Georges Bataille

• Born: September 10, 1897
• Birthplace: Billom, Puy-de-Dôme, France
• Died: July 8, 1962
• Place of death: Paris, France

Early Life

Many of the details of Georges Bataille’s early life come from his own writings. It is difficult to know, then, to what extent a painful childhood produced his fascination with the bizarre and to what extent his fevered imagination shaped his presentation of his own background. According to Bataille, his father suffered from blindness and general paralysis brought on by syphilis. The disease gradually drove his father insane, and madness apparently intensified the older Bataille’s dislike of the Catholic religion, because he refused to have a priest present when he died and expired ranting against the Roman Catholic Church. Georges Bataille’s youthful Catholic piety and lifelong attraction to religious feeling may have stemmed from rebellion against this anticlerical father.

In 1900, the family moved from Bataille’s birthplace to the nearby city of Reims. Bataille dropped out of school temporarily in 1913 and became a devout Catholic in 1914, just before the outbreak of World War I. The Germans advanced on the city, and Bataille and his mother evacuated, abandoning his father, who could not be moved because his syphilis was in an advanced state.

Young Bataille entered the seminary of Saint-Fleur in 1917, intending to become a monk. The following year, he produced his first-known published work, a six-page pamphlet on Notre Dame de Reims, a cathedral that had been nearly destroyed by German shelling. Bataille foretold the restoration of the cathedral and the restoration of the medieval Catholic spirit of its original builders. However, Bataille lost his faith in 1920, apparently as a result of a romantic involvement with a woman.

Bataille did not lose his interest in things medieval along with his faith. At the famous École de Chartres, he trained to be a librarian specializing in medieval texts. He also obtained a fellowship to study at the School of Advanced Hispanic Studies in Madrid. While traveling in Spain, he witnessed the gory death of a bullfighter, a scene that left a deep impression on him. In 1922, he submitted his thesis on a medieval romance to the École de Chartres, then obtained a position as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, where he would remain until poor health forced him to resign in 1942.

Life’s Work

During the 1920’s, Bataille published a number of scholarly articles on numismatics, the study of old coins. He also began to lead a second life, one that moved him into the French intellectual and artistic avant-garde. During World War I, disillusionment with the values of European society had led a number of young intellectuals to take up the movement known as Dada, a rebellion against all artistic and social standards. Under the leadership of poet and theorist André Breton, some of the Dadaists formed the Surrealist movement. While Dada was largely dedicated to pure revolt and ridicule, the adherents of Surrealism proposed to create new values out of the unconscious and the irrational.

In 1924, Bataille became friends with Michel Leiris, who was to become involved with Surrealism. Although Bataille had difficult relations with the Surrealists and was often regarded as an enemy by Breton, Bataille and the Surrealists became part of the same Parisian intellectual milieu. Bataille’s fictions and philosophical writings display the hallucinatory, dreamlike quality and exotic, incongruous images associated with Surrealism.

Leiris was one of the few readers of Bataille’s first book, W. C., written in 1926 and later burned unpublished by the author. According to Leiris, W. C. displayed Bataille’s characteristic obsessions with sexuality, excrement, violence, and death. The following year, 1927, Bataille wrote the essay “L’Anus solaire” (published 1931; “The Solar Anus,” 1985), in which he proclaims the sacred connection of all things through parody and sex. Although the essay does not take the form of an argument, it essentially maintains that the verb “to be” (the copula) unifying objects is the same as copulation unifying bodies. With the death of God, there is nothing to maintain the stability of this unification; therefore, all things can become parodies of all other things, and unstable copulation becomes the melting of bodies into bodies in perverse sexuality.

One doctor, a Dr. Dausse, who read W. C. and “The Solar Anus” was so shocked by the obsessive character of the writing that he arranged for Bataille to begin treatment with the psychotherapist Adrien Borel. Familiarity with psychotherapy intensified Bataille’s interest in the role of unconscious drives in human experience. The therapy also helped him to continue to write by clarifying his own emotional complexities. While in therapy, he entered into a brief marriage with the actress Sylvia Makles, later the wife of psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan, and had a child.

