Reviews for Georges Bataille An Intellectual Biography

The average rating for Georges Bataille An Intellectual Biography based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-03-08 00:00:00 John Hough Exhaustive, interesting, engaging, hardly ever boring... am i talking about Bataille or this book? Har har. Both. The book was written in a pretty accessible style which surprised me, not much jargon at all and stuff that isn't immediately obvious is almost always explained in footnotes (which there are a lot of). Some things I learned from this biography that I did not know before: -Bataille and Pablo Picasso went to bullfights together -One of Bataille's most prized possessions was a horse's skull (???) -Bataille and Jacques Lacan were good friends - Lacan even married Bataille's ex-wife. -Bataille and Andre Breton hated each other, Surya is very sympathetic to Bataille throughout the entire biography and portrays Breton as essentially a petulant child...which could be true. Bataille seemed to be jealous of Breton's status of leader of the Surrealists and thought that he could take it to new heights (depths?) -He gave a lecture in the late 50s about eroticism in which students were expecting something about free love being good and the love revolution being liberating when instead he starts talking about how eroticism is "by its very nature, accursed, accursed to a terrifying degree; and that this curse makes the sexual embrace rending and desirable (to the point of decay); that eroticism is in all times contained within the narrow limits of religion and morality because it is accursed; that these limits had and will always have the meaning humanity needs to give its fear of death, and for this reason it is pointless and impossible to seek to abolish them; that whoever wants to be sovereignly - but alone - free to transgress them must seek dark, frightful and infernal pleasure of this curse and this fear." He was just that kinda guy.... -He helped lead a violent anti-fascist group in the late 30s that Breton basically ruined because he talked about it in a right-wing French newspaper. -Despite being relatively neutral on the Soviet Union and Communism (some criticism but not enough to be called anti-communist, also along with a hate for the bourgeoisie), decides in 1947 to contextualize and "justify" Joseph Stalin's actions that not even Sartre was willing to do. Politically he was really trying to find a "fourth way": not capitalist, not fascist, not communist (in the Soviet sense). -Was diagnosed with a terminal illness that killed him slowly over eight years, he would have random "blackouts" where he couldn't think and would be left weak. This made his writing and output even slower than before: he often left things incomplete and wanted to take on impossible tasks (he wanted to write a book about "Universal History" that Surya speculates his entire bibliography up to this point could be a part of it). -Breton called him the "excrement philosopher". He was right. Overall I wouldn't really recommend this book to just anyone - its a really hefty tome and quite an exhausting read. Lots of details and you really need to care about Georges Bataille and the context of his thought. If you don't, this book is a paperweight. If you do it's essentially a holy text.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-07-10 00:00:00 Frank Guidinger Surya’s book announces itself as “An intellectual biography”, as more, he’d like us to know, than just the salacious juice on a death obsessed pervert. Although, at 600 pages, you'd think it'd have space for both. Well, for starters, the translation is kind of clumsy. Whether or not this reflects the original text I cannot say, but sentences trail on for so long that their meaning gets tangled beyond intelligibility in subordinate clauses. Or they end far too abruptly. I was very sensitive to this as I’ve been reading too many books in translation and I think it’s starting to blunt my mind. Where good books unmangled by translators enrich and enliven your inner voice, the heavy thudding pace of sentences rewired across different languages has a way of dulling it. Need to read a native speaker next. The best parts of this book survey what Bataille read and what he wrote. But he seems not to have written much until late in life (by WWII, when he was in his 40s, he had only written The Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon) so the first half of the biography is leaden by his prissy drama with Andre Breton and the surrealists. Certain chapters are unbearably tedious archives of the back-biting gossip and catty tussles between the small Bataillan contingent of the interwar Paris avant-garde and the shockingly conservative Surrealist machine. It’s very petty and boring. Who cares. Meanwhile, certain fascinating people and events in Bataille’s life are barely mentioned. We learn almost nothing about Sylvia Bataille, his wife who was impregnated by a family friend, one Jacques Lacan; eventually leaving her husband to marry Lacan. I wanted to know more about Sylvia but we learn almost nothing more than her name. Lacan himself, whose influence emanates from Bataille’s theories (the two rarely if ever explicitly referenced one another; but their deep theoretical connection resonantes if you know where to look for it), one of only several figures in Bataille’s life who measures up to him, is barely afforded a few sideways mentions. But there is an agitating surplus of information on the sycophants and second-rates who hung onto Bataille’s coattails. The tedium about the what’s-his-names who congregated around the many journals that Bataille wrote for is vast beyond comprehension. Another disappointing exclusion is Alexandre Kojève, Bataille’s intimate friend, who he considered to be ‘the greatest philosopher of the age’. Why Bataille thought so and what influence Kojève had on Bataille’s writing must be freeze-dried for another study. You won't learn about it here. I’m not yet familiar enough with Bataille's opus to totally extrapolate his involvement with Lacan and Kojève’s Hegel (they attended Kojève's legendary lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit together) but the intersection of psychoanalysis and German Idealism certainly had some sovereignty upon Bataille's theoretical works. Which is interesting, because this is the exact philosophical lineage that would be disavowed by those next generation in French philosophy; Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Foucault & Baudrillard, who hated Hegel and psychoanalysis but incidentally received Bataille enthusiastically. Even claimed to be his heirs in certain cases. There's a disappointing absence of writing about how postmodernism walked on eggshells around Bataille's (for them) inconvenient involvement with Lacan and Kojève. Similarly, Blanchot and Klossowski, doubtlessly important to anyone who was living and writing in the same climate as them, make appearances but do not receive a serious intertextual treatment. Alas, all we ever hear about in Surya’s book is Nietzsche and Sade. So many fascinating possibilities unrealized. And the coruscating circus of 20th century Paris, vast with strangeness and intensities, feels instead like a ghost town. And Bataille is the preeminent phantom, I never got a good sense of what he was like as a person. Bataille’s vivid and exciting life, his flamboyant personality, remained an enigma when I closed the book. How did he balance his bourgeois responsibilities as a librarian, husband and father with the exhausting demands of scholarship, authorship and his legendary debauchery? And if the documentation doesn’t exist, shouldn’t a good biographer come up with a decent speculative account? What this biography does offer is a fairly apt summary of Bataille's literary influences and estimates their bearing on his work (but, again, with some disappointing occlusions). Despite its faults in other areas, I think the deep involvement with Bataille's work made the book worth reading. I’m new to Bataille (as of writing this, I’ve only read Literature & Evil and 2/3 of Eroticism) and this biography gives you a good sense for his texts; you could probably do worse for an introduction. Surya can be really insightful & you'll leave with a decent context for Bataille's books. At the very least, I now know what order to read them in. But, then, there is probably an easier way to make yourself a Bataille syllabus than a 600 page biography.