cutting instrument in my hand; the
detached fragment from a machine, or an abattoir, seeking out the terminal sense
it was always refused.
Literature is like love in that both are crushing diseases. The way literature
willfully desecrates the resources of base physiology is like love, as is the
way it associates itself with hunger, insomnia, anxiety and bizarre fevers,
shattering lives and wrecking the most logical plans. Love institutes the
essence of abjection and the gutter into the most sheltered of existences,
violating interiorities, until it finally beats its abject sacrifices down onto
the floor, from where they are thrown into the void of supplication without
potential reaction, asphyxiating on a sulfurous combination of elation and pain.
There is no significant literature that is not concurrently an absurdity and a
blazing inanity. It is no accident that literature has been a eternal agonizing
erotic stuttering, whose aesthetic force emanates from the belief that beauty
single-handedly renders endurable the obligation for chaos, violence, and
ignominy that is the source of love.
Every invention and coherent word, every scrap of sustenance, every moment of
sleep, is an offence antagonistic to love and an impulse to desperation. Erotic
obsession has no tolerance for well-being, not even for plain survival. It is on
this basis that love is the decisive sickness and offence. Nothing is more
irreconcilable with the interests of the human species. "I search only for the
terror of evil" (1. writes Bataille, in his observation of the vehement
rejection of integral being. "Evil is love" (2., "the need to deny an order with
which one is unable to live"(3.. The terrestrial conception at its most animated
finds a futile collapse in eroticism, so that the downward spiral into love is
also plain economy, which is conceivably a tragedy or a hoax - something
genuinely repulsive and sacred in any case.
That the source of love is a thirst for danger is revealed throughout its
irregular progress. At its most fundamental, love is determined by a craving to
be pitilessly unrequited, nurturing every kind of repulsive self-abasement,
confusion, and inanity. Sometimes this excites the scorn that is so evidently
fitting, and the suffering individual can then indulge in the absolute blazing
wound that each act becomes. One dwindles to nothing, dissipating, exhausting
spirit and capital in orgies of narcosis, decreasing one's labor-power to the
point of ruin, driving one's every thought into an void of overwhelming
indifference. At the edge of such a flight lies the decisive fracture of health,
vicious destitution, psychosis and suicide. A love that does not conduct such a
damned trajectory is forever at some crucial level frustrated: "to love to this
point is to be sick (and I love to be sick)." (4. Yet there are times in which
the malevolent terror of love taints the beloved, or one is oneself tainted by
the fascination of another, or two forms of love impact, so that both
synchronize together into a spiral of enchantingly suspended collapse, denied
naive tragedy. Each struggles to be eliminated by the other, passing into the
desperate bliss that follows from the dissolving of all connections, trying to
surpass the other in frenzied debility. When pushed by an border-line of anxiety
this too can lead to suicide of course, but such a conclusion is unusual. The
sufficient basis for such an ending is absent, since the facility to damage is
liquefied from the world, which diminishes and softens (and regularly
practically indiscernible) setting, whilst the beloved-who is endowed with such
a power to a level unimaginable to the utilitarian intelligence-struggles
completely to rescind it. Accordingly it is that the lovers contrive to shield
each other from the toxic future of their love, either accomplishing this and
reverting to the miserable reason of mutual affection, or amplifying their fever
to a new zenith of intensity. In the latter case, all intelligible registers are
flawed, and if the real has a perimeter of pure exploration, this is it....
... Sickness is an experience I comprehend. My body shakes in an ecstasy of
cachexia each day that it shuffles agonizingly out on the plane of the earth.
The climate drains me, my joints aching and sore, ankylose; my lungs are
shredded and torched to the point that they hardly resist any longer; my skin is
greenish, ashen and the sockets of my eyes are withdrawn into black pits of
waste. As for my nervous-system-charred and three-quarters unstrung-that is my
direct pathogenic exhibit. No movement that does not seem like the convulsions
of an animal tormented to the edge of mortality, no thought that is not an
exploration in damnation. Between ecstasy and torture there is no longer any
space of restraint; there is not even an variation. I writhe on the skewer of a
shattered energy, thrilled with appetite for each ratcheting of the fall....
