From the acclaimed French philosopher, intellectual, and novelist, a brilliant account of the social and economic costs of civilization

In this important work, Georges Bataille uses his novel economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. He introduces here his concept of the accursed share, the surplus energy that any system, natural or cultural, must expend; it is this expenditure, according to Bataille, that most clearly defines a society. His examples include sacrifice among the Aztecs, potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam, and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet.

In this way, Bataille proposes a theory of a general economy based on excess and exuberance that radically revises conventional economic models of scarcity and utility. A brilliant blend of economics and aesthetics, ethics and anthropology, The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille's philosophic work. It will be of particular interest not only to readers of his fiction and essays but also to cultural theorists, anthropologists, and economists of all schools.

Georges Bataille considered The Accursed Share, his radical critique of economic theories based on rational categories of need, scarcity, and utility, his most important project. In Volume I, he announced two further volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, but he never published them in book form. This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction of completed versions of these texts as published in Bataille's posthumous collected works.

Here, Bataille expands on the notion developed in Volume I of an economics based not on the management of scarce resources but on the exuberant consumption of excess production, the accursed share. In its first part, Bataille identifies eroticism as an ideal form of consumption, since in his view it is useless, purposeless. As this expenditure of excess energy demarcates the realm of human autonomy, the study of eroticism leads naturally to an examination of sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality--Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective.

Bataille challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade, from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey. The subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is a psychological quest not alien to death.

. . . one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence.--Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review

Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century.--Michel Foucault

[An] urgent, thrusting book about love, sex, death and spirituality by Georges Bataille.--Mark Price, Philosophy Now

A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all.--The Book Depository

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.

Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Georges Bataille's earlier book The Accursed Share brought to anthropology and history, namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. No other work of Bataille's, and perhaps no other work anywhere since Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, has managed to draw so incisively the links between man's religious and economic activities.

Religion, according to Bataille, is the search for a lost intimacy. In a brilliant and tightly reasoned argument, he proceeds to develop a general economy of man's relation to this intimacy: from the seamless immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and the partial, ritual recovery of the intimate order through the violence of the sacrifice. Bataille then reflects on the archaic festival, in which he sees not only the glorious affirmation of life through destructive consumption but also the seeds of another, more ominous order -- war.

Bataille then traces the rise of the modern military order, in which production ceases to be oriented toward the destruction of a surplus and violence is no longer deployed inwardly but is turned to the outside. In these twin developments one can see the origins of modern capitalism.

The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

Introduced and translated by Michael Richardson.

Louis XXX presents two little known hybrid texts by French novelist and philosopher Georges Bataille: The Little One and The Tomb of Louis XXX. Written alongside Bataille's major work, Guilty, and only loosely narrative in any conventional sense, these audaciously experimental pieces of pornographic chamber music commingle prose and poetry, fiction and autobiography, philosophical and theological meditations, abstract artifice and intimate confession, bound together by the mysterious pseudonym at their center. Jean-Jacques Pauvert claimed that The Little One was the most shattering text that Bataille ever wrote and Andr Breton remarked that The Little One offers the most hungering, most moving aspect of Bataille's] thought and attests to the importance that that thought will have in the near future. The future is now as these texts appear in English for the first time. An extended postface by the translator places the works in biographical, historical, and critical perspective as assemblages constellated around the disappearance of the discursive real.

Best Foreign-Language Reprint 2013, Chicago Center for Literature & Photography

Here is the crux of Bataille: the admixture of pain and pleasure, torture and eroticism. Robert Kiely, Review 31

An obscure work in the history of transgressive literature has, for the first time, been given definitive and due recognition. Matt Pincus, Pank Magazine

In both of these fragmentary, hallucinatory, and sexually explicit works, we can see Bataille's influence in authors like Kathy Acker and William S. Burroughs. Karl Wollf, The Driftless Area Review

Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of poetics, modern and contemporary visual culture, theology, ecology, and design. His books include Georges Bataille (Reaktion Books, Critical Lives, 2007), The Ends of Art and Design (Infrathin, 2011), and eight book-length translations of French poetry, philosophy, and visual and cultural criticism, including books by Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Paul luard, Jean Baudrillard, Guy Debord, and Ren Char. In 2012, Contra Mundum published his Gilgamesh, a new version of the eponymous Mesopotamian poems.

