| Title | : | Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0816612838 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780816612833 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1985 |
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 Reviews
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I rarely understand Bataille. When I do, it's sometimes really beautiful but its also sometimes about buttholes
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Some great contributions here on Marx, Hegel, Nietzsche, fascism, and so on. Some impenetrable bits, too--though likely those should be read in close conjunction with his fictions, for mutual cross-illumination.
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One of the few books I brought with me when I lived in Japan. Georges Bataille is one of the great 'thinkers.' Just to spend time reading him with a glass of sake is a fond memory for me.
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As an undergraduate and then a graduate student during a period that fell on either side of the line demarcating the turn of the century I read and assimilated a great deal of Georges Bataille's writing. Something of a dissolute wild man, though one possessing not insubstantial scholarly discipline, it was no surprise that I was taken with Bataille. Certainly a fan of his quasi-pornographic 1928 novel STORY OF THE EYE, famously mobilizing as it does a fascinating and bold libidinal economy, I was even more taken with his subsequent novel BLUE OF NOON, which I found to encapsulate my own state of mental agitation (germane very specifically to my late teens and early twenties) better than any other work of fiction I had ever encountered (or ever would). As far as his theoretical writings were concerned, the Zone Books editions of his three-volume late-period pièce de résistance THE ACCURSED SHARE impacted me significantly, perhaps especially the opening volume on political economy, which very much blew my mind. As for Bataille's pre-war essays from the 20s and 30s, a great many of which were translated and editorially consolidated by Allan Stoekl in 1985 to comprise VISIONS OF EXCESS, the volume being presently considered: I have no small amount of experience with these either. A film major and philosophy minor who went on to attain a Film Studies MA, I studied French cinema of the 1930s extensively under internationally-respected Jean Renoir specialist Christopher Faulkner (who you can see holding forth on the special features of Criterion DVDs for a couple films by said master director). Studying under Faulkner meant engaging the French cultural, political, and intellectual landscape of the 1930s in all its minutiae. (We even studied maps of Paris.) In one of his seminar courses I was given the opportunity to present on Bataille, his adversarial relationship with the surrealists, and his considerable contribution to continental thought. "The Big Toe," collected here, was assigned reading for the course. VISIONS OF EXCESS does not collect all of Bataille's surviving theoretical writing of the 1930s--which is unsurprising considering such a volume would be comparatively massive--but rather a judicious, characteristic sample, covering three key phases that coalesced between 1927 and 1939. How are we to categorize Bataille? It would certainly be ill-considered to attempt to call him a philosopher. He is no such thing at the end of the day, and unstintingly reviles philosophical systems. From the standpoint of the current era Bataille looks more than a little like a critical theorist, though in the time and place he was writing the term was no being used. No. He was more or less a renegade social anthropologist. Though he is far more inflamed (not to say practically dangerous), he has more than a little in common with his contemporary Walter Benjamin (who we can more appropriately call a critical theorist), and his maverick method very much looks forward to Roland Barthes and Derrida. There would also clearly be no Michel Foucault without Bataille. In the 20s and 30s the most visible thing about Bataille would have been his contentious relationship with André Breton and the surrealists; it is important to note that though Bataille and Breton were engaged in vitriolic dispute, they were very much manifestations of the same basic zeitgeist, and we cannot engage either of them without situating their perspectives in relationship to the importance of psychoanalytic theory and Marxism. Bataille in his way interposes himself as a rogue bridge between Freud and Lacan. Though each valorized disruptive unconscious forces, what Breton rejected in Bataille was above all else what he denigrated as the "excremental" character of the latter's vision. Well, yeah, fair enough. At all points Bataille prizes the heterogeneous over the homogeneous, and asserts of his emergent Heterology that it “leads to the complete reversal of the philosophical process, which ceases to be the instrument of appropriation, and now serves excretion; it introduces the demand for the violent gratifications implied by the social life.” What we excrete is base matter, and base matter is sacred in relation to the profane things we are supposed to value. Science, religion, and philosophical systems become just as much about appropriation and acquisition as are capitalist systems, or, in fact, all institutions geared towards human utility. If Breton balks at the excremental and at base matter, the problem is his alone, reflecting an impotent and fatuous romanticism. In the 1930s Bataille had hopes for revolution, but there is no way to overlook that he is a terrible Marxist, and though dialectical materialist orthodoxy finds its way into his work as something he repeatedly grapples with and to some extent sublimates, he despises and has no patience with politicking, a tendency that only becomes more exaggerated in the face of the International Communist Party's intractable fealty to Stalinism. What he demands of revolution is something far more explosive and base: “profound complicity with natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them,” resulting in the “fall