Georges Bataille (1897-1962): Criticism in English
Overview
As the influence of French poststructuralist thought spread in American universities during the 1980s and 90s, critics and thinkers on this side of the Atlantic began to investigate the intellectual sources and touchstones of writers like Derrida, Foucault, and Lacan, and as a result touched off a decades-long reckoning with Bataille in English that has found its way into the center of debates in anthropology, art history, cultural studies, economics, gender & sexuality studies, literary & film theory, philosophy, sociology, theology, and many other subfields. Simply put, Bataille is crucial to how we read, write, and think now - partly through the influence of his intellectual progeny, but mainly through his own forceful writings and fertile conclusions.
On this page you can find an exhaustive guide to criticism of Bataille in English, from 1976 to the present, organized by the decade in which it was published. Works on each individual tab are listed from most to least recent. Each book listed in the bibliographies below is linked to the UB Library Catalog, when that item is available in our print collections, and its call number is provided. Books not available in the UB Catalog are linked to WorldCat, where you can discover library holdings for that item in your region; UB users can order these items through our Delivery+ service.
Even though the tradition of scholarship in English is generously represented on this page, the offerings here are by no means exhaustive: by necessity, it omits the lion's share of the copious literature in English published in periodicals, not to mention the entire range of fascinating and important research in French and other languages. Researchers who are ready and willing to look beyond the resources listed here would do best to begin their search for books in the UB Library Catalog and WorldCat, and their search for articles in the MLA International Bibliography, JSTOR, and/or Project MUSE. The UB Libraries also offer Research Guides on Romance Languages & Literatures as well as French & Francophone Literature that contain invaluable resources for the student of Bataille. And you can always contact your librarian and fellow Bataillean, Michael Kicey, Humanities Liaison Librarian, with further research questions and needs.
Image: Hans Bellmer, "Untitled (The Cube)" (ca. 1935-1945). Read more about Bellmer and his close relationship to Bataille's work here. Source: Wikiart.org. Fair use.
Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought by Publication Date: 2017Georges Bataille's influence upon 20th-century philosophy is hard to overstate. His writing has transfixed his readers for decades exerting a powerful influence upon Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida amongst many others. Today, Bataille continues to be an important reference for many of today's leading theorists. His work is a unique and enigmatic combination of mystical phenomenology, politics, anthropology and economic theory sometimes adopting the form of literature, sometimes that of ontology. This is the first book to take Bataille 's ambitious and unfinished Accursed Share project as its thematic guide, with individual contributors isolating themes, concepts or sections from within the three volumes and taking them in different directions. Therefore, as well as providing readings of Bataille's key concepts, such as animality, sovereignty, catastrophe and the sacred, this collection aims to explore new terrain and new theoretical problems.
Affectivity and the Social Bond: Transcendence, Economy and Violence in French Social Theory by Publication Date: 2016This book offers a fresh and original perspective on the relationship between affectivity and transcendence in nineteenth and twentieth century French social theory. Engaging in a conceptual analysis of the works of Comte, Durkheim, Bataille and Girard, this book exposes a major transformation brought about by the sociological gaze in understandings of affectivity and its relationship to both sociality and transcendence in nineteenth century social thought: the ambivalence between the transcendence of the social and the immanence of affective experience. Revealing the manner in which questions of violence and economy are intertwined in the sociological analysis of affectivity, this book reflects upon the problem of controlling affectivity, alongside the political implications and possible dangers of a sociological model which seeks the roots of the social bond first and foremost in the affective realm.
Violence, Society and Radical Theory: Bataille, Baudrillard and Contemporary Society by Publication Date: 2016This volume explores the distinctive but little-known theories of violence in the work of Georges Bataille and Jean Baudrillard, applying these to a range of violent events - events often labelled 'inexplicable' - in order to show how even the most extreme of acts can be seen as socially meaningful. The book offers an understanding of violence as fundamental to social relations and social organisation, departing from studies that focus on individual offenders and their psychological states to concentrate instead on the symbolic relations or exchanges between agents and between agents and the structures they find themselves inhabiting. Developing the notion of symbolic economies of violence to emphasise the volatility and ambivalence of social exchanges, this book reveals the importance to our understanding of violence, of the relationship between the structural or systemic violence of consumer capitalist society and forms of 'counter-violence' which attack this system.
Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion by Publication Date: 2015Despite Georges Bataille's acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers--including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes--and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille's work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.
Available as ebook only.
Georges Bataille: Key Concepts by ISBN: 0Publication Date: 2015Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, and literary critic whose work has had a significant impact across disciplines as diverse as philosophy, sociology, economics, art history and literary criticism, as well as influencing key figures in post-modernist and post-structuralist philosophy such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. In recent years, the number of works published on Georges Bataille, as well as the variety of contexts in which his work is invoked, has markedly increased. In Georges Bataille: Key Concepts an international team of contributors provide an accessible introduction to and survey of Bataille's thought. The editors' introduction provides an overview of Bataille's work, while the chapters in the first section cover the social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts that shaped his thought. In the second part, each chapter engages with a key theme in Bataille's philosophy, including: art, eroticism, evil, inner experience, heterology, religion, sacrifice, and sovereignty.
