"Further on your life is not limited to that ungraspable inner streaming; it streams to the outside as well and opens itself incessantly to what flows out or surges forth towards it. The lasting vortex which constitutes you runs up against similar vortexes with which it forms a vast figure, animated by a measured agitation. Now to live signifies for you not only the flux and fleeting play of light which are united in you, but the passage of warmth or of light form one being to another, from you to your fellow being or from your fellow being to you (even at the moment which you read in me the contagion of my fever which reaches your): words, books, monuments, symbols, laughter are only so many paths of this contagion, of this passage. Individual beings matter little and enclose points of view which cannot be acknowledged, if one considers what is animated, passing form one to the other in love, in tragic scenes, in movements of fervor. Thus we are nothing, neither you nor I, beside burning words which could pass from me to you, imprinted on a page: for I would only have lived in order to write them, and, if it is true that they are addressed to you, you will live from having had the strength to hear them."
--George Bataille "Communication," Inner Experience
Bataille was profoundly influenced by Mauss - to the extent that he spent his whole life trying to understand the primitive gift/flow economy from the point of view of the present (which had so lost it) and to reinvent a method. First with political, artistic, and sacred communities - then erotic excess and amour fou - finally to solitary mysticism, philosophy, and poetics.
Never solitary. I am that reader, that other, that communicant who received these words from "Inner Experience" with a passion enabling me to live different against all that is stagnant.
I am attracted to Badiou's mathematical conceptions - minimalist sharp as a rapier. And to Deleuze's liquid flows. Though not without his idiocies (partially that's the point) Bataille alone joins these still all-too-abstract philosophers by throwing himself into the mix.
"The human condition is an affliction resulting from the necessary compulsion to carry out a series of proofs - as demands or impossible goals - producing the deduction that topology cannot be reduced to geometry." (P. Hill "Using Lacanian Clinical Technique")
Rather than accepting this human neurotic condition or its psychoanalytic translation into common everyday resignation and malaise as Freud suggested, Bataille attempts to live at the level of this continual movement of jouissance. And yes that is the artist. The sovereign artist living on the margins of historical time and limited economy in the erotic time of the gift.
The continuum can never be tamed by the discrete but Bataille's concept of sovereignty is a way of living the one-all through your part or set. Each contracted moment as the whole or equal to the whole or the only whole which is. Slightly different from Leibniz's monadology - more Zen.
How do sovereign moments recognize an other set and aggregate without submitting their sovereignty to some outside truth. This I believe is part of catalysis - the continual encounter with other sovereign sets outside your sovereign set. This encounter can become an event (in Badiou's sense) which provokes the new within a set which becomes assimilated and transformed, or this encounter can be rejected as when the immune system expels, or this encounter can be repressed and deposited inside as trauma repeating itself continually.
Analysis is the counterpart of catalysis - the undoing of the knots or patterns now stagnant in the set - a release of traumas - a dis-integration or differentiation into sovereign moments. Catalysis is the integration or aggregation of sets in a new calculus. For example how and why to bions become cells become organisms become consciousnesses... Now to explore analysis and catalysis.
Felix Guattari's process of chaosmosis (from Joyce's chaosmos) describes eternal flux of contraction/expansion. Badiou's ontological development of Cantor's set theory provides another glimpse of an old esoteric cosmology of this nature. A set is a contraction from the infinite. One could say that the real is too full for us (as limited sets) or any other set to grasp and if experienced this fullness would only appear to be meaningless or mad chaos from the point of view (or perspective) of our set.
I believe that the continuum hypothesis is an attempt to grasp the real as one-all which Badiou describes of Deleuze. This position requires something similar to what Christians call faith. In moving from our limited set to the real, one must posit it. It cannot be proved or empirically experienced without a danger of dissolution - horror, fear, madness - as was the case for Cantor, Hegel, Descartes, Einstein, and others who at a certain point instituted a new theory to stop up the void. What I mean by void is but another name for the fullness of the real from another angle. Void for Badiou is the inbetween sets which alone are contracted logoi. What is always outside/inbetween sets could be experienced as void or one-all depending on your perspective. Badiou-Bataille and Deleuze-Guattari take different angles but essentially are on the same track even if the understanding of how fullness and emptiness are the same is one of the final impossible experiences.
