Literature and Evil Book

There's a grand seriousness, teetering on the edge of ridiculousness, which is possible in French but not in English. Granted, Bosie's translation can't help, but why else did Wilde write all those witty works in English and then the incantatory and half-absurd Salome in French? And who better exemplifies the Anglo-Saxon idea of a French intellectual than that academician of the perverse Georges Bataille? Who, much to my surprise, turns out not to take some of his subjects half so seriously as they'd like. He sees through Genet's bullshit, and is probably one of the first to note that de Sade is often at least as boring as he is disgusting (his further brilliant insight - that the 120 Days* is best considered in the same light as a monk's devotional work, rather than modern literature, is not one I recall seeing adopted elsewhere). A couple of the essays here are extended quibbles with Sartre, ultimately on the grounds that Bataille finds his obsession with individual sovereignty hollow. Because Bataille loves his transgression, yes - but he's also aware of the practical limits of transgression; once you genuinely want to do evil then to you it is no longer evil - and if you devote yourself to breaking every law, what have you done but make a new law for yourself? So transgression, like sacrifice in an earlier age, must always exist within a community and an ethical framework where it is still seen as taboo and as an occasional festival. Now, this is where I'm not at all sure I agree with those Gallic sweeping statements; did a society which practised human sacrifice really even regard that as murder, any more than ours considers judicial imprisonment to be a species of kidnapping? But the wider point is certainly one to bear in mind as the notion of rebellion becomes ever more hollow and commodified.

*A title which, alongside several others and some passages of quotation, translator Alastair Hamilton leaves in French. Finish the job, mate.