Bataille, Georges

Georges Bataille's (1887–1962) main writings span the period from the late 1920s up to his death in 1962. In his life, he was highly respected by many major authors (Blanchot, Caillois, Leiris, Klossowski), was in prolonged contact with others (Lacan, Benjamin), and was famously criticised (Breton, Sartre). He has had an immense influence on almost all French thought that has emerged since the 1960s, and since being translated extensively in the 1980s and 1990s, this influence has spread to the English-speaking world. What makes him important is the combination of transgressive content and a style that refuses academic convention, with Sade and Nietzsche high on the list of his own sources.

Several major works remained either anonymous (notably, erotic fiction such as The Story of the Eye or L'Abbé C, generally released under pseudonyms) or unpublished, such as the seemingly complete second and third volumes of The Accursed Share. This messiness and lack of resolution indicates something of the content—Bataille's writing is hard to consolidate into a systematic thought—wherever you look, there are paradoxes, contradictions, holes, and things simply not fitting together neatly. Whilst all this would be a problem for traditional philosophy, it is what makes his work exciting for theory, and why his writing seems only to increase in relevance.

Bataille was part of a vibrant network of artists, intellectuals, writers, and oddness that coalesced in Surrealism. Whilst the movement was a vital one for Bataille, with its combination of art, philosophy (outside the official discipline of the same name), interest in the unconscious, and aspirations to revolution, he was to be quickly ejected from the doctrinaire centre of Surrealism, where André Breton would dictate the party line. This continual rebellion can also be seen in Bataille's relation to Hegel, as well as to Marxism, and signals the endless negativity in his thought, a negativity without purpose or ulterior end.

Bataille's interest in philosophical anthropology (Émile Durkheim, Robert Hertz, and above all, Marcel Mauss), culminating in his establishing the College of Sociology (in the late 1930s), and collaboration with Roger Caillois, gives his work another way of creating a total theory but one that cannot be totalized, that is, made into a monumental, logical project in search of truth. Bataille's work, then, takes the theoretical implications of French anthropology and extends those into an ascientific model.

There are other contextual factors: the war (1939–1945), which seems largely to have passed Bataille by despite his forceful and prophetic anti-Nazism of the mid-1930s (see Bataille 1985), and also existentialism, which was unavoidable, in 1940s and 1950s France, at least. Here, too, Bataille could only be against: against the idea of life as project (as this meant you would always be serving a higher utility), against the overly literal idea of engagement (political commitment) in art, and against Sartre, who returned the favour in his not wholly inaccurate “review” (Sartre 1947) of Bataille's Inner Experience (1988b). There are, despite Bataille, similarities with the existentialist project, especially if we include Heidegger under that umbrella: the centrality of death, the individual as function of the world, negativity, a certain sense of authenticity. Essentially, the link comes down to the role of the phenomenology derived from Hegel, which Bataille continually surpasses without resolving (i.e., he does not seek to “better” Hegel), and existentialism might be asking the same questions as Bataille but not with the same methods or the same outcomes (there can be no outcome for the Bataillean subject; Bataille 1988b:22). His own view of the difference between himself and Heidegger is encapsulated when writing of a possible similarity, “I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman” (Bataille 1970–88, V:217).

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