Bataille 3 (Proust and Sade)

Do you actually read multiple new entries in the order in which they were added as opposed to in the order in which they appear? I suppose it would be good to create a style in which order of ideas doesn't matter... but, to continue with 'Literature and Evil', Bataille remarks that Proust is one of the least naive writers imaginable, and yet if you take the unpublished writings of his youth, some ten years before 'la recherche', you can find assertions that Bataille calls 'aggressively naive'. He includes the following quote, "it is this that moves us in 'the Phaedo'; when following Socrates' argument we suddenly have the extraordinary feeling of hearing a line of reasoning whose purity is unaltered by any personal desire, as though Truth is superior to everything else, because, in effect, we perceive that the conclusion Socrates will draw from this reasoning is that he must die." This is coming from a man whose later work will form one of the most adamant arguments ever made against the existence of a disinterested will to truth - who expounds at length on the fact that only desire can drive a search for the truth, and it is never just a desire for Truth for it's own sake (which, as I've already pointed out, is an idea that can be extracted from 'the Symposium' as well). Proust's naivete, by the way, comes as no surprise to anyone that has read any part of 'Remembrance of things past' (well, unless it was just the final volume maybe), since throughout, the narrator is constantly at great pains to show just how naive he once was, how the path to his final revelation was anything but straight, how it was built on the formation, loss and reformation of countless illusions and dead ends, how there is no direct or economical ways to learn the things he learns (as Deleuze explains, t is all a giant lesson in semiotics - things in themselves are not accessible, only signs which tell us about them. Those signs are like a language and you must go through a long grueling process in order to learn to read them). The particular sort of advocacy of falsehoods that the older Proust embraces makes no sense without the earlier aggressively naive devotion to the Truth (think in this regard of the young Nietzsche, devoted as he was to Schopenhauer).... at least this is, as I understand i, Bataille's reason for including this quote at the beginning of his Proust chapter. His entire discussion of Proust centers around a relatively minor event in 'Swann's Way'. A father is devoted to his daughter - is practically his only concern in life. The daughter is a lesbian, and had her lover living with her in her father's house. Though the father's devotion to his daughter was undiminished, sadness and worry about his daughter's position/ behavior sent him to an early grave. The father is shown in an extremely positive light - his devotion is thoroughly selfless, and we eventual discover that he is the greatest artist in the whole of Proust's work. After the father's death, the daughter and her lover profane the father's picture while making love. The explanation given is that because of the ban relating to the daughter's desires, she felt a constant guilt attached to pleasure, and it seemed that only the guilty and the wicked had access to pleasure. THough the daughter continued to love and admire her father, in order not to have guilt toward him ruin her enjoyment of the relationship she was having, it was necessary to embrace her guilt and think of Evil as itself pleasurable. She no doubt reproached herself for the act afterwards - had she not cared about her father the symbolic act of profanation would have had no interest for her... and of course, Proust himself had a mother who worshipped him and was deeply upset by the gay lover he had living at home with him or her - Proust's father being already dead at that point.
I think I've recounted all of that to you before... in a sense, that discussion doesn't relate so well to Sade, as I can't imagine him being a pure young idealist before going bad - though maybe I'm wrong. In a sense it very much does, as a genuine denial of the existence of Good and Evil, which is admittedly sometimes found in Sade, makes everything else he writes senseless. Have I said all this before in this blog? I fear I might have. I should also point out that in Sade it isn't 'Evil' so much as 'crime' that is prayed, and the existence of laws (divine, human and natural) that is generally discussed. As Bataille points out (so does Blanchot), it is extremely odd to speak of, or think of Sade's books as dangerous, since in order to be dangerous they would have to make crime seem attractive, and invite emulation, whereas in general Sade's books are calculated to awake disgust in the reader. For a person to be turned on and excited by all the mutilations killing, necrophilia and so forth that fills Sade's books, they would have to be unusually sick... (entry breaks off here, unfinished - perhaps to be finished one day?)