Giulia Agostini
Georges Bataille’s encounter with Nietzsche is a decisive one. By his own account, the works of Nietzsche are among his first readings worthy to be mentioned. Dating back to 1923, they are nearly contemporary with his readings of the first volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and followed shortly after by his discovery of Sade in 1926. Nietzsche is quoted and discussed at many stages in Bataille’s work, but he is central to Bataille’s concern about “experience,” and thus to Bataille’s Atheological Summa: Inner Experience (1943) and Guilty (1944), and especially his book On Nietzsche (1945), to which must be added Bataille’s collection of maxims by Nietzsche entitled Memorandum (1945).
To talk about “criticism” with regard to Bataille’s writings under the sign of Nietzsche (as a title like On Nietzsche might suggest) would be misleading, though. What Bataille has in mind is something radically different from a scholarly discussion of the works of Nietzsche or a biographical account, or even a sort of intellectual biography. He is much rather in search of a “strategy” appropriate to the uniqueness of his thinking as well as to the no less unique appearance of the historical person of Nietzsche.1 In the late 1930s, Bataille defends the German philosopher against fascism and the contemporary usurpation of his thinking by the Nazis for their own ideology. However, in On Nietzsche he also goes beyond this immediate political dimension, and it is by reflecting upon the very mode of writing in his work on – or rather with – Nietzsche that he develops a genuinely novel way of returning to Nietzsche (Hollier 1992, 25–26).
On Nietzsche consists of a “Preface,” which itself does not meet the criteria expected of the genre, and two initial chapters introducing “Mr. Nietzsche” and the notions of “Summit and Decline”; but it also contains an apparently incongruous personal journal, including several poems, occupying three quarters of the volume. Thus On Nietzsche is characterized by a striking heterogeneity and “imperfection,” responding to Nietzsche’s own hybrid modes of writing: “My book is in part, from day to day, a narrative of dice thrown – thrown, I must say, with impoverished means” (N, xxiii). It really is as if Bataille starts writing because of Nietzsche, yet without even wanting to talk about Nietzsche. The relation between Bataille’s book and its subject, Nietzsche, is similar then to that between his earlier work, Guilty, and the beginning of the war. Choosing this constructive rather than exegetical path, Bataille responds to Nietzsche’s demand for “writing with [one’s] blood” (N xxi); and he echoes it in avowing that “[he] could only write with [his] life this book” (N xxiii). The place of the reader then can be discerned from a maxim of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra quoted by Bataille at the opening of his Memorandum: “Qui écrit en maximes avec du sang ne veut pas être lu mais su par cœur.” [The one who writes maxims with his blood does not want to be read, but known by heart] (OC VI, 213).
Bataille feels the necessity of “‘being’ Nietzsche” in order to read him “authentically” (OC VIII, 476): “My life in Nietzsche’s company is a community; my book is this community” (N, 9). This necessity raises what Bataille calls the “essential problem,” the problem of “the whole man,” linked to the idea of “experience” (N, xxiii): “Only my life, only its ludicrous resources could pursue the quest for the Grail of chance in me. This proved able to respond to Nietzsche’s intentions more precisely than power” (N xxiii). The subtitle of his book On Nietzsche, The Will to Chance, evokes Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power even while suggesting a radical shift away from it. The expression “will to chance” merges ideally with another Nietzschean key notion, the “amor fati,” “love of fate” (The Gay Science), which Bataille – quite in tune with Nietzsche – defines as “wanting chance” (N, 116). It is in this sense of superposition (will to power, amor fati) that Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche appears in the mode of the eternal return of the same – if the latter is understood as the return of the same as always different: “The only motivation justifying the reading of Nietzsche and guaranteeing its sense is to be placed, as he was, without a choice, before the moment of destiny (l’échéance)” (OC VIII, 476).
It is thus under the necessarily contingent, Nietzschean sign of “chance” that Bataille responds to Nietzsche. Chance here is closely related to échéance, a word difficult to directly translate into English, but which has the meaning of “expiration,” and something “falling due.” This term figures frequently in Bataille, for whom it also refers to the mere fact of something “falling” like a die falling, an image that fascinates Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, too (N, 141). Both the French chance and échéance originate in the same Latin etymon cadentia “falling”: “Chance is that which expires, which falls (originally good or bad luck). It is randomness, the fall of the die” (N, 68). For Bataille, Nietzsche is the thinker not of the will to power, but of the eternal return, a notion coinciding in Bataille’s view with a chance perpetually at the risk of being missed and of turning into malchance, “bad luck” (N, 5). Bataille represents this idea as a process of constantly falling, but haplessly missing the “hook,” that would keep you from falling further (OC V, 315).
