Georges Bataille's influence upon 20th-century philosophy is hard to overstate. His writing has transfixed his readers for decades – exerting a powerful influence upon Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida amongst many others. Today, Bataille continues to be an important reference for many of today's leading theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy and Adrianna Caverero. His work is a unique and enigmatic combination of mystical phenomenology, politics, anthropology and economic theory – sometimes adopting the form of literature, sometimes that of ontology. This is the first book to take Bataille's ambitious and unfinished Accursed Share project as its thematic guide, with individual contributors isolating themes, concepts or sections from within the three volumes and taking them in different directions. Therefore, as well as providing readings of Bataille's key concepts, such as animality, sovereignty, catastrophe and the sacred, this collection aims to explore new terrain and new theoretical problems.Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought acts simultaneously as a companion to Bataille's three-volume secular theodicy and as a laboratory for new syntheses within his thought.

Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.

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. Stuart Kendall chronicles these aspects of his intellectual development, as well as tracing his pivotal role in the creation of journals such as Documents and Acéphale, and how his writings in aesthetics and art history were the pioneering cornerstones of visual culture studies. Kendall positions Bataille at the heart of a prodigious community of thinkers, including André Breton, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Kojève, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, among many others.

Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acphale. He has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought, influencing such writers as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the fascinating The Accursed Share, are modern classics. In this acclaimed intellectual biography, Michel Surya gives a detailed and insightful account of Bataille's work against the backdrop of his life - his troubled childhood, his difficult relationship with Andr Breton and the surrealists and his curious position as a thinker of excess, 'potlatch', sexual extremes and religious sacrifice, one who nonetheless remains at the heart of twentieth century French thought-all of it drawn here in rich and allusive prose. While exploring the source of the violent eroticism that laces Bataille's novels, the book is also an acute guide to the development of Bataille's philosophical thought. Enriched by testimonies from Bataille's closest acquaintances and revealing the context in which he worked, Surya sheds light on a figure Foucault described as 'one of the most important writers of the century'.

This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.

Keuze uit het werk van de Franse filosoof (1897-1962).

A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsche’s importance to Bataille, and of Bataille’s experience in Nazi-occupied France. Georges Bataille wrote On Nietzsche in the final months of the Nazi occupation of France in order to cleanse the German philosopher of the “stain of Nazism.” More than merely a treatise on Nietzsche, the book is as much a work of ethics in which thought is put to the test of experience and experience pushed to its limits. At once personal and political, it was written as an act of war, its publication contingent upon the German retreat. The result is a poetic and philosophical—and occasionally harrowing—record of life during wartime. Following Inner Experience and Guilty, On Nietzsche is the third volume of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica. Haunted by the recognition that “existence cannot be at once autonomous and viable,” herein the author yearns for community from the depths of personal isolation and transforms Nietzsche’s will to power into his own will to chance. This new translation includes Memorandum, a selection of 280 passages from Nietzsche’s works edited and introduced by Bataille. Originally published separately, Bataille planned to include the text in future editions of On Nietzsche. This edition also features the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes, as well as an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.