The exigency as experience

pp. 223-273

in: Joseph Libertson, Proximity, Berlin, Springer, 1982

Abstract

"I think the way a girl takes off her dress," writes the Bataille of L'Experience intérieure.¹ His irony and enthusiasm attest the importance and overdetermination of the theme of nudity in proximity. Within Bataille's discursive and fictional texts, nudity and denudation are constant presences which describe, on one hand, the excess of the exigency, and on the other hand, the communicational proposition of intersubjectivity. It is noteworthy that these themes are largely absent from Blanchot's text, and that they are a constant in Levinas. The latter's concept of nudity is a basic axis of his latent involvement with Bataille.