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George Bataille's notorious The Story of the Eye was first published (anoynmously) in 1928. Olympia picked up this work, and brought out their translation, curiously choosing to rename it "A Tale of Satisfied Desire." This book is the shocking account of erotica's darkest side, with excesses and extremes, obession and the most forbidden of passions ... Read more

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An authoritative account of the life and work of Bataille.Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acéphale. He has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought, influencing such writers as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the fascinating The Accursed Share, are modern classics.

In this acclaimed intellectual biography, Michel Surya gives a detailed and insightful account of Bataille’s work against the backdrop of his life – his troubled childhood, his difficult relationship with André Breton and the surrealists and his curious position as a thinker of excess, ‘potlatch’, sexual extremes and religious sacrifice, one who nonetheless remains at the heart of twentieth century French thought – all of it drawn here in rich and allusive prose. While exploring the source of the violent eroticism that laces Bataille’s novels, the book is also an acute guide to the development of Bataille’s philosophical thought.Enriched by testimonies from Bataille’s closest acquaintances and revealing the context in which he worked, Surya sheds light on a figure Foucault described as ‘one of the most important writers of the century’. 35 b&w illustrations ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

The Impossible Thought of Georges Bataille
This translation of Surya's 1992 biography of the notoriously contradictory French writer contains nearly 500 pages of text supported by 86 pages of notes. It is the first full-length biography in either English or French. Bataille is decidedly an acquired taste, so this book may well persuade you to admire this neo-Sadean thinker who spent his sixty-five years (1897-1962) as an archivist at the Bibliothèque Nationale and then as director of the Orléans Municipal Library.Surya weaves together Bataille's scatophilic and necrophilic obsessions and debauched private life with his literary themes in a way that is not sensationalist or prurient.The author does full justice to his subject's provocative claims concerning the role of consumption in capitalist civilization; the negative features of so-called inner experience; the alleged links between eroticism and death; and the supposed impossibility of community. Indirectly, Surya shows how Bataille's persistent preoccupation with the "informe" (formless) not only illuminates some of the most cutting-edge academic work in art history and literary criticism today, but also eerily foreshadows recent scientific theories of catastrophe, chaos and cosmic evolution.Hasty readers have long inferred a fascist moment in writings like "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (1933), the first psychoanalytical analysis of its subject, according to Surya (177).To counter this widespread tendency, Surya is particularly good at displaying the development of Bataille's "impossible" thought against the background of French left-wing political activity and thussuccessfully distances Bataille from any easy embrace of French (or German) fascism.
Surya's book is not easy to read, however, if you're expecting the straightforward prose of Deirdre Bair's biographies of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin. Surya's style is that of a sophisticated literary theorist rather than a factual historian.This book is a must if you're already familiar with Bataille's work and wanted to situate it in his life and times. But for a first look, I would turn to Fred Botting and Scott Wilson's introductions to their "The Bataille Reader" (1997) and "Bataille: A Critical Reader" (1997). ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (3)

My vote
No need to sum up the book, the other reviewers did it nicely. I'll just say its a great book, dark and exciting and perverse. If you're into it, buy it. You wont be disappointed.

Unbelievable...
(Before I get into my review of this book, I would like to point out that some of the unheralded treasures in this collection are found in the extra pieces. These include the prefaces written by Bataille for "Madame Edwarda" and the "Dead Man", and two critical essays, one of which was written by another equally intriguing author, Yukio Mishima, who wrote The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea and The Sound of Waves, among other things. The information in these pieces is quite helpful in understanding the philosophy and intent of Bataille's three short stories, and also serves as a great springboard to his other writings. I would also like to mention that I stumbled upon Bataille through the movie "Before Sunrise" - this was the book she was reading on the train - so if you like this book, you might like that movie.)
To start my review, I would like to say that the previous reviewer appears to have understood the broad strokes of Bataille's writing, but failed to see the finer points of it. Their descriptions are accurate, but the conclusions they draw seem to be results of their own moralizing and do not necessarily reflect the basic themes of the stories.
For example, while "My Mother" is a study of the mother's search for destruction and the influence of this on her son (as mygotta has pointed out) it is not a moralistic fable revealing the inevitable pitfalls of a profligate life. This kind of puritanical idea in regards to human sexuality is completely antithetical to the philosphy Bataille espoused in this and other texts. In the case of "My Mother," the libertine lifestyle and sexual openness of the characters is not the result of a slow, fatalistic slumping towards the gutter, but rather is a quest for transcendence through intense experience, especially sexual experience. This attitude is revealed, for example, when the mother writes to her son, telling him that, "I have absolutely no interest in this world where they scratch about, patiently waiting for death to enlighten them. As for me, it is the wind of death that sustains the life in me," or when the son realizes that, "Again and again during those interminable days of my solitude and of my sinfulness I would stiffen as though from an electric shock when the thought thrilled through me that my mother's crime elevated her into God, in the very way in which terror and the vertiginous idea of God became identified. And, wanting to find God, I wanted to burrow down and cover myself with mud, so as not to be more unworthy of Him than my mother." The juxtaposing of base sensuality with divinity, and the constant invocation of taboos in this story are interwoven with what seems to be an ultimate moral ambiguity. And these themes are continued in the other two stories as well.
Bataille's writing is terrific stuff if you can handle its pornographic imagery and blasphemous intonations. His stories and essays question not only the foundations of religion, morality and social norms, but also the fabric of reality itself. This stuff is not just well-written erotica: it is profound and provocative philosophy .

