Bataille

by Fred Botting, Scott Wilson

One of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century, Georges Bataille has only recently come to prominence in the Anglophone academy, partly through the influence of post-structuralism. Once seen as no more than a philosopher of eroticism and a writer of avant-garde pornography, Bataille is emerging as an absolutely central figure to discussions of culture, economy, subjectivity and difference.

Bataille is the first volume of its kind to offer lucid, diverse and relevant examples of the ways of reading literary and cultural texts in the light of Bataille's work. The essays explore the significance of Bataillean notions like heterology, general economy, transgression and eroticism, through detailed readings of Shakespearean, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature; in analyses of Gothic and postmodern fiction; and in critiques of popular culture, rock music and Hollywood movies. In order to make Bataillean notions more comprehensible to contemporary readers, his concepts are situated in relation to the ideas of renowned critical and cultural theorists like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, as well as Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. Here the influence of Bataille is outlined in intellectual and historical terms and the significance of his work can be seen for both contemporary and futural modes of cultural analysis.

Genres: Philosophy

232 pages, Paperback

First published May 11, 2001

Reviews

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Situating Bataille among his post-structuralist offspring (viz. Derrida, Lacan, and Baudrillard), this is a very interesting application of Bataillean (non-)concepts to culture, high and low. An exciting book, this is simply a taste at what Bataille can do vis-a-vis cultural studies and literary theory.

[Lukáš · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just a few bits away from a five star book. I believe it could be introduced as a set of essays taking as their subject the influence that Bataille's thought has exerted on poststructuralist and "postmodern" thought (most notably Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Deleuze, Kristeva, Lyotard, Baudrillard and Goux), into instead of a strict (in terms of Bataille's heterology - "in-formed", that is, both formed and formless at once due to the notion of excess) theoretical rigor takes up various artifacts of cultural production as means to illuminate and critique these connections. To give an example, while the figure of Shakespeare's Hamlet and the encounter with the ghost makes up for a major theme in Derrida's reading of Marx, Botting and Wilson take up The Birthday Party's song about the Danish prince riding a cadillac with a gun as a means to restructure the discours with a drive towards the... POW POW POW Or take a reading of the movie Pretty Woman according to the question of who's the whore - the figure of the prostitute played by Julia Roberts or the millionnaire earning money by destroying industries played by Richard Gere - all looming back into the links between Bataille's thoughts on eroticism and sovereignty and Lacan's notion of jouissance.
It's all fun to read and most of the discussions are brilliant, though I wouldn't recommend this neither to beginners in poststructuralism, or Bataille-newbies, not to mention the sometimes rather confusing amount of references (including the pop-cultural ones) the unfamiliarity with which can cause rather confusion. Nevertheless, I'm sure it won't be gathering dust in my bookshelf.
The book lists an annotated bibliography of works on Bataille as a list of Bataille's works available in English.
POW POW POW