Bio: (1897-1962) French writer and philosopher. Georges Bataille wrote novels, poems, and essays. He was passionate about eroticism, myth, sacrifice, profanity, and social transgression. He studied paleography and librarianship in Paris and then worked at the National Library of France in Paris. Bataille founded the Collège de sociologie (College of Sociology) with several colleagues, with the aim of departing from Durkheim's positivism, but this institution functioned for only a few years. Bataille was close to Surrealism, Marxism, and Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy. He studied politics, philosophy, religion, numismatics, and art. He contributed to sociology and literary criticism.

Bataille's greatest contribution to sociology and criminology is his study of the transgression of social taboos and norms in the conditions of rationalized social control of late capitalism. Those who break the rules feel fear but are also full of fascination at the same time, and the enthusiasm and fear they feel during that act stems from aggression and eroticism.

Main works

L'histoire de l'oeil ma mère (1928);

Madame Edwarda (1941); 

L’Expérience intérieure (1943);  

Le Coupable (1944);

Sur Nietzsche (1945); 

Le Bleu du cie (1957a);  

La Littérature et le mal (1957b);  

L’Ėrotisme (1957c);

Les Larmes d’Eros (1961).

Works translated into English:

Story of the Eye (1987, in French 1928);

My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man (1989, in French 1941);

The Tears of Eros (1989, in French 1961);

The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism (2006);

Guilty  (2011, in French 1944);

Blue of Noon, (2012, in French 1957a);

Literature and Evil (2012, in French 1957b);  

Inner Experience  (2014, in French 1943);

Erotism: Death and Sensuality (1986, in French 1957c);

On Nietzsche (2016, In French 1945).