Destruction and Hedonism
Sometimes erotic, other time incestial, and more times than not this book is shocking and curious. The narratives of a boy, Pierre, and his minglings with his mothers reckless lifestyle. The book is a study of a mothersdestruction after she was raped at a young age. It is also a study of thecontradictions of the hedonic world how it creates problems and destroysrather than forgets. Its not always a passive life. Pierre learns aboutthis and we see how it hampers his psyche into being passivle controlled,not just by mother, but by women in general. The lack of the father figure,and the hatred towards him allowed him to feel worthless. The second andthird story, Madame Edwards and Dead Man are shorter variations on the sametheme. A different type of storytelling than I am used to reading,nonetheless I found it completely intriguing (despite at times I did yawn).Once you read this, it will be one of those books that you will remember. ... Read more

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essays, tr Mary Dalwood ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Complex, though not remarkable
Bataille's philosophical/anthropological examination into taboo's and transgressions is a fine work of theoretical inquiry, though it ultimately fails to say anything that Freud has not already said in 'Totem and Taboo' as well as 'Civilization and its Discontents.' Although Bataille's familiarity with ethnographic records is stronger than Freud's, his capacity to extrapolate theories from them is far weaker. I believe that Bataille does little in the way of gathering a unified theory of the taboo and transgression, nor does he provide any genuine insight into the connection between human sensuality and death. However, I found his analysis of Sade and the final commentary on sanctity to be quite interesting.

Sex, death, and violence--a high-falutin' theory of the good stuff...


If I had to pick one book for the Bataille newbie, it would be this one. *Erotism* puts forth the crux of Georges Bataille's critical thought in what is its clearest and most forthright expression. Here the man once called "the theoretician of evil" lays out for the educated layman his controversial and challenging views of the interrelationship of sexuality, violence, taboo, suffering, mysticism, and death. Most of the major ideas found in Bataille's more complicated philosophical works such as *The Accursed Share* are distilled here, as well as the philosophical underpinning of the infamous novels *Madame Edwarda* and *The Dead Man.*

Bataille is always perversely entertaining, if sometimes frustrating, having a facility to cast even the most lurid subjects in a language that can render pornography intellectually impenetrable. The problem is partly due to the fact that Bataille's main concern is to elucidate what he calls "extreme states of being," those experiences at the very limit of human possibility such as orgasm, visions, and death--phenomenon that philosophy has traditionally left out of the equation when considering human life. Because these extreme experiences are often irrational--or transcend rationality, as Bataille would prefer it--they usually fall outside the natural scope of philosophy, as well as language itself. Bataille, who tries to write about these inner states on the outer edge, can only do so by ultimately failing, which he readily acknowledges is necessarily the fate of anyone who tries to express the inexpressible.

In *Erotism,* Bataille, for the most part, confines himself to saying what can be said before it becomes unspeakable and that's what makes this book so much more readable than most of his other texts. Taboo as that which sets us apart from the animal and yet is meant to be transgressed in order that we may know the sacred. Sacrifice as a communal "crime" by which we contemplate the deathless state of continuity that is death itself. Work as the dike that keeps humanity from being swept away in a flood of sex and violence. Bataille follows the red thread that zig-zaggedly stitches together man's age-old fascination with sexual transgression and violent death. From the cave paintings of prehistory to the novels of Sade, from Saint Theresa's pseudo-sexual ecstasy to the Kinsey Report, the result is a wide-ranging and fascinating re-interpretation of the religious instinct in man from the point of view of our mortal obsession with filth and degradation. What Bataille has wrought is a philosophy of "evil" that itself is a thing of transgression, overturning much of what we thought we knew about morality, love, civilization, god, and all the rest of it, but most of all ourselves.

A sort of primer to Bataille, *Erotism* can be used as a skeleton key to access the treasures locked away in his more inaccessible works. A must-read for any philosophically inclined renegade interested in sex and death, *Erotism* justifies your morbid penchant for the corrupt and obscene. You really shouldn't have another orgasm without being cognizant of the insights to be found in this life-warping and mind-bending book.

Freud transcended
Bataille's text represents a cogent, penetrating examination of the topics of eroticism and death, as well as the violence that connects them. He explores some of the links between erotic activity and violence, providing a refreshingly intellectual perspective on subjects typically ruled by silence.

Where Freud noted a connection between sex and violence, Bataille explores this connection in light of its broader philosophical implications. His section on Christianity is particularly helpful in understanding how that religion has rendered an entire sphere of sacred experience unto the profane world, with grave consequences for human culture. Never indicting Christianity or condemning it outright, Bataille instead seeks to explain the condition of humanity in the mid- to late-twentieth century--a condition that still very much troubles us today.

A WORK OF ART
This is, with no dout, one of the best books in the genre. It is decadentjet avant grade. If you like erotic literature and taboo this book is amust.

A compelling addition to the discourse of sex and religion.
Before Foucault ruined the game, this was the cutting edge of theoretical musings on sex.Bataille's "continuity" concept of the erotic still seems fascinating (if not slightly intuitive), especially in thechapters on war and mysticism.Beware of the difficult language, but oncethis hurdle is cleared you're in for a delightful read. ... Read more

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philosophical narratives & poems, tr Robert Hurley ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The new Ulysses
I believe that one day people will come back to this book and consider it to be as ground breaking for the novel as Ulysses was.

It is simply amazing.

There were parts that were so haunting and that drew me to such deep unconscious wells that I felt like screaming at the book with all my strength, eating it, and then crawling under my bed chuckling madly.

I have seen Her. I have seen Him. And it has all happenned over and over again across the ages.

If the future is capable of writing more gems like this, then we have something to look forward to after all.

a 'better book' may be unimaginable...
...in terms of unpredictability, uniqueness,
confessional-poetic-mystic-debauchery and
edge-thriving elan
(some call it true amour)--
Bataille's work here as in
La Somme atheologique trilogy
(GUILTY, ON NIETZSCHE, INNER EXPERIENCE)
takes la frigging Cake!

the last coolest Frenchman, 'e wuz!

Beyond And Before The Erotic
Note from personal experience (the only way to comment): Passing through the seemingly simple sexual plays of The Father, The Son or Daughter, and The Stark Flesh, one may finally attain a sense of lost freedom in a short excursion into self-conscious poetry forced back on itself. However, dropping the issue and/or the book leaves one caught in the cliche of feeling that one understands. This may require a Quixotic reenactment in order to survive this forgetting --- necessarily not only in the world of one's imagination. This transcendence is then achieved again by that fold and feedback of sacrificing to oneself all that one holds dearly and holy --- reason, despair, and perhaps folly. Only in this way can a true confrontation be finally and for the first time attempted and accomplished. ... Read more

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essays on art, tr Peter Conner ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

why the fuss?
I cannot understand why the fuss over this book. The text is disappointing: repetitive, opinionated, insubstantial, more like desultory notes than anything else. The images are all black-and-white and poorly reproduced, and again repetitive and disconnected.

