In the following essay, Connor argues that Bataille's system of thought engendered an ethical structure despite its inherent paradoxes.

In the following essay, Hussey discusses Bataille's interpretation of mysticism and subsequent critical reaction to it.

In the following essay, Guerlac explores various readings, and misreadings, of Bataille's notion of transgression.

In the following essay, de Kessel explores Bataille's concept of sovereignty and its ramifications for geopolitical issues.

In the following essay, Cokal explores the connection between eroticism, violence, and disruption in Bataille's fiction.

In the following essay, Hollywood finds parallels in the thought of Bataille and the thirteenth-century Umbrian mystic Angela of Foligno.

In the following essay, Noys discusses Jürgen Habermas's criticism of Bataille as an originator of an “anti-modern neo-conservatism.”

In the following essay, Itzkowitz discusses Bataille's thoughts on the possibility that excessive energy necessarily results in social violence and legal transgression.

In the following essay, Hollywood analyzes parallels between mysticism and the practice of writing in Bataille's works.

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.

In the following essay, Besnier defends Bataille against his critics who find him to be inferior as an intellectual.

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.

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." Modern thought has found two types of absurdity. For some, the fundamental absurdity is "factitiousness," i.e. the irreducible contingency of our "being here," of our purposeless, no-reason existence. For others it is caused by man's being an insoluble contradiction. It is this latter absurdity that Mr. ...

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 Finally, their strictures resemble the most outdated forms of ethical criticism, but they praise only immoral works.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 ...

[Eventually there will be ten volumes of Bataille's Oeuvres complètes, whose plan is chronological. What we have in the four volumes published so far] is a mass of erotica, review articles and poetry,… plus the liberal annotation of two editors…. (p. 233) Since his death in 1962, Bataille has been hustled up into France's pantheon of sacred monsters, to stand with his seniors—Sade, Lautreamont, Artaud—in a thin black line against the literary establishment&#x...

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 mystical experience: meditation, ecstasy, rapture. From the beginning of the first volume of his Somme athéologique (Summa Atheologica),… published in 1943 under the title L'Expérience intérieure (The Inner Experience), the author states that he is thinking less about the confessional experience "than about ...

[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 Sodom. There he argued that language, owing as much as it does to social transactions and conventions, is normally incapable of doing justice to violence which, like eroticism and mysticism, is an essentially private purpose. If this proposition isn't in itself, too surprising, to perfidious Albion, it asserted an obstinate resistance to ...

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 lit...

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...