Mr. Bataille has survived God's death and is here in order to bear witness to his failure. "God is silent … everything inside me asks for God."

Modern thought has found two types of absurdity. For some, the fundamental absurdity is "factitiousness," i.e. the irreducible contingency of our "being here," of our purposeless, no-reason existence. For others it is caused by man's being an insoluble contradiction. It is this latter absurdity that Mr. Bataille feels the most vividly. He has read Hegel and agrees that reality is conflict. But for him—as for Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Jaspers—there are no-solution conflicts: he has eliminated the moment of synthesis from Hegel's trinity and substituted a tragic vision of the world for the dialectical vision. For Mr. Bataille absurdity is not given, but made: man makes himself a conflict.

Poetry, Mr. Bataille writes, is "the sacrificial rite in which words...