Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille (September 16, 1897 – July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist and philosopher, though he avoided the latter 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.
Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology in France between World War I and World War II. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, 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, L'acéphale (the headless), the symbol of which was a decapitated man, in order to instigate a new religion, and planned to sacrifice his lover of the time as an inauguration. An indemnity was offered to the executioner, but a willing executioner was never found.
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), is pure pornography, and yet it has the philosophical and emotional depth of a great novel. 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.
Key concepts
- eroticism
- the accursed share
- the potlatch (borrowed from Marcel Mauss's discussion of the kula and the gift economy)
- absolute negativity
- acephality
- the sacred
- the solar anus
- heterogeneous matter (deviant social elements)
- homogeneity's need for deviance
Bibliography
Selected works:
- Histoire de l'oeil, 1928. (Story of the Eye) (under pseudonym of Lord Auch)
- Madame Edwarda, 1937. (under pseudonym of Pierre Angélique)
- L'expérience intérieure, 1943. (Inner Experience)
- Le Bleu du ciel, 1945 (Blue of Noon)
- La part maudite, 1949 (The Accursed Share)
- La littérature et le Mal, 1957. (Literature and Evil)
- Les larmes d'Éros, 1961. (The Tears of Eros)
Works on Bataille
- Die Zauberlehrlinge. Soziologiegeschichte des Collège de Sociologie, Stephan Moebius, 2006, Konstanz
External links
- Bataille material by James Comas at the University of Missouri-Columbia.
- Overview of Bataille
- George Bataille biography
- Georges Bataille Electronic Library