The Accursed Share, Volume I

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1890951579
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 139

Book Description
From the acclaimed French philosopher, intellectual, and novelist, a brilliant account of the social and economic costs of civilization In this important work, Georges Bataille uses his novel economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. He introduces here his concept of the accursed share, the surplus energy that any system, natural or cultural, must expend; it is this expenditure, according to Bataille, that most clearly defines a society. His examples include sacrifice among the Aztecs, potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam, and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet. In this way, Bataille proposes a theory of a “general economy” based on excess and exuberance that radically revises conventional economic models of scarcity and utility. A brilliant blend of economics and aesthetics, ethics and anthropology, The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille’s philosophic work. It will be of particular interest not only to readers of his fiction and essays but also to cultural theorists, anthropologists, and economists of all schools.

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.

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'.

Under Suspicion

Author: Boris Groys
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231518498
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Book Description
The public generally regards the media with suspicion and distrust. Therefore, the media's primary concern is to regain that trust through the production of sincerity. Advancing the field of media studies in a truly innovative way, Boris Groys focuses on the media's affect of sincerity and its manufacture of trust to appease skeptics. Groys identifies forms of media sincerity and its effect on politics, culture, society, and conceptions of the self. He relies on different philosophical writings thematizing the gaze of the other, from the theories of Heidegger, Sartre, Mauss, and Bataille to the poststructuralist formulations of Lacan and Derrida. He also considers media "states of exception" and their creation of effects of sincerity—a strategy that feeds the media's predilection for the extraordinary and the sensational, further fueling the public's suspicions. Emphasizing the media's production of emotion over the presentation (or lack thereof) of "facts," Groys launches a timely study boldly challenging the presumed authenticity of the media's worldview.

The Accursed

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062234366
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 540

Book Description
"Joyce Carol Oates has written what may be the world’s finest postmodern Gothic novel: E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime set in Dracula’s castle. It’s dense, challenging, problematic, horrifying, funny, prolix and full of crazy people. You should read it.” —Stephen King, New York Times Book Review Princeton, New Jersey at the turn of the 20th century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man—a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up. When the bride’s brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton’s most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the University, and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair, to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/ Mark Twain—all plagued by “accursed” visions. Narrated with Oates's unmistakable psychological insight, The Accursed combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect.

On Bataille

Author: Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 9780791424551
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

Book Description
Essays on the French writer and critic Georges Bataille, that examine his thought in relation to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

Reading Bataille Now

Author: Shannon Winnubst
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253218829
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 611

Book Description
The work of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) has often been reduced to his outrageous, erotic, and libertine fiction and essays. This book presents contemporary interpretations that situate Bataille in French and European intellectual traditions, and brings forward key concepts to understand the challenges posed by his important work and philosophy

Eroticism

Author: Georges Bataille
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics
ISBN: 9780141184104
Category : Death
Languages : en
Pages : 276

Book Description
A librarian, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', George Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. Although published at the start of the 'sexual revolution', Eroticism (1857) totally rejects the gospel of 'liberation'. Everywhere, it argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, and everywhere we transgress against them in our desperation to overcome an agonizing sense of separation from other people. In developing this central theme, Bataille offers a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and the violence at the heart of religious ritual. The result is one of the strangest and most compelling books ever written about sex.

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.

Bataille

Author: Fred Botting
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310026
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Book Description
One 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. Batailleis 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 Shakespearean, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature; in analyses of Gothic and postmodern fiction; and in critiques of popular culture, rock music and Hollywood movies. In order to make Bataillean notions more comprehensible to contemporary readers, his concepts are situated in relation to the ideas of renowned critical and cultural theorists like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, as well as Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. 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.