On Bataille

Critical Essays

Edited by Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons

Subjects: Continental Philosophy
Series: SUNY series, Intersections: Philosophy and Critical Theory
Paperback : 9780791424568, 338 pages, July 1995
Hardcover : 9780791424551, 338 pages, July 1995

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Table of contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

I.   Bataille and Philosophical Inquiry

1.   Georges Bataille and the Challenge to Think

Robert Sasso

2.   Georges Bataille and the Repetition of Nietzsche

Lionel Abel

3.   From Beyond Hegel to Nietzsche's Absence

Denis Hollier

4.   Unemployed Negativity (Derrida, Bataille, Hegel)

Tony Corn

II.   Expenditure, General Economy and Political Commitment

5.   Bataille and the World: From "The Notion of Expenditure" to The Accursed Share

Jean Piel

6.   The Maze of Taste: On Bataille, Derrida, and Kant

Arkady Plotnitsky

7.   On Georges Bataille: An Escape from Lameness?

Jean Borreil

III.   Alterity, Heterology, and Communication

8.   Of the Simulacrum in Georges Bataille's Communication

Pierre Klossowski

9.   The Heterological Almanac

Rodolphe Gasché

10.   Bataille and Communication: Savoir, Non-Savoir, Glissement, Rire

Joseph Libertson

IV.   Inner Experience and the Subject

11.   Bataille's Erotic Writings and the Return of the Subject

Paul Smith

12.   Bataille, Experience and Practice

Julia Kristeva

13.   Bataille and Science: Introduction to Inner Experience

Jean-Louis Baudry

V.   Histoire de l'oeil and Bataille's Fiction

14.   …And a Truth For a Truth: Barthes on Bataille

Michael Halley

15.   On the Eye of Legibility: Illegibility in George Bataille's Story of the Eye

Mikhal H. Popowski

16.   Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil

Susan Rubin Suleiman

Index

Essays on the French writer and critic Georges Bataille, that examine his thought in relation to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Derrida.

Description

This book examines the significance of Bataille's contributions to various areas of investigation: philosophical inquiry in the broadest sense; economic theory relative to waste, expenditure, and the heterogeneous; the political commitment expected of the intellectual and his relationship to the whole man; the experience of a subject at its limits, in moments of alterity, or of inscription within the literary text.

Contributors include Robert Sasso, Lionel Abel, Denis Hollier, Tony Corn, Rodolphe Gasché, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Piel, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jean Borreil, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Baudry, Paul Smith, Michael Halley, Mikhal Popowski, and Susan Rubin Suleiman.

Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons is Associate Professor of French at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. She is the translator of Bataille's Inner Experience, also published by SUNY Press.

Reviews

"I will say that Leslie Boldt-Irons' collection represents the most accurate and successful attempt made to popularize--without reducing--Bataille's thought in the United States. For this reason, it constitutes an indispensable asset for any scholar, Bataillian or not, in the field of postmodernism. " -- Jean-Michel Heimonet, Catholic University of America