Georges Bataille

• 1. Introduction

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  Georges Bataille was born on the 10th of September 1897 in Billom, a small town in the Auvergne region of France, and by the time he died on the 8th of July 1962 he had spent a lifetime writing things that made people deeply uncomfortable. He explored eroticism, mysticism, and transgression across essays, novels, and poetry. He founded secret societies and banned journals. Jean-Paul Sartre scorned him as a mere advocate of mysticism. Yet after his death, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva all acknowledged his influence.

  What kind of thinker attracts that range of reaction? What does it mean to write under a pseudonym that translates, roughly, as 'Lord to the shithouse'? And what is the 'accursed share', the concept Bataille said represented thirty years of his work?

  Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. From Billom to the Bibliothèque

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  Joseph-Aristide Bataille, a tax collector born in 1851, and Antoinette-Aglaë Tournarde, born in 1865, raised their son without religious observance in Reims, where the family had moved in 1898 when Georges was barely a year old. He went to school in Reims and later in Épernay, and then, at seventeen, converted to Catholicism with genuine conviction. For about nine years he was a devout Catholic. He briefly attended a Catholic seminary and considered entering the priesthood. His decision to leave, according to what is recorded, was driven at least partly by a wish to earn a living and eventually support his mother.

  By the early 1920s he had renounced Christianity entirely. That arc, from devout convert to atheist, would shape the obsessions that filled his writing for the rest of his life: sacrifice, the sacred, transgression, and what lies beyond institutional religion.

  In February 1922 he graduated from the École Nationale des Chartes in Paris. His bachelor's thesis was a critical edition of the medieval poem L'Ordre de chevalerie, reconstructed from eight manuscripts he classified himself. That training as an archivist shaped his working habits. He spent years employed at the Bibliothèque Nationale, though not cataloguing books; his work there was with the medallion collections, and he published scholarly articles on numismatics. He also studied at the School of Advanced Spanish Studies in Madrid after graduating. It was during this period that he befriended the Russian existentialist Lev Shestov, who introduced him to Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, and Plato, and whose own critique of reason and philosophical systematization left a permanent mark on Bataille's thinking.

• 3. The Secret Society of Acéphale

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  Around the mid-1930s, fascinated by human sacrifice, Bataille founded a secret society called Acéphale. Its symbol was a headless man. The group's internal logic was as extreme as its imagery: every member agreed to serve as the potential sacrificial victim at the society's inauguration. The impasse was that none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered to recruit someone willing to perform that role, but no one was found before Acéphale dissolved shortly before the Second World War.

  The philosopher Walter Benjamin described Bataille and Acéphale's fixation on sacrifice as a 'pre-fascist aestheticism.' It was a charge worth taking seriously, and Bataille took it seriously enough to write a notable essay defending Nietzsche against appropriation by the Nazis, trying to reclaim a thinker the fascists had stolen.

  Acéphale also produced a review of Nietzsche's philosophy, which Derrida would later characterize as attempting to postulate an 'anti-sovereignty.' Collaborators in these projects included the painter André Masson, the writer Pierre Klossowski, the sociologist Roger Caillois, and others including Jules Monnerot, Jean Rollin, and Jean Wahl. Bataille was simultaneously a member of the College of Sociology, a highly influential group that included several other renegade surrealists.

  His relationship with Surrealism itself was complicated. Initially attracted to the movement, he fell out with its founder André Breton. After the war they resumed cautiously cordial relations. But Bataille's intellectual temperament, which drew on Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, and Alexandre Kojève, was never quite housed by any single movement.

• 4. Writing Under Pseudonyms

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  Story of the Eye, Bataille's most notorious novel, was first published in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch. The name translates roughly as Lord 'to the shithouse,' with 'auch' being short for 'aux chiottes,' a crude slang phrase for dismissing someone. The novel was initially read as pure pornography. Interpretation shifted over time to recognize in it the same philosophical and emotional depth that critics find in other writers grouped under 'literature of transgression.' Its imagery is built from a series of metaphors that refer back to philosophical constructs developed across Bataille's wider body of work: the eye, the egg, the Sun, the Earth, the testicle.

