Illumination Techniques of Georges Batai

Illumination Illuminated:
An Annotated Translation of
Jean Bruno’s
“Illumination Techniques of
Georges Bataille”
Jacquelynn Baas
Have I ever been so certain that life bears an answer to the most
unfathomable movements of the heart?
—Georges Bataille, September 14, 19391
On October 10, 1931, Georges Bataille borrowed from the Bibliothèque

Nationale, Paris, volume two of the journal Encéphale: journal des maladies mentales
et nerveuses (1882).2 This was not unusual. Bataille read psychology books and
articles as part of an effort to understand the impact of his father’s tertiary
syphilis and his own mangled psyche. The article that attracted him was
probably part two of “Onanisme avec troubles nerveaux chez deux petites
filles,” by Dr. Démétrius Zambaco. The doctor’s conclusion after describing
the girls’ behaviour, his treatments, and the aftermath: “in cases similar to those
. . . we should not hesitate to have recourse, and early, to the hot iron to
combat the clitoral or vulvar onanism of little girls.”3 In other words,
1 Georges Bataille, Guilty [Le Coupable, revised edition], trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany,
NY: SUNY Press, 2011), 170.
2 Jean-Pierre Le Bouler and Joëlle Bellec Martini, “Emprunts de Georges Bataille à la
Bibliothèque Nationale,” in Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, t. XII, Articles II 1950–

1961, ed. Francis Marmande (Paris: Gallimard, 1988), 579, n. 357.
3 Dr Zambaco, “Onanisme avec troubles nerveaux chez deux petites filles,” in Encé-
phale: journal des maladies mentales et nerveuses / sous la direction de MM. B. Ball, J. Luys (Paris:
Librairie J. -B. Ballière et fils, 1882): 260–274; 274. A note to the reader: unless other-
wise indicated, all translations from the French are mine.
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cauterisation. The torments inflicted on these two small girls rival anything
found in Bataille’s fiction. But however interesting or useful he may have found
the doctor’s account, it was the title of the journal that had the more lasting
impact on Bataille’s work. Encéphale, from the Greek, means “in the head.”
Indeed, Dr Zambaco observed that, with the elder of the two girls, “at the
beginning masturbation was encephalic, it was only later that it became
instinctive [génésic].”4 One wonders whether it occurred to the good doctor to
cut off the girl’s head, the source of her “problem.”
That thought did occur to Georges Bataille: seven years later he would enti-
tle his secret society and journal, Acéphale, “headless,” and describe it as a com-
munity of the heart. Bataille’s goal for Acéphale was for its members to become
strong-hearted, a goal they could reach only by becoming athéos, godless. Head-
less, godless, they were the same thing as far as Bataille was concerned. “A kind
of hallucinating darkness causes me to slowly lose my head,” he wrote of desire;
“communicates a contortion of all being toward the impossible. Towards who
knows what hot, flowery, fatal explosion . . . in which I escape the illusion of a
solid relationship between me and the world.”5 Escape, in other words, from
dualism, from a perception of the world and everything in it as other. Dualistic
perception nourishes desire—yearning for wholeness. This enigma was not lost
on Bataille. His group-escape could not be an intellectual project; the rituals of
Acéphale were designed to generate intense states of mysticism.
Introduction
As I have written elsewhere,6 the impetus behind Bataille’s philosophy and

practice was personal experience—a horrific childhood with a suicidal mother
and a blind, syphilitic father whom Georges and his mother abandoned to a
solitary death during World War I. These events and others developed into a
complex lifelong project of regeneration and atonement. Bataille first sought
refuge with the Catholic church, an experience that transformed his guilt and
shame into anger. Bataille’s strong mystical tendencies led him to explore alter-
nate religious practices, especially antinomian practices. He assiduously re-
searched variations of these practices, both through reading and by exchanging
information with others. He finally found what he was looking for some time
4 Zambaco, “Onanisme avec troubles nerveaux chez deux petites filles,” 261.
5 Bataille, Guilty, 10.
6 This essay has been developed from more wide-ranging material found in chapters
seven through nine of my book Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2019); see pages 205–245 for “Acéphale” and “Sumptuous Subterranean
Ceremony,” respectively.
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before the end of May 1938,7 when he appears to have been initiated into a
modern derivative of nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantra from Kashmir.8
This essay is an exercise in creative hermeneutics in which I attempt to
make Bataille and his work more comprehensible through the lens of the teach-
ings and practices of Kashmir Shaivism, as though Bataille had actually received
training in that lineage.9 The evidence is scant, consisting mostly of parallels
between nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantra and what Bataille said and wrote about
his practice. It is my hope that the reader will find this approach useful, justify-
ing the legitimacy of interpreting Bataille through such a lens. Scholars have
struggled with Bataille’s understanding of himself as both atheistic and “fero-
ciously religious.”10 But in the radical or “supreme” nondual religion of Kash-
mir Shaivism, Reality is Consciousness, and one can just as easily be an atheist
as a monist or a monotheist. Bataille represents a fascinating case study.
What I write here and below, in my annotations to Jean Bruno’s “Les Tech-
niques d’illumination chez Georges Bataille” (published in Critique 19, 1963), is
informed by my own practice, based on a modern descendant of the Kashmir
tradition.11 That experience strengthened my intuition that Bataille was taught
his first “illumination techniques” by a Western master of a tradition that, until
the second half of the twentieth century, remained mostly an underground oral
teaching in the West. What were Bataille’s techniques? In Le Coupable, he de-
scribed the preliminary meditation practice he was taught by an anonymous
“friend”:
It is good to maintain a relaxed but steady and “flowing” body

position. Personal opportunities exist, but first we might trust
7 The date of Bataille’s “first meditation on peace,” according to Jean Bruno. In his
“Notice autobiographique [1958],” Bataille wrote: “Bataille in fact had begun yoga exer-
cises in 1938, in truth without closely following the precepts of the traditional disci-
pline, in great disorder, and in an extreme tumult of mind” (Georges Bataille, Œuvres
complètes, t. VII, ed. Thadée Klossowski [Paris: Gallimard, 1976], 462).
8 For an analysis of the original tradition see Paul Muller-Ortega, The Triadic Heart of
Siva: Kaula Tantricism of Abhinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir (Albany, NY:
SUNY Press, 1989).
9 Deepest thanks to Prof. Jeffrey Lidke for his encouragement, wise counsel, and sug-
gestions regarding presentation and wording.

10 E.g., Allan Stoekl, “Introduction,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xx.

11 After writing Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life (see note 6), I decided I could not take
my research further without initiation into a form of Shiva-Shakta Tantra; I chose the
version developed by Paul Muller-Ortega (see Blue Throat Yoga, “Neelakantha Medita-
tion,” https://bluethroatyoga.com/neelakantha-meditation/). Deep thanks to Prof.
Muller-Ortega and his colleagues for their teaching and guidance.
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effective methods: deep breathing, concentrating attention on the

breath, as on the intuited secret of all life. To the flow of images,
and to relieve the flight of ideas from the fact of endless
associations, we can suggest the help of obsessive words and
phrases [i.e., mantras], equivalent to the immobile bed of a
river. . . . For several days, life enters an empty darkness. A
marvelous relaxation results. Unlimited power is revealed to the
mind, the universe is available to desire, but trouble comes
quick.12
By “trouble comes quick,” Bataille was probably referring to natural difficulties

encountered in the process of vikalpa-samskara—refinement of mental and emo-
tional barriers to the recognition of oneself as Absolute Consciousness.13 Not
that he would have known the Sanskrit term for this process, but he devoted
himself to it, with quick results, and after a few months he felt ready to move
on to more advanced practices, as described by Bruno.
So-called “Kashmir Shaivism”14 was a sophisticated array of religious-
philosophical perspectives and ritual practices developed in northern India be-
tween the eighth and twelfth centuries. Unlike the nondualism of Advaita Ve-
danta, where the universal Self (Brahman) is real while the material world is
unreal (maya, illusion); and unlike Buddhism, where all is constant flux and there
is no permanent transcendent Self; the nondualism of Kashmir Shaivism under-
stands everything as a real manifestation of Absolute Consciousness, personi-
fied by Shiva/Shakti, Consciousness/Power. According to practitioner and
scholar of this tradition Christopher D. Wallis:
All that exists, has ever existed or will ever exist, is one infinite di-
vine Being, free and blissful, whose body is the universe and
whose soul is consciousness. This philosophy, then, can be called
theistic monism, . . . the view that . . . every person and object exists

13 See Paul E. Muller-Ortega, “‘Tarko Yogangam Uttamam’: On Subtle Knowledge and
the Refinement of Thought in Abhinavagupta’s Liberative Tantric Method,” in Theory
and Practice of Yoga, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2005), 181–212,
esp. 192ff.
14 The term “Kashmir Shaivism” is confusing because in addition to this nondual form,
in medieval Kashmir there were also dual and dual/nondual forms of this highly philo-
sophical tradition. Kashmir Shaivaism was the title of the first book in English on the
subject, written by J. C. Chatterji and published in 1914 by the Research Department of
Kashmir State. For an accessible description of this form of Shaivism, see William Bar-
nard’s Preface to the 1986 SUNY Press edition, where Barnard attempts to fill in the
missing pieces of Chatterji’s mysteriously unfinished account.
510
as a form or aspect of one basic reality (monism)—and that that

basic reality has an innate capacity for self-awareness, and there-
fore it can be called a being, a being whose nature is unbounded
by any form of limitation (theism). . . . To make it personal: you
are not separate from God/dess, the Divine, and never have been.
Indeed, you are the very means by which She knows Herself.15
The tradition both absorbed and affected co-existing religious philosophies and
practices, including Buddhism, Advaita Vedanta, and Vaishnavism, as well as
other forms of Tantra.16 During the late tenth to early eleventh century these
traditions were consolidated and transformed by the renowned synthesist, exe-
gete, poet, literary critic, and mystic, Abhinavagupta (ca. 950–1020), who drew
on earlier philosophical traditions and practices, most notably Kaula Trika, in
which sexual union was a key ritual performance.17 Abhinavagupta presented a
view he called paramadvaya, “the supreme nonduality,” which, according to Wal-
lis, “includes both duality and nonduality as valid experiences and levels of per-
ception. Nonduality transcends duality, but the ‘supreme nonduality’ transcends
the transcendent”; it “is simultaneously transcendent and immanent: it
englobes, includes, emanates as all these different views.”18
The texts of this influential tradition gradually disappeared during the
twelfth to sixteenth-century Muslim conquest of India and did not begin to be
translated and published until the turn of the twentieth century.19 Even then the
process was slow, and it was not until the second half of the century that non-
15 Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (Petaluma, CA: Mattamayūra Press, second

ed. 2013), 56, original emphasis. A note to the reader: unless otherwise indicated, all
emphases are in the original texts.
16 Kashmir Nondual Tantra influenced, among other things, the development of Tan-
tric Buddhism (Vajrayana) and Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedanta (via Vaishnavism).

