Are there any anons familiar with both authors that would be able to properly enlighten me on the relation between these Thinkers?
I heard that they both had a common student, however I was unable to discover any further information regarding that.
Guenon and Bataille
why are you making these shit threads?
well thats not me... Baudrillard and Guenon seems like a fricking chimera out of hell, but there is some legitimicy to Bataille and Guenon connection.
Does someone have the quote where Bataille calls Guenon an illiterate pseud who's also boring? It's a footnote in the accursed share, someone made a meme about it when I pointed it out.
If you want to relate Bataille to mysticism there's Simone Weil, Denys the Areopagite, St. Teresa of Jesus/Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart and also zen like the platform sutra and Dogen and also there's tantric yoga. Even Crowley is relevant compared to Guenon.
>your brain on brain damage
IQfy will become a Bataillean board. Rentboy Guenon can stay with his lovers of beardless youths in his adoptive country
What is the "way of thinking" in this context?
the fact that Guenon didn't read Hegel is so important, he pretty much missed the philosopher that did themost to advance esoteric philosophies in the west, Hegel is the culmination of the works of people like Eckhar tand Boehme(not to mention Heraclitus, Plato or Aristotle) and Guenon knows next to nothing about such an important moment in esoterci thinking
Nietzsche and Heidegger are also incredible important if you wanna see how the theory of "being" developed in the western tradition, but Hegel is just obligatory at this point
knowing all those philosopher AND the traditional thinkers put Bataille in a whole different league above Guenon
Hegel is too dense, nonsensical and unreadable for the average layman, Schopenhauer was vindicated in his distaste for him
>Hegel is too dense, nonsensical and unreadable for the average layman
The same might be said of Kant, and Schopenhauer's task was to have simplified him. For Hegel's reception among 20th century French philosophers, that job went to Kojeve. If Hegel is hated for being imparsable to the average reader, how much more so must that be for Kant, who also requires you to remember literally every word written previously, but with an even larger and more precise set of vocabulary.
I dunno Kant seemed alright to me
Guenon is the average layman. He should have read Hegel.
Hegel was modernist by historical standards, most of what he stated was said by Spinoza earlier in a much more efficient and effective manner. I'm not big on Guenon either but its clear who was reaching for the most primordial of sources
>average layman
so you admit that Guenon was a layman pleb?
Everybody knows this. Here in France, he is actually quite popular, mostly amongst new age women and hippies. Nobody actually worth their salt will be convinced by anything that Guénon has to say. Tradgays on this board are just too pseud to go beyond it.
Bataille did not know the traditional thinkers.
Bataille was an expert on the middle ages in Spain - therefore Bataille was well read in both muslim and christian theology and mysticism.
The accursed share is also a survey of religions all over the world. He knew.
>Hegel is too dense, nonsensical and unreadable for the average layman
Plebs seethe
"La spiritualité et ses parodies modernes" - does that not sound Traditionalist?
Bataille is certainly anti-modern, but not in a fascist or a traditionalist way - he rather thinks that to actually achieve the goals which Marx strives for, we need to be anti-modern.
I advice reading the notion of expenditure: Bataille certainly does not want to return to the hierarchical modes of expenditure of the past but at the same time rejects the modern overproduction: He calls for a future where everyone has access to the luxury and joy which where once limited to Kings and Popes and today is not present.
It certainly will, brother.
Oh I know (that title is Prévost's btw, not Bataille's): Bataille is really neither the one nor the other.
>hegelgayging this hard
Your knees must hurt anon
Is that so?
(1/2)
The 'student' is Pierre Prévost: he was a friend of Bataille's (he introduced Blanchot to him) and together the cofounded the journal Critique. He came from a nonconformist Catholic background, and Guénon was a strong influence on him. He wrote a book called Georges Bataille & René Guénon: L'expérience souveraine (also an autobiography on his time with Bataille; a book on Therese of Lisieux; and "La spiritualité et ses parodies modernes" - does that not sound Traditionalist?). However, those seeking out this book are in for a bit of a disappointment, as the book is not really about the connection between Bataille and Guénon, and basically just explains the two quite separately. Implicitly, however, his point is that Bataille, Inner Experience in particular, as a mystical, negative-theological (or atheological) experience, woke him up from the illusions of the modern world (servile, homogeneous society), but that Bataille (and Christian mysticism, even if he thinks Guénon undervalues this) can only get you so far, and that subsequently Guénon provides a positive vision by way of initiatic, intellectual experience.
Other than that he informs us that Bataille and Guénon both died at 64 years of age, and that Bataille for a while lived in a house that was frequented by Guénon some twenty years earlier (important coincidences for the author). Most importantly, he quotes from a letter Bataille wrote him on Guénon, and here we enter into Bataille's actual relation to Guénon. Bataille writes that he is sympathetic to Guénon's view of history (i.e. cosmic cycles), but thinks that the control of the decline by a "counter-initiation" is a caricature.
