The novels of yesteryear often have a thin tone to them that reminds us of the archaic oral form, the tale a storyteller recounted at length as he sat by the fire. [They] have the austere but graceful stiffness of naive songs that had, once upon a time, the virtue of explaining nothing.
The postwar essays of Georges Bataille—a contemporary of Sartre’s and a predecessor to Camus and Barthes—are now available in English in two volumes (with a third forthcoming), published by Seagull Books. The distance Bataille covers in these short excursions is staggering: from the possibility of a world government to the nature of ugliness; from the semiotics of gift-giving to the psychopathology of colonialism; from the violence of Stalingrad to violence in Goya.
Alberto Toscano is an Italian cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator.
Benjamin Noys is a professor of critical theory at the University of Chichester.
Chris Turner has translated numerous books from French, including works by Jean-Paul Sartre, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, André Gorz, Yves Bonnefoy and Pascal Quignard.
Poster Sejuti Malakar and DN