Georges Bataille

Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille
Full name Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille
Born 10 September 1897
Billom, France
Died 9 July 1962(1962-07-09) (aged 64)
Paris, France
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Continental philosophy

Georges Bataille (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ baˈtaj]) (10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962) was a French writer. His multifaceted work is linked to the domains of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art. Eroticism and transgression are at the core of his writings.

Contents

Life and work

French literature
By category
French literary history
French writers

Chronological list
Writers by category
Novelists · Playwrights
Poets · Essayists
Short story writers
Portals
France · Literature

George Bataille was the son of Joseph-Aristide Bataille (1851), a tax collector, and Antoinette-Aglae Tournarde (1865). Born in Billom, Puy-de-Dôme, his family moved to Champagne in 1901 which allowed him to study in Reims and then Épernay. He initially considered priesthood and went to a Catholic seminary but renounced his faith in 1922.

Bataille attended the École des Chartes in Paris and graduated in February 1922. Bataille is often referred to, interchangeably, as an archivist and a librarian. While it is true that he worked at the Bibliothèque Nationale, his work there was with medallion collections (he also published scholarly articles on numismatics), and his thesis at the École des Chartes was a critical edition of the medieval manuscript L’Ordre de chevalerie which he produced directly by classifying the eight manuscripts from which he reconstructed the poem. After graduating he moved to the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid. As a young man, he befriended, and was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist, Lev Shestov.

Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille is the author of an oeuvre both abundant and diverse: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, in passing of poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism). He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some of his publications were banned. He was relatively ignored during his lifetime and scorned by contemporaries such as Jean-Paul Sartre as an advocate of mysticism, but after his death had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, and Jacques Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the journal Tel Quel. His influence is felt in the work of Jean Baudrillard, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig.

Initially attracted to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton, although Bataille and the Surrealists resumed cautiously cordial relations after World War II. Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology which included several other renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis.[1]

Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a decapitated man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war. The group also published an eponymous review, concerned with Nietzsche's philosophy, and which attempted to postulate what Jacques Derrida has called an "anti-sovereignty". Bataille thus collaborated with André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, Jean Rollin and Jean Wahl.

Bataille drew from diverse influences and used diverse modes of discourse to create his work. His novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil), published under the pseudonym Lord Auch (literally, Lord "to the shithouse" — "auch" being short for "aux chiottes," slang for telling somebody off by sending him to the toilet), was initially read as pure pornography, while interpretation of the work has gradually matured to reveal the considerable philosophical and emotional depth that is characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within "literature of transgression". The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle.

Other famous novels include the posthumously published My Mother (which would become the basis of Christophe Honoré's film Ma mère), The Impossible and Blue of Noon. The latter, with its necrophilia, politics, and autobiographical undertones, is a much darker treatment of contemporary historical reality.

During World War II, he wrote a Summa Atheologica (the title parallels Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica) which comprises his works "Inner Experience," "Guilty," and "On Nietzsche." After the war he composed his The Accursed Share, and founded the influential journal Critique. His singular conception of "sovereignty" was discussed by Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and others.

Bataille's first marriage was to actress Silvia Maklès, in 1928; they divorced in 1934, and she later married the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Bataille also had an affair with Colette Peignot, who died in 1938. In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais, with whom he had a daughter.

In 1955 Bataille was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis, although he was not informed at the time of the terminal nature of his illness.[2] He died seven years later, on 9 July 1962.

Key concepts

Base materialism

Bataille developed base materialism during the late 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with mainstream materialism. Bataille argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. In a sense the concept is similar to Spinoza's neutral monism of a substance that encompasses both the dual substances of mind and matter posited by Descartes; however, it defies strict definition and remains in the realm of experience rather than rationalisation. Base materialism was a major influence on Derrida's deconstruction, and both share the attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable "third term." Bataille's notion of Base Materialism may also be seen as anticipating Althusser's conception of aleatory materialism or "materialism of the encounter," which draws on similar atomist metaphors to sketch a world in which causality and actuality are abandoned in favor of limitless possibilities of action.

Other

Bibliography

Primary literature

Complete works

Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard)

Works published in French:

Posthumous works:

Translated works:

Collected Poems of Georges Bataille, Mark Spitzer, 1998, 1999, Dufour Editions. Hardback is titled Collected Poetry of Georges Bataille, 1998.

Secondary literature

References

  1. ^ Bataille, Georges. "Nietzsche and Fascists", Acéphale, January 1937
  2. ^ Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, p. 474.
  3. ^ Oeuvres Completes III, pg. 491

External links