17 See Kerry Martin Skora, “Abhinavagupta’s Erotic Mysticism: The Reconciliation of
Spirit and Flesh,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, no. 1 (2007): 63–88.
18 Wallis, Tantra Illuminated, 185.
19 The earliest published English translation I have found dates to 1908: P. T. Srinivasa
Iyengar’s translation of a portion of the Shiva Sutras, “Shiva-Sutra-Vimarshini, with the

Bhashya of Kshemaraja,” in The Theosophist, vol. XXIX (Madras: Adyar, 1908). Iyengar
published a fuller translation of the Shiva Sutras with commentary by Kshemaraja
(whose guru was Abhinavagupta) in book form in 1912 (see note 26). The earliest Ab-
hinavagupta translation appeared in 1910: L. D. Barnett, “The Paramarthasara of Ab-
hinava-Gupta,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 1, no. 1–2 (July
1910): 707–747. In 1911, The Archaeological and Research Department of Kashmir
State, then under the direction of J. C. Chatterji, began publishing its Kashmir Series of
Texts and Studies, mostly in Sanskrit. Volume I was The Shiva Sutra Vimarshini, “Pref-
ace” and “Introduction [in English]” by Jagadisha Chandra Chatterji (Srinagar, Kash-
mir: Archaeological and Research Department Kashmir State, 1911).
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dual Kashmir Shaiva-Shakta Tantra began to come into scholarly focus. The
oral tradition, however, continued uninterrupted. Precisely how and when this
tradition made its way to Europe and the Americas remains a subject of re-
search that is made difficult (if not impossible) by the “hidden” nature of its
practices and the cultural adaptations they underwent. As there is no concrete
evidence for my intuition that what Bataille practised was a Western descendent
of Kashmir Shaivism, what follows is a creative exercise in which I identify
some parallels between Bataille’s experiences and writings and the Kashmir
Shaiva tradition.
During the twentieth century (and still today, to some extent) the word “tan-
tric” implied physical sexual practices, not the more cerebral “yoga” Bataille
specified when describing his practice. Bataille famously embraced eroticism,
writing: “The man who knows nothing of eroticism is no less foreign to the end
of the possible than he is without inner experience. One must choose the ardu-
ous, stormy path—that of the ‘whole man’ nonmutilated.”20 He could be de-
scribing Kaula Trika, where Shiva is Consciousness and kula (“Kaula” is a varia-
tion) refers to the nested reality-complex, whether universe, world, family, se-
cret society, or individual. According to practitioner and scholar Paul Muller-
Ortega:
As the “embodied cosmos” that emerges from Shiva, the kula is

the grand and complex structure of lived reality. . . . Since the ku-
la’s essential reality is finally that wholeness which it has bodied
forth, every unit, or kula resonates in identity with every other
self-sufficient structure composed of that wholeness. Thus the
human body, as a kula, resonates in identity with the entire uni-
verse. All that is manifested from Shiva, including the entire array
of universes, may be found present in the body.21
In this system, material and immaterial reality are nothing other than Con-
sciousness made manifest by Shakti, Shiva’s visarga-shakti, or “Emissional Pow-
er.”
Writing about tantra, historian of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal defined the Erotic
as “a dimension of human experience that is simultaneously related both to the
physical and emotional experience of sexuality and to the deepest ontological
levels of religious experience.”22 For advanced tantric practitioners, sexual
20 Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany, NY: SUNY Press,
2014), 30.
21 Paul E. Muller-Ortega, “The Power of the Secret Ritual: Theoretical Formulations
from the Tantra,” Journal of Ritual Studies 4, no. 2 (Summer 1990): 41–59; 43–45.
22 Jeffrey J. Kripal, Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Rama-
512
union is an effective add-on to meditative concentration through which

Emissional Power can be harnessed by women and men: both can realise
themselves as all-encompassing Consciousness (“Shiva”) and deploy their
creative Power (“Shakti”), thereby achieving a condition of complete freedom.
This is more commonly a mental practice; both versions are described in a
source cited by Bruno: the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.23
The Kaula and a related lineage group, the Krama, emphasised the mind-
body connection and practices that were transgressive of cultural norms, in
general, and Brahman orthodoxy in particular—including consumption of al-
cohol and ritualistic orgies. Such “sacrificial” rituals were not new: they had
roots in the Vedas. In an account published in 1936, which Bataille read, Mircea
Eliade wrote: “The sexual act is a sacrifice that must be performed with the
same rigor and precision as any other ritual. The identification of woman with
the elements of the sacrifice is clear: She has pelvis as altar, [pubic] hair for
grass, skin to press for soma [Vedic ritual drink].” Eliade went on to stress
that—in contrast with ancient Vedic practice, which focused on the sacrificial
element—in tantric practice the sexual act “becomes a means of meditation and
a technique for achieving oneness with divinity.”24
The goal of nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantra is to “recognise”25 oneself as
Shiva, or Absolute Consciousness, who through His Power, Shakti, generates,
krishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23.

23 Verses 69 and 70. The Vijnana Bhairava Tantra was the only “revealed” Tantric text
that continued to be copied and studied during and after the Muslim conquest. There
are quite a few published versions, but no easily accessible, accurate translations. Ab-
hinavagupta described the physical practice in chapter 29 of his Tantraloka; see Lilian
Silburn, Kundalini: The Energy of the Depths (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1988), and John R.
Dupuche, Abhinavagupta, The Kula Ritual as Elaborated in Chapter 29 of the Tantralokā (Del-
hi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2003).
24 Mircea Eliade, Yoga: essai sur les origins de la mystique indienne (Paris: Geuthner, 1936),
232. His source, Brhadaranyaka-upanishad (6.4.3), reads: “Her vulva is the sacrificial
ground; her pubic hair is the sacred grass; her labia majora are the Soma-press; and her
labia minora are the fire blazing at the center. A man who engages in sexual intercourse
with this knowledge obtains as great a world as a man who performs a Soma sacrifice”
(Patrick Olivelle, The Early Upanishads: Annotated Text and Translation [New York: Oxford
University Press, 1998], 155). We know Bataille read Eliade’s account because Eliade
reported in a journal entry for March 4, 1948: “Georges Bataille comes today. He asks
me to write a book on Tantrism, which he would publish immediately. In fact, the hour
we spent together was largely ‘confiscated’ by Tantrism. He told me that after a three-
years’ search of the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he was a functionary, he was sur-
prised to discover that the most lucid exposition of Tantrism was in a book published
in Bucharest (my Yoga of 1936)” (Mircea Eliade, Journal I, 1945–1955, trans. Mac Lin-
scott Ricketts [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990], 79).
25 See note 83.
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preserves, and (importantly for Bataille) destroys everything, seen and unseen.
Shiva/Shakti does this from its own free will; Shiva loves to play—lila is the
term for “divine play.” Such freedom would have appealed to Bataille, as would
the emphasis on transgression of social norms, especially relating to sexual
practices and the consumption of “forbidden” substances like alcohol. But to
be able to drink and screw freely from a perspective of Absolute Consciousness
takes training and considerable practice: initiation from a guru followed by
months, if not years, of tantric meditation practice.26 This foundational practice
constitutes a process of refinement (samskara) of conceptualisation (vikalpa) that
gradually removes mental and psychological barriers to entering “the fire of
Bhairava”—a metaphor for the heart of this fierce manifestation of Shiva
associated with annihilation and, in the Trika system of Abhinavagupta,
Supreme Reality.
Bataille had more psychological barriers than most. Perhaps as a result, he
appears to have gotten creative with his meditation techniques. It is hard not to
empathise with the dismay of his colleagues when he insisted: “[T]here is a
great simplicity here that collapses the objections of those who say, it is a fraud,
since we do not die, to speak of ‘joy in the face of death.’ It is not a question of
dying but of being brought to the height of death.”27 Bataille’s concept
“brought to the height of death” is prone to be misunderstood as it is sometimes
translated: “brought to the pinnacle of death.” What Bataille meant is far from
clear to anyone not familiar with Kashmir Shaiva-Shakta Tantra. Bataille is
saying that he recognised himself as equal to Shiva-Bhairava, the Destroyer.28
Elsewhere, he asked, “Why wouldn’t I become a little god if it is true that one
can no longer laugh, get drunk, screw naked girls and become ecstatic without
26 Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 26: “Shariravrittir Vatram: The Bodily Functions are
Worship. Whatever bodily functions are exercised by the Yogi who has been said to be
equal to Shiva, and who is meditating on the thought, ‘I am Shiva,’ are acts of worship,
consisting of a constant investigation of his own nature” (The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of
Ksemaraja, trans. P.T. Shrinivas Iyengar [originally Allahabad, 1912; reprinted Delhi: Sri
Satguru Publications, 2007], 53). Citation of Sanskrit texts like the Shiva Sutras is not
meant to suggest they were a direct source. First of all, Bataille made it clear that his
instruction was oral. He didn’t read Sanskrit, and there were almost no translations of
nondual Shaiva-Shakta texts available when he began practicing in 1938 (see note
19). One exception is Iyengar’s translation of the Shiva Sutras, but Bruno does not men-
tion it, and there is no record Bataille consulted it.
27 “[À] hauteur de mort,” from the closing paragraph of “Le sacrifice,” in Georges Ba-
taille, Œuvres complètes, t. II, Écrits posthumes 1922–1940, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Galli-
mard, 1970), 243.
28 Cf. Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 25: “Shivatulyo Jayate: Becomes Equal to Shiva. . . .
When [the practitioner] attains equality with Him, he becomes Lord Bhairava” (Iyengar,
The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 53).
514
being a god? A god is not concerned with the nature of things, like a man of
politics, and for a god, war and prostitution are only the nature of things, which
can be neither good nor bad, but only divine.”29 Shiva does love to play. “Joy in
the Face of Death” was, I suggest, Bataille’s experience of himself as all-
encompassing, Absolute Consciousness.
Not much is known about Jean Bruno beyond the fact that he was Bataille’s
colleague at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He kindly checked out and returned
books for Bataille after he was forced to leave the library in April 1942 due to
worsening tuberculosis,30 and Bruno probably spent many hours talking with
him about his meditation practice. This was a time when Bataille was engaged
in writing three books where he attempted to explain the nature of his practice:
L’Expérience intérieure (Inner Experience), published in 1943; Le Coupable
(Guilty), 1944; and Sur Nietzsche (On Nietzsche), 1945. When Bataille died in
1962, Bruno contributed an essay to the memorial issue of Bataille’s journal
Critique that attempted to bring order to and shed light on his disorderly ac-
counts.
Spirituality cannot be conveyed in writing; what Bataille wrote was not reve-
lation but scripture, which is descriptive. The fundamentals of tantric practice
are given during a personal initiation process. The first initiation experience is
usually Shaktipat, spiritual awakening. Bataille had apparently experienced spon-
taneous Shaktipat around 1927, during the umbrella enlightenment described in
Inner Experience.31 He appears finally to have sought someone who could teach
him tantric yoga sometime during the first half of 1938, began assiduously prac-
ticing, and made rapid progress. Bruno’s discussions with Bataille, as well as his
own considerable research, made for a formidably informative essay that is not
strictly chronological, but rather moves back and forth in time to describe the
various facets of Bataille’s practice.
Bruno provides several references aimed at helping readers understand Ba-
taille’s perspective. The first is the Yoga Sutra, compiled sometime between 500
BCE and 400 CE by the legendary sage Patanjali, who synthesised and organ-
ised previous yoga traditions. Bataille probably read the version provided by
Vivekananda in the worldwide best-seller Raja Yoga: Conquering the Internal Na-
ture, first published in 1896. According to Michel Surya, Bataille owned the
1930 edition, which he “heavily annotated.”32 Another helpful reference is
Grace Constant Lounsbery’s La Méditation bouddhique, étude de sa théorie et de sa
pratique selon l'Ecole du Sud (1935), a “basic but effective textbook,” according to
29 Bataille, Guilty, 168, n. 11.

