Wobbly times number 164

Georges Bataille in a nutshell






"The word, silence, is too noisy. The word, mystical, is too comprehensible." -- From Mike Greene (Bataille's Wound).

Whatever 'noise' there is comes from being mentally immersed within the fetters of capitalist levels ideological hegemony. Bataille uses the catalyst of 'non-knowledge' to break out in order to achieve 'individual sovereignty' and by extension, 'human sovereignty' aka a higher level of freedom through what the Situationists would call, 'radical subjectivity'.  To demystify is to cease reification by becoming the power to move and shape the world without the fetters of domination and submission inherent in class divided civilsation. 

Individual sovereignty could only be fully realised in a classless world where 'the accursed share' had been self-consciously turned into free-time. I think Bataille grasped this much better than Sartre. The shamanic wound (however that is brought about) works as a catalytic agent designed to push us beyond reified notions of the 'sacred'. A sovereign individual uses such catalytic agents on the basis of need in the history one makes, the praxis of which contains no 'last men'.