On Nietzsche [Paperback]

Georges Bataille (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1998

Hailed by Martin Heidegger as "one of FranceÆs best minds," Georges Bataille has become increasingly recognized and respected in the realm of academic and popular intellectual thought. Although Bataille died in 1962, interest in his life and writings have never been as strong as they are today--Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva have all acknowledged their debt to him. In his book, On Nietzsche, as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille comes as close as he would ever come to formulating his own unique system of philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something of a revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was NietzscheÆs work that lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism. In this volume, Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming NietzscheÆs thought where he left off--with GodÆs death. At the heart of this work is BatailleÆs exploration of how one can have a spiritual life outside religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism. He skillfully weaves together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and destruction raging outside with arguments against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and praise for the philosopher as a prophet foretelling "the crude German fate." With an introduction, "Furiously Nietzschean," by Sylvere Lotringer, an Appendix in which Bataille defends himself against Sartre, and an Index, this volume reconfirms Michel FoucaultÆs assertion that Bataille, "broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before.">

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Bataille’s entire work deals with the experience of the edge, that is living at the very limits of life, at the extreme...Bataille’s books exert a fascination that never ceases."--Bloomsbury Review

"An absorbing and illuminating read for persons with a philosophical and literary turn of mind."--Small Press Book Review

"One of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence."--Peter Brooks, The New York Times Book Review

"(Bataille’s) writing is superlative...daringly imaginative, intended only for those awake and aware of the possibilities of excess--in literature and life. Along with Celine and Breton, Bataille writes as if he were dropping a bomb."--Detroit Free Press

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: French --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Paragon House (August 27, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1557786445
• ISBN-13: 978-1557786449
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #330,417 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. Bataille died in 1962.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Question on the Possibility of Community, July 12, 2000

By 

Ilya Wick (Madison, WI USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: On Nietzsche (Paperback)

No disrespect intended, but the above review's take on this text was just so radically different than how I read it that I felt compelled to make a few comments. Bataille is in some sense writing "on Nietzsche", but more/instead of that he is using Nietzsche's work to explore the dynamics of communication and the limits of language, to question at a very fundamental level whether communication is even possible and if so how it takes place. In this exploration, of course, pain, suffering, loss, lack, desire, etc. all come into play, as they must since this is a work of Bataille's. But to speak of this pain as "sadistic" might be misleading... for (to essentialize perhaps too much) Bataille's "argument" centers more on what the individual must do to itself, its own subjectivity, in order to even approach community. When one inflicts pain on onesself, is that sadism? Masichism? The intense introspectivity of this work, much in tune with Nietzsche's, opens the door for the destruction of these very types of subject/object relationships, perhaps even to the point of obliterating the categories altogether. So despite the biographical and stylistic quirks of the author, which some might find troubling, others amusing, others entirely inconsequential, and yet others absolutely essential to the questions at hand (a la F.N.), ON NIETZSCHE is quite a provoking work if any of the issues mentioned are of concern.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Philosopher of the Impossible..., January 5, 2008

By 

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

This review is from: On Nietzsche (Paperback)

*On Nietzsche* really isn't a book explaining the philosophy of Nietzsche, but a personal meditation on Nietzsche's influence on Georges Bataille's own manner of thinking and living. For Bataille, it must be understood, thinking and living are inextricable; philosophy must be tested against life, and life--inner and outer--provides the raw material for philosophy. Bataille is no armchair theorist. So it is that a good portion of *On Nietzsche* consists of fragmentary entries from Bataille's own 1944 diaries which illustrated, more or less, his struggle to embody the thrust of Nietzsche's thought--the thrust of it, because Nietzsche, in Bataille's view, is a thinker who points the way beyond himself and into mankind's future. Bataille attempts to take up the torch and carry it further forward into the darkness of the not-yet-and-never-to-be-known. His method, if you want to call it that, is to leave himself open to "chance."

Well, it's something like that.

Bataille takes Nietzsche's work as a template rather than doctrine, a method for a never-ending and open-ended inquiry into what it is to be human, which in itself is a concept that is forever developing.

Bataille is often difficult reading and *On Nietzsche* is no exception. His thinking tends to turn repeatedly in on itself until you feel as if your brain is tied up into some sort of neural Gordian knot. He is also prone to verbal flights of fancy that seem a vestige of his surrealist days--he's a philosopher always straining for the inexpressible. It's all part of the appeal of Bataille, if you find that appealing. Some, most notably Jean-Paul Sartre, did not. And called Bataille a mystic, not a philosopher at all. This, coming from Sartre, was not a compliment. It strikes me that Bataille, like Jung, considered subjective states of mind as objective facts inasmuch as they are every bit as influential over us as any other objective phenomenon. So the concept "God," for instance, has a "truth" regardless of whether an actual God exists or not.

I found the first part of *On Nietzsche* to be the most coherent and most compelling part of the book. Here Bataille presents his radical theory that communication depends on an act of violence--the infliction of a sacrificial wound that breaks our own autonomy and the autonomy of another. The crucifixion of Christ being the highest example of this principle--facilitating the communication of God and Man. This transgression, which serves to make us human, thus illustrates the necessity--indeed the good--of evil.

The rest of *On Nietzsche*--the diary entries--I found much less compelling, often incomprehensibly fragmented, and of interest primarily for the copious excerpts Bataille reproduces from Nietzsche's *Gay Science* and *The Will to Power.* Bataille makes some enlightening observations in this section regarding his take on Nietzsche and, as always, provokes with the occasional stunning and illuminating aphorism, but, on the whole, I didn't feel *On Nietzsche* was one of Bataille's best works. Certainly it isn't the book I'd recommend for first time Bataille readers. *Erotism* would make a better--and more readable--choice of his nonfiction work, or, maybe, something like *The Impossible.*

But for those already familiar with Bataille, his general train of thought, and his idiosyncratic way of philosophizing, *On Nietzsche* provides a light into some of the deeper, though not the deepest, workings of Bataille's subversive oeuvre

5.0 out of 5 stars Quick and Concise, February 21, 2011

By 

Ultrak0w - See all my reviews

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This review is from: On Nietzsche (Continuum Impacts) (Paperback)

So for those who aren't overly concerned with Bataille, with proto-Deconstruction, or French literary theory in general, I would bump this rating down to four stars. As other reviewers have indicated, this text relies less on a point by point textual exegesis of Nietzsche's oeuvre, and more on a particular reading of Nietzsche which may or may not be obfuscated by the appropriation of Nietzsche by the National socialism. Bataille's Acephale group had for one of its task the safeguarding of Nietzsche from a explicitly fascist interpretation. Thus Bataille's presentation of what appear to be simply journal reflections written during the tumultuous wartime years at the end of the occupation of Paris seem indicate a way of reading Nietzsche that moves past rigid political conepts the of mid-20th century Europe. This is a childlike Nietzsche of play, rather than the strictly lion-like Nietzsche of Heidegger who offers only the will to power as the last epoch closing possibility of Western metaphysics. Derrida indeed takes up the thread of this reading, and, in my opinion, deconstruction distinctly emerges from out of an attempt to approach Nietzsche in this manner.