What causes [fragmentation] if not a need to act that specializes us and limits us to the horizon of a particular activity? Even if it turns out to b… - 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.

The difficulty—that contestation must be done in the name of an authority—is resolved this: I contest in the name of contestation what experience itself is.

How can we linger over books to which their authors have manifestly not been driven? ... the freakish anomalies of Blue of Noon originated entirely in an anguish to which I was prey.