into stinking filth of what had been elevated.” He says of most Marxist theory that it is mostly “revolting utopian sentimentality.” This is obviously brazen stuff! As he moves further away from Marx and Hegel, Bataille takes with him his early love of the Marquis de Sade and falls increasingly in thrall to Nietzsche (and by extension Dionysus and Heraclitus), finally leading to his stating outright in "The Obelisk" that "Nietzsche is to Hegel what a bird breaking its shell is to a bird contentedly absorbing the substance within.” Bataille reifies time: he sees time as the ground of Heraclitus and the heart of glorious Nietzschean tragedy, inherently "horror-spreading." He believes in “agitation on the scale of irreducible needs,” and the idea that humanity seems “able to subsist only at the limits of horror.” He despises fascism for its grotesque imperative mode, championing exclusively those manifestations of revolutionary emancipatory outrage that are genuinely subversive and refuse to repurpose old social and political models cast into disrepute. Both fascism and the Soviets show us “what frauds are acceptable to a mob limited by misery, at the mercy of those who basely flatter it.” As a young man, Bataille became deeply religious, a movement which was actually contrary to the temper of his (fraught) upbringing, so we can only understand his eventual ecstatic embrace of the "death of God" as a truly radical personal upheaval. Bataille is fundamentally a (base) materialist, and when he speaks of God (appropriate for a social anthropologist) it is always a transcendental God, precisely because it is a transcendental God that most societies have deployed as a shadowy agent of control. As something of a Spinozist, I have no problem locating God in the immanent and heterogeneous, but Bataille is disinclined to go there. Bataille's violent rejection of God becomes a violent rejection of the head, as the head is seen as “the conscious authority of God” keeping one subservient to function. Anything that is not wildly embodied myth, heterogeneous intensity, excretion, heated passion, sacrifice, the sacred, is rejected. God, the State, the political neuters, science, philosophy, writers producing literature in service to the leading of facile and pathetic lives by “the standards of salesmen,” out they go, out they go with the head. And so it comes to pass. In the third phase of the period represented in VISIONS OF EXCESS Bataille forms the Acéphale group, named for the headless man, in celebration of the rise of the headless man. The group got up to some pretty crazy business, apparently even discussing engaging in real human sacrifices, and in the writing of this period--look especially at "The Obelisk"--the domain of myth begins to take on something of an occult hue. (The amazing stuff on the pyramids in "The Obelisk" had me thinking of Kenneth Anger's film LUCIFER RISING.) In the essays collected in VISIONS OF EXCESS Bataille goes into very radical and sinister places without ever losing his exquisite scholarly poise. His language is invigorating yet always controlled. His rhetoric is pretty steady, you want to follow him (at least I do), and you stay with him despite the fact that he prescribes horror and prescribes it vehemently. Of course horror is also ecstasy. That is the rub. VISIONS OF EXCESS also had me thinking back on Volume One of THE ACCURSED SHARE, precipitating timely mediation concerning our despoiled planet and the calamity in store for us--which I think we might possibly frame as perhaps the final, most ghoulish and infernally orgiastic potlatch, expressing something like fidelity to the most ancient of customs--and also this other book, a book of science, Howard Bloom's THE LUCIFER PRINCIPLE, which I believe a housemate of mine must have brought into our shared residence (shortly after the turn of the century), and which I would suggest is a great resource for those who Rebecca Solnit would deem lazy cynics should they feel compelled to defend their strident fatalism, demonstrating as the book does that the most intelligent species have always been (in aggregate) abhorrent monsters, abhorrence growing proportionately with intelligence. Granted, you might be a crypto-Hegelian who believes that at some point we will transcend history. More power to you. I have myself become increasingly serene over the years, and have come to frame my life in terms of spiritual practice. I could go through Bataille's essays and pick points I don't agree with--especially perhaps with his occasional wholly counter-productive introduction of Hegelean negation into his critical repertoire in the earlier pieces and his periodic argumentative fallacies--but what is most trenchant here is what I can carry with me still of this inflamed vision as a psychic energy that does not have to be embodied in the wild self-destructive profusion that characterized my early adulthood and which nearly killed me. Young Bataille would not have agreed with me, but I think it is possible to live for violence and orgiastic intensity as a gentle and caring person, even as one who wishes to participate in healing. The history of mankind might well be seen as a colossal conflagration and the forces inherent to its occurrence indelibly course through me, a human person. I believe in mindfulness, bearing, and right conduct. I know that a violent cosmic horror can pass through me beautifully and that I can live connection and powerful awe. I will myself destroy only very minimally, but I will live what Bataille prescribes: "The Practice of Joy Before Death." Today I went with a friend to keep her company while the veterinary hospital euthanized her very ill cat Luna. Our fellowship was sad, intense, and beautiful. Life is very, very violent and intense. The putrescence of death is inexhaustible. And I am grateful. If Bataille reminds us how much Nietzsche despised Socrates for the pithy way he held up "the good," it is only because the bottom line is always going to be the tragic and you will only suffer if you fail to affirm it. Married to the tragic is the realization that passion superseding reason is where we find our glory.
