Bataille, Georges

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Thought provoking, brilliant and grotesque ...
Brilliant,,,
Only the French Can Match Erotic Literature with Philosophy
Filth and philosophy as only the French can serve it up
Grotesque and Disturbing...A Classic

Story of the Eye
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0872862097

Amazon.com

Only Georges Bataille could write, of an eyeball removed from a corpse, that "the caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation is so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing." Bataille has been called a "metaphysician of evil," specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror. Story of the Eye, written in 1928, is his best-known work; it is unashamedly surrealistic, both disgusting and fascinating, and packed with seemingly endless violations. It's something of an underground classic, rediscovered by each new generation. Most recently, the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir cites Story of the Eye as a major inspiration: she made a music video that alludes to Bataille's erotic uses of eggs, and she plans to read an excerpt for an album. Warning: Story of the Eye is graphically sexual, and is only for adults who are not easily offended.

Book Description

In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.

Customer Reviews:

Thought provoking, brilliant and grotesque ..........2007-05-08

What causes a mind to embrace gross sexual abstractions? When does a moment of teenage reckless abandon turn into a debauched nightmare? What causes a young mind to lean towards fetishism? Professionals have grappled with those questions for decades, and many of these and similar questions will remain forever unanswered in The Story of the Eye. And yet, even with the horrific, gruesome imagery, one cannot help but desire to know the answers. Don't fret, the author does not leave us empty. In part two of this edition, he offers some clarity as he mulls over a few of the aberrations of his childhood -- how he came to understand their relationship to events and images within the story itself.

While The Story of the Eye chronicles the deviant sexual escapades of two young lovers, this is not what I would consider a pornographic novel. Yes, the erotic scenes are quite intense - intense enough to make the faint hearted put the book down in order to vomit, but that is not the true bite of the story. The deep emotional, psychological, and pathological attachment between the two main characters is what drives this story. The narration slips in and out of conscious thought and action so fluidly it's like sinking into quicksand -- struggle against it and drown or remain still and experience this work as the true artistic endeavor that it is. If you dare to remain still, you certainly will not be disappointed.

Brilliant,,,.......2007-02-03

I decided to read this book out of curiosity when I read that Bjork had recommended everyone to read it. I knew that i was in for a shocking treat. Is it shocking? Yes, indeed. I personally wasn't too shocked by the erotic acts itself in the book, since none of it was new to me. I found it more shocking by how beautifully and yet frightful the narrative was...its such a page turner and definitely worth reading!

Only the French Can Match Erotic Literature with Philosophy.......2007-01-15

In "Story of the Eye", George Bataille combines the philosophy of the day (1928 France) - Surrealism - and weaves it into the tale of sexual depravity. This book has brings all of the forbidden sins to the table, including soft-boiled eggs! (You'll have to read it as I am not giving up the ghost on that one.)

I read this book fresh out of college while working a Generation X job in a bookstore; I found it on the shelf while shelving more mundane faire. It was stuck between two larger books and the gap caught my eye. Now, fifteen years later it is time for a new generation to discover this nifty AND disgusting psycho-sexual, philosophical novella.

Filth and philosophy as only the French can serve it up.......2007-01-05

Published nearly 80 years ago, *Story of the Eye* may still be the wildest ((and weirdest)) pornographic novel ever written. Sadomasochism, underage orgies, golden showers, homicide, necrophilia, soft-boiled eggs--and all of it in a story less than one hundred pages in length. Outstanding!

Couched in a super-lucid prose of hyperbolic surreality, *Story of the Eye* is a record of the x-rated exploits of two young lovers--the narrator and the lovely Simone, who he meets on a family vacation. Equally inexperienced and perfectly matched in their precocious perversity, they set about discovering their sexuality through a series of escalating debaucheries, sucking into their erotic vortex a mentally fragile blonde, a rich English psychopath, and a priest. Bataille seems determined to out-Sade deSade and he largely succeeds in outdoing the divine Marquis, spicing up the lewd proceedings with liberal doses of libertine philosophy and poetically-fueled descriptions of the most ordinarily unpoetic and sordid of acts.

Still, when all is said and done, *Story of the Eye* is truly a work of literature. You can tell because you're never once tempted to read with one hand! Complete with what amounts to a short "making of *Story of the Eye*" author's note, which traces the autobiographical links between Bataille's early life and the events of the novel, here is a fascinating take on the perverse imagination by one of its greatest theorists.

