"We know for certain that our planet, at its origins, was subject to an intense bombardment by meteorites." "We know that these meteorites, originating at the time of the formation of the solar system, consisted of complex organic molecules." "And we also know that some of those molecules were able to survive their brutal fall to earth." " How's it going?" " I don't know." "Stop." " Can I take off my dress?" " No, no, do it later." "Jean-Claude, why don't you read that Bataille quote." "We'll take it from the top." " Go ahead, Jean" "Claude !" " "I'll repeat it in all tones of voice;" "the world is only inhabitable on the condition that nothing in it is respected."" " OK, and now the news." " Shall I undress ?" " No, do it later." " Go ahead, Jean" "Claude" " Radio France Building, May 1996:" "fragment number 1, recorded December 10th, 1954." ""After a certain point there's a need for sensibility to call up disturbance." "No one is really touched emotionally unless there's some disturbance involved."" "Flashback – We are in Reims, at the very beginning of the century;" "Georges Bataille is 5 or 7 or 10 years old." "In this photo he's 33, and has already been the anonymous author of a scandalous book: "The story of the Eye."" "He'd already learned of misfortune long before this." "Fragment 2 : recorded May 20th, 1951." " I had a brother that was 7 years older than me." "My dad was blind, my mom was not a very cheerful person, and the house was a sad place to be." " Was your dad always blind your whole life?" " Yes, always." " Do you remember the earliest memory you have of being a child and that your father couldn't see ?" "Do you remember what that was like ?" " Yeah, basically; what happened was my dad would always just sit there in the dark, since it was meaningless to him to turn on the lights." "If no one else was there besides me, nobody would turn the lamp on and so I'd just sit there," "I remember, prostrate, and deeply sickened, even." "I remember quite clearly sitting for hours in feeble light, and how they were some of the most painful hours of my life.." "Well, you must have had the impression, as a little kid, that your dad couldn't really give himself any kind of a definite goal in life, since a blind man is separate from the outside world," "and has to walk along tapping his way." "I suppose it's possible that, unconsciously, you already had the feeling that there was something inane about directing and focusing effort on a particular goal, since your father wasn't capable of doing that." "Well and that's maybe even more true since you just said something that struck me;" "you talked about my father walking along tapping his way, but he didn't do anything of the sort because he was actually also paralyzed." "How sweet terror is, wrote Georges Bataille." ""not a single line, or a ray of morning sunlight fails to contain the sweetness of anguish."" "And as if misfortune attracted more misfortune, in 1914 in 1914 war broke out, darkening the tableau even more." "Georges, who had just converted to catholicism, left Reims with his mother, leaving his paralyzed father to be taken care of by a housekeeper." "Four years later, this edifying booklet devoted to Our Lady of Reims would bring those apocalyptic images up once more." "On the 19th of September, a terrible shelling took place, killing children, women, and the elderly." "The blazing inferno crackled and raged from street to street." "Houses collapsed, and people died crushed under the wreckage or were burned alive." "Then the Germans burned down the cathedral." "Upon Georges' return to Reims, his father was dead." "It was an image that would obsess him forever:" ""I left my father there alone, blind, paralytic, insane, crying and flailing about in pain, fastened to his armchair dead."" "Over the ten years that followed the death of his father," "Bataille worked to reverse the meaning of his misery." "Not to erase its inevitability, but just to reverse its meaning." "He would find clear light there underneath it." ""My misery devastated me;" "my internal irony was my answer to so many predestined horrors."" "In less than ten years, his faith was turned inside out like a glove" "– but it remained the same glove." "Quickly he established the string of metaphors that would flourish in infinite variations in short, volcanic stories, spitting out a burning lava that would for a long while keep poets, philosophers, and all professionals of thought at a distance." ""It is said," he wrote, for instance," ""that on the sabbath the sorcerers would lift their naked buttocks towards the sun and would put a flaming sheet of toilet paper in their assholes to cast some light on Mass."" "He also mentioned Van Gogh, staring