Georges Bataille: An Introduction to The Radical Philosopher’s Life & Thought Through Film and eTexts — openculture.com

Charles Baudelaire’s decadent visions pushed the Victorian cult of beauty toward modernism, Henry Miller’s lurid epics pushed a then staid modernism toward anarchic beat writing, and Georges Bataille and the surrealists of his arts journal Documents gave us much of the culture we have today, call it what you will if postmodern is too passé. Obsessed with torture, pornography, horror, and bodily fluids, Bataille “wanted to bring art down to the base level of other physical phenomena,” says surrealist scholar Dawn Ades. Where other transgressive figures of the past have mostly been tamed, Bataille, I submit, is still quite dangerous. The Bataille quote that opens the film above, A perte de vue (“As far as the eye can see”), won’t go down easily with almost anyone: “The world,” reads narrator Jean-Claude Dauphin, “is only inhabitable on the condition that nothing in it is respected.” This, the documentary suggests, is Bataille’s philosophy, one he defines as “a need for sensibility to call up disturbance.”

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