Bataille’s first published book was the novel L’Histoire de l’oeil (1928; The Story of the Eye, 1977), which appeared under the pseudonym Lord Auch. The novel is an erotic fantasy, influenced by the Marquis de Sade, marked by bizarre, perverse imagery. In 1929, Bataille and a group of associates from the Surrealist movement founded the journal Documents, in which Bataille published a series of essays. These essays, based on things such as photographs of toes and the genitals of plants, dealt with the constantly shifting boundaries of ideas and objects in a godless world.

While editing Documents, Bataille began to read Marxist literature and started to expand his previously self-absorbed speculations into social philosophy. He made contact with the anti-Stalinist Democratic Communist circle and contributed articles in which he developed his ideas about expenditure as the basis of economic activity to the Democratic Communist journal La Critique Sociale. He moved further in the direction of political and social philosophy when he attended the lectures of the celebrated philosopher Alexandre Kojève on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx from 1934 to 1939.

As a consequence of this growing concern with social philosophy, Bataille, Leiris, and former Surrealist Roger Caillois founded a group known as the College of Sociology in 1937. The College of Sociology sponsored lectures by some of continental Europe’s best-known intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Walter Benjamin. Bataille also established a secret society known as Acéphale that published a review of the same name and held mysterious rituals in order to create an atheistic, ecstatic religion. In a more public fashion, the College of Sociology dedicated itself to developing a “sacred sociology,” which explored the role of the sacred in creating human society.

The College of Sociology and Acéphale broke up with the onset of World War II. During the war years, Bataille appeared to move away from his social concerns. His most important productions at this time were the three books that he later named the La Somme athéologique (summa atheologica). These were Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche. Intended to recall the Summa theologiaea (c. 1265-1273; Summa Theologica, 1911-1921) of Saint Thomas Aquinas, these writings explore the contradictions, paradoxes, and absence of ultimate definitions in establishing standards and bounds in a universe without a god. Inner Experience, the most widely read book of La Somme athéologique, attempts to create an atheistic version of religious mysticism from the self-contradictory human urges to be separate from the surrounding universe and to achieve union with it.

Following the war, Bataille returned to social and political philosophy with his three-volume The Accursed Share, based on an article on the notion of expenditure that he had written during the College of Sociology period. The concepts of surplus and waste were at the core of Bataille’s thinking on economic and social relationships. Bataille maintained that living organisms receive more energy than they need for survival. If the excess energy cannot be spent in growth, it must be expended as waste. The basic problem of humanity and, indeed, the basic problem of living matter in general is the expenditure of excess energy or useless consumption.

Bataille referred to consumption as a luxury. He identified three luxuries in nature: eating, death, and sexual reproduction. Each luxury is an establishment of relations between self and not-self. Eating wastes energy because through being eaten, more efficient systems such as simple plants and animals lower on the food chain are lost to less efficient systems. These eaters and predators impose heavier burdens on the environment, are further from self-sufficiency, and squander more life in each moment of existence.

In death, a system squanders all its energy, yielding it all to the surrounding environment. Destruction creates an absolute unity between self and not-self. The paradoxical nature of squandering becomes clearest in sexuality. Through sexuality, individuals give up their own energies and their own possibilities for growth for the species. According to Bataille, all economic transactions and all social relationships are products of the need to give up excess.

The works Bataille composed after World War II offer the most coherent statements of excess and expenditure as the foundations of human society. In 1946, Bataille founded the journal Critique. In this journal, he published early works by philosophers who would come to dominate the French intellectual scene, including Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault. As Bataille’s reputation grew, some of the works that he had written earlier were made more widely available or were published for the first time. His novel Le Bleu du ciel (1957; Blue of Noon, 1978), for example, was written in 1935 but first published in 1957.

