Download or read book Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought written by Will Stronge and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-10-19 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges Bataille's influence upon 20th-century philosophy is hard to overstate. His writing has transfixed his readers for decades – exerting a powerful influence upon Foucault, Blanchot and Derrida amongst many others. Today, Bataille continues to be an important reference for many of today's leading theorists such as Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy and Adrianna Caverero. His work is a unique and enigmatic combination of mystical phenomenology, politics, anthropology and economic theory – sometimes adopting the form of literature, sometimes that of ontology. This is the first book to take Bataille's ambitious and unfinished Accursed Share project as its thematic guide, with individual contributors isolating themes, concepts or sections from within the three volumes and taking them in different directions. Therefore, as well as providing readings of Bataille's key concepts, such as animality, sovereignty, catastrophe and the sacred, this collection aims to explore new terrain and new theoretical problems.Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought acts simultaneously as a companion to Bataille's three-volume secular theodicy and as a laboratory for new syntheses within his thought.

Download or read book The Obsessions of Georges Bataille written by Andrew J. Mitchell and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-10-23 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Considers Bataille’s work from an explicitly philosophical perspective.

Download or read book Obsessions of Georges Bataille The written by Andrew J. Mitchell and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2009-10-29 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Featuring a new translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's "Confronted Community" and three essays by Bataille on community and communication available here in English for the first time, The Obsessions of Georges Bataille offers an indispensable account of Bataille's work. Despite the influence of Bataille on French continental thought, his ideas remain famously obscure. This volume clarifies them by approaching Bataille's thought through the themes of community and communication. Taking up the dialogue of Nancy and Maurice Blanchot on Bataille's ideas about community, the essays engage the many perspectives from which he approaches community: encouraging greater community, expressing concern with community, and addressing the connections between community and one's inner experience. Communication is brought out not as a singular activity, but as a collective natural state—a medium for human expression and relations.

Download or read book Georges Bataille written by Rodolphe Gasché and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-24 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.

Download or read book Georges Bataille written by Michel Surya and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 772 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Georges Bataille was a philosopher, writer, librarian, pornographer and a founder of the influential journals Critique and Acphale. He has had an enormous impact on contemporary thought, influencing such writers as Barthes, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault and Sontag. Many of his books, including the notorious Story of the Eye and the fascinating The Accursed Share, are modern classics. In this acclaimed intellectual biography, Michel Surya gives a detailed and insightful account of Bataille's work against the backdrop of his life - his troubled childhood, his difficult relationship with Andr Breton and the surrealists and his curious position as a thinker of excess, 'potlatch', sexual extremes and religious sacrifice, one who nonetheless remains at the heart of twentieth century French thought-all of it drawn here in rich and allusive prose. While exploring the source of the violent eroticism that laces Bataille's novels, the book is also an acute guide to the development of Bataille's philosophical thought. Enriched by testimonies from Bataille's closest acquaintances and revealing the context in which he worked, Surya sheds light on a figure Foucault described as 'one of the most important writers of the century'.

Download or read book The Trial of Gilles de Rais written by Georges Bataille and published by Amok Books. This book was released on 1991 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by France's famous connoisseur of transgression - the man the surrealist Andre Breton labelled an 'Excremental philosopher' - THE TRIALS OF GILLES DE RAIS is the best thing now available in English on one of the most bizarre figures in European history.' - New York Times Book Review'

Download or read book Story of the Eye written by Georges Bataille and published by Random House. This book was released on 2013-09-26 with total page 149 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

Download or read book After Bataille written by Patrick Ffrench and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of the obscene narrative Story of the Eye and of works of heretical philosophy such as Inner Experience, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is one of the most powerful and secretly influential French thinkers of the last century. His work is driven by a compulsion to communicate an experience which exceeds the limits of communicative exchange, and also constitutes a sustained focus on the nature of this complusion. After Bataille takes this sense of compulsion as its motive and traces it across different figures in Batailles thought, from an obsession with the thematics and the event of sacrifice, through the exposure of being and of the subject, to the necessary relation to others in friendship and in community. In each of these instances After Bataille is distinctive in staging a series of encounters between Bataille, his contemporaries, and critics and theorists who extend or engage with his legacy. It thus offers a vital account of the place of Bataille in contemporary thought.

