Promotional jacket text for George Bataille's Inner Experience, a work of nonfiction published by the State University of New York Press:

We receive these hazy illusions like a narcotic necessary to bear life. But what happens to us when, disintoxicated, we learn what we are? Lost among babblers in a night in which we can only hate the appearance of light which comes from babbling. The self-acknowledged suffering of the disintoxicated is the subject of this book...

His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "the mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy coexist."

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