Abstract

In this chapter, I attempt a reading of Bataille on Nietzsche and religion, concentrating in particular on Inner Experience, and consider how Bataille’s approach contrasts with other ‘religious’ readings of Nietzsche. Bataille, first, understands ‘God is dead’ in terms of sacrifice-we kill him and want to kill him (‘Dieu soit mort’)-which immediately gives it a religious character.Whereas many religious readings of Nietzsche have been upbeat, bringers of glad tidings about ‘affirmation and grace’ (Altizer) or an ‘elemental Yes’ (Roberts), Bataille’s God-sacrificer is anguished: trembling, laughter, even megalomania and madness are likely accompaniments of the sacrifice. For Bataille, sacred life involves the inescapable laceration of individual integrity. After completing a presentation of Bataille’s sense of God-be-dead experience, I turn to the question of how Nietzschean all this is. After all, Bataille himself never posed as a ‘true exegete’. Yet although one can hardly ‘demonstrate the correctness’ of his way of reading Nietzsche, there are important resonances, notably in The Madman, Zarathustra’s Prologue, and in aspects of Nietzsche’s figuring of Dionysus, that in my view make Bataille’s ‘dice-throw’ still a luckier hit than many ostensibly more careful readings.