Translated by Krzysztof Filjalkowski and Michael Richardson Winner of the 1987 Prix Goncourt for Biography Georges Bataille (1897–1962), 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 subjets 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. Revealing the contexts in which he worked, and the ways in which his work and ideas took shape, Surya sheds essential light on a figure Foucault described as "one of the most important writers of the century."
Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.
Stuart Kendall chronicles these aspects of his intellectual development, as well as tracing his pivotal role in the creation of journals such as Documents and Acéphale, and how his writings in aesthetics and art history were the pioneering ...
Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death.
This is the first English-language translation of what Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott argue is one of Bataille’s most structurally consistent works.
Ranging from Freud to Sade, this far-reaching and controversial study of the underlying sexual basis of religion and philosophy, especially in relation to death, includes the results of research into...
This edition also offers the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille_s Oeuvres Complètes, along with an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and ...
By turning away from the directly biographical Bataille's postwar works can better confront the assimilations that impose an identity on him . These more ' systematic writings are more systematic considerations of the limits of all ...
But the “ coprolagnic aberration , ” as Gilbert Lély so elegantly expresses it ( regretting , however , Sade's abuse of this “ paresthesia ” in Les 120 journées de Sodome , “ the result above all of mental alienation , " an " error ...
His classic works include The Story of the Eye and The Accursed Share. On Nietzsche takes up Nietzschean thought where Nietzsche left off - with the Death of God.
Essays discuss the work of Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, William Blake, Proust, Kafka, Genet, and de Sade, and examine the depiction of evil