09/16/2025
EQUUS PRESS SEPTEMBER RETROSPECTIVE
8. Georges Bataille, LOUIS ### (trans. Stuart Kendall, 2013)
In Louis ###, Georges Bataille constructs a profoundly unsettling meditation on eroticism, sacrifice, and the collapse of discursive reality, using a hybrid form that dissolves boundaries between diary, poetry, philosophical reflection, and theological confession. His prose—at once visceral and poetic—pulls the reader into an uncanny space where the sacred and the obscene collide. As Bataille writes in “The Little One”: “To write is to research chance.”
This declaration gestures toward the work’s formal daring: writing becomes an encounter with contingency, where language is not a transparent conduit of meaning but a terrain of unpredictability. The text’s fragmented, collage-like structure mirrors the destabilisation of identity and the disappearance of the “discursive real,” as the translator notes in his commentary.
Bataille’s relentless mingling of bodily detail, religious transgression, and metaphysical terror enacts a radical poetics of limit-experience—where the only divine residue is the “impossible” itself, glimpsed through the crack of violation. The effect is both intoxicating and disorienting: critique, beauty, and transgression fuse into a single ecstatic rupture.
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https://equuspress.wordpress.com/louis-###/
