My Literary Influences

As a start, I would like to note that this represents but the fraction of influences that are clearely apparent to my conscious mind, I, as is the case with any human being, am prone to cryptomnesia, and by such logic there might have been readings that skipped my intentionality and acted on a much deeper compartement of my Being, hence why this article should be properly titled : the conscious literary influences of my life. Alas, I will write what is currently present, and I will do my best to provide a concise overview of what influences my Weltanschauung most.

NEITZSCHE :

There is no particular order in the sense of whom influenced me first, so to begin we have Neitzsche (don't even know if this is the correct spelling of his name), the big bad wolf for anyone dipping his toes into les marécages of philosophy, perhaps the only person whose texts, beside the Holy texts, were most prone to hermeneutical rape. He was politicized, aesthetisized, fetishized, prophesized, everyone took a bite off him, from the Nazis to the Transgenders, from basement dwellers and manga readers (yes looking at you, Berserkcels) to Scholars and Philosophers. Besides Hegel and Plato, perhaps even more than both of them, he's the most influential on our modern thought. I do not imply that my interpretation and takings-away of him are in any sense, The Interpretation, so don't @ me with that, but as a human being with critical thinking and an ability to create rhizomatic linkages, I am free and actually compelled to make sense of Neitzsche my own way, based on my own reading of him.

With that out of the way, my first Neitzsche was Beyond Good & Evil, I remember reading it back in March-April of 24', whilst being in a very troublesome state of mind due to personal happenings during that time, the details of which are best kept aside for now. Of course, some neitzschefags will absolutely seethe and cry : YOU SHOULD HAVE PICKED GENEALOGY FIRST ITS SIMPLER AND NON-APHORISTIC YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!. The reason Neitzsche stuck with me most was due to his aphoristic style, he broke-off from conventional philosophical methods of discourse, the usual dry wall of text and the hyperautistic fixation on logic,axiomatics and the whole pack, and presented his readers with a more vibrant, lusher and wilder gateway towards what is termed "philosophy", although in a sense I concieve him to be an "anti-philosopher", the writing style is but a byproduct of his project.

So, my first reading of BGE left me confused, I wasn't THAT well acquainted with philosophy already, I haven't read (and still haven't) the German Idealists he was shitting on, I had a barebone understanding of Plato and primarily from secondary sources and critiques, but aphorisms, due to their symbolic and metaphoric nature, can be much easier to swallow than dry-text, but much more time-consuming to digest, or as he himself called it : to ruminate. My second reading was post-breakup, June or early July I think, and that was when It really stuck with me, his anger, his cry of revolt, and my state of mind, the mixture worked perfectly, and Deleuze's readings of him, as sparse as they manifest in Anti-OEdipus, a volume I had finished just as I began reading BGE, made the inquiry much more interesting, of course I have tried with the Genealogy before, but it did not leave the same effect as BGE did, Genealogy felt like the afterthought, BGE was the heat of the moment, the cry that doesn't shy away from anything.

So, they may ask, Zanto, we already know the history, what is YOUR takeaway from MustacheMan ? : To that I answer, in brief terms, his exaltation of life, his insistance on épuiser le champ du possible. as Pindar says, diverting our worry away from the already decaying eschatological fear-mongerings that have left us with a sense of manque d'être and starting to look at what's right in front of us, Earth as it is, not as a standing-reserve, the way Holy Science teached, but as a field of potentialities, a still terra incognita despite what Religion and Science claim to have done, that there's nothing to be found on Earth no'mo, and it's either Space or Heaven that we must reach out towards. With that also comes his critique of la mauvaise conscience, the torrent of nihilism and pessimism that has infected everybody, this logic of the no fun allowed, this hyperfocusing on misery and suffering as our new Diety, and the infamous zombie cry of : HOW DARE YOU BE HAPPY !