Borne on the currents of a deep exhaustion that flow silent and inexorable
beneath the surface perturbations of jolts and clatter, damned, shivering,
claw-like fingers hewn from affliction and sunk into wreckage drawn with
unbearable slowness down into the maw of flame and suffused blackness twisted
barbed into fever-hollowed eyes. Eternal recurrence is our extermination, and we
cling to it as infants to their mother's breasts.
The only truthful words? The only words with honesty? There are none. Only
silence and agony-and even then there is still deceit.
To express an image of eroticism is to be blistered upon pretence, festering
into either ersatz passion or distorted communication. What is the sense in
striving to convince you (were it true) that every word is an converse
fake-orgasm, a pseudo-transparency, a scream choked-up in the throat? The
attempt to let love speak simply furthers the pitiable vision that it is
necessary to die, as if individualistic existence were assessable outside the
triteness of being.
I walk around-a fiction of course-inexorably perturbed by the impossible,
drinking another unnecessary drink, attracted by constant equivocations. There
is no reason to oppose them, there is plainly no reason, but for a time I
resist, or at least they are resisted. The nausea I experience for each word I
write nearly chokes me. I am unsure whether I feel while I resist, or, at least
they are resisted. I am uncertain if I feel truly sick. Obscure feverish
spasms hover on the lip of a vague, but it is also a curious desire....
Melancholy, silence. That the failure to write should itself become expression
and thus text: this most hiemal of beliefs is the nervous wraith that the writer
can neither allay nor accept. The perception induced by its apparition is the
same as the one that menaces the sufferer of an intensely profound dream,
culminating in an axiom which-recollected during the hours of waking-is
corrupted into senselessness. The anorexic ruins of those chill and unrestrained
impossibilities, the furtive companion of darkness, silence, and isolation, are
recovered after an instance of sleep; fashioned into ridiculous puzzles, and
even-after daylight has drained away the remaining shadows-into stark paradoxes.
To become corrupted to the condition of a writer is to be everlastingly fixated
and then renounced by the illusion of method, a foundation for conception, an
unavoidability. As poetry is to prose, so would this be, in turn, to poetry
itself: a crest from which the flood-plains of textuality could be continuously
re-immersed, an antediluvian symbol of sheer fecundity. But the word "method" is
rather too philosophical, for what is at issue here is a chart for navigating
arcane topographies, and not one for classifying them; a chart for explorations
that emphasize the enigma of the world. "Method" not as logical grounding but as
a course to the site of delirium, to the state of an unconsciousness through
overload. Method as a chart that is identical to the voyage, a trail, sketched
out in details that already indicate towards the exoticism it reveals. What is
craved all-through the lengthy nights of entrancement is that one be annihilated
at the origin of the torrent. "To be spared a prosaic death!" But where the
spraying white-water should be located ... is dust, and even worse than this: the
pulverized relics of primeval seashells. Remnants of the same "movement which
denudes necessarily and makes one enter naked into a desert" (5. Those who fall
to their knees in desolation, after crawling their way to such places in a
fever-state of anticipation, are at least allowed the revelation of a divine
cruelty; of a laughter more heightened than any to originate from the flat-lands
of the earth.
You are the void and the cinder
Bird without head with wings beating the night
The universe is made of your slight hope
The universe is your sick heart and mine
Beating to skim death
To the cemetery of hope
My pain is joy
And the cinder is fire (6.
When contrasted to the dark core of writing, desolation is almost an attraction.
Yet regardless of the bitter sham of debris blind slippage into death" (7., "this slippage
outside oneself that necessarily produces itself when death comes into play."(8.
A "slippage produces itself;"(9. we do not do so; an abyss opens, chaos (=
zero), something ominous in its depth, a season in Hell that "slips immensely
into the impossible" (10., "the intensity and intimacy of a sensation opened
itself onto an abyss where there is nothing which is not lost, just as a
profound wound opens itself to death" (11. There is no question of confirmation,
attainment, benefit, but only a blasted-tragedy without alleviation compared to
which everything is misery and incarceration.
My heart is black ink
My sex is a dead sun (12.
Life disintegrates into ash as it realizes the electrifying death of the cosmos.
