Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille PDF

Author: Michel Surya

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2020-05-05

Total Pages: 772

ISBN-13: 1789601711

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Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acphale. He has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought, influencing such writers as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the fascinating The Accursed Share, are modern classics. In this acclaimed intellectual biography, Michel Surya gives a detailed and insightful account of Bataille's work against the backdrop of his life - his troubled childhood, his difficult relationship with Andr Breton and the surrealists and his curious position as a thinker of excess, 'potlatch', sexual extremes and religious sacrifice, one who nonetheless remains at the heart of twentieth century French thought-all of it drawn here in rich and allusive prose. While exploring the source of the violent eroticism that laces Bataille's novels, the book is also an acute guide to the development of Bataille's philosophical thought. Enriched by testimonies from Bataille's closest acquaintances and revealing the context in which he worked, Surya sheds light on a figure Foucault described as 'one of the most important writers of the century'.

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille PDF

Author: Stuart Kendall

Publisher: Reaktion Books

Published: 2007-08-30

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781861893277

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Until his death in 1962, Bataille was an instrumental force in philosophical debate, acting as a foil for both Surrealism and Existentialism and advocating radical views that spanned the entire spectrum of political thought. 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 cornerstones of visual culture studies. Kendall positions Bataille at the heart of a prodigious community of thinkers, including André Breton, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Kojève, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, among many others.

Story of the Eye

Story of the Eye PDF

Author: Georges Bataille

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2013-09-26

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 0141913673

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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.

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille PDF

Author: Rodolphe Gasché

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2012-10-24

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0804784280

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This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.

Against Architecture

Against Architecture PDF

Author: Denis Hollier

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 1992-02-25

Total Pages: 236

ISBN-13: 9780262581134

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Over the past 30 years the writings of Georges Bataille have had a profound influence on French intellectual thought, informing the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Barthes, among others. Against Architecture offers the first serious interpretation of this challenging thinker, spelling out the profoundly original and radical nature of Bataille's work.

Correspondence

Correspondence PDF

Author: Georges Bataille

Publisher: Seagull Books

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13:

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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 Nationa≤ 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. Including a number of short essays by each of them on aspects of the other's work, and excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of their correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents.

Ecce Monstrum

Ecce Monstrum PDF

Author: Jeremy Biles

Publisher: Fordham Univ Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0823227782

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In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a ferociously religioussensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.Bataille enacts a monstrousmode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists-a mode at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this mode through investigations of Bataille's sacrificialinterpretations of Kojve's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist Andr Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with hyperchristianity; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's religious sensibility

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille PDF

Author: Bejamin Noys

Publisher: Pluto Press

Published: 2000-05-20

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 9780745315874

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A concise guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated The Story of the Eye.

Visions of Excess

Visions of Excess PDF

Author: Georges Bataille

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 1985

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 9780816612833

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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.