Still, what does Bataille’s “community” with Nietzsche mean apart from the certainty that “[w]ith a few exceptions, [his] company on earth is that of Nietzsche…” (N, 3)? What does this chance community with Nietzsche, or rather, what do this communion and this communication, as they are implied in the very idea of community, actually consist in? At a first glance, Bataille’s understanding of community does not seem to surpass the univocity of its ordinary usage, i.e. Nietzsche alone ideally being “solidary” with Bataille simply by “saying we” (N, 3). Once Bataille intimates the possibility for community not to exist, however, the very question of community becomes equivocal and reveals itself to be of unexpected complexity.
After having introduced the rather banal idea of “solidarity,” Bataille continues: “If community doesn’t exist, Mr. Nietzsche is a philosopher” (N, 3). Thus, when talking about “community as existing” (IE, 33), what Bataille actually means is “virtually” existing (OC V, 436), as he corrects himself in a note to an earlier occurrence of the term. Bataille writes that he burns with “a feeling of anxious faithfulness” towards Nietzsche, and compares this with the burning of the one who wears the “shirt of Nessus” (IE, 33), i.e. a “cloth” covering the body only by adhering to it (and setting it aflame), clothing and nakedness essentially being identical. The image suggests that there really is nothing in this community that one can grasp, nothing but “a burning, painful longing that endures in [him] like an unsatisfied desire” (N, xvii). Similarly, his interpretation of the Nietzschean imperative “Be that ocean” from Zarathustra points to the same difficulty:
Such a simple commandment: “Be that ocean”, linked to the extremity, makes man at once a multitude and a desert. It is an expression that summarizes and makes precise the sense of community. I know how to respond to Nietzsche’s desire speaking of a community having no object but experience (but designating that community, I speak of a “desert”)
(IE, 34)
For Bataille, the desire for community, for the “ocean” as a “torrential multitude” expressed in this “simple commandment” turns into the recognition of a “desert” as a metaphor of solitude. If community does not exist, though, what is there possibly remaining for Bataille and Nietzsche, two “solitaries among solitaries,” to have in common? Bataille replies: “We can’t rely on anything. But only on ourselves” (N, 3). And at once another question arises: what does this privation – nothing to be grasped (as in the desperate simile of “Nessus’ shirt”), nothing in common, nothing to rely on but ourselves – tell us about philosophy as Nietzsche the “philosopher” embodies it? Philosophy, Bataille seems to suggest, acknowledges the task, takes on the “responsibility fall[ing] on us” (N, 3), our responsibility to think precisely about this space suspended in between the singularities, which in Bataille’s exploration of the limits of thought serves as a sort of background from which new dimensions may arise. Thus it is precisely in its very non-existence that Bataille’s “community” with Nietzsche opens up the possibility for a relationship hitherto “nearly unknown to human destiny” to manifest itself – as he writes not without a touch of pathos (OC V 284); what remains is the idea of friendship relating the two Nietzschean “solitaries among solitaries,” who actually are “in quest of a friend” (N, 6), to each other.
What does friendship designate, though, apart from the paradoxical “community of those deprived of community?”2 In an affirmative sense, friendship, for Bataille no less than Blanchot, his intimate friend and privileged reader, is the name for the relation between us, the in-between itself ceaselessly relating between plural singularities, as though it were the “only measure” (Blanchot 1969, 313), and as it is at work in conversation – if one comes to understand the latter as a plural speech rather than a dialogue in the everyday meaning of the word. This plural speech, as Blanchot describes it with regard to Bataille, is a plurality of ever singular voices striving for a “unique affirmation,” that in a seeming paradox “neither unifies nor lets itself be unified” but is constantly “pointing to a difference more original still,” thus “saying the absolutely other” (1969, 319). If Bataille’s “conversation” with Nietzsche means that they both are “saying the same,” the continuous reflexion of their “sayings” nonetheless differentiates them anew, and reveals still another difference between them – as can be seen, for example, in Bataille’s strategy of quoting Nietzsche and “echoing” the words in his own guise at a later stage. It is in this sense that we are witnessing the “speech of the neuter,” the “infinite speech,” where the “unlimitedness of thought is being played out” (Blanchot 1969, 320).
