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Georges Bataille

From The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), novelist and critic, flourished in Parisian intellectual circles in the period between World Wars I and II. Known for his erudite approach to eroticism and his iconoclastic writing style, Bataille focused his attention on a wide variety of themes and problems in anthropology, philosophy, literature, sociology, and economics. Although he was involved in contemporary literary and political groups in Paris throughout the 1920s and ‘30s, his writings did not have the kind of impact they would have on poststruc-turalists in the 1960s and ‘70s. He was in this sense an intellectual heir of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose own writings were not fully appreciated until after his death. In many ways critical of the French avantgarde in his lifetime, Bataille nevertheless managed posthumously to redefine it through his influence on writers like Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, and Julia Kristeva. Born in 1897 in Billom, in central France, to predominantly secular parents, …
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Full text Article Bataille, Georges

From The Penguin Dictionary of Sociology
A French philosopher and sociologist, he criticized the dominant assumptions of economics, notably the concentration on production and saving, and the premise that, in a context of scarcity, human beings attempted rationally but selfishly to satisfy their needs. Bataille, by contrast, attempted to…
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Full text Article Bataille, Georges (1897-1962)

From Encyclopedia of Philosophers on Religion
Bataille was born into a French family of peasant stock. His father, a civil servant blinded, paralyzed, and eventually driven mad by syphilis, had become extremely hostile toward the Catholic religion. The mother, too, was rather indifferent to Catholicism, with the result that Bataille was raised…
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Full text Article Bataille, Georges (1897–1962),

From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy
French philosopher and novelist with enormous influence on poststructuralist thought. By locating value in expenditure as opposed to accumulation, Bataille inaugurates the era of the death of the subject. He insists that individuals must transgress the limits imposed by subjectivity to escape…
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Full text Article PLEASURE

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
A sip is the most that mortals are permitted from any goblet of delight. ALCOTT, Bronson Table Talk (1877). One half of the world cannot understand the pleasures of the other. AUSTEN, Jane Emma (1816). Pleasure onl... …
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Full text Article Georges Bataille (1897–1962)

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
| 64 words
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Full text Article TRUTH

From Collins Dictionary of Quotations
The truth is often a terrible weapon of aggression. It is possible to lie, and even to murder, for the truth. ADLER, Alfred Problems of Neurosis (1929). The truth which makes men free is for the most part the truth which men prefer not to hear. AGAR, Herbert Sebastian A Time for Greatness (1942). …
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Full text Article Abject Art

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms
| 88 words
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Full text Article Bataille, Georges

From The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Sociology of Religion
Georges Bataille (1897–1962), born in France of an agnostic family and a syphilitic father, was fascinated by the two World Wars he witnessed as well as by religion. As a teenager, he converted to Catholicism and considered monasticism before repudiating his faith in the early 1920s. He was greatly…
| 1,131 words
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), novelist and critic, flourished in Parisian intellectual circles in the period between World Wars I and II. Known for his erudite approach to eroticism and his iconoclastic writing style, Bataille focused his attention on a wide variety of themes and problems in…
| 2,708 words
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Full text Article Bataille, Georges

From Collins Dictionary of Sociology
(1897-1962) French poststructuralist thinker who mixed fictional and scientific discourse in order to explore the nature of horror, baseness, and obscenity. During the 1930s Bataille attended Alexandre Kojeve's lecture course on Hegel's phenomenology. Taking his reading of Hegel from Kojeve, …
| 222 words
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