Deleuze assumes the one-all and the continuum like a priest of faith.
But similarly Nietzsche and Artaud become the one-all by leaping beyond the closure of the ego-set. Their experience should be celebrated and followed not feared and vilified. The closure of our current set contracts our logos into stifling stagnation suffocating what we are capable of, squeezing us into neurotic decay.
Badiou and Lacan construct political and psychoanalytic practices of resolving this stagnation, whereas Deleuze (and in the end Bataille too) sing how we are already there for "ecstasy scarcely differs from any other state."
A religious crisis as death of the one who was holding you together could be the advent of the new way to love this one again in and through another: Deleuze with Badiou.
To pick up another thread from my own work on bioenergetic medicine, philosophy, psychosomatics...
On topology and catastrophe theory: when is a difference of degree a difference in kind (Bergson/Deleuze) - this is the difference that makes a difference (Bateson/Pribram) - a question of desire and its politics (Lacan/Badiou)
This eternal debate between continuous and discrete is reflected again in the difference between energy and matter, and for me a matter of perspective - can one hold both simultaneously in the "mind" while not being able to look through both lenses.
This is what I find explicated perfectly between Deleuze and Badiou - the fruit of the history of ontology. It's "all" there - nothing.
From Deleuze's perspective the one-all always already is - manifesting as topological shiftings of kaleidoscopic simulacra. This is the fullness of spiritual faith. Very Taoist and Vedic
From Badiou's perspective we (every multiple) are always part of a set contracted from the void-chaos about which no set has the ability to finally name. The ontological limits of any particular logos dissolves at the border of the event which (now unconsciously) provides the foundational rules of that set. Chaos/nihilism is the truth of the inbetween sets which is also the freedom which allows the advent of the new. Very Zen and Christian.
Wilhelm Reich demonstrated in the laboratory that cells breakdown into smaller life particles called "bions" (which can only be seen by extremely powerful microscopes by studying live people) and that these bions also emerge out of inorganic matter and spontaneously organize into cells.
Bonghan Kim demonstrated in the laboratory that the acupuncture meridians developmentally and evolutionarily precede the nerve, blood, and lymph vessels and that they cary a fluid made of "sanals" - his name for bions. Kim unknowingly replicated Reich's work while showing exactly how the bions are formed into types of cells in each organ (liver, heart, spleen, etc) and then carried along that organ's meridian to the specific acupoint on the surface of the body, passing through the vessels and then back again continuously. He also showed that the sanals or bions are actually made up mostly of dna.
The chakra and meridian system is like a software system in the body - an interface between the psychic and etheric energy body manufacturing and organizing its tissues through organs (organic organizing events). It provides a field which grows its physical cells in the outer. While we manifest qi, or light, or life energy from our inner we also constantly absorb it from the surrounding outer in which we are enmeshed from food, water, air, sun... there is no empty space only differences of degree/kind. Deleuze and Guattari's body-without-organs is this ontological body freed from the particular organ society which ties us to this earth-culture: the body of absolute speed to which sometimes philosophy and psychoanalysis, art and poetry can transport us through a plane of immanence while science and medicine aspire to a plane reference localizing and capturing a territory.
William Tiller and Ernest Rossi have also demonstrated in the laboratory how conscious psychic intent and unconscious emotional intensity directly change living and non living matter even when this intent is merely stored in a carbon chip in one lab and transported thousands of miles to another or performed instantaneously across the globe. Again even time/space is a matter of differences of degree/kind which we have chosen at some level to pay attention to.
Who are we?. What are we? Folding ourselves from an ineffable void-all (0-1) into myriad diagrams and shapes...
A qabalistic narrative states that the ain soph or absolute presence of limitless light folds itself to create void through tzim-tzoum out of which will come the multiple vessels - a womb, a birth, a creation. This is similar to Rene Thom's topological ideas on prominence and pregnancy in semiophysics...
Badiou "Being and Event" and "Deleuze"
Bateson "Steps to an Ecology of Mind"
De Meo "Heretic's Notebook" (on Kim and Reich)
Deleuze and Guattari "What is Philosophy" and "A Thousand Plateaus"
Pribram "Brain and Perception"
Reich "The Cancer Biopathy"
Rossi "The Psychobiology of Gene Expression"
Tiller "Conscious Acts of Creation" and "Science and Human Transformation"