Books by Georges Bataille

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.

Linking the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, this title offers an array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as includes comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa.

In these three works of erotic prose Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes sacred, and intense experience is shown as the only way to transcend the boundaries of society and morality. Madame Edwarda is the story of a prostitute who calls herself God, and The Dead Man, published in 1964 after Bataille's death, is a startling short tale of cruelty and desire. This volume also contains Bataille's own introductions to his texts as well as essays by Yukio Mishima and Ken Hollings.

The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher.

‘Nietzsche. Memorandum’ (1945) er Georges Batailles indflydelsesrige udvalg af Friedrich Nietzsches aforismer og optegnelser. Udvalget ledsages af Batailles egne anvisninger til en særlig tolkning af Nietzsche, der skulle vriste den tyske tænker fri fra nazisternes politiske misbrug og søsteren Elizabeths redigering. Bogens modsvar – en ny anti-politisk sammensætning af Nietzsche – fik dermed stor betydning for, at man i efterkrigstiden igen læste Nietzsche som en afgørende, eksistentiel tænker. ‘Nietzsche. Memorandum’ er ikke kun en bog tilegnet Nietzsches minde, men også en præsentation af Batailles egen tænkning. Den franske litterat og filosof, der i eftertiden har haft stor indflydelse på bl.a. Foucault, Derrida og post-strukturalismen generelt, fremkalder med Nietzsches hjælp de typiske træk ved en bestemt tilværelsesform: det frie, ekstatiske og suveræne liv.‘Nietzsche. Memorandum’ er samtidig en appel og en opfordring til stillingtagen hos læseren. “Tiden er kommet til at være FOR eller IMOD.” Bataille søger i sin samtale med Nietzsche at få sig selv og sin læser i tale. I Nietzsche. Memorandum sættes alt dermed på spil, “ved grænsen til døden og intethed”.Bogen er forsynet med en grundig indledning Peter K. Westergaard.“Den, der skriver i blod og tankesprog, vil ikke læses, men læres udenad.”

Having spent the early thirties in far-left groups opposing Fascism, in 1937 Georges Bataille abandoned this approach so as to transfer the struggle onto the mythological plane, founding two groups with this aim in mind. The College of Sociology gave lectures attended by major figures from the Parisian intelligentsia - intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society that appeared to be bordering on collapse. The texts in this book comprise lectures given to the College; essays from the Acephale journal and a large cache of the internal papers of the secret society of Acephale.

'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Bront 's Wuthering Heights, Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal and the writings of Sade, Kafka and Sartre, explore subjects such as violence, eroticism, childhood, myth and transgression, in a work of rich allusion and powerful argument.

Set against the backdrop of Europe's slide into Fascism, Blue of Noon is a blackly compelling account of depravity and violence. As its narrator lurches despairingly from city to city in a surreal sexual and mental nightmare of squalor, sadism and drunken encounters, his internal collapse mirrors the fighting and marching on the streets outside. Exploring the dark forces beneath the surface of civilization, this is a novel torn between identifying with history's victims and being seduced by the monstrous glamour of its terrible victors, and is one of the twentieth century's great nihilist works.

Charles is a modern libertine, dedicated to vice and depravity, while Robert is a priest so devout that he is nicknamed l'Abbe. When the sexually wild Eponine intrudes upon their suffocating relationship, anguish, delirium, and death ensue.

A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential.

Takes up Nietzschean thought where Nietzsche left off - with the death of God. Written against the backdrop of Germany under the Third Reich the book explores the possibility of a spiritual life outside religion. In so doing it weaves an astonishing tapestry of confession, theology, philosophy, myth and eroticism.

Bataille s first novel, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch , is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.