On Nietzsche

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Paragon House, 1992 - 199 páginas
"Hailed as "one of France's best minds" by Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille has become one of the most influential thinkers in America. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva all acknowledge their debt to him." "For the first time translated into English, On Nietzsche is the third and last volume of Bataille's crowning achievement, The Atheological Summa, which includes the books Inner Experience and Guilty. Originally published in France in 1945, On Nietzsche comes as close as Bataille could ever come to formulating a system of his own - an "atheology."" "Nietzsche was a major influence on Bataille's life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that led him to abandon Catholicism for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism. In this volume Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought where he left off - with God's death. The heart of this book explores how one can have a spiritual life outside religion." "Throughout, Bataille argues against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche. He writes of Nietzsche's falling out with Richard Wagner and his disgust for German anti-Semitism. He lauds Nietzsche as a prophet foretelling "the crude German fate," and in the appendix Bataille defends himself against Sartre." "On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of the war and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism, skillfully weaving together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and the destruction raging outside. This volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's words: "[Bataille] broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

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Acerca del autor (1992)

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.

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