Grotesque and Disturbing...A Classic.......2007-01-04

What more can you say about Bataille's great contribution to surrealism? Read it, and be wrenched from your complacency. Surrender your prejudices, shatter your preconceptions, get sick, be healed.

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DRAWING from the MODERN

Drawing From The Modern
Andre Breton , Paul Gauguin , Georges Bataille , Jodi Hauptman , Hans Bellmer , Constantin Brancusi , Paul Cezanne , Marc Chagall , Giorgio De Chirico , Robert Delaunay , Andre Derain , Arthur Dove , Alexandra Alexandrovna Exter , Arshile Gorky , Juan Gris , Gustav Klimt , Wilfredo Lam , Filippo Marinetti , and Joan Miro
Manufacturer: The Museum of Modern Art, New York
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0870706632
Release Date: 2004-11-02

Book Description

Many of the key achievements in art of the last 125 years have been worked out on paper. From pictorial investigations that expanded the possibilities of vision to the invention of entirely new kinds of media, drawing has been the perfect laboratory for avant-garde experimentation. Drawing from the Modern traces such groundbreaking innovation through the unparalleled holdings of the drawings collection of The Museum of Modern Art. Drawing has historically been understood as a mark or line on paper--the record of a bodily gesture, an inscription of the action of the hand, an expression of the mind. Since the 1880s, however, artists have sought to interrupt these seemingly unbreakable links between mark, hand, and imagination. Defying long-held definitions of drawing and rejecting traditional materials, modern artists invented a host of practices, altering not only the field of drawing but artmaking in general. Examining masterworks from the Museum's collection of nearly 7,000 works on paper in three chronological volumes beginning in the 1880s and continuing through today, Drawing from the Modern reconsider artists' repudiation of traditional drafting methods, assault on the use of the single sheet of paper, and introduction of new materials. Going to the heart of avant-garde innovation, all three volumes showcase new formal strategies, including collage, abstraction, chance, and the integration of text and image, as well as new subject matter, including the urban experience, the body, and identity. Volume I, presented here, spans the period from 1880 to 1940, and includes work by such artists as Jean Arp, Hans Bellmer, Paul Cazanne, Arshile Gorky, Georgia O'Keeffe, Odilon Redon, and Kurt Schwitters. Volume II, available in Spring 2005, will cover 1940 to 1975, and Volume III, available in Fall 2005, will bring us from 1975 to the present day.

Customer Reviews:

DRAWING from the MODERN.......2006-12-27

DRAWING from the MODERN is the first of a three part series published by MOMA as catalogue to accompany the chronologically arranged exhibitions of their drawing collection; in part, celebration of the seventy fifth anniversary of the founding of the Museum.

This first book looks at the late nineteenth century through the beginning of the twentieth. Care and preservation of these drawings dictate that they are displayed infrequently, paper being a delicate medium, subject to fading, discoloration and brittleness. The publication of this series then allows us to have at hand a history of drawings seldom seen, and a visual education demonstrating how problems of that era both evolved and worked themselves out.

The introduction by Jodi Hauptman is broad and well worth reading. Aside from her entertaining "end of art" stories, she addresses artists and process leading to the dissolution of prevalent notions: relationship of "mark" to "ground", took new form; spatial notions of an orderly page, questioned; the element of chance, explored as process; the ego relationship of an artist to work, dissolving. New imagery happened: collage, abstraction, grids, enhanced emotions, metaphors of feeling, the sublime re-imaged. New subjects explored brutalities of war, notions of "city", identity, the spiritual, and the abstract.

As perhaps with all process of art, the uncertainty of change brought forth much that is new. The 139 plates of drawings both demonstrate and give testimony by leading artists of the time to new era in process. Drawing as subject matter is fascinating. To be expected, the book is well printed. Of course, what is book one without book two and three?

Nancy Gutrich

Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts (Atlas Archive, 3)

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intelligently designed book, a creative and fun read too

Encyclopaedia Acephalica: Comprising the Critical Dictionary & Related Texts (Atlas Archive, 3)
Iain White
Manufacturer: Atlas Press
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Binding: Paperback

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The Unfinished System Of Nonknowledge

ASIN: 0947757872

Book Description

The ideas of Georges Bataille (1897-1962) are being increasingly recognised as offering vital insights into the whole areas of human existence, and over the last few years most of his important theoretical and fictional texts have appeared in English. Yet Bataille's thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas.

