What we have here is an operation that is Hegelian to the point of excess.
Relying on Kojève, whose lectures Bataille attended, we might define Absolute Knowledge as a homogeneous state in which there would be nothing in the external world that is not mediated by mind or there would occur to the mind nothing that does not take place in the external world. The rift between the mind and the world would thus dissolve and this situation of reciprocal equilibrium would mark the ultimate triumph of reason but also, incidentally, “the end of history”: without desire or work there would be nothing to drive the dialectic, and without otherness to ground the experience of consciousness, the entire procedure would theoretically collapse.
But Bataille was unconvinced. In a correspondence with Kojève written in 1937 and published later as “Letter to X” he writes: “I imagine that my life – or, better yet, its aborting, the open wound that is my life – constitutes all by itself the refutation of Hegel’s closed system” (1988a, 89). Given this understanding, Bataille might have abandoned the operation of the dialectic entirely, but what he develops instead is a rather complex and deeply uneasy position vis-à-vis Hegel. Bataille’s response represents a liberatory struggle to preserve an individual quality – though not exactly the individual as such – against the homogenizing force of the Absolute, emphasizing the incommensurability of thought itself with such a state. Essentially then, what Bataille suggests is a system with neither the possibility of closure nor of realization by the individual as such, the two conditions being mutually dependent. The result is neither an inversion nor a critique of the Hegelian dialectic, but a step further: an approach to the dialectic which foregrounds what Bruce Baugh describes as the “contingent existence of knower” (2003, 84-5). Yet, as in Derrida’s reading of Freud, this step forward invariably brings us two steps back.
For Bataille, knowledge is so ontologically conditioned by a knower no knowledge could be complete to the degree required by the Absolute. Furthermore, there is a domain of “knowledge” that can only be experienced as or because of a threat to the integrity of the knower. Thus something akin to the Absolute may exist – Bataille certainly thinks it does – but no knower may