In the aftermath of World War II, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way, and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Continuing the publication of his postwar writings, this second book in a three-volume collection of Bataille's work collects his essays and reviews from the years 1949 to 1951.

In this period of intellectual isolation and intense reflection, Bataille developed and refined his genealogy of morality through a sustained reflection on the fate of the sacred in the modern world. He offered a critique of the limits of existing morality, especially in its denial of excess, while sketching the lineaments of a new hyper-morality. Bataille's wide-ranging reflections are true to the intellectual mission of Critique, which he founded as a space open to the broadest considerations of the present. As well as discussing significant figures like Samuel Beckett, André Gide, and René Char, Bataille also offers fascinating reflections on American politics, Nazism, existentialism, materialism, and play.

The connecting thread in these diverse essays remains Bataille's concern with the extremes of human experience and the possibilities of transcending the limits of societies founded on utility and restraint. His writings remain a provocative incitement to rethink the boundaries we impose on expression and existence.

Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions

This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto the mythological plane.

In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the sacred at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Acéphale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.

This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Acéphale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a journey out of this world.

In his book, On Nietzsche, as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille comes as close as he would ever come to formulating his own unique system of philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something of a revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism.

In this volume, Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought where he left off--with God's death. At the heart of this work is Bataille's exploration of how one can have a spiritual life outside religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism. He skillfully weaves together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging outside with arguments against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and praise for the philosopher as a prophet foretelling the crude German fate.

With an introduction, Furiously Nietzschean, by Sylvere Lotringer, an Appendix in which Bataille defends himself against Sartre, and an Index, this volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's assertion that Bataille, broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before.

The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges Bataille spanning thirty years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war in history -- with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Bataille's reflections on the possible origins of humanity coincide with the intensified threat of its possible extinction.

For Bataille, prehistory is universal history; it is the history of a human community before its fall into separation, into nations and races. The art of prehistory offers the earliest traces of nascent yet fully human consciousness -- of consciousness not yet fully separated from natural flora and fauna, or from the energetic forces of the universe. A play of identities, the art of prehistory is the art of a consciousness struggling against itself, of a human spirit struggling against brute animal physicality. Prehistory is the cradle of humanity, the birth of tragedy.

Bataille reaches beyond disciplinary specializations to imagine a moment when thought was universal. Bataille's work provides a model for interdisciplinary inquiry in our own day, a universal imagination and thought for our own potential community. The Cradle of Humanity speaks to philosophers and historians of thought, to anthropologists interested in the history of their discipline and in new methodologies, to theologians and religious comparatists interested in the origins and nature of man's encounter with the sacred, and to art historians and aestheticians grappling with the place of prehistory in the canons of art.

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry and in poems, Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death--precisely the perspective of poetry--and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights.--Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The Tears of Eros and Story of the Eye.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way, and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy. Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and Albert Camus.

In keeping with Critique's mission to explore the totality of human knowledge, Bataille's articles did not just focus on the literary but featured important reflections on the science of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and living that would inhabit that excess.

This is the first of three volumes collecting Bataille's post-war essays. Beginning with an article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille's post-war thought.

The Absence of Myth is the most incisive study yet made of surrealism, insisting on its importance as a cultural and social phenomenon with far-reaching consequences. Clarifying Bataille's links with the surrealist movement, and throwing revealing light on his complex and greatly misunderstood relationship with Andre Breton, The Absence of Myth shows Bataille to be a much more radical figure than his postmodernist devotees would have us believe: a man who continually tried to extend Marxist social theory; a pessimistic thinker, but one as far removed from nihilism as can be.

