Faith & Spirit Quote by Georges Bataille

Bataille stages a crude ladder of beings - animal to human to God - then kicks it out from under us. The line’s bait is its familiar hierarchy: we’re used to imagining “higher” forms as more whole, more finished. His twist is to treat completeness as not a virtue but a tell: the only being that can be fully self-contained is the one that doesn’t exist. God’s “perfection” becomes a psychological artifact, not a metaphysical fact.

That’s classic Bataille: he distrusts closed systems, whether theological, rational, or moral. “Incomplete” here isn’t just lack; it’s the engine of desire, violence, eroticism, art - all the messy expenditures that spill beyond utility. Humans don’t simply aspire upward; we rupture, we leak. The animal/human contrast sharpens the point: we fetishize human sovereignty (reason, language, control) but remain porous creatures haunted by what we can’t digest - death, sex, sacred awe. So we invent the “complete” as a fantasy mirror that makes our own fracture feel like a fall from a lost unity.

The subtext is a jab at bourgeois comfort and religious consolation: completeness is the dream of a world without excess, without contradiction, without waste. Bataille writes in a 20th-century France newly fluent in Nietzsche’s post-God universe and in Freud’s account of desire, where “the sacred” survives precisely as what cannot be domesticated. Calling God “imaginary” isn’t simple atheism; it’s a diagnosis. The sacred is real as a force, but the perfectly complete being is a story we tell to anesthetize the terror - and thrill - of never being finished.