There is too much horror in it. Bataille associates violence, horror, terror, pain, cruelty, with eroticism, madness, ecstasy, the sacred. Perhaps intense cultivation of pleasure creates a corresponding accumulative cultivation of pain. Why should this be so? I don't know except that we have what it takes to explore and we can explore in all and any direction. It's as simple as that.

It's possible to write books and essays that are lucid and meaningful and it's possible to write "The Tears of Eros".

An exploration of value through excessive experience
The Tears of Eros is a fitting culmination of Bataille's search for value through excess.Although Bataille addresses many of the themes touched on here in greater detail in earlier works (Eroticism, The Accursed Share),The Tears of Eros is notable for the significant amount of artwork includedto illustrate the connection Bataille develops between sex, death,expenditure, and sovereign value.This is a "must-read" for anyserious student of contemporary philosophy and--for that matter--any whowould insist that value resides elsewhere than in a petty, bourgeoisindividualism.

Extraordinary treatment of sex and death, emotions and words
It is from woman, we come and to woman, we return because we all have both aspects in our being...female and maleness ... Read more

Product Description
Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

much ado about zilch!
This book was recommended to me as the work of a very great thinker. Having read and re-read it several times I remain distinctly unimpressed. The thesis of the book appears to be that any society, once the most elementry necessities are overcome, inevitably creates a surplus (of time, energy, resources). Soceties differ and are distinguished from one another by how they spend/use this surplus. The productive capacity is not infinite and must inevitably result in "un-productive consumption".

Where is the profoundidty?

still relevant geopolitically
I am taking an extremely dim view (I was thinking about theology, but the final sentence of volume 1 mentions teleology, an antiquated teleology, at that, instead) of THE ACCURSED SHARE by Georges Bataille by limiting my review to those issues that were mentioned in Ezra, which I believe was written at the time that the earliest books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus, were compiled in the form some people are familiar with today. The first section of Leviticus, The Ritual of Sacrifice, in chapters 1-7, concludes with a portion for Aaron and his sons by orders of Yahweh binding the sons of Israel for all generations. Ezra opens with Cyrus King of Persia declaring that the temple in Jerusalem should be rebuilt and returning vessels of the temple which Nebuchadnezzar had carried away from Jerusalem. The greatness and glory associated with this effort is a triumph like "Mankind's Accomplishments Linked to that of the American Economy" on pages 188-189 of ACCURSED SHARE and the final sentence of volume one, "More open, the mind discerns, instead of an antiquated theology, the truth that silence alone does not betray." (p. 190).

The book was written in France to offer support for the American Marshall Plan to rebuild a prosperous global economy after World War II. On the final page of notes, the question, "Why deny the fact that there can no longer be a true initiative toward independence on the part of countries other than the USSR or the USA?" (n. 17, p. 197), states the geopolitical frame of reference that millionaires and billionaires with global interests seem to have risen above today, with the greatness of America as a superpower driving economic expansion in those areas where natural resources, access to capital, and wage levels allow maximum profits to appear when money can flow to those areas where it will accomplish the most. As the millionaire who has spent the most to advertise his views in the states with early presidential primaries, Mitt Romney has proudly proclaimed the greatness of America, but the underlying structure of the political hierarchy is similar in nature to the parallels between Ezra and Bataille's ACCRSED SHARE.

Chapters 9 and 10 of Ezra deal with a problem like the desire of people to move to the United States in order to make more money today. It was reported, "The people of Israel, the priests and the Levites, have not broken with the natives of the countries who are steeped in abominations--Canaanites, Hittites, Perizzites, Jebusites, Ammonites, Moabites, Egyptians and Amorites--but have found wives among these foreign women for themselves and for their sons; the holy race has been mingling with the natives of the countries; in this act of treachery the chief men and officials have led the way." (Ezra 9:1-2). It was such a massive problem that it took from the first day of the tenth month to the first day of the first month to officially process all the separations from foreign wives. This reminded me of Aztec customs which linked the victims to "The individual who brought back a captive had just as much of a share in the sacred office as the priest. A first bowl of the victim's blood, drained from the wound, was offered to the sun by the priests. A second bowl was collected by the sacrificer. The latter would go before the images of the gods and wet their lips with the warm blood. The body of the sacrificed was his by right; he would carry it home, setting aside the head, and the rest would be eaten at a banquet, cooked without salt or spices -- but eaten by the invited guests, not by the sacrificer, who regarded his victim as a son, as a second self. At the dance that ended the feast, the warrior would hold the victim's head in his hand." (Bataille, pp. 53-54).

Certainly the Aztecs were more harsh than the restrictions which the federal government wishes to put on drivers licenses in New York for those who are not American citizens or authorized by the United States government to live within the United States. The question of who is who here can have numerous answers, like questions about whether waterboarding is torture, or how people detained in Iraq compare to illegal combatants. Even a nominee for Attorney General might wish to equivocate about certain questions. Bataille picture people in Tibet willing to maintain a large number of monasteries to keep the young men from serving in an army. "In Tibet, even more so than in China, the military profession is held in contempt. Even after the reforms of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, a family of nobles complained of having had a son commissioned as an officer." (p. 110).

I was drafted once myself, so I read about these things after years of not knowing if I would serve in Nam; then, after I got to Nam, I was even told to go to Cambodia. Though Nixon thought sending troops into Cambodia might make Vietnam safer in 1970, it was also a risky move for those who were on helicopters that crashed. The feeling generated by such changes in the expectations associated with my ultimate objective is described by Bataille:

The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings. (p. 59).

