Summary
Contents
Subject index
Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille's ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world. His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging a
Death
Death
Death is a continual concern for Bataille, from the earliest writings, to the last fizzles in and around The Tears of Eros, and arguably sits at the centre of the general economy, as death can be seen as ‘the ultimate term of possible expenditure’ (‘Attraction and Repulsion II’, 123; OC II, 332 trans. mod.). Bataille's notion of death is an empty version of Hegel's: it is negativity, but one that cannot be recuperated, even if all our actions can be seen as attempts at such a recuperation. Death is the loss that defines our existence as individuals, since sexual reproduction is absolutely caught up with the death of the individual; unlike amoebae, there is no continuity of Being from one organism to the next ...
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