Hailed by Martin Heidegger as "one of France's best minds," Georges
Bataille has become increasingly recognized and respected in the
realm of academic and popular intellectual thought. Although
Bataille died in 1962, interest in his life and writings have never
been as strong as they are today--Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and
Kristeva have all acknowledged their debt to him. In his book, On
Nietzsche, as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille comes as close as
he would ever come to formulating his own unique system of
philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something of a
revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915,
in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of
the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's
work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an
idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism. In this volume, Bataille
becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought
where he left off--with God's death. At the heart of this work is
Bataille's exploration of how one can have a spiritual life outside
religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly
mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems,
myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War
II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving
breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to
eroticism. He skillfully weaves together his own internal
experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging outside
with arguments against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and
praise for the philosopher as a prophet foretelling "the crude
German fate." With an introduction, "Furiously Nietzschean," by
Sylvere Lotringer, an Appendix in which Bataille defends himself
against Sartre, and an Index, this volume reconfirms Michel
Foucault's assertion that Bataille, "broke with traditional
narrative to tell us what has never been told before."
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