La poetique pathique de Georges Bataille et de Pierre Klossowski

This thesis aims to show how the novel or literature in general embodies its own form of knowledge that Pierre Klossowski names "connaissance pathetique" (pathetic knowledge). This knowledge derives from emotivity rather than reason alone and relies on affects and percepts rather than on ideas and concepts.;The works of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski will serve both as the examples and the objects of this analysis. These two authors' fictional writings inevitably appeal to a philosophical pathos that implicate the characters as well as the reader. This "pathetic knowledge" that the subject is called to experience comes to be through the literary process seeking to name the unnamable. This particular aesthetic draws upon Nietzsche's work, the themes of which taken up in Bataille and Klossowski writings and appear on the levels of subject matter and narration. The resulting writing strategy leads the reader along, presenting a system of provocative, contradictory, and ambiguous interpretations that open up an affect-oriented knowing or thinking.;In studying the expression and content of this literary knowing, we will examine how the authors rely on strategies of transgression and simulacra to enable the characters and readers to experience thinking as a form of pathos.;In analyzing this "pathetic" poetics as the privileged form of narration in Bataille and Klossowski, this thesis first examines the works of Nietzsche (and, to a lesser extent, those of Sade) in order to understand their impact on the French authors' works. The thesis' second part, which focuses on Bataille's and Klossowski's writings, demonstrates how their works provoke in the reader a pathetic experience of knowing, particular to literature, that exceeds the knowing ascribed to rationalism. The corpus explored in this research includes Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, The Genealogy of Moral and The Gaya Scienza; Bataille's L'histoire de l'oeil, Divinus Deus and L'abbe C.; and Klossowski's La vocation suspendue, Les lois de l'hospitalite and Le Baphomet..