“Le bas matérialisme et la gnose,” Documents, second year 1 (1930): 1-8. Reprinted in Œuvres complètes, vol 1, ed. Denis Hollier (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 220-26.

English translation: “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 45-52.

il est difficile de rester aujourd’hui indifférent aux solutions même en partie faussées apportées au début de l’ère chrétienne à des problèmes qui ne paraissent pas sensiblement différents de nôtres (qui sont ceux d’une société dont les principes originels sont devenus, dans un sens très précis, lettre morte, d’une société qui doit se mettre en cause et se renverser elle-même pour retrouver des motifs de force et d’agitation violente).

[it is difficult today to remain indifferent even to partly falsified solutions brought, at the beginning of the Christian era, to problems that do not appear noticeably different from our own (which are those of a society whose original principles have become, in a very precise sense, the dead letter of a society that must put itself in question and overturn itself in order to rediscover motives of force and violent agitation).]

[Bataille’s] anti-idealist passion was to find its most perfect expression in “Le Base Matérialisme et la gnose,” a text of Manichaean inspiration devoted, in principle, to Gnostic intaglios: dismissing both “God as abstraction (or simply idea) and abstract matter, the head warden and the prison walls,” Bataille sees the monstrous deities reprented on these stones--one of which is acephalous, a motif on which he will place great emblamtic importance at a later time--as “the figuration of forms in which it is possible to see the image of this base matter, which alone, through its impropriety and a staggering lack of consideration, allows the intelligence to escape the constraint of idealism.”
Michel Leiris, “From the Impossible Bataille to the Impossible Documents,” Brisées, trans. Lydia Davis (San Francisco: North Point, 1989), 244.