"Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison. He has found beyond himself not God, who is the prohibition against crime, but a being who is unaware of prohibition. Beyond what I am, I meet a being who makes me laugh because he is headless; this fills me with dread because he is made of innocence and crime; He holds a steel weapon in his left hand, flames like those of a Sacred Heart in his right. He reunites in the same eruption Birth and Death. He is not a man. He is not a god either. He is not me but he is more than me: his belly is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster."

 

Georges Bataille - The Sacred Conspiracy, from Visions of Excess - Selected Writings 1927 - 1939