Product Description

Divine Filth is a collection of long-overlooked erotic prose and scatological fragments rivaled only by Georges Bataille's most well-known work, Story of the Eye, for pure "pornographic" content that transcends the limits of literature and the self. These are the shattered mystic visions of a seminal Surrealist with a deep thirst for the negation of consciousness through ecstasy, humiliation, depravity and pain.

Product Description
Excessive Narratives: Georges Bataille, Self-Sacrifice & The Communal Language of the Yucatec Maya:This essay is based on Georges Bataille's 1930s cultural theory of 'general economy' which presented modern living as problematic for societies that attempt to survive as a construct of multiple 'sovereign selves' expending themselves as useful in an overarching edict of economy (Bataille, 1949). However, the descendents of Late Formative Mayan culture (300BC-100AD) live according to 'other' narratives recognizing that a more 'useful' objective loss of self is to be found in the unconscious revelations of language and ritual performance. Self-sacrifice is beneficial to cross-communal relations when the sovereign self released in memorial moments facilitates a better understanding of our place in larger world and cosmic orders (Heyden 1981, Joyce, 2003).U Chan Tsola'ni Ek Balam (The Short Story of The Black Cat):Written from travel experiences in Southeast Mexico, this humorous Mexican 'memory play' explores language alterity and the roles nature and myth play in understanding the mis-understandings of the 'indigenous Maya'. The story is of a respected academic who travels to Mexico in search of the Cult of the Black Cat. Told in English, Yucatec Mayan and poor Spanish, the play is structured according to the everyday language of the Yucatec Maya where performing a triumvirate of 'teller, respondent and audience' allows physiocratic meanings to appear through acts of 'inactive witnessing'. ... Read more

Product Description
In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader.

Copublished by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London ... Read more

Product Description
The transgressive writing of George Bataille (1897-1962) and the rigorous ethical philosophy of social activist and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) seem to belong to different worlds. Yet in the political ferment of 1930s Paris, Bataille and Weil were intellectual adversaries who exerted a powerful fascination on each other. Saints of the Impossible provides the first in-depth comparison of Bataille's and Weil's thought, showing how an exploration of their relationship reveals new facets of the achievements of two of the twentieth century's leading intellectual figures and raises far-reaching questions about literary practice, politics, and religion.

Considering the seeming antithesis between Weil's heroic political engagement and Bataille's antipolitical aestheticism, Saints of the Impossible brings out the insufficiently recognized performative dimension of Weil's politics, while revealing the political reach of Bataille's mystical writings. As it opens a new perspective on both Weil and Bataille, the book also points to a new way of understanding the uses and abuses of sacred power and the performative in an era of philosophical disorientation, social chaos, and war.

Alexander Irwin is assistant professor of religion at Amherst College and a research associate of the Boston-based Institute for Health and Social Justice. ... Read more

Product Description
A deft reconstruction of what Georges Bataille envisioned as a continuation of his work La Somme Athéologique, this volume brings together the writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. Gathering Bataille's most intimate writings, these essays, aphorisms, notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice clarify and extend Bataille's radical theology, his philosophy of history, and his ecstatic method of meditation.

Following Bataille's lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall's introduction offers a clear picture of the author's overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The "system" that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is "atheology," understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge.

At the other side of realism, Bataille's writing in La Somme pushes language to its silent end. And yet, writing toward the ruin of language, in search of words that slip from their meanings, Bataille uses language-and the discourses of theology, philosophy, and literature-against itself to return us to ourselves, endlessly. The system against systems is in fact systematic, using systems and depending on discourses to achieve its own ends-the end of systematic thought.

A medievalist librarian by training, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was active in the French intellectual scene from the 1920s through the 1950s. He founded the journal Critique and was a member of the Acéphale group and the Collège de sociologie. Among his works available in English are Visions of Excess (Minnesota, 1985), Tears of Eros (1989), and Erotism (1990).

