His is a journey marked by the questioning of experience itself, until what is reached is sovereign laughter, non-knowledge, and a Presence in no way distinct from Absence, where "The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy ...

I live — if I choose to see things this way- — among a curious race that sees earth, its chance events and the vast interconnectedness of animals, mammals, ...

" Clearly introduced and comprehensively annotated by the editors, this book provides the best single-volume coverage of Bataille's work available.

In this text, Bataille clarifies his idea of the ‘excluded part’, i.e. that which is left behind by science. Bataille seeks to create an approach that would challenge the abstracted method of science, which presents the world as idealized and homogeneous. The aim of Bataille’s ‘science of the heterogeneous’ is to shed light on the unproductive expenditure of life, which moves between the sacred and the unclean. In pursuing this, he debunks the common idea that what is profane is already (...) impure and vice versa. This text is notable for the new vocabulary that Bataille introduces in order to define heterology. Terms like heterodoxy, agiology and scatology rehabilitate the ideas of the unclean and the profane by structuring them in a new discourse, in which the excluded part is taken as the foundation for the new science of the impossible. Finally, the text shows how Bataille articulates this new science through providing examples largely from the study of religion and psychoanalysis. (shrink)

Together, these texts also comprise perhaps the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with ...

This volume collects the most intimate writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre.

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

Georges Bataille's work is an essential reference in any discussion of modernity and postmodernity. An important influence on Foucault, Derrida and post-structuralism, Bataille is a thinker of key significance. This volume makes a selection from the entire body of his academic work, showing how his thinking on sacrifice, eroticism, taboo and transgression, and the nature of identity inform his social theory. Bataille - Essential Writings contains much previously untranslated material, including the complete texts of seven essays, and long extracts from (...) many others. It is the most comprehensive selection of Bataille's work to date, edited by an acknowledged authority. Bataille - Essential Writings will be the standard introductory text to this profound and difficult thinker. (shrink)

This lecture argues for a theory of play that departs from the Freudian analysis of pleasure and pain that associates pleasure with the resolution of a psychic tension or anxiety rather than with play and its ambiguities. It advances the idea that poetry, the domain of the aesthetic, eroticism, as well as that of the sacred involve forms of play. Play is here conceptualized in its positive aspect as an experience beyond reflective consciousness or calculation and that relates instead to (...) the improbable, the fascinating, the risky and thus to the death instinct. To that extent, the decisive part of play concerns the role of the unconscious in its elaboration. It is from such a perspective that it proposes the identity of pleasure and play. (shrink)