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Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and
sensuality-Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original,
often startling perspective. Bataille challenges any single
discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily
Bronte to Sade,from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr.
Kinsey. The subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical
ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to
and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that
eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death." " . . .
one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in
the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of
thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence."-Peter
Brooks, New York Times Book Review "Bataille is one of the most
important writers of the century."-Michel Foucault "[An] urgent,
thrusting book about love, sex, death and spirituality by Georges
Bataille."-Mark Price, Philosophy Now "A philosopher, essayist,
novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the
brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks
among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century
thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual
basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights
into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and
violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint
Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos,
which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense
of isolation that faces us all."-The Book Depository Georges
Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon
who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and
sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights
published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The
Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.
This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille's
essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical
writings. In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker
and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the
moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by "a
need to live events in an increasingly conscious way," and to
reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille
founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review
essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing
his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy.
Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he
tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and
Albert Camus. In keeping with Critique's mission to explore the
totality of human knowledge, Bataille's articles did not just focus
on the literary but featured important reflections on the science
of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of
drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how
humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and
destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and
living that would inhabit that excess. This is the first of three
volumes collecting Bataille's post-war essays. Beginning with an
article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the
liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts
make available for the first time in English the systematic
diversity of Bataille's post-war thought.
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."
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." This Zone edition includes in a single
volume a reconstruction, based on the versions published in
Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation
of The Accursed Share.In the second and third volumes, The History
of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of
utility, respectively from an anthropological and an ethical
perspective. He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the
prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of
eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic
life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates
the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to.useful"
ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the
examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the
sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor,
creating a life beyond the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a
philosopher and novelist sui generis, died in 1962.
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. It appears here with Susan Sontag’s superb study of pornography as art, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, and Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’.
A deft reconstruction of what Georges Bataille envisioned as a
continuation of his work La Somme Athéologique, this volume brings
together the writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the
twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. Gathering
Bataille’s most intimate writings, these essays, aphorisms,
notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice
clarify and extend Bataille’s radical theology, his philosophy of
history, and his ecstatic method of meditation. Following
Bataille’s lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart
Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated
collecting for his summa. Kendall’s introduction offers a clear
picture of the author’s overall project, its historical and
biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The
"system" that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is
"atheology," understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge.
At the other side of realism, Bataille’s writing in La Somme
pushes language to its silent end. And yet, writing toward the ruin
of language, in search of words that slip from their meanings,
Bataille uses language—and the discourses of theology,
philosophy, and literature—against itself to return us to
ourselves, endlessly. The system against systems is in fact
systematic, using systems and depending on discourses to achieve
its own ends—the end of systematic thought.A medievalist
librarian by training, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was active in
the French intellectual scene from the 1920s through the 1950s. He
founded the journal Critique and was a member of the Acéphale
group and the Collège de Sociologie. Among his works available in
English are Visions of Excess (Minnesota, 1985), Tears of Eros
(1989), and Erotism (1990).
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Eroticism (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Mary Dalwood
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R341
R278
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A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent
Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true
'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most
disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study
he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering
a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage,
murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including
comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism
argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually
transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces
us all.
Including a number of short essays by Bataille and Leiris on
aspects of the other's work as well as excerpts on Bataille from
Leiris' diaries, this collection of correspondence throws new light
on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents. Â In the
autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste
du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for the first
time. Georges Bataille, 27, starting work at the
Bibliothèque Nationale; Michel Leiris, 23, beginning his studies
in ethnology. Within a few months, they were both members of
the Surrealist group, although their adherence to Surrealism
(unlike their affinities with it) would not last long: in 1930 they
were among the signatories of "Un cadavre," the famous tract
against Breton, the "Machiavelli of Montmartre," as Leiris put
it. But their friendship would endure for more than 30
years, and their correspondence, assembled here for the first time
in English, would continue until the death of Bataille in 1962.
In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a
pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the
erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and
sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the
Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the
investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts
Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which
he developed in later work.
Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been
an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The
French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking
focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to
the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume
in which Batailles's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and
obsessively put forward.This book challenges the notion of a
"closed economy" predicated on utility, production, and rational
consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into
account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This
collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as
well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille
(1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French
review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story
of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.