This idea of unlimitedness recurs throughout Bataille’s conversation with Nietzsche. It points to Bataille’s notion of non-knowledge and the unknown, both of them being without limits by definition. It is the experience of the necessarily inaccessible, the incommensurable unknown, the unknowable – be it called “inner (or mystical) experience,” or given instead the seemingly whimsical, mocking, yet all but unambiguous shorthand name “impalement” – upon which Bataille’s Atheological Summa is grounded.
This can be seen in Inner Experience, where Bataille introduces the metaphor of the blind spot pertaining to the anatomy of the eye as a model for how understanding works (IE, 112). “To know means: to relate to the known, to grasp that an unknown thing is the same as another known thing” (IE, 110). Bataille here instead considers the opposed movement “going from the known to the unknown” (IE, 112) to be a more adequate definition of knowledge; – knowledge then implying the discovery of the blind spot within understanding, the “spot” of invisibility ever exceeding what can be known. However, since no stable “position” can be assigned to this “spot” of blindness (of non-knowledge) continuously accompanying sight (knowledge) like its own “shadow” (Esposito 2006, 119), no tranquillity can follow for existence from its discovery; and not even ecstasy – literally that which “stands outside” – can possibly accomplish the exploration of the night of non-knowledge in its unlimitedness: “Final possibility: that non-knowledge still be knowledge. I would explore the night! But no, the night explores me…” (IE, 112).
This is precisely what poetry is about in Bataille’s view. Like desire and Nietzschean laughter, it ceaselessly, and inexhaustibly moves towards the unknown, imagining, and thus placing one in the first place before the unknowable, as can vividly be seen from metaphor:
When the farm girl says “butter” or the stable hand says “horse”, they know the butter, the horse. In a sense, the knowledge that they have of these things exhausts the very idea of knowing, since they can make butter or lead a horse at will […] But poetry, by contrast, leads from the known to the unknown. It can do what the farm girl or the stable hand cannot – introduce a butter horse. In this way, it places us before the unknowable
(IE, 136)
This simple thought experiment, introducing the “butter horse” as a metaphor of the unknown performatively shows what Bataille takes to be the strength of poetry – appearing as an “agent,” or in a deeply Bataillean expression, an “accomplice” of non-knowledge, namely its ability of pointing to the unknowable as unknowable, and thus opening up the unlimited dimension of non-knowledge whence new knowledge may arise. As opposed to this knowledge of poetry, i.e. its complicity with non-knowledge, the usual, and entirely insufficient notion of knowledge in its movement from the unknown to the known, is falsely reducing to the “same” what is ultimately only the same as different, and is establishing a merely apparent, and truly blind relation of unity. When it comes to non-knowledge, though, it is evident that we are not only dealing with the inversion of the movement striving for knowledge. The experience Bataille has in mind, the experience of non-knowledge, the inner experience defies the very idea of completion, or unity: like the very “shadow” of knowledge, non-knowledge in Bataille’s thought is absolutely irreducible to knowledge and figures as an “unknowable absolute” (Esposito 2006, 119). It thus is the experience of that which ever lies “beyond complete knowledge” as a graspable “whole,” and thus paradoxically points to a “relation […] there where relation is impossible” (Blanchot 1969, 309). Again we encounter the in-between that holds open the unlimited game of thought, the in-between as the infinite movement of the unknown: “The unknown […] cannot serve as an intermediary, since the relation with it – the infinite affirmation – falls outside of all relation” (Blanchot 1969, 320).
It is not surprising, then, that Bataille’s attitude towards poetry is ambivalent. Despite its strength – it is one of the privileged domains where the unknown is being played out – poetry in its inability to escape from the “curse” of representation necessarily fails before that which is essentially unknowable; and this means that poetry fails before the impossible, too, a term Bataille would introduce with respect to what he had precisely called his hatred of poetry.3 Not only is The Hatred of Poetry, published in 1947, nearly contemporary with Bataille’s writings on Nietzsche, but it similarly hovers around the idea of the necessity of a “leap.” The “freedom” of the leap shows the impossibility of relating to the unknowable absolute – and The Impossible is then the title given to The Hatred of Poetry, when it was republished in 1962.
