Inner Experience (French: L'Expérience intérieure) is a 1943 philosophical and literary work by the French writer Georges Bataille. First published by Gallimard in its Les Essais series, it was Bataille's first book issued by a major commercial publisher; most of his previous books had appeared anonymously or pseudonymously in small private editions.

Combining philosophical argument, spiritual autobiography, aphorism, poetry, meditative writing and diary-like fragments, the book investigates experiences ordinarily classified as mystical, including ecstasy, rapture and contemplative emotion. Bataille nevertheless seeks to separate such states from religious confession, revelation and the expectation of salvation. He describes inner experience as a "naked" experience that has no predetermined destination and recognizes no authority external to itself.

The work is also an account of a practical method. Through anguish, concentrated attention and what he calls "dramatization", Bataille attempts to interrupt discursive thought and bring the experiencing subject to the limit of its separate existence. The book develops concepts central to his later thought, including nonknowledge, contestation, communication, sacrifice, laughter, ipseity, the insufficiency of individual being and the dissolution of the distinction between subject and object.

Although Bataille draws extensively on Christian mysticism and apophatic theology, he refuses to identify the unknown disclosed by experience with a doctrinally defined God. His project has consequently been described as an atheological mysticism: it preserves the movement of mystical self-loss while rejecting divine union, salvation and permanent spiritual attainment as its necessary conclusions.

Bataille grouped Inner Experience with Le Coupable (1944; translated as Guilty) and Sur Nietzsche (1945; translated as On Nietzsche) under the collective title La Somme athéologique ("The Atheological Summa"). The title alludes to theological syntheses such as Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica, while Bataille's books reject the possibility of a completed system of knowledge. A revised edition published in 1954 added Méthode de méditation (1947; Method of Meditation) and Post-Scriptum 1953.

During the late 1930s, Bataille investigated sacrifice, myth, ritual and collective experiences of the sacred through the journal and secret society Acéphale and the College of Sociology. His essay "The Practice of Joy before Death" joined Heraclitus, ecstatic meditation and the imagined destruction of the individual body. Inner Experience retained these concerns but shifted their centre from the attempted formation of a sacred community to a predominantly first-person examination of anguish, ecstasy and the limits of individual existence.

Bataille's investigations included practical experiments. According to his later account, he had obtained a photograph of a victim of lingchi from his psychoanalyst Adrien Borel during the 1920s. After being introduced to yoga in 1938, he used the image as an object of concentration and associated it with a reversal in which extreme anguish opened into ecstasy. Connor and Hussey place these meditative experiments among the immediate precursors of the method developed in Inner Experience.

Bataille was also reading extensively in the history and literature of mysticism. His sources included Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Augustine of Hippo, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, Angela of Foligno, Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross. Connor argues that these authors supplied not only descriptions of ecstasy but also a tradition of writing concerned with the limits of intellect, language and affirmative knowledge.