It may come off as an Unorthodox position to hold, and those who know me might protest on how am I able to combine between this seemingly "anti just about any religion" conception, and my Islamic adherence and faith, to that I say : we only begin to understand and properly exalt God once we treat his worldly creations in the same vein as we think and treat his otherworldly "what's out theres". It is not a call for Hedonism, at least not a call for the common conception of Hedonism, as that is also yet another façade and gateway towards Nihilistic errance, we see Pain and Suffering, and we choose to accept it and even moreso affirm it, for it is due to them, the "evil" forces, that we derive the willpower and juice to create the "good". In practical terms, stop whining like a little bitch, take your pain and misery and suffering and anger, and turn it into creation, destroy in order to create, and don't count on the Old-World values or What Appears As Convention to provide this gemmy that you call "meaning", you create it yourself, not out of nowhere, but with your own adaptation and your own conclusions and interpretations of what is around.

CARL GUSTAV JUNG :

I think enough has been said about uncle Neetch, now we move on to a thinker who's ideas are themselves heavily influenced by the Mustachio, but in my humble opinion, improved upon and more nuanced, Carl Gustav Jung. My story with Jung begins, well that's as far as I could recall at least, around summer of 23', after finshing Serial Expriments Lain, and binging a couple of explanation videos, one in particular did bring a comparaison between the person of Lain herself as she would become (SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!) later in the show, a "God" of sorts, a collective entity, and the collective unconscious as understood by Jung, from there on, this concept kept bugging my mind, it was very impressive, and once internalized, I thought, could explain plenty of phenomena that can't be explained otherwise, how there are such forces that have never rested and are never meant to be extinguished, how War for example, once presented under the mythological figure of Hades and Ares, then becoming the judaic Yahweh, and finally taking the form of Modern Warfare (MW2 online lobbies are to be praised, I add) and from the figure of Funny Austrian Painter to the fucking IDF blowing poor children apart, how that is an integral part of the human condition (I know, I know, I repeat this phrase plenty of times, but that's for emphasis, it is that important). So from there on, I got to read his "Modern Man In Search For A Soul" which I found lying between stacks of arbitrary archives in a second hand bookstore in Bouzareah, Algiers, and that I bought for 600da (2.5 EUR) if I recall correctly, the copy was slightly worn but readable and still holding up, I read and read and started to like what he had to say even more until TADAM!, his seminar on Dreams.... it was then, it was then that I knew that his sayings were meant to stay with me for a long period of time, if not for a lifetime. I was already familiar with Freud beforehand, but only as this "mommylover guy" as memes like to paint him, upon further inspection it turns out that in a way, yes, Freud was a mommyguy, but for one, he called it a "complex", that is he was not ADVOCATING or putting it out as a DETERMINISTIC CONDITION of a human, but something to be overcome, and Two, the ways in which he described such an overcoming are subject for critique, but that is another topic. To get quickly back to point, Freud saw dreams as compensation mechanisms, that which goes unaccomplished in the real world, travesties into dreams, sure so far so good, that's what Jung also says, but to call it THE ONLY FONCTION of a dream is too myopic, and to even dare and say that each and every content of the dream has to do ONLY AND ONLY WITH SEXUALITY, says more about Freud than about humanity as a whole, Jung said that whilst sure, plenty of dreams are related in some way or another to sexuality, but that's not all, there exist also content that is related to the mythical, to the symbolic, to God, to Humanity as a whole, to the Heroic desire, and so on... We thank Freud for his bringing forth of the Unconscious to serious discussion, when at one time it was a playground restricted only to artists and poets alike, discarded by serious philosophy, but we part off with him in order to further more understand and appreciate the Unconscious, as the pool from which what composes Humanity emenates.