at the sun and gluing a crown of lit candles around his hat so that he'd be able to walk around at night." "In 1928, the "Story of the Eye,"" "illustrated by André Masson came out:" ""'Put it up my ass, Sir Edmond,' cried Simone, and Sir Edmond would delicately slip the eye between her ass cheeks." "But in the end Simone withdrew from me wrenched the beautiful eyeball out of the tall Englishman's hands, and with a steady and consistent effort of her two hands, she inserted it into her dripping flesh, amid the fur."" "To fully understand the tragic scope of this joyous, blasphemous book, one must refer to the Granero episode, page 67." "The episode is borrowed from a miscellaneous, bloody news piece that Bataille himself was present for on the 7th of May 1922." "On that day, in Madrid, a bull's horn popped out the right eye of bullfighter Manuel Granero, a providential footnote, which allowed the theme of the eye, which up to this point in the story had been withheld from the plot," "to dominate the story until its denouement." "Granero's torn out eye represents the dead gaze of his father, which Bataille scrutinized until he became nauseous." ""I, like Oedipus, have seen the enigma,"" "he declared; "no one has seen further than I."" "To the night that the dead gaze of his father inspired," "Bataille counterposed the sunlight;" ""The act of staring at the sun," he remarked," ""has been considered a symptom of incurable dementia, and psychiatrists have likened it to eating one's own shit."" "There we are." "Everything in Bataille -who had read Freud, Nietzsche," "Dostoyevski, Proust, Sade – everything came from the hallucinatory exploration of this inventory of ideas." "Shit, rot, sexuality, death, and unrequited discharge, for which the sun is the major metaphor" ""The sun, which gives constantly and never receives "says Bataille." "This sun," he adds," ""which now lends its brilliance to death, has buried all existence in the stench of night."" "Bataille had an analysis session with doctor Adrien Borel." "On that occasion, doctor Borel had shown him a photo of a Chinese torture called the "torture of a hundred cuts,"" "an image that would haunt him the rest of his life and in which he found an infinite value of reversal." ""I'm haunted," he wrote," ""by the image of the executioner working to cut his victim's leg off at the knee, with the victim bound upright, his eyes contorted, the grimace on his face pulling back his lips and showing his teeth."" "In 1928, "The Story of the Eye" was like a story in code." "Today it is like testimony, full of biographical indications, as if Bataille's replacement of his own name by the pseudonym" "Lord Auch had revealed the documentary aspect of the work, which up to now had masked the extravagance of the fiction content." "We now know, for example, that the ruins discussed in the final chapter are the ruins seen here:" "the ruins of Apchon castle." "As a child, Bataille had made a place of pilgrimage out of it, and he went back there numerous times over the course of his life." "This old photo shows it." "Here he is, accompanied by wo young women that time has erased the memory of." "How old is he here?" "27?" "28?" "A few kilometers from Apchon castle, his lost village in Auvergne, also mentioned by Bataille, is actually Riom-ès-Montagnes," "His mother's family's hometown, where Georges spent a number of vacations." "Endless summer days;" "solitary meditation;" "aimless meandering in the area on foot or on bicycle." "Bataille, who hardly knew his birthplace" " at Billom in Puy-de-Dôme – never forgot Riom-ès-Montagnes." ""It's the only place that still has any attachment to anything from my childhood," he wrote." "The family home is in the heart of the village, within earshot of the voices of the faithful, who go to Mass at the neighboring church." "It is said that little Georges shut himself up in here one night, all night long." "And in 1914, when the war had chased him from Reims, he took refuge behind those walls enrolling in the little Saint Flour seminary." "Bataille lost his faith at the moment that he discovered the destabilizing force of laughter, a decisive, dizzying discovery." "Hell itself could not resist it." "Bataille insisted:" "How ridiculous the carvings of Hell on church façades ought to look to us!" "Hell is the feeble idea god involuntarily gives us of himself."" "One year before his death, he confided to Madeleine Chapsal that the thing he was most proud of was having switched up the cards, that is, that he had associated the most scandalous kind of laughter with the most profound religious spirit." "In fact nothing that Bataille wrote can be understood without in some way or another seeing how laughter is part