Georges Bataille

George Bataille (1867-1962) is widely recognized as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. This is the first book in English to examine Bataille's work as a whole. It offers an accessible introduction to a complex and often ambiguous thinker.

Combining psychoanalytic criticism, feminist theory, and literary analysis, Maternal Fictions offers a complex psychological portrait of these writers who managed at once to challenge patriarchal authority and at the same time attempt to return to the maternal.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the eruption of theory was presented as an epistemic break, reorganizing the field of questioning both prospectively and retrospectively. In the forefront of this new movement was the influential journal Tel Quel, which both canonized a body of preferred avant-garde texts (both literary and theoretical) and nullified prominent figures from preceding generations. In a broad remapping of French modernism, this book shows how the milieu of Tel Quel transferred myths of the powers of literature inherited from Bataille, Sartre, Valery, and Breton to theory, in the process erasing the traces of these myths and their common ground.

In this arresting and extraordinary book the reader is not offered a secondary text, a book about Bataille, in the usual sense. But it is a book of which Bataille would have been proud: untamed, impassionate and fearless.