Winter of 23' I went to Belgium, and took it as an opportunity to find more of his works as they were infrequent where I live, and so I bought two books from there : his Autobiography, and his Psychological Types, needless to say, the former is considered in my humble opinion to be the best introduction to his work, he calls it the story not of his outer life as any autobiography would happen to be about, but of his inner world, of his quest for understanding what lies within him first, and within all of humanity by analogy next, I did find resonance when he spoke about his first remarkable dream (the phallic antichrist), and how that actually ties into a dream I myself had when I was young (the details of which I'll only provide the fact that it included a Buddha statue and that it was traumatic to the point of annihilating all inquiries about Buddhist thought and a repression that lasted and presisted until a much later time). The latter is a more textbook, sort of dry approach to an explanation of the dichotomy he proposed, of the Introvert and the Extravert, now both of these terms have been perverted and tarnished to a point of mockery, where the first image that comes to mind when one uses these terms is that of a pseudo-alt girl who's a bit too much into chakra, crystals and astrology, and has levels of narcissism that go beyond the scale. Anywhoo, what Jung really meant by the terms is simple, the Introvert's energy moves inwards, inwards towards himself and inwards towards what underlies the objects he percieves, the Extravert's energy, or as Jung calls it the Libido (not mere Sexual energy as Freud posited), moves outwards, towards the direct appearance of himself and that which surrounds him. The fact that the Introvert is less social and the Extravert is a social butterfly are not the causes but the symptoms of what we had mentionned before. Jung plays an interesting note here, noting that the majority of conflicts that have arisen between humans can be explained by their difference of type, by their misunderstanding of each other. He talks about the Chruch schisms and explains them as such, and I by analogy found the interpretation to be compelling when it comes to the Islamic conflicts aswell, between Sufists and Modern Day Salafists for example, the former exalts his inner world and which is within him, has an immanent perception of God and his endpoint is the negation of all external forces, including the external laws of the Shari'a for example, whilst the latter oppresses his inners and disregards them or trivializes them in favor of a heavily Sociopolitical view of Islam that is all about the Other, and has a transcedent view of God, as a distant 'unattainable until day of judgement' overseer, now to Jung, both of these are valid, they both have their foundations and chose to view the World under their own lens, he follows Schoepenhauer in his portrayal of the World as something that is shaped by our Will, by the impossibility of comprehending the Ding An Sich. But the problem arises when one attitude attempts to suffocate the other, it is concerning on an individual level, but it is catastrophic on a collective level, because like a kettle that's holding too mucho pressure, there will be a time where which lies hidden shall explode in tremendous fashion, our heavily Extroverted tendencies will soon be overthrown by the revolt of our inner who wants to be heard and to be left the fuck alone by the outward cries and honks of "existence under capitalism".

The most important concept in my eyes when it comes to Jung is that of ἐναντιοδρομία (enantiodromia), a greek word that means "counter-course", now for my Darija readers, I have already explained what this concept is all about and how it applies as a method for understanding general history on a video I made a while back. But for the rest, we'll simply explain, it is the psychic application of Newton's 3rd law of motion :

To every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction

A society that's moving a bit too fast towards Science and Rationality, whilst repressing Passion and Sentiment, will experience these latter under the most perverted of forms, what was Love and Eros turns into a destructive Sex-centered culture, what was once poetic Sentiment and Romanticism turns into an arbitrary unexplained Anger and a blind sense of Revolt that leaves nothing in it's way, and so on and so forth, this is the way in which I view Carl Jung as a modern day prophet, his predictions have been made further confirmed, and we can but anticipate the way that is to come.

Speaking of "The Way That Is To Come", that's the title of the beginning chapter of what is arguably his magnum opus, and his most powerful piece of work which went unpublished until much later after his death, The Red Book (Liber Novus), now look, I am not one to be easily swayed and shaken by books, but reading this text has made me cry and laugh not once and not twice, it almost feels illegal to be reading the personal cosmic conflicts and borderline psychotic ramblings of a man who decided to induce voluntary Psychotic episodes and to study them under the light of mythology and cosmology, as a passing joke I like to call it the "Anti-Zarathustra", it is composed in the same poetic manner but with the opposite message, instead of a "God is Dead, and we have killed him" we get a "God is alive and thriving, we just have been looking the wrong way". I have re-read this piece of work two times already, it has been difficult to obtain and I only managed to get an Arabic translated copy since that's the only available, and affordable form I could obtain in the shithole that I reside within, if I were to give it as recommendation, it would be either to jump right into it and let your mind figure it out, or much preferrably, to leave it at the end, as Jung called it the tree from which all of his fruits and ideas sprouted, it is Endgame Jung, and it is him at his most human, poetic and beautfiul.

CIORAN :

Now we move to someone with whom I have a very complicated relationship, one could call it that of a "hate-love" nature, Emil Cioran, this little French-Romanian fucker with a jaw that could cut glass and an Eraserhead by David Lynch looking ass haircut, is quite an interesting character.