In modern society, people who are not talented enough to be known by millions of people are nobodies. John Lennon was not entirely unwelcome in New York City; he was merely shot down in the street. Government has become so awful at facing any kind of issue, Congress after World War II attempted to define a c.o. as someone who believed in a Supreme Being who prohibits a c.o. from taking part in any war. The Department of Justice was not generous in denying the status to boxer Cassius Clay all the way up to the Supreme Court, where most justices finally agreed that the Department of Justice was wrong about when Cassius Clay needed to file for a determination. Such questions plague anyone who has rules like the clean and unclean beasts in chapter 11 of Leviticus, which then considers leprosy in chapter 13, sexual impurities in chapter 15, nakedness in chapter 18, and handing over any children to Moloch in chapter 20. There are things which must not be worshiped:

"You must make no idols; you must set up neither carved image nor standing stone, set up no sculptured stone in your land, to prostrate yourself in front of it; for it is I, Yahweh, who am your God." (Leviticus 26:1).

It does not directly prohibit saluting the flag or pledging allegiance, but anyone who doesn't is likely to be sacrificed in some other way, like John Lennon certainly was, and Martin Luther King, Jr., both of whom opposed certain aspects of the Vietnam war. The call to support the troops is like something in THE ACCURSED SHARE for me, but so much so that my list will not go on.

a work of genius
Read both books that contain all three volumes: in a way, the summation of Bataille's thoughts and written with clarity. It's not just the consumption-expenditure approach to analysing human activity that'sorginial, he is (as he states towards the end of vol. 3) the closestthinker to Nietzsche. That is an assertion that bears merit as Batailleexamines in as thorough a way possible (and in many ways supplements and isa good commentary on) Nietzsche's ideas of the overman, which he calls thesovereign man. At the core of his thoughts is Hamlet's last line, 'The restis silence'. Sovereignty is NOTHING. A brilliant and vital contribution tothe century's history of ideas.

A thought provoking work connecting religion and economics.
In this book, Georges Bataille explores the connection between man's religious and economic pursuits.By focusing in on such divergent practices as human sacrifice and ritualized warfare in Aztec society, the practice of "potlach" in native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, Tibetan Lamaism, and the conflagrations of our most recent World Wars, the author seeks to overturn classical models of economics. Instead of economics being driven by individuals seeking to satisfy their personal needs, Bataille proposes that economics is actually a social process that seeks to destroy, excrete, and expend excess goods and services.His unique perspective centers around the ideathat the systematic destruction and loss of goods and services is intimately connected to our age old struggle to attain the Beyond.The French philosopher Michel Foucault once stated that Bataille said what had never been said before.After reading this first volume of Bataille's three volume work "The Accursed Share", you can begin to understand why Foucault believed as he did. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Inner Experience
In this book Bataille shows how "project" -- the realm of work not just physical but also the incessant discourse running through one's interior mind -- is a prison, a prison based upon our inauthentic interaction with the world: one puts everything off until later, one livesin a "hazy illusion".But this viel can be broken, saysBataille, through the dynamic ground of non-knowledge, the point onereaches when the quest for the "summit", for God and Absoluteknowledge, dissolves.This point is the height of drama and is ultimatelythe last act of folly (like when Sisyphus realizes his fate of rolling arock up a mountain).One then experiences a fusion of anguish and ecstasy;one is moved by Inner Experience, something that, paradoxically, is not"inner" nor "experience", but rather is like a slap inthe face, a slap simlilar to what a zen monk receives in meditation when heor she realizes who he or she IS: emptiness.

Transgress the limits of experience
Georges Bataille was a French writer and philosopher during the surrealist period. He founded many literary movements in the form of magazines and critical reviews within surrealist circles such as, "Acephale", with friend and contemporary artist, Andre Masson. Other contemporaries of Bataille's include, Salvador Dali, andBataille's nemesis, self-professed 'leader' of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton.

The book, "Inner Experience", was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, "Inner Experience" is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille's philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.

Recommended reading by Bataille: "Story of the Eye", "Documents", and "Visions of Excess" a collection of essays (edited by Allan Stoeckl). Also, to learn more about Bataille, look up "Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille", by Dennis Hollier ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Cute
I'm a fan of Bataille, but I'm afraid that in most translations into English this major thinker comes across as being merely silly about sex and excrement and the Absolute.From his own febrile, pathological alluvium located in a fertile triangle between Eros and Thanatos, anus and genitals, Bataille (said in the helpful introduction by the translator to be using poetry to reach the Eternal) comes up with cuties like these:

The Wall

A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.

I have to admit feeling like that myself recently.And:

Laughing

To laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the pebbles
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pope's p**
at mommy
and a coffin full of sh**.

It doesn't get any better than that folks, although Bataille makes lots of references to the void, Zarathrustra, Heraclitus, and other touchstones of modern Western culture.I do admire his mixture of profundity and scatology and wish that more post-modern writers would follow Bataille's example.Why let the makers of popular movies and television sit-coms get a jump on the rest of us?

Death + Sex + More Death
Bataille's poetry is often beautiful, using words and ideas to paint vague emotional pictures. You might get bored when he goes on and on about immensity or death, but it's worth it for the good parts. ... Read more

Product Description
Takes up Nietzschean thought where Nietzsche left off - with the death of God. Written against the backdrop of Germany under the Third Reich the book explores the possibility of a spiritual life outside religion. In so doing it weaves an astonishing tapestry of confession, theology, philosophy, myth and eroticism. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

The question of Community
It's a real puzzle: why we are compelled to spend our time in the ways that we do. So rarely, we do not question the reason behind our activities, the "why" surrounding it all. But it is hard to back off from our presuppositions; namely, our penchant for being recognized. And so I begin typing a "re-view" of this book, without quite knowing "why" outside of the fact of being-compelled. And, also, because to come to a work like Bataille's is to be compelled beyond one's knowing why, I think... for it ushers us out of the realm of "utility."