Now, if it is true that poetry appears as an “accomplice” of non-knowledge, it necessarily has to be an “accomplice” of the impossible, too. What does this complicity mean, though, especially if one bears in mind that one of the volumes of Bataille’s Nietzsche project is entitled Guilty? It seems worth noting here that Bataille understands friendship (in the wake of Nietzsche) as “complicity,” qualifying his own friendship as “complicitous,” as we can grasp from his words quoted by Blanchot (1971) as an epigraph to another of his books, Friendship: “my complicitous friendship: this is what my temperament brings to other men.” This essentially transgressive mode of Bataillean friendship as complicity, the friend as accomplice, “accompanying” the other beyond the limits of existence, beyond the known and the knowable, quite literally means that something or someone, whatever it or he is, is always already “folded together” with something or someone else. This in turn implies for Bataille as the guilty one to be “jointly guilty” with someone else – here with Nietzsche, i.e. to be his accomplice, his accomplice in the experience of non-knowledge, because it is precisely the descent “to the depths” of non-knowledge, the solitary exploration of a domain beyond good and evil, that is profoundly Nietzschean. This is what Bataille himself realizes when he writes about “go[ing] to the depths” (N, 98), about not hesitating any longer: “Without doubt, I have tended more than Nietzsche towards the night of non-knowledge […] But I hesitate no longer: Nietzsche himself would be misunderstood if one did not go to this depth” (IE, 33). And these “labours in the dark,” the very task of philosophy mentioned earlier on, recalling Nietzsche’s subterrestrial from the preface to The Dawn of Day, “digging, mining, undermining,” are also carried on by Bataille, urged by his “love of the unknown” (N 70), his amor fati.
Not surprisingly, it is in the section of Guilty entitled “The accomplice,” in which Bataille’s complicity with Nietzsche in the experience of non-knowledge is developed, as if after his nightly toil, and proceeding on his “own path” in solitude, Bataille were in the very same expectation of his “own morning,” his “own rosy dawn,” as Nietzsche’s “mole.” After the account of his “burning experience,” walking on a tiresome dark path in the woods at night, Bataille describes his way back as being no more than a “light shadow,” complicitous of the “skies opening,” and tells of “seeing” the sky all of a sudden being illuminated by a (Nietzschean) dawn rising, “some dawn” other than any dawn of day:
The sky opened up. I saw, I saw […] But the festival of the sky was pale next to the dawn that was rising. Not exactly in me: I cannot give a location to something that was not more concrete, no less abrupt than the wind. There was the dawn, on me, on all sides, I was certain of it […] I was lost in this dawn.
(OC V 276)
As the blind spot of understanding, this other dawn Bataille is experiencing here cannot be assigned any position; and like poetry in its ability of pointing to the unknowable as irreducibly unknowable, it is simply opening up the unlimited dimension of non-knowledge whence new knowledge may arise. It thus serves as a groundless ground: “[…] love has the power to wrench open the skies. […] Through the wrenching, I see: as if I was the accomplice of all the nonsense of the world, the empty and free depths appear” (N 60). Like these “free depths” approximating the same experience of unlimitedness, the French partitive “de l’aurore,” literally “some dawn,” points to the impossibility of ever grasping any “whole,” whatever that may be; and it is precisely this indivisible remainder infinitely setting free new dimensions – this “rest” being “the chance of the whole man” – that grants him, the “man of impalement” to come into existence again and again: “Imagine ebb and flow. Admit a deficit. ‘We don’t have the right to desire a single state, we must desire to become periodic beings – like existence’” (N, 130 quoting The Will to Power).
It is in this sense that the inner experience is itself “the authority” (auctoritas initially not only meaning “augmentation,” but “creation,” and “leading to existence,” as shown by Benveniste (1969)), an equation advanced by Blanchot in a conversation Bataille insists on quoting (IE, 104); however, as in the motif of the other dawn in its essential incompleteness following the night of non-knowledge, and of the rhythmically moving ebb and flow – both being images of the eternal return defying any sense of a “beginning” – the limit-experience actually is not an “origin” for thought, but it is “like a new origin” (Blanchot 1969, 310). From this, it results for both Bataille and Blanchot that “affirming” the inner experience means “contesting” it (IE, 104). The experience of non-knowledge is the paradoxical experience that one does not experience, but of which one is merely the accomplice.
