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Erotism : death & sensuality / Georges Bataille ; translated by Mary Dalwood.

By: Material type: TextTextLanguage: English Original language: French Publication details: San Francisco : City Lights Books, 1986, c1962.Edition: 1st City lights edDescription: 276, [4] p. ; 20 cmISBN:
  • 0872861902
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 305.3 BAT
Contents:
Eroticism in inner experience -- The link between taboos and death -- Taboos related to reproduction -- Affinities between reproduction and death -- Transgression -- Murder, hunting and war -- Murder and sacrifice -- From religious sacrifice to eroticism -- Sexual plethora and death -- Transgression in marriage and in orgy -- Christianity -- The object of desire : prostitution -- Beauty -- Kinsey, the underworld and work -- De Sade\'s sovereign man -- De Sade and the normal man -- The enigma of incest -- Mysticism and sensuality -- Sanctity, eroticism and solitude -- A preface to \'Madame Edwarda.
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
Standard Loan LSAD Library Main Collection 305.3 BAT (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 1 Available 39002000394362

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Taboo and sacrifice, transgression and language, death and sensuality--Georges Bataille pursues these themes with an original, often startling perspective.

Bataille challenges any single discourse on the erotic. The scope of his inquiry ranges from Emily Bronte to Sade,from St. Therese to Claude Levi-Strauss and Dr. Kinsey. The subjects he covers include prostitution, mythical ecstasy, cruelty, and organized war. Investigating desire prior to and extending beyond the realm of sexuality, he argues that eroticism is "a psychological quest not alien to death."

" . . . one of the most original and unsettling of those thinkers who, in the wake of Sade and Nietzsche, have confronted the possibility of thought in a world that has lost its myth of transcendence."--Peter Brooks, New York Times Book Review

"Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century."--Michel Foucault

"[An] urgent, thrusting book about love, sex, death and spirituality by Georges Bataille."--Mark Price, Philosophy Now

"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 insights into incest, prostitution, marriage, murder, sadism, sacrifice and violence, as well as including comments on Freud, Sade and Saint Theresa. Everywhere, Eroticism argues, sex is surrounded by taboos, which we must continually transgress in order to overcome the sense of isolation that faces us all."--The Book Depository

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including The Impossible, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.

Translation of: L\'érotisme.

Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York : Walker, 1962.

Includes bibliography: p. [277]-[278] and index.

Eroticism in inner experience -- The link between taboos and death -- Taboos related to reproduction -- Affinities between reproduction and death -- Transgression -- Murder, hunting and war -- Murder and sacrifice -- From religious sacrifice to eroticism -- Sexual plethora and death -- Transgression in marriage and in orgy -- Christianity -- The object of desire : prostitution -- Beauty -- Kinsey, the underworld and work -- De Sade\'s sovereign man -- De Sade and the normal man -- The enigma of incest -- Mysticism and sensuality -- Sanctity, eroticism and solitude -- A preface to \'Madame Edwarda.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Georges Bataille was a French poet, novelist, and philosopher. He was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dome, in central France on September 10, 1897. His father was already blind and paralyzed from syphilis when Bataille was born. In 1915, Bataille's father died, his mind destroyed by his illness. The death marked his son for life.

While working at the Bibliotheque National in Paris during the 1920s, Bataille underwent psychoanalysis and became involved with some of the intellectuals in the Surrealist movement, from whom he learned the concept of incongruous imagery in art. In 1946 he founded the journal Critique, which published the early work of some of his contemporaries in French intellectual life, including Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida.

Bataille believed that in the darkest moments of human existence-in orgiastic sex and terrible death-lay ultimate reality. By observing them and even by experiencing them, actually in sex and vicariously in death, he felt that one could come as close as possible to fully experiencing life in all its dimensions.

Bataille's works include The Naked Beast at Heaven's Gate (1956), A Tale of Satisfied Desire (1953), Death and Sensuality: A Study of Eroticism and the Taboo (1962), and The Birth of Art: Prehistoric Painting (1955).

Bataille died in Paris on July 8, 1962.

(Bowker Author Biography)

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