I do have to admit that I am yet to read any of his work beside Précis de Décomposition but from my standing point, what I really appreciate about Cioran is his quality as a writer, he pushed the aphoristic form to the very limit of poetic flowery expression, to the very negation of Form, one can boldly state. He is stylistically much more extravagant than anything Neetchuh wrote. In matters of substance on the other hand, I wouldn't really think of his pessimistic philosophy as a code of conduct so to speak, as a system to build one's Weltanschauung upon, and he is well aware of that, I appreciate his honesty, he acknowledges the contradictory nature of his aphorisms and that is respectable. Cioran's work is best understood, at least the way I see it, as a cathartic exercise of meditation when one is ravaged by the Sartrean Nausea, what he offers can be described as an "ointment for the raped spirits of the World", a hook of bitter espérance in face of the fluxes of human garbage.

I have a tradition of reading his Précis de décomposition every beginning of Summer, a religious ritual as I like to call it, I read each aphorism thrice or more and digest, ruminate, reflect and meditate, A very particular aphorism has stuck with me, it comes from Visages de la décadence and it reads as follows (sorry for my English speakers in advance) :

L’erreur de ceux qui saisissent la décadence est de vouloir la combattre alors qu’il faudrait l’encourager : en se développant elle s’épuise et permet l’avènement d’autres formes. Le véritable annonciateur n’est pas celui qui propose un système quand personne n’en veut, mais bien plutôt celui qui précipite le Chaos, en est l’agent et le thuriféraire. Il est vulgaire de claironner des dogmes au milieu des âges exténués où tout rêve d’avenir paraît délire ou imposture. S’acheminer vers la fin de l’histoire avec une fleur à la boutonnière, – seule tenue digne dans le déroulement du temps. Quel dommage qu’il n’y ait pas un Jugement dernier, qu’on n’ait pas l’occasion d’un grand défi ! Les croyants : cabotins de l’éternité ; la foi : besoin d’une scène intemporelle… – Mais nous autres incroyants, nous mourons avec nos décors, et trop fatigués pour nous leurrer de fastes promis à nos cadavres…

DELEUZE :

What can be said about Deleuze, a lot : I like to shitpost about him, I like to make fun of him and his long dirty fingernails, we love his sense of humor and he would be proud to see the memes made about him. Jokes aside, I seem him as a very influential figure, one which has shaped a decent portion of my perception. If I had a single word to use in order to describe him it would be that he is creative, I mean the guy wrote an entire monograph on Bergson, the guy who wrote "CREATIVE Evolution", you can see where this is going..... I first got acquainted with him through philosophy meme pages on Instagram (of fucking course), and his portrayal as this "esoteric bordering on the schizo side of things" guy made him very appealing, but so I heard : his writing is impenetrable, dense and impossible to decipher unless you've been sitting on the cuck chair where he and Monsieur Guattari used to fuck the living shit out of each other off and mutter obfuscationist rambles, with that in mind, I happened to find a copy of Anti-OEdipus on a bookstore I frequently visit in Algiers, which was a bit expensive but I told myself : 'hey it's fucking Deleuze afterall', and I had plenty of money that day anyways so I bought it off, it was published by a cheap Tunisian publisher house and was in two volumes, I studied the living shit out of it with online ressources and yada yada, I immediately made the connection between him and Neitzsche, one which I'll get into later, though on one cold November evening I happened to come across a bookseller page I follow on Facebook which sells second-hand books, and lo and fucking behold, amongst a stack of irrelevant books including a Camus biography as if anyone cares about Camus, The two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia : Anti-OEdipus and A Thousand Plateaus, IN THE ORIGINAL LANGUAGE, AND THE ORIGINAL 70s PRESS FROM ÉDITION DE MINUIT, my heart skipped 10 beats and I moaned and shivered and right fucking away sent a message to the page asking for the price, and I moaned even harder when the price was the equivalent of a dish at a mid-range resturant, I got both volumes for 1200DA (almost 5EUR), and had them delivered to me by a friend of mine (Yasmine, if ur reading this, thanksiesss ^^) since the seller was located in a city that's 400km away from home.

