Paluch
The Toe

Summary/Abstract: Can a toe become a philosophical problem? The Big Toe is the title of an unusual essay by Georges Bataille, written in 1929 and published in „Documents“. A brilliant commentary was written by Roland Barthes... „Bataille thought in the Nietzschean style: that which is loftiest and most noble in man, for example, the head, remains in a mysterious relationship with that which is most mundane. (...) Barthes demonstrated that Bataille's wisdom consists in using scientific discourse in a contrary, artistic way which, one would like to say, is doubled or even multiplied. This is scientific discourse in inverted commas, shifted, opened, sometimes mocked and at the same time deceitfully and faux naively proposed precisely as a scientific discourse. According to Barthes in the text by Bataille, truth and wisdom stem from fiction which, successfully composed, allows a brief, flickering, but true grasping of the truth...“.

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