Guilty

by Georges Bataille, Stuart Kendall

Overview

Guilty is a searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship. It takes the form of a diary, recording the earliest days of World War Two and the Nazi occupation of France, but this is no ordinary day book: it records the author's journey through a war-torn world without transcendence. Bataille's spiritual journey is also an intellectual one, a trip with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Blake, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche as his companions. And it is a school of the flesh wherein eroticism and mysticism are fused in a passionate search for pure immanence. Georges Bataille said of his work: "I teach the art of turning horror into delight." This new translation of Guilty is the first to include the full text from Bataille's Oeuvres Complètes. The text includes Bataille's notes and drafts, which permit the reader to trace the development of the book from diary to draft to published text, as well as annotations of Bataille's source materials. An extensive and incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically. Guilty is Bataille's most demanding, intricate, and multi-layered work, but it is also his most personal and moving one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438434629
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	01/01/2011
Series:	SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Georges Bataille (1897–1962), a medievalist librarian by training, founded the College of Sociology and the secret society Acéphale. He was equally famous for his contributions to French literature, art criticism, anthropology, philosophy, and theology. Bane of theologians, existentialists, and surrealists during his lifetime, he became an essential reference for the poststructuralist generation of French intellectuals, including Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of modern and contemporary art and design, critical theory, poetics, and theology. He is the author of the critical biography Georges Bataille and has also edited and translated two other books by Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge and The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture, along with works by Maurice Blanchot, Paul Eluard, Jean Baudrillard, and Guy Debord. He is the editor of the online magazine Design/Culture/Criticism.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Translator's Introduction: Autobiographia Atheologica ix

Guilty

Introduction 3

Friendship

Night 9

"Gratified Desire" 15

Angel 18

The Point of Ecstasy 24

The Accomplice 33

Unfinishable 37

The Misfortunes of the Present Time

Exodus 45

Solitude 52

Luck

Sin 57

The Attraction of Gambling 61

The Divinity of Laughter

Expiration 79

The Need for Laughter 80

Laughter and Trembling 90

Will 97

The King of the Wood 104

Appendices

Letter to X 111

Fragment on Knowledge, Action, and Interrogation 114

Two Fragments on the Opposition between Human Beings and Nature 117

Fragment on Christianity 122

Fragment on Guilt 123

Two Fragments on Laughter 127

Alleluia: The Catechism of Dianus 131

Notes 151

Index of Names 253

Editorial Reviews

"This important new edition and translation of French philosopher and poet Georges Bataille's wartime diary, first published in 1944, stands as a crucial record of the intimate thoughts and imagery that would become the ground for his later, and better known, works on eroticism and mysticism … Highly recommended." — CHOICE

From the Publisher

To many Western critics, Bataille (1897-1962) stands as one of the most arresting and influential writers of this century. Accordingly, this first English translation of Le Coupable will surely gratify those interested in contemporary intellectual history or literature. Guilty , which defies classification by genre, is presented as series of reflections and meditations. Tellingly begun in September 1939, Bataille's philosophical inquiries are heightened by the war and its introduction of profound uncertainty: ``I started this book as the result of an upheaval that ended up challenging everything and freed me from undertakings I was stuck in. Once war broke out, there was no way I could wait any morewait, that is, for the liberation which this book is for me.'' Elegant and gnomic passages challenge the barriers imposed on the self by language and by conceptions of the sacred: ``Human existence is guilty: it is this to the degree it opposes nature. A humility that makes humanity ask forgiveness (Christianity) overwhelms human existence without excusing it. Christianity's advantage is that it at least aggravates the guilt it proclaims . . . . '' Bataille probes this fundamental imprisonment in an argument made here poetic and accessible through a lucid translation. (September)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly