1.
Let there be light. And so there was light. Who sees? God, can see nothing - he knows everything already, he is everywhere, and has no use for an organ of sight only a finite being could possess. But for the human being? The light is switched on; there is a world. Why did God create light? Because he knew the human being would be the mirror in which he would see himself as he was seen by a finite being. Cosmic narcissism: God witnesses himself as the human being witnesses the world.
And when God disappears? Magritte's famous painting shows the back of the head mirrored where there should be a face. What is seen is what should not be seen. The self reflects the world, that is true. It reflects the world, but it is not the world and does not ground it. What does it see? Mystery. It sees what it cannot know and calls this unknown God. But this is human vanity, the desire to be witnessed by an indulgent parent, to be His-Majesty-the-Baby all over again. Narcissism redoubled: the human being witnesses itself in the witnessing attributed to God. It sings of its own glory.
That is why, one day, the self decides to ground itself insofar as it would mirror itself in its mirroring. Now the rise of reflexivity as philosophy's method and its content. The subject appears, for this is what the self has become, as subiectum, that which is thrown under, which throws itself under what is to be discovered, only discovering itself and confirming its own measure, the natural light of reason. Subiectum and not hypokeimenon, which at least retains a sense of what is non-human, of lying outside what can be known. Of what is now known as the object, or what is throw against us. Narcissism shattered - or is it?
The next step: the subject must posit itself in what differs from it, that is, as object, before it brings itself back as subject (for it becomes a subject at this moment). That is, it posits itself in its self-alienation as an object before retrieving itself. So it is that alienation and objectivity are annulled. The subject continues to throw itself out of itself and draws itself back as it overcomes is own alienation.
Then, terribly, a blind spot reveals itself. How did this happen? Overwhelming weariness which reveals a groundlessness where you would have posited yourself. A kind of madness by which the abyss returns in the place of that self-mirroring you took as the mirror of the world. What do you see? The back of your head; the back of your eyes. What do you see? Your own blindspot.
The abyss: how can it fail to remind you of the place God once occupied? Of that abyss that was God's abyss, and from which God looked out as the unknown? Tragedy: you cannot think the tain of the mirror. You cannot get back behind what gives itself as the world and gives you to the world. Now again, the old sense of destiny: you are thrown into the world and subjected to it. No longer a subject, but subjected, finite, and you do not command what you see.
You are seen - the eye of the abyss is upon you. You are tormented by dreams, by your unconscious as it gives unto what you cannot know. Vision is not enough. You see by blindness, by way of your blindness. You hear by your deafness a great roaring and nonsense. By blindness and deafness, by what you cannot touch, but what touches you, you are witnessed, known, though it is not God who knows you thus.
Anti-narcissism. Finitude in the double sense: you are born, thrown into the world, and you cannot know what escapes your measure. Finitude as subjection, as fate without gods and without witnesses. But now the new dream: to see blindly, to hear deafly, to know what cannot be known.
2.
'There is in understanding a blindspot' - Bataille. A blindspot you can know only in your blindness, wandering like Oedipus in the last play of the trilogy, who seeks only a place to die. What does Bataille want? Another kind of dying - that which would allow him to be engulfed by the blindness of non-knowing. He wants to not-know, where what is thought is not a ground, a reflexivity, thought thinking itself, but groundlessness, thought thinking what it cannot think. But how is this possible? Isn't there always a reflexivity that recovers itself, reconfirming the measure of knowledge and knowing?
Over and again in modern thought, the idea that the conditions of thinking are experiencable, that they strange traces even as those conditions withdraw from thought. A withdrawal conceived in so many thinkers as into the past (Bergson, Levinas) - albeit a past which cannot be be remembered or brought to presence (Heidegger, Derrida). So it is in Bataille that there is an experience which breaks with the measure of knowing - a kind of weariness.
Crucial to Bataille is the fact that this experience must be enacted in his text. The pathos of his writing is inextricable from its message, which cannot be that of a report at second hand. The book is experience - a genre, it is true, that was launched by Breton (Nadja). A short step - but is it short? - from here to the idea of a kind of literary research, that is, a research specific to literature (Blanchot).
3.
Inner experience (Bataille) is outer experience. But that is not right. What is inside, nous, the thinker, is what is also outside. An outside-inside. No longer can the self posit itself as an object and then draw itself back to itself, for it is already inhabited by an 'object', by an alienation that precedes everything. Who am I? The question reverberates without answer. Who am I? Outside myself - but not, as Heidegger would say, ecstatically without (temporal transcendence). Outside myself, yes, but not by that propitious fore-throw, the pro-ject that would allow Dasein to make good on its thrownness (the last temptation, the last narcissism).
Extimacy. The 'other' ecstasis - not the leap that carries you into the world, but rather the counterleap where the world runs up against you. The early Levinas knew this (he retreated from this experience, but in an interesting way); as did Blanchot (he knew it as literature, and perhaps he retreated, too). They thought between them exactly this collapse and at around the same time as Bataille (no wonder Blanchot and Bataille became friends at once - this was a friendship for the unknown, for the outside-inside, and the same with Blanchot's friendship for Levinas).
4.
In the beginning there was the light. But there is a blindness that can see what lies before the beginning as its condition. There is a deafness that hears its roaring and a touch that asks to be touched. None of these formulations suffice. This insufficiency is what calls for writing. How to create an idiom to speak of the overcoming of anthropomorphisms? How to write of what the words abyss and cosmos still conceal?