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A collection of essays that have a healthy appetite for dissent. From aesthetics to culture, Bataille examines the individual and society. Idealism falls from the heavens and is defecated upon until life comes into focus.
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"دوگانگی، ذاتی هر پدیدار دگرسان است. تخطی، مازاد، هذیان، و دیوانگی، هریک درحدی نشان از قلمروی دگرسان دارند: این موارد هرگاه به فعلیت درآیند قواعد همسانی اجتماعی را میشکنند. واقعیت آنها نیز از نظمی دیگر و متفاوت از همسانی ست، چرا که آنها به ابژهی دیگر انتقال یافته و سرایت میکند.
نمادهای دارای ارزش و بار معنایی احساسی نیز نقشی بنیادین در برانگیختن نیروهای دگرسان دارند. لذا، باتای به نفع پیوند تکمیل گرایانهی میان لاهوتی/ناسوتی، هزینه پردازی/تولید، سرخوشی/ملالت و پراکندگی/تمرکز ارائه میکند تا این برهان را تقویت کند که یک ذهنیت بورژوا-سرمایه دار به نام مدرنبته، پیشرفت و عقلانیت، در حقیقت یک بعد را به زیان بعد دیگری از ارزش انداخته و بی مقدار میکند. جانکاهتر آنکه، این امر به انتقال یک شق این دوگانه به محیط های اجتماعی خاصی منجر شد، که نتیجه آن انزوا و انزجار آنها از یکدیگر بود، در حالی که دسترسی به اشکال جمعی، دگرسانی را از بورژوازی نیز مضایقه میکرد. با زعم باتای، این بازتاب های روان شناختی به لحاظ ذهنی تغییر شکل های تاریخی عینی مسببِ خیزش نظامی گری را تحکیم کرد." -
A collection of Bataille's writings from this era that ranges from "could appear in an academic journal" (The Critique of the Foundation of the Hegelian Dialectic, the Psychological Structure of Fascism, maybe the Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade) to the outright surreal and borderline maddening (The Pineal Eye, The Obelisk, The Solar Anus) to works that have a mixture of the two (The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Base Materialism and Gnosticism). There is also a quasi-religious/mystic chant "The Practice of Joy Before Death". In other words, the work is heterogeneous and I think heterogeneity is at the core of Bataille, if you could say there is a core.... it is definitely an influence.
Bataille's topics in general are those that are unassimilated, outside, excreted, in other words heterogeneous (eroticism, radical leftist/anti-fascist politics, sacrifices, lacerations, mutilations, ruptures, wounds, mysticism, ecstasy, etc.) When Breton called Bataille the "Excremental Philosopher" I am thinking Breton meant it as an insult, but really what Breton said in Bataillean terms is that Bataille is a philosopher of the heterogeneous, a heterologist (a neologism of his own making: a science of the completely other).
Bataille is often described as a "shadow" that follows behind post-structuralism, influencing Derrida and Kristeva, among others. Even in this way he is exterior. He is (was?) exterior to the academy, a librarian by profession, and tended to renounce being called a philosopher. He was a thinker of the completely other, of the expelled, of repulsion, of excrement, of an eroticism of death but also of ecstatic frenzy found in these things.
