Jean-Michel Heimonet - Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of ...

This is undoubtedly because any truly forceful mind is also a mind so obsessed and fascinated by its own way of apprehending the world that it can admit no other system of reference, no other range of values than its own

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"A New Mysticism" is a "boomerang" text, or a revealing one, in the photographic sense, being more valuable for what it tells us about its author than for what it teaches about the object being criticized

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Sartre's vision of a coherent and intelligible world

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The entire second part of Sartre's essay, which concentrates on the examination of this "form," will be to demonstrate the essentially perverse and noxious character of Inner Experience. As heir to the Enlightenment, and on his way toward Marxism, Sartre reproaches Bataille for having God survive his own death, and for inventing, by way of a detour through a critical approach pushed to its limits, a new form of religion, independent of dogma, rites of worship, and a church, and all the more impossible to exorcise since it is based, as in Kierkegaard, on lived experience--in the sense in which German phenomenology uses the term Erlebnis [see 189].

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Bataille defines inner experience by opposition to traditional mysticism; the sacred that is revealed is not tied to the attainment of transcendence but results instead from the exercise of the critical faculties, through the infinite questioning of thought and language. To counter this, Sartre will have to prove that Bataille is a "real" mystic, not simply a "devout Christian" but a Christian "ashamed" of being a Christian

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