Bataille, Nietzsche, Desire

Your true educators and formative teachers reveal to you what the real raw material of your being is, something quite ineducable, yet in any case accessible only with difficulty, bound, paralyzed: your educators can be only your liberators.
— Nietzsche, Schopenhauer as Educator, §1

Here with reference to education, to talk of Bataille is to consider Bataille’s discussion of Nietzsche with reference to desire. As Nietzsche writes, and this already inspires Wittgenstein: “The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up to the nature of his spirit." (BGE § 75)



Already what is at stake is a matter of representation, not feeling, not real desire.

If Bataille can rightly be named the philosopher of the Real as he is (speaking of Lacan’s Real rather than Baudrillard’s), Bataille’s Real is very much an imaginary or representational affair: profiles in pornography, here less metaphorical profiling than phenomenological. Even before the internet, the specular project of collective desire as it may be regarded and like Malraux’s Les Voix du Silence [Voices of Silence ], Bataille’s Tears of Eros offers an illustration of erotic desire both graphically throughout history but also quite philosophically expressed (provided one can read Nietzsche, and this is more of an undertaking than most readers imagine).






Bataille’s Tears of Eros is a serious, scholarly book, an art book, archival book, anthropological resource, philosophical reflection, as much as it is anything else:





“Beyond calculated means, we look for the end — or the ends — of these means. … The quest for wealth — sometimes the wealth of egoistic individuals, sometimes wealth held in common — is obviously only a means. Work is only a means. … The response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end.” -- Bataille

Most discussions of desire end here, especially those on the internet (or late night TV). Bataille’s meditation is even and unflinching:

"The essence of man as given in sexuality — which is his origin and beginning — poses a problem for him that has no other outcome than wild turmoil. This turmoil is given in the little death. How can I fully live the little death if not as a foretaste of the final death." -- Bataille

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