Georges Bataille
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==Quotes== | ==Quotes== | ||
- | *"Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him." | + | *"Man goes constantly in [[fear]] of himself. His [[erotic]] [[urge]]s [[terrify]] him." |
- | *"Eroticism is assenting to life even in death." | + | *"[[Eroticism]] is assenting to [[life]] even in [[death]]." |
- | *"The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility." | + | *"The [[sovereign]] being is burdened with a [[servitude]] that crushes him, and the condition of [[free]] men is deliberate [[servility]]." |
- | *"Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison." | + | *"[[Pleasure]] only starts once the [[worm]] has got into the [[fruit]], to become delightful [[happiness]] must be [[tainted]] with [[poison]]." |
- | *"Naturally, love's the most distant possibility." | + | *"Naturally, [[love]]'s the most distant possibility." |
==Key concepts== | ==Key concepts== |
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His brand of subversive surrealism is documented in Documents.
Contents |
Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer
One reason that Histoire de l'Oeil [3] and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and unsettling impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death. I am not suggesting that every pornographic work speaks, either overtly or covertly, of death. Only works dealing with that specific and sharpest inflection of the themes of lust, "the obscene," do. It's toward the gratifications of death, succeeding and surpassing those of eros, that every truly obscene quest tends. --Susan Sontag in the Pornographic Imagination via Styles of Radical Will p. 60, Picador USA
Influence on American modern art criticism
American modern art criticism as professed by Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Denis Hollier, and Hal Foster has been much influenced by Bataille. Although I should add that it has not only been Bataille who influenced American art and literary criticism; the whole of French theory has had an enormous — and by some much bemoaned — influence on postmodern American theory, much like German theory was influential in post-war France.
Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism
http://jahsonic.wordpress.com/2006/12/05/bretonian-and-bataillean-strains-of-surrealism/
Romantic life
Bataille was twice married, first with the actress Silvia Maklès; they divorced in 1934, and she later married the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Bataille also had a liaison with Colette Peignot, who died in 1938.
On 2 October 1939, Georges Bataille meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil who was the mother of the then 4 year old vampire filmmaker Jean Rollin ...
In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais; they had one daughter.
Posthumous reputation
Bataille's works influenced a number of key philosophers and theorists towards the end of his life and after his death, including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Lacan.
Author James Dickey used a quote from Bataille as an epigraph to his novel Deliverance.
Ma Mère was adapted for film in 2004.
In 2006 the Hayward Gallery in London staged the 'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition devoted to "the vision of Georges Bataille".
In the 2007 Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Kevin Barnes mentions Georges Bataille as well as his novel The Story of the Eye, or Histoire de l'oeil, in the song "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal".
Quotes
- "Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him."
- "Eroticism is assenting to life even in death."
- "The sovereign being is burdened with a servitude that crushes him, and the condition of free men is deliberate servility."
- "Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, to become delightful happiness must be tainted with poison."
- "Naturally, love's the most distant possibility."
Key concepts
Base materialism
Bataille developed base materialism during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with mainstream materialism. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. In a sense the concept is similar to Spinoza's neutral monism of a substance that encompasses both the dual substances of mind and matter posited by Descartes, however it defies strict definition and remains in the realm of experience rather than rationalisation. Base materialism was a major influence on Derrida’s deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable ‘third term’. Bataille's notion of Base Materialism may also be seen as anticipating Althusser's conception of aleatory materialism or "materialism of the encounter", which draws on similar atomist metaphors to sketch a world in which causality and actuality are abandoned in favor of limitless possibilities of action.
Other
- eroticism
- the accursed share
- the potlatch (borrowed from Marcel Mauss's discussion of the kula and the gift economy)
- absolute negativity
- formlessness
- acephality
- the pineal eye- see Pineal: Mythology and Philosophy
- the sacred
- The Solar Anus
- heterogeneous matter (deviant social elements)
- homogeneity's need for deviance
- transgression
- immanence
Bibliography
Primary literature
Complete works
Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard)
- Volume 1: Premiers écrits, 1922-1940: Histoire de l'œil - L'Anus solaire - Sacrifices - Articles.
- Volume 2: Écrits posthumes, 1922-1940
- Volume 3: Œuvres littéraires: Madame Edwarda - Le Petit - L'Archangélique - L'Impossible - La Scissiparité - L'Abbé C. - L'être différencié n'est rien - Le Bleu du ciel.
- Volume 4: Œuvres littéraires posthumes: Poèmes - Le Mort - Julie - La Maison brûlée - La Tombe de Louis XXX - Divinus Deus - Ébauches.
- Volume 5: La Somme athéologique I: L'Expérience intérieure - Méthode de méditation - Post-scriptum 1953 - Le Coupable - L'Alleluiah.
- Volume 6: La Somme athéologique II: Sur Nietzsche - Mémorandum - Annexes.
- Volume 7: L'économie à la mesure de l'univers - La Part maudite - La limite de l'utile (Fragments) - Théorie de la Religion - Conférences 1947-1948 - Annexes.
