The French List

1944–1948

Georges Bataille, Benjamin Noys, Alberto Toscano, Chris Turner

• Publisher: Seagull Books
• Year: 2023
• ISBN:
  9781803090863
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This first book in a three-volume collection of Georges Bataille's essays introduces English readers to his philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of the Second World War, French thinker and writer Georges Bataille forged a singular path through the moral and political impasses of his age. In 1946, animated by "a need to live events in an increasingly conscious way, " and to reject any compartmentalization of intellectual life, Bataille founded the journal Critique. Adopting the format of the review essay, he surveyed the post-war cultural landscape while advancing his reflections on excess, non-knowledge, and the general economy. Focusing on literature as a mode of sovereign uselessness, he tackled prominent and divisive figures such as Henry Miller and Albert Camus.
 
In keeping with Critique 's mission to explore the totality of human knowledge, Bataille's articles did not just focus on the literary but featured important reflections on the science of sexuality, the Chinese Revolution, and historical accounts of drunkenness, among other matters. Throughout, he was attuned to how humanity would deal with the excessive forces of production and destruction it had unleashed, his aim being a way of thinking and living that would inhabit that excess.
 
This is the first of three volumes collecting Bataille's post-war essays. Beginning with an article on Nietzsche and fascism written shortly after the liberation of Paris and running to the end of 1948, these texts make available for the first time in English the systematic diversity of Bataille's post-war thought.
 

Table of contents

• Bataille’s Copyright page
• editors’ introduction At the Crossroads: The Postwar Bataille
• Translator’s Note
• 1944
• Is Nietzsche Fascist?
• Is Literature Useful?
• 1945
• The Will to the Impossible
• Picasso’s Political Paintings
• On Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls
• 1946
• Klee
• Miller’s Morality
• Dionysos Redivivus
• Mystical Experience and Literature
• The Indictment of Henry Miller
• Gide – Baranger – Gillet
• The Last Instant
• Gide – Nietzsche – Claudel
• Take It or Leave It
• The War in China
• Cossery – Robert Aron
• Marcel Proust and the Profaned Mother
• Adamov
• 1947
• The Friendship between Man and Beast
• Giraud – Pastoureau – Benda –Du Moulin de Laplante – Govy
• On the Relationship between the Divine and Evil
• Pierre Gordon
• What Is Sex?
• A New American Novelist
• Sartre
• A Morality Based on Misfortune: The Plague
• Letter to Merleau-Ponty
• Is Lasting Peace Inevitable?
• Joseph Conrad
• Preface to the Gaston-Louis Roux Exhibition
• From Existentialism to the Primacy of the Economy
• 1948
• Goya
• Psychoanalysis
• Tavern Drunkenness and Religion
• Political Lying
• The Sexual Revolution and the Kinsey Report
• Jean Paulhan – Marc Bloch
• On the Meaning of Moral Neutrality in the Russo-American War
• The Divinity of Isou
• The Mischievousness of Language
• Marcel Proust
• Bibliography and Notes