"English readers will now be able to appreciate what many consider Bataille's finest work, undoubtedly one of the outstanding texts of modern French writing, just as they will be able to fill a major gap in the history of post-structuralist thought. Whereas Bataille may be the acknowledged forefather of such figures as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, this centrality is often not appreciated by American admirers of the latter." -- Michele Richman, University of Pennsylvania "I consider the publication in English of Inner Experience to be of great importance and long overdue. It is only recently that many have come to recognize Bataille's profound influence on a number of the most important contemporary French thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Kristeva--an influence much more important than that of existentialists such as Sartre or Camus." -- Allan Stoekl, Yale University "We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book." -- Georges Bataille, from the Preface His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist."
| |||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.75
Trade in Inner Experience (SUNY Series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.75, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Special Offer until June 30, 2013: Receive an additional £5 promotional Gift Card, when you trade-in at least £10 worth of books. Learn more
|
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
16 of 16 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
To give in a few paragraphs what this book is about is an impossible task, let alone evaluating it. Upon its publication in 1943 it took Sartre over 40 pages to review it. He called Bataille a dangerous madman as well as 'a new mystic'. (Noteworthy is that Bataille was friends with and exerted influence upon philosophers and artists ranging from Michel Foucault to Pablo Picasso, and is one of the most colorful 'bohemians' of the 20th century.)
Which is funny, because "Inner Experience", one of Bataille's most influential and most important works, begins with a repudiation of mysticism. Shortly, Bataille here explores that what he calls Experience, settled within a range of terms like "non-knowledge", "communication", "rapture", "anguish", absence", "night", but largely over-capping, "ecstacy".
Essentially, Experience is the absolvement of the I, an abyss where nothing 'is', produced by the tension between our conflicting desires to become everything and to retain our autonomy. This Experience once was made possible in sacrifice or feudal war, where man came in touch with violence, excess, and death. However, since religion and the state have gone into decline this Experience has become more and more Inner instead of collective.
Bataille explores where this Experience still lingers - in the festival, eroticism, sickness, art, war, financial spilling, violence, etc. But "Inner Experience" cannot be called easily accessible. Do not expect a schematic disposition of Experience, or a structured thesis with arguments and a conclusion.
... Read more ›Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars
3 reviews
33 of 36 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Inner Experience
14 Mar 2000
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
In this book Bataille shows how "project" -- the realm of work not just physical but also the incessant discourse running through one's interior mind -- is a prison, a prison based upon our inauthentic interaction with the world: one puts everything off until later, one lives in a "hazy illusion". But this viel can be broken, says Bataille, through the dynamic ground of non-knowledge, the point one reaches when the quest for the "summit", for God and Absolute knowledge, dissolves. This point is the height of drama and is ultimately the last act of folly (like when Sisyphus realizes his fate of rolling a rock up a mountain). One then experiences a fusion of anguish and ecstasy; one is moved by Inner Experience, something that, paradoxically, is not "inner" nor "experience", but rather is like a slap in the face, a slap simlilar to what a zen monk receives in meditation when he or she realizes who he or she IS: emptiness.
15 of 22 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Transgress the limits of experience
3 Aug 1997
By A Customer
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback
Georges Bataille was a French writer and philosopher during the surrealist period. He founded many literary movements in the form of magazines and critical reviews within surrealist circles such as, "Acephale", with friend and contemporary artist, Andre Masson. Other contemporaries of Bataille's include, Salvador Dali, and Bataille's nemesis, self-professed 'leader' of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton.
The book, "Inner Experience", was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, "Inner Experience" is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille's philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.
Recommended reading by Bataille: "Story of the Eye", "Documents", and "Visions of Excess" a collection of essays (edited by Allan Stoeckl). Also, to learn more about Bataille, look up "Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille", by Dennis Hollier
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Esoteric, but worth the read!
30 Nov 2012
By Jennifer Armstrong
- Published on Amazon.com
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Bataille's hidden agenda, the meaning of his notion of "the summit" in relation to Nietzsche -- hence, reasons enough to peruse this book thoughtfully.
›
Go to Amazon.com to see all 3 reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