This is where Nietzschean chance comes into play again, the complicity in the experience of non-knowledge, of the other dawn entirely depending on “a rare chance” (OC V 275) – i.e. the randomness of a “fall,” and as if randomly “being folded together” with this dice-like fall that “befalls” the accomplice. In the end it is “only chance,” that “retains a disarming possibility” (N, 100). Once again, Bataille’s hatred of poetry turns into its opposite: poetry, the accomplice of non-knowledge inexhaustibly giving voice to the silence of its night, reenters the scene, even if it has all the while been present in the metaphorical guise of the night of non-knowledge, and the other dawn as figures pointing to the impossible. Indeed, for Bataille the absence of poetry is no less than the “eclipse of chance” (OC V 320). Expressing the necessity of a leap where any relation is impossible, poetry thus enacts the inner experience as literally doomed to remain project (IE, 29); and Bataille’s uncertainty about his intimation of “a leap outside of time?” is now transformed into six poems included in the Journal of On Nietzsche, its number perhaps recalling the six sides of a die, dice actually being “thrown” in the last poem of the series. As the original English title recalling Hamlet “Time out of joints [sic]” suggests, these poems take up the idea of the leap, which is precisely the project of the experience of non-knowledge. And it is in the last of these poems hovering around the “may-be” of chance, “naked chance – remaining free – proudly confined in its infinite randomness” (N 122–23), where all of the motifs we have come across in our reading of Bataille’s conversation with Nietzsche seem to converge:
O the dice thrown
from the depths of the tomb
in the fingers of the delicate night
dice from birds of sunlight
leaps from the drunk lark
me like an arrow
out of the night
o transparency of bones
my heart drunk with sunlight
is the shaft of the night.
(N, 81)
Apostrophizing the “dice thrown,” the poem presents itself from the beginning as an invocation of the rare chance granting the experience of non-knowledge. The “dice thrown,” in the double gesture of flying up and falling down, as if necessarily defying and obeying gravity, not only point to the randomness of the fall, and the necessity of contingency, but also to infinite finitude: the “tomb” – in the French tombe the verb tomber “to fall” is clearly audible – and its “depths” recall the Nietzschean depths as the groundless ground of non-knowledge that the philosopher (the solitary subterrestrian) daringly undertakes to explore while awaiting his own dawn, the authority of the experience of the other dawn. And indeed, both night and dawn are present: the dice are thrown in the “fingers of the delicate night,” and the figure of dawn can be glimpsed, as it were, from the evocation of the “birds of sunlight,” the leaping “lark” announcing the chance of the other dawn in its (mute) morning song. And this lark’s song (which neither is nor is not an aubade since it is not about any existing dawn of day but about some dawn other) figures as a mise en abyme of the poem itself, complicitously trying to voice the silence of the other dawn, too, a mise en abyme of the nightly song of the lyrical I, whose heart is as “drunk with sunlight” as is the lark. These “leaps from the drunk lark” are not only a metaphor of the dice being thrown, of chance as the authority, but also of the impossibility of relating with the unknowable absolute figured by the blinding visibility of sunlight, the heart of which is the epitome of invisibility. Again reflecting the lark leaping as if sent by dawn, the lyrical I is leaping, too, “like an arrow,” but towards the sunlight, “out of the night,” desiring a relation where any relation is impossible. Echoing the apostrophe of the first verse, the last stanza again begins with an invocation of chance, now focusing on its “transparency,” if this “transparency” is understood as qualifying the dice made out of bone, thus letting in the “sunlight” of the other dawn, which serves as the invisible background always accompanying the visible, and which is itself pure transparency. And it is precisely in its transparency that chance opposes itself to the opacity of calculation as the “negation of poetry,” and thus the “destruction of chance” (OC V, 320) damned by Bataille. By the very art of his poem, and in his metaphysical desire of responding to the lark as a “messenger” of the other dawn, the lyrical I is not only vertically projecting himself – his “heart drunk with sunlight” being “the shaft of the night” – but he is also embodying, as it were, one of Nietzsche’s “little ideals”: staying a “stranger to reality,” i.e. striving for the impossible, “half an artist, half a bird and metaphysician” (N 62).
