Bataille: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) [Paperback]

Fred Botting (Editor), Scott Wilson (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0631199578 | ISBN-13: 978-0631199571 | Publication Date: January 16, 1991 | Edition: 1

An elegant introduction to Bataille's major concepts and concerns, Bataille: A Critical Reader underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ways, on an entire generation of thinkers.

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Review

"Bataille: A Critical Reader is a careful selection of some of the best and most interesting critical work on this elusive and often obscure thinker." University of Sussex

From the Back Cover

An elegant introduction to Bataille's major concepts and concerns, Bataille: A Critical Reader underlines the powerful impact his work has had, in different ways, on an entire generation of thinkers. It reveals a fascinating genealogy, marking Bataille's pivotal position for theorists whose own work has enabled the transformation of literary and cultural studies in the Anglo-American academy in the last twenty years. The Critical Reader thus redresses what has been a gaping oversight in the reception of French thought since the 1960s. Keying their selections to The Bataille Reader, the editors provide students and general readers of both volumes with an essential and consistently clear source of reference and elucidation.

Chapters included are by: Jean Baudrillard, Maurice Blanchot, Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean-Joseph Goux, Denis Hollier, Jurgen Habermas, Philippe Sollers, with an extensive introduction by the editors.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell; 1 edition (January 16, 1991)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0631199578
• ISBN-13: 978-0631199571
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #767,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars full of French Nietzsche fan ideas, October 1, 2011

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Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bataille: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader) (Paperback)

Frog pond copycat leap to nowhere you've ever been.

I would like to suggest Judee Sill's Ridge Rider (1971) as an opening song to set the spirit for the cryptosphere where the great sadness begins. People who were not alive in 1971 have a lot in common with Georges Bataille (1897-1962) who was already dead when Judee Sill released her first album. Bataille: A Critical Reader (1998) has Acknowledgements for the original publication of its essays in 1991, 1983, 1977, 1987, 1981, 1993, 1984, 1990 and even mentions the original French language edition of a work by Maurice Blanchot in 1969. The translators mentioned for eight of the ten essays were mainly working from French originals, but the New German Critique was the publisher of the piece by Habermas:

The French Path to Postmodernity:
Bataille between Eroticism and
General Economics (pp. 167-190).

Bataille gets credit for:

the concept of the `heterogeneous',
the name he gave to all those elements
that resist assimilation to the
bourgeois form of life
and to the routines of
everyday life, just as they
evade the methodical
grasp of the sciences. (p. 168).

Bataille wrote about Nietzsche, so he got attention from thinkers like Foucault, Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard, who shared a common null experience at the heart of what everybody thinks.

Foucault was interested in transgression.

Blanchot got his rocks off on the passion of negative thought.

Denis Hollier writes about dualist materialism.

Philippe Sollers sees a "fetish openly displayed and thus deprived of meaning." (p. 74).

Jean-Joseph Goux provides the summary of a general economic reversal of meaning that interests me:

There is something striking
and grandiose about Bataille's
attempt to subvert existing
political economy,
caught within the limits
of a utilitarian or calculating
rationality, in order to replace it
with a `general economics'
that would make of unproductive
expenditure (sacrifice,
luxury,
war,
games,
sumptuary monuments)
the most determinant
phenomenon of social life. (p. 196).