Guilty (SUNY series in Contemporary French Thought)

A searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship.

Guilty is a searing personal record of spiritual and communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning of friendship. It takes the form of a diary, recording the earliest days of World War II and the Nazi occupation of France, but this is no ordinary day book: it records the author s journey through a war-torn world without transcendence. Bataille s spiritual journey is also an intellectual one, a trip with Hegel, Kierkegaard, Blake, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche as his companions. And it is a school of the flesh wherein eroticism and mysticism are fused in a passionate search for pure immanence. Georges Bataille said of his work: I teach the art of turning horror into delight. This new translation of Guilty is the first to include the full text from Bataille s Oeuvres Compl tes. The text includes Bataille s notes and drafts, which permit the reader to trace the development of the book from diary to draft to published text, as well as annotations of Bataille s source materials. An extensive and incisive introductory essay by Stuart Kendall situates the work historically, biographically, and philosophically. Guilty is Bataille s most demanding, intricate, and multilayered work, but it is also his most personal and moving one.

This important new edition and translation of French philosopher and poet Georges Bataille s wartime diary, first published in 1944, stands as a crucial record of the intimate thoughts and imagery that would become the ground for his later, and better known, works on eroticism and mysticism Highly recommended. CHOICE