A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human
consciousness, community, and potential. The Cradle of Humanity:
Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges
Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative
religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor
idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the
bloodiest war in history-with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and
Hiroshima. Bataille's reflections on the possible origins of
humanity coincide with the intensified threat of its possible
extinction. For Bataille, prehistory is universal history; it is
the history of a human community prior to its fall into separation,
into nations and races. The art of prehistory offers the earliest
traces of nascent yet fully human consciousness-of consciousness
not yet fully separated from natural flora and fauna, or from the
energetic forces of the universe. A play of identities, the art of
prehistory is the art of a consciousness struggling against itself,
of a human spirit struggling against brute animal physicality.
Prehistory is the cradle of humanity, the birth of tragedy.
Bataille reaches beyond disciplinary specializations to imagine a
moment when thought was universal. Bataille's work provides a model
for interdisciplinary inquiry in our own day, a universal
imagination and thought for our own potential community. The Cradle
of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture speaks to philosophers and
historians of thought, to anthropologists interested in the history
of their discipline and in new methodologies, to theologians and
religious comparatists interested in the origins and nature of
man's encounter with the sacred, and to art historians and
aestheticians grappling with the place of prehistory in the canons
of art.
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.
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Blue of Noon (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Harry Mathews
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R331
R266
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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.
In these three works of erotic prose Georges Bataille fuses sex and
spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the
self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's
sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane
becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to
transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is
the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man,
published in 1964 after Bataille's death, is a startling short tale
of cruelty and desire. This volume also contains Bataille's own
introductions to his texts as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and
Ken Hollings.
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Literature and Evil (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Alastair Hamilton
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R334
R270
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'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this
extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by
acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can
literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles
of eight authors and their work, including Emily Bronte's Wuthering
Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade,
Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism,
childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and
powerful argument.
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Inner Experience (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Stuart Kendall; Introduction by Stuart Kendall
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R1,148
Discovery Miles 11 480
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Originally published in 1943, "Inner Experience" is the single most
significant work by one of the twentieth century s most influential
writers. It outlines a mystical theology and experience of the
sacred founded on the absence of god. Bataille calls "Inner
Experience" a narrative of despair, but also describes it as a book
wherein profundity and passion go tenderly hand in hand. Herein, he
says, The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy
take shape.
Bataille s search for experience begins where religion, philosophy,
science, and literature leave off, where doctrines, dogmas,
methods, and the arts collapse. His method of meditation, outlined
and documented here, commingles horror and delight. Laughter,
intoxication, eroticism, poetry, and sacrifice are pursued not as
ends in and of themselves but as means of access to a sovereign
realm of inner experience.
This new translation is the first to include "Method of Meditation"
and "Post-scriptum 1953," the supplementary texts Bataille added to
create the first volume of his "Summa Atheologica." This edition
also offers the full notes and annotations from the French edition
of Bataille s "Oeuvres Completes," along with an incisive
introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work
historically, biographically, and philosophically."
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The Impossible (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Robert Hurley
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R470
R386
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In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in
poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible.
The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail
quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement
toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved
Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy. "Humanity is
faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent
pleasure, horror and death - precisely the perspective of poetry -
and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of
utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We
are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth
has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and
indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is
stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only
by forgetting the truth of all these rights." -Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary
icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical
and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City
Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The
Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.
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L'Abbe C (Paperback)
Georges Bataille
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R332
R267
Discovery Miles 2 670
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L'Abbe C is a shocking, unnerving narrative about the intense and
terrifying relationship between twin brothers. Charles is a modern
libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a
priest so devout that he is nicknamed 'l'Abbe'. When the sexually
wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish,
delirium, and death ensue. Charged with sensuality and a
heightened, dreamlike atmosphere, this novel portrays the darkest
and most profound aspects of human experience.
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On Nietzsche (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Stuart Kendall; Introduction by Stuart Kendall
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R1,102
Discovery Miles 11 020
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Louis XXX (Paperback)
Georges Bataille; Translated by Stuart Kendall
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R404
Discovery Miles 4 040
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