His writing can be opaque and it is not entirely clear what he means at points in this book (as opposed to books like The Accursed Share or Erotism, which I found to be much more clear, though residual opacity did remain at times). But seeing as though he has a book about "nonknowledge", maybe he was never meant to be understood, maybe you can't really understand the pure exteriority of humanity, but only experience it in eroticism, death, sacrifice, ecstasy and madness. -
tempted to go the full five for the latter half essays on nietzsche alone, but honestly there's a lot here i feel the need to return to after spending more time with hegel (gasp, i know)
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Equal parts brilliant and equals parts insane. Bataille sings the delirious praise of all things base, excremental and impure, things at the other pole of the sacred. I enjoyed reading Bataille's fragmentary ruminations on the sheer irreducibility of matter to thought (unlike ordinary materialism which simply places dead matter at the summit) and his spirited defense of nietzsche's "myth of the future" against the fascist appropriations that seek to chain men to the past. Many of the shorter pieces have a burst of mystical violence about them, through which the sense of contagion is communicated to the reader, lacerating and butchering them open. Perhaps not the best introduction to Bataille's thought, but a feast nonetheless.
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if bataille understands one prescient point it is that "political revolution" needs to spend its time in the shitty no fun depths of materialism to be even slightly worthwhile. He makes (or borrows? i forget) a nice metaphor for this in the eagle vs the mole, the burning heat of the sun and the unknown caves of the earth etc etc (he basically does this the whole book). aside from this a lot of these essays read like something i would be embarrassed to hand in for an undergraduate class with occasionally interesting put downs of surrealism and good spots of "marxist analysis". i'm not sure about this as a flattering introduction but i would give him another look. i drank way too much coffee
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YOU KNOW WHAT IM JUST GONNA SAY I READ IT. THERE.
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I am in love with this man
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En essäsamling som säkert är full av kött för någon som försöker förstå idéerna och historiken bakom Batailles tänkande men om man redan löst honom känns det mesta igen. På slutet handlar det mesta om Nietzsche så där somnade jag till lite och skummade mest.
Väl översatt och lättläst men man måste nog vara väldigt sugen på Bataille för att närläsa allt. -
Reading reviews from other GR readers I am surprised to see many find him contradictory, when what maybe struck me most in those texts written over nearly fifteen years was the rigour, the cohesion of his diverse strands of thought, and its distinctly systematic character: more than contradictions it is perhaps the cherished paradoxes on which he builds an otherwise meticulous edifice that leave people uneasy, a turn of mind that testify to his avowed roots in avantgarde culture, and which I have encountered often enough not to mind the leap of faith it demands:
At the beginning -of existence, of social life, of individual psychology- was expenditure. Here might be both the most simple, but also the more difficult and the more fascinating of Bataille's argument.
In his strictly materialist view the fundamental impulse of man is consumption, in French 'dépense', a wasting of energy, resources or health (of anything that separate us from the crushing submission to nature in death) which crucially must be understood as an absolute end in itself and an existential imperative. Expenditure takes many forms in many different contexts, from the gift economy of Marcel Mauss to the ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs, and carries, in proportion to its purity (to its standing as its own end, escaping instrumentalisation), a sense of the sacred. This sacred was visible in ancient civilisations, relegated to heterodoxy during the christian age, but is still driving to this day the most authentic cultural forms, because all of human culture, being fundamentally contingent, is, at heart, expenditure. When function or instrumentality creeps into it, it becomes debased and looses its timeless existential value.
The existential value of expenditure is expressed in largely nietzschean terms, maybe the most visible and durable influence on Bataille's thought: expenditure constitute the concrete and practical form of 'Bejahung', that 'saying yes to life' which constitute both the essence of tragedy and the existential imperative of worldliness. In Bataille this takes a potentially even more radical turn, given the aesthetic fascination that drive his thought and his fiction, for all the sights rejected by the tidy, functional and superficial spectacle of bourgeois society: Bejahung becomes 'the practice of joy before death', and the nietzschean suspicion of contemplation is overcome in a pervasive but fundamentally materialist and immanent mystique of death. Facing death and contemplating its imminence and inevitability ties Bataille's Nietzsche back with a christian mystique tradition that provides, in the age preceding the death of God, the missing link between XXth century philosophy and ancient tragic thought.
Much like death (the cadavers, severed body parts and gushing blood are the best remembered elements of his erotica) is granted a special ontological status on the basis of its absolute uselessness, so are bodily fluids, shit, piss or sperm, which become, in virtue of their being expenditure in the most literal sense, the fundamental units of culture. Delivering poetry, improvising music or speaking in tongues, in that system, are on a par with taking a shit or vomiting in the gutter. This presupposition grounds what Bataille (and his followers) call base materialism, around which is woven his art criticism and engagement with surrealism. Breton, figure-head of that movement, for all his luciferian posturing was, all in all, prim and stuffy, carefully policing the borders of his movements through grandiloquent pronouncements and vociferous anathema that only reach us today daubed in ridicule and megalomania. Beyond those frontiers lay, for him, dissipation, pathology or idealism. This is where -off-centre, many would say today- Bataille starts his sabotage. Recognising the surreal (the visceral, 'convulsive' otherness sometimes surfacing in the polished surface of everyday life) in elements the surrealist orthodoxy had carefully disavowed, he seeks their shared ground, their lowest (basest) common denominator, which he find in some kind consuming frenzy, consuming both in terms of absorption and in terms of self-destruction.
