Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography

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Summary: The Impossible Thought of Georges Bataille
Review: This translation of Surya's 1992 biography of the notoriously contradictory French writer contains nearly 500 pages of text supported by 86 pages of notes. It is the first full-length biography in either English or French. Bataille is decidedly an acquired taste, and this book may well persuade you to admire this neo-Sadean thinker who spent his nearly sixty-five years (1897-1962) as a "paleographic archivist" at the Bibliothèque Nationale and, finally, as the director of the Orléans Municipal Library. Anyone who can weave together Bataille's scatophilic and necrophilic obsessions with his literary themes and debauched private life as Surya has without sensationalism or prurience surely earns my admiration. Surya does full justice to his subject's innovative claims concerning the role of consumption in capitalist civilization; the negative features of so-called inner experience; the alleged links between eroticism and death; and the impossibility of community. Indirectly, Surya shows how Bataille's persistent preoccupation with the "informe" (formless) not only illuminates some of the most cutting-edge academic work in art history and literary criticism today, but also eerily foreshadows recent scientific theories of catastrophe, chaos and cosmic evolution. Surya is particularly good at displaying the development of Bataille's "impossible" thought against the background of French left-wing political activity and so successfully distances Bataille from any easy embrace of French (or German) fascism, a predilection for which hasty readers infer from his "The Psychological Structure of of Fascism" (1933)--the first analysis of its subject from a psychoanalytical point of view, according to Surya (p.177).
Surya's book is not an easy read, however, if you're expecting the straightforward prose of Deirdre Bair's studies of Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir and Anaïs Nin. Surya's is the prose of a philosophically trained literary man and not an historian. I would buy this book only if I were already pretty familiar with Bataille's work and wanted to situate it in his life and times. For a first look, I would turn to Allan Stoekl's introduction to a collection of Bataille's major essays entitled, "Visions of Excess" (1985).