The following quotations are from:
Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros
“The violence of spasmodic joy lies deep in my heart. This violence, at the same time, and I tremble as I say it, is the heart of death: it opens itself up in me!
The ambiguity of this human life is really that of mad laughter and of sobbing tears. It comes from the difficulty of harmonizing reason’s calculations with these tears… With this horrible laugh…” 20
“These limits are given in the fact that, inevitably, the end of reason, which exceeds reason, is not opposed to the overcoming of reason!
In the violence of the overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!” 20
“Among the gods, Dionysos is the one essentially linked to the feast. Dionysos is the god of the feast, the god of religious transgression. Dionysos is seen most often as the god of the vine and of drunkenness. Dionysos is a drunken god, the god whose divine essence is madness. But, to begin with, madness is itself of divine essence. Divine, which is to say, it denies the law of reason.” 71