So once I got them both, I sold the Anti-OEdipus I already had to my friend and began re-studying the scriptures once again, I became immersed, and the ideas that both Sir Deleuze and Guattari proposed had the potential to blow shit up, my shit up, and just about any construct's (or Code as they termed it) shit up, they were quite ahead of their time in so many aspects, I can argue that a pretty large portion of Internet culture is indirectly influenced by their corpus. And alongside Jung, I like to see them as Prophet figures aswell, except they're probably the ones that would go and poison the water supply and defecate in public instead of preaching to the choir.

First thing, what I like most about Deleuze, or well to be even more specific, aside from the fact that it was due to him that I decided to make my own abécédaire inspired by his own, is his writing style, at least the way in which it presented itself alongside Guattari's in the two volumes of C&S. We're already familiar with "philosophers" breaking conventional verbiage, we have seen it in Neetch for one, but the way Dolce&Gabanna do it is very unique, Lyotard comes to mind aswell but I wouldn't happen to know as I haven't read the guy yet, there's a very captivating sense of humor in their writing and it feels as if they're both not taking their subject matter seriously whilst underlying that is a strong sense of seriousness about their dealings.

As an entry point, if there can exist an "entry point" per se (Deleuze's writings are dense and require an extensive knowledge of the Continental tradition in order to be able to grasp with his project), I would recommend for everyone to read their short essay termed Rhizome, which can be found here. It's the first essay within A Thousand Plateaus (such a fun book by the way, just don't expect to be able to understand everything, treat it as one would treat a trip, you can read whichever chapter you'd want first, that's the way they recommend the book to be read.) where we can see their breaking away from philosophy's autistic obsession with "identity","hierarchies" and "orders", represented by the "tree" topology, for a much more creative, fresh, experimental and "rhizomatic" approach, whose meaning and value is immanent and independent of an external transcedental entity.

To highlight how impactful and importnat Rhizomatic thought happens to be, we take the example of Guerilla Warfare, as shown by history, it proved itself to be very successful in countering conventional Army squad strategies by its dispersive and almost arbitrary nature (I remark passing by, that it is such a shame for such theories to be studied by the fucking IDF whilst we're still autistically screeching our heads with Hegelslop, or even worse, milk prices), another example would be the Internet : Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks, the Decentralized Web, including this very website, all share the traits of the Rhizome, in contrast with the congregation of Social Media, as it tragically appears, the tree shoved its roots balls deep into the rhizome....

In short, Deleuze's "rhizomatics" stand for everything that takes the courage of being creative and experimental, of breaking away from the norms in a quest to find lush unexplored lands of human potentiality, it is a VERY OPTIMISTIC and VITAL philosophy, in stark contrast to his demise, his commiting of a felo de se by jumping off a balcony, but what can we know, maybe he found his lines of flight within such a decisive and final act.

As a tribute to how influential he happens to be to my person, and despite my apparent lackluster elaboration on the rich legacy that he left, for a lack of creative juice, I'll share with you, perhaps my favorite quote from Anti-OEdipus, and which describes an aspect of his pensée that I admire most :

All the cynical tactics of bad conscience, just as Nietzsche and then Lawrence and Miller analyzed them to arrive at a definition of civilized European man: the hypnosis and the reign of images, the torpor they spread; the hatred of life and of all that is free, of all that passes and flows; the universal effusion of the death instinct; depression and guilt used as a means of contagion, the kiss of the Vampire: aren't you ashamed to be happy? follow my example, I won't let go before you say, "It's my fault," O ignoble contagion of the depressives, neurosis as the only illness consisting in making others ill; the permissive structure: let me deceive, rob, slaughter, kill! but in the name of the social order, and so daddy-mommy will be proud of me; the double direction given to ressentiment, the turning back against oneself, and the projection against the Other: the father is dead, it's my fault, who killed him? it's your fault, it's the Jews, the Arabs, the Chinese, all the resources of racism and segregation; the abject desire to be loved, the whimpering at not being loved enough, at not being "understood," concurrent with the reduction of sexuality to the "dirty little secret," this whole priest's psychology.

