1ac

we can scamper in and out of the maze in a way they cannot understand,
during the first weekend of June
at half-past one on Sunday morning
deep in the crypt of the night
together with a fellow voyager in madness
i crossed the line into death
which is called Hell because the police control heaven
***
Melting shells drunk on our inexistence
torched in the flame of the sacred
we trudged though the burnt and blackened swamps of the shallows
testing the edge of the estuary
dripping brimstone from our boots
an immense ocean of annihilation stretched out before us
***
There has been a revolution in Hell
Satan hangs from a gibbet and rots
wreathed in the howls of anarchy
out there beyond the stars
the cold wind of zero rages without interdiction

Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick,

Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 94) LB.

Death and water flow together in the circles of existence The

resolutions call to secure and develop the ocean is another form
of managerialism that attempts to overcome the inevitability of
death
Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick,
Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 76-77) LB.
Is not transcendental philosophy a fear of the sea? Something like a dike or a sea-wall? A longing for the
open ocean gnaws at us, as the land is gnawed by the sea. A dark fluidity at the roots of our nature
rebels against the security of terra firma, provoking a wave of anxiety in which we are submerged, until
we feel ourselves drowning, with representation draining away . Nihil ulterius Incipit Kant:We are not

amphibians, but belong upon solid earth. We are not amphibians, but belong
upon solid earth. Let us renounce all strange voyages. The age of desire is past. The new
humanity I anticipate has no use for enigmatic horizons; it knows the ocean is madness
and disease. Let me still your ancient tremors, and replace them with dreams of an iron
shore. Reason in its legitimate function is a defence against the sea, which is also an
inhibition of the terrestrial; retarding our tendency to waste painstakingly accumulated
resources in futile expeditions, a barrier opposed to the expenditure offerees [II 332] as
Bataille describes it. It is a fortified boundary, sealing out everything uncertain, irresolvable,
dissolvant, a sea-wall against the unknown, against death. This is a structure continuous with the
great land reclamation projects of Frederick II of Hohenstaufen: a matter of drainage, rigorous separation of the wet and
the dry, eradication of marshes and ambiguous terrains, rigidification of the soil (the mosquitos and other stinging insects
that make the wilds of America so trying for the savages, may be so many goads to urge Fanged noumenon (passion of the
cyclone) 75 these primitive men to drain the marshes and bring light into the dense forests that shut out the air, and, by so
doing, as well as by the tillage of the soil, to render their abodes more sanitary [K X 328]). Such

terrestrialism
reaches its zenith in Prussias classic age; in the restriction of policy to continental
ambitions. It is thus characterized by a certain hardness; a certain deliberate blindness
towards death, as towards everything that flows freely like a wound.

The desire to control nature and reconcile the false dichotomies

that exist within it produce the most violence forms of
anthropocentrism and capitalist exploitation
Deleuze and Guattari '72 (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, , Anti-Oedipus, 1972, pp. 3-6, LC)
This does not mean that we are attempting to make nature one of the poles of schizophrenia. What the schizophrenic
experiences, both as an individual and as a member of the human species, is not at all any one specific aspect of nature,
but nature as a process of production. What do we mean here by process? It is probable that at a certain

level nature and industry are two separate and distinct things: from one
point of view, industry is the opposite of nature; from another, industry
extracts its raw materials from nature; from yet another, it returns its
refuse to nature; and so on. Even within society, this characteristic mannature, industry-nature, society-nature relationship is responsible for the
dis- tinction of relatively autonomous spheres that are called production,
distribution, consumption. But in general this entire level of distinctions, examined from
the point of view of its formal developed structures, presupposes (as Marx has
demonstrated) not only the existence of capital and the division of labor, but also the

false consciousness
that the capitalist being necessarily acquires, both of itself and of the
supposedly fixed elements within an over-all process. For the real truth of the matterthe
glaring, sober truth that resides in deliriumis that there is no such thing as relatively
independent spheres or circuits: production is immediately
consumption and a recording process (enregistrement*), without any sort of mediation, and
the recording process and consump- tion directly determine production, though they do so within the production process
itself. Hence everything

