The Impossible

by Georges Bataille

Book Overview

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry and in poems, Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

"Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0872862623
• ISBN13: 9780872862623
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: City Lights Books
• Length: 188 Pages
• Weight: 0.52 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

The new Ulysses

I believe that one day people will come back to this book and consider it to be as ground breaking for the novel as Ulysses was. It is simply amazing. There were parts that were so haunting and that drew me to such deep unconscious wells that I felt like screaming at the book with all my strength, eating it, and then crawling under my bed chuckling madly. I have seen Her. I have seen Him. And it has all happenned over and over again across the ages. If the future is capable of writing more gems like this, then we have something to look forward to after all.

a 'better book' may be unimaginable...

...in terms of unpredictability, uniqueness, confessional-poetic-mystic-debauchery and edge-thriving elan (some call it true amour)-- Bataille's work here as in La Somme atheologique trilogy (GUILTY, ON NIETZSCHE, INNER EXPERIENCE)takes la frigging Cake!the last coolest Frenchman, 'e wuz!

Beyond And Before The Erotic

Note from personal experience (the only way to comment): Passing through the seemingly simple sexual plays of The Father, The Son or Daughter, and The Stark Flesh, one may finally attain a sense of lost freedom in a short excursion into self-conscious poetry forced back on itself. However, dropping the issue and/or the book leaves one caught in the cliche of feeling that one understands. This may require a Quixotic reenactment in order to survive this forgetting --- necessarily not only in the world of one's imagination. This transcendence is then achieved again by that fold and feedback of sacrificing to oneself all that one holds dearly and holy --- reason, despair, and perhaps folly. Only in this way can a true confrontation be finally and for the first time attempted and accomplished.