O mal da literatura: a crítica da forma e da significação em Georges Bataille

De profundis clamavi ad te, Domine

Abstract

In this article, we intend to think about the notion of communication in Georges Bataille as what defines, in a more rigorous way, the experience of literature. We depart, in principle, from his controversy with surrealism in the 1930s to demarcate the fact that literature is the opposite of a formal composition that obeys an intentional expression of meaning. Rather, it is communication that accesses the unnameable by bending the subject-object separation to make one see, in language, the nudity of the author’s experience of anguish; moment in which, for Bataille, the language, the saying, coincides with the materiality of its enunciation: the material base of human life. In this way, literature as communication moves away from a realistic and demonstrative exposition of the world, in the eagerness to translate the referent into meaning, to claim the possibility of saying the human experience there where the saying is subtracted, that is, in the proximity of the enunciator with the limit experience of his anguish.