When we write or communicate, we never do so in total abstraction. Sure, I'm not sure who you are. But (bear with me), neither do you! The question surrounding Bataille's work is the question of communication and what it is to be a "me" with regards to it. His answer seems simple on the surface: communication is only achievable when being is put at risk, or surrendered to chance. This is a good thing to emphasize when it comes to reading his work in general: there is no use to it outside the putting-at-risk of being qua communication. Jean-Luc Nancy writes of "learning" Nietzsche as communication in this profound sense, outside language-as-reference, or outside thinking as a system of propositions, or philosophy as a set of truth statements: to learn Nietzsche is to have an experience at heart, to share something of, or touch upon, a certain kind of experience, despite apparent contradictions in its expression. As Bataille shows, such contradictions are inherent to the expression ("I'm overjoyed, ruined finally..."). This is precisely what Bataille "does" here: he puts into practice an intuition similar to Nietzsche's (which Nietzsche formulated variously as the death of God, the devaluing of values, the end of grand narratives, the failure of national, political, or economic end-oriented projects, etc.): this is an experience of the absence of community.

Now, there's no getting around it, this is a difficult book, especially the theoretical section "Summit and Decline" which is a paper Bataille gave in front of the likes of Sartre, Hippolyte, Marcel, etc. But intellectional/cognitive cogency is decidedly not the point here, and this book is "sublime" to the extent that it causes these faculties pause and reorganization. To read this work is, in my opinion, to put the very "I" of "your" self at risk (i.e. it is sheer trauma or sacrifice, where both executioner and victim are sacrificed at once); to read this work is to read it as if you yourself were writing it, to be with it like a moment of your own journal. To gloss over a sentence Bataille wrote about anguish, or impalement (Zen), etc., looking for his argument or the logic behind it is totally "worthless"-- unless all of your experience and all of your being can, in a sense, "inhabit" the experience he tries to put to words-- which, make no mistake, would be an exhibition, your exhibition. Anyways, no one could convince you of that, especially not me; but if it's you, I think you'll find that it holds true. The ultimate word for Bataille seems to be "friendship," and I don't hesitate to say that he is a friend of mine, in the same way that Nietzsche was a friend to Bataille (I'm trying to be friendly in the same way... and also: it's urgent). But this criteria of friendship is also the basis for a real heterogeneity; the difference in tone between Bataille and Nietzsche does nothing to diminish their kinship, but establishes it. These works proceed from a crisis that oscillates around joyful freedom (in Bataille's lingo, an anguish that circulates around an ecstasy, where the two transform into one another, etc.); and I don't think that it's being unfair to say that those who have experienced similar crises will find a greater companionship than those who approach this book as a work of philosophy. Or, these works might induce crises-- who knows?-- in whoever is ready, or vulnerable. I think of these works as "direct addresses" whereby I address myself, redress myself, and readdress myself. If I'm not at stake, it's worth nothing; or rather, if I try to make this work "worth something," I've missed the whole point, and it won't reach me the way it could've. It's a real challenge to risk it all (it's not just me that I'd be putting at risk if I did); but for me to say "me" after reading such a work is to have opened a new potential for saying "we." Not incidentally, this is the justification for the plethora of Nietzsche quotes in this book: it's a shared expression, totally, just as it's the traces of something "inexpressible," which is not to say it's without translatability. To open this book randomly, to instantly refer the sentence you stumble upon to an event in your life seemingly removed from it, to allow the "synchronicity" of these juxtaposed glances to inform each other, and to come out the other end of it changed, yet without direction... I think that is the whirlwind ecstasy of risk/chance and non-knowledge that Bataille is indicating, and it situates us in otherness, as otherness, where what's other is the origin of the world...

This book "brings to completion" Bataille's Summa Atheologic: the trilogy of "Inner Experience," "Guilty," and "On Nietzsche." It is helpful to think of them as one struggle, which was for Bataille precisely the struggle to communicate an experience (is it so different from what I am doing here?). This struggle brings him to the limits of language and likewise to the limits of communicating an experience "through words," as well as all the challenges that come with having a "project" as ambitious as communicating ones whole being. What endears me to Bataille is his honesty and his willingness to share (in a surprisingly literary way) all of his failures along the way. The twists and turns are truly human-- humanity at the extremity of being-human. I write with encouragement for this volume and his work in general because of it's honesty and its potential to be a kind of "companion"-- driving you mad as well as easing your madness, often in the same stroke/strike.

Jean-Luc Nancy has coined a term for philosophy: "Excription." It is what 'cannot be read' in a writing, what can't be inscribed, what lies entirely outside the realm of signification (i.e. in bodies, "only"). The word comes from his deep engagement with Bataille's work. The reference of the text is never in the text; when Bataille says "me," or when I read "me," he says nothing but being, that is to say, he says "me." He is "speaking me," not "speaking to me." In a way, that's utterly stupid: in fact, impossible. But that, precisely, would be the point. Nothing is rendered when reading this work other than yourself; it rends you, and your reaction to it says more about you than it says about anything else (there is nothing to say anything about other than you, which is what makes this communication so difficult...).

Alas, as Bataille writes: "The greatest, most certain love doesn't prevent you from being the butt of infinite laughter. Such love can be likened to an utterly demented music, an ecstatic lucidity" (p 61).

The Philosopher of the Impossible...
*On Nietzsche* really isn't a book explaining the philosophy of Nietzsche, but a personal meditation on Nietzsche's influence on Georges Bataille's own manner of thinking and living. For Bataille, it must be understood, thinking and living are inextricable; philosophy must be tested against life, and life--inner and outer--provides the raw material for philosophy. Bataille is no armchair theorist. So it is that a good portion of *On Nietzsche* consists of fragmentary entries from Bataille's own 1944 diaries which illustrated, more or less, his struggle to embody the thrust of Nietzsche's thought--the thrust of it, because Nietzsche, in Bataille's view, is a thinker who points the way beyond himself and into mankind's future. Bataille attempts to take up the torch and carry it further forward into the darkness of the not-yet-and-never-to-be-known. His method, if you want to call it that, is to leave himself open to "chance."

Well, it's something like that.

Bataille takes Nietzsche's work as a template rather than doctrine, a method for a never-ending and open-ended inquiry into what it is to be human, which in itself is a concept that is forever developing.

