Georges Bataille
L'Amicizia

"Love is such a deep denial of being isolated that it makes us consider natural and in a certain sense ideal that an insect dies from the desired embrace."

Entering the universe of Bataille is equivalent to ascending, irredeemably entering an incorporeal and carnal universe, joining an unrepeatable and unsettling universe. Bataille's writing is inimitable: it is bare, sparse, but at the same time bubbling with blood, death, and sex. An author contested and controversial from the beginning, criticized even by those who could identify with his thought (first and foremost the epitome of malaise, Jean-Paul Sartre), Bataille has been labeled a madman and a pervert, but over time he has established himself as one of the most important, revolutionary, and shocking thinkers of the last century. Picking up one of his texts in 2014 can still be shocking: it is violent, vulgar, and, at the same time, poetic, allegorical, cryptic, and solipsistic.

The thought that runs through the production of the French author and philosopher is eclectic (novels, philosophical essays, economic essays, essays on philosophy, essays on literature, essays on eroticism...), and chaotic. But his is an ordered chaos, a logical animality where the attainment of happiness coincides with vertigo, a suffocating and unsettling feeling, but at the same time light, liberating, connected to the nature of man linked to the desire for self-destruction.

It is, without a doubt, an author too complex and obscure to be condensed into a few lines. He must be read, lived, endured. He must be understood, not understood. When opening his writing and subjecting oneself to his game, one must let go. The journey undertaken by the reader is exactly what he wants all human beings to experience: a continuous resurfacing and submerging, in search of moments of pure vertigo.

With a paralyzed and blind father as a burden and the never-overcome trauma of the death of his most faithful companion, Bataille's writing became febrile, ill, and unhealthy, an apnea of words from which emerging untouched is absolutely impossible.

Among the countless works, I recommend three: the extraordinary novel "Story of the Eye", the calculated delirium "The Solar Anus" and, especially "Friendship" (Published in Italian by SE Editore). This last text is the most suitable to approach the author. It is a very short booklet (about 60 pages), yet very dense, where the entire Bataillean thought is concentrated in a continuous succession of suspensions and stranglings. A quick, yet risky, dreamy, and annihilating read.

Do not be deceived by the enchanting cover framing a painting by Kandinsky and the title that suggests a simple philosophical essay on the value of friendship, a theme already addressed by the most important thinkers of philosophy: these pages are dripping with blood and sweat, ecstasy and death. An unmissable text, of fascinating beauty and compactness. A small great breviary to delve deep into the human soul with a sensitive and painful gaze, but at the same time, without any pity.