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Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form
In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a "ferociously religious" sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.
Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe ("formless"), the author demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice--an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form.
Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists--a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's "sacrificial" interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with "hyperchristianity"; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's "religious sensibility."
With its wide-ranging analyses, this book offers insights of interest to scholars of religion, philosophers, art historians, and students of French intellectual history and early modernism.
Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe ("formless"), the author demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice--an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form.
Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists--a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's "sacrificial" interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with "hyperchristianity"; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's "religious sensibility."
With its wide-ranging analyses, this book offers insights of interest to scholars of religion, philosophers, art historians, and students of French intellectual history and early modernism.
- GenresPhilosophy
372 pages, Hardcover
First published November 15, 2007
63 people want to read
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September 21, 2025
‘‘The sight of torture,’’ Bataille writes in Guilty, ‘‘opens my individual being violently, lacerates it.’’
Not seeking to avoid injury, Bataille gazes upon these intolerable photographs to ‘‘stretch the laceration out,’’ and thereby engage in a violent inner experience at the level of death.
[…]
‘‘Compassion, pain, and ecstasy connive with each other [se composent].’’ Bataille italicizes the element that he also places first in this series because pain and ecstasy, if they are to be experienced to the point of death, are only possible through compassion. And compassion, carried to its extreme in identification with the other, comes forth tears. The tears that issue in profound communication are the tears of a god at once cruel and gentle sacrificing and self-sacrificial. They are the tears of Eros, the god who wounds those whom he conjoins. And as Bataille never stops reminding us, those who would risk compassion for the other also risk being wounded by what they look upon.
Not seeking to avoid injury, Bataille gazes upon these intolerable photographs to ‘‘stretch the laceration out,’’ and thereby engage in a violent inner experience at the level of death.
[…]
‘‘Compassion, pain, and ecstasy connive with each other [se composent].’’ Bataille italicizes the element that he also places first in this series because pain and ecstasy, if they are to be experienced to the point of death, are only possible through compassion. And compassion, carried to its extreme in identification with the other, comes forth tears. The tears that issue in profound communication are the tears of a god at once cruel and gentle sacrificing and self-sacrificial. They are the tears of Eros, the god who wounds those whom he conjoins. And as Bataille never stops reminding us, those who would risk compassion for the other also risk being wounded by what they look upon.
Displaying 1 of 1 review