Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French writer who explored, in his writings, extreme states of consciousness, in particular eroticism and violence. Bataille believed that these states represented the point at which nature and culture converge.

Bataille was born in Billom, in the Auvergne. By profession a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale, Bataille edited the review, Documents, in the 1930s, and the influential monthly, Critique, in the 1940s. He was a founding member of the Collège de Sociologie (1936-1939), whose aim it was to study la sociologie sacrée. He wrote dozens of critical articles a year, but never completed the large-scale projects he had planned (including a history of human civilization). Instead he published brief erotic or pornographic fantasies, full of dark and scatological humour: Histoire de l'Oeil (1928; The Story of the Eye, 1949), Le Mort (1928), Madame Edwarda (1941), and Ma Mère (1949). He felt unable to acknowledge these works publicly, and they appeared under pseudonyms such as Lord Auch and Pierre Angélique. He published two novels under his own name, L'Abbé C. (1950), and Le Bleu du Ciel (1957), which are set in World War II France and 1930s Spain respectively, but they received little critical attention. L'Erotisme (1957; Eroticism, 1962) and Les Larmes d'Eros (1961) examine the links between sexuality, transgression, and death. La Part Maudite (1949) and La Littérature et le Mal (1957) are texts about aesthetics and writing.

Bataille colluded with the Surrealists, but was never a full member of the group; André Breton was suspicious of his obsession with violence at a time of growing fascism. Bataille was attacked by the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre for writing “apologias for worshipping the abyss”, but his reputation has risen posthumously, particularly following the interest in his taboo-breaking work shown by the radical intellectual group Tel Quel in the 1970s. Bataille's first wife, Sylvia, later married the psychoanalyst and writer Jacques Lacan.