Philosophe-Excrément

André Breton, often alleged to have called Bataille an “excremental philosopher,” regarded the author of such classics as The Story of the Eye, On Nietzche and The Accursed Shared as a “sick person” suffering from « psychasthenia » and a « déficit conscient à forme généralisatrice », reduced to expressing himself in a vocabulary of the “befouled, senile, rancid, sordid, lewd, doddering”: il est à remarquer que M. Bataille fait un abus délirant des adjectifs : souillé, sénile, rance, sordide, égrillard, gâteux, et que ces mots, loin de lui servir à décrier un état de choses insupportable, sont ceux par lesquels s’exprime le plus lyriquement sa délectation…

The world demands a philosophy commensurate with its own sickness. Breton, voyeur of neurotic obliqueness, believed the sickness of the world was a parlour game. Bataille recognised it instead as the sickness of the impossible: the impossible in the depth of things exhales an unhappy agitation, one submits to its law but questions, one clings to the fiction with a guilty, suppressible strength, without which one would take pleasure in happiness…

Presenting two little known texts by Bataille — ‘The Little One’ and ‘The Tomb of Louis XXX’ — LOUIS XXX is an audaciously experimental piece of pornographic chamber music commingling prose and poetry, fiction and autobiography, philosophical and theological meditations, abstract artifice and intimate confession…

Now available from Equus…