Some books translated into English by Bataille. This post inspired by a 2003 post by Spurious on Bataille’s (who hid Walter Benjamin’s manuscript of Paris Arcades in the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale when Benjamin fled from the Germans to Spain) time during WWII:
The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (1999) – Georges Bataille, Mark Spitzer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Wall
A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.
Inner Experience (1988) – Georges Bataille, Leslie A. Boldt [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The book, “Inner Experience”, was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, “Inner Experience” is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille’s philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.
Chronology of Inner Experience via Spurious:
1941: Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience.
1942: Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer. It is published by Raymond Queneau.
1943: Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.
1943: ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.
1943: Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.
1943: Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.
1944: Marcel [Moré] reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction. —Spurious
The Unfinished System Of Nonknowledge (2004) – Georges Bataille, Stuart and Michelle Kendall [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Following Bataille’s lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall’s introduction offers a clear picture of the author’s overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The “system” that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is “atheology,” understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge. –from the publisher
The Impossible (1991) – Georges Bataille [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
When I discovered Bataille in the early 2000s, I remember reading a quote which goes something to the effect of: “sex starts where words end” which illustrates the transgressiveness of sexuality and the inadequateness of language to describe experience. Can somebody pinpoint this quote? [Nov 2006]