Un-Knowing and Rebellion

"My conception...consists in saying that all is play, that being is play, that the idea of God is unwelcome and, furthermore, intolerable, in that God, being situated outside time, can only be play, but is harnessed by human thought to creation and to all the implications of creation, which go contrary to play (to the game)..

Christianity, Christian thinking, remains the screen separating us from what I shall call the beatific vision of the game...

It seems to me to be our characteristically Christian conception of the world and of man in the world which resists, from the very outset, this thought that all is play...

But Christianity is only the spokesman of pain and death...

The philosophy of play appears, in a manner that is fundamental, to be truth itself, common and indisputable; it is, nevertheless, out of kilter in that we suffer and we die...

The other solution: we can think and be the game, make of the world and of ourselves a game on condition that we look suffering and death in the face. The greater game -- more difficult than we think -- the dialectic of the master who confronts death. Now, according to Hegel, the master is in error, it is the slave who vanquishes him, but the slave is nonetheless vanquished, and once he has vanquished the master, he is made to conquer himself. He must act not as master, but as rebel. The rebel first wants to eliminate the master, expel him from the world, while he, at the same time, acts as master, since he braves death...

The rebel's situation is thus highly equivocal...

Rebellion's essential problem lies in extricating man from the obligation of the slave...

I think, though, that this time I have found my way out of the first proposition of a philosophy of play by passing to the game itself...

It thus appears that we extricate ourselves from the philosophy of play, that we reach the point at which knowledge gives way, and that un-knowing then appears as the greater game -- the indefinable, that which thought cannot conceive. This is a thought which exists only timidly within me, one which I do not feel apt to sustain. I do think this way, it is true, but in the manner of a coward, like someone who is inwardly raving mad with terror..."

--Georges Bataille