Writing, Heterology, Inner Experience

Writing, for Georges Bataille, doubles as experience. No longer, or not merely, the representation of ‘some occasion’, some ecstatic embrace in the woods, writing itself performs the experience of loss, performs ecstasy. In this account, inky blackness literally surrounds the writing subject; and inside, at the point of the interior inaccessible to thought, presence is consumed by fire. Writing drains, ‘in slow rivers through the inky sky’, the life of the subject to the point of death: to the point where ‘I’ve stopped being ME.’ Through an intense identification with the Other, the subject’s interiority is projected out into an exteriority of pure affect. In an ecstatic tension, immanence bleeds away into external objects that similarly lose themselves as both subject and object, self and other, dissolve in a ‘deep kiss’, rolled round in earth’s nocturnal course, ‘wheeling through heaven’s loss’.