is production: production of productions, of

actions and of passions; productions of recording processes, of
distributions and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference;
productions of consumptions, of sensual pleasures, of anxie- ties, and
of pain. Everything is production, since the recording processes are immediately consumed, immediately

consummated, and these con- sumptions directly reproduced.+ This is the first meaning of process as we use the term:
incorporating recording and consumption within production itself, thus making them the productions of one and the same
process. Second, we

make no distinction between (human) man and nature:

the human essence of nature and the natural essence of (the human)

man become one within nature in the form of production or industry, just
as they do within the life of man as a species. Industry is then no longer considered from the extrinsic point of view of
4
utility, but rather from the point of view of its fundamental identity with nature as production of man and by man. Not
(human) man as the king of creation, but rather as the being who is in intimate contact with the profound life of all forms
or all types of beings, who is responsible for even the stars and animal life, and who ceaselessly plugs an organ-machine
into an energy-machine, a tree into his body, a breast into his mouth, the sun into his asshole: the eternal custodian of the
machines of the universe. This is the second meaning of process as we use the term: (human) man

and nature
are not like two opposite terms confronting each othernot even in
the sense of (polar) bipolar opposites within a relationship of
causation, ideation, or expression (cause and effect, subject and object, etc.); rather,
they are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product.
Production as process overtakes all idealistic categories and
constitutes a cycle whose relationship to desire is that of an immanent
principle. That is why desiring-production is the principal concern of a materialist psychiatry, which conceives of
and deals with the schizo as Homo natura. This will be the case, however, only on one condition, which in fact constitutes
the third meaning of process as we use the term: it must not be viewed as a goal or an end in itself, nor must it be confused
with an infinite perpetuation of itself. Putting an end to the process or prolonging it indefinitelywhich, strictly speaking,
is tantamount to ending it abruptly and prematurely is what creates the artificial schizophrenic found in mental
institutions: a limp rag forced into autistic behavior, produced as an entirely separate and independent entity. D. H.
Lawrence says of love: "We have pushed a process into a goal. The

aim of any process is not the

perpetuation of that process, but the completion thereof. . . . The
process should work to a completion, not to some horror of
intensification and extremity wherein the soul and body ultimately
perish."5 Schizophrenia is like love: there is no specifically schizophrenic phenomenon or entity; schizophrenia is the
universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines, universal primary production as "the essential reality of man
and nature."

We reject the assumption that it is somehow desirable to be

disciplined and obedient participants in reformist capitalism,
laboring and lurching towards the apocalypse we should stop
numbing ourselves to the lacerated communication of poetry
that is excluded by their humanist discourse opening yourself
to the impossible is a pre-requisite to any constructive
engagement or construction of meaning
Land 92 (Nick, Batailles personal erotica author, Thirst for Annihilation, Georges
Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 140-141)
Fascism is not so much a symptom of political desperation, as of libidino-religious numbness, a kind of antipoetry on the streets. Like all policy-obsessed behaviour patterns it is rooted in the
humanist dead-end characterized by hysterical struggle for autonomy: selfdetermination, national self-management, master-races, autarkyall attempts to seal the
blister from within, to hide from the ocean. The thought that there might be a political
response to fascism makes me laugh. Shall we set our little fascism against their big one?
Organize ourselves, become disciplined, maybe we could make ourselves some smart
uniforms and stomp about in the street? Politics is the last great sentimental indulgence
of (humanity) mankind, and it has never achieved anything except a deepened idiocy,
more work, more repressionmore pompous ass-holes demanding obedience. Quite naturally
we are bored of it to the point of acute sickness. I have no interest at all in groping at power in the
blister. What matters is burning a hole through the wall. Bataille was not immune to the political
charade, but even his short period of reality-process politicking during 1935-6when he was deeply involved with the

journal Contre-Attaque and its project of radicalizing the Popular Frontis mapped in the labyrinth. The Contre-Attaque

