Georges Bataille is undoubtedly one of the most elusive figures of French intellectual life to attain legendary status in this century. Variously termed a surrealist, an existentialist, a Hegelian, a Marxist, or a Nietzschean, Bataille is often first identified as the author of erotic novels. Having equated literature with evil, the librarian-philosopher thus earned the title écrivain maudit, and the implied filiations with Sade and Lautréamont are intended to contain his excesses within a literary cliché. But to pigeonhole the unwieldy diversity of this work into traditional classifications perpetrates an ideological bias by clouding the moral imperative that motivated Bataille. (p. 1)
Although known among intellectuals during the 1950s, Bataille's work attracted a more general public during the following decade due to its increased availability. On ideological grounds, the contributors to the review Tel Quel established the conditions for this greater receptivity. Individually and collectively, they featured him as a precursor to what Barthes called a "mutation" in modern epistemology and theories of classification. Specifically, this change involves the status of the literary work and a modification of the values attendant upon the act of criticism…. The text, no longer the classical work of literary creation, is now the product of a conscious violation of the hierarchy of discourses on which genre theory, and poetics in general, depend. Barthes assesses Bataille's writing as the exemplar of textuality:
What constitutes the Text is, on the contrary (or precisely), its subversive force in respect of the old classifications. How do you classify a writer like Georges Bataille? The answer is so difficult that the literary manuals generally prefer to forget about Bataille who, in fact, wrote texts, perhaps continuously one single text.
