Full name: Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939

Author: Georges Bataille Year: 1985 Rank: Rating: Original Rating: Pop Rating: Genres/categories: Philosophy, Non Fiction, Essays, Art Purchase/reserch links: LibraryThing Goodreads Amazon ISBNs: 9780816612833 0816612838

Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward. This book challenges the notion of a "closed economy" predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth. Similar books: Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille Open Sky by Paul Virilio The Perfect Crime by Jean Baudrillard The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener by Martin Gardner The Temptation to Exist by E. M. Cioran The Heart of Things by A. C. Grayling The Writing of the Disaster by Maurice Blanchot Concepts and Categories by Isaiah Berlin The Defeat of the Mind by Alain Finkielkraut The Open by Giorgio Agamben Illuminations by Walter Benjamin Only the Lover Sings by Josef Pieper Reality Hunger by David Shields A Short History of Decay by E. M. Cioran In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell Logic of Sense by Gilles Deleuze On Seeing and Noticing by Alain de Botton The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus The Plague of Fantasies by Slavoj Zizek Erotism: Death and Sensuality by Georges Bataille