Georges Bataille

Copyright © 2017 Lynn Hughey Engelbert.

Published by Kismet Press LLP under an exclusive license to publish. Commercial copying, hiring, lending is prohibited. The book is freely available online at kismet.press under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license.

This short introduction to Georges Bataille’s work examines his philosophy and literature by identifying the central theories of transgression, sovereignty and/or subjectivity, sacrifice, art and/or aesthetic radicalism, general and restricted economies, as well as the profane and the sacred by way of eroticism and ecstasy. Bataille remains a singular and complex figure, an Outsider in poststructuralist, continental philosophy, and the complexities of his interdisciplinary approach to literature and theory compels this introduction to explore and explain his innovative and often controversial work as an impossible philosopher, as well as a philosopher of the Impossible.

Lynn Hughey Engelbert teaches philosophy at the University of Alberta and Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada. She has published a variety of essays regarding avant-garde philosophers and artists, and is concerned with postmodern aesthetics more generally. She is currently working on a book about the feminist sublime and its connection to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

1. An Introduction: Georges Bataille and Impossibility
2. The General and Restricted Economies: Outsider Philosophy
3. Sovereignty, Transgression, and Power: Bataille’s Subject
4. Transgression, Art, and Surrealism: In-between the Avant-Garde and Literature
5. Outsider Literature(s) inside the Abyss
6. The Sacred/Profane or Eroticism/Ecstasy: Saint Bataille
7. A Conclusion for Bataille and the Anti-Aesthetic

All publications by Kısmet Press are and always will be free to read online. If you would like to support us, you can purchase our books in print and electronic forms from most online bookstores. You can also order our print publications from your local independent bookshop. Since we use a print-on-demand system, occasionally our printed publications may be listed as “temporarily unavailable” or “out of stock”, but this is almost always misleading. Please feel free to get in touch with us if you experience problems in purchasing our publications. Here are our our suggestions for online platforms for purchases:

• Buy on Bookshop.org
• Buy on BetterWorldBooks
• Buy on e-Books.com

*When you make a purchase using these links Kısmet Press may earn a small commission, which also helps us. This does not affect the price that you pay for any of our publications.