Upon no grounds does the heterogeneous register on any scale, since it is
"entirely" the explosion of decomposition. Heterogeneous, base, matter-"blood,
sperm, urine and vomit ..." (13.-is categorized in the negative relative to all
potential levels of a fundamental system, which is why it confronts the question
on things. Vomit, excrement, and decomposing fleshy-tissue do not tender
uncomplicated solidness or intelligible structure, but more exactly quasi-fluid
separability, indefinite stability, compound, deficient, and ephemeral outlines
of composition. All of which are jumbled with words disfigured with the blessed.
"To write is to investigate chance,"(14. but the volatile overload that shatters
in a black spray of poetry is not purely chance, because chance entails the
opportunity for a benevolent ending. It is a "ruin without limits"(15., "the
submission of man to [blank]" (16.. Overload is toxic.
Winter wind
Oh my dying sister
Wolf gleam bite of hunger
Stone of frost pasted on a naked heart
Oh spittle of indifference
Oh heaven of insult against all hearts
Oh cold emptier than death (17.
Reason itself, in the form of scientific enquiry has corroded and fragmented in
junk-space, across the ash-planes of the industrial panorama, because all polar
concepts which impart its configuration necessitate the subjugation of scaling
variation. Form is filled by matter, the abstract by the concrete, the
transcendent by the immanent, space by time. It is not only ideal/real,
actual/virtual, infinite/finite, plain/intricate that submit, but also
Euclidean/fractal, unqualified/scaling, coherent/junk. Life is infected with
death; lethally penetrated by the inexorable reality of its loss. There is no
primary self or other but only ambiguous junk-zones, vibrating with
unclassifiable transmission latencies. Not simply fatal infections, but the
infection of fatality; a labyrinth of contamination interweaving unremittingly
into death.
Chaotic "arithmetic"-but this is not arithmetic-diseases, liquids, warfare,
vermin and desire: all sides of immeasurable chaos. A chaos that does not have
the purity of amorphousness, homogeneity, entropy, or consistent substance. No,
this is a real chaos; insubstantial, unimaginable-even by negation. Chaos is not
fluid but inconsistently liquidated, partial at each level between a solidity
and a liquidity that mean nothing singularly, a force of penetration that cannot
be polarized. The divisions of a liquid have speeds, sketched in arithmetical
space, and polarized between immobility and the velocity of light, but the
constituents of a liquification have velocities, spatializations, or degrees of
becoming. These are the repetitive complexities of arithmetic, capriciously
outlined as differing from an active mean, infinite in both dimensional
possibilities. Speeds can be symbolized arithmetically but velocities
"structure" space. Which implies: there is no transcendental space, no
spatiality that is definitive; no ultimate grid, topology, or territory; no
unqualified arithmetic. There are only degrees in which everything takes place
....
Space itself is unfathomable and distorted-a "mortuary abyss of debauchery"
(18.- which is not at all to indicate that it has three dimensions. Its depth
does not depart from an exterior-plane, apart from as a network-like conundrum.
Junk-space has the depth of Nietzschean eternity - a depth of incessant
sophistication excavated by recurrence and a-synchronicity. Far from being
equivalent to a spatial component, the complexity of space is generated
specifically from the impossibility of any mathematical or geographic
central-location form which degrees could be conceived in uniform space. Nor
can time be viewed as peripheral in relation to space, since both are
co-effectuated as recurrence or opacity disseminate advancement. It is not any
transcendentally spatialized neutrality, but spatiality, as such, that is a void
presented as intricate through degrees.
I fall into immensity
which falls into itself
it is blacker than my death (19.
Particles decay, molecules disintegrate, cells die, organisms expire, species
become extinct, planets are shattered and stars burn-out, galaxies ignite... until
the immeasurable craving of the whole universe breaks-down into darkness and
wreckage. Death, magnificent and cruel, outstretched, immense outside all suns,
protected by the jagged flickering of flames and serenity, bitter mother of all
gods, hers is the intense submission. If we are to contest nothing-not even
nothing-it is essential that all opposition to death end. We are fatally damaged
by our hunger to survive, and in our sickness is the theme that directs back and
nowhere, because we belong to the end of the cosmos. The paroxysm of fading
stars is our syphilitic legacy. The name "Bataille" partially coagulates a
memento from the inanimate core of the real, and everything human is quite
insignificant here. Matter gestures to its desperate explorers, revealing to
them that their voyage is hopeless, and that their motherland already exists in
ruins behind them.
