Georges Bataille Add a review

Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille (; French: [ʒɔʁʒ batɑj]; 10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French writer, essayist, librarian and theorist whose work crossed the boundaries of literature, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political economy, religious studies and art history. His writings include novels, erotic fiction, poetry, philosophical essays, art criticism, lectures, diaries and fragmentary meditations. Although frequently described as a philosopher, Bataille resisted treating his work as a conventional philosophical system. He conceived writing as an exploration of the limits of human experience in which theoretical reflection, literary form and personal exposure could not be cleanly separated.

Bataille's recurring subjects included sacrifice, eroticism, death, laughter, mystical experience, expenditure, sovereignty, community and the sacred. Among the concepts associated with his work are base materialism, heterology, the informe, nonknowledge, general economy and the "accursed share". His writings combine Nietzschean affirmation, Hegelian negativity, Freudian psychoanalysis, the sociology of Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, and sustained engagement with Christian mysticism and apophatic theology.

During the interwar period, Bataille edited the journal Documents, participated in the anti-Stalinist Democratic Communist Circle, collaborated with André Breton in the anti-fascist organization Contre-Attaque, founded the journal and secret society Acéphale, and helped establish the College of Sociology. His relationship to Surrealism was conflictual but enduring: after initially opposing Breton's group, he later described himself as Surrealism's "old enemy from within" and argued that it had posed fundamental questions about freedom, revolt, poetry and collective life.

During the Second World War he wrote the works later grouped as La Somme athéologique ("The Atheological Summa"): Inner Experience, Guilty and On Nietzsche. These books developed an atheological mysticism based on anguish, ecstasy, nonknowledge and communication without a transcendent God or promise of salvation. After the war, Bataille founded the journal Critique and published major works on general economy, eroticism, literature, prehistoric art and the history of representation. His writings became especially influential after his death, shaping the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julia Kristeva, Jean Baudrillard and other figures in postwar French thought, literary theory and social theory.