Why Humans Are Drawn to the Forbidden | Georges Bataille for Sleep

Vote on what comes next: ⁠https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote⁠Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language.Subscribe: ⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe⁠By day a mild librarian, by night the philosopher of excess, eroticism, and the sacred where reason ends.Georges Bataille kept one of the strangest double lives in modern thought. For decades he was a quiet librarian in Paris, courteous and unremarkable, while in private he wrote some of the most extreme and original books of his century. This episode follows him from a childhood shaped by a blind and dying father, through a lost faith and a notorious first novel, into the feuds and secret societies of the years between the wars. It traces the ideas that made him a hidden source for a whole later generation, the economy of loss and useless expenditure, the sun that gives without return, the sacred glimpsed in transgression, a mysticism with no God at the end of it, and eroticism understood as the meeting place of desire and death. Along the way it restores the man behind the scandal, the gentle scholar drawn to everything orderly thought leaves out. Told as a serious essay and paced for rest.Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.00:00:00 The Blind Father00:12:59 The Eye and the Egg00:22:42 The Excremental Philosopher00:29:12 The Low and the Formless00:39:22 The Economy of Loss00:46:20 Hegel's Wound and Nietzsche's Laughter00:56:34 The Headless God01:03:36 The Return of the Sacred01:13:42 Laure and the Silence01:20:00 A Mysticism Without God01:33:08 A Theology Turned Inside Out01:42:03 God in the Brothel01:48:07 Love Among the Graves01:56:30 The Sun That Gives Without Return02:11:27 The Sovereign Moment02:20:13 Desire All the Way to Death02:34:31 Literature Is Not Innocent02:44:02 The Community of Those Who Have Nothing02:50:24 The Tears of Eros02:58:01 The Mild Librarian03:04:24 The Uses of Georges BatailleSleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest.Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded