What some would call a modern day
There is within today’s man a profound intolerance for the sense of humiliation which is demanded every day of our human nature and to which we submit everywhere: we submit in the office and in the street; we submit in the country. Everywhere men feel that human nature has been profoundly humiliated, and what is left of religion finally humiliates him in the face of God who, after all, is merely a hypostasis of work. I do not think one could dream of denying this nostalgia. I imagine that if we are gathered here, whatever diverse elements could be at play in the fact of the presence of everyone in this hall, it is a dominant element which has certainly determined this presence: it is the nostalgia for a life which ceases to be humiliated; it is the nostalgia for a life which ceases to be separated from what lies behind the world. It is not a question of finding behind the world something which dominates it; there is nothing behind the world which dominates man, there is nothing that can humiliate him; behind the world, behind the precise limits where we live, there is only a universe whose bursting open is incomparable, and behind the universe there is nothing.
Georges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth, ” from a lecture before Club Maintenant, 24 February 1948
Georges Bataille, “The Absence of Myth, ” from a lecture before Club Maintenant, 24 February 1948