“... But this materialism should not be confused with empiricism. On the contrary, it’s what Georges Bataille, in his ‘Critical Dictionary’, calls ‘base materialism’. For Bataille, the positivist materialism of science or the dialectical materialism of Marxism are nothing more than Christianity in ...”

“... particularly eccentric outpost, Thomas Hirschhorn’s plywood and packing tape temple in honour of Georges Bataille, was erected in the middle of a low-income housing project.Documenta, whose original mission had been to celebrate Germany’s new postwar identity and the transnational role of Kassel as a centre of culture, has now become an amazingly ...”

“... diabolical and the exotic; excrement; old age; women; Africans; disease; lesbians; Jews; and for Georges Bataille the big toe and the putrefaction of flowers, which he manages to bind to age and misogyny: ‘flowers don’t age honestly like leaves, which lose none of their beauty even after they are dead; flowers wither like simpering, overly made-up ...”

“... real is – what it’s made of. In the Critical Dictionary (to which Leiris also contributed), Georges Bataille (whose short novel Story of the Eye contains the most stunning matador-goring episode in all literature – forget Hemingway) addresses the idea of ‘formlessness’: they imagine a philosophy and aesthetics, or counter-aesthetics, in which ...”

“... great and mordant Minima Moralia), Christopher Gray’s Leaving the 20th Century, Abiezer Coppe, Georges Bataille. Oddly, the name William Blake never passes the lips(tick) of this book. Marcus uses as well the reminiscences and recapitulations of various people who were swept up in the storms raised by these people: for example, Henri Lefebvre, Michele ...”

“... that had gathered around Isou, threatened to burn down the Gallimard offices. Described by Georges Bataille as ‘touching, frightful, stupid, bungled, ridiculous and inspired’, it charts a life very close to Isou’s own. Hussey uses it as the primary source for the first half of his biography, alongside an interview he conducted with Isou in ...”

“... Kristeva, Barthes, Sollers, Pleynet, Lyotard, Sartre, Fanon, Beauvoir, and the complete works of Georges Bataille. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Bradley, Collingwood, Scheler, Merleau-Ponty … all gone. No more literary criticism, or literary history, or history, or linguistics. And then there were the sets: Hazlitt’s Works, De Quincey’s (the 14-volume ...”

“... new attention to Surrealists who rebelled against their controlling impresario, André Breton: Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris. It has pondered the theory of the sign, foregrounded photography and helped to install Peter Bürger’s 1974 essay ‘Theory of the Avant-Garde’ (translated into English in 1984) as a founding text of ...”

“... of conspicuous depredation which much appealed to youthful hammers of the bourgeois ethos like Georges Bataille and Queneau when they first read about it in the work of Marcel Mauss, for seeming to collide head on with the practices of an acquisitive society. In the potlatch, Kwakiutl notables in the American North-West competed in the public ...”

“... aesthetic form that had erupted intermittently in 20th-century art (here the theoretical guide was Georges Bataille). Already in his 1971 seminar on semiology Barthes had pointed Bois to ‘the historical link between modernism and the awareness that language is a structure of signs’. This link had been forged by two formalists of a very different ...”

“... with them?Pan-Africanists, like the negrophiliac Surrealists and sousréalistes (Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille and the Documents group), deployed Africa against the imperial metropole, but Baker was being put to the opposite use. She was picked as queen of the 1931 Colonial Exhibition, whose display of native peoples made Paris the gateway to ...”

“... hiding in plain sight: ‘I’m always disheartened when a cool French girl enamoured with Georges Bataille recalls Colette as someone whom Nana read sous le bonnet – under the hairdryer. Or when an old actor who once emoted Phèdre natters on about her cats.’‘What is the heart, madame?’ Colette once reported that a woman had asked her ...”

“... at the time by even some of the more severe observers of American activity in Europe. In 1949, Georges Bataille celebrated the Marshall Plan as the greatest example of human generosity since the Native American potlatch. In American policy circles, the words ‘Marshall Plan’ have congealed into a panacea for every problem on earth – and outer ...”

“... in 1934, in an essay published in Documents, the journal of the ‘dissident Surrealists’ around Georges Bataille, Magritte made a statement that also applies to many other works: ‘With few exceptions, it is a question of mises-en-scène, which give the illusion of contact with the real, but merely encounter the void.’ This thought leads to his ...”

“... away and joined the team of Documents, the short-lived dissident Surrealist periodical edited by Georges Bataille. Leiris was both a marginal and a promising figure. Dangerously self-obsessed, fatally inclined to turn his hand to anything that passed for literature – in 1925 he published a volume of verse with illustrations by André Masson – he was ...”