of it." "While "The Story of the Eye"" "remained an underground work," "Bataille came out into the open in 1929 with his work in "Documents,"" "an abundantly illustrated magazine dedicated to archeology, the fine arts, ethnography, and popular culture." "There Bataille wrote his first, puzzling articles on themes that were themselves not very commonly dealt with:" "the academic horse, the language of flowers, the big toe." "Bataille disturbed the orthodoxy of the avant-gardes." "At a time when Breton and his surrealist friends were putting beautiful rot-proof creatures into circulation," "Bataille preferred to investigate the terrifying secret people have at their feet." "In Breton's opinion," "Bataille was an obsessive who only saw the most vile, discouraging, and corrupt aspects of the world." "Well played!" "Who could be proud of such an irrefutable diagnosis?" "But life goes on." "Well, what we call life..." "On January 15, 1930, Bataille's mother died, at 85 Reine street, up there, behind those closed shutters." "And it was an inconceivable scene, which Bataille retold many times in a veiled manner, but that he finally put down on paper 13 years later with all the dryness of a police report." ""I jacked off that night standing naked in front of my mother's corpse."" "Provocation, necrophilia, filial homage, parody of the last sacraments." "Behind those closed shutters, imagine that night of terror, where a man, perfectly ordinary, but guilty of every crime, decided to make his guilt into the instrument of an intimate, atrocious, intolerable kind of surgery..." "But on January 30th, 1933," "Hitler took over Germany." "Over the course of these years, haunted by the specter of fascism," "Concorde square was the stage for violent unrest." "Night and day, the shadows of revolution wandered among the cars." "For Bataille, Concorde square is a place of pure terror." ""The people have every right," he wrote." ""The people even has the right to ignore the suffering that it demands."" "When "Documents" ceased to exist," "Bataille joined up with Souvarine's "Social Critique,"" "where he published texts that pushed his thinking even further in its analysis of the human animal." "Looking at Bataille, you really do have to see him as a political thinker." "After the Popular Front failed to gather the left avant-garde around its project of a united force against fascism, he invented a new magazine, called Acephale, and gathered around himself a few convinced and dedicated friends:" "André Masson, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski." "Acephale was a way of speaking and living against fascism, against the falsifying exploitation of Nietzsche, a restoration, a strike back against the politicization of Nietzsche that was coming out of Germany at the time, you know?" "We started off by talking about the real Nietzsche, from all perspectives." "It was very valuable, really extremely valuable work." "Not just in Germany, but in France, there was an extremely narrow way of understanding Nietzsche." "We had those three first issues, which were really quite interesting." "We also had a whole revolutionary side to the whole thing." "In the psychic night enveloping the era," "Acéphale shone with an incomparable brightness;" "a handful of collaborators, 5 issues published under the aegis of a tutelary triad:" "Sade, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche." "The cover art was done by André Masson." "Bataille gave it its tone." ""Human life is tortured by having to serve as the brain and reasoning of the universe." "This headless monster fills me with anguish because it's made of innocence and crime."" "Urged on by Nietzsche, Bataille overturned the heavens to dump out the values surrounding them." "Fragment number 3, recorded December 10th, 1954." "Really it's quite a blessing and a curse to have to point it out:" "aying atop everything is this heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, heaven close at hand, foolhardy heaven." "And randomly it happens that is the most ancient nobility of the world;" "I've given it to everything," "I've delivered it from servitude to goals." "You see, it's essentially a question of delivering things, that is, existence and the world, from goals and aims." "And Nietzsche always, always worked in that same direction." "He protested against the assignment of purpose to things, the assignment of a purpose to the world." "For him, the world has no purpose, no goal, and consequently what's left to us is to laugh at what it is." "But not to laugh like the banal laughter you get when people realize that they're superior to the thing they're laughing at, but another kind of laughter, a definitive laughter, a laughter in