Proximity and Philosophy

Abstract

Bataille’s meditation of discontinuity in proximity, from his earliest essays, concentrates its attention upon differentiation and individuation rather than manifestation. One index of this concern is his consistent invocation of physical and biological categories for an elaboration of the event of interiority in being. At the same time, the thematic level of Bataille’s text is faithful to the twentieth century’s intellectualism (informed as it is by the apparent subjectivism of the philosophies of existence), in its concern with the irreducibility of closure as a moment of manifestation. On this thematic level, the proposition of the accessibility or “communicability” of closure’s heteronomous expérience is a constant in Bataille, and has dominated many influential readings of his text.