October 26, 2005

Georges Bataille, The Impossible, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1992). 164 pages. $12.95.

Bataille originally called this The Hatred of Poetry, but as readers seemed to have misunderstood the title he opted for the current one. This work spells out Bataille's approach to poetry and philosophy (very Neitzschean): "If I did not exceed nature, in a leap beyond 'the static and the given,' I would be defined by laws" (157).

"A poet doesn't justify -- he doesn't accept -- nature completely. True poetry is outside laws. But poetry ultimately accepts poetry" (158).

"Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I entered a kind of grave where the inifinity of the possible was born from the death of the logical world" (163).

But even poetry, a mere "middle term," fails in the quest to attain the impossible (164).