Georges Bataille 1897 – 1962

Georges Bataille was a French philosopher, novelist, and librarian whose work occupied a singular position at the edges of surrealism, sociology, and the history of religions. After training as a medievalist at the Ecole des Chartes, he spent his career at the Bibliotheque Nationale and in the provincial libraries of Orleans and Carpentras while founding journals and clandestine groups. His major philosophical works, including Inner Experience, The Accursed Share, and Eroticism, articulated a general economy in which expenditure, sacrifice, and the sacred play a more fundamental role than production and utility. He shaped the work of Foucault, Derrida, and Baudrillard.

Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was born at Billom in the Auvergne in September 1897, the son of a blind and syphilitic father whom he later memorialised in the harrowing opening pages of his fiction. After a brief seminary phase he trained at the École nationale des chartes in Paris, graduating in 1922 as a medievalist librarian. He spent his professional life as a librarian, mainly at the Bibliothèque Nationale and later at municipal libraries in Carpentras and Orléans, while orchestrating an extraordinary series of journals and secret societies in the Parisian avant-garde.

He founded or co-edited Documents (1929–1930), the secret society and journal Acéphale (1936–1939), the Collège de Sociologie with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris (1937–1939), and after the war the journal Critique (1946 onward). His books include the pseudonymous Story of the Eye (1928), Inner Experience (1943), Guilty (1944), On Nietzsche (1945), the three-volume Accursed Share (1949 onward), Eroticism (1957), Literature and Evil (1957), and the posthumous Tears of Eros (1961).

Bataille's writing developed a 'general economy' of expenditure, loss, and sovereignty against the restricted economy of production and utility, treating eroticism, sacrifice, and mysticism as transgressive forms of inner experience that rupture the closed self. His thought decisively shaped Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard, Kristeva, and Agamben, and established a model for thinking the sacred without religion. He died in Paris in July 1962.