SOURCE: Cokal, Susann. “Wounds, Ruptures, and Sudden Spaces in the Fiction of Georges Bataille.” French Forum 25, no. 1 (January 2000): 75-96.

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 librarian and, along with Denis Hollier, co-founder of the Collège de Sociologie. After his death, however, and thanks in part to the upheavals of 1968, his philosophical writings about death, eroticism, and transgression were rediscovered, and their author gradually assumed a place among a new community of avant-garde literary philosophers. Michel Foucault, Maurice Blanchot, Philippe Sollers, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Jean Baudrillard have all taken pen in hand to appreciate Bataille's philosophical and literary writings.¹ Of particular interest have been the two essays L'Érotisme² and Les Larmes d'Éros,³ in which he expounded controversial theories about the affinity of...