Bataille - Torment (French Philosophy - La Somme athéologique)

A singular courage is necessary in order not to succumb to depression and to continue - in the name of what?  Nevertheless I continue, in my darkness: man continues in me, goes through this.  When I utter within myself: WHAT IS IT?  When I am there without a conceivable reply, I believe that within me, at last, this man should kill what I am, become himself to that point that my stupidity ceases to make me laughable.  As for...(rare and furtive witnesses will perhaps find me out) I ask them to hesitate: for condemned to becoming man (or more), it is necessary for me to die (in my own eyes), to give birth to myself.  Things could no longer remain in their state; man's 'possible' could not limit itself to this constant distaste for himself, to the dying individual's repeated disavowal.  We cannot be without end that which we are: words cancelling each other out, at the same time as resolute non-entities, believing ourselves to be the foundation of the world.  Am I awake?  I doubt it and I could weep.  Would I be the first one in the world to feel human impotence make me mad?


trns. by Leslie Anne Boldt