ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of some key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. This book maps French intellectual history in the twentieth century through an interpretative engagement with the thought and legacy of Georges Bataille. A critical engagement with Bataille's thought appears at symptomatic moments in the work of the proponents of structuralist and post-structuralist thought such as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Julia Kristeva. The work of Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy evolves in engagement with that of Bataille. Theoretically this book is generated by the proposition that Bataille's heterogeneous and often difficult work is made consistent when seen as an attempt to think through different forms and possibilities of relation. The book may be mapped as a series of engagements with Bataille on the part of a litany of figures: Kojeve, Mauss, Freud, Sartre, Levi-Strauss, Deleuze and Guattari, Hegel, Derrida, Kristeva, Blanchot, Nancy, Duras.