As the price of oil climbs toward $100 a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be characterized by resource depletion?
The French intellectual Georges Bataille saw energy as the basis of all human activity—the essence of the human—and he envisioned a society that, instead of renouncing profligate spending, would embrace a more radical type of energy expenditure: la dépense, or “spending without return.” In Bataille’s Peak, Allan Stoekl demonstrates how a close reading of Bataille—in the wake of Giordano Bruno and the Marquis de Sade— can help us rethink not only energy and consumption, but also such related topics as the city, the body, eroticism, and religion. Through these cases, Stoekl identifies the differences between waste, which Bataille condemned, and expenditure, which he celebrated.
The challenge of living in the twenty-first century, Stoekl argues, will be to comprehend—without recourse to austerity and self-denial—the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure.
Allan Stoekl is professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University. He is the author of Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition and translator of Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minnesota, 1985).
Georges Bataille was arguably the greatest influence on the poststructuralist revolution in twentieth-century thought and literature, yet few truly understand his work and legacy. Stuart Kendall now translates the work and life of this renowned French writer, anthropologist, and philosopher into a concise yet informative biography that reveals fascinating facets of this intellectual giant.
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. Georges Bataille chronicles these aspects of his intellectual development, as well as tracing out his pivotal role in the creation of the College of Sociology and how his writings in aesthetics and art history laid the groundwork for visual culture studies. Kendall positions Bataille at the heart of a prodigous community of thinkers, including André Breton, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Jacques Lacan.
A compelling account, Georges Bataille will be invaluable for all thinkers who have benefited from Bataille’s lasting contributions.
A surprising exploration of the relationship between these two twentieth-century thinkers
The transgressive writing of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and the rigorous ethical philosophy of social activist and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) seem to belong to different worlds. Yet in the political ferment of 1930s Paris, Bataille and Weil were intellectual adversaries who exerted a powerful fascination on each other. Saints of the Impossible provides the first in-depth comparison of Bataille’s and Weil’s thought, showing how an exploration of their relationship reveals new facets of the achievements of two of the twentieth century’s leading intellectual figures, and raises far-reaching questions about literary practice, politics, and religion.
Considering the seeming antithesis between Weil’s heroic political engagement and Bataille’s antipolitical aestheticism, Saints of the Impossible brings out the insufficiently recognized performative dimension of Weil’s politics, while revealing the political reach of Bataille’s mystical writings. As it opens a new perspective on both Weil and Bataille, the book also points to a new way of understanding the uses and abuses of sacred power and the performative in an era of philosophical disorientation, social chaos, and war.READERS
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