Abstract

My dissertation examines the crucial role that poetry plays in Bataille's exploration of the epistemological crisis informing modern thought. ;In my first chapter, I explore Bataille's analysis of modern poetry, starting with the heated polemic he entertained with the Surrealist movement. I try to show how Bataille's criticism, while constant in its themes, become progressively more radical and reaches its critical peak with the conception and publication of The Inner Experience. The denunciation of poetry---which, at first, left opened the possibility of finding another, more adequate, writing of excess---becomes then a denunciation of writing in general. And the inner experience becomes synonymous with an affirmation of writing's impossibility in the face of non-knowledge. ;The second chapter explores more precisely Bataille's inner experience, its "apoetical" claims and the mystical analogy that serves as a model for its complex renunciation of writing and language. Through a sustained comparison of Bataille's "atheology" with the aims and methods of negative theology, I try to show the ambiguous nature of a critique that denounces poetry's failure in the name of a more truthful revelation of the unknown. The Bataillian contestation of poetry, like the mystical renunciation to positive theology, does not forsake truth entirely. It simply reveals its negative and invisible figure. The unknown becomes truth; ecstasis, its medium; and poetry, a mere simulacrum. Thus, the Bataillian denunciation of poetry might appear to be reproducing the most traditional philosophical and religious critique of language and representation in general. ;This difficulty is what the third chapter of this dissertation attempts to deal with while showing how Bataille himself struggles to find another, less discursive, model to think poetry's ecstasy. For Bataille was, indeed, acutely aware of the ambiguity of his own critique. He knew that the "ecstasy of writing," understood as the revelation of a negativity beyond language, was a mere theoretical fiction. He also knew that one could not, through discourse, conceive of anything less ambiguous. For discourse must always assert the truth of its own negation. It cannot conceive of an "unemployable excess," inacessible to meaning and the labor of its negativity. Bataille's discourse on poetry---its schemes and critique---is, therefore, like any other discourse, subject to the law of its speculative nature. Yet discourse is but one dimension of Bataille's text, a dimension that Bataille tried, without fail, to exceed. ;In this third and final chapter, we consequently try to show, through a close reading of Bataille's text, how Bataille's writing attempts to submit itself to a "negativity" or "excess" that goes beyond any of its thematic and theoretical expressions. Bataille's text exceeds its own speculative denunciation of writing. It does not try simply to go beyond poetry and replace its linguistic comedy with a more authentic and silent "ecstasy". It shows, through its own indecidability, that "ecstasy" or the unknown is the very impossibility of meaning in the text. It is the undecidable excess of its writing. Bataille's denunciation of poetry, thus, is also Bataille's affirmation of the undecidable, the excessive, or the "ecstatic" nature of writing itself