BATAILLE :

More of an esthète than a philosopher per se, as his writings are quite deviant from any apparent practicality, something I like to think that he was well aware of, and which, to clarify matters, does not reduce its value nonetheless, the Imaginary is as real as the Real, one can practice what he preaches sure, but the question that still remains is to what limit ?, I wrote once :

Bataille runs a stud service, where he creates a bastard mulatto mix between Neitzsche and Sade.

Thus in case you were looking for a brief description, this should be enough for you to figure out his position, if you want the detes, including my personal brush-ups with his books, follow me.

جورج بطاي أعطاي.... Well, the story starts probably around the same time I began finding out about Deleuze, as there exist a certain connection between both. His image was much more captivating than that of Deleuze's, usually when people bring Bataille to subject, he gets called either a degenerate filthy French cuckold, or a modern-day Prophet (and that is in the sense of his powerful impact upon the modern Zeitgeist, I mean.... BDSM owes this motherfucker that much).

I decided to make my dues, and to task myself with reading him, since his books happen to be pretty rare to find (as such is the case with just about any writer that isn't a pathetic Syrian/Egyptian/Arab "young and aspiring writer", cheap YA slop that makes one vomit or Classics spread ad nauseam) I started reading his books online, I remember reading the first few pages of Histoire de L'OEil, only to be instantly filtered, my first impression was : "this nigga's got to be fucking retarded, but not in a bad way, I still want to uncover more of him" so I went for les OEuvres Complètes, downloaded all volumes at one point, and started skimming and jumping from one to another, I remember watching this video which made me furthermore interested in what Bataille had to say about the notion of Expenditure and the value of non-utilitarian activities.

What stuck with me plenty was what he had to say in his Accursed Share, how he sought to question the modern conventional conception of Economy and Economical Science, as one that is grounded on notions of Acquisition and Reserve, as one which treats Loss as a Manichean Evil to be abolished by any/all means possible, on that basis he argued that pure, unconditionnable Expenditure is a necessity for a proper functioning of the system, if we happen to neglect or disregard this, then we run into trouble, as the Excess is spent in spite of us, and in the most catastrophical of ways, the culmination of which can manifest in pure Warfare, as he wrote :

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.

And, in a fancier way he writes again :

Incomprehension does not change the final outcome in the slightest. We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood. It deprives us of the choice of an exudation that might suit us. Above all, it consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion.

But were I to be asked, Bataille shows his best not in theory and philosophy, if you can call his inquiries "properly" philosophical per se, but in his literary works, he is quite possibly, alongside Henry Miller, one of my favorite writers of all time, despite my humble readings of his fiction. It is his language, his lexique that is so very captivating, magically enchanting, as a sorcerer casts spells on his disciples. His literary project can be resumed in the word Transgression, transgressing Literature by exalting Evil, transgressing Oneself by the meditation of Nothingness, of L'Acéphale (the headless one), transgressing the monotony of Industrial Errance by affirming and bringing forth the Primitive Forces of one's Being, and so on and so forth. My first story (beside Story Of The Eye, which I came to appreciate later on) was Blue Noon (Le Bleu du Ciel), one which was not that impactful on my person, but that did give a glimpse as to how intense a writer such as Bataille can be, my favorite part is :

Le bonheur à l'instant m'enivre, il me saoule.

Je le crie, je le chante à pleine gorge.

En mon coeur idiot, l'idiotie chante à gorge déployée.

JE TRIOMPHE!

But it was with L'Abbé C. that I knew what Bataille meant to me, what his writing meant to me : the personification of my own Accursed Share, my blasphematory cries, my vile perversions, my fou rires and my playfulness in face of the monotony of the Serious.... what my timid person could not reveal to the surface, for fear of jeopardy, jeopardy of my relationships with the People around me, with my Friends and Family. Becoming immersed in the worlds he painted was the only possible outlet (besides writing my own Worlds or undergoing Psychosis) for my filthy innards to breathe. L'Abbé C. in short is a story about a Priest reaching his limit, and diving into la débauche, coming to terms with the realization that Sacred and Profane are two sides of the same coin, thus as blasphematory as it is, God can be found in Filth just as he can be found in Purity, Bataille was a Catholic himself, and yet he said : Une maison close est ma véritable église, la seule assez inapaisante. L'Abbé C. has a special spot in my heart, its disjointed format, its terminology, words like déchirement, dépassement and extase that hold plenty of weight and when properly used, can be a blow to one's self.

