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The Accursed Share
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The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher.
"A serious book of political economy that also claims 'the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space.'... The Accursed Share is a brilliant product of [Bataille's] loony-tunes coupling of critical genres: pseudo/antisurrealist manifestos, leftist political treatises, erotics, Hegel 'n' Nietzsche studies, mysticism, anthropology, and sun worship. " Erik Davis , The Voice Literary Supplement
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Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization.
Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology.
Series: Zone Books
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780942299113
Publisher: Zone Books
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 15 May 1991
Country: United States
Imprint: Zone Books
Contributors:
- Translated by Robert Hurley
Audience: Tertiary education, Professional and scholarly
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 13.0mm
Width: 152.0mm
Height: 229.0mm
Weight: 363g
Pages: 200
About the Author
Georges Bataille (18971962), founder of the French review Critique, wrote fiction and essays on a wide range of topics. His books in English translation include Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, Literature and Evil, Manet, Theory of Religion, and Eroticism.
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Eroticism
An influential exploration of sex and its surrounding taboos. A philosopher, essayist, novelist, pornographer, and fervent Catholic who came to regard the brothels of Paris as his true 'churches', Georges Bataille ranks among the boldest and most disturbing of twentieth-century thinkers. In this influential study, he links the underlying sexual basis of religion to death, offering a dazzling array of...Paperback$2700Elsewhere:$3000Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
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An extraordinary collection of essays arguing for literature's complicity with evil, new to Penguin Modern Classics. Literature is not innocent, stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of eight authors and their work, including Emily Brontë's...Paperback$2400Elsewhere:$2600Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man
Three works of erotic prose fusing sex and spirituality, new to Penguin Modern Classics. In these three works of erotic prose, Georges Bataille fuses sex and spirituality in a highly personal and philosophical vision of the self. My Mother is a frank and intense depiction of a young man's sexual initiation and corruption by his mother, where the profane becomes...Paperback$2700Elsewhere:$3000Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
Story of the Eye
In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's...Paperback$2299Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 4-6 weeks -
Critical Essays
An introduction for English-language readers to Georges Bataille's postwar philosophical and critical writings. In the aftermath of World War II, 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...Hardback$5499Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
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The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its...Paperback$8700Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
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Including a number of short essays by Bataille and Leiris on aspects of the other's work as well as excerpts on Bataille from Leiris' diaries, this collection of correspondence throws new light on two of Surrealism's most radical dissidents. In the autumn of 1924, just before André Breton published the Manifeste du surréalisme, two young men met in Paris for...Paperback$4699Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
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