Stuart Kendall and Michelle Kendall are freelance translators who live in Stony Brook, New York. ... Read more

Product Description

Product Description
Author of the obscene narrative Story of the Eye and of works of heretical philosophy such as Inner Experience, Georges Bataille (1897-1962) is one of the most powerful and secretly influential French thinkers of the last century. His work is driven by a compulsion to communicate an experience which exceeds the limits of communicative exchange, and also constitutes a sustained focus on the nature of this complusion. After Bataille takes this sense of compulsion as its motive and traces it across different figures in Bataille's thought, from an obsession with the thematics and the event of sacrifice, through the exposure of being and of the subject, to the necessary relation to others in friendship and in community. In each of these instances, After Bataille is distinctive in staging a series of encounters between Bataille, his contemporaries, and critics and theorists who extend or engage with his legacy. It thus offers a vital account of the place of Bataille in contemporary thought. ... Read more

Product Description
No topic has caused more discussion in recent philosophy and political theory than sovereignty. From late Foucault to Agamben, and from Guantanamo Bay to the 'war on terror,' the issue of the extent and the nature of the sovereign has given theoretical debates their currency and urgency. New thinking on sovereignty has always imagined the styles of human selfhood that each regime involves. Each denomination of sovereignty requires a specific mode of subjectivity to explain its meaning and facilitate its operation. The aim of this book is to help outline Jacques Derrida's thinking on sovereignty - a theme which increasingly attracted Derrida towards the end of his career - in its relationship to subjectivity. It investigates the late work Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, as not only Derrida's fullest statement of his thinking on sovereignty, but also as the destination of his career-long interest in questions of politics and self-identity. The book argues that in Derrida's thinking of the relationship between sovereignty and subjectivity - and the related themes of unconditionality and ipseity - we can detect the outline of Bataille's adaptation of Freud. Freud completed his 'metapsychology,' by defining the 'economic' nature of subjectivity. In Bataille's hands, this economic theory became a key to the nature of inter-relationship in general, specifically the complex and shifting relationship between subjectivity and power. In playing with Bataille's legacy, Derrida connects not only with the irrepressibly outrageous thinking of philosophy's most self-consciously transgressive thinker, but with the early twentieth century scientific revolution through which 'energy' became ontology. As with so many of the forebears who influenced him, Derrida echoes and adapts Bataille's thinking while radically de-literalising it. The results are crucial for understanding Derrida's views on power, subjectivity and representation, as well as all of the other key themes in late Derrida: hospitality, justice, otherness and the gift. ... Read more

Product Description
Editor and P.S. 1/MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach credits the late Susan Sontag with sparking the idea for this survey of Body and Action art in the course of their conversations about artistic approaches that describe and question the human condition. Into Me / Out of Me gathers work focused on the imagined, descriptive and performative acts of passing into, through and out of the human body--explorations and visualizations of the wet and the dry, the inner and the outer--and the physical exchange of the body with the material world. Spanning over 40 years and featuring an international group of more than 130 artists, it addresses the primordial relationship between the internal and the external in three chapters: "Metabolism" (eating, drinking, excreting); "Reproduction" (intercourse, conception, birth); and "Violence" (shooting, impaling, perforation). Featured works range from Hannah Wilke's unflinching self-portraits in illness to Matthew Barney's performance-based installations to Kara Walker's antebellum figures. Artists include Chris Burden, Valerie Export, Bruce Nauman, Carolee Schneemann, Kiki Smith, Andy Warhol, Vito Acconci, Patty Chang, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Douglas Gordon, Mona Hatoum, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ana Mendieta, Paul McCarthy, John Miller, Frank Moore, Carolee Schneemann, Rirkrit Tiravanija and Marina Abramovic, among many others. ... Read more

Product Description
Examining the work of Georges Bataille, Pierre Klossowski, and Maurice Blanchot together for the first time, this pioneering study explores their response to a double challenge: that of assuming the burden of philosophy while at the same time affirming the shadows, spirits, and specters that go under the name of literature. ... Read more