Friday, March 24, 2006

Friday dinner party conversation stopper

As soon as the effort at rational comprehension ends in contradiction, the practice of intellectual scatology requires the excretion of unassimilable elements, which is another way of stating vulgarly that a burst of laughter is the only imaginable and definitively terminal result - and not the means - of philosophical speculation. And then one must indicate that a reaction as insignificant as a burst of laughter derives from the extremely vague and distant character of the intellectual domain, and that it suffices to go from a speculation resting on abstract facts to a practice whose mechanism is not different, but which immediately reaches concrete heterogeneity, in order to arrive at ecstatic trances and orgasm.

- Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess

6 comments:

helmut said...

Crickets.... Hahahahaha....

barba de chiva said...

I can't help but imgaine nervous titters round the table.

MT said...

I have almost no idea what that quote is saying, but I'm sure I could have said it better myself, and even if I had to learn French to do it.

helmut said...

I take this rather simply: at the limits of rationality - which is always limited in the face of full experience - there exists the irrational. In confronting the irrational, all one can do is "laugh." The irrational is the domain of ecstacy. The act of laughing is "insignificant" in that it has no particular signifier, which would mean to return to the domain of rationality. Something like that....

MT said...

Assuming you've read him right, then to me it seems the take home message is just "The irrational is the domain of ecstacy." If I heard that at a Friday dinner party I guess I'd respond "O.K." I guess one of the more elaborated versions might trigger a "So?" To the extent the utterer was grave and earnest, I might be caused to laugh, which I guess would be the aptest response at all, excluding I suppose an offer of tenure in a critical studies department. But then I am kind of a jerk at times.

helmut said...

I've probably read him wrong. That's the nice thing about the Friday conversation stopper. I can't claim to have ever understood Bataille.