Bataille is often difficult reading and *On Nietzsche* is no exception. His thinking tends to turn repeatedly in on itself until you feel as if your brain is tied up into some sort of neural Gordian knot. He is also prone to verbal flights of fancy that seem a vestige of his surrealist days--he's a philosopher always straining for the inexpressible. It's all part of the appeal of Bataille, if you find that appealing. Some, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, did not. And called Bataille a mystic, not a philosopher at all. This, coming from Sartre, was not a compliment. It strikes me that Bataille, like Jung, considered subjective states of mind as objective facts inasmuch as they are every bit as influential over us as any other objective phenomenon. So the concept "God," for instance, has a "truth" regardless of whether an actual God exists or not.

I found the first part of *On Nietzsche* to be the most coherent and most compelling part of the book. Here Bataille presents his radical theory that communication depends on an act of violence--the infliction of a sacrificial wound that breaks our own autonomy and the autonomy of another. The crucifixion of Christ being the highest example of this principle--facilitating the communication of God and Man. This transgression, which serves to make us human, thus illustrates the necessity--indeed the good--of evil.

The rest of *On Nietzsche*--the diary entries--I found much less compelling, often incomprehensibly fragmented, and of interest primarily for the copious excerpts Bataille reproduces from Nietzsche's *Gay Science* and *The Will to Power.* Bataille makes some enlightening observations in this section regarding his take on Nietzsche and, as always, provokes with the occasional stunning and illuminating aphorism, but, on the whole, I didn't feel *On Nietzsche* was one of Bataille's best works. Certainly it isn't the book I'd recommend for first time Bataille readers. *Erotism* would make a better--and more readable--choice of his nonfiction work, or, maybe, something like *The Impossible.*

But for those already familiar with Bataille, his general train of thought, and his idiosyncratic way of philosophizing, *On Nietzsche* provides a light into some of the deeper, though not the deepest, workings of Bataille's subversive oeuvre

addendum
although i certainly appreciate the above reader's take on bataille's work, there really aren't that many parallels between georges bataille and friedrich nietzsche.they have a distinctly different writing style, very different ideas, and almost diametrically opposed visions of the future. (i would also say, although this would be nothing more than a personal opinion, that in terms of the quality of his prose work, bataille is nowhere near nietzsche's league, however much we may debate the legitimacy or merit of nietzsche's controversial ideas.)while bataille is more about apocalypse and exploring the possibilities of extreme decadence, nietzsche was about nothing of the sort. indeed, he would have in all likelihood abhorred bataille's work, and more than likely written him off as a "decadent" of the worst kind, although i would certainly not agree.the similarities are small, if any indeed exist at all. while nietzsche will certainly have a place in history as one of the greatest philosophers to ever live, it would not surprise me if bataille faded into obscurity, as shock value lessens as sensibilities become more hardened.

idiosyncratic and cryptic, but w/ flashes of genius
bataille's "on nietzsche" is at times incomprehensible and far too much like the author talking to himself than the reader, but it is nonetheless a must-read by any standards. like heidegger, at times we find ourselves lost and simply not knowing what the hell he is talking about, but every once in awhile we achieve a moment of understanding that made all the mental confusion and frustration worth it and then some. bataille takes the death of transcendence to the ultimate conclusion, absolute meaninglessness and hedonism, reaching far different conclusions than nietzsche did about how the individual should live in the absence of any underlying metaphysical meaning. indeed, bataille, while many see him as a kind of modern nietzsche, might be called an anti-nietzschean in that he not only rejected the idea of 'the superman' but, through his novels and philosophical works, created characters for whom the ideas of discipline and so called 'becoming' flew out the window along with any sense of morality or sanctity. bataille says, 'ah, to hell with some future! the future no longer exists, anyway', and the frightening thing is that for a moment we are tempted to say it with him. as with all of bataille's work the intensity of his aggressive amorality is chilling, but it is perhaps among the best literature ever written if we want to gain insight into the nature of the intelligent rebel and the sadean libertine. to make a long story short, read it.

idiosyncratic and cryptic, but w/ flashes of genius
bataille's "on nietzsche" is at times incomprehensible and far too much like the author talking to himself than the reader, but it is nonetheless a must-read by any standards. like heidegger, at times we find ourselves lost and simply not knowing what the hell he is talking about, but every once in awhile we achieve a moment of understanding that made all the mental confusion and frustration worth it and then some. bataille takes the death of transcendence to the ultimate conclusion, absolute meaninglessness and hedonism, reaching far different conclusions than nietzsche did about how the individual should live in the absence of any underlying metaphysical meaning. indeed, bataille, while many see him as a kind of modern nietzsche, might be called an anti-nietzschean in that he not only rejected the idea of 'the superman' but, through his novels and philosophical works, created characters for whom the ideas of discipline and so called 'becoming' flew out the window along with any sense of morality or sanctity. bataille says, 'ah, to hell with some future! the future no longer exists, anyway', and the frightening thing is that for a moment we are tempted to say it with him. as with all of bataille's work the intensity of his aggressive amorality is chilling, but it is perhaps among the best literature ever written if we want to gain insight into the nature of the intelligent rebel and the sadean libertine. to make a long story short, read it. ... Read more

Product Description
When Sartre referred to Georges Bataille as a "new mystic," he meant the labelas an insult. Sartre considered mysticism to be a less rigorous mode of inquiry thanphilosophy—especially dangerous where the writings of mystics adapt philosophical terminologyfor different purposes. In Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin, Peter Connor arguesthat 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 correctsthis distorted view of Bataille, giving us a more complete picture of the complex and influentialwriter.