mobilization into militant action against fascism, militarism, and capitalism, the Popular
Front in the Street [I 402], stumbles in a maze of composition and decomposition. War with Germany is a futility because
[t]he process of decomposition which has been slow during the course of the last war will begin in France from the
beginning of the next [I 330]. In his 1933 essay on The Psychological Structure of Fascism Bataille

outlines a
reemergent theological impulse in which the heterogeneous or decompositional element
is deployed paradoxically as an operator of social integration, tending to the fascist state
as a secularized divine order. The quasi-fascist undertow of his own politicized workwhich he laments in a
text from 1958has less to do with the exultation of violence, than with its concession to counter discipline: What decides
social destiny today is the organic creation of a vast composition of forces, disciplined, fanatical, capable of exercising an

composition of forces must group together all those

who do not accept the course to the abyssto ruin and to warof a capitalist society
without head and without eyes[I 380]. Capital is a headless lurch into the abyss, an
acephalic catastrophe. What Bataille recoils from at this moment is not the claustrophobic managerial profanity
of capital, but its psychotic flow into ruin: We see that the masses of humanity remain at the
disposal of blind forces which dedicate them to inexplicable hecatombs [I 402]. The
implacable authority in the day to come. Such a

vocabulary of such writings does not jar against the deep currents of his slide into the sacred, but its evaluative impulse is
almost wholly reactive; a tawdry Leninist voluntarism fixated upon control. I think of these 1930s texts as parodic, they
are humorous and lively, a definite advance upon the austere preachings so prevalent on the left. They are, in any case, at
best a joke. Who

is more attentive than Bataille to the vacuity of manifestos, programmes,

policy statements, declarations of commitment? The destruction of language is not my
act [fait] but does not have a place in me except by destroying me, like the act of the
moment which has suppressed me (I speak now but in vain) [IV 167]. The impossible is the basis
of being [III 41]. To write is poverty and captivity if it is not wreckage upon the impossible, because the impossible is
not a margin, a fissure, a border-zone, but an immensity compared to which the possible shrivels to the edge of nothing. I

even believe that in a sense my stories clearly attain the impossible [III 101], and that is why they
matter, why The Blue of Noon is of immeasurably greater importance than the Contre-Attaque posturings, why in contrast
to Sadewho sought an impossible freedom [IX 242]Lenin is a ranting dwarf.IMPOSSIBLE! she cried [IV 51], read
or work? it was impossible [IV 59]. The Hatred for Poetry, renamed The Impossible, exempts Baudelaire and Rimbaud
from the complacency of words that resign themselves to the cramped box of the possible. Insipid

lyricism vaunts
itself as another possible type of language, a type that is elevated, beautiful, ethereal.
True poetry is outside laws. But poetry, in the end, accepts poetry [III 218]. Bataille vomits, but the
poetry of Baudelaireor that of Rimbaudnever inspires that hatred in me [III 513], and from the start Batailles reading
of Nietzsche insists thatunlike

the language of fascismNietzsches texts are labyrinths, with

no hint of the directive, no politics [I 450-2], only the voyage into the impossible, the will to
chance. Utter confusion. Those moments, he said, where everything is divine, because
everything is impossible. (Impossible above all to explain, to speak) [IV 146]. Only when human
relationships collapse in darkness and pain is there worth. Between her and me there was never
anything possible [IV 233]. At first, death surrounds us with an endless silence as an island is
surrounded by water. But there, precisely, is the unsalable. What importance have words which do
not pierce this silence[?] What importance in speaking of [the] moment of the tomb
[moment de tombe], when each word is nothing for as long as it has not attained the beyond of
words[?]