Nietzschean conditions; a tragic laughter." "Starting from Nietzsche's understanding and knowledge, there's no possibility of laughter that doesn't go all the way, taking it to the limit of laughter's possibilities." "That is, to laugh tragically, to laugh as if laughing in the face of a crucifix." ""It's necessary," Bataille said," ""to put the whole ridiculous universe on the same level with a naked woman and a torture device." "There's a kind of identity between a woman, a torture device, and the whole ridiculous universe." "They all make me want to lose myself."" "Was the forest of Saint-Nom-La-Bretèche perhaps one of those places where he would go to lose himself?" "Perhaps, if it's true that a human sacrifice was envisioned by the members of Acephale to seal their complicity as a secret society." "An unspeakable secret that Bataille, refrained from revealing." ""I'd have to go run around in the rain naked, with a blindfold over my eyes, and eat dirt."" " (Pierre Klossowski) No, you can't take that seriously." "We had some meetings in the middle of the forest, in front of a tree that'd been struck by lightning, and we would kind of pray to ourselves." "Kaiva was really interested in all that, but no, it wasn't really like that." "There was a lot of things we would stage, a whole lot of staged acts!" ""Unspeakable secret, these lips open up to a kiss like a soft marsh, like a creek silently flowing, and their big eyes drowned in pleasure open up to a scene full of madness." "Cries and whispers, endless horror."" "Fragment number 4, recorded May 20th, 1951" " It seems that happiness, for you, the greatest happiness, is associated with the greatest intensity of perceived sensations." " Well, let me just explain my thinking on that quickly:" "intense sensation is what destroys order, and I don't think it has to do with anything but that." "It's essential that people manage to totally destroy the servile state they're kept in, due to the fact that they built their world, the human world, a world I live in... er, a world that I live off, but which either way has a kind of charge to it," "something infinitely heavy that is found in all our anxieties and that needs to be removed some way or other." "Certainly, I'd much more prefer to hear a sonata than have a gun fired right next to my ear." "The intensity is however even greater if I get an enormous noise like that in my ear, on purpose, just to annoy me." "It appears to me then that it's something invariable that extremely intense sensations are very valuable as long as we can tolerate them." "In the life of debauchery that Bataille lived, from which he drew his most powerful questions, certain women counted more than others." "Sylvia, Colette, Denise, Diane." "Nowl, Colette Peignot, who'd decided to call herself Laure, died at the age of 35, at the end of November 1938, in this house, which she shared with Bataille near Saint-Nom-La-Bretèche forest." ""I won't say exactly how she died," wrote Bataille," ""although I feel the need to say it inside me in the most terrible way."" "Here too there is much left unclear, which we can only guess at:" "pain, shock, tears, delirium, orgies, madness, death:" "a secret kept forever." "One year later, on September 5th, 1939, two days after war was declared, he began to write "Guilty."" "Fragment 5 :" "recorded February 1961" " I must say that "Guilty" is the first of my books that gave me a kind of real satisfaction, an anxious one, though," "like no other book had ever given me before or since." "It is perhaps the book where I am the most myself, the book that most resembles me, because I wrote it in a kind of a rapid and continuous explosion." ""Naked girls, half undressed girls, like a hiccup, like a floor cracking open." And further on:" ""the preceding lines were not written in possession of myself."" "May 1940, lightning trip to Riom-ès-Montagne." ""Arriving here," wrote Bataille," ""I feel like the far-off parts of my life have merged with what is in my heart today." "Nothing would stop me right now from kicking the stair f a hotel to where I might even make myself bleed."" "In effect, nothing would prevent him, in September" "– October '41, from writing a brilliant tale which appeared under the pseudonym Madame Edwarda." ""Madame Edwarda fascinated me," "I'd never seen such a pretty little girl – or a more naked one." "Never taking her eyes off me, she pulled a white silk stocking out of a drawer, sat down on the bed, and slipped them on." "The delirium of her nudity possessed her." "Again she spread her legs and opened up her slit."" "Here we are at the heart of the Bataillean moment, where everything pales before the horrors authorized by the darkness of night." "Bataille