Bataille, Georges(1897–1962)
Georges Bataille is a pivotal thinker in the history of twentieth-century thought, in a literal sense. His work serves as a pivot between any number of significant ...
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Critical Essay by Jean-paul Sartre
Mr. Bataille has survived God's death and is here in order to bear witness to his failure. "God is silent … everything inside me asks for God.&...
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Critical Essay by Claude Mauriac
Georges Bataille constantly refers to God, or rather to his eternal absence and the void that he denotes. By inner experience he means what is habitually called mysti...
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Critical Essay by The Times Literary Supplement
[Eventually there will be ten volumes of Bataille's Oeuvres complètes, whose plan is chronological. What we have in the four volumes publ...
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Critical Essay by Raymond Durgnat
[Bataille's] variety of literary and intellectual activities are in obvious tension with his contentions in his introduction to Sade's The 120 Days of ...
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Critical Essay by Michel Beaujour
The essays of Georges Bataille, which identify literature with evil, must seem strangely wrongheaded. They do few of the things that criticism is supposed to do: they...
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Critical Essay by Michael Wood
Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag said, had a "finer and more profound sense of transgression" than Sade [see excerpt above]; and Bataille himself regarded t...
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Critical Essay by Michele H. Richman
Georges Bataille is undoubtedly one of the most elusive figures of French intellectual life to attain legendary status in this century. Variously termed a surreal...
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In the following essay, Besnier defends Bataille against his critics who find him to be inferior as an intellectual.
The question of the intellectual comes back at regular intervals. I don't...
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In the following essay, Connor argues that Bataille's system of thought engendered an ethical structure despite its inherent paradoxes.
Consciousness of Others
On the face of things, the ide...
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In the following essay, Hussey discusses Bataille's interpretation of mysticism and subsequent critical reaction to it.
Bataille, abattage d'un humain bétail
—Michel...
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In the following essay, Hussey addresses the ways in which Bataille employed traditional elements of Western thought in his development of a theory of spiritual experience.
I pray God that he may q...
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In the following essay, Boldt-Irons examines Bataille's notion of sacrifice as it appears in his erotic fiction, notably the element of loss as experienced by the reader and the witness.
The...
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In the following essay, Hollywood analyzes parallels between mysticism and the practice of writing in Bataille's works.
Within Georges Bataille's texts of the late 1930s and 1940s, in...
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In the following essay, Noys discusses Jürgen Habermas's criticism of Bataille as an originator of an “anti-modern neo-conservatism.”
How much blood and cruelty lie at t...
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In the following essay, Guerlac explores various readings, and misreadings, of Bataille's notion of transgression.
I write for whoever, upon entering my book, would fall into it as into a ho...
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In the following essay, de Kessel explores Bataille's concept of sovereignty and its ramifications for geopolitical issues.
“Man shall not live by bread alone.” Few in our rich...
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In the following essay, Itzkowitz discusses Bataille's thoughts on the possibility that excessive energy necessarily results in social violence and legal transgression.
The two opposing valu...
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In the following essay, Hollywood finds parallels in the thought of Bataille and the thirteenth-century Umbrian mystic Angela of Foligno.
Toward a New Mystical Community
Georges Bataille (1897-1962...
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In the following essay, Cokal explores the connection between eroticism, violence, and disruption in Bataille's fiction.
When Georges Bataille died in 1962, he was perhaps best known as a li...
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Bataille, Georges (1897–1962)
Critical Essay by Jean-paul Sartre
