It was at Victor’s Café, on Rue St. Sauveur, on September 11 in 1983. A group of masochistic Chileans had gathered to remember that dismal day. There were twenty or thirty of us and we were scattered around inside the café and at the outside tables. Suddenly someone, I don’t know who, started to talk about evil, about the crime that had spread its enormous black over us. Please! Its enormous black wing! It’s clear we Chileans will never learn.
Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
“Obscenity is a zone of nothingness we have to cross without which beauty lacks the suspended, risked aspect that brings about our damnation. …If I contemplate the nothingness of obscenity independently of desire and so to speak on its own behalf, I only note the sensible, graspable sign of a limit at which being is confronted with lack. But in temptation, the outer nothingness appears as a reply to a yearning for communication. …Crude obscenity gnaws away at my existence, its excremental nature rubbing off on me — this nothingness carried by filth, this nothingness I should have expelled, this nothingness I should have distanced myself from — and I’m left defenseless and vulnerable, opening myself to it in an exhausting wound.”
Georges Bataille | On Nietzsche
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