Ebook: The Beast at Heaven's Gate : Georges Bataille and the art of transgression

The essays in this collection were originally given at the international colloquium Cent Ans de Bataille: La Bataille de Cent Ans held at the Fondació Tàpies in Barcelona in September 1998. They are written from a variety of perspectives but are drawn together by the singular aim of addressing and interrogating Georges Bataille as our contemporary whose fascination with the rupture between mythical and experimental forms of discourse defines our own age as much as it did in Bataille’s own time. More precisely, the essays in this collection range over Bataille’s status as a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a philosopher and a prophet of post-modernity with this aim in mind. They not only seek to advance and clarify debate about Bataille’s present status in the post-modern canon but also shed new light on the complex relation between Bataille and the present generation of readers who have come to him through the prism of post-modernist thought. It is of significance for each writer in this collection, most crucially, that the premonition of catastrophe which defined Bataille’s fluid political positions is also located between tragedy and irony. Table of Contents Andrew HUSSEY: The Beast at Heaven’s Gate: Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression Boris BELAY: Le Secret du corps de Madame Edwarda (Bataille de la philosophie à la limite de l’obscène) Martin CROWLEY: L’eschatologie trouée de Ma Mère Lina FRANCO: Deux écrivains face à l’histoire: George Bataille et Elio Vittorini. La hantise du politique Patrick FFRENCH: Dirty Life Paul HEGARTY: As Above, So Below; Informe/Sublime/Abject Andrew HUSSEY: ‘The Slaughterhouse of Love’: The Corpse of ‘Laure’ Ian JAMES: From Recuperation to Simulacrum: Klossowski’s Readings of George Bataille Cathy MACGREGOR: The Eye of the Storm: Female Representation in Bataille’s Madame Edwarda and Histoire de l’oeil John PHILIPS: ‘The Law of the Mother’: Masochism, Fetishism and Subjectivity in George Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil Malcolm POLLARD: The Use-Value of Georges Bataille: Philippe Sollers and the Act of Writing Richard WILLIAMS: Informe and ‘Anti Form’ Notes on Contributors