Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, Puy-de-Dome, France, “of peasant stock” (Bataille 1989, 217). He considered himself to have suffered an extremely painful and disturbed childhood, possibly including sexual abuse by his father. Yet it is unclear whether this actually occurred or existed only in Bataille's imagination (see Surya 2001). In 1914, Bataille and his mother abandoned his blind and syphilitic father, fleeing the advancing German army. This abandonment of a feared yet revered father seemed to have a decisive influence on Bataille's thought and life, concerned as it is with the sacred, violence, loss, eroticism, consumerism, excess, and death.

Bataille's earliest intellectual interests were medieval history, languages, and philosophy. Formally converted to the Roman Catholic faith in 1914, Bataille seriously considered joining the priesthood. After spending several months with Benedictine monks at Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight in 1920, Bataille's faith faded, seemingly due as much to sexual experiences as to his avid reading of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. In 1922, Bataille graduated from the École des Chartres in Paris and became a fellow of the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid. Developing a taste for bullfights, Bataille witnessed the horrific death of a famous matador, Manuel Granero, whose skull was penetrated through the eye by a bull's horns. This event fed into Bataille's best-known fictional work, The Story of the Eye. Indeed, the interweaving of fact and fiction, thought and life, eroticism and philosophy is characteristic of Bataille's work.

Bataille worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris from 1922 until 1942, when forced to retire due to ill health. In 1946, Bataille founded the influential journal Critique, which published early works by Michel Foucault and Maurice Blanchot, and later in his career published systematic treatments of his major ideas, including the influential study The Accursed Share.

This work elaborates Bataille's fundamental “law of General economy”:

Excess cannot be accumulated indefinitely: ancient societies expended excess wealth and energy through festivals and sacrificial rites. The European Industrial Revolution made possible an immense growth of wealth and energy and relative peace between 1815 and 1914, but inevitably, according to Bataille, the excess production was turned to catastrophic ends: “The two world wars organised the greatest orgies of wealth—and of human beings—that history has recorded” (37).

Bataille feared that the postwar emergence of an American superpower would threaten the entire globe unless its wealth could be expended through peaceful rather than warlike means. He advocated an extension of the Marshall Plan to redistribute “excess” American wealth to the war-shattered European economies. Such an ethics of generosity would protect the world from unplanned and uncontrolled internal convulsions of violent squandering. For Bataille, such an ethics might constitute “consumption for the other,” which he contrasted with the dominant capitalist mode of consumerism for individual or selfish ends, such as profit, reinvestment, or prestige (69).

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