His writing, which included essays , novels , and poetry , explored such subjects as eroticism , mysticism , surrealism , and transgression. His work would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory , including post-structuralism.
Georges Bataille was the son of Joseph-Aristide Bataille b. Born on 10 September in Billom in the region of Auvergne , his family moved to Reims in , where he was baptized. Although brought up without religious observance, he converted to Catholicism in , and became a devout Catholic for about nine years. He considered entering the priesthood and attended a Catholic seminary briefly. However, he quit, apparently in part in order to pursue an occupation where he could eventually support his mother.
He eventually renounced Christianity in the early s. As a young man, he befriended, and was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist Lev Shestov , who schooled him in the writing of Nietzsche , Dostoevsky , and Plato as well as Shestov's own critique of reason and philosophical systematization. Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille is the author of a large and diverse body of work: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects on the mysticism of economy, poetry , philosophy, the arts and eroticism.
He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some of his publications were banned. His influence is felt most explicitly in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy , but is also significant for the work of Jean Baudrillard , the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan , Julia Kristeva , and recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig.
Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology which included several other renegade surrealists. The group also published an eponymous review of Nietzsche's philosophy which attempted to postulate what Derrida has called an "anti- sovereignty ". Bataille drew from diverse influences and used various modes of discourse to create his work. The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the Sun, the Earth, the testicle.
