The Collège of Sociology is a collective which was constituted on the initiative of Georges Bataille of November 1937 at July 1939 to constitute an erudite and moral community having for object the study and the propagation of social sciences. The college gave public conferences; it contributed to enrich the French intellectual life by the interval wars and it left traces in work of many researchers.

Objectives of the College

In number 3/4 of the Headless review , gone back to July 1937, appeared on page 26 a declaration relating to the foundation of a College of sociology” . This declaration was signed, according to the alphabetical order, of Georges Ambrosino, Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Libra, Jules Monnerot. It presented on three points and in less than 40 lines the objectives of the Collège of sociology :

# social sciences appear as a promising field but its audience remains still limited because they limit to “the analysis of the structures of the companies known as primitive, leaving side the modern societies” . This is probably due to the “character necessarily contagious and activist of the representations” that this type of work highlights.

# Insofar as this field of study appears potentially virulent, those which wish to develop this type of investigations could constitute in “a moral community” which would be different from a simple scientific community. It would be about a community open to all those which want to bring their point of view.

# This type of activity could “receive the name of crowned sociology , as it implies the study of the social existence in all those of its demonstrations where day the presence is done activates crowned.”

A note specified that the declaration had been written in the month of March 1937 and that the activity of the Collège will begin in October. The correspondence was to be sent to the address of Georges Bataille, street from Rennes to Paris.

Thus started what Denis Hollier described as the constitution of the “last literary group of before guard” which was going to live only two years but which, as all the intellectual companies of Battle, was going to leave important traces in the evolution of the ideas in France. This company constitutes as precisely qualifies it Michel Surya the exoteric part (i.e. public) of the activities of Battle which is opposed to the esotericism of Headless which continued in addition

One needs from the start rising an ambiguity: the sociology of the Collège appears quite exotic even suspect with a student who has just discovered this discipline by reading the authors registers with the program. It is that the members of the Collège were not located like academics but like impassioned. With more or less of intensity, they all wanted to influence the company by the professional work, to try to modify the course of the History, in particular to fight against the spectrum of the war which was profiled in a way increasingly more precise. Their work for is not disqualified as much as the echo than they will find later on shows it but it should be heard that them sociology was very extensive.

Course of the meetings

The Collège held of the public meetings at a rate of two meetings per month (of the autumn at the beginning of the summer) in the back shop of a bookstore, street Gay Lussac. These meetings gave place to talks, according to a definite program announced for the year to come. Some of these talks, which had been written by their authors are published in the study of Denis Hollier and are also found in work of the authors. Other interventions, oral, can be evoked only by the memories or the notes of the participants, work also established by Denis Hollier.

The reading of exposed shows that the Collège was worked by several contradictory currents:

• the militant nietzschéens whose Bataille was one of most active;
• the current of the Personalism incarnated by several members of the review Spirit with in particular Denis de Rougemont, Landsberg, Moré;
• partisans of Kierkegaard with Jean Wahl but also Denis de Rougemont or Pierre Klossowski;
• hégéliens like Alexandre Kojève;
• ethnographers like Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois.

To beyond or in addition to these theoretical divergences or preferences, the community was crossed by complex emotional ties:

• the almost militant passion of the majority of the participants who were convinced to be able to act on the company.
• divergences between Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille who did not exclude a true regard so much so that Caillois, patient, load on several occasions Bataille of speaking in its place whereas they are not agreement.
• dissensions and divergences of objectives between Jules Monnerot and Georges Bataille who will lead the first not to quote Bataille in his work and to assert later on the real paternity of the project.
• strong friendship between Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille in spite of the reserves that the first tested for the concept of crowned and which led it to have only one distant participation in work.

Contrary to other companies of Battle, the Collège of Sociology was a real public success, if one leaves it, of course, with the ell of intellectual success. Denis Hollier announces that the assistance was numerous and often comprised outstanding personalities of the time like Julien Benda, Drieu La Rochelle, Walter Benjamin.

In spite of this undeniable success the Collège will cease its in July 1939 activities. The tensions which divided the promoters of the project had become too strong and the war which led certain members to the exile carried the blow of thanks to what remains a French intellectual great adventure.

Concept of Crowned

This dimension of crowned is in the middle of the step of Battle. It is a question for him of defining what maintains a community human and which could consist of a core which médiatiserait the human relations. These theses will be developed later on by Bataille in the literature and the evil . In this work it develops a central idea: what binds the human beings it is death. But “individual death is only one aspect of excess proliferator to be it. The sexuée reproduction is itself only one aspect, more complicated, of the immortality of the life guaranteed in the sexuée reproduction. Immortality, but at the same time of individual death. ” (Georges Bataille, complete Works, flight XI p.174)