The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel by Publication Date: 2015Hegel's "highway of despair," introduced in his Phenomenology of Spirit, is the tortured path traveled by "natural consciousness" on its way to freedom. Despair, the passionate residue of Hegelian critique, also indicates fugitive opportunities for freedom and preserves the principle of hope against all hope. Analyzing the works of an eclectic cast of thinkers, Marasco considers the dynamism of despair as a critical passion, reckoning with the forms of historical life forged along Hegel's highway. This book follows Theodor Adorno, Georges Bataille, and Frantz Fanon as they each read, resist, and reconfigure a strand of thought in Hegel. Arguing against more recent trends in critical theory that promise an escape from despair, Marasco shows how passion frustrates the resolutions of reason and faith.
Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society by Publication Date: 2015In this comprehensive and engaging study Georges Bataille's central ideas - the sacred, community and eroticism - are explored in detail. Bataille's project to understand social bonds and energies at their most fundamental level and to re-energise society by challenging individualism is argued to be of continuing relevance to sociological thought. Bataille's infamous Collège de Sociologie is placed in the intellectual context of Durkheimian and Maussian sociology. Social effervescence, gift exchange, and the dual, ambivalent and volatile nature of the sacred emerge as the central threads of Bataille's thought, ideas which challenge both capitalist hegemony and the reductive notion of society as exclusively normative and repressive. The study concludes by applying Bataille's ideas to contemporary issues including de-secularisation and the rise of religious fundamentalism, the vicarious experience of transgressive violence, and finally, to consumerism and the violence of globalisation.
Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille's Theory of Art and Literature by Publication Date: 2013This research monograph is the first book-length study of the philosophical premises of Bataille's theory of art and literature. By means of Bataille's notion of "aesthetic sovereignty", an idea he developed in the wake of the Second World War, Kennedy demonstrates how Bataille's attitude towards the relation between art, society and religion, changed quite substantially in the course of his career as a writer. The book contains an in-depth analysis of Bataille's theory of subjectivity and transgression, which are at the basis of his theory of art. Although the work is an analysis of Bataille's writings on art and literature, it can also be read as a general introduction into the basic premises of his thought as a whole. Kennedy's methodological approach primarily consists in a close reading and critical exposition of a number of texts, which contain the key to understanding Bataille's aesthetic theory and, to a certain extent, his postwar work as a whole.
Georges Bataille: Phenomenology and Phantasmatology by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z67413 2012Publication Date: 2012This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which he wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.
Rethinking the Political: The Sacred, Aesthetic Politics, and the Collège de Sociologie by Publication Date: 2011This book demonstrates that the Collège de Sociologie's quest to create a new place for the sacred in modern collective life ostensibly entailed avoiding the theorization of both aesthetics and politics. While the Collège condemned manipulation by totalitarian regimes, its understanding of community also led to a rejection of democratic and communist forms of political organization, leaving the group open to accusations of flirting with fascism. Acknowledging these political ambiguities, the author goes beyond a narrow ideological reading to reveal the Collège's important contribution to our thinking about the relationships between community formation, politics, aesthetics, and the sacred in the modern world. She expands her historical account of the members' thought, including their relationship to Surrealism, beyond the group’s dissolution, and shows how the work of Claude Lefort extends, but also resolves, many of the Collège's key theoretical insights. This book offers crucial insights into the contradictions at play in modern notions of community that still resonate today.
The Limits of Ferocity: Sexual Aggression and Modern Literary Rebellion by Call Number: PN771 .F79 L56 2011Publication Date: 2011This book is a powerful critique of the culture of extremity represented in the works of D. H. Lawrence, Georges Bataille, Henry Miller, and Norman Mailer. Daniel Fuchs provides close readings of their literary and intellectual texts, which convey a loathing of middle-class culture or, as the case may be, society itself, in favor of a rebellion often expressed as an aggressive, even apocalyptic, sexuality. Fuchs shows as well how these writers reflected and contributed to a broader cultural assault on liberal moderation and Freudian humanism. This absorbing study illuminates the utopianism and narcissism in works of intellectual and artistic "ferocity" that characterized the turn in American consciousness from the period after the Second World War to the late 1960s and 1970s.
The Pathos of the Real: On the Aesthetics of Violence in the Twentieth Century by Call Number: BH301 .C88 B83 2010Publication Date: 2010This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real--their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering--and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means. The works at the center of this study--by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Müller--zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis. Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics.
An Atheism That Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought by Publication Date: 2010French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.
Community, Myth and Recognition in Twentieth-Century French Literature and Thought by Publication Date: 2010Taking as its point of departure the notion of community in mid-twentieth century French literature and thought, this study seeks to uncover the ways in which Breton, Bataille, Sartre and Barthes used literature and art to engage with the question of reconceptualizing society.
