Note on Heraclitus and Bataille

Heraclitus may have been the first to conceive a general movement into destruction, into annihilation.

Fire represents a process of destruction, and only in this sense can one imagine everything ‘turning into fire’. In return, the only thing that naturally arises from fire is smoke and ashes’. If fire is chosen as a model for physical transformation, to replace the Milesian model of evaporation and condensation, it will intuitively prefigure the annihilation of nature, the devastation of the world order, as fire in warfare prefigures the burning of ships, the destruction of crops and fruit trees, the sack and pillage of a town.

-The Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 145

Heraclitus introduced us to flux, imminent annihilation, and excrement through his conception of fire in the cosmic order. Bataille, following Nietzsche, took these ideas to possibly their most radical conceptions.