The ‘non-identifiable’ cannot be understood by reason, but only through experience. It is “the putting into question of that which a man knows of being” (Bataille 4) that pushes most people towards desiring to put a label upon such an understanding. When doing such a thing, we are only staying connected to the subjects of the identifiable world when Bataille’s hope is for us to separate ourselves from this realm of existence and understanding.
When allowing ourselves to break free and truly explore within ourselves, we can reach sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a presence in no way distinct from absence, where “From that moment begins a singular experience. The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist” (Bataille xxxii). Yet how does someone share this experience with another and is there a way for this to allow us to relate to one another? If we are experiencing life and understanding on this unknown level where all co-exists, is there a method or means to incorporate this into our daily interactions with other individuals?
An inner experience disrupts the regulating force of language and disrupts the subject of that experience as well. It is always experiencing from the outside—of a community that cannot be held within some boundaries or limits. Inner experience for Bataille is a finite experience that promises nothing outside itself. There is no limit based upon language, subject, or anything for that matter; inner experience is a contestation of any limits placed upon our experience.
In order to make the passage from inner experience as a contestation of language and subject to inner experience as a community, we must pass through ‘communication. ’ Contestation breaks down the limits of the subject and language, and in doing so opens an experience of communication. If we happen to incorporate this ideology into a relationship with another individual, perhaps we can come to some experience where no words can describe the interaction between the two. Perhaps, love is exactly that; perceiving one another through communication of this opening up within inner experience.
Communication for Bataille is not the exchange of words or messages from one subject to another but it is used to “pull the rug out from under the object as well as from under the subject” (Bataille 54). He later compares communication to the streaming flow of electricity and explains that “your life is not limited to that ungraspable inner streaming; it streams to the outside as well and opens itself incessantly to what flows out and surges forth towards it” (Bataille 94). This essentially destroys the notion of inner experience being internal.
This logic of communication is not limited to language and is really an opening up to community by constantly overflowing, giving us the most divine understanding or contemplation of the existence of community. The individual here is thrown outside of itself, outside of it’s understanding, into the unknown. This allows for an infinite abundance of unknown impossibilities and new experiences. It is a risk and vulnerable experience that opens us to anguish, sovereign laughter, and a true transcendental experience with another individual.
This idea of communication with another eludes the typical means of discourse with another individual and how we fundamentally work on relationships. People are often induced in today’s societal norms, incapable of breaking the boundaries of common thought or ‘project. ’ For Bataille, the discourse of work or ‘project’ leads us towards the misleading idea of completion of the self. Rather than that, it is a way of existing where there is no distinction between yourself and the other.
You dissolve in mutual ‘communication’ with this other person. This leads to the thought that having another individual viewed through this experience will almost prevent you from reaching total freedom of the identifiable. The fact that you can perceive this other within the non-identifiable leaves us with some form of consciousness. We are identifying the other and therefore not allowing ourselves to fully leap out of the world and its restrictions of understanding.
This may be the reason why he speaks of death when becoming fully enraptured and anguished within the non-identifiable; we may not want to become fully captivated within it in order to keep ourselves somewhat grounded within reality. Otherwise there would truly be no love between yourself and the other, only being fully immersed as one in the unknown. Perhaps there is a way to place our perception of the non-identifiable on a spectrum or balanced level to keep sanity and hold some sort of connection between the other in order to conduce love.
