Communication As A Limit Experience

Georges Bataille provides a context for thinking the presumptions of communication at the edge of metaphysical frameworks and concepts. His radical idea of communication, which he calls “inner experience,” is developed in tandem with his long-time friend and interlocutor, Maurice Blanchot. Neither of them professional philosophers, Bataille and Blanchot interrogate the metaphysical tradition to locate the resources for rethinking being human as essentially a relationship with another rather than a relationship of the self. Bataille performs that reconfiguration in his work Inner Experience through his dialogue with Blanchot. From this minimal community of two interlocuters, which is transposed in Inner Experience to the minimal, necessary and strange community of reader and writer, Bataille rejects both positivist and nihilistic visions of community. What is opened by this reconfiguration of community is the basis for future communication that occurs through a bond based on difference rather than unity or commonality. The paper outlines the significance of Bataille’s reworking of G.W.F Hegel’s and Friedrich Nietzche’s decisive contributions to contemporary thought to effect this reconfiguration of the self and the communication that it entails.