" the story of a poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love "

Bataille for his part does not invoke Eros so much with respect to Nietzsche’s fairly clear claims for Greek tragedy and orgiastic frenzy (and it is hard to get clearer than that) but and much rather with respect to the ecstasies of mysticism, that is of religion and thus with regard to the supernatural and the natural. Bataille thus illuminates Nietzsche’s description of nature, indeed his anti-Malthusian, anti-Darwinian constatation of nature as chaos and as unmeasured.





Analogy fails and if we remember our theology, we are talking of the divine, the divine conjoined with the erotic dimension, and rudely too: “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?” < Bataille, On Nietzsche >






This is the story told by Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal and elaborated upon by Nietzsche as he makes a comparison between the God of love and the deep belief held by women of his times and arguably by many women today: “that love can do everything — it is the prejudice peculiar to her.” (BGE §269)






Bataille too catches the riff Nietzsche goes on to follow, comparing women’s expectations with regard to love to the divine relation to love as such, to the God of love and his commandment of love.




Thus Nietzsche has an edge and very few commentators find it and still fewer follow it. The point is a complicated one.


“Alas,” as Nietzsche goes on to write,

anyone who knows the heart discovers how poor, helpless, pretentious, and blundering even the best and deepest love is — he finds that it destroys rather than saves! — It is possible that under the holy fable and travesty of the life of Jesus there is hidden one of the most painful cases of the martyrdom of knowledge about love: the martyrdom of the most innocent and most craving heart, that never had enough of any human love, that demanded love, that demanded inexorably and frantically to be loved and nothing else, with terrible outbursts against those who refused him their love; the story of a poor soul insatiated and insatiable in love, that had to invent hell to send thither those who would not love him — and that at last, enlightened about human love, had to invent a God who is entire love, entire capacity for love — who takes pity on human love, because it is so paltry, so ignorant! He who has such sentiments, he who has such knowledge about love — longs for death! — (BGE §269)

This aphorism proves Nietzsche’s aspiration to say more in a single aphorism that others say (or do not say) in a book. Yet Bataille is faster and more quotable by far: “God is a whore like every other whore.” < Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality > Nietzsche, if anything, goes easier on God, as Nietzsche prides himself on having the indulgence of the nobility he describes for slaves, even for a deity who takes the guise of a slave, an immortal as a mortal being.


Nietzsche, if anything, goes easier on God, as Nietzsche prides himself on having the indulgence of the nobility he describes for slaves, even for a deity who takes the guise of a slave, an immortal as a mortal being.





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