We reach ecstasy by a contestation of knowledge. Were I to stop at ecstasy and grasp it, in the end I would define it. - Georges Bataille

Anyone wanting slyly to avoid suffering identifies with the entirety of the universe, judges each thing as if he were it. In the same way, he imagines, at bottom, that he will never die. We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book.

All that I had loved during my life rose up like a graveyard of white tombs, in a lunar, spectral light. Fundamentally, this graveyard was a brothel. The funereal marble was alive. In some places it had hair on it.

Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.