who wrote "the Torture Device"" "while at the same time writing "Madame Edwarda,"" "clearly had to remark that he couldn't have written "the Torture Device"" "if he hadn't first given himself the lewd central key to it, and that key is Edwarda, nude, sticking out her tongue in the middle of a packed hall full of men and women" ""Madame Edwarda's voice was obscene;" "do you want to see my twat?" "She said." "Sitting down now, now, she lifted up a spread leg, so as to better open up her slit, and pulled back her hood with her two hands." "And so Edwarda's twat gazed up at me, hairy and red, full of life like some disgusting squid." "I stammered softly:" "'why are you doing this?" "'" "'You see,' she said, 'I'm GOD;" "I'm nuts!" "No, don't turn away;" "you have to look;" "look!"" "Friday April 26, 1996;" "a traveler and his shadow arrive in Vézelay," ""walk in these steps, recommends the shadow, and look at the mountains behind you;" "the sun is going down."" "The traveler smiles and wanders off." "In 1943, stricken with tuberculosis," "Bataille took refuge here, in this narrow building sitting on a long strip of land dividing a boxwood-lined walkway." "At the other end of the walkway, the garden forms a kind of terrace." "In Vézelay, Bataille found Diane Kotchoubey de Beauharnais, who was his last girlfriend." "Here she is, on the terrace that looks out over the walls of the village." "She's smiling at the camera lens;" "everything seems to indicate that it's probably summer." "Bataille laughs beside her;" "it's an instant of pure happiness – outside of time." "The war is far away." "What time is it here?" ""As the day fell into night" Bataille wrote," ""the anguished agitation ended and I went out onto the terrace to lay in my long chair." "The sky was pure, and growing pale;" "undulating waves stretched out far beyond the calm of the valleys."" "Arriving here a half century later, the traveler made inquiries." "What was Bataille writing in this blessed era?" "What did he expect of himself?" "The least we can say is that his thinking and his obsessions did not let up;" "that's plain just by reading his writing." "Here we have an attempt at an autobiography, the Ecole des Chartes which led him to the National Library, to religion, to Huysmans." ""I loved Huysmans" he wrote, and went on: "I wanted to get to know the Middle Ages so as to be no longer trapped in the present."" "Over the course of these years, Bataille filled up numerous journal books:" "journal books: intimate diaries, logbooks, poems, essays, stories, miscellaneous fragments." "Some of them would eventually be gathered together into books:" "The Inner Experience," "On Nietzsche," "History of Rats,"" ""The Accursed Share," "Hallelujah"" "– a kind of catechism, doubtless intended for Diane." ""You must know, first of all, also has a that everything that has a manifest side also has a hidden side." "Your face is quite noble, there's a truth in your eyes with which you grasp the world, but your hairy parts underneath your dress are no less a truth than your mouth is."" "1946, Bataille reflected on whether anyone would be interested in a magazine discussing the essential aspects of human thought captured in the great books, and so invented "Critiques,"" "a monthly magazine published by "Midnight Editions" 4 years later." "Like "Documents," from 1929, or like "Acephale" in 1936, like "The College of Sociology" in 1937," ""Critique" satisfied Bataille's need to break the isolation that the deepening profundity of his thinking was keeping him in." "However we need to go back to that thinking of his which was never so active or crucifying as it was during the war years and immediately after them." "Gazing out on the forest of stones in the Vézelay basilica, the traveler has no trouble imagining the worst." "Bataille in Saint Jérôme, meditating in front of a horse skull, impregnating himself the point of madness with the burning pages of Angèle de Foligno and dictating his writing:" ""thumb up the pussy, cigar on naked breasts, my ass dirties the hotel's tablecloth."" "Blasphemy, black Mass, sorcerer's Sabbath;" "the traveler recalls it all:" ""I wanted to get to know the Middle Ages so as to be no longer trapped in the present,"" "an image comes back to him suddenly, obsessive and grotesque : in the middle of a swarm of of girls, Madame Edwarda, nude, stuck out her tongue." ""The Lucky Position," April, June 1944." "Vézelay, 1-24-43; how boring it is to reflect all the time on the whole of what's possible, on the phenomenology of mind." "Starry sky – my sister – accursed men –" "–star, you are death– the light of a great chill" "– the solitude of thunder – the absence of man, in sum –" "–I empty myself of all memory–a