The Bataille Reader

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by Georges Bataille,

Edited by Fred Botting and Scott Wilson

Blackwell Publishers

Due/Published October 1997, 320 pages, paper

ISBN 0631199594

If your collection of Bataille texts is not quite what it might be, here's a way to get more than a taste in a single volume. This reader includes key texts from the broad spectrum of Bataille's work, ranging from his early essays on surrealism and the cultural politics of the 30s, to selections from The Accursed Share--Bataille's work on post-Marxist economic theory. Much coverage is given to Bataille´s speculations, also of the 1930s, on the limits of being, experience and identity, as well as to his post-war engagements with existentialism, Marxism, and Hegelianism. The major texts are interspersed with some of Bataille's work as a prolific essayist, reviewer and originator of highly-influential journals, such as Documents, Acephale and Critique. .

Contents :

Introduction: From Experience to Economy

Part I: Inner Experience



1. Chance
2. Guilt
3. Laughter
4. The Torment
5. Christ
6. Love
7. Life
8. Poetry
9. Autobiographical Note

Part II: Heterology



1. Program (Relative to Acéphale )
2. The Psychological Structure of Fascism
3. The Use-Value of D. A. F. de Sade
4. Base Materialism and Gnosticism

Part III: General Economy



1. The Notion of Expenditure
2. The Meaning of General Economy
3. Laws of General Economy
4. The Gift of Rivalry
5. Sacrifice, the Festival and the Principles of the Sacred World

Part IV: Eroticism



1. Mme Edwarda 
2. Preface to the History of Eroticism
3. Death
4. The Festival, or the Transgression of Prohibitions
5. The Phaedra Complex
6. Desire Horrified at Losing and at Losing Oneself
7. The Object of Desire and the Totality of the Real
8. Epilogue to the History of Eroticism

Part V: Sovereignty



1. To Whom
2. Hegel, Death and Sacrifice
3. Letter to X
4. Knowledge of Sovereignty
5. The Schema of Sovereignty
6. Un-knowing and its Consequences
7. Un-knowing and Rebellion
8. On Nietzsche: The Will to Chance

Bibliography
Index

Review

"What matters what thinks (at the very limit of thought if necessary) is what does not lend itself wholly to a univocal meaning and throws it off balance. Bataille never stops exposing this. Alongside all the themes he deals with, through all the questions and debates, 'Bataille' is nothing but a protest against the signification of his own discourse."

Just as Georges Bataille's works continues to have a profound influence on contemporary discourse in a wide range field, it also continues to be, fifty years after the fact, some of the most original and even unsettling writing. Botting and Scott have done an uncommonly good job of selecting and editing this collection of Bataille's writing, emphasizing Bataille's breadth of interests. The volume includes his earliest writings on cultural politics in 1930's France and responses to Surrealism (a movement he disavowed), a critique of Post-Marxist economic thought in his brilliant 1949 work The Accursed Share, his writings on other philosophers including Nietzsche and Hegel, and finally his more famous writings on Eroticism. Bataille's essays transgress and constantly challenge boundaries in form and patterns of thought (even his own thought, see above quote), yet in his refutations emerges a very distinct pattern of thought that developed into what Baudrillard has termed "a single mythic thought."