The Review of Contemporary Fiction
The Bataille Reader by Georges BatailleJames Sallis
Georges Bataille. The Bataille Reader. Ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Blackwell (England), 1997. 353 pp. £45.00; paper: £14.99.
Any estimation of Bataille must ask, first, to what degree his work emerges from intellectual discipline and to what degree from a patchwork of obsessions. It is the urgency of communication one notes long before content registers, the power of that communication, its palpable arc, bearing up Bataille’s notion of release through discharge of surplus energy. True, the work is brilliant, often penetrating. Yet about it all there is a deliberate air of contingency. Salted with bits of personal history and transcriptions of everyday life, “shaped” by elision and paradox, his texts remain forever adamantly underdetermined and irreducible.
Bataille crowded in his work the very limits of human experience: violations of the self in torture, ritual, the erotic, chance, economies of loss. For him, the deepest connection between art and life was their common origin, or culmination, in horror.
Intricately connected with surrealism, founder of the influential journal Critique, author of still-unsettling pornographic tales like Histoire de l’oeil, Bataille became in the seventies, when his collected works were published in twelve volumes, a cultlike figure for the Tel Quel group. Champions include all the bad boys of contemporary theory: Foucault, Sollers, Blanchot, Baudrillard, and Derrida, whose seminal 1967 essay remains one of the best.
Unfortunately, in presenting to us so felicitous and multifarious a sampling of Bataille, the book’s editors do little to ease our passage through Bataille’s forbidding interior. A simpler, less dense presentation seems called for; discrete introductions for the selections also would have been welcome. The general introduction, while quite good, may prove heavy going for the general reader.
The Georges Bataille who emerges here, skulking just beyond the light of our campfire, is one of many, a kind of missing link between the historical avant-garde and postmodern. Always with Bataille we have the sense of a man steadily writing away from himself, again and again hauling the world, by the bootstraps of obsession, back. [James Sallis]