Outlines a mystical theology and experience of the sacred founded on the absence of god.

Originally published in 1943, Inner Experience is the single most significant work by one of the twentieth century's most influential writers. It outlines a mystical theology and experience of the sacred founded on the absence of god. Bataille calls Inner Experience a narrative of despair, but also describes it as a book wherein profundity and passion go tenderly hand in hand. Herein, he says, The mind moves in a strange world where anguish and ecstasy take shape.

Bataille's search for experience begins where religion, philosophy, science, and literature leave off, where doctrines, dogmas, methods, and the arts collapse. His method of meditation, outlined and documented here, commingles horror and delight. Laughter, intoxication, eroticism, poetry, and sacrifice are pursued not as ends in and of themselves but as means of access to a sovereign realm of inner experience.

This new translation is the first to include Method of Meditation and Post-Scriptum 1953, the supplementary texts Bataille added to create the first volume of his Summa Atheologica. This edition also offers the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes, along with an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

Guilty is a searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship. It takes the form of a diary, recording the earliest days of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, but this is no ordinary day book: it records the author's journey through a war-torn world without transcendence. Bataille's spiritual journey is also an intellectual one, a trip with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Blake, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche as his companions. And it is a school of the flesh wherein eroticism and mysticism are fused in a passionate search for pure immanence. Georges Bataille said of his work: I teach the art of turning horror into delight. This new translation of Guilty is the first to include the full text from Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes. The text includes Bataille's notes and drafts, which permit the reader to trace the development of the book from diary to draft to published text, as well as annotations of Bataille's source materials. An extensive and incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically. Guilty is Bataille's most demanding, intricate, and multi-layered work, but it is also his most personal and moving one.

In the decade prior to the publication of Inner Experience (L'expérience intérieure), the twentieth-century French philosopher Georges Bataille produced a nascent masterwork containing some of his most original and extensive reflections on a range of subjects. With thoughts on ritual sacrifice and military conquest, the nature of laughter, and the mechanisms of capitalism, The Limit of the Useful, as Bataille had planned to title the work, illuminates the philosopher's later corpus, yet it remained unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, and untranslated until now.

This is the first English-language translation of what Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott argue is one of Bataille's most structurally consistent works. Paired with draft essays and plans for The Accursed Share, along with over a hundred pages of appendixes and notes, the volume distinctively elaborates Bataille's thought. The Limit of the Useful spans a decade of rich intellectual ferment in Bataille's life as he first formulated his challenge to capitalism, engaging with concepts and ideas in ways not seen in his other published works. The volume bridges the gap between Bataille's surrealist literary writings and later scientific pretensions, drawing attention to, and filling in, an overlooked lacuna in his oeuvre.

A poetic, philosophical, and political account of Nietzsche's importance to Bataille, and of Bataille's experience in Nazi-occupied France.

Georges Bataille wrote On Nietzsche in the final months of the Nazi occupation of France in order to cleanse the German philosopher of the stain of Nazism. More than merely a treatise on Nietzsche, the book is as much a work of ethics in which thought is put to the test of experience and experience pushed to its limits. At once personal and political, it was written as an act of war, its publication contingent upon the German retreat. The result is a poetic and philosophical-and occasionally harrowing-record of life during wartime.

Following Inner Experience and Guilty, On Nietzsche is the third volume of Bataille's Summa Atheologica. Haunted by the recognition that existence cannot be at once autonomous and viable, herein the author yearns for community from the depths of personal isolation and transforms Nietzsche's will to power into his own will to chance.

This new translation includes Memorandum, a selection of 280 passages from Nietzsche's works edited and introduced by Bataille. Originally published separately, Bataille planned to include the text in future editions of On Nietzsche. This edition also features the full notes and annotations from the French edition of Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes, as well as an incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall that situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically.