Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Michel Beaujour

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 do not explain much and they interpret even less; they disregard the formal structure of individual works, and their own structure looks haphazard and fragmentary. Finally, their strictures resemble the most outdated forms of ethical criticism, but they praise only immoral works. Bataille's approach to the written word is perverse, his scorn for the greater part of literature, narrow and uncompromising.

A bizarre terminology borrowed from Hegel, political science, ethnology, economics, and mysticism disconcerts the reader who does not readily grasp its relevance to literary problems. On the other hand, Bataille ignores the technical terms derived from rhetoric, poetics, and linguistics which have brought some measure of lucidity to modern critical discourse.

Such key words as "sovereignty," "evil," "transgression," "excess," and "consummation," with their connotation of barbaric ritual, bespeak Bataille's refusal of "civilization": to him, literature belongs outside the law, it challenges order. (p. 149)

As a writer, and a critic, Bataille himself tried to be an outlaw: his underground, pornographic novels constitute an aggression against taste, morality, and the regular uses of language. His criticism defies all lawful theories of literature and chooses to explore the wilderness of violence…. Bataille does not yield to synthesizing efforts. Between Bataille and most other critics …, there lies a precipitous gap. Bataille's thought...
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