Visions Of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Theory and History of Literature) By Georges Bataille
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press 1985 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0816612838 , 0816612803 | PDF | 31 MB
Publisher: Univ Of Minnesota Press 1985 | 304 Pages | ISBN: 0816612838 , 0816612803 | PDF | 31 MB
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.