The Critical Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, the second series of texts, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work — to name but a few.

The Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project. The Acéphale group was more mysterious, even its membership is only vaguely known, and its activities remain secret. The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume reveals for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, even so, the identity of the authors of a large part of it remain unknown.

Customer Reviews:

intelligently designed book, a creative and fun read too.......1999-04-15

Designed from cover to back with many diagrams, photos, etc. this is a nice piece of book. It contains writings by Bataille that were published separately in a surrealist type group's periodical which is fantastic when put together here. From A to Z Bataille defines in a dictionary/encyclopedic type style various terms, objects, actions, and in this format really grabs a reader by his perspective and YANKS, turns ya around to see things differently than you could've ever imagined. There's much more than that though, other writing, including an introduction that mentions Bataille's attempt at creating a secret society. A great book to not just read, BUT TO OWN, whether a frequent reader of Bataille or as just a curious soul. "Acephale", by the way, means without head, and as you might know: Decapitation is really in these days so buying this Book will make you cool.

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Form and Content
Formeless - Useless
"puffed up with rhetorical noise and wind"

Formless: A User's Guide
Yve-Alain Bois , and Rosalind Krauss
Manufacturer: Zone Books
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Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 0942299434

Book Description

In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User's Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the "formless" been deployed in the theorizing and reconfiguring of the field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content; "formless" constitutes a third term standing outside that opposition, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal.

In Formless: A User's Guide, Bois and Krauss present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They chart its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a "job." The job of Formless: A User's Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

Customer Reviews:

Form and Content.......2002-04-30

Georges Bataille was a provocative thinker. Associated freely with the Surrealists, playing around with the fascists, Gnostics, psychoanalysis and eroticism, he managed to create a highly explosive cultural blend which proves influential in our times, like a real time-bomb should. Was he really that quasi-Postmodern thinker some interpreters try to make him look? Anyway, he wrote some of the most intellectually challenging texts and supplied exquisitely enjoyable concepts which present-day artists still can not truly exhaust. The book "Formless" provides an equally provocative reading of Bataille projected against some Modern and Postmodern artifacts, which the French thinker never really saw. It is anachronistic, it is puzzling, sometimes quite enjoyable. Problem is, it does not add to our understanding of neither Bataille, nor, for example, Andy Warhol. It shows that Rosalind Krauss and Yve-Alain Bois can write complicated and intricate pieces on virtually anything, citing from Bataille and/or the so-called "French theory" to interesting effect. But this is not an art history book, it is rather a kind of artifact of its own right. Personally I do not regret that I bought it, but I can imagine people who would be disappointed.
I think in Thomas Pynchon's "V" there is a passage where two thugs planning to steal Botticelli's "The Birth of Venus" from the Uffizi go to the museum and stare at the painting. They see a nude woman, a maid who is trying to cover her up with a cloak, and an excited male god at the left who is trying hard to blow the cloak away and keep Venus nude. Well, this does not add to our understanding of Botticelli, but provides amusing reading and serves Pynchon's point nicely. Something similar happens with "Formless": it is entertaining but tells us mostly about personal excitements and idiocyncrazies of the two intellegent people who wrote this collection.

Formeless - Useless.......2001-09-28

One should re-name this book: Useless - a Form Guide.

"puffed up with rhetorical noise and wind".......1998-07-19

This book claims to introduce a whole new perspective of 20th- century art which has so far been repressed. We are led to believe that it is necessary to add a third and foreign element into the conceptualization of art. The basis on which this whole endeavour is anchorred is the philosophical "Informe" of Georges Bataille. However, the arguments presented by the authors are weak as the whole book is stuffed with analyses purporting to reveal the operational tool of "informe". Any attempt at explaining the original intentions of Bataille's "informe" is so brief and convenient so as to get the reader lost in its adjectival superfluity. There is never any attempt to explain the introduction of "informe" into art and its necessity. The authors make claims to be liberating our thinking from the semantic and that this project is only the beginning. I am only too happy to wish for a clearer and thoroughly convincing argument the next ti! me.

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a work of genius
A thought provoking work connecting religion and economics.

Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: Zone Books
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Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0942299116

Book Description

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.

