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Bataille: A Critical Reader (Blackwell Critical Reader)

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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).