Title: Complex, Problematic, and Fascinating
Product review: A fascinating and extremely difficult collection of essays from philosopher-anthropologist-novelist-librarian Georges Bataille, whose work on literature brings us closer to literarity in terms of Freudian repression. Bataille covers a number of great writers in this collection (Bronte, Genet, Baudelaire, Sade), and attempts to unveil their complicity with evil and eros. For Bataille, writing is eros in the damned sense. He inherits the Platonic legacy which has condemned poetry as that which is always at a double removal from truth. Literature is not an innocent counter-gesture to the decay of civilization, it is itself embedded in thanatos. While Bataille's own prose here is extremely cryptic, and he often subordinates the author's to his own vision, this remains a peculiar and important text.
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