Customer Reviews

Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature)

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Bataille remains for me a thinker who is almost always interesting but rarely coherent. His fiction is brilliantly conceived and revolutionary, but this collection of essays ranges from the inspired to the merely fragmentary. Although by his own admission, Bataille was not interested in forging a positive philosophy to replace the systems of materialism or idealism, still there remains something strangely absent in Bataille's varied speculations on sacrifice, auto-mutilation, or the unforgettable 'pineal eye.' It is difficult to discern how literally he is to be taken. On the one hand, his excoriations of the Nazi's appropriation seems totally sincere and convincing, but his work on 'the solar [...]' is both juvenile and uninteresting. Granted, his essay on Sade is a brilliant and provocative analysis of the 'use value' of excrement, but this still remains a minor and confused work of thinking.

Im so impresed with this mans work I am obsessed. He is a rare breed of intelligence. He has a piece in this called 'Mouth" which refers tothe position our heads take well being thrown back in a scream as that of an extension to our spines, inother words that we assume an animal architecture to our bones in the most extreme pains. Batailles constant opinions detailed here in wonderful totaly controlled short pieces , is for me, the only truly awful reading I have ever done. A music piece I often play also has this effect. It is genuis to have the power of horror in works not involving the 'supernatural". I am in awe of this odd,dead man.

Bataille was French surrealist who wrote like an alien trapped on a hostile planet. In searing essays like "the Solar Anus," he almost convinces you that the end is not just near, but here. Disturbing and beautiful, this book is highly recommended.

in reponse to stevie, i'd say that andre breton has left us infinitely more to 'go on' than the far too reductionist bataille. unlike bataille, breton was not living in the shadow of his idols (bataille:sade) but trying to generate something new. bataille's assessment of nietzsche and the surrealists as romantic icaruses also seems a self assessment; bataille could never rise above his 'need to go below'. he was guilty of precisely the same things he accused the surrealists of.