About Me
Georges Bataille (1897-1962)
alias: Lord Auch, Pierre Angélique, Louis Trente
French essayist, philosophical theorist and novelist, often called the metaphysician of evil.
Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion.
LIFE
Georges Bataille was born in Billon, France. He had a terrible childhood. His mother attempted suicide several times. Bataille loved his father, who became blind and suffered from general paralysis due to syphilis, and died in 1915.
Tuberculosis troubled Bataille all his life, and he suffered from periods of depression.
In 1917 he joined the seminary with the intention of becoming a priest. He spent a period with the Benedictine congregation on the Isle of Wright. A few years later Bataille experienced a loss of faith.
In the 1920 Bataille was involved with the Surrealist movement, but he called himself the "enemy from within". He was excommunicated from its inner circles by André Breton.
In the same decade Bataille started to write after a liberating period of psychoanalysis.
Between the years 1922 and 1944, Bataille was a librarian at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the evenings Bataille changed his role and became known as a regular visitor of bordellos. This habit caused him troubles at work.
He founded many journals that revealed his interests in sociology, religion, and literature.
Bataille was the first to publish such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Derrida.
In 1939, to explore the manifestation of the sacred in society, he founded the Collège de Sociologie. It was closely associated with a secret society which published the Acéphale.
In 1946 he founded one of the most respected scholarly journals in France, Critique.
Bataille died in Paris on July 8, 1962.
MAIN WORKS
Histoire de l'oeil (1928, The Story of the Eye), Le Bleu du ciel (1945, Blue of Noon), and L'abbé C (1950, The Abbot C.) are among Bataille's best-known glorifications of eroticism. He felt that sexual union causes a momentary indistinguishability between otherwise distinct objects. The secret of eroticism opened visions into unknowable continuity of being, the death. Poetry has similar dimensions when it dissolves the reader "into the strange." Pornography was for Bataille the vehicle for his own surrealist experiments and memory - this also partly explains complex associations of eggs and eyes.
The Story of the Eye, a classic of erotic literature, was written in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch. It told a tale of a young couple, Simone and the narrator, who explore the boundaries of sexual taboos. They play with eggs, milk and all bodily fluids. During a champagne orgy, their friend Marcelle is left in a wardrobe. She becomes traumatized and is taken to a sanatorium. After she is brought back she hangs herself in the same wardrobe. Simone and the narrator, escape to Spain, where their sexual fantasies become more blasphemous.
"I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop."
The Story of the Eye has enjoyed a cult status. Most recently it was rediscovered by the Icelandic pop singer Björk.
Blue of Noon was set against the backdrop of General Strike in Spain and nascent German Nazism. The protagonist, Troppmann, sways between two women, Lazare, a young Communist,Dirty. Troppmann is almost always drunk, he is a manic, nihilist dreamer. Eventually he leaves Germany with Dorothea, they copulate in a graveyard and watch a band of Hitler Youth playing marching songs. Eyes appear again in the text:
"My eyes were no longer lost among the stars that were shining above me actually, but in the blue of the noon sky. I shut them so as to lose myself in that bright blueness."
The Tears of Eros (1961) was Bataille's final book, an excursion in the history of eroticism and violence from the Aurignacian era to modern times. Bataille started to write it in 1959, but his declining physical strength, lapses in memory, and the arrest of his eldest daughter for her political activities for Algeria slowed down the work. In its foreword Bataille confessed:
"In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!"
In the last chapter he wrote about the Chinese torture and presented photographs of an ecstatic man who is cut to hundred pieces. The strange, exalted facial expression of the man fascinated Bataille: "I have never stopped being obsessed by the image of this pain," he said. André Malraux, who was Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, condemned the book.
read an extrat of Bataille's Eroticism
