ABSTRACT
The work of Georges Bataille is seemingly composed of contradiction. Early texts, from the late 1920s, such as ‘W.C.’, ‘L’Anus solaire’ (Solar Anus) and ‘L’Oeil pinéal’ (The Pineal Eye) can be read as a violent reaction, informed by a reading of Nietzsche and Freud, to a pious and conformist youth. His influential journal Documents (1929-31) engaged in an ethnography of the everyday, directly contrasting high and low culture or Western and non-Western society, in order to arrive at a ‘base materialism’. The 1935 Contre-Attaque movement to which he adhered was an antiFascist and anti-Stalinist resistance to the Popular Front that involved a short-lived collaboration with Surrealism. His recognition of the Durkheimian principles of the College of Sociology, which he co-founded in 1937 with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois, was implicitly contested by his parallel formation of Acéphale, a conspirational and ‘headless’ society devoted to the realization of ritual transgression and sacrifice. These essentially collaborative manifestations of the sacred in contemporary life collapsed with the advent of the war, giving way to an intense internalization of sacred experience culminating in the 1943 Inner Experience (L’Expérience intérieure). His new journal, Critique, founded in 1946 and still in existence, stands in direct contrast to the short-lived Documents with its challenge to academic classification, being based on extended book reviews. At the same time, their heterogeneous nature (the areas covered being ‘literary creation, philosophy and historical, scientific, political and economic knowledge’) sought to contest the orthodoxies of existentialism. Cutting across these critical works, in turn, was an equally transgressive production of novels and stories, culminating in L’Abbé C (pub-
lished in 1950 but set during the war) and Blue of Noon (Le Bleu du ciel), published in 1957 (but finished in 1935), the same year as Literature and Evil (La littérature et le mal), a collection of essays which had appeared in Critique, and Eroticism (L’Érotisme). This last text, probably Bataille’s best known, and (if we can say this) the summation of his work, presents eroticism and its relation to transgression and death as central to the human condition. The recovery of this eroticism, repressed by Christian culture, is the task of an atheism. Such tensions and transgressions are defined by Bataille himself as the contradiction between solidity, involving the orthodox isolation and analysis of an object, and sovereignty, a key term in Bataille which designates a rejection of preservation and reserve in favour of the dynamics of excess and expenditure. On a personal level, sovereignty may be experienced and celebrated via the mucosity of the body, the extremity of the emotions and the uselessness of human activity (play, crime, eroticism, poetry); on an economic level, as Bataille attempts to show in The Accursed Share (La Part maudite), this involves replacing a scarcity model with the notion of the circulation of excess. Such designations indicate, of course, how the idea of contradiction is ultimately inadequate to the task of reading and applying Bataille. His work has enormously influenced poststructuralist theorizing.
