Research Seminar: Tracing Europe through the work of Georges Bataille: from fiction to reality

Department of French and Francophone Studies

Research Seminar Series 2015-2016

Tracing Europe through the work of Georges Bataille: from fiction to reality 

Claire Lozier (University of Leeds)

All Welcome

Extract:
This paper looks at the ways in which Europe is represented and imagined in the work of French writer and philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962). A key thinker of his time, Bataille produced in his fictional and theoretical oeuvre a critical discourse that documents and analyses the events that shaped contemporary Europe. In difference from most of his contemporaries, Bataille’s work, which ranges from erotic novellas and art books to essays in economics and politics, offers a kaleidoscopic and interdisciplinary insight into the construction of European cultural identity. In this paper, I focus on his short prewar novel The Blue of Noon – written in 1935 but only published in 1957, the year of the signature of the Treaty of Rome – and on his 1949 seminal essay of general economy, The Accursed Share, whose last chapter discusses the significance of the newly implemented 1948 Marshall Plan and its consequences for the rebuilding of post-war Europe in a precarious new geopolitical order. First, I examine the representation of pre-Second World War Europe laid out in The Blue of Noon, where the characters’ journey through decadent Inter-war London and Paris, early Civil War Spain and rising Fascistic Germany causes eroticism to collide with politics calling for another way of ‘vivre ensemble’. Then, I consider the question of expenditure and prodigality that Bataille advocates in The Accursed Share in order to assess the alternative Europe he imagines. Finally, I trace the evolution of Bataille’s vision of Europe from fiction to reality through reading the pre-war fiction against the post-war essay in order to highlight his understanding of ‘life’ as politics.