The apex of his thought, although only outlined in the present volume, seems to be his conceptions of communication and community, which I have seen credited as an important source of the 'communautarian' debates of Nancy, Taylor, Bellah, Bell and others. It seems crucial in redeeming Bataille's political thught (when it comes close verge on the messianic navel-gazing), by providing a sturdy link between expenditure, his central concept of existential consumerism, and his other, more overtly political marxism. The wedding of the two, in his early thought, is not a peaceful one and the expected contradiction often arise. In the later period covered by this book (later Bataille would, after WW2, turn debatably 'apolitical') – that of the College of Sociology, attended by a number of luminaries orbiting around Bataille and his endeavours, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Lacan – Bataille developed an interesting analogy between love – not understood (only) in its platonic sense – and society in general: to cut to the chase, the expenditure of love comes both tears apart the individual and produce a new stable being, from the material (s)he and his or her partner expended. This only last an instant but must form the basis of community in general, one that can only be founded in the expenditure-sacrifice of its members, at the sole condition that the community be not utilitarian but that the expenditure and the community it produces become an end in itself.
I am no puritan – but I find I often see with much suspicion thinkers who give sexuality too central a place in their systems: this might come from living in an age where sex has become the conveniently delimited arena in which transgressions can be safely re-enacted, or maybe from too many writers applying a thin veneer of psychoanalysis to grant their thought, in a single blow, both the glitz of decadence and the sheen of scientific accuracy. The joy I felt in reading Bataille, then, despite the omnipresence of sex as the privileged locus authenticity (a kind of atavism testifying to the permanence of human condition) testifies to both the quality of his writing style (sex never feels lavished or utilised to give banal ideas undue privileges) and the absence of a rhetoric of 'nature' or normalcy (sex, and its more elaborate manifestation, culture, is intrinsically perverse and self-destructive – thus as much as all culture is sexual, we can also say that all sex is cultural).
There are obvious issues with such a view: first and foremost is the messianic character of his marxism, that like his pairs make maybe for a great cultural critique but permanently displace action -and thus justice- in a vaguely defined future. The revolution, or communism, become in this perspective little more than a myth, one useful maybe to shape and discipline individual consciousness, but ultimately only useful, a term I would imagine Bataille was none to keen on. His rejection of the strictures of political parties (avowed marxist he opposed stalinism but was never affiliated with any other currents, save maybe that of Souvarine for a time) and his related rejection of all instrumentality can only lead to some kind of Hakim-Bey-style spontaneism, where free culture magically provide free political organisation (his friend Kojeve would scold him for trying 'to make something out of nothing') – a common enough trait in those circles, but one which in his case, in light of biography, tarnish his commitment, leave us only an armchair (or bedroom, or kitchen table) philosopher.
Can I say I 'believe' Bataille? Probably not: I have probably not yet read enough philosophy to feel the same sense of explanation I can have more spontaneously toward sociology for example (not that I have read much sociology, however). Bataille, like much of pre-WW2 philosophy, I appreciate just as I appreciate the avantgarde: less for the more or less coherent living systems they propose, than for 'baring the device', the criticism through parody those same system conduct on modernity - 'alternative modernities' as the saying goes. None of those alternatives move me enough to accept or believe the kind of radical break in the continuity of time (revolutions) or in that of personal experience (mystique and/or existentialism) they posit. Bataille is no different: although his system is, from what I have read so far, possibly the most coherent and original one I know (the fact he has graduated from the 'avantgarde' department into the 'philosophy' one reflect I think the quality of his thought) it remains an object of curiosity, an object of contemplation, and ultimately one that is not really 'base' in the sense of 'base materialism'. In other words it is an idea, a highly fascinating one, but because of its overly theoretical character and its sometimes indulgent use of notions of unconscious, it is 'just' an idea. The structural inversion he operates, in line with what was then already a tradition, effectively turns functionalism on its head, but simultaneously his commitment to mass materialism makes him a real man of his time. -
The key reason I never mark things off as read that're incomplete nor make notes/review said books is not because I have much to lose in the digital public (i.e. the public) raising a lugubriously mimetic eyebrow, but rather because this site is an invaluable, relatively public, catalog which I annually update on flash drives in order to preserve notes for a plethora of reasons.
