Georges Bataille

Author: Michel Surya
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1789601711
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 772

Book Description
Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acphale. 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 Andr 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'.

Georges Bataille

Author: Rodolphe Gasché
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804784280
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 354

Book Description
This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. 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.

Against Architecture

Author: Denis Hollier
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262581134
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Book Description
Over 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.

Story of the Eye

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0141913673
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Literature and Evil

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : European literature
Languages : en
Pages : 1122

Book Description

Georges Bataille

Author: Bejamin Noys
Publisher: Pluto Press
ISBN: 9780745315874
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 178

Book Description
Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Abbreviations -- Introduction -- 1. The Subversive Image -- 2. Inner Experience -- 3. Sovereignty -- 4. The Tears of Eros -- 5. The Accursed Share -- Conclusion -- Notes and References -- Bibiliography -- Index

The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816635054
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Keuze uit het werk van de Franse filosoof (1897-1962).

Blue of Noon

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0241215390
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 123

Book Description
Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface of civilization, this is a novel torn between identifying with history's victims and being seduced by the monstrous glamour of its terrible victors, and is one of the twentieth century's great nihilist works.

On Nietzsche

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438458592
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 383

Book Description
A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsches importance to Bataille, and of Batailles experience in Nazi-occupied France. Georges Bataille wrote On Nietzsche in the final months of the Nazi occupation of France in order to cleanse the German philosopher of the stain of Nazism. More than merely a treatise on Nietzsche, the book is as much a work of ethics in which thought is put to the test of experience and experience pushed to its limits. At once personal and political, it was written as an act of war, its publication contingent upon the German retreat. The result is a poetic and philosophicaland occasionally harrowingrecord of life during wartime. Following Inner Experience and Guilty, On Nietzsche is the third volume of Batailles Summa Atheologica. Haunted by the recognition that existence cannot be at once autonomous and viable, herein the author yearns for community from the depths of personal isolation and transforms Nietzsches will to power into his own will to chance. This new translation includes Memorandum, a selection of 280 passages from Nietzsches works edited and introduced by Bataille. Originally published separately, Bataille planned to include the text in future editions of On Nietzsche. This edition also features the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Batailles Oeuvres Complètes, as well as an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.

Theory of Religion

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 134

Book Description
Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Bataille's earlier book, The Accursed Share, brought to anthropology and history; namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. Bataille brilliantly defines religion as so many different attempts to respond to the universe's relentless generosity. Framed within his original theory of generalized economics and based on his masterly reading of archaic religious activity, Theory of Religion constitutes, along with The Accursed Share, the most important articulation of Bataille's work.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), founder of the French review Critique, wrote fiction and essays on a wide range of topics. His books in English translation include Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, Literature and Evil, Manet and Erotism.Robert Hurley is the translator of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Distributed for Zone Books.