His theories of Eroticism also come to mind, another very important aspect of his work, and an even more critical subject to my horny ass self, from secondary ressources (for unability to acquire a physical copy) I can gather that what he meant by Eroticism was the dépassement of oneself, in the union with the Other, the union of the flesh becomes a slightly lesser (and perhaps on a similar level) version of the unio mystica, the Flesh is sacred, and Sex is not a mere interplay of chemicals, physiology or instinct, although each one of these do have their place within Sex, that the superior sense and purpose of such an act, is accomplishing what one is never able to accomplish by himself, discounting the eschatological encounter with The One, that is to unite with another Being, breaking away from the discontinuity of our Beings, to a yes momentary, but powerful, arrachante continuity, similar points are also brought up within Evola's "Metaphysics of Sex", a book which is of interest aswell (and one has to drop the préjugé of Evola being a ""bigot right wing chud"" as is often described within online circles, this is one of his more mature, well researched and grounded works, aside from the political babble he talks about in other works.)

In short, I use Bataille's works, and words, and expressions (as I will be quoting Histoire De L'OEil to my future gf) to justify my horniness, not to intellectualize it, but to sacralize it.

I happen also to have read a couple of excerpts from L'Expérience Intérieure, arguably his magnum opus, where he proposes the abolishion of all "systems", accompanied by a hard-on for Anti Dialectics, but admits that such an endeavor cannot be done without proposing a "system" of his own, one which doesn't occupy itself with Teleology, but instead says that l’expérience elle-même est l’autorité. He proposes a mystical project that is ateleological, that doesn't aim at attaining a unio mystica, a irf'an or an aletheia with a transcedent Being, but one which derives its value from its own torturous errance and one's jumbles with the Unknown, it is in this sense here that we start to see the overlap between Deleuze and Bataille, they both focus on an immanent project rather than a transcendental one. L'Expérience Intérieure is composed of theoretical esquisses and poetic cry-outs, the latter being my favorites, also a very important recommendation.

I would like to add passing by, that plenty of people like to highlight the political aspect of his works, including within the literary, but whilst that is an aspect he himself was lucid about, as one can see in his Contre-Attaque pamphlets for example, and in Bleu du Ciel aswell. I argue that reading Bataille, to me at least, should be approached in the same manner as one would approach Milton, or Blake, or any of the Romanticists for that matter, simply : as a tormeneted, violently poetic writer, a doctoris daemonii.

Thus, to wrap this up, and consider it a dirty not so quick introduction into Georges Bataille, both as a person and as thinker, I would recommend in terms of literature, to read Story Of The Eye first, and most importantly to read L'Abbé C. , then If you want a more theoretical Bataille, read The Accursed Share, Eroticism and Inner Experience. And in terms of secondary ressources, whilst having not read it yet, I think Michel Surya's "Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre" is the best biography available, and there exist a few Youtube videos that I deem of interest, such as this documentary, and this analysis of Inner Experience. Now rejoice, Fellas !!

HENRY MILLER :

What's so captivating about Miller is the honesty he uses whilst writing, the way in which he lays out the mundanity of his life and puts it in touch with something that goes well beyond, something that, for lack of a better word, we'll call "mystical", is very beautiful and worthy of admiration. Don't let the word "mundane" fool you, I meant that in the sense of how the mere narration of a walk for example, would appear to and within Miller's, as a stroll through Heaven. On the contrary, he actually had led quite an interesting life, abandonning his marriage and job in the U.S. and immigrating to France with a (I think so) lover, being homeless within most of his time there and living on friends and family aid, whilst writing his corpus.

The honesty within his work appears as he tackles subjects, that during that time, were quite tabooed (sexuality and his unorthodox mystical perception come to mind), in such a direct,vivid manner, that one can't help but feel immersed in his narratives. I first read Tropic of Cancer when I came across it, as usual, at a second hand bookstore, the copy was a nice, clean hardcover and I like to think that in some way, this had improved my reading experience, I still remember the story of that one Indian dude Miller and his friends knew, I forgot his name but he says that it sounds, when spoken, similar to "non-entity", so probably Nanentiti, and how they took him into a whorehouse and he used the bidet to shit, shocking the employees and being almost kicked by the patroness if not for Miller's intervention, very funny one.

