Excess: Bataille and the Explosion of History

Abstract

Over the past ten or so years, there has been a flowering of interest in the work of Georges Bataille in the English-speaking world. Bataille, French post-Surrealist cum thinker of heterology from the 1920s through the '50s, had always maintained a unique place in the history of continental philosophy and cultural cntlque (especially, and not surprisingly, for the French). In his own lifetime, his work attracted critique from Sartre, Breton and Klossowski (scathing, in the cases of Sartre and Klossowski), and after his 1962 death he gained homage from the emerging wave of structural, post-structural and postmodem thinkers, most noticeably Barthes and Foucault. However, as was the case with many things connected to 1960s and 1970s French thought, it took time for Bataille's work to make it to the Anglophone world, outside of the hands of a few specialists. All that has changed, though, with regard to both sixties and seventies French thought in general and Bataille specifically. To offer just a few examples, Victor Taylor and Charles Windquist chose to begin Routledge's encyclopedic fourvolume Postmodernism: Critical Concepts (1998) with Bataille's 1931 essay 'The Notion of Expenditure'. Another of his works, the Summa Atheologica (actually comprised of three individual pieces, published separately in French and formerly translated separately in English), has recently undergone a new, unified translation. An English translation of Michel Surya's prize-winning 1987 Georges Bataille: Ia Morte a I'CEuvre is awaiting publication in the spring of this year. This is just a small sampling of the flood of literature that has emerged on Bataille in recent years. This 'flood', though, has been productive in terms of Bataille scholarship. Under the authority of figures like Barthes and Foucault, Bataille's significance was generally taken to be literary. The projects that most directly connected him with the centre of Parisian intellectual life over the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, the anti-Surrealist journal Documents, the ultra-left Contre-Attaque (founded with Roger Callois), the 'college of sociology' (with Michel