The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida by Publication Date: 2010No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. The issue of the extent and the nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency. Each denomination of sovereignty requires a specific mode of subjectivity to explain its meaning and facilitate its operation. The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty - a theme which increasingly attracted Derrida towards the end of his career - in its relationship to subjectivity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity, we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud, in which Freud's economic theory became a key to the nature of inter-relationship in general. As with so many of the forebears who influenced him, Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalising it.
Available as ebook only.
The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication by Publication Date: 2009Featuring a new translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s “Confronted Community” and three essays by Bataille on community and communication available here in English for the first time, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille offers an indispensable account of Bataille’s work. Despite the influence of Bataille on French continental thought, his ideas remain famously obscure. This volume clarifies them by approaching Bataille’s thought through the themes of community and communication. Taking up the dialogue of Nancy and Maurice Blanchot on Bataille’s ideas about community, the essays engage the many perspectives from which he approaches community: encouraging greater community, expressing concern with community, and addressing the connections between community and one’s inner experience. Communication is brought out not as a singular activity, but as a collective natural state—a medium for human expression and relations.
The Dismembered Community: Bataille, Blanchot, Leiris, and the Remains of Laure by Call Number: PQ305 .S94 2009Publication Date: 2009This book examines the intersecting communitarian endeavors of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Colette Peignot, known posthumously as Laure. Through detailed analysis of a series of interlocking texts that the four authors wrote on, for, and to one another on such topics as love, friendship, and fraternity, it explores these authors' theoretical elaborations of community, their actual communities, and the relation between the two.
Against Transgression by Call Number: B37.24443G.1 T28 A52 2008Publication Date: 2008Both a controversial account of the transgressive turn in critical thought characteristic of the moral turmoil of the twentieth century, and a provocative study of maternal transfiguration in the author's own turn from transgression, Against Transgression poses an urgent question for the current generation of literary critics. The book studies the origins of the contemporary proliferation of transgression in the compelling thought experiments of Georges Bataille, and follows its inauguration as a mode of legitimate critical practice via Michel Foucault. It goes on to tracks the author's rejection of transgression as a legitimate critical methodology, showing how the po-faced claims of critical methodology can be exploded by genuinely personal reflection. In so doing, the Tauchert argues against the model of the death of god that underpins the transgressive turn in critical thought.
Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 B55 2007Publication Date: 2007In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a "ferociously religious" sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred. Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss, the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe ("formless"), the author demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice--an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists--a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate.
After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community by Publication Date: 2007Author of the obscene narrative Story of the Eye and of works of heretical philosophy such as Inner Experience, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is one of the most powerful and secretly influential French thinkers of the last century. His work is driven by a compulsion to communicate an experience which exceeds the limits of communicative exchange, and also constitutes a sustained focus on the nature of this compulsion. After Bataille takes this sense of compulsion as its motive and traces it across different figures in Bataille's thought, from an obsession with the thematics and the event of sacrifice, through the exposure of being and of the subject, to the necessary relation to others in friendship and in community. In each of these instances, After Bataille is distinctive in staging a series of encounters between Bataille, his contemporaries, and critics and theorists who extend or engage with his legacy. It thus offers a vital account of the place of Bataille in contemporary thought.
Georges Bataille (Critical Lives) by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 K46 2007Publication Date: 2007Georges Bataille was arguably the greatest influence on the poststructuralist revolution in twentieth-century thought and literature, yet few truly understand his work and legacy. Stuart Kendall now translates the work and life of this renowned French writer, anthropologist, and philosopher into a concise yet informative biography that reveals fascinating facets of this intellectual giant. Until his death in 1962, Bataille was an instrumental force in philosophical debate, acting as a foil for both Surrealism and Existentialism and advocating radical views that spanned the entire spectrum of political thought. Georges Bataille chronicles these aspects of his intellectual development, as well as tracing out his pivotal role in the creation of the College of Sociology and how his writings in aesthetics and art history laid the groundwork for visual culture studies.
Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability by Publication Date: 2007As the price of oil climbs toward $100 a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be characterized by resource depletion? Georges Bataille saw energy as the basis of all human activity--the essence of the human--and he envisioned a society that, instead of renouncing profligate spending, would embrace a more radical type of energy expenditure: la dépense, or "spending without return." Stoekl identifies the differences between waste, which Bataille condemned, and expenditure, which he celebrated. The challenge of living in the twenty-first century, Stoekl argues, will be to comprehend--without recourse to austerity and self-denial--the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure.
Reading Bataille Now by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 R43 2007Publication Date: 2007Reviled and fetishized, the work of Georges Bataille has been most often reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. But increasingly, readers are finding his insights into politics, economics, sexuality, and performance revealing and timely. Focusing on Bataille's most extensive work, The Accursed Share, Shannon Winnubst and the contributors to this volume present contemporary interpretations that read Bataille in a new light. These essays situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, bring forward key concepts for understanding the challenges posed by his important work, and draw out his philosophy on a range of topics and themes, including ethics, politics, economy, psychology, and performance. While focusing attention on Bataille and his provocative work, this book offers a sympathetic, yet critical, reappraisal and rehabilitation.
Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and Documents by Call Number: NX542 .U53 2006Publication Date: 2006Undercover Surrealism is the first major survey of Documents, the radical surrealist magazine published in France in 1929 and 1930, and edited by the avant-garde philosopher and novelist Georges Bataille. Documents combined an eclectic mixture of art, archaeology, ethnography and popular culture, drawing in many of the greatest writers, poets and artists of the time, including Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro and Andre Masson. With essays by leading authorities on Bataille and surrealism, and new translations of original articles, Undercover Surrealism reflects both the subversive energy and the violent confrontations of imagery and ideas found in Documents.
The Beast at Heaven's Gate: Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z72 1998Publication Date: 2006The essays in this collection were originally given at the international colloquium Cent Ans de Bataille: La Bataille de Cent Ans held at the Fondacio Tapies in Barcelona in September 1998. They are written from a variety of perspectives but are drawn together by the singular aim of addressing and interrogating Georges Bataille as our contemporary whose fascination with the rupture between mythical and experimental forms of discourse defines our own age as much as it did in Bataille's own time. More precisely, the essays in this collection range over Bataille's status as a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a philosopher and a prophet of post-modernity with this aim in mind. They not only seek to advance and clarify debate about Bataille's present status in the postmodern canon but also shed new light on the complex relation between Bataille and the present generation of readers who have come to him through the prism of post-modernist thought.
Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel by Call Number: PQ7082 .E74 U25 2006Publication Date: 2006Sacred Eroticism addresses a neglected chapter in Latin American literature, namely, the influence of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski's atheist mysticism in the Latin American erotic novel of the twentieth century. Combining a Lacanian analytical framework with an (inter)textualist approach, Ubilluz reveals how Julio Cortazar, Salvador Elizondo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Garcia Ponce adopted Bataille and Klossowski's aesthetic and philosophical models as a point of departure to rearticulate the modern subject's buried dimension of the sacred through various innovations on the erotic novel's form.
The Headless Republic: Sacrificial Violence in Modern French Thought by Call Number: JC491 .G57 2005Publication Date: 2005Goldhammer explores how the French revolutionaries retrieved a set of ideas about founding violence from the classical Romans and early Christians and incorporated it into post-revolutionary debates that echoed into the twentieth century. By linking sacrifice as expressed in revolutionary practices to modern French theory, Goldhammer shows how ancient ideas of violent political renewal made their way into the contemporary age. Showing how Georges Bataille, Joseph de Maistre, and Georges Sorel adapted concepts of sacrifice to their own particular political agendas--whether reactionary or revolutionary--Goldhammer challenges conventional readings of these three thinkers as "bloodthirsty intellectuals." Instead, he argues, their work reveals the limits of violence as an agent of political change and attacks the forms of violence later adopted by fascist regimes. More broadly, Goldhammer makes the case for including ancient concepts of collective bloodshed in the modern lexicon of political violence.
French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism by Publication Date: 2003This history of ideas considers the impact of Hegel on French philosophy from the 1920s to the present. Hegel's influence on French philosophy has been profound, and can be traced through all the major intellectual movements and thinkers in France throughout the 20th century.
The Sunday of the Negative: Reading Bataille, Reading Hegel by Publication Date: 2003Although often considered an esoteric figure occupying the dark fringes of twentieth-century thought, Georges Bataille was a pivotal precursor to a generation of post-structuralist and postmodern thinkers—including Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lyotard. The Sunday of the Negative provides the most extensive English-language investigation of Bataille's critical treatment of the thought of Hegel, focusing on the notions of subjectivity, desire, self-consciousness, knowledge, and the experience of the divine. The author explains how Bataille's notion of self-consciousness both derives from, and is an alternative to, that of Hegel. Disclosing the origins of Bataille's most influential concepts, the book moves across philosophy proper to include reflections on anthropology, economics, cultural criticism, poetry, eroticism, mysticism, and religion.
Available as ebook only.
Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History by Call Number: BV5083 .H55 2002Publication Date: 2002Sensible Ecstasy investigates the attraction to excessive forms of mysticism among twentieth-century French intellectuals and demonstrates the work that the figure of the mystic does for these thinkers. With special attention to Georges Bataille, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray, Amy Hollywood asks why resolutely secular, even anti-Christian intellectuals are drawn to affective, bodily, and widely denigrated forms of mysticism. What is particular to these thinkers, Hollywood reveals, is their attention to forms of mysticism associated with women. They regard mystics such as Angela of Foligno, Hadewijch, and Teresa of Avila not as emotionally excessive or escapist, but as unique in their ability to think outside of the restrictive oppositions that continue to afflict our understanding of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. Mystics such as these, like their twentieth-century descendants, bridge the gaps between action and contemplation, emotion and reason, and body and soul, offering new ways of thinking about language and the limits of representation.
Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the Politics of the Sacred by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 I79 2002Publication Date: 2002Saints of the Impossible provides the first in-depth comparison of Bataille’s and Weil’s thought, showing how an exploration of their relationship reveals new facets of the achievements of two of the twentieth century’s leading intellectual figures, and raises far-reaching questions about literary practice, politics, and religion.
Sacred Revolutions: Durkheim and the Collège de Sociologie by Call Number: HM477 .F8 R53 2002Publication Date: 2002It seems improbable, but the most radical cultural iconoclasts of the interwar years—Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, and Michel Leiris—responded to the rise of fascism by taking refuge in a "sacred sociology." Michèle H. Richman examines this seemingly paradoxical development in this book which traces the overall implications for French social thought of the "ethnographic detour" that began with Durkheim’s interest in Australian aboriginal religion—implications that reach back to the Revolution of 1789 and forward to the student protests of May 1968.
Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z8813 2002Publication Date: 2002Georges Bataille, philosopher, writer and founder of the influential literary review Critique, had an enormous impact on the thinking of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard, and his ideas have been the subjects of recent debates in a wide range of disciplines. In this acclaimed intellectual biography Michel Surya enters into a complicity with Bataille's oeuvre to provide a detailed exposition of its themes as they developed against the backdrop of his life. The essence of Bataille's life and work were defined by transience and effacement, reflecting a will both to contest the impermanence of things and to confront death. His troubled childhood, his relationships with surrealism and his paradoxical position at the heart of twentieth-century French thought are enriched here with testimonies from Bataille's closest acquaintances, making this a vivid and detailed study.
Bataille by Publication Date: 2001One of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century, Georges Bataille has only recently come to prominence in the Anglophone academy, partly through the influence of post-structuralism. Once seen as no more than a philosopher of eroticism and a writer of avant-garde pornography, Bataille is emerging as an absolutely central figure to discussions of culture, economy, subjectivity and difference. Bataille is the first volume of its kind to offer lucid, diverse and relevant examples of the ways of reading literary and cultural texts in the light of Bataille's work. The essays explore the significance of Bataillean notions like heterology, general economy, transgression and eroticism through detailed readings of literature, film, and popular culture, and his concepts are situated in relation to the ideas of renowned critical and cultural theorists. Here the influence of Bataille is outlined in intellectual and historical terms and the significance of his work can be seen for both contemporary and futural modes of cultural analysis.
Bataille, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing at the Limit by Call Number: PQ305 .H55 2001Publication Date: 2001What happens when philosophy and literature meet? What is at stake when the text of a so-called single author begins to speak in two languages, now the language of theoretical reflection, now the language of narrative fiction? And what relation does writing have to the limit that defines it but, by exposing it to the limitlessness that lies beyond it, also threatens its very possibility? These are some of the questions raised by three of the most provocative and influential French writers of the twentieth century: Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot. Examining all three together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy while at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, an spectres that go under the name of literature.
The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski by Call Number: PQ731 .K38 2001Publication Date: 2001By not conforming to standard practices of critical discourse, laudatory essays give new status to supposedly inferior forms of communication and states of being--including chatter, silence, sickness, imbalance, and absence of work--and emphasize affective states or emotions such as joy, friendship, and longing. This book examines a group of five twentieth-century French intellectuals--Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Pierre Klossowski--and their laudatory essays about each other. Structured as a circular series of exchanges, the book examines pairings of two thinkers with respect to a given theme. Where the praise is most excessive, approaching delirium, Kaufman locates a powerful thought-energy that pushes the laudatory essay to its limits.
The Cut: Reading Bataille's Histoire de l'œil by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 H484 1999Publication Date: 2000Patrick ffrench gives an imaginative theoretical reading of the unsettling masterpiece, Histoire de l'oeil (1928), by the French writer Georges Bataille, recognized now as a major figure in twentieth-century French literature. Bataille's erotic and disturbing text is a traumatic event in the history of modernity, provoking critical moments in the trajectories of structuralism and in the recent theorizations around his notion of the informe.
Georges Bataille (Core Cultural Theorist) by Publication Date: 2000Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille's ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world. His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging and utterly unique thinker.
The Inner Scar: The Mysticism of Georges Bataille by Publication Date: 2000Drawing on texts the French thinker wrote between 1938 and 1947, Hussey addresses the question and challenge of Bataille's relation to mysticism, examining the relation between his account of an inner experience of lost identity, and how he parallels it to traditional forms of religious mysticism.
Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction by ISBN: 0Publication Date: 2000This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States. Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.
Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 C66 2000Publication Date: 1999When Sartre referred to Georges Bataille as a "new mystic," he meant the label as an insult. Sartre considered mysticism to be a less rigorous mode of inquiry than philosophy—especially dangerous where the writings of mystics adapt philosophical terminology for different purposes. In Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, Peter Connor argues that literary scholars, eager to represent Bataille as a philosopher or as an early deconstructionist, have tended to neglect or misunderstand Bataille's interest in mysticism. Connor's study corrects this distorted view of Bataille, giving us a more complete picture of the complex and influential writer. Through examination of Bataille's writings—including Inner Experience and his underappreciated final book, Tears of Eros—Connor shows the surprising connection between Bataille's mysticism and his sense of personal and political ethics. Mysticism, Connor argues, lies at the heart of Bataille's double identity as an intellectual and as a kind of anarchic prophet.
