Books like The Bataille Reader

Across Bataille's oeuvre, represented in this volume by essays touching on fields of intellectual inquiry from sociology to metaphysics, as well as literary works of phenomenological introspection and erotic surrealism, the refrain to which he constantly returns might be summed up as a search to define the conditions of human freedom. This liberty which he pursues, as the reader ultimately discovers, transcending banal notions of social relations or even personal will, exists only in our capacity to live beyond utility and purpose, beyond reasons – indeed, beyond reason, that very ability to reason and plan for an intuited future which, as Bataille acknowledges, determines our humanity as such. Nevertheless, what Bataille suggests is neither a regression to animality, nor a quixotic diversion bearing no relevance to real social life. As he illustrates, more or less explicitly, in works exploring fascism, archaic religion, and his own speculative meta-economics, the irruption of an irrational, unassimilable excess of energy occurs continuously and ineluctably. Bataille, whose writings bookend the rise and fall of fascism and the second World War, was issuing a warning: unless we recognize and engage that excess, unless we find ways to successfully live excessively on our own terms, then heterogeneous force will blindly overtake us in the forms of social disintegration, cults of personality, and war.