The Impossible
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In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry and in poems, Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.
"Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death--precisely the perspective of poetry--and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights."--Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The Tears of Eros and Story of the Eye.
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille, French essayist and novelist, was born in 1897. He converted to Catholicism, then to Marxism, and was interested in psychoanalysis and mysticism. As curator of the municipal library in Orleans, he led a relatively simple life, although he became involved, usually on the fringes, with the surrealist movement. He founded the literary review Critique in 1946, which he edited until his death in 1962, and was also a founder of the review Documents, which published many of the leading surrealist writers. His writing is a mixture of poetry and philosophy, fantasy and history, and his first novel, Story of the Eye, was written under the pseudonym of Lord Auch. Bataille's other works include the novels Blue of Noon and L'Abb� C, and the volumes of essays Eroticism and Literature and Evil.
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