Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
I.
I give myself up to peace until my annihilation.
The sounds of struggle are lost in death like rives in the sea, like the brilliance of stars in the night.
The power of conflict is fulfilled in the silence of all action.
I enter into peace as into a dark unknown.
I fall into this dark unknown.
I myself become this dark unknown.
Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
II.
I AM joy in the face of death.
Joy in the face of death upholds me.
Joy in the face of death casts me down.
Joy in the face of death annihilates me.
I remain in this annihilation and, from there, imagine nature as a play of forces expressed in a multiple and never-ending death agony.
In this way I slowly become lost in meaningless and endless space.
I reach the end of worlds.
I am gnawed at by death.
I am gnawed at by fever.
I am absorbed into the darkness of space.
I am annihilated in joy in the face of death.
Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
III.
I AM joy in the face of death.
The depths of the sky, the emptiness of space, this is joy in the face of death: everything is deeply cracked.
I picture the Earth spinning giddily in the heavens.
I picture the heavens themselves slipping, spinning and becoming used up.
The sun, like an alcohol, spinning and exploding until out of breath.
The depths of the sky like a debauch of icy light becoming lost.
All that exists destroying itself, consuming itself and dying, each moment only bringing itself forth in the annihilation of the one that came before and itself only existing with fatal wounds.
I too destroying and consuming myself endlessly within myself in a great festival of blood.
I picture the frozen moment of my own death.
Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
V.
If I picture myself in a vision, within a circle of light that transfigures the ecstatic and exhausted face of a dying being, what radiates from this face of necessity lights up the clouds in the sky, whose glimmering greyness thereby becomes more penetrating than the light of the sun itself.
In this representation, death appears to be of the same nature as the illuminating light, in so far as the latter fades away after leaving it source; it appears that no less a loss than death is needed for the spark of life to journey through and transfigure dull existence, since only its wrenching free can become in me the power of life and time. And so I cease to be anything except the mirror of death, just as the universe is only the mirror of light.
Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
VI. Heraclitean Meditation
AND I AM WAR.
I picture a human movement and rebellion which are limitless in their potential; this movement and this rebellion can only be appeased by war.
I picture the gift of an infinite suffering, of blood and bodies opened up, in the image of an ejaculation, knocking down the one it shakes and leaving him to an exhaustion racked with nausea.
I picture the Earth projected into space, like a woman screaming with her head on fire.
Before the terrestrial world, whose summer and winter regulate the death agony of everything that is alive, before the universe formed of countless spinning stars the fade away and consume themselves beyond measure, all I can see is a succession of cruel splendours whose movement alone is enough to require my death; this death is merely an explosive consumption of all that was, the joy of existing felt by everything that comes into the world; up until my own life requires that everything that is, and in all places, endlessly gives itself up and disappears into nothingness.
I picture myself covered with blood, broken but transfigured and in harmony with the world, at the same time a victim and one of the jaws of TIME, which is constantly killing and constantly killed.
Almost everywhere there are explosives and it will perhaps not be too long before they put out my eyes. I laugh when I think that these eyes continue to ask for objects that cannot destroy them.
Bataille's Joy in the Face of Death
IV
I fix a point in front of me, and picture this point as the locus of all existence and all unity, all separation and all anguish, all unsatisfied desire and all death that is possible.
I cling to this point, and a deep love for what is in this point burns away at me until I refuse to continue living for any other reason than for what is there, for that point which, being together the life and death of the beloved being, thunders like a cataract.
And at the same time it is essential that all external representations are stripped away from what is there, until it is nothing but pure violence, an interiority, a pure inner fall into a limitless abyss; this point endlessly absorbing the whole cataract of the nothingness within it, in other words what is vanished, 'past', and in the same movement endless prostituting a sudden apparition to the love that seeks in vain to grasp what will cease to be.
The impossibility of being satisfied in love is a guide for the leap to fulfilment at the same time as being the nullification of all possible illusion.