deserted sun–erase the name." "13/14 April '44, Samois." "I'm ashamed of myself, I'll go soft, totally impressionable;" "I'm getting old." "In 1943, his illness obliged Bataille to leave his position as librarian." "In 1949, his lack of money obliged him to go back to work first in Carpentras, where he got bored, and then in Orleans, where he moved in 1951." "Tuesday, April 23rd, 1996; the traveler arrives at Orleans." "or Bataille, after two years of purgatory," "Orleans was like a peaceful haven:" "close to Paris, a free apartment granted him by his job, a new dawn." "Like always, in Orleans, the painful freedom of his thought was accompanied by an effort of conceptualization that would for a long while be misunderstood." ""I am not a philosopher," he clarified, however." ""I am a Saint, maybe a madman."" "Fragment 6, recorded December 10th, 1954" "Obviously, in what I have to say, the manner of expression is more important to me than the content." "Philosophy in general is about content, but I for my part call upon sensibility more than upon intelligence and from that moment on it's the expression of it in all its sensitive character that counts the most." "Moreover, my philosophy could in no way be expressed in an unfeeling manner, there'd be absolutely nothing left." "It is only from the moment when I give it form that it can be passed off as passionate, and could even be passed off as something dark, but I don't think my work is any darker than that of Nietzsche." "Around ten AM, the traveler discovers a library, fallen to the ravages of time, and wandering mute memories come to him that emanate a vague stench of rats." "Here's the reading room as it once was," "and here is Bataille as he once was," "and here's the storeroom where the works were kept, now overrun by rats." "These rats, wrote Bataille, that run out of our eyes as if we ourselves were tombs." "Faced with this perfectly ordinary disaster, the traveler feels himself overtaken by the dizziness of his reading." ""The part of girls between their thighs and waists, which responds so violently to attack, indeed responds to it as it would to a rat elusively scurrying by."" "Towards the end of the afternoon, the traveler hastens to the end of his hike, passes across the unchanged garden overlooked by the windows on the reading room and takes a leap 35 years back in time." "In February 1961, one year before the death of Georges Bataille, a young journalist followed the same path:" "the garden, the entry hall, the somber little corridor." "She was received by Bataille in his ground floor office, leaning out a bit, one can see the cheviot of the Cathédrale." "Moments stolen from time as it passes." "The young woman's name was Madeleine Chapsal;" "she was accompanied by a photographer, and recorded the interview on a portable tape recorder." "For a number of years already, it should be remarked," "Bataille had been suffering from cerebral arteriosclerosis." "Fragment number 7 : recorded by" "Madeleine Chapsal in February 1961" "Well, in sum, everybody knows quite well what God represents for the people that believe in God and what place God has in their thoughts, and I think that by taking the God character out of that place," "there's still something there anyway, an empty space," "and that space is what I want to talk about." "At bottom it's basically the same thing as what happens when you become aware of what death means, what death implies, for the first time." "That is, the fact that everything we are... everything that we are is fragile and perishable." "Consequently we are doomed to seeing everything that we base the self-interest of our existence on dissolve into a kind of inconsistent haze." "Was that a complete sentence?" "Well, even if it isn't," "I suppose it expresses pretty well what I wanted to say." "What's valuable about religions is whatever is contrary to good sense about them." "The life of a christian mystic runs contrary to good sense to the extent that it doesn't admit im...ahem, mortality." "Wait, I'm afraid I'm getting mixed up..." "Uh, yeah, well, I'm definitely getting mixed up here because I feel like I've forgotten something, some link in the chain... ah, I'm like one of those old ladies that sit around knitting and then leave out a stitch;" "you know; my mind still works but there are some seams getting loose and I guess that just has to do with the state it's in." "Basically, there's... for example when I have a seizure it's like a really big stitch coming undone." "Because at bottom I like to talk like a materialist a lot." "I really do;" "I feel like I agree with everything materialist, on one condition: that is," "I also agree with a lot that people think is not materialist, and