30 Bataille, Œuvres complètes, t. XII, 617–618.
31 Bataille, Inner Experience, 40. See also Baas, Duchamp and the Art of Life, 209–210.
32 Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and
Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 553, n. 11.
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Bruno, which promoted a “modernised” version of Southern School Theravada

Buddhism. According to the jacket copy for the 1935 English edition, “more
than half of the book is a compilation of specific meditation practices, one of
which is the ‘Meditation of Peace,’ designed for Westerners by a hermit who
spent his life meditating in the forests of Ceylon.” While describing practices
heavily influenced by Tantra, Lounsbery’s book is Buddhist in its emphasis on
renunciation and transcendence of suffering (the opposite of Bataille’s own
proactive mystical bent). It is precisely the kind of practical treatise Bataille
longed to write, but did not, for reasons Bruno explains.
Lounsbery was clearly an inspiration for some of Bataille’s meditation prac-
tices, most notably the “meditation on peace” that Bruno dates to the end of
May 1938, for which the ultimate source would have been a key Shaiva-Shakta
mantra, the Shanti, or Peace Mantra.33 Bruno also describes Bataille’s practice
of sky-gazing—mentioned by Lounsbery, but similarly derived from an older
text referenced by Bruno. In a section toward the end of his essay entitled “Vo-
latilisation,” Bruno writes: “[M]any techniques had recourse to a double move-
ment of concentration and then of evanescence. Nowhere have these alternat-
ing processes been repeated more insistently than in a remarkable Kashmir tan-
tra, the Vijnana Bhairava, which untiringly varies the same fundamental exercise,
where the sensations serving for concentration must in the end disappear.”
What distinguishes Kashmir Shiva-Shakti tantric yoga practice is precisely this
“bi-directional gaze,” “the liberating experience that the outer world and one’s
own consciousness are co-extensions of the one, unified field of divine con-
sciousness that is at once self and other, inside and outside,” as Jeffrey Lidke
writes.34
The Vijnana Bhairava tantra was not published in a European language until
1961,35 so Bataille must have gotten the second-stage teachings Bruno describes
in this section from another source, perhaps the same “friend” who initiated
him. In Le Coupable, Bataille wrote: “In the first movement, the traditional pre-
cepts are irrefutable; they are marvelous. I got them from one of my friends,
33 T. S. Eliot concluded The Waste Land with the closing words of the Shanti Mantra:
Shantih shantih shantih. See Jacquelynn Baas, “Observations on The Waste Land and
Dada,” in Academia Letters, https://www.academia.edu/44835533/Observations_on_
The_Waste_Land_and_Dada.
34 Jeffrey Lidke, “The Potential of the Bi-Directional Gaze: A Call for Neuroscientific
Research on the Simultaneous Activation of the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic

Nervous Systems through Tantric Practice,” Religions 7, no. 11 (2016): 132–149.
35 Lilian Silburn, Le Vijñana Bhairava, texte traduit et commenté (Paris: Institut de Civilisa-
tion Indienne, 1961). This tantra was published in Sanskrit in 1918 in the Kashmir Se-
ries of Text and Studies, but according to Stuart Kendall, Bataille did not read Sanskrit
(personal communication).
516
who got them from an oriental source.”36 It may be that Bataille first tried to
teach himself meditation from Lounsbery’s text and, when that proved ineffec-
tive, sought personal instruction from a friend. When he felt he had achieved
what he wanted from the basic “precepts,” as he called them, and became im-
patient for more advanced teachings, he would have had to make his case to the
person who first initiated him. We do not know who that person was, aside
from the fact that s/he was a friend of Bataille’s who had studied with someone
from the “Orient” (i.e., India), and would have known Bataille well enough to
perceive that what this mystical, guilt-wracked, death-obsessed man needed was
a connection with Shiva, Creator-Preserver-Destroyer. Bataille was clearly or-
dered not to reveal the identity of his teacher, a common practice in occult cir-
cles.37
Also not to be revealed would have been the specific mantra or practice Ba-
taille was given. A mantra is a short, personalised series of sounds or words
given to trainee meditators as part of the initiation process; it is repeated, usual-
ly silently, to effect reorganisation of consciousness over time. Mantra practice
foregrounds the foundational Indian concept of Vak—Word as creative power.
André Padoux, who explored this aspect of Shiva-Shakta Tantra, writes:
“[F]rom Vedic times speech had a divine quality and a central role, the same is
even more true in Tantrism, of which all the speculations about the Word are
based upon the identity established between the latter and the divine energy, an
energy which, in its innermost nature, is speech and is acting through speech.”38 “Innermost
nature” is a coded reference to the womb. Vak points us to the esoteric con-
cept of matrika shakti, the “mother” or womb of manifestation, the source of
vibrational sound. Matrika is the matrix from which everything arises, including
language as consolidator of human consciousness.
Returning to the source—experiencing the Word as gateway to matrika shak-
ti—is a powerful complementary path to realisation of oneself as Conscious-
ness. Bataille wrote of “the liberation of the power of words that is mastery.”39 Stuart
Kendall characterised Bataille’s use of Word as Power: “Inner Experience revels in
its own rhetoric, not for persuasive effect, but to provoke an experience for its
author and for its reader.”40 Bataille’s more poetic version: “[T]he word silence is

37 Bruno does not mention that Bataille had a teacher. A likely candidate is Mircea Eli-
ade, but according to Eliade, he and Bataille did not meet in person until 1948 (see note
24). Additionally, Eliade’s political sympathies would have made friendship between
them unlikely during this pre-war period.
38 André Padoux, Vāc: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras, trans. Jacques
Gontier (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1990), 48–49.

