He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.
Georges Bataille was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, in central France. On the eve of World War I, Bataille converted to Catholicism. In 1916-17 he served in the army, but was discharged because of tuberculosis. Ill health troubled Bataille all his life, and he suffered from periods of depression. He joined the seminary at Saint-Fleur with the intention of becoming a priest. He spent a period with the Benedictine congregation at Quarr, on the Isle of Wright. A few years later Bataille experienced a loss of faith. From 1918 to 1922 he studied at the École des Chartres in Paris. His thesis dealt with thirteenth century verse. In 1922 he received a fellowship at the School of Advanced Hispanic Studies in Madrid.
In the 1920s Bataille was involved with the Surrealist movement, but he called himself the 'enemy from within'. He was officially excommunicated from its inner circles by André Breton, who accused him of splintering the movement. In the same decade Bataille started to write after a liberating period of psychoanalysis. He founded and edited many journals that revealed his interests in sociology, religion, and literature. Bataille was the first to publish such thinkers as Barthes, Foucault and Derrida. He edited Documents (1929-31), and in 1935 he cofounded with André Breton the anti-Fascist group Contre-Attaque. To explore the manifestation of the sacred in society he cofounded in 1939 with Michel Leiris and Roger Caillois the short-lived Collège de Sociologie. It was closely associated with a secret society which published the Acéphale review.
Between the years 1922 and 1944 Bataille was a librarian and a deputy keeper at Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. In the evenings Bataille changed his role and became known as a regular visitor of bordellos. This habit caused him troubles at work. He resigned in 1944 because of tuberculosis, two years earlier he had moved to Vézelay. Bataille worked as a librarian in Carpentras in Provence (1949-51), and from 1951 in Orléans. In 1961 Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Juan Miro arranged an auction of paintings to help him in financial difficulties, which had troubled him since the 1940s. Bataille died in Paris on July 8, 1962. The Tears of Eros (1961) was Bataille's final book, an excursion in the history of eroticism and violence.
Histoire de l'oeil (1928, The Story of the Eye), Le Bleu du ciel (1945, Blue of Noon), and L'abbé C (1950, The Abbot C.) are among Bataille's best-known glorifications of eroticism. He felt that sexual union causes a momentary indistinguishability between otherwise distinct objects. The secret of eroticism opened visions into unknowable continuity of being, the death. Poetry has similar dimensions when it dissolves the reader 'into the strange'. Pornography was for Bataille the vehicle for his own surrealist experiments and memory - this also partly explains complex associations of eggs and eyes.
Friedrich Nietzsche's work influenced Bataille deeply, and such figures as Sade and Gilles de Rais. The latter was a 15th-century serial killer whose victims were young children. Bataille's views about social organization were influenced by anthropologist Marcel Mauss' The Gift. In La part maudite (1949) he dealt with the phenomenon of waste in nature and society. Although Bataille could write clearly he was many times content to present his ideas in a puzzling way.
source: www.kirjasto.sci.fi