Forbidden Fictions: Pornography and Censorship in Twentieth-Century French Literature by Call Number: PQ673 .P55 1999ISBN: 0Publication Date: 1999French culture has long been perceived by the English-speaking reader as somehow more 'erotic' than its Anglo-Saxon equivalent. Forbidden Fictions is the first English-language study devoted exclusively to the wide spectrum of French literary pornography in the twentieth century. Phillips provides a broad history of the genre and the associated moral and political issues. Among the texts examined in detail - all selected for their literary or sociopolitical importance - are landmark works by Apollinaire, Louÿs, Bataille, Réage, Robbe-Grillet, Arsan, and Duvert. Phillips challenges current politically correct trends in literary criticism and stereotyped censoring discourses about pornography to provide a new reading of each text and to illustrate the genre's potential for social subversion. Forbidden Fictions addresses the most controversial issues of contemporary sexual politics, such as objectification, sadomasochism, homoeroticism and paedophilia, with particular emphasis on the feminist debate on pornography.
Bataille: A Critical Reader, by Call Number: B2430 .B33954 B38 1998Publication Date: 1998An elegant introduction to Bataille′s major concepts and concerns, Bataille: A Critical Reader underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ways, on an entire generation of thinkers.
Georges Bataille (Twayne's World Authors Series) by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z627 1998Publication Date: 1998Bataille did not receive the accolades his work deserved during his lifetime. Today, most of his writings have been translated into English due to the popularity of his ideas to the generation of writer-intellectuals who have come to be known as "post-structuralists." Bataille's work, however, contains a much broader vision than that attributed to him by the post-structuralists. Roland Champagne presents here the overall scale of Bataille's work through an exposure of its five major components: his biography, the influences on his work, an overview of the "general economy" of his writings, the appropriations of his writings by major intellectuals, and the overlooked affirmations of Bataille.
Formless: A User's Guide byCall Number: N6488 .F8 P316813 1997Publication Date: 1997Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new set of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Although it has been over 60 years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the formless been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of 20th-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; Formless constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.
Absent Without Leave: French Literature Under the Threat of War by Call Number: PQ305 .H6513 1997ISBN: 0Publication Date: 1997They were not the Banquet Years, those anxious wartime years when poets and novelists were made to feel embarrassed by their impulse to write literature. And yet it was the attitude of those writers and critics in the 1930s and 1940s that shaped French literature - the ideas of Derrida, Foucault, de Man, Deleuze, and Ricoeur - and has so influenced literary enterprise in the English-speaking world since 1968. This literary history, the prehistory of postmodernism, is what Denis Hollier recovers in his interlocking studies of the main figures of French literary life before the age of anxiety gave way to the era of existentialist commitment.
Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton by Call Number: PQ305 .G78 1997Publication Date: 1997In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of the influential journal Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground. The author analyzes cultural and theoretical positions--pure art, automatism, engagement, and transgression--that structured the literary and critical field from the 1920's to the 1950's to show their strong impact on the formulation and elaboration of theoretical issues in more recent decades. Focusing on the question of relations between poetry and action, she reexamines these positions and uncovers proximities between them that significantly displace theoretical issues. These proximities emerge when a philosophical subtext of Bergson--antiphilosopher and nondialectical thinker--is revealed to operate alongside the more obvious subtext of Hegel.
Georges Bataille: An Occasion for Misunderstanding, Diacritics, vol. 26, no. 2 by Publication Date: 1996A special issue of a leading theory journal devoted to Bataille's work.
Contents: Carolyn J. Dean, "Introduction" | Suzanne Guerlac, "Bataille in Theory: Afterimages (Lascaux)" | Judith Surkis, "No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault" | Jean Dragon, "The Work of Alterity: Bataille and Lacan" | Sheri I. Hoem, "Community and the 'Absolutely Feminine'" | Jean-Michel Heimonet, "Bataille and Sartre: The Modernity of Mysticism," trans. Emoretta Yang | Amy Hollywood, "Bataille and Mysticism: A 'Dazzling Dissolution'" | Elisabeth Arnould, "The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice" | Lucette Finas, "Reading Bataille: The Invention of the Foot"
On Bataille: Critical Essays by Call Number: B2430 .B339 O5 1995Publication Date: 1995This book examines the significance of Bataille's contributions to various areas of investigation: philosophical inquiry in the broadest sense; economic theory relative to waste, expenditure, and the heterogeneous; the political commitment expected of the intellectual and his relationship to the whole man; the experience of a subject at its limits, in moments of alterity, or of inscription within the literary text.
