Georges Bataille constantly refers to God, or rather to his eternal absence and the void that he denotes. By inner experience he means what is habitually called mystical experience: meditation, ecstasy, rapture. From the beginning of the first volume of his Somme athéologique (Summa Atheologica),… published in 1943 under the title L'Expérience intérieure (The Inner Experience), the author states that he is thinking less about the confessional experience "than about a bare experience, in no way connected with any confession whatsoever." That is why, he adds, he does not like the word mystic. The states of mind described by mystics "independent, it is true, of the assumptions with which mystics suppose them to be bound up," have none the less not ceased to be closed to him. Bataille points out in Méthode de méditation that for him this spiritual experience is at the antipodes...