Eternal Delight Bataille Blake and the S

1
Eternal delight: Bataille, Blake and the “state” of grace
Stuart Kendall
Grace is a surprising concept to use in connection with both Georges Bataille and
William Blake. Yet it is a concept carried through each corpus as a challenge confronted in
similar ways. My purpose here will be to trace this concept across each oeuvre with a particular
emphasis on the unrecognized influence of Blake on Bataille’s thought.
In January 1956, in a retrospective letter to a critic outlining major influences on his
work, Bataille mentions encountering Blake “around 1935” (7: 615). The immediate context
of the remark is suggestive. Blake’s is the third name on Bataille’s list of influences, following
Nietzsche and Sade, and preceding Kafka, Durkheim, Mauss, and Hegel. Readers familiar
with Bataille’s work will recall frequent references to Blake and a chapter devoted to him in
Literature and Evil, but they might nevertheless be surprised at Bataille’s level of esteem for and
interest in Blake, an esteem so great that Bataille ranked Blake third after Nietzsche and Sade
as an influence on his work.
The influence of Nietzsche and Sade on Bataille has of course been well documented
and studied at this point. But that of Blake certainly has not. Indeed, almost nothing at all has
been written about it: a case of critical neglect resulting, I think, from fidelity to disciplinary
boundaries. French literary historians tend to look for French literature in Bataille;
philosophers look for philosophy; art historians look for art history. Yet the influence of the
English proto-Romantic mystic on the French writer was clear and acknowledged by Bataille

himself.
Bataille’s direct engagement with Blake was nevertheless confined to crucial readings,
in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and writings, in the late 1940s, culminating in two distinct
book proposals: one an anthology of translations, the other a work in interdisciplinary
intellectual history linking Blake, Sade, and Goya with the birth of modernity. Beyond these
projects, Blake figures prominently in – though often on the margins of – all of Bataille’s
major works. The Accursed Share, for example, begins with an epigram from Blake:
“Exuberance is beauty.”
Why Blake? What did Bataille find in Blake that he had not already found in
Nietzsche or Sade? I would suggest that Bataille did not find something entirely new in Blake,
only a new inflection for familiar problems. In Blake, Bataille recognized a fellow antichristian,
a thinker who used systems to deliver us from systems, and a political prophet of sacrificial
subjectivity and erotic mysticism. Bataille and Blake were both prophets of energy, which is to
say of evil, which is to say of eternal delight. With Blake, Bataille shared something he did not
share with Nietzsche or Sade, a pursuit of the state of grace, a state that was neither a state, in
the true sense of this term, nor of grace in a sense that a Christian might accept.
But Grace, again, is a surprising word to use in connection with both Bataille and
Blake. It is a word that appears only rarely in each corpus. William Blake almost never used
the term to express his relationship to transcendence. Yet this is not to say that he did not live
in its pursuit. Indeed as Blake never ceased telling his friends and readers, his was the life of a

2
visionary, lived in the company of spirits. He quotes a conversation with Isaiah in The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell in which Isaiah asserts, for him: “My senses discover’d the infinite
in every thing”[12]. At the beginning of Milton, Blake invokes his inspirational muses: “Come
into my hand/ By your mild power; descending down the Nerves of my right arm/ From out
the Portals of my Brain, where by your ministry/ The Eternal Great Humanity Divine
planted his Paradise” [Milton 2].
For Blake, the state of grace is the state of spiritual awareness that recognizes no
distinction between body and spirit, nor between perception and reality. The body, for Blake,
is the instrument of perception and it is the outward form of the spiritual imagination. “The
Human Imagination/ Which is the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus”[Milton 3]. Paradoxically,
to recognize the truth of the self, according to Blake, is to recognize the divine spirit within
oneself. This recognition is doubly paradoxical, for the truth of the self is not the self at all,
and indeed individualism, the subjectivity promoted by John Locke is the bane of Blake. But
this spirit is not a spirit nor even really imagination, it is the body itself. The human body is
form of the divine.
The recognition of this divine form is the purpose and teaching of Blake’s art. In The
Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Blake proclaims a vision of revelation, when the “whole creation
will be consumed, and appear infinite, and holy, whereas now it appears finite and corrupt.