With careful attention to Bataille's historical and intellectual context, Connor raises manyimportant questions: What drew Bataille to the mystics? How did he conceive of their thought inrelation to his own? And what is the connection between mysticism and morality? This lastquestion raises an especially interesting issue for Bataille, an atheist whom readers generallyassociate with images of transgression and sin. Through examination of Bataille'swritings—including Inner Experience and his underappreciated final book, Tears ofEros—Connor shows the surprising connection between Bataille's mysticism and his sense ofpersonal and political ethics. Mysticism, Connor argues, lies at the heart of Bataille's doubleidentity as an intellectual and as a kind of anarchic prophet. ... Read more

Product Description
The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems."In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. The History of Eroticism analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Batille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

exploring inner complexity
I am interested now in a few pages near the end of the book associating destitution with art. Georges Bataille is quite familiar with forms of social analysis making a distinction between accumulation and consumption that directs the worker against growing accumulation as a way to increase current wages. The complexity at this point about the subjectivity of the "man of sovereign art" as a subjectivity lowering himself: "This loss of social standing is not opposed to inner knowledge of the human possibilities that classing alone opened up, but it involves itself in the negation of those possibilities insofar as they attain the cohesion that bestows rank." (p. 423). I see a major opening up between institutional thinking that hopes individuals acquire a regimentation for uniform thinking appropriate to their level within an organization, and those people possessing supernatural powers of an artistic nature that astound a world in which shooting for $14 trillion has become a fallback for coming up with the trillions of dollars that it takes to govern you people each year. The age in which actual solutions for our present problems locating the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke leading us to a promised land is rapidly turning into a time that does not exist, and what are we leaving ourselves with if not destitution?

Sovereignty and Being
Bataille's 3-volume masterwork is the triumph of his life's work in the philosophy of expenditure. For beginners seeking a comprehensive introduction to this most important of 20th century philosophers (a title Foucault bestowed upon Bataille), I recommend reading "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" first, then the three volumes of "The Accursed Share," and finally "The Tears of Eros."

To what has already been written here about "The Accursed Share," I would add a few words about the book's content. Bataille proposes that the sovereign state--that condition of ultimate value, in which we are removed from the world that tallies our value in terms of the work we perform, in which we exist for our own sake--is the secret goal of all humanity. However, this sovereignty is not so much a development of humanity as a return to our lost animal state, a return along the trajectory of self-consciousness that resulted from becoming human. Bataille defines the human as an eternal dialectic between this lost animality and the human world of work and reason.

His masterwork develops ideas that will benefit the fields of study including economics, morality, humanities, politics, aesthetics, Nietzschean philosophy, theology, and ontology, for Bataille elucidates some of the principles that link all these fields together--principles that many of these fields have loathed to discuss for themselves. ... Read more

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'Literature is not innocent,' Bataille declares in the preface to this unique collection of literary profiles.'It is guilty and should admit itself so.'This idea is then explored in the work of eight outstanding authors: Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Blake, Michelet, Kafka, Proust, Genet and De Sade. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

The postmodern canon
If you're into postmodernism and literary theory, you can't go wrong by reading this book. And what makes this book a cut above most books in po-mo literary theory is that it's got an accessibe layer that any fool can understand. There's also an esoteric underbelly that only people who've read Nietzsche closely will get. But the only time the esoteric underbelly becomes important is in the chapter on Genet.

Bataille claims Genet did not know how to give, because he liked to betray people. And since he did not know how to give, he wasn't truly evil because he sacrifices nothing. By which Bataille means that he doesn't know how to take. There's no collusion with doing a 100% gratuitous act, like committing suicide. (Let's face it: the suicide is the most selfish person around. The subway system in my city is frequently held up by them, preventing all sorts of people from going to work on time. All because their life is depressing.) Bataille's entire oeuvre is a celebration of paradoxes and the idea of give = take is not so far from his idea in Inner Experience of the subjectobject.

Apparently contemporary postmodern theory finds itself in crisis. Any outside observer could tell you why: the thinkers are opaque. The reason they are opaque is because they like to give. What Bataille knew is that in order to give, you also have to take. Hence his exoteric, loquacious facade and his esoteric, unutterable interior. If you are an American postmodernist, you ignore this advice at your peril.

Literature and Evil
Georges Battaille throws down a challange to Jean-Paul Sartre, who held that "literature is inncocent". Bataille, in his examination of such figures as Emily Bronte, Sade, Baudelaire, Genet, Kafka and Michelet, and the component of "evil" in their works, argues that literature is, in fact, "guilty" and that, moreover, it must acknowledge itself as such. In his reading of these literary figures, Bataille proceeds to analyse literature's complicity with evil and how this enables it reach a fuller level of communication. Drawing on Freud, he "eroticises" literary creativity and contends that the notion of "Art for art's sake", which emerges as a reaction to a fragmented and reified social world dominated by utilitarianism and commodity fetishism, is actually a subterfuge, literature masquerading as innocent under the mantle of "pure art", in order to rechannel the forces that are dammed up owing to the repressions imposed by culture. Though elliptical and opaque, this book is a challenging and fascinating study, which has a potential for laying the foundations for a philosophy of composition that underwrites the aesthetic of evil and explores its relation to the overarching forces of institutional and administrative surveillance.

The Death Drive in literature
In this short (and at times very difficult) collection of essays, Bataille challenges Sartre's view that "literature is innocent". A selective survey of key writers - including Bronte, Genet and Sade - shows that literature is a necessary antidote to the overarching Superego and Capitalism's emphasis on the Reality Principle. In this way, Bataille shows that literture is in fact evil, in that it is anti-utilitiarian and thus embedded in the childish Pleasure Principle. While Bataille seems to alternate between ascribing the driving force of literature to both the Life Drive (Eros) and the Death Drive (Thanatos), he does succeed in showing how Freud - although he never explicitely invokes the name - can be used for a new method of reading literature.

Well writing articles.
In this book Bataille seems to tell how evil is in literature and in life.How near is the eroticism and the death. Brilliant. ... Read more

Product Description
Since the publication in France of his Oeuvres Complètes in the mid-1970s, the breadth of Bataille's writing and influence has become increasingly apparent across the disciplines in, for example, the fields of literature, art, art history, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, economics, and anthropology. He is now held by many to be one of the most profound thinkers of the century, the enormous ramifications of whose work have yet to be fully grasped.

