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, ...
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 ...
Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The "Accursed Share "provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and (...) cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. The three volumes of "The Accursed Share" address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, "The History of Eroticism" and "Sovereignty", Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. "The History of Eroticism" analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Bataille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends.". (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)
The first English translation of key texts by Georges Bataille pertaining to The Accursed Share that also map out his transition from "dissident surrealist" to systematic thinker.
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)