39 Bataille, Inner Experience, 22.
40 Stuart Kendall, “Translator’s Introduction: A Debauchery of Thought,” in Bataille,
Inner Experience, xiv.
517
Jacquelynn Baas
still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing, and to no longer know, it

would be necessary to no longer speak.”41
Bataille went on to develop his own mantras inspired by the “Meditation of
Peace designed for Westerners” promoted by Lounsbery. On the eve of World
War II, “peace” (shanti in Sanskrit) would have been a timely antidote to the
karmic legacy of his birth-name, Bataille: “Battle.” At any rate, Bataille elaborat-
ed the simple word “peace” into meditative poems that he shared with his
Acéphale colleagues—poems that he hoped would take them “Beyond Poet-
ry.”42 Bataille wrote most of his poetry during the first half of the 1940s when
he was writing his books on meditation practice.43 Poetry was a consistent fea-
ture of his published work, and this aspect of Bataille’s writing foregrounds
another Indian concept. Kashmir Shaivism’s most important exegete, Ab-
hinavagupta, was a poet and key contributor to Indian aesthetic theory who
elaborated and expanded the classical concept of emotive aesthetics, rasa—
“juice/flavour/essence.” Rasa theory holds that the presentation of emotions is
the proper object of poetic and artistic discourse. Traditional Indian aesthetics
describes eight rasas—surprise/wonder, love/eros, fear/shame, disgust/revolt,
courage/heroism, laughter/comedy, sadness/compassion, and rage—all famil-
iar themes for readers of Bataille. Abhinava added a ninth, shanta, “silence,”
peace—another familiar Bataillean theme.
Abhinavagupta used the terms rasa and bhava to distinguish between
“emotion as it is rendered in dramatic performance [bhava], and the aesthetic
experience of an emotional state [rasa], which is an achievement on the part of
the spectator.”44 Bhava is experienced by the playwright, actor, artist, or poet,
while rasa is experienced by the viewer, listener, or reader. But the emotional
content of a work of art can be relished only by a participant who is sahridaya,
who “has heart.” “The transformation of a bhava to a rasa,” according to
Kathleen Marie Higgins, “depends on transcendence of the narrowly personal
sense of self. Accordingly, any experience of rasa requires the overcoming of
egoism. This breakthrough enables the artistic audience member to achieve
rasa, a condition of pleasure, or rapture.”45 This is true not only for artistic

42 According to Stuart Kendall, the advertising band wrapped around the first edition of
L’Expérience intérieure announced: “Beyond Poetry” (Stuart Kendall, “Translator’s Intro-
duction: The Hatred of Poetry,” in The Poetry of Georges Bataille [Albany, NY: SUNY
Press, 2018], vii–viii).
43 Kendall, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Poetry of Georges Bataille, xxi–xxiii.
44 Kathleen Marie Higgins, “An Alchemy of Emotion: Rasa and Aesthetic Break-
throughs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65, no. 1 (Winter, 2007): 43–54; 44.
45 Higgins, “An Alchemy of Emotion,” 49. For applications of rasa in poetry, see Eliot
Deutsch, “Reflections on Some Aspects of the Theory of Rasa,” in Sanskrit Drama in
518
works where the content is pleasant, but equally true for works whose content
is unpleasant, repulsive, or even horrific. Whether he was consciously aware of
it or not, with his “dramatisations” Bataille was enacting bhava-rasa.
Bataille’s poetry brings us to a third term, dhvani—the idea that rasa can only
be communicated by the power of implied or suggested meaning. Bataille re-
garded poetry as a sacrificial act in which words “are solicited only in order to
die.”46 Stuart Kendall writes that for Bataille: “Poetry does violence to language,
to meaning, to the structures of language that support meaning; . . . Poetry rais-
es questions about the processes and possibilities of meaning in human life,
about the ways that human beings create meaning in the world.”47 Dhvani theo-
ry similarly holds that the poet’s sacrificial act liberates words, enhancing their
creative power (Vak). Through bhava, performative emotion, the poet paradox-
ically “kills” words by combining and thus endowing them with womb-like
power. Readers create their own meaning in the form of rasa: aesthetic experi-
ence of the emotion conveyed.
Bataille’s bhava runs the gamut; no emotion is excluded. He challenges his
readers to realise their own emotional range, confident that through aesthetic
experience we will come to rest where he apparently did—savouring the ninth
rasa, peace. While questions remain about precisely where Bataille received his
practice and who exactly initiated him, Jean Bruno’s essay remains the best
summary of what Bataille accomplished with his “techniques of illumination.”
Reading an account of someone else’s meditation experience is a bit like read-
ing an account of someone else’s dreams: not very interesting unless you are
interested in the person. In that case, the account can be revealing—but only to
the extent the reader has knowledge of and (ideally) experience with the prac-
tice being described. I can offer only information. It will be up to you, dear
reader, to transmute these words into knowledge, and to apply this knowledge
to your own experience of Bataille. As Bruno’s epigraph suggests, he had high
hopes for you.
***
Performance, ed. Rachel Van M. Baumer and James R. Brandon (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1981), 214–225.
47 Kendall, “Translator’s Introduction,” Poetry of Georges Bataille, xxxii.
519
Jacquelynn Baas
Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille

Jean Bruno48
I will say what paths have led me to ecstasy, in the desire that others can
achieve it in the same way.
—Bataille, Le Coupable
The mystical experience ought to be sufficient in itself. Its capacity to intoxi-

cate, its different levels, the perspectives to thought it opens in all directions,
can enrich an existence and sometimes consume it. When it seized him, only
ecstasy could satisfy Bataille in his eagerness to live on a more exhilarating
plane. And yet, as his “experience” grew, he felt the need to share it. At the end
of notes in which his first great illuminations allusively shone, he confessed: “I
wanted to make accessible to the living, happy with the pleasures of this world,
and disbelievers, the transports that seemed furthest from them.” To this end,
he described the paths he himself had travelled. Despite the numerous echoes
that arose in three works published within a span of a few years—L’Expérience
intérieure (1943), Le Coupable (1944), Sur Nietzsche (1945)—it seemed to him (he
felt it at different times) that on this point (capital for him) he had not really
been heard. The following pages do not aim to develop the complex scope and
all the implications of “inner experience,” nor to comparatively assess their lev-
el, but to analyse the techniques of approach.
The year in which L’Expérience intérieure appeared, Sartre consecrated three
articles to him in Cahiers du Sud entitled, “A New Mystic.” In his conclusion,
Sartre minimised the value of the illumination described by Bataille, and above
all he denied that the latter had succeeded in facilitating access to it for others:
“I have no doubt that our author knows certain ineffable states of anguish and
torturing joy. I note only that he fails when he wants to give us the method that
would allow us to obtain them in turn.” And Sartre added: “Although his
avowed ambition has been to write a Discourse on Mystical Method, he
48 Jean Bruno, “Les techniques d’illumination chez Georges Bataille,” Critique 19, no.
195–196 (August–September 1963): 706–720. I omit Bruno’s citations (most of which
are to editions few readers would have easy access to), footnoting only his information-
al references.
520
repeatedly confesses that these states come when they want and likewise
disappear.” But on the contrary, Bataille succeeded in facilitating these fleeting
flashes, in multiplying the brief instants of spontaneous illumination which he
had stealthily accessed, and which Nietzsche (and others with him) had known
without being able to master them.
From The Practice of Joy in the Face of Death, published in June 1939 in the final
issue of Acéphale, to his Method of Meditation of 1947, Bataille repeatedly insisted
on the possibility of mystical training and alluded to procedures he discovered
through the Orient and Christianity, but which he connected in a personal way.
Exceptionally gifted in this experiential practice, he first made rapid progress,
then his states evolved more slowly. What he had been able to write over the
course of seven or eight years about pre-mystical methods reflected the point
of evolution he had reached at various times. However, barely a year had
elapsed since the start of his training when he reached a crucial step in the
summer of 1939, and in the notebook that he then began to keep, he gave the
essentials of his method: “I have said how I reached such an intense ecstasy.
On the wall of appearance, I projected images of explosion, of tearing. First of
all, I would make within myself the most spacious silence. With time, this be-
came possible for me almost whenever I wanted. In this often-bland silence, I
evoked all the tearings imaginable. Obscene, laughable, funereal representations
followed one another. I imagined the depth of a volcano, war, or my own
death. I no longer doubted that ecstasy could do without the representation of
God.”49 To these two processes—silence and dramatisation—Bataille returned
at greater length in L’Expérience intérieure. One would be tempted to attribute the
most effectiveness to the second phase, but the drama only fully plays out when
associated with internal absorption. When unleashed too soon, “natural exalta-
tion or drunkenness are as effective as a flash in the pan.” One achieves “dark
incandescence” only by acquiescing first to this withdrawal into oneself, which
we are loath to do, and which is a technique Bataille borrowed from the Orient.
Access to Silence
The initial principle of the yoga-sutras,50 of which Bataille found the equivalent
in Pseudo-Dionysius, is the cessation of discursive thought. If language ampli-
49 Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 4: “Let him think of his city as burnt up in the kalagni
[Kala-Agni, ‘fire that is time’]. In the end the illumination called shanta [peace] is born”
(Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 38).
50 Classical Yoga, a dualistic practice summarised by “Patanjali” (probably not one per-
son), is designed to achieve through concentration what nondual Shaivism regards as

only the first stage of meditation: the conquest of delusion. While not abandoning yogic
521
Jacquelynn Baas
fies, it can dampen the freshness of sensations and detour the subtle interior
impressions that are revealed only to a consciousness without attachment. And
orienting thought towards some future “project” is just as harmful a distraction
from the deep self as the words with which one constructs fictions for oneself,
or the dialogues one imagines in order to triumph over others. The simplest
method consists in directing the mind towards a function of the body, such as
breathing, which one follows voluntarily and then is easily forgotten. These
organic “supports” are common to the great oriental techniques. Attention can
then fix temporarily on the language itself (the words, the phrases), used here
only to abolish language in the end. This is the “meditation” of which Bataille
found schemas in Southern Buddhism. Whether original Pali texts or modern-
ised themes (like those in Lounsbery's basic but effective textbook),51 their
hallmark is a monotonous rhythm, with constant repetitions: “To the flow of
images, and to relieve the flight of ideas from the fact of endless associations,
we can suggest the help of haunting words and phrases, equivalent to the im-
mobile bed of a river.” Rather than a banal recitation, these themes are intend-
ed for a very slow inner recitation, as if one were lingering to savour in isolation
each term, each image of a familiar poem as the approach of sleep calms the
mind. The purpose of meditation is to induce a kind of torpor where thought
subsides, but other levels begin to awaken. By the choice of its images, by the
brevity and the balance of its sentences, the first of the six themes published by
Bataille in June 1939 tended to provoke this lucid somnolence.52 Here it is:
I surrender to peace until annihilation.

The sounds of struggle are lost in death like rivers in the sea, like the bright-
ness of stars in the night.
The power of combat is fulfilled in the silence of all action.
I enter into peace as into a dark unknown.
I fall into this dark unknown.
I myself become this dark unknown.53
practice, the goal of the nondual Shaiva practitioner is the second stage: omniscience
and bliss. (See Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutras 7 and 16, in Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-
Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 41–42; 45–46.)
51 G. Constant Lounsbery, La Méditation bouddhique, étude de sa théorie et de sa pratique selon
l'Ecole du Sud (Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1935).

