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| FACTORY CHIMNEY.--I was not hallucinating when ,
as a terrified child, I discerned in those
giant scarecrows, which both excited me to the point of anguish and made
me run sometimes for my life, the presence of a fearful rage. That rage
would, I sensed, later become my own, giving meaning to everything,
spoiling within my own head and to all that which, in civilised states,
looms up like carrion in a nightmare. I am of course not unaware that for
most people the factory chimney is merely the sign of mankind's labor,
and never the terrible projection of that nightmare which develops
obscurely, like a cancer, within mankind. Obviously one does not
continue to focus on that which is seen as the revelation of a state of
violence for which one bears some responsibility. This childish or
untutored way of seeing is replaced by a knowing vision which allows one
to take a factory chimney for a stone construction forming a pipe for the
evacuation of smoke high into the air--which is to say, for an
abstraction. Now, the only possible reason for the present dictionary is
precisely to demonstrate the error of that sort of definition.
Georges Bataille, ENCYCLOPAEDIA ACEPHALICA.
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