Thus Luisa and I embrace the ocean, allowing our corpses to

dissolve in a sea of non-knowledge To attempt to know
anything beyond yourself requires the negation of the place in
which you currently resides. All knowledge is self-effacing,

however our Affirmative allows for an endless oscillation and

enjoyment of that process
Bataille 45 (Georges, On Nietzsche, 1945, LB)
"Life,"

I said, "is bound to be lost in death, as a river loses itself in the sea, the known in
the unknown" ( Inner Experience). And death is the end life easily reaches (as water does sea
level). So why would I wish to turn my desire to be persuasive into a worry? I dissolve
into myself like the sea--and I know the roaring waters of the torrent head straight at me!
Whatever a judicious understanding sometimes seems to hide, an immense folly connected with it (understanding is only
an infinitesimal part of that folly), doesn't hesitate to give back. The

certainty of incoherence in reading,

the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books. Since
appearance constitutes a limit, what truly exists is a dissolution into common opacity rather than a development of lucid
thinking. The apparent unchangingness of books is deceptive: each book is also the sum of the misunderstandings it
occasions. So why

exhaust myself with efforts toward consciousness? I can only make fun of
myself as I write. (Why write even a phrase if laughter doesn't immediately join me?) It
goes without saying that, for the task, I bring to bear whatever rigor I have within me. But
the crumbling nature of thinking's awareness of itself and especially the certainty of thinking reaching its end only in
failing, hinder any repose and prevent the relaxed state that facilitates a rigorous disposition of things. Committed to the
casual stance--I think and express myself in the free play of hazard. Obviously, everyone in some way admits the
importance of hazard. But this recognition is as minimal and unconscious as possible.

Going my way
unconstrained, unhampered, I develop my thoughts, make choices with regard to
expression--but I don't have the control over myself that I want. And the actual dynamic
of my intelligence is equally uncontrollable. So that I owe to other dynamics--to lucky chance and to
fleeting moments of relaxation--the minimal order and relative learning that I do have. And the rest of the time . . . Thus,
as I see it my thought proceeds in harmony with its object, an object that it attains more and perfectly the greater the state
of its own ruin. Though it isn't necessarily conscious of this. At one and the same time my thinking must reach plenary
illumination and dissolution . . . In the same individual, thought must construct and destroy itself. And even that isn't
quite right. Even

the most rigorous thinkers yield to chance. In addition, the demands

inherent in the exercise of thought often take me far from where I started. One of the great
difficulties encountered by understanding is to put order into thought's interrelations in time. In a given moment, my
thought reaches considerable rigor. But how to link it with yesterday's thinking? Yesterday,

in a sense, I was
another person, responding to other worries. Adapting one to the other remains possible,
but . . . This insufficiency bothers me no more than the insufficiency relating to the many
woes of the human condition generally. Humanness is related in us to nonsatisfaction, a nonsatisfaction to
which we yield without accepting it, though; we distance ourselves from humanness when we regard ourselves as satisfied
or when we give up searching for satisfaction. Sartre is right in relation to me to recall the myth of Sisyphus, though "in
relation to me" here equates to "in relation to humanity," I suppose. What

can be expected of us is to go as

far as possible and not to stop. What by contrast, humanly speaking, can be criticized are endeavors whose
only meaning is some relation to moments of completion. Is it possible for me to go further? I won't wait
to coordinate my efforts in that case--I'll go further. I'll take the risk. And the reader, free
not to venture after me, will often take advantage of that same freedom! The critics are right to
scent danger here! But let me in turn point out a greater danger, one that comes from
methods that, adequate only to an outcome of knowledge, confer on individuals whom
they limit a sheerly fragmentary existence--an existence that is mutilated with respect to
the whole that remains inaccessible. Having recognized this, I'll defend my position. I've spoken of
inner experience: my intention was to make known an object. But by proposing this
vague title, I didn't want to confine myself sheerly to inner facts of that experience. It's an
arbitrary procedure to reduce knowledge to what we get from our intuitions as subjects. This is something only a newborn
can do. And we ourselves (who write) can only know something about this newborn by observing it from outside (the child
is only our object). A

separation experience, related to a vital continuum (our conception and

our birth) and to a return to that continuum (in our first sexual feelings and our first
laughter), leaves us without any clear recollections, and only in objective operations do

we reach the core of the being we are. A phenomenology of the developed mind assumes
a coincidence of subjective and objective aspects and at the same time a fusion of subject
and object. * [This is the fundamental requirement of Hegel's phenomenology. Clearly, instead of responding to it,
modern phenomenology, while replying to changing human thought, is only one moment among others: a sandcastle, a
mirage of sorts.] This means an isolated operation is admissible only because of fatigue (so, the explanation I gave of
laughter, because I was unable to develop a whole movement in tandem with a conjugation of the modalities of laughter
would be left suspended--since every theory of laughter is integrally a philosophy and, similarly, every integral philosophy
is a theory of laughter . . .). But that is the point--though