If there is any termination, it is zero. Silence. Words endure as something
else, as something in any instance, or at best, the perimeter of something-of
all things. Yet there is nothing but chaos, even if chaos alone is subjugated.
Independent differentiation. That is why revolution must be an apex of potential
concentrated upon fiery insanity, since anarchism and complete submission only
unite in a doctrine of mortality. Thanocracy, anarchism are identical at zero,
and a person who is not perpetually haunted is inconceivable. Being fashioned
in the likeness of God, we signify nothing to ourselves and crave only the
inhuman. It may be correct in saying that in trafficking these words I am
consistent with the thoughts of Nietzsche's supreme abhorrence; vermin,
sickness, psychosis, anarchism, and religion surge through me as through their
own space. Through Bataille also.
Here in the blank space of the internal border there is no end for words
they twist through the tangled ribbons
liquid insect hammers cruelly blinded and driven on by motors whining in the
twilight
once maggots hauling themselves from the carcass of reason
now winged
heavy with poison
they rage for me
"Were you to stop a short moment: the complex, the gentle, the violent movements
of worlds will make your death a splashing foam" (20..The correlation between
being and death is generally appreciated in one of two ways. Either
existentially, such that death is considered as an unconditional loss of
being-in-the-world, or naturalistically, such that being is regarded as entirely
unrestricted-merely re-arranged-by death. With Bataille, things are different:
"Being is nowhere." (21. Which is to say, it has no distinctive degree, no
asylum, either in the particle or in its entirety. From the point of view of
ontology, the structure at each degree is agitated by deficiency; both too
friable and too fractional to be. Being would be other to death-either
annihilated by it or left immaculate-were there not degrees.
How tender and serene if death were truly nothing but an end or a cessation of
being, but is there anything such as "mere death?" Were there to be, we would
under no circumstances realize it, for it is only in over-extending itself that
death leaves behind a narrative. What more significant fault than confusing our
death with non-being? Is it because we would like to believe in the fidelity of
our matter that we formulate this curious equation? If so, we must be humiliated
at our deceit. The evidence is transparent: it is not the instance that death
has the result of rendering matter fulfilled. At most it is a momentary
stimulant, a chill iridescent glimmer for matter to bask in like a reptile, a
period of quiescence, before the precipitate scurrying back into the violent
dissipation of life. Possibly we believe that our deaths should be more
satisfying, that they should be significant enough to extinguish the most
numbing thirst. It is more or less as if we even now trust in the faithful
resurrection of the body. How degrading then that matter continues to be "itchy"
after throwing us from it, that it is still fervent, that even before the
laments have faded it is flirting with the worms.... Across the eons our sum of
hydro-carbon gets pleasure from a genuine harem of souls.
They want us to fear death so much, but we can inhabit it like
vermin, it can be our space, in our violent openness to the sacred
death will protect us against their exterminations, driven insane by
zero, we can knot ourselves into the underworld, communicate
through it, cook their heavenly city in our plague,
we can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot
understand,
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
I crossed the line into death
Which is called Hell because the cops control heaven ...vicious
"I am not a philosopher but a saint, perhaps a madman." (22. Bataille does not
communicate a philosophy, but more accurately a delirious negative epiphany,
death can be tasted." Life is a scream which one cannot implore a termination.
It is rather that one would aggravate it. Agony alone has the ability to seduce
us, and it is to our most extreme suffering that we most passionately adhere. We
appreciate that a life which was not scorched into dust by desire would be an
unbearable emptiness. Pain, however, remains pain. A word effortlessly written.
Maybe there is not much sense in remarking upon it. One could envisage
inestimable unauthentic motives for repeating the word "scream" as an
illustration. That life itself is muted injury-who could be concerned about this
being deliberated? "Everyone and no-one", as Nietzsche proposes.
Dying is inseparable from the ruthless intensity of sexual agony in which one is
increasingly consumed. It does not tolerantly await its consummation but tears
at the nucleus of the brain, slashing each life into eroticized fragments.
Survival decomposes as a fragile defence does-eroded into splinters by the
clamour of dynamic frenzy-so that sexual desire is the cry of nature's extreme
crushed into junk by the sun.