- Volume 8: L'Histoire de l'érotisme - Le surréalisme au jour le jour - Conférences 1951-1953 - La Souveraineté - Annexes.
- Volume 9: Lascaux, ou La naissance de l’art - Manet - La littérature et le mal - Annexes
- Volume 10: L’érotisme - Le procès de Gilles de Rais - Les larmes d’Eros
- Volume 11: Articles I, 1944-1949
- Volume 12: Articles II, 1950-1961
Selected works:
- Histoire de l'oeil, 1928. (Story of the Eye) (under pseudonym of Lord Auch)
- Le Bleu du ciel, 1935 (Blue of Noon)
- Madame Edwarda, 1937. (under pseudonym of Pierre Angélique)
- L'expérience intérieure, 1943. (Inner Experience)
- La Part maudite, 1949 (The Accursed Share)
- L'Abbe C, 1950.
- L'Erotisme, 1957 (Erotism)
- La littérature et le Mal, 1957. (Literature and Evil)
- Les larmes d'Éros, 1961. (The Tears of Eros)
- L'Impossible, 1962. (The Impossible)
- Ma Mére, 1966 (My Mother)
- Le Mort, 1967 (The Dead Man)
- Théorie de la Religion, 1973. (Theory of Religion)
Translated works:
- Lascaux; or, the Birth of Art, the Prehistoric Paintings, Austryn Wainhouse, 1955, Lausanne: Skira.
- Manet, Austryn Wainhouse and James Emmons, 1955, Editions d'Art Albert Skira.
- Literature and Evil, Alastair Hamilton, 1973, Calder & Boyars Ltd.
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939, Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr., 1985, University of Minnesota Press.
- Erotism: Death and Sensuality, Mary Dalwood, 1986, City Lights Books.
- Story of the Eye, Joachim Neugroschel, 1987, City Lights Books.
- The Accursed Share: An Essay On General Economy. Volume I: Consumption, Robert Hurley, 1988, Zone Books.
- The College of Sociology, 1937–39 (Bataille et al.), Betsy Wing, 1988, University of Minnesota Press.
- Guilty, Bruce Boone, 1988, The Lapis Press.
- Inner Experience, Leslie Anne Boldt, 1988, State University of New York.
- My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, Austryn Wainhouse, with essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings, 1989, Marion Boyars Publishers.
- The Tears of Eros, Peter Connor, 1989, City Lights Books.
- Theory of Religion, Robert Hurley, 1989, Zone Books.
- The Accursed Share: Volumes II and III, Robert Hurley, 1991, Zone Books.
- The Impossible, Robert Hurley, 1991, City Lights Books.
- The Trial of Gilles de Rais, Richard Robinson, 1991, Amok Press.
- On Nietzsche, Bruce Boone, 1992, Paragon House.
- The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism, Michael Richardson, 1994, Verso.
- Encyclopaedia Acephalica (Bataille et al.), Iain White et al., 1995, Atlas Press.
- L'Abbe C, Philip A Facey, 2001, Marion Boyars Publishers.
- Blue of Noon, Harry Matthews, 2002, Marion Boyars Publishers.
- The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall, 2004, University of Minnesota Press.
Secondary literature
- Ades, Dawn, and Simon Baker, Undercover Surrealism: Georges Bataille and DOCUMENTS. (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006).
- Boldt-Irons, Leslie Anne (ed.), On Bataille: Critical Essays (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995).
- Surya, Michel 'Georges Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre' (Gallimard: Paris, 1992)
- Connor, Peter, Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000).
- Derrida, Jacques, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve," in Writing and Difference (London: Routledge, 1978).
- Gill, Carolyn, Bataille: Writing the Sacred, (London: Routledge, 1995).
- ffrench, Patrick, The Cut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
- Gemerchak, Christopher, The Sunday of the Negative: Reading Bataille Reading Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003).
- Hill, Lesley, "Bataile, Klossowski, Blanchot: Writing At The Limit" (Oxford University Press, 2001).
- Hollier, Denis, Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille (MIT Press, 1992).
- Hussey, Andrew, Inner Scar: The Mysicism of Georges Bataille (Amsterdam: Rudopi, 2000).
- Land, Nick, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an essay on atheistic religion) (London: Routledge, 1992).
- Nancy, Jean-Luc, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis & Oxford: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
- Noys, Benjamin, Georges Bataille: a critical introduction (London: Pluto, 2000).
- Richardson, Michael, Georges Bataille (London: Routledge, 1994).
- Sollers, Philippe, Writing and the Experience of Limits (Columbia University Press, 1982).
- Stoekl, Allan (ed.), On Bataille: Yale French Studies 78 (1990). Includes: Bataille, "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice"; Bataille, "Letter to René Char on the Incompatibilities of the Writer"; Jean-Luc Nancy, "Exscription"; Rebecca Comay, "Gifts without Presents: Economies of 'Experience' in Bataille and Heidegger"; Jean-Joseph Goux, "General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism."
- Surya, Michel, Georges Bataille: an intellectual biography, trans. by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002).