I set forth these principles, at the same time I

must renounce following them. Thought is produced in me as uncoordinated flashes,
withdrawing endlessly from a term to which its movement pushes it. I can't tell if I'm expressing
human helplessness this way, or my own . . . I don't know, though I'm not hopeful of even some outwardly satisfying
outcome. Isn't there an advantage in creating philosophy as I do? A flash in the night--a language belonging to a brief
moment . . . Perhaps in this respect this latest moment contains a simple truth. In

order to will knowledge, by

an indirect expedient I tend to become the whole universe. But in this movement I can't
be a whole human being, since I submit to a particular goal, becoming the whole.
Granted, if I could become it, I would thus be a whole human being. But in my effort,
don't I distance myself from exactly that? And how can I become the whole without
becoming a whole human being? I can't be this whole human being except when I let go.
I can't be this through willpower: my will necessarily has to will outcomes! But if
misfortune (or chance) wills me to let go, then I know I am an integral, whole
humanness, subordinate to nothing. In other words. the moment of revolt inherent in
willing a knowledge beyond practical ends can't be indefinitely continued .
And in order to be the whole universe, humankind has to let go and abandon
its principle, accepting as the sole criterion of what it is the tendency to go
beyond what it is. This existence that I am is a revolt against existence and is
indefinite desire. For this existence God was simply a stage-and now here he
is, looming large, grown from unfathomable experience. comically perched
on the stake used for impalement.

We are the cyclones of death The oceans symbolize the chaotic,

uncontrollable forces of nature. The negative will ask you to
preserve their ground as they cling to a small island of
impossible truth. Do not secure yourself against death. Embrace
it.
Land 92 (Nick, Lecturer in Continental Philosophy at the University of Warwick,
Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 74-75) LB.
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean. The water is still now, almost unnaturally
so as if it was resting from its monumental act of carnage, exhausted by its orgasmic tidal
surge. Nothing seems to move. The water, so savage last week, now laps gently round the
bodies. Half-embedded in the mud and very, very still, a child lies in the water, arms and
legs stiffly outstretched, its body bloated by the heat, its face battered and bloody. Next
to it lies the body of a calf, its eyes wide in final uncomprehending shock. A few yards
away in the middle of the road lie the bodies of two dead fish, as if the sea had even
turned on its own. The state of Bangladesh, until 1971 East Pakistan, is nestled in the delta complex of the Ganges
and Brahmaputra rivers, and is amongst the poorest as well as the most densely populated regions of the earth. It is a
country whose natural inheritance is a mixture of fertility and disaster, and whose people are exposed by their poverty to
the unimpeded course of elemental forces; rendered naked before the storms. Since

records began in the

eighteenth century at least 1.2 million Bangladeshis have been killed by cyclones, as many as
half a million in the storm of 1970 alone. Cyclones are atmospheric machines that transform latent
energy into angular momentum in a feed-back process of potentially catastrophic
consequence. Their conditions of emergence are a warm water surface, a latitude of at least five or six degrees
deviation from the equator (such that the Coriolis effect is operative), a pronounced instability in the air column or a low
surface pressure, and the absence or virtual absence of wind shear. When

