Georges Bataille

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Georges Bataille (September 16, 1897 – July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist and philosopher, though he avoided this last term himself.

Contents

Life and work

Bataille was initially tempted by priesthood and went to a Catholic seminary but lost his faith in 1922. He is often quoted as regarding the brothels of Paris as his true churches, a sentiment which reflects the concepts in his work. He then worked as a librarian, thus keeping some relative freedom in not having to treat his thinking as work.

Founder of several journals and groups of writers, Bataille is the author of an oeuvre both abundant and diverse: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, in passing of poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism). He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some publications were banned. He was relatively ignored in his lifetime and scorned by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre as an advocate of mysticism, but has had considerable influence after his death on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Jacques Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the Tel Quel journal. More recently he has influenced the work of major English-language philosophers such as Crispin Sartwell.

Attracted early on to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder and "pope," André Breton. Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology in France between World War I and World War II. The College of Sociology, also comprised several renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis.

Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale (the headless), the symbol of which was a decapitated man, in order to instigate a new religion. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victime as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found until the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war.

Bataille had an amazing interdisciplinary talent — he drew from diverse influences and used diverse modes of discourse to create his work. His novel The Story of the Eye, for example, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch (literally, Lord "to the shithouse" — "auch" being slang for telling somebody off by sending them to the toilet), was initially read as pure pornography, while interpretation of the work has gradually matured to reveal the considerable philosophical and emotional depth that is characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within "literature of transgression." The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle.

Other famous novels include "My Mother" and "The Blue of Noon." The "Blue of Noon," with its necrophilic and political tendencies, its autobiographical or testimonial undertones, and its philosophical turns "The Story of the Eye" on its head, and provides a much darker and bleaker treatment of contemporary historical reality.

Bataille was also a philosopher, though for many, like Sartre, his philosophical claims bordered on atheist mysticism. During World War Two, and influenced by Martin Heidegger, Hegel, and Nietzsche, he wrote a Summa Atheologica (the title cites and parallels Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica, which comprises his works "Inner Experience", "Guilty", and "On Nietzsche". After the war he composed his "The Accursed Share", and founded the also extremely influential journal "Critique".

Key concepts

Bibliography

Selected works:

Works on Bataille

  • Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie, Stephan Moebius, 2006, Konstanz

External links

Retrieved from "http://en.freepedia.org/Georges_Bataille.html"


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