The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

GEORGES BATAILLE

At last, this shadow on the bank
where life lets up and the wind
and the horrid trampling
of the crowd as I pass by.

When I raise my eyes toward you
you’d think the world trembling
and the fires of love
resembling your beloved’s.
—mary ann caws

Georges Bataille 1897–1962

billon, france

A

Surrealist poet, novelist, and anthropologist who associated eroticism

with death, Bataille held that through sexual intercourse two normally

discrete subjects merge to lose their rational selves, that all activity of

the will should be bent toward this kind of annihilation of the rational subject.

Bataille su√ered a troubled childhood; the paralysis, blindness, and early death of

his father and repeated suicide attempts of his mother deeply marked his views.

In 1929–1930, in the pages of his dissident Surrealist journal Documents, he

actively studied ethnographic undertakings, linking the avant-garde, the aca-

demic, and the literary. Breton excommunicated him from the Surrealists be-

cause of his divisive presence in the group, though the two later resolved their

di√erences for a time and cofounded Contre-Attaque, a group committed to

fighting fascism. For years he was a librarian in Provence and in Paris. In 1938, he

founded the Collège de sociologie with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois. Bataille

was the first to publish the work of Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques

Derrida, and Michel Foucault in his review Critique, which appeared in 1946.

Principal works: Histoire de l’oeil, 1928; L’Expérience intérieure, 1943; Le Bleu du

ciel, 1945; L’Érotisme, 1957.