these conditions coexist a cyclone

can develop, over a period that normally lasts from four to eight days. A large cyclone
transfers 3.5 billion tons of air an hour from the lower to upper atmosphere, and releases
energy in the order of 1025 ergs every second. At the centre of the cyclone is a still zone of low pressure
known as the eye or core which registers no radar echo, and which functions as the immobile motor of the storms
angular momentum or expressed energy11. Large cyclones have the impact of immense explosions, and when they strike
the coast of Bangladesh they leave a shock-wave in the silt, throwing-up numerous evanescent islands in the shallows of
the gulf of Bengal. Due to the general hunger for land, and the richness of the sediment that has been carried down to the
sea, these fragile traces are enthusiastically occupied, rice is cultivated upon them, and fish harvested from their shores. It
takes no great feat of imagination to envisage the fate of the peasants and fishermen clustered on these insubstantial
ripples of earth when the cyclone returns, and instantaneously consumes the tenuous vestiges of previous ravages. The
densely inhabited silt traces are not merely flooded, but utterly erased, as everything which had seemed solid is dissolved
into the vortex of the storm. The people of the Bangladesh coast are episodically consumed by a harsh truth from which we
can momentarily hide. Being a patriarchal faith, or doctrine of identity, the Islamic culture predominant in Bangladesh is
no better a preparation for this liquidation than Judaism or Christianity would be. Nevertheless,

an
annihilation such as that of the cyclonein which all stability is washed away and loss
alone prevailsis not merely a disaster, but religion.

The topic is dying and we will kill it on Monday, not to worry.

Poetry is death, framework is death, switch sides is death and at
a minimum justifies trying death once: how can we learn about
the other side without doing so?
The topical version of the aff is dead. This topic is dead, and so
was the last Latin America topic, which makes this topic a dead
horse.
Inner experience is warfare and violence wielded against the self
The Ballot should represents which team best affirms a form
of sacred communication with death and non-existence.
Mystical contemplation is a precondition to any claims of
knowledge or language
Irwin 2002 (Alexander, eats puppies, Saints of the the Impossible Exercises in
Inutility p. 151-153)
i. Inner

experience is a form of sacrifice. In his 1961 preface to the reedition of Guilty, Bataille described his
mysticism as "essentially internalized violence" [violence rentree] (BOC V, 493). For Bataille, the mystic is
the heir of the ancient sacrificial priest, a connection Bataille underscores by attributing Guilty to "Dianus," the criminal
priest-king of Frazer's Golden Bough (see above, chapter i). Mystical

contemplation is nothing other than

sacrificial violence taken within and wielded against the self. Internalized violence tears the
boundaries of the ego and opens the isolated subject to "communication": the "inhuman
joy" inseparable from "despair and madness" in which subject and object fuse and
dissolve in an ecstatic spasm (49, 74). As the example of the "Tibetan ascetic" suggests, anguish and the

visionary confrontation with one's own death provide the emotional force that fuels the
experience. In Guilty, Bataille makes this program explicit when he outlines his meditational method. "I am going
to say how I gained access to ecstasy so intense. On the wall of appearance, I projected
images of explosion, of laceration. [... ] Obscene, risible, funereal representations followed
one another. I imagined the depths of a volcano, war, my own death" (BOC V, 269). Turning "the
fury of sacrifice" against himself, the meditator is transformed into the pure violence of an inner
"combat": "I decided to attack myself [m'en prendre a moi-meme]. Seated on the edge of the bed, facing the
window and the night, I worked, struggled to become a combat. The fury to sacrifice, the fury of sacrifice opposed
each other in me like the teeth of two gears, if they snag at the moment when the drive shaft begins
to move" (250). In inner experience, sacrificial violence is sublimated but at the same time, Bataille
insists, radicalized. In the moment of mystical ecstasy, "I open my eyes on a world where I have
meaning only as wounded, lacerated, sacrificed, where in the same way divinity is only
laceration, putting to death, sacrifice" (BOC V, 282). The human being imitates and becomes
God in the gesture of self expenditure, in the "lama sabachtanrt" of pure abandonment, in the
spasm of spiritual death. Taking a cue from the Nietzsche of Beyond Good and Evil, the mystic kills God
in a mental ceremony of the "'final cruelty'" (152) in which the human subject (the sacrificer) is
sanctified and annihilated along with the (imaginary) divine "victim." "Laughter in tears.
The killing of God is a sacrifice that, making me tremble, nevertheless lets me laugh, for in it I
succumb no less than the victim" (178). Dying with God, the mystic becomes God, that is,
lays claim to an absolute sovereignty: the pure, tragic (and laughing) freedom imparted by
death. 2. The principle of the experience is infinite contestation. Bataille understands mystical practice as
a radical questioning not only of specific contents of knowledge, but of the fundamental
structures and operations that make claims to "knowledge" possible: including the
ordering structures of language and the coherent identity of the knowing subject. The
contestation or calling into question linked to the experience is not circumscribed, but all encompassing and interminable.