This will come to pass,” he says, “by an improvement of sensual enjoyment”[14]. For this
reason Blake is a practitioner of a composite art, a writing-drawing that gives physical form to
abstract language. His composite art bears his message for himself and for his reader, it enacts
the sensual experience of which he speaks. His work is thus personal and political at once. His
goal as an artist was, he said, to “restore the golden age”, to build Jerusalem “in England’s green
& pleasant land”[Milton 1].
“I rest not from my great task!” Blake says,
To open the Eternal Worlds, to open the immortal Eyes
Of Man inwards into the Worlds of Thought: into Eternity
Ever expanding in the Bosom of God, the Human Imagination.
O Saviour pour upon me thy Spirit of meekness & love:
Annihilate the Selfhood in me, be thou all my life! [Jerusalem 5]
Widely and thoroughly informed, Blake transforms exoteric and esoteric notions,
giving them idiosyncratic and often counter-intuitive meanings. In Blake, thought is
perception, imagination is spirit, and spirit is flesh. Blake uses the language of Christianity –
among other discourses – to decidedly anti-Christian effects. If he is a Christian at all, he is a
Dionysian Christian, an ecstatic.
I choose this word deliberately: ecstasy suggests – in its root – an escape or deliverance
from the state in which one finds oneself. Ecstasy is, in the words of Blake, “selfannihilation”[Milton 48/41]. Yet this is not to say that ecstasy is an abstract or disembodied
state of bliss. Rather, it is an eruption of the flesh. This eruption, in Blake, as in Bataille,

remains bound by the terrain of its occurrence: the body is a field of multiple pleasures that
can, at least to a certain extent, be provoked, but that have definite limits. Experience, in other
words, is always particular, always rooted in a particular body, and as Blake says, “Every body

3
does not see alike… As a man is So he Sees.” (Letter to John Trusler, 8.23.1799). Blake’s task
is the liberation of the spiritual body, the resurrection of the flesh.
This ecstatic process can also be described through reference to the contraries order
and energy, wherein the ecstatic body is the energetic body. In Blake’s thought, contraries such
as these are necessary and inevitable. One gives way to the other in constant and eternal
oscillation. Energy bursts through order only to reestablish a new order. Inspiration falls into
demonstration, reason, memory, only to resurge again as these forms themselves become
vehicles for the renewal of inspiration. Contraries, in other words, never quite negate one
another nor do they ever give rise to a new synthesis of opposites. Rather they are bound
together as different and eternally opposed qualities of a thing or person. [See The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell 3; Jerusalem 10]
The paradox implied here is difficult to parse. The human imagination is itself the
divinity. This divinity both is and is not universal, as the form it takes is always particular.
Blake’s vision here is a revelatory vision, historical vision. He sees the infinite in all things. This
is the kingdom of heaven, if but we have eyes to see.

The paradox consists in the peculiar nature of what Blake calls the “minute particular”.
If we cling to our particular experience as that of a distinct selfhood, Blake will fault us for our
vanity, for our will to isolate ourselves from the world, from other people, and, oddly, from the
true nature of our own experience, for this distinct selfhood is only part of what we are and it
is not even the most significant part. We are and the world is, quite simply, more than we
think. Reason, in fact, can lead us astray. And I use the word reason intentionally. Blake says,
“I come in Self-annihilation & the grandeur of Inspiration;/ To cast off Rational
Demonstration by Faith in the Saviour/ To cast off the rotten rags of Memory by Inspiration/
To cast of Bacon, Locke & Newton”[Milton 48.41].
Bataille would of course add Descartes and Hegel to this list, and change some of the
key terms, but his purpose and the structure of his thought are essentially the same. Like
Blake, Bataille proposes a sacrificial model of subjectivity more intent on self-annihilation than
self-recognition. For Bataille, as for Blake, the isolated individual is precisely the problem, both
for the individual and for society. (We might also add for the earth as a whole.) The solution
to this problem, for Bataille as for Blake, consists in self-annihilation or self-sacrifice.
Self-sacrifice is of course a very powerful phrase, and therefore difficult to understand
in its proper sense. Self-sacrifice may entail the total immolation of a being on behalf of
another or of others. But it need not be so grand. By self-sacrifice, both Bataille and Blake are
suggesting that we perform each action as though it were a gift, an offering of our energy, of all
that we are, all the trajectories of energetic disposition that we embody, not only to a particular