Customer Reviews:

a work of genius.......2000-07-31

Read both books that contain all three volumes: in a way, the summation of Bataille's thoughts and written with clarity. It's not just the consumption-expenditure approach to analysing human activity that's orginial, he is (as he states towards the end of vol. 3) the closest thinker to Nietzsche. That is an assertion that bears merit as Bataille examines in as thorough a way possible (and in many ways supplements and is a good commentary on) Nietzsche's ideas of the overman, which he calls the sovereign man. At the core of his thoughts is Hamlet's last line, 'The rest is silence'. Sovereignty is NOTHING. A brilliant and vital contribution to the century's history of ideas.

A thought provoking work connecting religion and economics........1998-03-07

In this book, Georges Bataille explores the connection between man's religious and economic pursuits. By focusing in on such divergent practices as human sacrifice and ritualized warfare in Aztec society, the practice of "potlach" in native American tribes of the Pacific Northwest, Tibetan Lamaism, and the conflagrations of our most recent World Wars, the author seeks to overturn classical models of economics. Instead of economics being driven by individuals seeking to satisfy their personal needs, Bataille proposes that economics is actually a social process that seeks to destroy, excrete, and expend excess goods and services. His unique perspective centers around the idea that the systematic destruction and loss of goods and services is intimately connected to our age old struggle to attain the Beyond. The French philosopher Michel Foucault once stated that Bataille said what had never been said before. After reading this first volume of Bataille's three volume work "The Accursed Share", you can begin to understand why Foucault believed as he did.

Inner Experience (Suny Series : Intersections : Philosophy and Critical Theory)

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Inner Experience
Transgress the limits of experience

Inner Experience (Suny Series : Intersections : Philosophy and Critical Theory)
Georges Bataille , and Leslie A. Boldt
Manufacturer: State University of New York Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0887066356

Customer Reviews:

Inner Experience.......2000-03-15

In this book Bataille shows how "project" -- the realm of work not just physical but also the incessant discourse running through one's interior mind -- is a prison, a prison based upon our inauthentic interaction with the world: one puts everything off until later, one lives in a "hazy illusion". But this viel can be broken, says Bataille, through the dynamic ground of non-knowledge, the point one reaches when the quest for the "summit", for God and Absolute knowledge, dissolves. This point is the height of drama and is ultimately the last act of folly (like when Sisyphus realizes his fate of rolling a rock up a mountain). One then experiences a fusion of anguish and ecstasy; one is moved by Inner Experience, something that, paradoxically, is not "inner" nor "experience", but rather is like a slap in the face, a slap simlilar to what a zen monk receives in meditation when he or she realizes who he or she IS: emptiness.

Transgress the limits of experience.......1997-08-04

Georges Bataille was a French writer and philosopher during the surrealist period. He founded many literary movements in the form of magazines and critical reviews within surrealist circles such as, "Acephale", with friend and contemporary artist, Andre Masson. Other contemporaries of Bataille's include, Salvador Dali, and Bataille's nemesis, self-professed 'leader' of the surrealist movement, Andre Breton.

The book, "Inner Experience", was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, "Inner Experience" is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille's philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.

Recommended reading by Bataille: "Story of the Eye", "Documents", and "Visions of Excess" a collection of essays (edited by Allan Stoeckl). Also, to learn more about Bataille, look up "Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille", by Dennis Hollier

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14)
Average customer rating:

reductionism in a more poetic form

Georges Bataille was NOT a surrealist

Brilliant

Disturbing and beautiful!

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14)
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: University of Minnesota Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0816612838

Customer Reviews:

reductionism in a more poetic form.......2004-03-02

in reponse to stevie, i'd say that andre breton has left us infinitely more to 'go on' than the far too reductionist bataille. unlike bataille, breton was not living in the shadow of his idols (bataille:sade) but trying to generate something new. bataille's assessment of nietzsche and the surrealists as romantic icaruses also seems a self assessment; bataille could never rise above his 'need to go below'. he was guilty of precisely the same things he accused the surrealists of.

Georges Bataille was NOT a surrealist.......2002-10-08

He and Breton (the dead ox, vile priest, castrated lion of surrealism) violently attacked one another precisely because Bataille was opposed to the idealism and the upstanding morals of surrealism. Bataille is probably spinning in his grave at the mere thought that his legacy would be trashed by the sloppy reference to him as a member of religion he so hated.

