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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Literature and Evil, June 26, 2001
Georges Battaille throws down a challange to Jean-Paul Sartre, who held that "literature is inncocent". Bataille, in his examination of such figures as Emily Bronte, Sade, Baudelaire, Genet, Kafka and Michelet, and the component of "evil" in their works, argues that literature is, in fact, "guilty" and that, moreover, it must acknowledge itself as such. In his reading of these literary figures, Bataille proceeds to analyse literature's complicity with evil and how this enables it reach a fuller level of communication. Drawing on Freud, he "eroticises" literary creativity and contends that the notion of "Art for art's sake", which emerges as a reaction to a fragmented and reified social world dominated by utilitarianism and commodity fetishism, is actually a subterfuge, literature masquerading as innocent under the mantle of "pure art", in order to rechannel the forces that are dammed up owing to the repressions imposed by culture. Though elliptical and opaque, this book is a challenging and fascinating study, which has a potential for laying the foundations for a philosophy of composition that underwrites the aesthetic of evil and explores its relation to the overarching forces of institutional and administrative surveillance.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The Death Drive in literature, June 14, 1998
In this short (and at times very difficult) collection of essays, Bataille challenges Sartre's view that "literature is innocent". A selective survey of key writers - including Bronte, Genet and Sade - shows that literature is a necessary antidote to the overarching Superego and Capitalism's emphasis on the Reality Principle. In this way, Bataille shows that literture is in fact evil, in that it is anti-utilitiarian and thus embedded in the childish Pleasure Principle. While Bataille seems to alternate between ascribing the driving force of literature to both the Life Drive (Eros) and the Death Drive (Thanatos), he does succeed in showing how Freud - although he never explicitely invokes the name - can be used for a new method of reading literature.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Complex, Problematic, and Fascinating, June 27, 2011
A fascinating and extremely difficult collection of essays from philosopher-anthropologist-novelist-librarian Georges Bataille, whose work on literature brings us closer to literarity in terms of Freudian repression. Bataille covers a number of great writers in this collection (Bronte, Genet, Baudelaire, Sade), and attempts to unveil their complicity with evil and eros. For Bataille, writing is eros in the damned sense. He inherits the Platonic legacy which has condemned poetry as that which is always at a double removal from truth. Literature is not an innocent counter-gesture to the decay of civilization, it is itself embedded in thanatos. While Bataille's own prose here is extremely cryptic, and he often subordinates the author's to his own vision, this remains a peculiar and important text.
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