This lines up with the few other statements we have by Bataille about Guénon. One is another letter (in Choix de lettres) to Prévost, concerning the latter's review of The Reign of Quantity for the first issue of Critique: iirc he isn't a fan of Guénon's tone, and thinks a critical paragraph should be added at the end (on Guénon's oversight of Hegelian, Heideggerian philosophy). This is very close to what Bataille writes here (a footnote to The History of Eroticism, an unfinished book I might add) of his "haughtiness"; that's not a refutation but it's not meant to be either. Note that "this way of thinking" is in reference to history, and so Bataille is not entirely critical of Guénon (less than of "modern science" at least).
(2/2)
On the other hand, Guénon engages, but doesn't engage, with Bataille on only one occasion that I know of, and that's a review of "Pour un collège de sociologie" (three texts by Bataille, Caillois, and Leiris serving as manifesto for the College of Sociology): Guénon writes that one the whole these texts are confusing and disquieting, but only treats Leiris's in depth, which is on "the sacred in everyday life", which he judges to be contradictory and parodic. (Guénon would also review Caillois's "Théorie de la fête" and write a follow-up essay on Carnivals: herein, he says that Caillois mistakes festivals for carnivals, and that while the carnival (inversion of values, transgression of limits) was okay as long as it was regulated, it already contains something satanic, and obviously is against a modern-day "perpetual carnival".) From this, I would suspect that if Guénon would've known more about Bataille, he would probably be more negative towards him: it is easy to oppose the two, to see Bataille (and his secret society Acéphale) as satanic, counter-initiatic (but unwittingly so?), as Borella also writes of libertine gnosticism; but while for Prévost and more so any traditionalist Bataille falls short, the two are not completely opposed, I think. Bataille's own view of the sacred, as expounded in Theory of Religion, is one of pure and impure poles, "good" and "evil" poles, which are both removed from the profane sphere; only with the rise of systematic religions, he argues, does the profane become linked to evil, the sacred to good. But Bataille is in search of the sacred in a desacralized world; he is a critic of the modern world, characterized by servility, homogeneity, and work, which could favorably be compared to Guénon's critique of the reign of quantity. It's only that Bataille stood both outside the Church (the Catholic Klossowski's criticism) and (most likely) outside an initiatic tradition: so Bataille's search for the sacred will doubtless appear inverted and problematic: take his libertinism, his "atheology" or "base materialism"; however, I would think it a mistake to place him on the side of quantity, profanation, satanism, etc. because of this.
Btw, the book Guénon ou le renversement des clartés by Xavier Accart is a very handy resource with details all the influences and connections of Guénon on French intellectual life. Despite his reputation now among esotericists, the "radical right", or IQfy meme, quite a few significant authors were interested in him (Gide, the Surrealists, etc.).
Not OP but thanks for effortposting anon, this was interesting to read.
OP here, this is the exact answer I was looking for, thank you for the effortposting
Thanks for the effortpost.
You are keeping IQfy alive
>Bataille, Inner Experience in particular, as a mystical, negative-theological (or atheological) experienc
What a modern bullshit kek...
Apophatism never were atheist like Bataille.
>Apophatism never were atheist like Bataille.
Bataille's atheism is quite different from Dawkins or any Catholic [common] atheism you know of.
wow le wikipedia
not saying they're the same
le atheist. What a shame. Imagine one could say that about you, even if it were false.
Anyway he was a coomer "muh eros, I need to write a book on it"
>not saying they're the same
I know, but you somewhat assimilate the two. It's a very classic mundane prideful confusion in vain spiritualist litterature
argumentum ad wikipedium
Okay, my bad it's even worst than I though.
>“God finds rest in nothing and is satisfied in nothing. Every existence is threatened, is already in the Nothingness of His instability… He knows nothing, he knows nothing of Himself. If he were to reveal himself to Himself, He would have to recognize himself as God, but He cannot even for an instant concede this. He only has knowledge of His Nothingness, that is why He is [an] atheist”
>Georges Bataille, Inner Experience , trans. Leslie Anne Boldt (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1988), 103.
What a fool, should hav humbled himself and followed humble spiritual practice or serious metaphysics, that could have helped cure his stupidity.
>fool
>humbled
>humble
go pray to another ethnic group's volcano, slave moralizer
both were gnostics
bataille > guenon
If you want to prove that you have to make more memes.
dude Bataile his one fof the most important philosopher that studied mysticism in the 20th century, cited and his work is studied all across the globe, a must if you wanna aproach the philosophy of religion, Guenon is only ever cited by schizo right wingers
Neither were good. Both were french pseuds and degenerates sex or drug addicts.
>Guénon was quite right to declare that the Vedanta is the most direct expression of pure metaphysics and, in a certain respect, the most assimilable; no attachment to any non-Hindu tradition obliges us to ignore it or to pretend to ignore it.
-Frithjof Schuon
>no attachment to any non-Hindu tradition obliges us to ignore it or to pretend to ignore it.
That means adopting heterodox beliefs if you belong to theistsic religions. Schuon is stupid.