Famous quote by Georges Bataille

"I believe that truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction"

About this Quote

Georges Bataille’s assertion that “truth has only one face: that of a violent contradiction” invites a profound reflection on the nature of truth, not as harmonious resolution, but as an arena of tension. In ordinary discourse, truth is often equated with clarity, consistency, or conformity to fact. Bataille, though, posits truth as inherently paradoxical, born of friction between opposites, never fully reconcilable, always on the verge of rupturing itself. The contradiction here is not a flaw to be eliminated, but the very pulse of truth’s aliveness.

In this perspective, truth resists neat classification or passive acceptance. It destabilizes, demanding attention where ideas, experiences, or values collide. For Bataille, reality is fundamentally liminal, traversed by forces that refuse synthesis. Truth, then, is not encapsulated in static statements, but emerges only where certainties collapse, where rationality encounters its limits, and where the boundaries of thought or experience are crossed with risk and intensity. The adjective “violent” does not merely conjure physical force, but alludes to psychic, existential, or epistemological upheaval, where established meanings are torn apart, and only in that fragmentation do we glimpse something of the real.

Such a notion challenges the comfort of coherence and compels a recognition that comprehension is often achieved at the price of reduction or exclusion. To embrace truth as violent contradiction is to acknowledge that understanding is inescapably dynamic and uneasy. It is a ceaseless negotiation between what can be said and what resists articulation, between the histories we inherit and the ruptures that remake them. Bataille, in valorizing contradiction, insists on a more radical honesty: affirmation of the world in all its incompatibilities and disturbances. In this view, truth ceases to be a possession and becomes an endless process, lived at the threshold between opposing forces, irreducible, vital, and always unfinished.

About the Author

France Flag This quote is written / told by Georges Bataille between September 16, 1897 and July 9, 1962. He/she was a famous Writer from France. The author also have 13 other quotes.
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