The final metaphor of the “shaft” may certainly recall the ambivalent, and itself metaphorical shorthand name of the inner experience: “impalement” – the French pal meaning both “stake” and the “torture of impalement” ([supplice du] pal),4 as well as suggesting the monosyllabic zen of Buddhism, which Bataille (like Nietzsche in The Antichrist) refers to time and again in opposition to Christian mysticism. However, the metaphor of the “shaft of the night” also seems to hint at a Bataillean metaphor from his early anthropology. In its plant-like verticality reaching out for the sunlight, and as from the reverse angle of that other ocular metaphor (the blind spot), the blind “shaft of the night” recalls the metaphor of the pineal eye, a metaphor equally based on an anatomical, albeit vestigial figure, the “pineal gland” (Krell, “Foreword,” Gasché 2012, XI). Bataille considered this organ situated in the brain to be a sort of “embryonic” eye at the crown of the head, virtually granting the vision of the incandescent sun as the epitome of impossible knowledge, and thus transgressing the limits of human experience (Dossier de l’œil pinéal OC II, 11–47; Gasché 2012). In this distant evocation of the phantasmatic pineal eye – the only, but obviously missing organ apt to catch sight, as it were, of the very invisibility amidst the extreme visibility of sheer sunlight, to grasp the impossible and thus to grant knowledge of the unknowable, the “shaft of the night” ever striving for this illumination ultimately reveals the lyrical I to consciously be the lack of an eye. In the tragic awareness, and first of all the expression of its inaptitude, the blind “shaft” as a mere phantasm of an eye corresponds to the inadequacy of language.
Both the chance communion after the “fall of God,” announced by Bataille’s atheology after Nietzsche, and the chance communication of his philosophy as poetry thus ultimately show the “privileged state” of the inner experience to be no more, and no less, than: first, the purely immanent “impalement” in its utter, yet conscious inadequacy (as the “shaft of the night” desiring the chance vision of invisibility, the fall of dice purely transparent); and second, the famous Proustian “teacup” celebrating the no less contingent and immanent eucharist of poetry – thus Proust, that other friend, at last (and in spite of the doubts expressed in the Digression on Poetry and Marcel Proust within the Nietzsche section of Inner Experience) recognized by Bataille to be the “sovereign accomplice” (IE, 150) of the inaccessible unknown, of ungraspable nothingness (N, 54–55). Not surprisingly Bataille’s attitude towards Proust – as the one “a little later” than Nietzsche “shar[ing]” the same experience – is characterized by an ambivalence similar to his hesitant oscillation between the hatred of poetry and poetry, rather the love of it:
That privileged state […] is the only one where we can if we accept it completely dispense with the transcendence of the outside. It’s true, it’s not enough to say: if we accept it. We must go further, if we love it, if we have the strength to love it.
(N, 134)5
This recalls Bataille’s idea of chance as the art of loving chance, and this is what his will to chance is all about.
1 All quotations from On Nietzsche are taken from Stuart Kendall’s translation (forthcoming in September 2015 through SUNY Press), which he has kindly let us use. The page numbers following the abbreviation N refer to the English translation by Bruce Boone (from 1992) republished by Continuum, 2004. For the passages not available in English we refer to the French Œuvres complètes in XII volumes, abbreviated OC.
2 To say it in Bataille’s words Blanchot quotes as an epigraph to the first part of The Unavowable Community, “Negative Community” (Blanchot 1983).
3 Bataille’s hatred of poetry corresponds to his hatred of lies expressed in On Nietzsche, as well as to his despising the simulacrum in general (Klossowski 1963).
4 The idea of torture present in the French pal points to the “Chinese torture” mentioned both in Inner Experience and in “The accomplice” (the accomplice being essentially linked to the martyr, literally “the witness,” who also knows), the paragraph of Guilty immediately preceding the account of Bataille’s “burning experience” culminating in his own Nietzschean dawn. It is the same “Torture of the Hundred Pieces” he would come back to almost twenty years later in The Tears of Eros (Connor 2000, 2–6, 41).
5 Translation modified.
Benveniste, Émile. 1969. Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Vol. 2. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1969. L’Entretien infini. Paris: Gallimard.
Blanchot, Maurice 1971. L’Amitié. Paris: Gallimard.
Blanchot, Maurice 1983. La Communauté inavouable. Paris: Minuit.
Connor, Peter Tracey. 2000. Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin. Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Esposito, Roberto. 2006. Communitas. Origine e destino della comunità. Turin: Einaudi.
Gasché, Rodolphe. 2012. Georges Bataille. Phenomenology and Phantasmatology. Translated by Roland Végsö. Foreword by David Farrell Krell. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Hollier, Denis. 1992. Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille. Translated by Betsy Wing. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Klossowski, Pierre. 1963. “A propos du simulacre dans la communication de Georges Bataille.” Critique 195–196, 742–750.