52 Bruno notes: “It would be an illusion to see in this result a simple suggestion due to
the explicit content of the theme (although this is not negligible), because the same
state would be equally well achieved by another mode of concentration (for example
sensory), or with a different theme.” At this point, perhaps inspired by Lounsbery, Ba-
taille was developing his own mantras.
53 Bruno points out that this mantra was published in Georges Bataille, “Folie, Guerre
et Mort,” special issue, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie 5 (June 1939): 14. Cf.
522
From his first meditation on peace at the end of May 1938, Bataille was sur-
prised at its effect: an intense numbness, with hypersensitivity to the slightest
noise, and, when the exercise was over, a feeling of power and calm.54 After
having plunged a few days further and further into this conscious torpor, taking
up the same theme despite its monotony, and after having overcome various
obstacles,55 Bataille moved on to a new subject: joy before death, which lost the
peaceful tone of the first text, but still included concentration on a poem with
an insistent rhythm.56 In the following period, some visions appeared to him
and he meditated more often on images. Although also bearing on joy in the
face of death, the third theme of Acéphale is not simply constructed like the
preceding one on rhythmic sentences, but on visual representations, where the
annihilation takes on cosmic perspectives. The character of meditation there-
fore changed: instead of the slight self-hypnosis of the beginning, it endeav-
oured to provoke a kind of incandescence. The interiorisation phase, however,
was not a negative half-sleepiness. It had an element of euphoria, of “voluptu-
ous torpor.” “Scarcely had we directed attention towards an interior presence
[when] that which until then had been hidden took on the magnitude not of a
storm (it is about slow movements), but of an invasive surge. Now the sensibil-
ity is exalted: it suffices that we detach it from the neutral objects to which we
habitually give it.” Soon enough, this diffuse and sweet bliss risked becoming
insipid. Many meditators who reach this stage immediately are unable to go
beyond it and are discouraged. If they persist, they progress slowly, and only
reach another level much later. Bataille did not have time to suffer from this
stagnation, for he abruptly changed things.
Georges Bataille, “The Practice of Joy in the Face of Death,” in The Sacred Conspiracy:
The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology, ed.
Marina Galletti and Alastair Brotchie, trans. Natasha Lehrer, John Harman, and Meyer
Barash (London: Atlas Press, 2017), 431–437; 434.
54 Bruno is talking here about the practice of samadhi. In most yogic and Buddhist prac-
tises, samadhi is the goal of meditation. In Shaiva-Shakta tantric yoga, however, samad-
hi is only the first of two complementary “flows” of consciousness (as suggested by
Bruno below in “Interiority and Projection”).
55 Bruno notes: “A growing tension that had to be resolved, or a tendency of the mind
to drift through premature neglect of tedious elements of the exercises.” Bruno does
not mention Bataille’s soul-mate Laure’s worsening tuberculosis, or her death in early
November 1938—factors that may have motivated Bataille to develop an effective
meditation practice at this time.
56 Georges Bataille, “JE SUIS la joie devant la mort,” Acéphale 5, 15–16.
523
Jacquelynn Baas
Dramatisation57
He began to meditate on themes of barely tolerable emotional sharpness. He

contemplated or recalled the photographs of a tortured Chinese [victim], or
pictured a world in flames, exploding, being destroyed.58 His “Heraclitan medi-
tation” on war, published in the last issue of Acéphale, had no less eruptive vio-
lence than the drawings by André Masson illustrating texts on Heraclitus and
Dionysus in the previous issues of the journal. The “sacrifices” he imagined not
only annihilated [other] beings or God: he constituted their first victim, medi-
tating on his own death or turning his hostility against himself. “I wanted to
take it out on myself. Sitting on the edge of a bed, in front of the window and
the night, I practised, determined to become myself a battle.”59 The first time he
fully achieved ecstasy, during a nocturnal walk in the forest in the summer of
1939, he had elicited the threatening image of a bird of prey swooping down on
him and tearing his throat open.60 A year later, his meditation again discovered
in the solitudes of Auvergne a sinister nourishment: “When I ‘meditate’ in front
of the bare slopes of a mountain, I imagine the horror that emanates from it in
the cold, in the storm, hostile like fighting insects, more welcoming to the
corpse than to the living.”
It would be superficial to attribute this persistence of violent themes to a
morbid romanticism of pain. The role of overwhelming images is to open a
breach in the psyche: “If we did not know how to dramatise, we would not be
able to come out of ourselves. We will live isolated and compressed. But a kind
of rupture—in anguish—leaves us on the verge of tears: then we lose ourselves,
57 Abhinavagupta’s pupil Kshemaraja, in his commentary on Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III,
Sutras 11–13, describes how true freedom, which he characterises as “spontaneous

knowledge and power of action,” is obtained by turning the senses inward and observ-
ing the Self as engaged in dramatic performance (Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of
Ksemaraja, 44–45).
58 The Vijnana Bhairava and Kshemaraja’s commentary on the Shiva Sutras both describe
meditation on cosmic burning or conflagration as an effective path to nonduality (Shiva

Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 4, in Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 38).
59 Bruno uses the words un combat, but it should be noted that the name Bataille means
“battle,” making this a kind of pun.

60 A raptor pouncing on its prey is a powerful trope from the Tantrasadbhava for the
mind of the practitioner flying toward the bindu, the Luminous Point of the Self—
Kshemaraja cites it in his commentary on Shiva Sutras, Unmesa II, Sutra 2 (Iyengar, The
Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 24). According to tradition, the Vishuddha chakra at
the back of the throat is the purification centre, associated with discrimination, creativi-
ty, and self-expression. When the throat chakra is open, negative life experiences are
transformed into wisdom and learning.
524
we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.”61 Yet a fleeting

emotion is not enough. Just as contemplation is effective only through linger-
ing, dramatisation is intensified by its repetition and its duration: “Piercing im-
ages (in the precise sense of the word) are continually forming on the surface of
the sphere where I was enclosed. I only access rending.62 I glimpsed only one
possibility of escape: the wounds are closing. Concentration is necessary: a deep
tear, a lasting bolt of lightning must break the sphere; the point of ecstasy is not
reached in its nakedness without a painful insistence.”
This induced incandescence was not without some fatigue, and too violent
meditations were sometimes followed the next day by depression. Bataille ex-
plored at his own risk this path of dramatic intensification—of which religious
methods offer many examples.63 The critical moment seems to be when numb
consciousness must be reactivated. When the mind tends in meditation to come
to a standstill, it is antiphysiological to forcibly continue the unfolding of the
theme; but the brain, partially inhibited in its surface activities, can be energised
more deeply by emotion, which in itself can sometimes block thought. Notes
Bataille, “to be freed from the agitating importunity of discourse, it suffices to
arouse in oneself an intense state: attention then shifts from ‘projects’ to the
being that one is, who, little by little, begins to move, emerges from the shad-
ows.” Under very special conditions, internalised emotion can, by growing,
burst the hardened structures of ego and approach ecstasy, which is not emo-
tion, however. Without doubt it is the paroxysmal and too prolonged relent-
lessness to dramatise (with the multiplicity of artificial representations that this
supposes) that, in the end, is exhausting. The spontaneous reactivation by a
feeling, by a brief interior movement, or by a few contemplated images, would
be more natural. But Bataille, who had glimpsed the application of essentially
polyvalent methods of concentration to psychotherapy, sought to trigger in
himself a sort of conflagration, or solar radiance, and not to achieve harmony
61 Experiencing one’s own body or the body of “one who is dear” sacrificed is de-
scribed in Kshemaraja’s commentary on the Shiva Sutras, Unmesa II, Sutra 8: “The
body, gross, subtle, etc., which is wrongly regarded by all as the cognizer, is the sacrifi-
cial food which the great Yogis throw in the fire of consciousness; for when this wrong
notion of the body is gone, they are always absorbed in pure consciousness” (Iyengar,
The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 33).
62 The practice of piercing the body described in verse 93 of the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra.
63 Bruno notes: “As types of dramatisation, Bataille cites all the Ignatian exercises,
which he had partially practised in his youth; or Zen, which triggers satori with a shock.
He also knew, thanks to Tibetan Yoga, the contemplative ritual of Chöd, where the
novice imagines his body torn apart by spirits.” On Bataille and Chöd, see Jacquelynn
Baas, “Acéphale,” in Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life, 205–226; 211–212.
525
Jacquelynn Baas
or peace.64 Yet he did not always stick to a tragic atmosphere: some of his
themes were buff or funny (like those he later published in Méthode de médita-
tion), or even involved a female presence. He also took up again the more con-
structed and calmer beginning schemas.
In February 1939, on the verge of finishing a meditation in an excessive
state of tension, he felt that it was necessary, under pain of shock, to avoid ab-
ruptly breaking off. Then he relaxed, and his state suddenly changed, became
effusive, rising, as if he were caught up in an immense force. Bataille’s experi-
ence changed considerably around this date, in the obscure but very powerful
grasp of an element that he felt was external to himself, and to which he was
linked in contemplation. We know of cases other than his where, following a
strong emotional tension, relaxation (whether provoked or due to a feeling of
discouragement and abandonment) will accelerate the processes of enlighten-
ment. This contrast of a tension abruptly resolved in relaxation is used nowa-
days in Japan by a master of Zen to hasten pre-mystic evolution.65 Bataille’s
account of his first great illumination in the forest, in the middle of summer
1939, is no less revealing: It was at the end of a stormy day, strained by re-
pressed desire, and after having imagined himself, during his meditation, under
attack, that he knew ecstasy, but only when dramatisation and all research or
attempt had ceased. “I shook myself and I think I laughed, freed from an ex-
cess of horror and uncertainty . . . On the return path, despite an extreme state
of fatigue, I was walking on big pebbles that usually twisted my feet as if I were
a light shadow. At that moment I wasn't looking for anything, but the sky
opened. I saw . . . The lost agitation of a sweltering day had finally shattered,
volatilised the shell . . . From a distant storm, nonstop lightning emanated . . .
But this heavenly festival paled, compared with the dawn that arose. Not exact-
ly in me: I cannot, in fact, assign a seat to that which is no more graspable or
less sudden than the wind. On all sides dawn was upon me . . .”
64 In other words, Bataille had experienced the effectiveness of these meditation meth-
ods in dissolving mental and emotional reactivity, but he wanted more than mere seren-
ity: he was seeking complete liberation.
65 Bruno’s annotation: “Sato (Koji), How to get Zen enlightenment. On Master Ishiguro’s five
days’ intensive course for its attainment. (In Psychologia, Kyoto University, Department of Psy-
chology, June 1959, p. 107–113.) After the classic count of breaths comes nembutsu, or
repetition. ‘It begins with a quiet call, analogous to a chanting, and ends with an ener-
getic and vigorous cry accompanied by strong muscle tension in the face, shoulders and
arms . . . At the height of this vigorous exercise, the tension is suddenly released and at
this point the disciple experiences Kensho (to see into one’s own nature), guided by the
master’.”
526
After the First Ecstacies
From the summer of 1939, ecstasy became much more accessible for Bataille.
Sometimes it was enough to find himself in a place where he had had this expe-
rience for [ecstasy] to repossess him. “I had to stop writing. As was often the
case, I was sitting down in front of the open window: hardly seated, I fell into a
kind of ecstasy.” The short poems that had provided him with a pretext for
learning to concentrate were becoming superfluous. The simple fact of willing,
in a tense way, to attain these states, risked shrivelling them. It was more effi-
cient for him to meditate and close his eyes. Sometimes ecstasy seized him un-
expectedly, anywhere, without internalisation and with open eyes. Sometimes
he had to wait, and enlightenment would slip away, in spite of desire and insist-
ence; or, on the contrary, it would suddenly burst forth, “depending on luck
and never on a tension of the will.” If, at the beginning of L’Expérience intérieure,
he explains the first yogic and dramatic phases almost didactically, we can better
see at what point he had personally arrived from the more burning and discon-
tinuous notes he took in the winter of 1941–42 (Le supplice),66 than in the reflec-
tions inspired by a “partly missed experience” that he had at the beginning of
June 1942. We still discover the two essential processes of grounding and inten-
sification, but stripped down, reduced to their principle. The prerequisite re-
mains the stopping of verbal logical thinking (“it is enough to shatter speech in
me; from then on, the ecstasy is there”). But, admits Bataille, this is only effec-
tive because he had already reached this culminating point. To the degree that
the phases of experience become easier, more familiar, they telescope and con-
dense themselves. Renouncing the artifice of piercing images, dramatisation
reduces itself to anguish or revolt against human limits. “Ecstasy then arises
from disequilibrium,” Bataille analyses. “I am able to anticipate it, instinctively
driven by disgust for the stagnation that I am.” What he calls “the diagram of
pure experience” brings into play a rebounding between states and reflections,
which are only effective if ecstasy, now very close, is triggered by a minute
shock. The same remark applies to the veranda experience,67 the unfolding of
which implied a series of previous steps and would remain impossible for a be-
ginner.
Interiority and Projection
If silence and dramatisation represent fundamental moments on Bataille’s path,
66“Torture” is “Part Two” of Inner Experience.