Bataille's Wound by Call Number: PS3557 .R386 B38 1995Publication Date: 1995Bataille's Wound is a fictional presentation of the thought of a central modern French thinker and novelist, showing him as a radical teacher and mentor. Georges Bataille was a highly controversial writer associated with the Surrealist movement and—in writing often considered by turns pornographic and brilliant—concerned with moral transgression and the authenticity of inner experience. Greene uses quotation, paraphrase, and the recreation of Bataille's celebrated style to further the spirit of that work.
Bataille: Writing the Sacred by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z585 1995Publication Date: 1994Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work. The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together international specialists on Bataille from philosophy and literature to art history, this collection is able to explore the many facets of his writings.
Maternal Fictions: Stendhal, Sand, Rachilde, and Bataille by Call Number: PQ653 .L84 1994Publication Date: 1994Stendhal, George Sand, Rachilde, Georges Bataille: Forgoing the patronym, with its weight of meaning, these modern French writers renamed themselves in their work. Their use of pseudonyms, as Maryline Lukacher demonstrates in this provocative study, is part of a process to subvert the name of the father and explore the suppressed relation to the figure of the mother. Combining psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, and literary analysis, Maternal Fictions offers a complex psychological portrait of these writers who managed at once to challenge patriarchal authority and at the same time attempt to return to the maternal. Maternal Fictions establishes a new pseudonymous genealogy in modern French writing that will inform and advance our understanding of the act of self-creation that occurs in fiction.
The Myth of the Other: Lacan, Deleuze, Foucault, Bataille by Call Number: B2421 .R43 1994ISBN: 0944624200Publication Date: 1994Rella came of age as a philosopher in Italy during the period of the "crisis of reason" or more generally the exhaustion of classical rationality in its authority to structure experience. For Rella, unlike many others, the tensions of the crisis are productive. In The Myth of the Other, he presents a unique perspective on four seminal French thinkers: Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, and Bataille. Moe's masterful translation brings this remarkable Italian thinker to American readers for the first time. This slim book mayvery well change the way American scholars think about the crisis of the other and the self coming our of French poststructuralism.
Georges Bataille by Call Number: PQ2603.A695 Z855 1994Publication Date: 1994George Bataille (1867-1962) is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first book in English to examine Bataille's work as a whole. It offers an accessible introduction to a complex and often ambiguous thinker.
Symbolic Exchange and Death by Call Number: HM291 .B34 1993Publication Date: 1994Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and controversial of contemporary social theorists. Translated into English for the first time, this remarkable volume examines the full extent of his critical appraisal of social theories including traditional Marxism, cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, and feminist thought. In particular, it offers the most complete elaboration of Baudrillard's concept of the simulacrum and his reorientation of social theory toward the issues of fashion, the body, and death. This book, originally published in France in 1976, is a recognized classic and one of the most important sources for the redefinition of contemporary social thought.
The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentered Subject by Call Number: BF697 .D363 1992Publication Date: 1992Why did France spawn the radical poststructuralist rejection of the humanist concept of 'man' as a rational, knowing subject? In this innovative cultural history, Carolyn J. Dean sheds light on the origins of poststructuralist thought, paying particular attention to the reinterpretation of the self by Jacques Lacan, Georges Bataille, and other French thinkers. Arguing that the widely shared belief that the boundaries between self and other had disappeared during the Great War helps explain the genesis of the new concept of the self, Dean examines an array of evidence from medical texts and literary works alike. The Self and Its Pleasures offers a pathbreaking understanding of the boundaries between theory and history.
Also available as an ebook: JSTOR | Project MUSE
Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, by Call Number: PQ2603 .A695 Z713 1992Publication Date: 1992Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, among others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work.
The Inoperative Community by Publication Date: 1991This work examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse and the individual. Contrary to popular Western notions of community, the author shows that it is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power.
The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism by Call Number: PQ2603.A695 .Z74 1992Publication Date: 1990An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.
Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard by Call Number: B831.2 .P44 1991Publication Date: 1990In Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis presents a new view of the history of poststructuralism (heterology) and the origins of postmodernism by analyzing three important French theorists, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard. Beginning with the introduction of Hegel in French postmodernist thought--largely but not exclusively through the thought of Georges Bataille--Pefanis argues that the core problematics of postmodern aesthetics--history, exchange, representation, and writing--are related to Bataille's reconceptualization of the Hegelian framework. Pefanis explores how Bataille was influenced by Hegel, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Nietzsche, and traces the effects of this influence on the analyses and critiques of later postmodernists, most notably Lyotard and Baudrillard. Finally, employing these postmodernists along with Freud and Jacques Lacan, Pefanis discusses discourse on postmodernism and its relation to Freud's concept of the death drive. This intellectual history makes valuable contributions to the debates over what the "postmodern" may mean for intellectual and political activity.
Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory by Call Number: PQ94 .S5 1990Publication Date: 1990Explores the ways in which Blanchot and Bataille have influenced post-structuralist and deconstructionist critics. The book suggests that a critic should be a ventriloquist, taking his cues from the author's words.
