[2] When originally speaking on limit-experiences, Bataille drove inspiration from Charles Baudelaire and his poetics of paradoxical experience, such as in the line "O filthy grandeur!
[3] He noted "the fact that these two complete contrasts were identical—divine ecstasy and extreme horror",[4] and he went on to challenge the conventions laid down by the surrealists at the time with an anti-idealist philosophy conditioned on what he called "the impossible", defined by breaking "rules" until something beyond all rules was reached;[5] Foucault would later summarize this as "the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme".
[7] Foucault remarked that "the idea of a limit-experience that wrenches the subject from itself is what was important to me in my reading of Nietzsche, Bataille, and Blanchot".
[10] Influenced by Bataille, from whom he drew the idea of impossibility,[11] Lacan explored the role of limit-experiences, such as "desire, boredom, confinement, revolt, prayer, sleeplessness ... and panic"[12] in the formation of the Other.
He also adopted some of Bataille's views on love, seeing it as predicated on man having previously "experienced the limit within which, like desire, he is bound".