Georges BatailleThinkers

The Accursed share is the general economy as including death, waste, expenditure, violence and sacrifice in addition to the restricted sense of accumulation, profit, savings, and morality.

Anguish can and should be turned into delight.

Animality is something we posses which allows us to experience immanence. As such, it serves as a powerful resource in the critique of western civilization.

Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled... not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.

Community is neither a work to be produced, nor a lost communion, but rather as space itself, and the spacing of the experience of the outside, of the outside-of-self.

Contradiction is the nature of truth.

Contradiction is ultimately the only face of truth.

Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Crime is the secret aspect of the human species, impenetrable and hidden. By its nature, crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

Death is the emotional element which gives an obsessive value to communal existence.

Decency is only what the universe seems to be because decent people have welded eyes. In general, people savor the 'pleasures of the flesh' only on the condition that they may be insipid.