On Bataille, Yale French Studies no. 78 by Publication Date: 1990A special issue of a leading journal in French literature and culture devoted to previously unpublished texts by Bataille and new essays on Bataille.
Contents: Allan Stoekl, "Editor's Preface" | Georges Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice," trans. Jonathan Strauss | René Char, "Open Letter" | Georges Bataille, "Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of the Writer," trans. Christopher Carsten | Jean-Luc Nancy, "Detours of Rewriting," trans. Katherine Lydon | Rebecca Comay, "Gifts Without Presents: Economies of 'Experience' in Bataille and Heidegger" | Suzanne Guerlac, "'Recognition' by a Woman!: A Reading of Bataille's L'Érotisme" | Jonathan Strauss, "The Inverted Icarus" | Denis Hollier, "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille," trans. Hilari Allred | Michèle Richman, "Bataille Moralist?: Critique and the Postwar Writings" | Jean-Michel Besnier, "Georges Bataille in the 1930s: A Politics of the Impossible," trans. Amy Reid | Allan Stoekl, "Truman's Apotheosis: Bataille, 'Planisme,' and Headlessness" | Jean-Joseph Goux, "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism," trans. Kathryn Ascheim & Rhonda Garelick | Jean-Michel Heimonet, "Recoil in Order to Leap Forward: Two Values of Sade in Bataille's Text," trans. Joaniko Kohchi | Marie-Christine Lala, "The Conversions of Writing in Georges Bataille's L'Impossible," trans. Robert Livingston | Steven Ungar, "Phantom Lascaux: Origin of the Work of Art"
Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde by Call Number: PQ307.E95 S85 1990Publication Date: 1990With this important new book, Susan Suleiman lays the foundation for a postmodern feminist poetics and theory of the avant-garde. Suleiman directly addresses the subversive intent of avant-garde movements from Surrealism to postmodernism. Through her detailed readings of provocatively transgressive works by Breton, Bataille, Barthes, Robbe-Grillet, Duchamp, Ernst, and others, Suleiman demonstrates the central role of the female body in the male erotic imagination and illuminates the extent to which masculinist assumptions have influenced modern art and theory. By examining the work of contemporary women avant-garde artists and theorists--including Hélène Cixous, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson, Leonora Carrington, Barbara Kruger, Jenny Holzer, and Cindy Sherman--Suleiman shows the political power of feminist critiques of patriarchal ideology, and especially emphasizes the power of feminist humor and parody.
Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge by Call Number: PQ307.P64 S76 1985Publication Date: 1985The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates. In this book, Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms. The irreconcilable tendencies of these authors can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation. Stoekl acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France—that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual—are not at all remote from contemporary theoretical concerns.
Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication by Call Number: P90 .L43Publication Date: 1982The problematic reality of an alterity implicit in the concept of communication has been a consistent attestation in formal discourse. The rapport of thought to this alterity has been consistently described as a radical inadequation. By virtue of the communicational economy which produces discontinuity and relation, illumination and the possibility of consciousness, an opacity haunts the famili arity of comprehension. Consciousness' spontaneity is limited by the difference or discontinuity of the exterior thing, of the exterior subject or intersubjective other, and of the generality of existence in its excess over comprehension's closure. An element implicit in difference or discontinuity escapes the power of comprehension, and even the possibility of manifestation.
Reading Georges Bataille: Beyond the Gift by Call Number: PQ2603.A695 Z86Publication Date: 1982[No description is available for this title.]
Intersections: A Reading of Sade with Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski by Call Number: PQ2063.S3 G35Publication Date: 1981Four writers form the central cast of characters of this literary-philosophical dialogue which seeks to transcend the barriers of time, space, and sexual identity imposed by traditional approaches to literature. Gallop observes that Sade and the structuralists display a congruity of purpose, in that both take as their goal the destruction of the classical dichotomy, long enshrined at the heart of the humanist tradition, between the ideal and the material. She introduces Bataille's Sade to Blanchot's Sade, relates Klossowski's Sade to Klossowski's Bataille, and, when necessary extricates Sade himself from the web of what has been written about him. Gallop demonstrates, however, that Sade is ultimately not appropriable--cannot, in effect, be consumed--and that, thus, an inversion occurs whereby Bataille, Blanchot, and Klossowski become extensions of Sade's characters, subsumed into the Sadian world.
Georges Bataille, Semiotext(e) vol. 2, no. 2 by Publication Date: 1976An early issue of the seminal theory journal devoted to texts by and about Bataille.
Contents: Denis Hollier, "Présentation" | Georges Bataille, "Hemingway in the Light of Hegel" | Georges Bataille, "La Vénus de Lespugue (inédit)" | Jacques Derrida, "A Hegelianism Without Reserve" | A. Smock & P. Zuckerman, "Politics & Eroticism" | Charles Larmore, "Bataille's Heterology" | Peter B. Kussel, "From the Anus to the Mouth to the Eye" | Bibliography