67I presume what Bruno means is the expectant moment he describes at the beginning
of this section.
527
Jacquelynn Baas
they do not exhaust his method. To this must be added polarisation, oriented
alternately towards interior and exterior.68 These antagonistic processes of con-
centration and expansion (studied by Georges Poulet, in Les metamorphoses du
cercle, through literary texts devoted both to illumination and to more common
states)69 take on double significance as both a technique and as a new vision of
existence obtained in moments when the individual breaks his isolation to
merge into a vaster totality.70 One can “communicate” in many ways—through
laughter, love, sacrifice, etc. Bataille had initiated the analysis long before he
experienced ecstasy, but [polarisation] gave him a modality of infinitely more
radical fusion. “I become immense flight out of myself, as if my life flowed in
slow rivers through the ink of the sky. I am no longer myself, but what came
from me reaches and encloses in its embrace a boundless presence, itself similar
to the loss of myself.”71
This strange ecstatic expansion remains inaccessible at first glance. It does
not result from an effort of expansion or direct tension toward the outside. The
path leading to total enlargement must almost always pass through the interior,
just as a nocturnal stillness commands access to the lightning. This absorption
within oneself is constant in the early pre-mystical methods. It has also been
rediscovered by poets, although they have rarely been able to develop all the
possibilities.72 Nonetheless, very quickly the visions that on various occasions
imposed themselves on Bataille tore him from pure interiority. The religious
images that sometimes emerged, along with many others from his subcon-
scious, did not disturb him (having passed through a Christian period in his
youth, he saw their origin), and he even played with them. He did not therefore
seek to fix himself on sacred or mythical figures. But when he had guided his
meditations to a high degree of intensity, he would project beyond himself a
68 This in-and-out process of merging with the source of consciousness and then re-
turning empowered awareness to experience is a feature of nondual Shaiva-Shakta tan-
tric yoga. See note 34: “Tantric texts like Abhinavagupta’s Tantrāloka map out a com-
plex meditative ritual system in which inward-gazing, apophatic, sense-denying con-
templative practices are combined with outward-gazing, kataphatic sense-activating
ritual practices” (Lidke, “The Potential of the Bi-Directional Gaze” [Abstract]).
69 The book by Poulet that Bruno cites was published in 1961. It is a general study, and
not particularly helpful.

70 This self-cleansing Power of Consciousness (Raudri) dissolves conceptualisation, re-
fining individual consciousness into Ambika, Supreme Wholeness.

71 This experience of Supreme Wholeness is turiya, the mass of bliss that is pure con-
sciousness—a state Bataille labelled “ecstasy.”

72 Bruno writes: “At the start of his Method of Meditation, Bataille quoted these words of
René Char: « Si l'homme ne fermait pas souverainement les yeux, il finirait par ne plus voir ce qui
vaut d'être regardé » [‘If man did not sovereignly close his eyes, he would no longer see
what is worth looking at’].”
528
“point” on which he focused his desire to burn. It was not an abstraction, but a
“stripped down mode of dramatisation”: “I did not begin, like the Christian,
with a single discourse, but from a state of diffuse communication, from a bliss
of interior movements. These movements, which I seized in their flow as
stream or river, I could condense to a point where the increased intensity trans-
formed from a simple escape of water to a rain evocative of a waterfall, of a
burst of light, or of thunder.”73 These last words suggest that the vertiginous
point in question was no longer a cold process but had become an experience.74
When Bataille spoke in the fourth text75 of Acéphale of June 1939 of his love
for “what is” [ce qui est là], he had for several months experienced an astonishing
formless perception, which gave rise to an unquenchable longing as a prelude
to ecstasy. Though he did not accept any theistic interpretation of his states, the
connections he did not hesitate to make with Christian experiences (despite
risking confusion), attest that he was comparing their relationship with his own.
Like the limitlessness of consciousness, this burning76 characterises the mystical
experience in one of its phases, and it has likewise arisen in many other cases
apart from theism.77 This unexpected passion, which paradoxically combined
unbelief and bhakti [adoration], in fact only lasted for a time. It vanished when
73 This is a good description of Raudri, descent of Supreme Power (see note 70), which
is compared with a fall of water or light.

74 Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 15: “Concentration on the Seed . . . Bija, the seed, is
the cause of the universe of the nature of illumination . . . She is the womb of the gods
and of the manifold shaktis” (Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 45).
75 Issue number 5, following the preceding double issue. See Georges Bataille, Roger
Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, André Masson, and Jules Monnerot, “Dionysos,” special
issue, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie 3–4 (July 1937).
76 Passionate longing.
77 Bruno: “We queried Bataille on the criteria of mysticism. It seems to us that (more
than by secondary elements such as language or conduct) what we discover in the histo-
ry of religions associated with beliefs or the most diverse philosophies must be charac-
terised above all by the content of ecstatic consciousness (with components that are
elusive, yet many times suggested: expansion, light, sudden ascension and forgetfulness
of the body, etc.). It would be premature today to speak of physiological criteria, be-
cause, with one exception that has not been fully elucidated, the observations made in
India and Japan reveal little more than states of concentrated absorption, and not mo-
ments of ecstasy or high samadhi.” The mind-body connection to which Bruno refers is
another feature of nondual Kashmir Shaivism, in which the body (like everything else)
is a manifestation of Consciousness, and thus not separate from mind. By “one excep-
tion that has not been fully elucidated,” Bruno may have meant J. C. Chatterji’s unfin-
ished Kashmir Shaivaism, referred to in note 14. Chatterji wrote brilliantly about the pro-
cess of manifestation, but never published anything about the complementary process
of psychosomatic return to Consciousness.
529
Jacquelynn Baas
ecstasy had given way to less contrasting states of peaceful transparency,

