Reading Bataille, Reading Klossowski

Was it by chance that I ended up reading Klossowski? Could not have been? Or how could it have been otherwise? And, still, if not entirely determined (how could that be, as if by fate), there could be found certain traces, a certain path that takes one from text to text, from one name to another.

My first contact with Klossowski was The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in Spanish translation. At that moment, I was living in Colombia, thinking in assuming my passion for literature seriously, like a suicide. A lot of writers ‘happened’ to me around that time: Barthes, Bataille, Sollers… most of them French. Most of them I started reading them in part thanks to ‘happy accidents,’ because I would find one of their books in a bookshop, because of the attractive editions (for example, I got quite into a collection titled La Sonrisa Vertical [The Vertical Smile], with lavish pink cover). I was  also ‘coming out’ of a certain interest for ‘erotic literature,’ bored with its conventions, looking for something different.

Bataille was a revelation. But it took time. If I remember correctly, I started reading Mi madre [Ma mere], probably not the best place to start (but does it exist a right place?). What were supposed to mean, for example, all those sentences about God? Not matter how many times I read them, I had not idea. But I was intrigued. Then I got into El erotismo, also published in Tusquets, in a different edition (not La Sonrisa Vertical), revealing me how eroticism -or ‘erotism’, despite the objections-, related to so many other fundamental things, beyond the repetitive interaction of naked bodies, as portrayed in the so-called erotic novels I used to read. And if until then I thought myself mainly as  Nieztschean/Sartrean, a curious mixture, then I became Bataillean, what later on would allow me to rediscover ‘another’ Nietzsche. (For some time, I didn’t know of the Sartre/Bataille exchange of opinions, but it was somehow obvious to me then the limitations of the Sartrean model of thought to think what Bataille was trying to pursue). In a few years, I think I became the biggest ‘collector’, and reader, of everything related to Bataille, in the city where I was living -something not difficult to conceive if one takes into consideration my ‘bibliophilism’, my fanatical passion for everything related to him, in contrast with an almost generalised lack of interest (in there) for his work, at that time. But two of his best known works -Story of the Eye, and Madame Edwarda- were some of the last ones I was able to read, so difficult were they to find then. But, still today, I’m far from having read ‘all Bataille’, especially since not ‘all Bataille’ is available in English or Spanish. I have started to doubt, also, about the ‘quality’ of some of my previous readings, wishing to go back, to re-read his work, as indispensable as to re-read Nietzsche, despite how difficult it seems to me to ‘fit’ such readings into my current projects.

But back to my first contact with Klossowski, to close temporarily this circle (cycle) of memories, I didn’t realise then that the translation was in part by Juan García Ponce, who later would become quite an influential figure for me. I started reading The Revocation, just a few minutes after buying it. I couldn’t wait more; though probably also didn’t have much else, better, to do. And I can only guess now at my initial motivations to buy such a book and start reading it: apart from the edition, the materiality of the book (belonging to another collection I liked; right now I can’t remember its title), a relation between Klossowski’s name and Bataille’s (probably pointed out in the blurb), the relation between religion and pornography, a more subtle and transgressive form of heresy. (Since I can remember, I’ve been an atheist, though sometimes, to avoid confrontations, preferred to call myself agnostic; but having received certain amount of religious education, in a Catholic school, I was tempted, sometimes, to believe -sometimes I wanted to believe; such experiences allowed me to get into contact with figures such as Bataille and Klossowski, which are practicable unthinkable without -or outside- a Catholic context). In the reading, Klossowski blew my mind, of course, with his rhetorical, philosophical and theological simulacra and paradoxes. Especially with Roberte Ce Soir, which I read immediately afterwards, and El baño de Diana [Le Bain de Diane]. However, I wouldn’t try to go any further here into Klossowski’s ‘thought’, or Bataille’s. It wasn’t my purpose, for now, to try to ‘explain’ any of them, but to remember how I got ‘in touch’ with certain names, texts. The role of chance in all this also remains to be thought.