What I cherish in Bataille: his worldview. All, he says, is but part of a system of interplaying energetic forces. The system is such as to desire violent excess, chaos. All is desire to overflow, to explode, to release, to expend. Energetic frenzy is seemingly suspended- it's slowed up, congealed... Until the breaking point. All is a torrent meeting a resistance, then a building up of tension (of pressure), then a glorious overcoming and release.
My problem with Bataille: he's not personal enough. He's not genuinely intimate with death- his experience... abstract; conceptual; universal.
To personalize Bataille: to embrace (to experience) my life as such an event, and to hold this task the highest of all- as that deserving of all my respect- my sole value, from whence all other values are derived. The only reason "I AM" (meaning, the raw "I experience", "I am conscious", "I live an identity") is that my life is a suspension. My "being" is a congealment of energy. At every moment, violent forces from within desire release, forces from without desire entrance. I am a surface. And all the force of nature would have me erupt in glorious laceration.
Logically- this is senseless, ludicrous. But I am not inserting elements into a mathematical equation, calculating the "solution" (i.e. suicide or death). I am expressing my existence. To exist is to be the feeling of a lacerated surface, being simultaneously raped by life (through my senses) and squandering my energies in intense expenditure. Feeling shatters all logic, transcends all reasoning. I don't wish to be dead. How then, would I feel laceration? (The surface would be already-obliterated.) I love to be alive, because I love to be a surface, because I love the felt experience of being a laceration.
Nature's system of energy is not one of total free flow, it is not the total absence of all surface suspension. (That type of "actuality" (reality) is not even logically possible: were things so, force would not be a heterogeneous interplay but a homogenous equilibrium. This type of homogeneity has not anything to do with energy though- it would be the absence of energy... pure "staticity"... Such a reality would be no different from a reality which consists entirely of only rigid surfaces and no activity/ potentiality between.) "That which is" is laceration. For anything to exist it would necessarily be laceration. Existence itself: laceration.
Thus I, whose essence IS existence, I by my very nature love and desire laceration. Not immunity (rigid surface). And not death (absence of surface).
But would it still seem then, that I fear death?
DEATH IS MINE. Bataille seems to be staring mortality straight in the face- but at the core, he fails. He faces death only abstractly, with a rational, withdrawn numbness... not with genuine intimacy. He supposes a "system" of which he is a part. He portrays himself a gear within a machine- even though he would scream and beg and plead otherwise. But viewing oneself- one's life- as within a larger picture is not facing actuality. In reality, I AM- MY LIFE IS- the larger picture. I am not a part in some larger system. All is within me. Bataille rationalizes his experience by fitting it into a transcendent system. But nothing transcends my life, my "experience" which is doomed to cease. (In an ironic twist, Bataille's noble attempt at taking death head on fails to a greater degree than any life has ever failed to do so before.) All that matters, really only matters as far as it concerns my mortal life. I don't experience before my surface exists, and I don't experience after it ceases to exist. Thus those points in time simply "are not".
Is it my biggest worry that facing death, I will not have exhausted my capacity of force, of playful energy to expend? (Can it be fairly put in such objective terms?)
I don't know. All I do know is that if I were assured my death within the hour, I would be running around in wild abandon, exposing myself, burning with desire... pure laceration.
And so perhaps qualms with death are never "come to terms with", perhaps calm acceptance of death is not to be... perhaps that would mean going completely against the essence of life, of existence. In other words, perhaps there is no answer. Perhaps, instead, the desperate and futile (and yet endless) yearnings to be able to face death head on... are but affirmation of life raging deep within my chest.
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For me, to affirm life is to exist, to exist is to be lacerated, and to be lacerated is to feel. My life "goal": to feel all I can, to do so being struck to the deepest depth possible. (Those times when I cannot "feel": when I am breathing but numb to death's threat; and when I am no longer breathing.)
