Georges Bataille

Biography

In 1922, it obtains its diploma of the École of the Charters and starts a long career of Bibliothécaire, initially with the National library where there will remain twenty years, before being named with the Bibliothèque Inguimbertine in 1949, then finally with Orleans (1951).

Political commitment and antifascist

With the beginning of the year 1930, Bataille is member of the democratic communist Cercle founded and directed by Boris Souvarine, he writes in his review social Criticism . In the context of the years 1930, in margin of the Leagues and Popular front, Bataille founds the movement Contre-attaque which it directs in its theoretical broad outlines. The fracture between him and André Breton is declared. Indeed, the " pope of the surréalisme" had to be disturbed by the importance and the credit lately granted to an old victim of the policy of ostracism which it had hitherto applied to its " troupes" surrealist.

Work

All comes owing to the fact that Bataille is based on an obvious logical contradiction: to seize the imperceptible one. One could find this formula hollow and indeed it is it, so much it seems to be able to apply to any literary text. But actually the problem is explicit and even more: exarcerbé at Battle. It is the combat of all its writing which makes the problem palpable. This carries out Bataille to confuse the kinds and to use of metaphors in its tests ( the Interior Experiment ) like theoretical passages in its accounts ( the blue of the sky ). Between the two range unclassable works, between the cry of rage, the account and philosophy ( Sacrifice , Small the , Impossible the ). However it is by this logical contradiction that one could see like the problematic conflict between the esthetics and the experiment i.e. of a writing which wants to be the experiment by exceeding esthetic contemplation, that one arrives at chiefs of literary works. Thus Mrs Edwarda seems to be the point acutest reached by Bataille, a text as attractive as short, thrown in a draft, a sincere gesture which he will seek to reproduce the remainder of his life. It is about a very short news (the author will seek besides has to add a foreword to him and to couple it with other accounts, of which My Mother ) who diverts absolutely. Not leaving any catch to the literary comments, he escapes understandable comprehension, one cannot draw any theory from it… Except that of the interior Experiment . We can nevertheless raise two processes, used constantly in its work of fiction to transform esthetics into the experiment (and not in a experiment, that of esthetics). It is initially about the erotism, which allows the instigation of a sexual desire. Then the provocation which revolts the reader, pushes it in its last inhibitions morals the goal being that this one arrives to a horror (even a pleasure) similar to that which the characters live. But we can notice that this second process is especially characteristic of the young Battle. The corrections brought to Mrs Edwarda , Julie or the Abbot C for example, show that the author reduced the vocabulary ordurier and the scenes believed in the profit of a raising of the register and more evasive allusions. It is about a very important point because he reveals the interest which takes Bataille more specifically to form part of the literary history. Indeed, as from a certain moment in its work, the writing uses processes which move away from the probability of the experiment that live the characters to constitute another extatic but different experiment (installing a complex correspondence between an esthetic experiment and the experiment " Impossible"). Concretely one can notice the multiplication in the accounts the dialectical ones of conscience being never solved, exceeding probability compared to the situation of the character (it is thus speech on the love which closes Julie or more specifically of the thoughts of the narrator in My Mother ). In addition, the reference to the literary kind until in its parody makes its appearance: tables of the Dead or with dimensions theatrical one exaggerated Julie . One can say that the contradictory relationship between esthetics and the experiment constitutes an insoluble stake and it is that which paradoxically make them fertile. Battle itself adopts a contradictory attitude by affirming at the time of the one of its interviews on the Literature and the evil that the literature is a danger which makes it possible to confront the man in the worst case. This " confrontation with the pire" can pass only by one kind of total identification: coarsely and for example if I see a mother dying in a work, I take it exactly as if it were about my own mother and I feel a similar horror of it. But in Impossible the the author seems to adopt a point of view more " proustien" : " Poetry is not the experiment but the evocation of this one, initially poor and difficile". Battle seems to concede here that the writing and art in general have a richness that cannot have the true life, slicing with the ideals on the extase and the duty of " to live before connaître". Later in the interview, Bataille speaks about this book ( Literature and the evil ) by presenting it like a warning statement (against the danger of the literature). But actually and it is by there that Bataille founds its hope of an art transcendantal, of an opening towards " the impossible" , it is about advantage of an opening to a sensitivity, an encouragement not to take any distance with a work, to take it as true, in other words to have imagination with the direction that Thomas Mann gives some: " To have imagination is not to look further into an idea, it is to take it with the sérieux". The success of work (to be included/understood by the goal of the text) holds mainly of the horizon of waiting of the reader.

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Founder of several reviews (whose in 1946, the Critical review directed later by his/her friend Jean Piel) and groups of writers, he is the author of an abundant and very diverse work, partly published under pseudonym: accounts, poems, tests on innumerable subjects (of the mystic to the economy, while passing by poetry, philosophy, art, the erotism…). He discusses thus within the Collège of sociology (1937-1939) with the Ethnologue S Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris and Anatole Lewitzki. Relatively little known of alive sound, he will exert after his death a considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers or Jacques Derrida.

Fascinated by the ritual of human sacrifice, it founds Acéphale, a review of inspiration nietzschéenne but also a secret society aiming at creating “the community of those which do not have community. ”

Battle had an astonishing interdisciplinary talent - it drew from various influences and was accustomed to using various modes of speech to work its work. Its novel the History of the eye , for example, published under the pseudonym “Lord Auch”, was criticized initially like pure pornography, but the interpretation of this work gradually matured, then revealing a philosophical and emotive depth considerable; a characteristic of other authors who were classified in the category of the “literature of Transgression”. The illustrated language of the novel rests here on a series of metaphors which refer to their turn with the philosophical constructions developed in its work: the eye, the egg, sun, ground, the testicle. Although the account is perhaps in its structure more " classique" accounts of Battle, resting in a driving crescendo with a final scene operating a transgressive and poetic synthesis of the whole of the obsessions met in the novel, this first work marks already the genius of the author for the settings in erotic scenes, and affirms its style.

Other famous novels include My mother and the blue of the sky . the blue of the sky with its tendencies nécrophiles and policies, its autobiographical or testimonial nuances, and its philosophical moments chamboulent the history of the eye , providing a treatment much darker and dull of contemporary historical reality. My mother is a novel published on a purely posthumous basis in 1966. He was rather wrongfully regarded as unfinished. Actually, Bataille did not finish the copying of the final manuscript, but joined two manuscripts one after the other (the manuscript " vert" and the manuscript " jaune") so that the text has an acceptable outcome and an end, offering a coherence allowing the literary comment. My mother is an account on the inititation with the defects of a son by his mother. Far from being simply a causing novel (with the obvious suggestion of the inceste), it rather represents a synthesis of the concerns of Battle lasting the whole of its allied work to the total maturity of its literary style. The genesis of My mother just like her analysis would deserve an article with share.

Battle was also a philosopher (although it gave up for this reason), but for much, like Sartre, its claims philosophical are limited to an atheistic mysticism. During the second world war, influenced by Heidegger, Hegel, and Nietzsche, he writes to the atheologic Sum (the title refers to the Summa Theologica of Thomas d' Aquin) which comprises its work the interior Experiment , the Culprit and On Nietzsche . After the war it composes the cursed Share , and founds the influential review '' Critique ''. Its very particular design of the “sovereignty” (which can be regarded as anti-sovereign) was discussed by Jacques Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and others.

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