I think there's a whole wealth there, for example the emotions, which are not entirely different from madness, but which are not in any case totally different" "from love for example." "Leaving the library, the traveler is suddenly stricken by a mortal cramp, and pushes his shadow in front of him in the direction opposite to the sunrays rotting on the horizon." "Further on, at the end of the garden, there are children playing." "The traveler hadn't noticed them." "Where are we going, he asks?" "The shadow remains silent;" "could it be that its response merely came too late to be heard?" "Once again the traveler remembers:" ""In the middle of the road of our life" "I found myself in a dark forest, because I'd lost the straight path." "Ah, how difficult it is to say what this ferocious forest really was, this bitter and powerful forest that awakens the fear in one's thought."" "The traveler salutes the poet, and opens for one last time his copy of "The Story of the Eye":" "chapter one, the cat's eye." ""She had black silk stockings that went up above her knees;" "I'd never been able to see them all the way up to her cunt." "I'd always used that word for it around Simone, and for me it's the most beautiful word for the genitals." "In the corner of the hallway there was a saucer with some milk for the cat." "'the saucer is for pussy, isn't it?" "' Said Simone." "'Do you dare me to sit on the saucer?" "'" "'I dare you,' I replied, nearly breathless." "Simone placed the saucer on a little bench, stood in front of me, and, never looking away from my eyes, she sat in it, without me being able to see her burning buttocks, dipping into the cool milk under her skirt." "I lay down at her feet without her moving at all, and for the first time I saw her red and black flesh, cooling off in the white milk."" "March first 1962," "Georges Bataille moved to Paris," "Saint Sulpice street." "July 8th, he vomited out his soul in the presence of a friend, Jacques Pimpanneau:" ""Diane had left to go to England, so I'd invited some friends to add a little excitement" "I'd invited my friends to supper, just like that, I still remember;" "it was a Saturday evening." "After dinner everything went very well, it was all in very good form, I should say." "And unfortunately, after dinner, my friend said that he felt tired, and went to go lay down; in his sleep he fell into a coma, and when I realized that all was definitely not well," "I called out: 'Frankel, Frankel, the doctor's here';" "and we took him to the AENEC, but it was too late;" "he never came out of the coma, and he died at night between Sunday and Monday." "And only on Sunday Frankel said that we'd have to call" "Diane right away on the phone, and so she came over Monday in the daytime." "He was buried in Vezelay;" "Diane didn't want anyone there, and so there were only the Leiris, who'd taken us there in their car," "Jean Piel, Diane and me." "I don't know whether they'll see this broadcast or not, but there was a young couple who very discreetly stood at the top of the hill that dominates the Vézelay cemetery;" "then when we went back up to leave we wanted to go up to them, you know, to ask them who they were, to see them, to say hello, but they ran away." "We never knew who they were." "They weren't just people from around Vézelay..." "On July 8th, 1962," "Georges Bataille hence finally rejoined his old lady, his faithful darling with the frozen belly and jackal's teeth – death." "Finally, and forever, he can now run naked, a blindfold over his eyes, and eat the dirt." "And for a long while he had been aware of the things that go along with such a hardly significant event." "The gravediggers; the pit; the caddisflies, the wind, the sun ...and the boundless horror." "Flashback to May 1935:" "Bataille puts the finishing touch, on a book haunted by the era," "Spain, Germany, fascism, death." ""Troppman and Dirty arrived in Trèves, in Germany; it was nighttime, an electric night that would soon embrace all Europe." "The earth under Dirty's body was open like a tomb;" "Troppman spoke." "His stomach opened up to me like fresh grave;" "we were stricken by a stupor, making love beneath a starry sky in the cemetery." "Each of the lights in the sky was like the announcement of another skeleton in its grave." "Our bodies trembled like two rows of teeth chattering together." ." "The book was called "The Blue of the Sky,"" "and stands out prominently like a twin tomb, built with all the piety appropriate for the garden of universal memory." "But how can we not admire the dark irony that an ensemble of texts whose every page celebrates the triumph of the incomplete is now called "complete works"!" "Thank god, this tomb doesn't quite fully close."