1917 ~ Bataille's period of religious devotion, which includes training to become a priest, takes place whilst he is around the

age of 20. ~ Spirituality. Georges sought atonement and purification via the rituals of religious piety; it was shortly after this episode that his career as a seminarian began. Among the surprising facts Surya has unearthed, several concern the young Bataille's profound attachment to Catholicism, to which he converted at the age of seventeen, since his parents were nonbelievers. (Undoubtedly, this attachment was profoundly affected by Bataille's upbringing in the majestic cathedral city of Rheims.) Les annes suivantes, Bataille, dmobilis pour insuffisance pulmonaire, mne une vie pieuse. Sa foi l'incline vers le sacerdoce et il songe srieusement se faire prtre. That a provincial Frenchman of Bataille's generation and background was a practicing Catholic is hardly newsworthy. That for a year he trained as a seminarian, as Surya informs us, is another matter entirely. It illustrates Bataille's "passion": the depth of his commitment to spiritual concerns, an enthusiasm he transposed later in life, via the alchemy of negative theology, to the pursuit of profanation. Boyhood friend Georges Delteil characterizes the twentyyear-old Bataille as "[living] a saintly life, imposing on himself a discipline of work and meditation." We also learn that Bataille's first published book was not, as had been long assumed, The Story of the Eye (1928) but a conventional devotional work, Notre-Dame de Rheimsas Surya describes it, "a book as pious as he was." (Tellingly, the editors of Bataille's twelve-volume collected works decided to omit this devout Jugendschrift. However, it has been included in Denis Hollier's 1989 study, Against Architecture.) At the age of twenty, the author-to-be of depraved classics such as Madame Edwarda and L'Abb C. proclaimed with unbending piety: "I see [the Rheims cathedral] as the highest and most marvelous consolation left with us by God, and I think that, whether it lasts or is in ruins, it would remain a mother for whom to die." According to the testimony of painter and intimate Andr Masson, Bataille's bedside reading during this period was Rmy de Gourmont's anthology Le Latin mystiquea graphic and delirious portrayal of the evils of carnality. ~ From spirituality to inner experience Dans le dernier entretien qu'un an avant sa mort il a accord Madeleine Chapsal, Bataille a donn un lment de rponse : Je dirais volontiers que ce dont je suis le plus fier, c'est d'avoir brouill les cartes..., c'est--dire d'avoir associ la faon de rire la plus turbulente et la plus choquante, la plus scandaleuse, avec l'esprit religieux le plus profond. La forme la plus labore que Bataille a donne sa rflexion sur l'excs au plan de la connaissance, est d'ordre la fois philosophique et mystique. Ce troisime moment, dans lequel la reprsentation de l'oeil pinal et les considrations sur l'htrologie trouvent leur forme acheve, est celui de l'Exprience intrieure. S'expliquant avec les plus rationalistes des philosophes, Descartes et Hegel, Bataille a alors recours des techniques d'illumination propres l'exprience mystique, aussi bien chrtienne (exercices spirituels) qu'orientale (bouddhisme, yoga), qu'il dtourne de leur finalit religieuse pour leur donner une porte philosophique. Se situant endea ou au-del de toute rationalisation possible, les tats de conscience et d'motion violente auxquels Bataille accde attestent l'existence de ce qu'il appelle une tache aveugle dans l'entendement. Par sa seule prsence, celle-ci dnie la raison la capacit de rendre compte de toutes les possibilits de l'esprit.

 Il est dans l'entendement une tache aveugle : qui rappelle la structure de l'il. Dans l'entendement comme dans l'oeil on ne peut que difficilement la dceler. Mais alors que la tache aveugle de l'oeil est sans consquence, la nature de l'entendement veut que la tache aveugle ait en lui plus de sens que l'entendement mme. Dans la mesure o l'entendement est auxiliaire de l'action, la tache y est aussi ngligeable qu'elle est dans l'oeil. Mais dans la mesure o l'on envisage dans l'entendement l'homme lui-mme, je veux dire une exploration du possible de l'tre, la tache absorbe l'attention : ce n'est plus la tache qui se perd dans la connaissance, mais la connaissance en elle. L'existence de cette faon ferme le cercle, mais elle ne l'a pu sans y inclure la nuit d'o elle ne sort que pour y rentrer. Comme elle allait de l'inconnu au connu, il lui faut s'inverser au sommet et revenir l'inconnu. (L'Exprience intrieure.) Herein lie the affinities between Bataille's worldview and the discourse of "negative theology" or redemption through sin. As the writer and kindred spirit Pierre Klossowski astutely observed, Bataille's avant-garde projects during the '30s (the Collge de Sociologie and Acphale, which possessed a double incarnation as both a "secret society" and an exoteric review) sought "to create a religion without god." The duality between the "sacred" and the "profane" obsessed him, but the habitual signs were reversed. He elevated acts of profanation or desecration to the status of epiphanies: singular mystical moments of Oneness with the All. Archaic societies established taboos in order to maintain the divide between the sacred and profane orders of life. For Bataille, conversely, the act of willfully violating taboos offered privileged access to the holy. Fellow Collegian Roger Caillois felicitously described Bataille as an "atheistic mystic." During the '40s Sartre penned an unforgiving review of Bataille's book Inner Experience, lambasting the author for being a modern mystic ("Un Nouveau Mystique"). Peter Connor's book Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin does a commendable job of demonstrating the extent to which Bataille's Sadean corpus remains indebted to Christian mystics such as Meister Eckert and Jakob Boehme to an extent, in fact, that might dismay Bataille's secular followers. Deprived of a direct political outlet for his unorthodox cultural views during the war, Bataille sublimated his convictions in his two-volume, pseudoscholarly La somme athologiquethe ultimate anti-Thomist screed. 1918 to 1928 Il choisit cependant la vie laque en s'inscrivant l'cole des Chartes, qui forme l'tude des documents anciens. Admis en 1918, il vient s'installer dans la capitale. Du Bataille de cette poque, un de ses condisciples dira qu' il semblait le plus dou pour faire une brillante carrire sur les chemins traditionnels de l'rudition . Mais des lectures, des voyages et des rencontres en dcideront autrement.