Download or read book Negative Ecstasies written by Jeremy Biles and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2015-08-03 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

Download or read book On Nietzsche written by Georges Bataille and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2015-09-23 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsche’s importance to Bataille, and of Bataille’s experience in Nazi-occupied France. Georges Bataille wrote On Nietzsche in the final months of the Nazi occupation of France in order to cleanse the German philosopher of the “stain of Nazism.” More than merely a treatise on Nietzsche, the book is as much a work of ethics in which thought is put to the test of experience and experience pushed to its limits. At once personal and political, it was written as an act of war, its publication contingent upon the German retreat. The result is a poetic and philosophical—and occasionally harrowing—record of life during wartime. Following Inner Experience and Guilty, On Nietzsche is the third volume of Bataille’s Summa Atheologica. Haunted by the recognition that “existence cannot be at once autonomous and viable,” herein the author yearns for community from the depths of personal isolation and transforms Nietzsche’s will to power into his own will to chance. This new translation includes Memorandum, a selection of 280 passages from Nietzsche’s works edited and introduced by Bataille. Originally published separately, Bataille planned to include the text in future editions of On Nietzsche. This edition also features the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes, as well as an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.

Download or read book Erotism written by Georges Bataille and published by City Lights Books. This book was released on 1986-10 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.

Download or read book Heterology and the Postmodern written by Julian Pefanis and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Heterology and the Postmodern, Julian Pefanis presents a new view of the history of poststructuralism (heterology) and the origins of postmodernism by analyzing three important French theorists, Georges Bataille, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard. Beginning with the introduction of Hegel in French postmodernist thought--largely but not exclusively through the thought of Georges Bataille--Pefanis argues that the core problematics of postmodern aesthetics--history, exchange, representation, and writing--are related to Bataille's reconceptualization of the Hegelian framework. Pefanis explores how Bataille was influenced by Hegel, Marcel Mauss, Freud, and Nietzsche, and traces the effects of this influence on the analyses and critiques of later postmodernists, most notably Lyotard and Baudrillard. Finally, employing these postmodernists along with Freud and Jacques Lacan, Pefanis discusses discourse on postmodernism and its relation to Freud's concept of the death drive. This intellectual history makes valuable contributions to the debates over what the "postmodern" may mean for intellectual and political activity.

Download or read book Georges Bataille written by William Pawlett and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this comprehensive and engaging study Georges Bataille’s central ideas – the sacred, community and eroticism – are explored in detail. Bataille’s project to understand social bonds and energies at their most fundamental level and to re-energise society by challenging individualism is argued to be of continuing relevance to sociological thought. Bataille’s infamous Collège de Sociologie is placed in the intellectual context of Durkheimian and Maussian sociology. Social effervescence, gift exchange, and the dual, ambivalent and volatile nature of the sacred emerge as the central threads of Bataille’s thought, ideas which challenge both capitalist hegemony and the reductive notion of society as exclusively normative and repressive. The study concludes by applying Bataille’s ideas to contemporary issues including de-secularisation and the rise of religious fundamentalism, the vicarious experience of transgressive violence, and finally, to consumerism and the violence of globalisation. The study seeks to reposition Bataille as a key figure in sociological theory.

Download or read book The Thirst for Annihilation written by Nick Land and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

Download or read book Georges Bataille written by Paul Hegarty and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-08-18 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille′s ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world. His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging and utterly unique thinker.

Download or read book Literature and Evil written by Georges Bataille and published by . This book was released on 1973 with total page 1122 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Inner Experience written by Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2014-07-24 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Outlines a mystical theology and experience of the sacred founded on the absence of god. Originally published in 1943, Inner Experience is the single most significant work by one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. It outlines a mystical theology and experience of the sacred founded on the absence of god. Bataille calls Inner Experience a “narrative of despair,” but also describes it as a book wherein “profundity and passion go tenderly hand in hand.” Herein, he says, “The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy take shape.” Bataille’s search for experience begins where religion, philosophy, science, and literature leave off, where doctrines, dogmas, methods, and the arts collapse. His method of meditation, outlined and documented here, commingles horror and delight. Laughter, intoxication, eroticism, poetry, and sacrifice are pursued not as ends in and of themselves but as means of access to a sovereign realm of inner experience. This new translation is the first to include Method of Meditation and Post-Scriptum 1953, the supplementary texts Bataille added to create the first volume of his Summa Atheologica. This edition also offers the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille’s Oeuvres Complètes, along with an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.