Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.

A librarian, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', George Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. Although published at the start of the 'sexual revolution', Eroticism (1857) totally rejects the gospel of 'liberation'. Everywhere, it argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, and everywhere we transgress against them in our desperation to overcome an agonizing sense of separation from other people. In developing this central theme, Bataille offers a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and the violence at the heart of religious ritual. The result is one of the strangest and most compelling books ever written about sex.

The Tears of Eros is the culmination of Georges Bataille's inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common obsession: death. This essay, illustrated with artwork from every era, was developed out of ideas explored in Erotism: Death and Sexuality and Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux or the Birth of Art. In it Bataille examines death--the ""little death"" that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice. Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. In 1959, Bataille began The Tears of Eros, and it was completed in 1961, his final work. Bataille died in 1962.

"I am the man," wrote Artaud, "who has best charted his inmost self." Antonin Artaud was a great poet who, like Poe, Holderlin, and Nerval, wanted to live in the infinite and asked that the human spirit burn in absolute freedom. To society, he was a madman. Artaud, however, was not insane but in luciferian pursuit of what society keeps hidden. The man who wrote Van Gogh the Man Suicided by Society raged against the insanity of social institutions with insight that proves more prescient with every passing year. Today, as Artaud's vatic thunder still crashes above the "larval confusion" he despised, what is most striking in his writings is an extravagant lucidity. This collection gives us quintessential Artaud on the occult, magic, the theater, mind and body, the cosmos, rebellion, and revolution in its deepest sense.

When this work was first published in the first hald of the last century, sexology and the unprejudiced study of sexual activity was in its infancy. In his study of human sexual behaviour, Kinsey was able to state that the majority of human beings had masturbated at one time or another but to us today this seems quite an astonishing statement to have made. The study of human sexuality was surrounded by ignorance and superstition, and the medical profession was regrettably the worst offender and the most ignored. In such a climate, Dr Stekel’s book was a revelation much ahead of its time. This edition first published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.