Inner experience corresponds to "the necessity where I am human existence along with me to
put everything at issue (call everything into question) with no rest allowed" (BOC V, 15). Dissolving
not "particular items of knowledge" [connaissances particulieres] but their underlying "ground,"
inner experience plunges into an "intolerable unknowing [nonsavoir]" in which "I grasp as I
fall that the only truth of man [... ] is to be a supplication without response" (2.5). Denying
all "existing values and authorities," the experience itself becomes "positively the value
and the authority" (BOC V, 19). But the authority residing in the experience is necessarily paradoxical:
"founded on questioning [sur la mise en question]," this authority is itself constituted by the
"questioning of authority." As a "positive questioning" it becomes the "authority of man
defining himself as the calling into question of himself [se definissant comme mise en question de luimeme]" (19, note i). With this paradox at its heart, inner experience reveals itself as the "site par
excellence" of the Bataillean "impossible."42 The experience defines the conflicted field of
a practice "in which the subject, putting himself into play, experiences his limits, that is to
say the beyond of his possible, 'to the point where death is laughable.' "43 In inner experience, "I
enter a dead end" in which "all possibility is exhausted, the possible slips away, and the
impossible rages [sevit]. To face the impossible exorbitant, indubitable when nothing is
possible any more is in my eyes to have an experience of the divine; it is analogous to
torture" (45).

Protests will inevitably fail, being absorbed by the system

without any effect only by offering the system the singularity
of radical otherness can we stand as an impediment to the one-

track dominant mode of thinking and escape all forms of terror

exerted upon otherness
Baudrillard 06 (Our Societys Judgment and Punishment Volume 3, Number 2
(July 2006), IJBS, LC)
What or who can stop globalization? Surely not anti-globalization forces, whose real aim
is only to slow deregulation. The anti-globalization forces have considerable political
influence but their symbolic impact is non existent. The violence of the protestors is
simply one more event that system will absorb while continuing to control the game.
Singularities however confound the system. Singularities are neither positive nor
negative and they do not represent alternatives. They are outside of the system and they
cannot be evaluated by value judgments or through principles of political reality. They
correspond to both the best and the worst. Singularities play by another set of rules
which they determine themselves allowing them to stand as impediments to the singletrack thinking of the dominant mode of thought (although they are only one kind of
challenge to the system). Singularities are not inherently violent they represent unique
characteristics of language, art, culture, and the body. Violent singularities such as terrorism do also
exist. Violent singularities attempt to avenge the various cultures that disappeared in the
face of an emerging global power. What we have before us is not so much a clash of
civilizations as an anthropological struggle pitting a monolithic universal culture against
all manifestations of otherness, wherever they may be found.
Our poetry resists discourse and the discursive attempt to master and reify
language. Our poetry is fragmentation, slippage into the black sun, flinging
ourselves towards ruin without limits and communication with nothingness
you should let the poet die in an intoxicated cyclone our method, or antimethod as it may be, asks you to leave poetic excess in the silence of the
vacant eye of the storm rather than trying to enslave it and make it work
Land 92 (Nick, Thirst for Annihilation, Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, pg 202204, LB)
As if the confusional cyclone of poetry had already laid waste the resources of articulation,
Rimbaud says that he cannot explain himself, just as two years later in A Season in Hell he will write: I understand, and
not knowing how to explain myself without pagan words, I would rather be silent [R 304]. This

is not to say that

words come to an end, but only that discourse ceases to dominate them. The motor is not
discursive competence, but the vacant eye of the storm. In a further letter, this time to Paul Demeny, dated the 15th of the
same month, Rimbaud repeated the phrase a deregulation of all the senses [R 10] (only the emphasis is changed), the
phrase I am an other, and the rhetoric of the pote maudit from the Izambard letter, stressing the necessity of intoxication,
suffering, and exile:

