Biography of Georges Bataille

Surrealism and beyond

10 September 1897 8 July 1962 Georges Bataille was born on 10 September 1897 in Billon, Puy-de-Dome, in Central France. The mother is psychic unstable, the father suffers from degeneration by syphilis and already blind at the time of conception of the child. In 1900 the family Battle moves to Reims. Here the little Georges receives a rigidly Catholic education. At the time of the explosion of world war mother and son escape German domination by abandoning the breadwinner now completely paralyzed that soon dies, dealing his son an unsurpassed sense of guilt. Studies regularly but turning several cities Chartres to Paris to Madrid. Meditate to become a monk. Lose faith because of love come to catastrophe because of his rigorous Catholic. In 1922, after a period of teaching at the University of Madrid, he returned to Paris where he employs in the national library. It is a time of unprecedented intellectual processing for the Parisian intelligentsia. Bataille adheres to the circles in which it is formalizing the surrealist credo, under the aegis of Breton. Married the actress Sylvia Makles which, secondly, you wife of Jacques Lacan. The dispute with Breton and the surrealist movement soon emerged and soon the break is total. A rapprochement with an intellectual of Breton's group occurs at the time of the advent of continental fascism: along with Roger Caillois founded the magazine "Counter-attack", in defence of community values betrayed by real socialism. Esoteric circle is founded in 1936 the Acéphale and his version, the College of Sociology whose exoteric readers are of extraordinary caliber: among them, Pierre Klossovski, Jean-Paul Sartre, Claude Lévy-Strauss, Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno. Ten years later, Bataille is a philosophical and literary absolute guru. It is thanks to her prescient eye that see the light the early work of Barthes, Derrida, Blanchot and Foucault. Tuberculosis that strikes in recent years, albeit treated, causes a weakening of the immune system which leads him to death last July 8, 1962.
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.