Nick Land - The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

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As though to give yourself a certain positive assurance, which harbored as well a suspicion of superiority, you have often reproached me for what you call my appetite for destruction [TE 113].

The reasons for writing a book can be led back to the desire to modify the relations which exist between a human being and its kind. Those relations are judged unacceptable and are perceived as an atrocious wretchedness.

However, to the extent that I have written this book I have been conscious that it is impotent to regulate the account of that wretchedness. Up to a certain limit, the desire for perfectly clear human exchanges which escape general conventions becomes a desire for annihilation [II 143].

* * *

I have always unconsciously sought out that which will beat me down to the ground, but the floor is also a wall.

* * *

What best befits an author is to preface a work with its apology, ornamenting it with the gilt of necessity. After all, one should not beg attention without excuse. That a writer provide some rudimentary justification for a book seems a modest enough expectation, but such a demand obliterates me, since this is a text which has been reared in perfect superfluity, clutching feebly at zero. There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name Bataille shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravingsbut at least it is not that(and even now I lie)

In truth, Bataille seems to me far less an intellectual predicament than a sexual and religious one, transecting the lethargic suicide upon which we are all embarked. To accept his writings is an impossibility, to resist them an irrelevance. One is excited abnormally, appalled, but without refuge. Nausea perhaps? Such melodrama comes rapidly to amuse (although we still vomit, just as we die).