The poet makes himself a visionary by a long, immense and rational

deregulation of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness: he searches
himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, in order to preserve only their quintessences.
Unspeakable torture where he has need of all faith, all superhuman strength, where he
becomes among everyone the great invalid, the great criminal, the great accursed one
and the supreme scholar!Because he arrives at the unknown, since he has cultivated
his soul, already rich, more than anybody! He arrives at the unknown, and when, bewildered, he ends by
losing the intelligence of his visions, he has seen them! Let him die as he leaps through unheard of and unnamable things:
other horrible workers will come; they will begin from the horizons where the other collapsed! [R 717].

A method or
an antimethod, the will to chance, a voyage into loss of control, this impossibility is the
desolate core of poetry, a space of slippage. To slip is not to plan, to work, to struggle. I

have a horror of all trades. Masters and workers, all peasants, ignoble. The hand at the
quill just as the hand at the plough [R 301]. Rimbaud confesses that he is lazier than a toad [R 3012],
without decency, an alien to the civilization of toil. I have never been of this people; I have never been a Christian; I am of
the race who sings under torture; I do not understand the laws, I am a beast: you fool yourselves [R 308]. An

explorer of the sacred, traversing wildernesses beyond piety or sense, charred by the
flame of the impossible, Rimbaud treads the edge of the maze, scraping away his tight
European skin. * * * I am of an inferior race to all eternity [R 304]. Religion. * The mobility peculiar to the
labyrinthreal cosmic motion or liquidationis not confined by the scales, instead it finds a shaft of facilitation passing
from one to another, a slippage (glissement), the full consequence of which is an illimitable dispersion across the strata:
communication through death. A

strangely stationary mobility therefore. It is not that journeys

are lacking in Batailles writings, merely that they radiate from a transition in profundity,
from which they derive their futility and abortiveness. These static voyages can be
undertaken by invalids in bed; Tropmann in the last two sections of Maternal Feet in The Blue of Noon [III
42539], Henri in Julie [IV 57114]. The Wait in The Abb C. [III 31619] describes Charles and ponine in bed, glued
together by the horror of Charles apparently impending murder at the hands of the giant of butchery (another Henri)
who ponine counts amongst her lovers. The narrator of the first part of The Impossible declares himself: prey to fear in
my bed [III 113]. Meanderings

in extension remain trapped in the maze, unless they cross

over into a blind slippage into death [III 29], this slippage outside oneself that
necessarily produces itself when death comes into play [II 246]. A slippage produces
itself [V 113], we do not do so, a chasm opens, chaos (=0), something horrific in its
depth, a season in Hell that slips immensely into the impossible [III 77], the intensity and
intimacy of a sensation opened itself onto an abyss where there is nothing which is not lost, just as a profound wound
opens itself to death [IV 248]. Poetry

is this slippage that is broken upon the end of poetry,

erased in a desert as beautiful as death [IV 18]. There is no quesion of affirmation, achievement, gain, but
only a catastrophe without mitigation compared to which everything is poverty and imprisonment. I would love to forget
the ungraspable slippage of myself into corruption [III 227]. Corruption is the spiritual cancer that reigns in the depths of
things [IV 261]. my heart is black ink my sex is a dead sun [III 87]. Life

decomposes into filth as it explores

the vicarious death of the universe. In no case does the heterogeneous belong to any
scale, since it is exactly the irruption of decomposability. Heterogeneous (base) matterblood,
sperm, urine and vomit [I 24]is characterized negatively in relation to every possible stratum of elemental
organization, which is why it resists the discourse on things. Vomit, excrement, and decomposing flesh do not proffer
unproblematic solidity or comprehensible form, but rather quasifluid divisibility, imprecise consistency, multiple,
insufficient, and evanescent patterns of cohesion. All of which are mixed with words slimed with sanctity.

To write is
to investigate chance [VI 69], but the explosive excess that breaks in a black foam of
poetry is not merely a risk, because risk implies the possibility of a benign outcome. It is
a ruin without limits [III 75], the submission of man to [blank] [II 247]. Excess is
venom.