Germana Berlantini Ethic of knowledge and violence of language in Georges Bataille

By choosing sadism, disease, death, débauche and sacrifice as main themes, the work of Georges Bataille displays a phenomenology of the forms of violence that is more variegated than ever.
In this regard critics has rarely dwelt upon the analysis of a specific epistemic form of violence that Bataille addresses in his reflection on non savoir and which is embodied in the literary text as a game space of language with its own silence. Starting from the analysis of L’Impossible or La haine de la poésie, perhaps the most obscure and restless works among the author’s fictional writings, this paper tries to examine the ethic of knowledge that lies behind the Bataillean theme of the sacrifice of the work, and to throw light upon its unpredictably pedagogical values. Through the proposal of a radical exercise of deconstruction of the experiential space, Bataille’s reflection on writing and language becomes, in this way, the mediator of an ecology of word as well as of an ethic of relationship.

Keywords: ethics of knowledge; violence of language; non-savoir; Georges Bataille.

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Published on: N. 28 New Series – Year XIV 2018 – On violence