Agape and Bhakti with Bataille and Mark at Loyola and St. Francis. David L. Goicoechea

loved Nietzsche and he understood

      with him that many gods have died including

      the gods of Descartes, of Kant and of Hegel,

      of Luther, of Calvin and of Henry VIII.

      He saw how, in 1881, Nietzsche had his great conversion

      and came to be a child-like believer in Jesus

      with his “Yes and Amen” for the eternal return of all existence.

      He came to appreciate also the literary work of Kierkegaard

      whose pseudonymical writings all led up to the Works of Love

      in which he explains the agape of Jesus

      and the logic of its reconciliation

      in loving the other as more important than oneself.

      Bartaille himself converted to Catholicism

      and even studied to be a priest and came

      to greatly love the works of St. John of the Cross

      and St. Theresa of Avila and of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

      But he did not like dogmatic servitude

      which he felt at times the church imposed upon him.

      So he left all servility to become a sovereign person.

      He also made a great study of Hinduism

      and of Buddhism and he mistrusted their mysticisms

      which led to the loss of the sovereign person

      and did not bring about the end of the caste system

      which kept millions enslaved in servitude.

      Bataille, like Nietzsche, is a Franciscan

      with Scotus’ metaphysics of excess

      and Ockham’s nominalistic scepticism.

      But with Nietzsche, Bataille lives this out

      in the play of a dancing ecstasy.

      Bataille had His Followers

      We will see how Julia Kristeva greatly appreciated

      Goerge Bataille, which she explained in nine ways:

      1) Bataille and Kristeva’s Psychoanalytic Revolution

      2) Bataille and Kristeva’s Poetic Revolution

      3) Bataille and Kristeva’s Semiotic Revolution

      4) Bataille and Kristeva’s Sexual Revolution

      5) Bataille and Kristeva’s Women’s Revolution

      6) Bataille and Kristeva’s Philosophic Revolution

      7) Bataille and Kristeva’s Scientific Revolution

      8) Bataille and Kristeva’s Christian Revolution

      9) Bataille and Kristeva’s Political Revolution

      We will also study in detail in just what way Michel

      Foucault appreciated Bataille so much in nine ways:

      1) Bataille, Foucault, and the Heart of Divine Love

      2) Their Notion of Animal and Human Sexuality

      3) And of Transgression and the Sacred

      4) In the Play of Limits and Transgression

      5) Transgression can even be Glorious

      6) And can help us discover the forgiving God

      7) And can be an Affirmative Postmodern Leap

      8) So that Bataille and Foucault are Men of Prayer

      9) As Transgression takes them beyond Hegel

      Bataille had His Critics

      Several great philosophers took Bataille very seriously

      and it is interesting to think about why great existentialists

      like Sartre and Marcel would have been opposed to him

      while postmodernists like Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva

      valued him so much and got so much from his thought.

      We will think about this in detail and see why Sartre

      even though he was a great existentialist philosopher was

      opposed to Bataille’s altruistic ethics which Bataille

      explained in terms of mysticism and the agape of Jesus.

      Sartre thought of Bataille as arguing for an altruistic

      ethics and yet as very unethical in his promiscuity.

      He saw Bataille as writing about mystics like St. John

      of the Cross and yet he could not stomach his very

      erotic writing, which Bataille would see as ethical and religious.

      Gabriel Marcel, a Roman Catholic existentialist, living at

      the same time as Sartre and Bataille, saw Bataille as

      an atheist for refusing to believe in salvation as

      miserable without God and his radical nihilism was

      the thought of an egomaniac and madman who had

      a boundless pride and even a superiority complex.

      We will see how Leslie Boldt and Peter Connor defend

      Bataille against these criticisms of Marcel and how they

      argue that Marcel completely misunderstood Bataille.

      What we see in the criticism of Sartre and Marcel is

      that there can be excellent existentialists who

      however are not postmodern and even though they might

      appreciate Kierkegaard and Nietzsche they do not understand them.

      Part One

The Love of Wisdom