Georges Bataille Biography and List of Works

French essayist, philosophical theorist, novelist. Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, power, and the potentialities of evil. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

"Blameless, shameless. The more desperate the eroticism, the more hopelessly women show off their heavy breasts, opening their mouths and screaming out, the greater the attraction. In contrast, a promise of light awaits at the limits of the mystical outlook. I find this unbearable and soon returnd to insolence and erotic vomit - which doesn't respect anybody or anything. How sweet to enter filthy night and proudly wrap myself in it. The whore I went with was as uncomplicated as a child and she hardly talked. There was another one, who came crashing down from a tabletop - sweet, shy, heartbreakingly tender, as I watched her with drunken, unfeeling eyes."
(from Guilty, 1988)

Georges Bataille was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, in central France. His mother was of dubious sanity. His father, who became blind and suffered from general paralysis due to syphilis, died in 1915. Bataille converted to Catholicism on the eve of World War I. In 1916-17 he served in the army, but was discharged because of tuberculosis. Ill health troubled Bataille all his life, and he suffered from periods of depression. He joined the seminary at Saint-Fleur with the intention of becoming a priest. He spent a period with the Benedictine congregation at Quarr, on the Isle of Wright. A few years later Bataille experienced a loss of faith. From 1918 to 1922 he studied at the École des Chartres in Paris. His thesis dealt with thirteenth century verse. In 1922 he received a fellowship at the School of Advanced Hispanic Studies in Madrid.

In 1920 Bataille was involved with the Surrealist movement. He was officially excommunicated from its inner circles by André Breton, who accused him of splintering the movement. In the same decade Bataille started to write after a liberating period of psychoanalysis. He founded and edited many journals that revealed his interests in sociology, religion, and literature. Bataille was the first to publish such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. He edited Documents (1929-31), and in 1935 he co-founded with André Breton the anti-Fascist group Contre-Attaque. To explore the manifestation of the sacred in society he cofounded in 1939 with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois the short-lived Collège de Sociologie. It was closely associated with a secret society, which published the Acéphale review.

Between the years 1922 and 1944 Bataille was a librarian and a deputy keeper at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the evenings Bataille changed his role and became known as a regular visitor of bordellos. This habit caused him troubles at work. He resigned in 1944 because of tuberculosis, two years earlier he had moved to Vézelay. Bataille worked as a librarian in Carpentras in Provence (1949-51), and from 1951 in Orléans. In 1961 Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Juan Miro arranged an auction of paintings to help him in financial difficulties, which had troubled him since the 1940s. Bataille died in Paris on July 8, 1962.

Bataille was twice married, first with the actress Silvia Maklès; they divorced in 1934. She married later the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Bataille also had a liaison with "Laurie" (Colette Peignot, who died in 1938). In 1946 Bataille married Diane de Beauharnais; they had one daughter.

Histoire de l'oeil (1928, The Story of the Eye), Le Bleu du ciel (1945, Blue of Noon), and L'abbé C (1950, The Abbot C.) are among Batalle's best-known glorifications of eroticism. He felt that sexual union causes a momentary indistinguishability between otherwise distinct objects. Poetry has similar dimensions when it dissolves the reader "into the strange." The Story of the Eye was written in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch. It told a tale of a young couple who explore the boundaries of sexual taboos. The book has enjoyed a cult status. Most recently, it was rediscovered by the Icelandic pop singer, Björk Guðdmundsdóttir.

"The actions of religious sacrifice and of erotic fusion, in which the subject seeks to be 'loosed from its relatedness to the I' and to make room for re-established 'continuity of Being', are exemplary for him. Bataille, too, pursues the traces of a primordial force that could heal the discontinuity or rift between the rationally disciplined world of work and the outlawed other of reason. He imagines this overpowering return to a lost continuity as the eruption of elements opposed to reason, as a breathtaking act of self-de-limiting. In this process of dissolution, the monadically closed-off subjectivity of self-assertive and mutually objectifying individuals is disposses and cast down into the abyss."
(Jürgen Habermas in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1987)

Friedrich Nietzsche's work influenced Bataille deeply, and such figures as Sade and Gilles de Rais. His views about social organization were influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss' The Gift. In La part maudite (1949) he dealt with the phenomenon of waste in nature and society. Although Bataille could write clearly he was content to present his ideas in a puzzling way.

For further reading: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin by Peter Tracey Connor (2000); Georges Bataille by Roland A. Champagne (1999); Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (1998); On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. by Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (1995); Georges Bataille: A Bibliography by Joan Nordquist (1994); Bataille: Writing the Sacred, ed. by Carolyn Bailey Gill (1995); Georges Bataille by Michael Richardson (1994); Eroticism in Georges Bataille and Henry Miller by Gilles Mayne (1993); The Taste for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Violent Nihilism by Nick Land (1992); Georges Bataille, la mort à l'oeuvre by Michel Surya (1992); Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory by Steven Shaviro (1990); Yale French Studies issue on Bataille, 78 (1990); Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille by Denis Hollier (1989); Beyond the Gift: Reading Georges Bataille by Michèle Richman (1982); Vers une rèvolution culturelle: Artaud, Bataille, ed. by P. Sollers (1973); L'entretien infini by M. Blanchot (1969); L'Arc issue on Bataille, 32 (May 1967); Critique issue on Bataille (August-September 1963)

Histoire de l'oeil, (1928)
L'anus solaire, (1931)
Sacrifices, (1936)
Madame Edwarda, (1937)
L'Expérience intérieure, (1943)
Le Coupable, (1944)
Dirty, (1945)
Le Bleu du ciel, (1945)
Sur Nietzsche, (1945)
L'Orestie, (1945)
Dianus, (1947)
L'Alleluiah, (1947)
La haine de la poésie, (1947)
La Part maudite, (1947)
Histoire des rats, (1948)
Théorie de la religion, (1948)
Éponine, (1949)
L'abbé C, (1950)
Somme athéologique I-II, (1954)
Lascaux, ou, La Naissance de l'art, (1955)
Manet, (1955)
L'Érotisme ou la muse en question de l'être, (1957)
La Littérature et le mal, (1957)
Les Larmes d'Éros, (1961)
L'impossible, (1962)
Le petit, (1963)
Gilles de Rais, (1965)
Ma mère, (1966)
La notion de dépense, (1967)
Le mort, (1967)
La Pratique de la joie avant la mort, (1967)
L'Archangélique, (1967)
Documents, (1968)
Œuvres complètes, (1970)
Le Collège de sociologie, (1937)
Visions of Excess, (1985)
La Dictionnaire critique, (1993)
The Absence of Myth, (1994)