Bataille's obsession is with "the unity of death, or of the consciousness of
death, and eroticism" (23. , which he also depicts as the "essential and
paradoxical accord" of "death and eroticism" (24., and "the intimate accord
between life and its violent destruction." (25. Orgasm, the little death, is not
merely a simulacrum or sublimation of a big one-of a real and virginal
inexistence-but a deception that leaves the bilateral architecture of life and
death in in shreds; a communication and a slippage which contravenes the
immaculate otherness of darkness. Eroticism delineates the labyrinth, the maze,
the web, from which death cannot be precipitated into transparency. Death is
trapped irresolvably in ambiguity.
"My rage to love opens onto death as a window onto a courtyard," (26. because
death is the only place we intensely touch each other. "And death is not mine
alone. We all die incessantly. The little time that separates us from emptiness
has the flimsiness of a dream" (27. Intimacy is not a synthesis, but unless it
is the edge of synthesis, it is nothing. Like eroticism, literature is
communication, and communication is released by death alone-but in the end, the
whole thing is death, even the confusion that coats it. This is why to love is
to bleed, which is not exactly from the pain of lack, but to excess. "Erotic
conduct opposes itself to the habitual kind, as expenditure to acquisition."
(28. It is only in an unreserved debasement of the process to live that the
violent breadth of continuity is attained. "We have no true pleasure except in
expending uselessly, as if a wound opens in us." (29. The decrepit union of
societal alliance is smashed on the abyssal-rocks of deep community, where
synthesis is consummated in the impossible; "it is under the condition of
rupturing a communion that limits it that eroticism finally reveals the violence
which is its truth." (30. Only in the infidelity to life is there integration.
"The truth of eroticism is treason." (31.
... Death is the authenticity of the impossible, creating fictions of us all, and
it is only in fiction that we detach ourselves from it. Travelling across the
labyrinth, one realizes that not-one is only isolated by an obstacle of
territory, and that passageways directing out of the possible can never be
walled-off. If explanations were required why literature can in no way be
replaced by philosophy, this is one, even though it is unreason itself. "Are we
able to imagine a place more favorable to this disorder: the lost depths of the
cavern ..." (32. Depths that are also the maze, the rift, the caverns of Lascaux:
"it is in the bottom of a fissure, so difficult of access that it is today
called the 'pits,' that we find ourselves before the most striking, and the most
strange of evocations."(33. The necromantic forms adorning the walls of Lascaux
are not to be surpassed or subdued, and there is no location that is not
originated from the labyrinth: "pass the night in the house if you dare, but
don't forget that death inhabits it...." (34. Not that on the outside of the
house, the box, the prison, there is anywhere to seek protection from the
devastation of zero since "the thunder of death/fills the universe" (35. and one
can only scuttle into her arms-"death my lover," Bataille cries. (36. On the
other side of the limit is the affirmation the futility that was one's escape:
Black death you are my bread
I eat you in my heart
terror is my sweetness
madness is in my hand (37.
With every word that one writes about Bataille, one multiplies the confusion,
contributing to an effective illustration of transgression and oblivion. It
could be said that the question here is that of a paradox, but that is mere
acquiescence to a philosophical lexicon, and thus the ultimate acceptance of an
accumulative ending. More serious by far is the fusion of nausea and shock that
corresponds to the pre-philosophical effect of Bataille's predicament: an
altitudinal slippage upon the immanence of death. It is then that one
appreciates every word, read or written, as a desolate clutching for an escape
(from isolation).
Death is no longer an imprecise problem but a reminiscence belonging to
something else, a mark upon zero. I ask myself, "Did Bataille also cross the
line and die before the end?" Recoiling acutely shattered in life, a conduit of
an intolerable but seductive horror. Entreating himself to nothing, presenting
the sacrifice of his words to death. accumulating
Europe is the ethnic waste-site of Asia, accumulating excessive scorched ash. My
ancestors were vagrants, whores and killers. Minds melted in delirium, they
exulted in the relics of monasteries, the base-line of the human species,
smeared across the sea-rocks of the North.
"It is perfectly evident to me that I have always belonged to an inferior race.
I don't understand rebellion. My race never rebelled except to loot: as hyenas
devour an animal they have not killed." (Arthur Rimbaud, "A Season in Hell")
(38.
