>>64 I'm not super familiar with that particular bataille piece, I should have specified I was talking about "The Accursed Share", but I'll have a go at tackling that sentence you quoted.
You're missing the context which informs Bataille's usage of the word "God", you're thinking of it only in terms of the christian god, but he immediately dismisses christians as dogmatists. A few pages later, he dismisses the gods of organized religion, saying "God in Islam or the Christian Church; in the Buddhist Church this negative end: the suppression of pain", which he finds unconvincing for reasons I'll explain in a second.
Bataille is talking of ecstatic experience, the moments of extreme inner experience which defy reason and seem to take us beyond ourselves. The concept of "the inconceivable unknown" is what he refers to when he says "god". But you can't just call it "the inconceivable unknown", because it's not equivalent directly to just "the unknown". This is because through "states of ecstasy, of ravishment, at least of meditated emotion", it is experiencable. It's already accessible to us from childhood in the form of "a profound emotion". That emotion being "the pleasure to be drawn from a ravishment", "states of ecstasy". Bataille's whole deal is being a kinky motherfucker who thinks pleasure and pain converge into something called a "limit experience". This is why he doesn't like god as "the suppression of pain", because he thinks it dismisses the ecstatic pleasure to be found in pain.
So, because it can't be reduced to "the unknown", he refers to this Thing that you can access during the extremes of experience as "God", because it's the closest concept he can think of to something which seems to go beyond us, isn't holly knowable, but also isn't merely "the unknown". Something which is experiencable, but not knowable, that's what Bataille calls "god". Does any of that make sense?
I'm not super familiar with that particular bataille piece, I should have specified I was talking about "The Accursed Share", but I'll have a go at tackling that sentence you quoted.
You're missing the context which informs Bataille's usage of the word "God", you're thinking of it only in terms of the christian god, but he immediately dismisses christians as dogmatists. A few pages later, he dismisses the gods of organized religion, saying "God in Islam or the Christian Church; in the Buddhist Church this negative end: the suppression of pain", which he finds unconvincing for reasons I'll explain in a second.
Bataille is talking of ecstatic experience, the moments of extreme inner experience which defy reason and seem to take us beyond ourselves. The concept of "the inconceivable unknown" is what he refers to when he says "god". But you can't just call it "the inconceivable unknown", because it's not equivalent directly to just "the unknown". This is because through "states of ecstasy, of ravishment, at least of meditated emotion", it is experiencable. It's already accessible to us from childhood in the form of "a profound emotion". That emotion being "the pleasure to be drawn from a ravishment", "states of ecstasy". Bataille's whole deal is being a kinky motherfucker who thinks pleasure and pain converge into something called a "limit experience". This is why he doesn't like god as "the suppression of pain", because he thinks it dismisses the ecstatic pleasure to be found in pain.
So, because it can't be reduced to "the unknown", he refers to this Thing that you can access during the extremes of experience as "God", because it's the closest concept he can think of to something which seems to go beyond us, isn't holly knowable, but also isn't merely "the unknown". Something which is experiencable, but not knowable, that's what Bataille calls "god". Does any of that make sense?