Heterology and the Critique of Instrumental Reason

Consider Bataille's Cogito: When I think, I am like a whore undressing. Traversing the full range of the writing, one ends by assenting to this movement of stripping and delivery of the disincarnate self to a reader/auditor/interlocutor/spectator, frequently implied, invoked, evoked, addressed. One has also, however, a sense of ritual, somber and deliberate, of a ceremony of effort and abandon, incessantly renewed in solicitation and encounter. In the constancy of renewal we take the measure of Bataille's assiduous interrogation, issuing, paradoxically enough, in a systemic of sorts, a cosmology which founds his general economy. It is this which affords us, in turn, a certain license of approach. Whatever our point of departure, it will signal direction to a center, to the abyss which opens on to the sacred, disclosing, on the way, the stations of Bataille's trajectory, the terms which resonate throughout our course. I depart, then, from the text offered in this issue of October as The Ascent of Mount Aetna. Its place in the Oeuvres complktes1 is entirely marginal; it is, in fact, a note written in 1954, during the composition of the postscript to Le

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