Why Humans Are Drawn to the Forbidden | Georges Bataille for Sleep

<p>Vote on what comes next: <a href="https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote⁠</a></p><p><br /></p><p>Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language.</p><p><br /></p><p><strong>Subscribe: </strong><a href="https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">⁠https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe⁠</a></p><p><br /></p><p>By day a mild librarian, by night the philosopher of excess, eroticism, and the sacred where reason ends.</p><p><br /></p><p>Georges Bataille kept one of the strangest double lives in modern thought. For decades he was a quiet librarian in Paris, courteous and unremarkable, while in private he wrote some of the most extreme and original books of his century. This episode follows him from a childhood shaped by a blind and dying father, through a lost faith and a notorious first novel, into the feuds and secret societies of the years between the wars. </p><p><br /></p><p>It traces the ideas that made him a hidden source for a whole later generation, the economy of loss and useless expenditure, the sun that gives without return, the sacred glimpsed in transgression, a mysticism with no God at the end of it, and eroticism understood as the meeting place of desire and death. Along the way it restores the man behind the scandal, the gentle scholar drawn to everything orderly thought leaves out. Told as a serious essay and paced for rest.</p><p><br /></p><p>Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.</p><p><br /></p><p>00:00:00 The Blind Father</p><p>00:12:59 The Eye and the Egg</p><p>00:22:42 The Excremental Philosopher</p><p>00:29:12 The Low and the Formless</p><p>00:39:22 The Economy of Loss</p><p>00:46:20 Hegel's Wound and Nietzsche's Laughter</p><p>00:56:34 The Headless God</p><p>01:03:36 The Return of the Sacred</p><p>01:13:42 Laure and the Silence</p><p>01:20:00 A Mysticism Without God</p><p>01:33:08 A Theology Turned Inside Out</p><p>01:42:03 God in the Brothel</p><p>01:48:07 Love Among the Graves</p><p>01:56:30 The Sun That Gives Without Return</p><p>02:11:27 The Sovereign Moment</p><p>02:20:13 Desire All the Way to Death</p><p>02:34:31 Literature Is Not Innocent</p><p>02:44:02 The Community of Those Who Have Nothing</p><p>02:50:24 The Tears of Eros</p><p>02:58:01 The Mild Librarian</p><p>03:04:24 The Uses of Georges Bataille</p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p>Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest.</p><p><br /></p><p>Music by Kevin MacLeod (<a href="http://incompetech.com/">incompetech.com</a>)</p><p>Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License<br><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/</a></p><p>Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded</p>