What we have seen is that we can only arrive at Bataille through Sade, because it is Sade who poses the problem of the foreign body. For Bataille there are two tendencies in Sade’s writings: firstly,

an irruption of excremental forces

(VE, 92; BR, 148) and secondly,

a corresponding limitation

(VE, 93; BR, 149). These two tendencies are in conflict, with the excremental forces challenging the limitations that arise from their eruption. The two tendencies are also reflected in the reception of Sade, which has responded to the eruption of his writings with limitations by either rejecting them or confining them by admiration. Instead Bataille analyses eruption as the essential movement of Sade’s writings and as the destruction of all limitations. In this way he tries to free Sade from the limitations imposed by his readers.

The

violent excitation

(VE, 101; BR, 158) of Sade’s work shakes those who reject it and those who try to appropriate it. It threatens to overflow the limitations in which they try to confine Sade. Bataille is also an irruptive force of violent excitation, and this accounts for the excitement of reading him. Thle irruptive forces which are condensed in Bataille’s works threaten to destroy any reading that imposes a sense on Bataille or tries to place him within limits. To do so is to destroy the thought of freedom that is central to all of Bataille’s work. If we do not read Bataille as a thinker of freedom then we do not read him at all. He has to be read between the gestures of rejection and appropriation for the heterogeneity of his writings and the heterogeneity he exposes at work in all writings to be uncovered. For Bataille,

the certainty of incoherence in reading, the inevitable crumbling of the soundest constructions, is the deep truth of books

(ON, 184). Bataille’s objective is to expose all writing to the violent excitation of the heterogeneous and so to force us to confront the impossibility at the heart of thought.