=An Alphabet of My Creative Icons=

He was a librarian by profession for a good part of his life. But in all of library history there were few librarians like Georges Bataille. His heart wasn't really in a library career, however. It was just something Bataille did to survive while he followed his real passion: theoretician of evil.

For a guy who believed that no true work could ever be “complete,” he managed to finish an impressive array of books. But it perplexed readers and critics as to just what these books were supposed to be. Bataille wrote novels that weren’t really novels. He wrote philosophy that lacked method. His anthropological studies were half-scholarship and half flights of artistic inspiration.

He was a surrealist early on but ran afoul of Andre Breton who discerned in Bataille an unacceptable abundance of independence—and an equally unacceptable lack of submissiveness.

Once Bataille wrote: “I have in mind an obscenity so great I could vomit the most dreadful words and still it wouldn’t be enough.”

It was never enough, but he never stopped trying. He wrote a porn novel called Story of the Eye. It features eyes, eggs, testicles, priests, murder, castration, and milk. I can’t imagine anyone ever successfully masturbating to it. I’d be intrigued, albeit more than a little scared, of anyone who claimed they did.

He was forever tracing the incestuous relationship between sex, transgression, and the sacred. He once belonged to a secret society of artists and writers who were rumored to have planned a voluntary human sacrifice.

He believed in the spiritual transcendence of hysteria, blood, orgasm, filth, and killing.

He had complete faith in the irrational and incomplete, the imperfect and the contradictory. He had no faith in Aristotelian order. He didn’t believe in the Platonic ideal.

Goodness induced a great big Homeric yawn in Georges Bataille. I'm talking Homeric as in Homer Simpson.

His enemies accused him of incoherence. They accused him of sharing an atavistic aesthetic akin to fascism. They hinted—sometimes more than hinted—that he was insane. His answer was to write a text called The Solar Anus. He ignored his critics and wrote a summation of his thought called The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge.

He wrote “a kiss is the beginning of cannibalism.” He wrote “pleasure only starts when the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison.”

He wrote, “I don’t want your love unless you know I am repulsive and love me even as you know it.”

As he approached sixty, the arteries in his brain started to harden. Dementia was on its way. He found it more and more difficult to put his thoughts into words. He found it difficult to fix words to his thoughts. He found thinking itself to be every bit as limited as he'd always thought. He suspected that the disease that had turned his father into a terrifying raving lunatic had struck him, too. He would live with the disease for nine increasingly debilitating years, until he was 64.

Above all else, he valued, pursued, wrote about, and celebrated EXCESS.

Bataille seemed to grow better and better looking as the years passed. In some later photos, he is devastatingly handsome, like a silver-haired, intellectual George Hamilton.

“One day,” he wrote, “this living world will pullulate in my dead mouth.”

That day came on July 9, 1962.