Bataille’s deep interest, lest anybody remain confused, is in the study of silence.
Silence is the socially determined (but unconsciously imposed) blanket that covers the realities of psychological and emotional violence. Reason gives us no words to adequately convey an experience of violence. The overwhelming force of naked violence, even as a memory, mocks our timid assertions that something about it has been violating. Bataille’s response to violence is to attempt to reveal it through language — an attempt that is generally inclined to fail (for language is logical, and implies a logic about the way things work, whereas violence avoids being pinned down by the facile conceptualisations available to language.)
Bataille is a kind of Taoist, (or, left Hegelian), who notices that a state of being psychologically abject (due to forces of extra-linguistic violence) form the underlying conditions of our social experiences. He also sees that we do not manage get rid of this pervasive violence by such tactics as being more sociable or by ignoring it.
The Tao is the silence which precedes and gives form to Reason. The Tao that is silence is the silencing cloaking the violence which brings about social conformity, which forges history, which destroys or decimates certain portions of the population. To ignore this violence is to place all your hope in reason. But the very imposition of your own reason on others is a form of violence (which most perpetrators are reluctant to acknowledge.) The reign of reason is also the reign of an enforced passivity, which atrophies and harms the animal self that is constrained and condemned to slavery by the reasoning self.
To realise that reason is only half of the story of human existence, and that the rest is silence is to embrace the Tao.
