Georges Bataille [Paperback]

Dr Michael Richardson (Author), Michael Richardson (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0415098424 | ISBN-13: 978-0415098427 | Publication Date: June 23, 1994 | Edition: 1

George Bataille (1867-1962) is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first book in English to examine Bataille's work as a whole. It offers an accessible introduction to a complex and often ambiguous thinker.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Absence of Myth adds to the collection of Bataillean texts already available in English and provides an interesting selection of his work in and around surrealism. As such, it is an important book for those interested in the surrealist movement.
–John G. Watters

About the Author

Michael Richardson is the editor of Georges Bataille's The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 160 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (June 23, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0415098424
• ISBN-13: 978-0415098427
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,995,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars unclear on the concepts, October 1, 2010

By 

C. Cheh "A Reader" (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Georges Bataille (Paperback)

This is a simplistic, narrow-minded, and conservative attempt to place Bataille within a conventional art historical framework. The author spends the first chapter ranting and raving about how poststructuralist claims of allegiance to Bataille are misguided because Bataille died before structuralism was even invented. He congratulates himself on this in-the-box insight, wondering why no one else has thought of it before. I put the book away at that point. Thank God I borrowed this from the library rather than spend money on it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Bataille, considered from a position of sobriety..., October 13, 2009

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Georges Bataille (Paperback)

Bataille is often more fun to talk about than to actually read, more inspiring to misunderstand than to comprehend. As a result, a lot of books on Bataille end up being a record of the author's subject and intoxicated personal encounter with Bataille's supposed ideas. This, they often claim, is encouraged by the very nature of Bataille's work...in which Bataille is often engaged, quite literally, in the extreme.

Richardson's main objective in this introductory study is to rescue Bataille from this sort of breathless, hysterical, and inaccurate "critical" response and restore Bataille to his rightful place in traditional scholarship--a place, Richardson argues, that Bataille never entirely foreswore in spite of his own wild, personal, and unconventional way of philosophizing.

The results is a concise and lucidly written overvew of Bataille's work from soup to stern. Richardson does an excellent job of charting Bataille's labyrinthine thought and lighting the way through the blacker passages; it's an even more impressive accomplishment in a work as short as this one.

Although he seeks to take some of the fang out of Bataille and rather overstates his case to make his point, and to situate Bataille within the purview of a conventional scholarship where, in fact, Bataille does not easily fit, if at all, Richardson's little book remains a much-needed shot of corrective sobriety in a field where so many others have used Bataille as license to flail about unreservedly in a state of philosophical intoxication speculating in ways that reveal more about themselves than about what Bataille actually wrote.

Richardson gives us a Bataille without the hero worship, without the sensationalism, and without the personal "responses" of authors on Bataille whose value as entertainment often comes at the price of distortion.

In any event, a good little book to sit on the shelf between your others on Bataille.