deeper down 

There exists at the basis of human life a principle of insuffiency. On his own, each man imagines others to be incapable or unworthy of "being". A slanderous and free conversationn expresses the certainty of the vanity of my fellow beings; what apparently a mean spirited chat reveals a blind straining of life towards an undefinable summit.

The sufficency of each being is challenged unceasingly by those who surround him. Even a look expressing admiration is attached to me like a doubt. ["Genius" lowers more than uplifts; the idea of "genius" prevents one from being simple, urges one to show the essential, to hide what would dissapoint: there is no "genius" conceivable without "art". I would like to simplify, to brave the feeling of insufficency. I myself am not sufficent and only mantain my "pretense" by means of the shadow in which I finds myself.] A burst of laughter, an expression of repugnance greet gestures, sentences, shortcommings in which my deep insufficency is betrayed...

... Being is in the world so uncertain that I can project it where I wish -outside of me. It is a sort of inept man -who did not know how to unravel the essential plot, who limited being to the self. In actual fact, being is exactly nowhere and it was a game to grasp it as divine at the summit of the pyramid of individual beings. [Being is "ungraspable". It is only "grasped" in error; the error is not just easy -in this case, it is the condition of thought.]


The Labyrinth (Or the constitution of beings). On Inner Experience. Georges Bataille. 1954 (L. A. Boldt trad.) (pp 81-82)

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