In response to this growing interest, The Bataille Reader includes key texts from the broad spectrum of Bataille's work, from the early essays interrogating surrealism and cultural politics in the 1930s, down to texts from The Accursed Share (1949, translated 1988), a major engagement in post-Marxist economic theory generally regarded as being his most important work. Generous coverage is given to Bataille's speculations, also of the 1930s, on the limits of being, experience and identity, as well as to his post-war engagements with existentialism, Marxism, and Hegelianism. The major texts are interspersed with some of the brilliantly punctual essays Bataille produced throughout his career as a prolific essayist, reviewer and originator of highly-influential journals, such as Documents, Acephale and Critique. Clearly introduced and comprehensively annotated by the editors, this book provides the best single-volume coverage of Bataille's work available. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Excellent, substantive introduction to Bataille's writings
My interest in Bataille has different emphases than Mr. Wong's (the writer of the first review), but I'm happy to refer the reader to his intelligent, poetic, and sympathetic reading of Bataille.A bit more might be said, though, about the work of the editors.

Bataille's oeuvre is wide-ranging, to say the least: erotica to economics.Botting and Wilson's volume gives one a thoughtful overview divided into sensible categories; it begins with an informative and perceptive, but not over-long or overbearing intro. The excerpts from Bataille's writings are long enough to give one a sense of what he wants to say (many are complete essays or long book excerpts) and are free from annoying cuts.

I bought the book some years ago when I found that I needed to learn about Bataille's work (esp. economy, ritual, sacrifice)--then picked it up when I _really_ needed it.I learned a lot (many sections deserve multiple readings)and have also gained a sense of where to look to try to learn more (the temptation to write this review arose while looking for some of the works I've been missing).What more can you ask from a _Bataille Reader_?

It's also worth pointing out, perhaps, that _The Bataille Reader_ is a notable exception in an often undistinguished genre. (Paul Rabinow's _Foucault Reader_, for instance, is disappointing--Rabinow's own excellent scholarship notwithstanding).Yes, one can (and in the case of Foucault no doubt should) skip the Reader and simply start on the complete corpus.But volumes of the "reader" type, if done with the care, thought, and understanding of Botting and Wilson, demand a great deal of time and work, of devotion to the author whose work they're presenting and, indeed, of generosity toward their own readership.They deserve our gratitude.

Bataille le nouveau mystique!
The idea of editing a Bataille Reader in 320 pages might sound unthinkable to any French scholars of Bataille.Similar collection has never been appeared in France.The reason for such absence might be due to thecomplexity of the thought of Bataille and the voluminous nature of hiswritings.Once a devoted theology student, a libertine, a surrealistdissident,chief organizer for "College de Sociologie", founderof secret society "Acephale" and the most important French revue"Critique", Bataille has always been a figure of respect andcontroversy.

In the most literal sense, Bataille's writings arepersonal: the narrations (pornography, poems), philosophical discourses(Inner Experience, On Nietzsche) and interpretations (book review, artcriticism) he put forward are originated from his intense desire toappropriate life's meaning/mystery.Interspersed over the pages in presentReader are principal leitmotivs of Bataille: laughter, death, chance, gift,transgressions etc.In these texts we shall never encounter the stiffcoldness common to certain analytical philosophers.Bataille uplifts usfrom solid ground and force us to head for the furthest in our intellectualreserch.Sometimes, if not always, reading Bataille could be an unbearbaleexperience. Passages from "Madame Edwarda" in this Reader can beserved as a test for your tolerance.To me it is the most importanttheological investigation ever written by Bataille - the prostitute asincarnation of divinity.After reading this text may be you would agreewith Sartre in calling Bataille a "New Mystic". This BatailleReader is indeed an ideal 'book of initiation' to Bataille - the mostinspiringFrench thinker born a hundred and three years ago.

Afterall,I'm happy to place this excellent compendium next to the 12 yellow bricks(the French Gallimard edition of Oeuvres completes looks like bricks)already lying on my shelf. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

Difficult to Place
Bataille remains for me a thinker who is almost always interesting but rarely coherent. His fiction is brilliantly conceived and revolutionary, but this collection of essays ranges from the inspired to the merely fragmentary. Although by his own admission, Bataille was not interested in forging a positive philosophy to replace the systems of materialism or idealism, still there remains something strangely absent in Bataille's varied speculations on sacrifice, auto-mutilation, or the unforgettable 'pineal eye.' It is difficult to discern how literally he is to be taken. On the one hand, his excoriations of the Nazi's appropriation seems totally sincere and convincing, but his work on 'the solar [...]' is both juvenile and uninteresting. Granted, his essay on Sade is a brilliant and provocative analysis of the 'use value' of excrement, but this still remains a minor and confused work of thinking.

reductionism in a more poetic form
in reponse to stevie, i'd say that andre breton has left us infinitely more to 'go on' than the far too reductionist bataille. unlike bataille, breton was not living in the shadow of his idols (bataille:sade) but trying to generate something new.bataille's assessment of nietzsche and the surrealists as romantic icaruses also seems a self assessment; bataille could never rise above his 'need to go below'.he was guilty of precisely the same things he accused the surrealists of.

Brilliant
Im so impresed with this mans work I am obsessed. He is a rare breed of intelligence. He has a piece in this called 'Mouth" which refers tothe position our heads take well being thrown back in a scream as that of an extension to our spines, inother words that we assume an animal architecture to our bones in the most extreme pains. Batailles constant opinions detailed here inwonderful totaly controlled short pieces , is for me, the only truly awful reading I have ever done. A music piece I often play also has this effect. It is genuis to have the power of horror in works not involving the 'supernatural". I am in awe of this odd,dead man.

Disturbing and beautiful!
Bataille was French surrealist who wrote like an alien trapped on a hostile planet. In searing essays like "the Solar Anus," healmost convinces you that the end is not just near, but here. Disturbing and beautiful, this book is highly recommended. ... Read more

Product Description

One of the most provocative and controversial writers of his time, these essays comprise George Bataille's most incisive study of surrealism.

For Bataille, the absence of myth had itself become the myth of the modern age. In a world that had lost the secret of its cohesion, Bataille saw surrealism as both a symptom and a beginning of an attempt to address this loss. His writings on this theme are the result of a profound reflection in the wake of World War Two.

The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

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In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.

Copublished by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London ... Read more