With so much ash in the blood, I have never had a chance of peace / so many
years gnawing and scratching at the metal bars until I collapsed with exhaustion
and loathing. It's difficult to comprehend those elegant creatures who seem to
have escaped from being knifed into incoherent fragments by life.
Disillusionment white-extreme as a heated blade forced into blank
vulnerabilities cross-cut with word liquefaction and congealed agony into
insignificance. I have long been aware of the necessity of including myself
amongst the accursed, even before crossing over the borderline.
I now perceive that my tellurian ur-mother was savaged by something
dagger-toothed and insane from the wasteland, and that I am a vampire shrouded
raggedly in humanity, infected from birth by a profane intimacy with death. The
virus that sustains me extends across the entire health of the Earth,
transferring me with my accursed twin into an oblivion beyond the reservoir of
stars. Although the voyage of inexistence only launches in Hell there is no
fear, only wonder and fiery vampiric thirst for the expedition. Nestled in some
inlet of this foreign shore an integrally consummate eroticism-a covenant
against nature-tightens through synthesis to its fading, stripped before the
abyss: a shimmering droplet of loss and beginning.
Inside the perimeter of Hell no walls remain against the incomprehensible.
Everything is serene, luxuriant, unfathomably derelict. The ghost of self glides
across the shallows; the waning echo from a clamor of frenzied dreams. One
slides effortlessly into not-one....
Let's slip out
into the night
tear free our souls and cross the highway
through the heart of fear
where the inseminate of annihilation crawl from the blinding-machine
to follow the shadow-edge of sanity
Humanism-Capitalist Patriarchy-is the same thing as our imprisonment. Trapped in
the maze, treading the same weary round. Round and round and round and round and
round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and
round and round and round and round, even when we think we are progressing,
knowing more. Round and round missing the sacred, until it drives us completely
out of our minds. Individualism is a trap, because to believe that some of what
one was holding onto will be taken care of by another being is irreligion. It is
not our devotion that matters, but surrender. There is no end to the loss that
lies down river. If only we can give up. "Life will dissolve itself in death,
rivers in the sea, and the known in the unknown." (39.
Footnotes
1. Georges Bataille Oeuvres Completes, Vol. IV, p. 219
2. Ibid, Vol. III, p. 37
3. Ibid Vol. III, p. 37
4. Ibid Vol. III, p. 105
5. Ibid Vol. II, p. 242
6. Ibid Vol. III, p. 87
7. Ibid Vol. III, p. 29
8. Ibid Vol. II, p. 246
9. Ibid Vol. V, p. 113
10. Ibid Vol. III, p. 77
11. Ibid Vol. IV, p. 248
12. Ibid Vol. III, p. 87
13. Ibid Vol. I, p. 24
14. Ibid Vol. VI, p. 69
15. Ibid Vol. III, p. 75
16. Ibid Vol. II, p. 247
17. Ibid Vol. IV, p. 26
18. Ibid Vol. IV, p. 327
19. Ibid Vol. III, p. 75
20. Ibid Vol. V, p. 112
21. Ibid Vol. V, p. 98
22. Ibid Vol. V, p. 218
23. Ibid Vol. X, p. 585
24. Ibid Vol. X, p. 597
25. Ibid Vol. II, p. 247
26. Ibid Vol. VI, p. 76
27. Ibid Vol. VI, p. 155
28. Ibid Vol. X, p. 169
29. Ibid Vol. X, p. 170
30. Ibid Vol. X, p. 167
31. Ibid Vol. X, p. 170
32. Ibid Vol. X, p. 596
33. Ibid Vol. X, p. 597
34. Ibid Vol. IV, p. 123
35. Ibid Vol. II, p. 212
36. Ibid Vol. IV, p. 22
37. Ibid Vol. III, p. 88
38. Arthur Rimbaud Collected Poems introduction and translation by Oliver
Bernard Penguin Books 1986
39. Bataille Oeuvres Completes, Vol. V, p. 119
George Bataille Oeuvres Completes Editions Gallimard Paris - twelve-volume
edition of Bataille's work published between 1970 and 1988 editors I and II
Denis Hollier, III and IV Thadee Klossowski, V Mme Leduc, VI and all following
Henri Ronse and J. -M. Rey