Throughout the last two decades of his life, Bataille suffered from recurrent tuberculosis and from continual financial difficulties. Remarrying after the war, he supported himself by returning to work as a librarian, first in Charpentras and later in Orleans. In 1961, Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Joan Miró, and other artist friends of Bataille held an art auction to raise money for the ailing Bataille. With the proceeds of this auction, he was able to purchase an apartment in Paris and live comfortably for a short time as something of a cult figure, admired by many of the leading intellectuals in France. Until shortly before his end in 1962, Bataille worked steadily on a last book of meditations on sexuality and death.

Influence

Despite the disturbing quality of his writing, Bataille was an influential figure both because of his role in intellectual networks during his lifetime and because of the continuing impact of his ideas after his death. Bataille took part in many of the central movements of the French avant-garde. He participated in Surrealism and was, at the same time, a major critic of Breton’s Surrealist movement. As a founder of the College of Sociology, Bataille helped provide a forum for some of France’s most brilliant philosophers and social thinkers. His journal Critique introduced many of the philosophers, such as Derrida and Foucault, who would later become known as poststructuralists.

Bataille’s greatest impact on Western philosophy was probably his concept of transgression, the continual breaking of boundaries, as an act that disintegrates the traditional philosophical distinction between subject and object and between self and not-self. In an article entitled “Homage to Bataille,” published in Critique in 1963, Foucault acknowledged Bataille as basic to the formation of his own philosophy. Foucault and others known as poststructuralists tended to see acts of transgression as acts of liberation from social and intellectual limits. Because sexuality is a fundamental human impulse, Foucault and other poststructuralists have also followed Bataille in seeing sexual transgression as a particularly important means of liberation.

Bataille’s critics often object to the violence and nihilism, or rejection of all values, in his work. Nevertheless, Bataille offered intriguing insights into the role of the irrational in human thoughts, actions, and social relations.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, edited by Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. A collection of Bataille’s early writings, with a helpful introduction by the editor that can provide general readers with some insight into the development of Bataille’s thinking.

Drury, Shadia B. Alexandre Kojève: The Roots of Postmodern Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Examines the influence of the ideas of Alexandre Kojève, a Russian thinker who introduced the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to many French thinkers, including Georges Bataille. Chapter 8 looks specifically at how Kojève’s Hegelian teachings affected Bataille’s philosophical views.

Hollier, Denis, ed. The College of Sociology, 1937-1939. Translated by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988. A collection of writings by Bataille and his colleagues, during the period of the College of Sociology, on their attempts to develop a sacred sociology. In addition to writings by Bataille, it includes lectures by other participants such as Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois. The editor is one of the foremost French authorities on Bataille and his circle. Hollier’s discussion of the College of Sociology in the foreword will provide useful background for readers seeking to learn about Bataille and French intellectual circles on the eve of World War II.

Land, Nick. The Taste for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (An Essay in Atheistic Religion). New York: Routledge, 1992. A philosophical essay on Bataille’s ideas on the sacred. The writing is difficult and the book is probably best suited for readers who already have some familiarity with Bataille’s work.

Nadeau, Maurice. The History of Surrealism. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Macmillan, 1965. The authoritative history of the Surrealist movement, written by one who participated in it. This work explains the intellectual climate that shaped Bataille’s thoughts and writing.

Polizzotti, Mark. Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton. London: Bloomsbury, 1995. This biography of the leader of the Surrealist movement offers readers a view of the radical intellectual and artistic circles that surrounded Bataille in Paris. It also gives a history of the difficult relations between Breton and Bataille and discusses Bataille’s criticisms of the Surrealists.

Richardson, Michael. Georges Bataille. New York: Routledge, 1994. The most thoroughly researched and dependable biography of Bataille available in English. It also offers a readable introduction to Bataille’s thinking.

Stoekl, Allan. Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris, and Ponge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. An examination of the use of language in the writings of Bataille and his colleagues. Stoekl sees Bataille and the others as precursors of deconstructionist philosophers and literary critiques, such as Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, who look at writing and other forms of expression as reflections of political and social relations.