achieved with such ease that their interest could only weaken.
If Bataille spoke then of so-called “theopathic states” (and he was re-
proached for this), it is less because he claimed himself to be at the highest
conceivable level of this experience, than by analogy with the evolution of
Christian mystics who had reached a calm phase after ecstasies of barely beara-
ble intensity. Passing from the euphoria of the beginning to paroxysms, then to
sweeter impressions, his own [experiential] curve had in fact something of the
classic, the most surprising period remaining that of love for this unknown el-
ement that he refused to conceptualise. His feelings, like his language, here had
an ambiguity that believers and rationalists criticised: no doubt both would have
preferred to see him renounce the traditional formulations that he simultane-
ously derided. But far from ignoring God, he wanted to be an “arrow shot at
him,”78 and he entitled the ensemble of his mystical works Atheological Compendi-
um. In his eyes, his new immanent vision was “godliness itself.” In this he felt
much closer to Proust and Zen than to any dualistic religion.
Volatilisation
When Bataille began to perceive a burning presence after February 1939, and
then more clearly the following summer, he continued to see the outside
world—objects—but as if in transparency, without attending to them, too ab-
sorbed by what he perceived beyond. “In ecstasy,” he said, “I see outside, but
any particularity bothers me—the leaves of a tree in front of me, for example.”
On the other hand, he could easily look at the sky, or the clouds, because “it is
something that comes undone.” This spontaneous tendency of the clairvoyant
to escape formal perceptions explains why, to initiate the globalisation prepara-
tory to ecstasy, many techniques had recourse to a double movement of con-
centration and then of evanescence. Nowhere have these alternating processes
been repeated more insistently than in a remarkable Kashmir tantra, the Vijnana
Bhairava, which untiringly varies the same fundamental exercise, where the sen-
sations serving for concentration must in the end disappear. These deliberate
jugglings accustom consciousness to glide from shimmering external multiplici-
ty into a sudden and profound absorption.79 Hence also the efficacy of mobile
78 The released, Luminous Self flying like an arrow towards Absolute Consciousness
(aka the Divine) is another simile from the same passage in Tantrasadbhava cited in note
60.
79 This, too, is characteristic of nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantra: “At the culmination of
his or her practice the Tantric attains a state of consciousness in which the inner and
outer become united in the singular continuum of consciousness. At this ‘no-path’ stage
530
spectacles in which the light flickers, blurring recognisable forms, and empty
landscapes that no longer offer the mind a surface to cling to.80
Ultimately, this can evolve towards a quasi-abstract contemplation of space,
or towards sky-gazing, which the Buddhists have practised, and which Bataille
saw several times to experience about him.81 Several of his texts, which might at
first glance perhaps evoke free images, in reality correspond as well to a method
as to states, as we can guess in the first poems of L’archangélique, where con-
sciousness is lost in immensity, as well as in the fragments of Méthode de médita-
tion published in 1946 under the title Devant un ciel vide, where he opposes to the
anguish of being limited to oneself “a poem [chant] similar to the modulation of
light from cloud to cloud, afternoon, in the unbearable expanse of the heav-
ens.” Or elsewhere: “In the wood, the sun rising, I was free, my life rose effort-
lessly and like a bird’s flight crossed the air: but infinitely free, dissolved and
free.”
If he presents his research “following, alongside surrealism,” he substitutes
for the fetishistic obsession with the object a dialectical movement that uses the
object to escape from the object, “a slipping into immanence and all a sorcery
of meditations. Destruction more intimate, upheaval more strange, limitless ques-
tioning of oneself. Of self, simultaneously of all things.” Without asserting that
it leads to the state where appearances become rarefied and vanish, Bataille
of transcendent experience (bhairavìmudrà) the Self within and the world without are
one” (Jeffrey S. Lidke, “Interpreting Across Mystical Boundaries: An Analysis of
Samàdhi in the Trika-Kaula Tradition,” in Theory and Practice of Yoga: Essays in Honour of
Gerald James Larson, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen [Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2005], 143).
80 Bruno writes: “The Vijnana Bhairava. Text translated and commentary by Lilian Sil-
burn (Paris, de Boccard, 1961), verses 76 and 60, p. 117 and 103: ‘The gaze ought to be
fixed on the sun, on a lamp, etc., and it is there that the essence of one’s own Self
shines. Let us fix our gaze on a region devoid of trees, mountains, walls or other ob-
jects. In the mental state of absorption, one becomes a being whose fluctuating activity
has disappeared’.”
81 Bruno’s mention of Buddhist sky-gazing is probably another reference to Lounsbery:
“The student, seated or lying upon his back (in the open air), should look at the sky and
notice the space between the clouds . . .” (from the Tucson, AZ: Omen Press, 1973
edition, 61–62). Sky-gazing is described in verses 84 and 85 of the Vijnana Bhairava Tan-
tra: “84. Looking at the clear blue sky, with uninterrupted gaze, remaining completely
still: all at once, O Goddess, one attains the ‘form’ of Bhairava [fierce aspect of Shiva,
who is formless]. 85. Imagine the entire sky as Bhairava, and that it is dissolved in your
head. You will become completely permeated with the reality of the radiant energy that
is Bhairava’s nature” (Christopher Wallis, A Translation of the Vijnana-bhairava-tantra
[2018], available from: https://hareesh.org/vbtdownload).
531
Jacquelynn Baas
gives as the theme of meditation “the bright and light flame consuming itself in
itself,”82 which plays a symbolic and fascinating role in so many rites:
I visualise
the void
identical to a flame
suppressing the object
revealing the flame
that intoxicates
and illuminates.
For him, in ecstasy as in his final immanent vision, all notion of being—
God as well as the human personality—was annihilated, an interpretation close
to Buddhist conceptions of insubstantiality and emptiness. Because Bataille had
spontaneously recognised83 after his enlightenment the phantasmagoria of our
sensory universe, there was no need for alternating exercises of annihilation and
reconstruction of the world, like those the Tibetans imagined in order to per-
suade themselves of the unreality of phenomena (technique described by
Michel Leiris in connection with Miró, and which Carrouges recalls in La mys-
tique du sur-homme). His knowledge did not come from the theory of a deceptive
Maya,84 but arose out of the impression of an underlying energy—“a ceaseless
and swarming movement.”85 This play obsessed him for several months, and its
vision never entirely left him. Though very few men have had such a keen sense
of the material universe (physiologically tested to the point of nausea), his later
82 Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 26: “As the flame of a burning fire is seen (to end in
empty) space, so the atma [self] has to be dissolved in the prana [life energy] of the
body” (Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja, 53).
83 Pratyabhijna (literally “re-cognition”), a school of philosophy in Kashmir Shaivism, has
as its central thesis the reality that everything is Shiva or Absolute Consciousness. It is
possible to “recognise” this fundamental reality, identify with Shiva, and be immersed
in bliss. See Paul Muller-Ortega, “Foreword” to Jaideva Singh, The Doctrine of Recognition:
A Translation of Pratyabhijnahrdayam (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990), xiii:
“[R]ecognition is a kind of non-event. Once it occurs, it is accompanied by the realiza-
tion that one knew all along what has just been recognized. It is this deeply paradoxical
nature of the process which generates an ecstatic and blissful astonishment in the prac-
titioner.”
84 As in Vedanta.
85 Spanda, the “doctrine of vibration,” emphasises the vibrating energy aspect of con-
sciousness. Like the more philosophical Pratyabhijna (note 83), Spanda is a school within
Kashmir Shaivism. See Mark S. G Dyczkowski, The Doctrine of Vibration: An Analysis of the
Doctrines and Practices of Kashmir Shaivism (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987). There is no
evidence that Bataille was aware of these schools and their doctrines.
532
writings manifest an avidity to know the totality of reality and a rare finesse in
the appreciation of the most diverse forms of art.86
A Yoga Stripped of Moral and Metaphysical Excrescences
Bataille’s provocative, sometimes sacrilegious atheism was not the only occa-
sion for reticence or scandal. As much as his rejection of God, some have been
astonished at his aggressive rejection of asceticism. “I hate monks. To give up
the world, chance, and the truth of the body, is shameful in my opinion.” Or
again: “That a bloodless particle of life, without humour, turning up his nose at
an excess of joy, lacking in freedom, reaches—or pretends to have reached—the
extreme, it is an illusion . . . Even the asceticism of brilliant beings to my mind
takes on the import of a transgression, of impotent wretchedness.” However,
Bataille immediately recognises: “I do not deny that asceticism is helpful to the
experience.” Sexual abstention, which most traditions impose as a prerequisite
for inner training, should not be judged on moral or aesthetic criteria, but from
an energetic perspective. Despite the sterile conflicts it provokes, it releases
forces and allows a more exclusive polarisation than everyday life. If one knows
how to direct it, a powerful sexuality is capable of precipitating inner experi-
ence, because, assuming a biological basis for the Indian ascension scheme (the
rise of the Kundalini, which should be reinterpreted and which Bataille experi-
enced improvisationally almost from the beginning of his meditation), it would
be the same energy utilised at different levels.87 The first phase of interiorisation
requires detachment, and although Bataille never ceased his sexual activity, it
was for some time reduced by external circumstances. The account of his first
decisive illumination in the summer of 1939, of which we have already spoken,
alludes to the curbing [of sexual expression] that he would sometimes impose
on himself: “The first day the wall gave way, I was in a forest at night. For part
of the day, I had a violent desire for sex. Refraining from seeking satisfaction, I
had decided to get to the end of this desire by ‘meditating,’ without horror, the
images to which it linked.”88
86 Among the effects of nondual Shaiva-Shakta Tantric practice are enhanced percep-
tion and judgment-free sensual enjoyment. Abhinavagupta was a great aestheticist as
well as a great exegete and poet.
87 Kundalini is a term in Shaiva Tantra denoting divine energy (by definition female)
said to reside in the muladhara chakra (energy centre) at the base of the spine. As this
dormant energy “awakens” and flows freely upward through the chakras, it generates
expanded states of consciousness. Bataille’s source may have been Vivekananda’s Raja
Yoga.
88 From Le Coupable. These were probably images of a dying Chinese torture victim that
Bruno mentions at the start of his “Dramatisation” section.
533
Jacquelynn Baas
Although interested in Tantrism (of which he had rediscovered certain prin-

ciples and on which he had recently planned an entire work),89 Bataille does not
seem to have used it.90 From the first, he had noticed that these meditations
were capable of neutralising desire without suppressing feeling.91 Later, he
found that when enlightenment had been reached, sexual life undoubtedly di-
minished its intensity, but did not disappear. The experience restored greater
freedom and led to an overcoming of asceticism, and we can understand the
urgency with which he would have applied himself to developing more effec-
tive accelerated techniques to shorten the initial period. We can also explain the
very lively curiosity that Bataille felt for the unexpected ecstasies of writers and
poets, or more simply of lay people, for whom nothing—neither moral con-
cern, nor received practice—had prepared for enlightenment. These involun-
tary states (of which a comparative study would reveal mechanisms similar to
those of [Bataille’s] techniques) were at the origin of his own research, and the
method he improvised, even more than [what] he learned, enabled him to ex-
tend [these states], to multiply them, in order to obtain at the end freely and
without effort what he had only glimpsed a few years earlier.
Closely associating in several of his books, eroticism, or love, with the more
airy intoxication of enlightenment, slipping subtly from one register to another,
and discarding the mutilations of asceticism for a full life, Bataille desired
methods better suited to his contemporaries, whom he wanted to lead into the
most remote domains, to “the extreme of the possible”: “It would be a happy
thing if there were some manual that stripped the practices of yogis of moral or
metaphysical excrescences. The methods, moreover, could be simplified.”92
89 This is probably the book referred to by Mircea Eliade in his journal entry for March
4, 1948: “Georges Bataille comes today. He asks me to write a book on Tantrism,

which he would publish immediately” (see note 24).
90 Bruno and Bataille were referring to manipulative physical tantric sexual practice, as
opposed to the psychosomatic sexual intercourse promoted within Kashmir Shaivism

that always involves the heart and the mind, but which can also involve the body.
91 Desire is generated by the anava-mala, one of three limitations on consciousness dis-
mantled in the course of Shaiva-Shakta meditation practice. The anava-mala makes us

feel small and incomplete. Desire is fundamentally desire for wholeness. The sense of
wholeness or completeness produced by nondual Shaiva-Shakta meditation dissipates
needy desire and fosters the love and empathy essential to the “spiritual” sexual inter-
course described at the end of the preceding note. From Kshemaraja’s commentary on
Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III, Sutra 40: “When on account of being touched with the shakti
of Parameshvara he is enlightened and recognizes his real nature, then desire dies and
his mind is not outward-turned, but is self-gratified” (Iyengar, The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini
of Ksemaraja, 64).
92 Regarding Méthode de méditation, published in L’Expérience intérieure, Bruno notes: “De-
spite its title, one should not seek in this short work a manual describing techniques
534
However, he refused to develop in detail all points of his technique in a contin-

uous manner, or to publish a systematic collection of themes corresponding to
the phases he had passed through: internalised silence—dramatic tearing—
projection and exit from the self—gliding towards an elusive transparency. One
regrets that with his gift of scintillation and imagery and, even more, with his
experience, Bataille did not write a complete set of texts to induce a whole pro-
gression of psychological states. But he thought that a hasty reading would
prematurely neutralise the action of the themes before one had really reached
the levels that can make the practice effective. And a certain freedom of im-
provisation seemed to him moreover necessary as soon as the learning of con-
centration is acquired. He knew how insufficient is the mere consultation of a
manual that is not individualised by oral indications. “A writing can only leave
traces of the course followed. Other routes remain possible: on condition of
perceiving that the ascent is inevitable, and that it requires an effort against
gravity.”
He was well aware of the diversity of obstacles, the lack of attraction in the
face of the apparent banality of the techniques, how anti-natural the interiorisa-
tion. If at first, he was disappointed at how little he was followed in the way he
had started, he was nevertheless able to initiate several friends in meditation.
Then came the war. Almost isolated, he continued to deepen his own experi-
ence at a time when he would have also wanted “a community of seekers.” In
the end, it was to writing that he entrusted, like Nietzsche, most of what he
wanted to transmit. It is not impossible that, through their precision and their
richness of analysis, the three or four works in which Bataille retraced his inter-
nal development, and which deserve to be gathered in a single volume, will one
day help to bring out this invisible “community” without bonds—what he
thought of as a community of strangers walking, scattered in the night. Free
from any dogmatic hindrance, this community would be founded exclusively on
“experience.” Westerners who, for twenty-five or thirty years, have practised
very diverse forms of meditation inspired by Asia are more numerous than one
thinks. But, apart from applications for medical purposes, no record of all of
this still sparse exploration has so far been attempted. Meditators who reach
very advanced states remain rare, and one would find few testimonies as com-
plete as that of Georges Bataille. Despite what sometimes masks it, the funda-
mental sincerity of his story should allow us to better interpret exceptional
states whose authenticity we have not always been able to recognise.
(they are mentioned only incidentally): it aims rather to locate various modalities and
implications of the [meditation] experience.”
535
Jacquelynn Baas
Selected Bibliography
Baas, Jacquelynn. Marcel Duchamp and the Art of Life. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2019.
Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Allan

Stoekl, and translated by Allan Stoekl, with Donald M. Leslie Jr. and Carl Lov-
itt. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
Bataille, Georges. Guilty. Translated by Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY: SUNY

Press, 2011.
Bataille, Georges. Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY:

SUNY Press, 2014.
Bataille, Georges. On Nietzsche. Translated by Stuart Kendall. Albany, NY:

SUNY Press, 2015.
Bataille, Georges. The Poetry of Georges Bataille. Translated by Stuart Kendall. Al-
bany, NY: SUNY Press, 2018.
Chatterji, J. C. Kashmir Shaivaism. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1986.
Chatterji, J. C. Kashmir Shaivaism (Being a Brief Introduction to the History, Literature

and Doctrines of the Advaita Shaiva Philosophy of Kashmir, Specifically Called the Trika
System). The Kashmir Series of Texts and Studies, Vol. II. Fasciculus I. Srinagar:
The Research Department, Kashmir State, 2014.
Iyengar, P.T. Shrinivas, trans. The Shiva-Sutra-Vimarsini of Ksemaraja. Originally

published Allahabad, 1912; reprinted Delhi: Sri Satguru Publications, 2007.
Kendall, Stuart. Georges Bataille. London: Reaktion Books, 2007.
Lounsbery, G. Constant. Buddhist Meditation in the Southern School: Theory and Prac-
tice for Westerners. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1935. (French edition: La
méditation bouddhique, étude de sa théorie et de sa pratique selon l'Ecole du Sud. Paris:
Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1935.)
Muller-Ortega, Paul Eduardo. The Triadic Heart of Śiva; Kaula Tantricism of Ab-
hinavagupta in the Non-Dual Shaivism of Kashmir. Albany, NY: SUNY, 1989.
536
Padoux, André. Vāc: The Concept of the Word in Selected Hindu Tantras. Translated
by Jacques Gontier. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1990.
Silburn, Lilian. Le Vijnāna Bhairava. Paris: Éditions E. De Boccard, 1961.
Silburn, Lilian. Kundalinī: The Energy of the Depths; A Comprehensive Study Based on
the Scriptures of Nondualistic Kaśmir Śaivism. Translated by Jacques Gontier. Alba-
ny, NY: SUNY Press, 1988.
Vivekananda, Swami. Rāja yoga: being lectures by the Swami Vivekananda, with Patan-
jali's aphorisms, commentaries and a glossary of terms. London: Routledge, 2019.
Wallis, Christopher D. Tantra Illuminated: The Philosophy, History, and Practice of a

Timeless Tradition. Petaluma, CA: Mattamayūra Press, second edition 2013.
537

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Illumination Illuminated:

On October 10, 1931, Georges Bataille borrowed from the Bibliothèque

Bibliothèque Nationale,” in Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, t. XII, Articles II 1950–

As I have written elsewhere,6 the impetus behind Bataille’s philosophy and

It is good to maintain a relaxed but steady and “flowing” body

gestions regarding presentation and wording.

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), xx.

effective methods: deep breathing, concentrating attention on the

By “trouble comes quick,” Bataille was probably referring to natural difficulties

12 Bataille, Guilty, 31.

as a form or aspect of one basic reality (monism)—and that that

15 Christopher D. Wallis, Tantra Illuminated (Petaluma, CA: Mattamayūra Press, second

tric Buddhism (Vajrayana) and Vivekananda’s Neo-Vedanta (via Vaishnavism).

Iyengar’s translation of a portion of the Shiva Sutras, “Shiva-Sutra-Vimarshini, with the

As the “embodied cosmos” that emerges from Shiva, the kula is

union is an effective add-on to meditative concentration through which

krishna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 23.

29 Bataille, Guilty, 168, n. 11.

Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 553, n. 11.

Bruno, which promoted a “modernised” version of Southern School Theravada

Research on the Simultaneous Activation of the Sympathetic and Parasympathetic

36 Bataille, Guilty, 32.

Gontier (Albany, NY: SUNY, 1990), 48–49.

Inner Experience, xiv.

still a sound, to speak is in itself to imagine knowing, and to no longer know, it

41 Bataille, Inner Experience, 20.

Deutsch, “Reflections on Some Aspects of the Theory of Rasa,” in Sanskrit Drama in

Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille

The mystical experience ought to be sufficient in itself. Its capacity to intoxi-

son), is designed to achieve through concentration what nondual Shaivism regards as

I surrender to peace until annihilation.

l'Ecole du Sud (Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve, 1935).

He began to meditate on themes of barely tolerable emotional sharpness. He

57 Abhinavagupta’s pupil Kshemaraja, in his commentary on Shiva Sutras, Unmesa III,

Sutras 11–13, describes how true freedom, which he characterises as “spontaneous

meditation on cosmic burning or conflagration as an effective path to nonduality (Shiva

“battle,” making this a kind of pun.

we forget ourselves and communicate with an elusive beyond.”61 Yet a fleeting

After the First Ecstacies

Interiority and Projection

If silence and dramatisation represent fundamental moments on Bataille’s path,

66“Torture” is “Part Two” of Inner Experience.

not particularly helpful.

fining individual consciousness into Ambika, Supreme Wholeness.

sciousness—a state Bataille labelled “ecstasy.”

is compared with a fall of water or light.

ecstasy had given way to less contrasting states of peaceful transparency,

A Yoga Stripped of Moral and Metaphysical Excrescences

Bruno mentions at the start of his “Dramatisation” section.

Although interested in Tantrism (of which he had rediscovered certain prin-

4, 1948: “Georges Bataille comes today. He asks me to write a book on Tantrism,

opposed to the psychosomatic sexual intercourse promoted within Kashmir Shaivism

mantled in the course of Shaiva-Shakta meditation practice. The anava-mala makes us

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