Georges Bataille, Susan Sontag said, had a "finer and more profound sense of transgression" than Sade [see excerpt above]; and Bataille himself regarded transgression as the fundamental concept in all his thinking…. More than anyone else, Jacques Derrida said of Bataille, he wanted to be Nietzsche—meaning both that he wanted to be Nietzsche more than anyone else did and that he wanted to be Nietzsche more than he wanted to be anyone else. The remark clearly conveys Bataille's passion for Nietzsche—he wrote a book on him and constantly evokes him in his writing—and just as clearly indicates the strange, and strangely limited, nature of Bataille's intellectual enterprise…. [Bataille] often looks like a man returning to the Bastille after its fall, patiently building again the walls he needs for the regular reenactment of his escape. Sartre called Bataille a survivor of the death of God [see excerpt above], but this is true only in a rather special sense. Bataille, a confirmed unbeliever, resurrected God so that he could go on surviving him.
Sartre, reviewing L'Expérience intérieure after it was published in 1943, also compared Bataille to Pascal before descending on him for his metaphysical confusion…. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Sollers, and Kristeva have all written or lectured on [Bataille]. A certain flightiness in his writing, a refusal to be tied down by the failures of his own logic, make him attractive to the newer criticism, and the vivid obscenity of some of his work has made him, rather belatedly, a murky romantic hero….
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