Georges Bataille
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Georges Bataille [1][2] (September 10, 1897 – July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist, archivist and philosopher, though he avoided this last term himself.
His brand of subversive surrealism is documented in Documents.
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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
Denise Rollin-Le Gentil
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 ...
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.
Blog entries
http://jahsonic.wordpress.com/2006/12/05/bretonian-and-bataillean-strains-of-surrealism/