But I wouldn't have held Miller in such high regard if I didn't read Nexus, keeping in mind that his writings were mostly autobiographical, reading him will provide you with a glimpse into the man he was, the way he saw things, the way he thought about Life, about God, about Love and about Sex, his blending of the Sacred and the Profane, from descriptions of his sexual escapades to philosophical meditations. I found myself resonating with what he had to say within those few hundred pages, it was as if some Angel happened to connect both me and Miller through a different plane of existence, the medium was the Word, his Word, that I absorbed thoroughly with my two eyes. Ever since then I have been on the lookout for the two remaining volumes of his Rosy Crucifixion : Plexus and Sexus, I have happened to find the former, but have been unable to go all the way to the city and buy it for reasons of laziness, I will probably acquire the work within a few weeks, and as for Sexus we'll probably have to look further. Alas, Miller is a writter that I have only recently got started with, and one which I'm sure will remain within my heart for a long time.

In the meantime, there is a very interesting documentary that was done on him, which I'd suggest checking. And then there's the bathroom monologue, une délice which can be found on Youtube divided into Parts I, II, III (which I am unable to find) and IV.

WILLIAM BURROUGHS :

Seems like I have a thing for الخماج, for literary degenerates, for this is the third person to call an influence that writes extremely vulgar, degenerate and vile word viruses as he called them, about Sex and Co.

I have only read Naked Lunch so far, it was NOT what I expected it to be, but I enjoyed the ride. This is a unique book, even within the postmodernist genre, I don't think there exist any work yet that has gutted, torn apart, and vehemently raped Language and the Word as we know it as much as Naked Lunch does, for the book was written in the midst of Tangier's heat, whilst being high on hashish and struggling with a lack of opiates, and to amp things up, just in case la débauche isn't already apparent, whilst having a young boyfriend named Kiki.

There is no plot, and if there exist one I am sure I wouldn't be able to explain it to you, perhaps a Wikipedia article would be best fitting for your inquiry. Alas, I'll tell you what I personally think of Naked Lunch, it is a testament on how arbitrary, bushy, and rhizomatic (because I love using that word) the human mind can be. I'll leave you with a short excerpt as to properly understand what I'm talking about :

Followers of obsolete, unthinkable trades doodling in Etruscan, addicts of drugs not yet synthesized, pushers of souped-up harmine, junk reduced to pure habit offering precarious vegetable serenity, liquids to induce Latah, Tithonian longevity serums, black marketeers of World War III, excusers of telepathic sensitivity, osteopaths of the spirit, investigators of infractions denounced by bland paranoid chess players, servers of fragmentary warrants taken down in hebephrenic shorthand charging unspeakable mutilations of the spirit, bureaucrats of spectral departments, officials of unconstituted police states, a Lesbian dwarf who has perfected operation Bang-utot, the lung erection that strangles a sleeping enemy, sellers of orgone tanks and relaxing machines, brokers of exquisite dreams and memories tested on the sensitized cells of junk sickness and bartered for raw materials of the will, doctors skilled in the treatment of diseases dormant in the black dust of ruined cities, gathering virulence in the white blood of eyeless worms feeling slowly to the surface and the human host, maladies of the ocean floor and the stratosphere, maladies of the laboratory and atomic war... A place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum... Larval entities waiting for a Live One...

Yeah.... it's good to the point of amazement, I also recommend watching the Film adaptation/biopic, also titled Naked Lunch, it is directed by Cronenberg, thus even if you won't happen to like the movie that much as I did, you'll still enjoy the bits and pieces of body horror. I am pretty unaware of the rest of his writings, besides hearsay about his cut-up technique which he also uses in NL, and his theory of the word-virus which seems interesting, his late fascination with magic that I know nothing of :=(, so overall, an interesting character, and a fun writer, ينيك برك بصح يعرف كيفاه.