This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille’s essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by “a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way,” and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy. Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and Albert Camus.
 
In keeping with Critique’s mission to explore the totality of human knowledge, Bataille’s articles did not just focus on the literary but featured important reflections on the science of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and living that would inhabit that excess.
 
This is the first of three volumes collecting Bataille’s post-war essays. Beginning with an article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille’s post-war thought.
 

An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille’s postwar philosophical and critical writings.

In the aftermath of World War II, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by “a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way,” and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Continuing the publication of his postwar writings, this second book in a three-volume collection of Bataille’s work collects his essays and reviews from the years 1949 to 1951.

In this period of intellectual isolation and intense reflection, Bataille developed and refined his genealogy of morality through a sustained reflection on the fate of the sacred in the modern world. He offered a critique of the limits of existing morality, especially in its denial of excess, while sketching the lineaments of a new hyper-morality. Bataille’s wide-ranging reflections are true to the intellectual mission of Critique, which he founded as a space open to the broadest considerations of the present. As well as discussing significant figures like Samuel Beckett, André Gide, and René Char, Bataille also offers fascinating reflections on American politics, Nazism, existentialism, materialism, and play.

The connecting thread in these diverse essays remains Bataille’s concern with the extremes of human experience and the possibilities of transcending the limits of societies founded on utility and restraint. His writings remain a provocative incitement to rethink the boundaries we impose on expression and existence.

This is a guide to the life and work of the French intellectual Georges Bataille, best known as the author of the celebrated erotic novel, The Story of the Eye. Benjamin Noys introduces Bataille as a writer out of step with the dominant intellectual trends of his day - surrealism and existentialism - and shows that it was his very marginality that accounted in large part for his subsequent importance for the post-structuralists and the counterculture, in Europe and in the United States.

Treating Bataille's work as a whole rather than focusing, as other studies have done, on aspects of his work (i.e. as social theory or philosophy), Noys' study is intended to be sensitive to the needs of students new to Bataille's work  while at the same time drawing on the latest research on Bataille to offer new interpretations of Bataille's oeuvre for more experienced readers. This is the first clear, introductory reading of Bataille in English - challenging current reductive readings, and stressing the range of disciplines affected by Bataille's work, at a time when interest in Bataille is growing.

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.

A deft reconstruction of what Georges Bataille envisioned as a continuation of his work La Somme Athéologique, this volume brings together the writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. Gathering Bataille’s most intimate writings, these essays, aphorisms, notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice clarify and extend Bataille’s radical theology, his philosophy of history, and his ecstatic method of meditation. Following Bataille’s lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall’s introduction offers a clear picture of the author’s overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The "system" that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is "atheology," understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge. At the other side of realism, Bataille’s writing in La Somme pushes language to its silent end. And yet, writing toward the ruin of language, in search of words that slip from their meanings, Bataille uses language—and the discourses of theology, philosophy, and literature—against itself to return us to ourselves, endlessly. The system against systems is in fact systematic, using systems and depending on discourses to achieve its own ends—the end of systematic thought.A medievalist librarian by training, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was active in the French intellectual scene from the 1920s through the 1950s. He founded the journal Critique and was a member of the Acéphale group and the Collège de Sociologie. Among his works available in English are Visions of Excess (Minnesota, 1985), Tears of Eros (1989), and Erotism (1990).

Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles’s positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward.This book challenges the notion of a “closed economy” predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.