Brilliant.......1998-05-22

Im so impresed with this mans work I am obsessed. He is a rare breed of intelligence. He has a piece in this called 'Mouth" which refers tothe position our heads take well being thrown back in a scream as that of an extension to our spines, inother words that we assume an animal architecture to our bones in the most extreme pains. Batailles constant opinions detailed here in wonderful totaly controlled short pieces , is for me, the only truly awful reading I have ever done. A music piece I often play also has this effect. It is genuis to have the power of horror in works not involving the 'supernatural". I am in awe of this odd,dead man.

Disturbing and beautiful!.......1997-10-09

Bataille was French surrealist who wrote like an alien trapped on a hostile planet. In searing essays like "the Solar Anus," he almost convinces you that the end is not just near, but here. Disturbing and beautiful, this book is highly recommended.

The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty

Average customer rating:

a work of genius
A thought provoking work connecting religion and economics.

The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: Zone Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Erotism: Death and Sensuality

ASIN: 0942299213

Book Description

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 of The Accursed Share, 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, Batille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends."

Customer Reviews:

a work of genius.......2000-07-31

A thought provoking work connecting religion and economics........1998-03-07

Average customer rating:

A WORK OF ART
A compelling addition to the discourse of sex and religion.
This book made me feel dizzy

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Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: City Lights Books
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ASIN: 0872861902

Book Description

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality-Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective. He challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey; and the subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death.

Customer Reviews:

A WORK OF ART.......2000-09-14

This is, with no dout, one of the best books in the genre. It is decadent jet avant grade. If you like erotic literature and taboo this book is a must.

A compelling addition to the discourse of sex and religion........2000-02-26

Before Foucault ruined the game, this was the cutting edge of theoretical musings on sex. Bataille's "continuity" concept of the erotic still seems fascinating (if not slightly intuitive), especially in the chapters on war and mysticism. Beware of the difficult language, but once this hurdle is cleared you're in for a delightful read.

This book made me feel dizzy.......1999-01-05

This is one of the most amazing books I've ever read. Bataille contemplates humanity by means of erotism. He deals with love, sex, death and spirituality. He quests what makes human distinguished from other animals. He is vague sometimes, and leaps amazingly. Actually, I read the book in Korean, but I'd like to share the feeling with anyone who'd love to. If you liked this book, please write to me!

Average customer rating:

A purposely vague and thus misunderstood book
Bataille's spirit is dead but his body lives on
Very abstract at beginning, firms up as it goes along.

Theory of Religion
Georges Bataille
Manufacturer: Zone Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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Similar Items:

Accursed Share, Vol. 1: Consumption
The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Literature and Evil
Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature, Vol 14)

ASIN: 0942299094

Book Description

Theory of Religion, along with its companion volumes of The Accursed Share, forms the cornerstone of Bataille's "Copernican" project to overturn not only economic thought but its ethical foundations as well. No other work of Bataille's has managed so incisively to draw the links between man's religious and economic activities.

Customer Reviews:

A purposely vague and thus misunderstood book.......2000-02-27

George Bataille's "Theory of Religion" is an attempt to sum up religion in as succinct a manner as possible. To be all things to all religions, the book is very vague and difficult to understand. Bataille created a chart or table to explain what he was doing and to give body to the work. ALAS! The chart is not in the book, lost to time. Thus, as it exists, Bataille's book is a glimpse into the inner workings of a genius mind. It is a colorful attempt to understand "religion," whatever that is. Further, it is an off-the beaten path romp through the daisies of the study of religion, sweet flowers that often remain unromped.

Bataille's spirit is dead but his body lives on.......1999-08-16

In On Nietzsche Bataille became Nietzsche. Here Bataille becomes the reader and consumes her/him/it(the thing). Who knows why Bataille never published this mistresspiece in his lifetime. Maybe even Bataille didn't know....

Very abstract at beginning, firms up as it goes along........1998-07-01

Interesting associations made by the author. The initial chapters are somewhat opaque, but careful reading will allow for understanding. Overall, pretty good, although a bit pretentious. To paraphrase the concept, 'if your deriving utility, you've lost the essence or true reality... that is, if you moved from object to subject, well you've embraced capitalism, you dog! (well, i think thats what he is trying to say...smile).

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