person or group in proximity to which we are situated but also to the universe as a whole. The
proposition is that we live every moment as a gift, perceiving our flesh as a field in which
energy is transformed and transferred, offered back to the world, but now carrying our trace,
the mark of our divine human life. In this model our flesh forms a vessel for the descent of
grace.
Unlike Blake, Bataille often engages with the language of grace, though unsurprisingly
this engagement is again transformative. Bataille’s thought grapples with the notion and
structure of grace that he inherited from the Catholic faith of his adolescence only to change
the terms and to recast the problem. In a lecture from 1942, for example, he suggested that

4
ecstatic experience could only be pursued under peculiar conditions, conditions that he
defined as determined by chance but that, he said, Christians called grace.1
Two years later, in another lecture, this one the famous “Discussion on Sin”, Bataille
confronted the essential ambivalence of his thought on this topic. The audience for the lecture
included members of the clergy and the literati, as well as several philosophers: Jean Hyppolite
and Jean-Paul Sartre most notably. In a prepared response to Bataille’s lecture, Father Jean
Daniélou addressed the question of ambivalence directly. Christians traditionally – including
Kierkegaard – perceive sin as an opportunity for the descent of grace. Sin therefore can be a
vehicle for the good but it remains sin and exists only so that it can be rejected. Bataille’s

thought, however, rests on the necessary proximity of sin and grace and, moreover, as
Daniélou puts it, Bataille “applies himself specifically to making [sin and grace] coexist.”2 Sin
and grace, in other words, and for Bataille, function as contraries in Blake’s sense of this term.
They are necessary opposites, each bound by an inherent opposition to its other. Grace exists
only against the horizon of sin, and sin against that of grace. Blake calls this the marriage of
heaven and hell.
For the theologians and philosophers who participated in the “Discussion on Sin” this
was an unthinkable ménage: sin and salvation simply could not coexist. For Bataille, as for
Blake, it was the reality of history. Daniélou criticized Bataille for being unable to conceive of a
life without limits – a thought that Bataille would have characterized as idealistic at best – and
for being unable to conceive of a positive model of communication, one in which two
independent entities could share something held in common. Ironically, Bataille might have
criticized this model of communication, Daniélou's model, as insufficiently Christian, in
Blake’s sense of Christianity, which insists that you must lose yourself to experience grace.
Bataille’s thought – following Nietzsche, following Blake – proposed a “hyper-Christianity”.
For Bataille, as for Blake, communication implies the dissolution of the self, self-sacrifice, the
gift of life. The state of grace here is ecstatic and instantaneous.
In a note from 1950, Bataille discussed this process of sacrificial destruction: he wrote,
“The destruction of the object is offered as grace. As in poetry. This grace is perhaps only
energy, but one is unable to intend to attain it. From this, a multitude of consequences…”3

The language and the structure of the thought, here as elsewhere in Bataille, is again
that of Blake. Grace is perhaps only energy, according to Bataille, but energy, according to
Blake, is eternal delight.

Notes
This lecture was delivered at The Descent of Grace: Art, Nature, and Religion, a Symposium
sponsored by Medieval Studies, Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies (CMEMS),
Humanities Center, and Department of French and Italian, Stanford University, May 15,
2009.
1

Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge (University of Minnisota Press, 2001)
17.
2
Ibid. 37.

5

3

Ibid. 160-1.