Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset

Examines how postwar French writers constitute the thinking subject and reshape its relation to the external social world. Joseph Acquisto analyzes the writings of three thinkers during and shortly after the Second World War who address the question of what it means to think, and what it means to constitute oneself as a thinking subject – at a time that seems to come "after everything"; with the ruins of attacked cities echoing the remains of a philosophical tradition that was confident in its establishment of human beings as rational, of reason leading to progress, and of both the self and the world as knowable. What Georges Bataille calls "inner experience" and Emil Cioran labels "thinking against oneself" is something akin to a drama; not a mere representation of the self in relation to the world, but a process of remapping the relation of subject to object of thought dialectically. Acquisto argues that both writers adopt an anti-systematic approach to thinking that implicates fragmentary writing as a way of turning answers about subject-object relations into questions. Acquisto contends that this stands in contrast to the approach of Clément Rosset, whose affirmation of the inaccessibility of the real leads to an anti-intellectual, grace-filled affirmation of life as it is given, under the guise of what he calls the "tragic." Bringing together thinkers that have seldom been discussed in a comparative light, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset examines the affective dimensions of thought as experience and considers the political stakes of postwar thought as "out of order" with the world from which it springs.

Table of Contents:
Introduction 1. Georges Bataille: Thinking as Anguished Adventure 2. Emil Cioran: Thinking Against Oneself 3. Clément Rosset: Thinking the Real Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Joseph Acquisto is Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. He is the author or editor of seven books, including of Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Subjectivity, Dissonance, Transcendence (Bloomsbury 2023). Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche, and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy (Bloomsbury 2015).

Review :
The real value of Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset lies beyond the estimable exegetical work it does on the three principal thinkers it engages – for the book at once analyzes and extols a nonsystematic mode of dialectics that, refusing the totalizing tendencies of 'resolution,' actively courts contradiction and paradox as the energetic sources for experiential thinking and experimental living. In a time of rampant nonthought and intensifying authoritarianism, readers should embrace Acquisto's account as a provocation to accede to the voluptuous agony of thinking without aim or end – the very conditions of a world transformed. Through careful attention to the question of what thinking means from an existential, political, as well as ethical point of view, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset captures subtle and paradoxical movements of thinking in the three writers' works in the years during and shortly after the Second World War. Through the range of historical, political, and philosophical phenomena which Acquisto explores, as well as the conceptual sophistication of his analyses, this fascinating volume will become a crucial work of reference. One might understandably be surprised, at first, by Acquisto's decision to read these three resolutely singular thinkers (Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset) with one another and, in the case of the third-and to illuminating effect-against or through the first two. But his meticulous examination of the multiple stakes of accounting for the affective aspect of thinking as an experience-an experience achieved, in turn, only in fiction, against the self, or tragically sought in 'idiocy'-is undeniably compelling and offers us, page after a page, a fascinating reading experience.