This evening I must make an exception.
Although I have not even thought about Georges Bataille in a decade in the way one climbing a ladder seldom reflects upon rungs, nor anuses upon tissue paper (re: Saint Wolfgang and the Devil), I took a glance at old volume of his I'd marked up said years ago. I was less looking for a gem than glancing over whatever robust idiocies had picqued my interest in the days of Rimbaud and Verlaine (I was seventeen; __________). Needless to say I found nothing nothing there: Christ-this, de Sade-that, phallic-this, Bronte-that. Further, however, a note: 'Visions of Excess.'
Ah yes, Minnesota. Some good ones in this series. This volume itself includes:
'The earth sometimes jerks off in a frenzy, and everything collapses on its
surface.'
This was preceded by something about love being a parody of rotten eggs, in a chapter entitled 'The Solar Anus.'
Thank you for the laugh, Monsieur Bataille. The laugh was good, hearty, and completely unexpected . It is not going to get better than that, so I finish this note in good jest thankful I revisited thee. -
Here are a series of experiments in search of a free society. Bataille tries on many hats throughout- the psychoanalyst, the pervert, the philosopher, the priest, the madman, the sociologist- to etch many different conceptions of the world with and without various phenomenological prisons and traps. Though it seems like everything gets its chance to be critiqued, the uniting thread that runs through these essays holds myth and mysticism as telos, that even without their ontic picture-thinking qualities hold on to something visceral and natural about the animal experience.
But Agh! Everything brings us so much closer to putting everything into language, yet simultaneously takes us further and further away! I guess we have to die to get to the afterlife, after all.
It makes total sense that Bataille is a Nietzsche head. Too bad about fickle human consciousness- staring into the abyss just produces more anthropomorphism and categorical thinking.
The Van Gogh essay, Solar Anus, the essay about human deformities and freak shows, the Hegel essay, "The Labyrinth", "The pineal eye" were probably my favorites. -
Interesting book. As he is often described as a forefather of Foucault and Baudrillard, it will be interesting to read them now and see for myself.
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What little I read was definitely fascinating...but it's the wrong time to really dive into this book right now. Hope to come back to it another time.
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Cultural theory, art criticism, philosophy and drunken shamanism all blended together with poetry by the world's most distinguished debauched librarian who favored human sacrifice.
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"My father slaps me and I see the sun."
"An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love."
"It is vain to consider, in the appearance of things, only the intelligible signs that allow the various elements to be distinguished from each other." -
Just amazing. My favorite pieces were “The Solar Anus” (a classic), Sacrifices, The Use Value of DAF de Sade, and the Psychological Structure of Fascism, but every essay is truly an excellent piece of work. I imagine this would be a great entry-point to Bataille’s more critical and philosophical work, as it provides a varied sample of Bataille’s pre-WWII literature that touches on philosophy, history, and economics, as well as providing a good insight into his somewhat contradictory and paradoxical strategy of philosophical thought and explanation.
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Someone trying to out-Nietzsche Nietzsche. How? Well, Fritz was quite chaste and polite, so Bataille lards on lots of genitalia and violence. (You can get the flavour of Bataille's philosophy from
Magritte's unprintable sketches, illustrations for GB's writing.)
Quite ordinary French Theory, cocks aside. -
Nice background that explains the motivations behind Bataille's later works. A couple stunning, poetic early essays. Shows his influences (Marx towards the beginning, Nietzsche towards the end, Hegel throughout) well. None of the essays were bad though not many grabbed me either, despite loving Erotism.
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Coomer philosophy, typical perverse, transgressive French thought as expected from Bataille. It's a neat synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche, but with a touch of his own originality in the mix (base materialism, social homogeneity and heterogeneity as critical concepts, the notion of limitless expenditure, etc.)
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I skimmed through the book to see any traces of Mauss...It isn't that obvious. But the book turns out to be full of Elan, or Nietzsche's Dionysian sense of the tragedy of life. What a man struggling for claiming his sovereignty of life.
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I think I'm going to have to let this one sink in for a bit and will probably read it again at a later date. Even though I didn't take in everything I read here, I still think I've found my new favourite philosopher.
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Solar anus ftw