  The pseudonym was not a one-off. Some of his publications were banned, and he published other works under names including Pierre Angélique and Louis Trente. Madame Edwarda, for instance, appeared in 1941 under the Pierre Angélique pseudonym, fictitiously dated 1937; a third edition appeared in 1956 with a preface under Bataille's own name.

  Blue of Noon, written during 1935-36 but not published until 1957, was described by those who encountered it as a much darker treatment of contemporary historical reality. Its elements included incest, necrophilia, politics, and autobiographical undertones. His posthumously published novel My Mother later became the basis for Christophe Honoré's film Ma Mère.

  During the Second World War, Bataille produced Summa Atheologica, a title that consciously parallels Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologica. It comprises three works: Inner Experience, Guilty, and On Nietzsche. The religious architecture of the title, borrowed and inverted, is characteristic of the way Bataille worked: inside the forms of what he rejected.

• 5. The Accursed Share

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  La Part maudite was published in 1949 by Les Éditions de Minuit. The English translation, The Accursed Share, appeared in 1991. Bataille said the book represented thirty years of work, and the idea at its center is genuinely strange: he proposed a 'general economy' of the universe, in contrast to the 'restricted' perspective of ordinary economic theory.

  In his own words from the book's theoretical introduction, Bataille wrote that 'the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles.' He compared the shift from restricted to general economy to a Copernican transformation, a reversal of thinking and of ethics. Ordinary economics assumes scarcity and rational actors trying to maximize utility. Bataille's starting point was the opposite: the sun pours out energy without receiving anything in return, and life's basic chemical reactions constantly produce surplus. Organisms, in his framework, normally have excess energy available, not a deficit.

  That excess, which he called 'dépense' (the French word for expenditure), must go somewhere. Either it is spent luxuriously and knowingly, without gain, in art, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and monuments, or it overflows catastrophically into war. Bataille introduced the neologism 'consummation,' evoking a fire's burning, to name this excess expenditure and distinguish it from ordinary consumption.

  Crucial to the theory was Bataille's thinking about potlatch, the ritual of competitive gift-giving and destruction. He drew here on Marcel Mauss's The Gift and on Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. Reception to the accursed share concept was mixed. But the concept of sovereignty it introduced became a significant topic of discussion for Derrida, Giorgio Agamben, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

• 6. Personal Entanglements

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  Bataille's first marriage was to the actress Sylvia Maklès in 1928. They divorced in 1934, and she later married the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, a figure whose theories Bataille's work also influenced. Bataille had an affair with Colette Peignot, who died in 1938.

  In 1946 he married Diane de Beauharnais, who published under the pseudonym Selena Warfield and was the great-granddaughter of Eugen Maximilianovich, the 5th Duke of Leuchtenberg. They had a daughter together.

  In 1955 Bataille was diagnosed with cerebral arteriosclerosis. He was not told at the time that the illness was terminal. He died seven years later. Those final seven years still produced significant work: in 1955, the same year as his diagnosis, he published short books on Manet and on the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux with his friend the publisher Albert Skira. Both books were written for a mass audience, described as the only monographs on painting written by a philosopher with that intention. They proved influential on artistic practice in France.

• 7. Base Materialism and Derrida's Debt

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  During the late 1920s and early 1930s, Bataille developed what he called base materialism. It was an attempt to break with mainstream materialism, which he argued was itself a subtle form of idealism. The concept draws on Gnostic ideas and proposes an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilizes all foundations by design.

  Derrida's deconstruction owes a significant debt to this framework. Both thinkers tried to destabilize philosophical oppositions by introducing what amounts to an unstable third term that fits neither pole of a binary. Louis Althusser's later concept of aleatory materialism, or 'materialism of the encounter,' also draws on similar atomist metaphors: a world in which causality and fixed actuality give way to limitless possibilities of action. Bataille's concept anticipated it.

  Bataille's influence spread further still. It is felt most explicitly, in the words of those who have traced these intellectual lineages, in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy. It runs through Jean Baudrillard's social theory, through the psychoanalytic frameworks of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and into recent anthropological work by scholars such as Michael Taussig.

  The journal Critique, which Bataille founded, became one of the vehicles through which his thinking reached the next generation. Foucault, Philippe Sollers, and Derrida were all affiliated with Tel Quel, another journal that carried his influence forward. The thinker whom Sartre had dismissed as a mystic turned out to be a founding pressure on much of what came after him.