ID: 19
Family Name: BATAILLE
Given Name: Georges
Field of activity: Writer (fiction, poetry, essays)
Date of birth: 1897
Place of birth: Billon (Puy-de-Dôme)
Date of death: 1962
Place of death: Paris
Biographical_Information: Georges Bataille was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, in central France. His mother attempted suicide several times, but none of her desperate acts succeeded. Bataille loved his father, who became blind and suffered from general paralysis due to syphilis, and died in 1915. On the eve of World War I, Bataille converted to Catholicism. In 1916-17 he served in the army, but was discharged because of tuberculosis. He joined the seminary at Saint-Fleur with the intention of becoming a priest. From 1918 to 1922 he studied at the École des Chartres in Paris. In 1922 he received a fellowship at the School of Advanced Hispanic Studies in Madrid.
In the 1920 Bataille was involved with the Surrealist movement, but he called himself the "enemy from within." In the same decade Bataille started to write after a liberating period of psychoanalysis. He edited Documents (1929-31), and in 1935 he cofounded with André Breton the anti-Fascist group Contre-Attaque. To explore the manifestation of the sacred in society he cofounded in 1939 with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois the short-lived Collège de Sociologie.
Between the years 1922 and 1944, Bataille was a librarian and a deputy keeper at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the evenings Bataille changed his role and became known as a regular visitor of bordellos. Bataille worked as a librarian in Carpentras in Provence (1949-51), and from 1951 in Orléans. In 1961 Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Juan Miro arranged an auction of paintings to help him in financial difficulties, which had troubled him since the 1940s. Bataille died in Paris on July 8, 1962. The Tears of Eros (1961) was Bataille's final book, an excursion in the history of eroticism and violence. He started to write it in 1959. Bataille's declining physical strength and the arrest of his eldest daughter for her political activities for Algeria slowed down the work. In its foreword he confessed: "In the violence of overcoming, in the disorder of my laughter and my sobbing, in the excess of raptures that shatter me, I seize on the similarity between a horror and a voluptuousness that goes beyond me, between an ultimate pain and an unbearable joy!" In the last chapter he wrote about the Chinese torture and presented photographs of an ecstatic man who is cut to pieces. André Malraux, who was Minister of State for Cultural Affairs, condemned the book.
French essayist, philosophical theorist, novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potentialities of obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion.

Related Photographs (1)
Title: Bataille: Larmes d'Éros

Related Textual (1)

1  Title: Georges Bataille's contemplation of a tortured Chinese
    Ressource_Provider: Jérôme Bourgon
    Internal_Type: OCR

Derniére modification le : 2005-11-17