Georges Bataille  

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Georges Bataille (September 10, 1897July 9, 1962) was a French writer, anthropologist, archivist and philosopher best known for his novella Story of the Eye. Philosophically, he traced the intimate connections between sex and death and was known as the metaphysician of evil. In 2004, his novel My Mother was adapted for film by Christophe Honoré.

Contents

Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer

"One reason that Histoire de l'oeil 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 The Pornographic Imagination

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. See American reception of French theory.

Bretonian and Bataillean strains of Surrealism

Bataillean surrealism is documented in Documents and in the 'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition.

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.


In 2006 the Hayward Gallery in London staged the 'Undercover Surrealism' exhibition devoted to "the vision of Georges Bataille".

Life and work

Bataille was born in Billom (Auvergne). He initially considered priesthood and went to a Catholic seminary but renounced 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.

Bataille attended the École des Chartes in Paris and graduated (second in his class) in February 1922, as a 'archiviste-paléographe' (which is translated by Fijalkowski and Richardson as 'palaeographic archivist', a term which by any modern English professional standards, is virtually meaningless). Bataille is often referred to, interchangeably, as an archivist and a librarian. While it is true that he worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his work there was with medallion collections (he also published scholarly articles on numismatics), and his thesis at the École de Chartes was a critical edition of the medieval manuscript L’Ordre de Chevalerie which he produced directly by classifying the eight manuscripts from which he reconstructed the poem. After graduating he moved to the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid. [For further information see Surya, Michel 'Georges Bataille, la mort à l'œuvre' (Gallimard: Paris, 1992 and the English translation 'Georges Bataille: an intellectual biography' by Fijalkowski and Richardson (Verso: London, 2002)]

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 of his 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 after his death had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Jacques Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the Tel Quel journal. His influence is felt in the work of Jean Baudrillard, as well as in the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan.

Attracted early on to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton, although Bataille and the Surrealists resumed cautiously cordial relations after World War II. Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology in France between World War I and World War II. The College of Sociology was also comprised of several renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève 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, Acéphale (the headless), the symbol of which was a decapitated man, in order to instigate a new religion. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war. The group also published an eponymous review, highly concerned by Nietzsche's philosophy, and which carried an attempt of thinking what Jacques Derrida has called an "anti-sovereignty". Bataille thus collaborated with André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Julles Monnerot, Jean Rollin and Jean Wahl.

Bataille had an amazing interdisciplinary talent — he drew from diverse influences and used diverse modes of discourse to create his work. His novel 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), was initially read as pure pornography, while interpretation of the work has gradually matured to reveal the considerable philosophical and emotional depth that is characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within "literature of transgression." 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.

Other famous novels include My Mother and The Blue of Noon. The latter, with its necrophilic and political tendencies, its autobiographical or testimonial undertones, and its philosophical moments turns Story of the Eye on its head, providing a much darker and bleaker treatment of contemporary historical reality.

Bataille was also a philosopher (though he renounced this title), but for many, like Sartre, his philosophical claims bordered on atheist mysticism. During World War Two, and influenced by Kojève's reading of Hegel, and by Nietzsche, he wrote a Summa Atheologica (the title parallels Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica) which comprises his works "Inner Experience", "Guilty", and "On Nietzsche". After the war he composed his "The Accursed share", and founded the also extremely influential journal "Critique". His very special conception of "sovereignty" (which may be described as "anti-sovereignty") was discussed by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and others.

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. In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais; they had one daughter.

Quotes

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

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:

Translated works:

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).




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