What do you think?
Rate this book
Critical Essays, Volume 1: 1944–1948
This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille’s essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings.
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.
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.
400 pages, Hardcover
Published May 30, 2023
About the author
Georges Bataille
233 books2,606 followersFrench 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. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 14, 2023
Reading these essays, mostly about obscure books published in France during the post-war years, is interesting. Well, because it's by Batalille, but him in the service of being a book reviewer through various publications at the time. He does cover Queneau and Proust, but the majority of the authors and their books are unknown in the U.S. to English speakers/readers.
June 28, 2024
actually have no respect for any opinions after saying animals are unfeeling things & our ideas of sex mean nothing but the gender binary is real
August 4, 2023
From "A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague" (1947):
Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one.
This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life. What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise there would be evil in tigers); evil lies in the fact that passion has grown servile, has placed itself in the service of a legal power that can only exert itself coldly. Pure passion is naturally in revolt and never wants legal power; generally, it does not even have power as its end but ruin, excessive expenditure rapidly destroying power.
*
From "From Existentialism to the Primacy of the Economy" (1947):
The word profit jars, admittedly, if used in connection with the present instant, but that incompatibility reveals precisely what governs the narrowness of economics: the narrowness of the language of knowledge, which is not able, as a general rule, to reckon with the present. In discursive language, the present is the poor relation (or whipping boy): what has meaning only for the present has, in reality, no meaning; what has value only for the present is not useful. An immense State has ascribed to itself the purpose of emancipating human beings once and for all, but that seductive end has led it, in a privileged way, into the clutches of logic: since the present instant has meaning only in a way that runs counter to logic, en entire people is subject to an actual heightened servitude, which, as a consequence, does not count, in the name of a nonexistent emancipation, which, as a consequence is the very meaning of servitude. And indeed, when it comes to the strenuous effort currently stirring the world, who could set the perfect impotence of the instant against it? I shall confine myself to showing that unproductive expenditure, drawing its meaning from the current instant, is seldom, as we imagine, wastage; as a general rule, it has the positive value of art. Living creatures are so constructed that, as they expend themselves, their excess of energy radiates out: the effect of this is the brilliance that attracts us, above and beyond the needs that are satisfied. Art is precisely this positive squandering of energy; it is an economic fact and the economy gives it a—theoretically measurable—value as soon as it accepts the sense of the present.
*
From "The Sexual revolution and the Kinsey Report" (1948):
This deserves precise formulation:
'Animality' or sexual exuberance is the element within us which prevents our being reduced to things.
'Humanity,' on the other hand in its specificity in working time, tends to make us into things, at the expense of our sexual exuberance.
Camus's example shows how one may start out from a revolt-based morality and slide back quickly into a depressed one.
This is because a morality founded upon passion, upon an irreducible part of ourselves, is often accompanied by bad conscience: how are we to avoid feeling guilty, certain as we are that we are concealing the face of Caligula within ourselves? No one is in any doubt, the power associated with the unleashing of passion is a fearsome danger for possible life. What is ordinarily missed is that the even is not then the product of passion, but of power. Even in Caligula one could not say that the evil was profound, since his capricious acts rapidly destroy his power—and he knows it. Evil is what is done by the SS in the concentration camps; it is what acquires power by killing and, by killing, increases the power of the regime it serves. One cannot even say exactly that evil lies in power (otherwise there would be evil in tigers); evil lies in the fact that passion has grown servile, has placed itself in the service of a legal power that can only exert itself coldly. Pure passion is naturally in revolt and never wants legal power; generally, it does not even have power as its end but ruin, excessive expenditure rapidly destroying power.
*
From "From Existentialism to the Primacy of the Economy" (1947):
The word profit jars, admittedly, if used in connection with the present instant, but that incompatibility reveals precisely what governs the narrowness of economics: the narrowness of the language of knowledge, which is not able, as a general rule, to reckon with the present. In discursive language, the present is the poor relation (or whipping boy): what has meaning only for the present has, in reality, no meaning; what has value only for the present is not useful. An immense State has ascribed to itself the purpose of emancipating human beings once and for all, but that seductive end has led it, in a privileged way, into the clutches of logic: since the present instant has meaning only in a way that runs counter to logic, en entire people is subject to an actual heightened servitude, which, as a consequence, does not count, in the name of a nonexistent emancipation, which, as a consequence is the very meaning of servitude. And indeed, when it comes to the strenuous effort currently stirring the world, who could set the perfect impotence of the instant against it? I shall confine myself to showing that unproductive expenditure, drawing its meaning from the current instant, is seldom, as we imagine, wastage; as a general rule, it has the positive value of art. Living creatures are so constructed that, as they expend themselves, their excess of energy radiates out: the effect of this is the brilliance that attracts us, above and beyond the needs that are satisfied. Art is precisely this positive squandering of energy; it is an economic fact and the economy gives it a—theoretically measurable—value as soon as it accepts the sense of the present.
*
From "The Sexual revolution and the Kinsey Report" (1948):
This deserves precise formulation:
'Animality' or sexual exuberance is the element within us which prevents our being reduced to things.
'Humanity,' on the other hand in its specificity in working time, tends to make us into things, at the expense of our sexual exuberance.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews