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Excessive Narratives: Georges Bataille, Self-Sacrifice & The Communal Language of the Yucatec Maya This essay is based on Georges Bataille's 1930s cultural theory of 'general economy' which presented modern living as problematic for societies that attempt to survive as a construct of multiple 'sovereign selves' expending themselves as useful in an overarching edict of economy (Bataille, 1949). However, the descendents of Late Formative Mayan culture (300BC-100AD) live according to 'other' narratives recognizing that a more 'useful' objective loss of self is to be found in the unconscious revelations of language and ritual performance. Self-sacrifice is beneficial to cross-communal relations when the sovereign self released in memorial moments facilitates a better understanding of our place in larger world and cosmic orders (Heyden 1981, Joyce, 2003).U Chan Tsola'ni Ek Balam(The Short Story of The Black Cat)Written from travel experiences in Southeast Mexico, this humorous Mexican 'memory play' explores language alterity and the roles nature and myth play in understanding the mis-understandings of the 'indigenous Maya'. The story is of a respected academic who travels to Mexico in search of the Cult of the Black Cat. Told in English, Yucatec Mayan and poor Spanish, the play is structured according to the everyday language of the Yucatec Maya where performing a triumvirate of 'teller, respondent and audience' allows physiocratic meanings to appear through acts of 'inactive witnessing'.Robert John Brocklehurst (BA Hons, Fine Art, Winchester School of Art; PGD in Video Production, Bournemouth University; MA in Cultural Memory, University of London) Bob Brocklehurst is a lecturer in Technical Theatre. He is currently conducting research at the University ofManchester, focussing on the relation between visual language and communal memory within Yucatec Mayan communities, Central Yucatan, Mexico. He has also worked as both a visiting lecturer and filmmaker in California, Bosnia Herzegovina and Ghana, West Africa. ... Read more

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Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille's ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world.

For much of the post-war period, Bataille was dismissed as an oddball.However, his influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood. Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient.

This book demonstrates why Bataille should be regarded as a significant figure.It offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging and utterly unique thinker.

The book will be of interest to students of cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and French studies.

Customer Reviews (1)

Important neglected topic well configured
Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille And Pierre Klossowski in the Latin America Erotic Novel by Juan Carlos Ubilluz (The Bucknell Studies in Latin American Literature and Theory: Bucknell University Press) rather than a gross exaggeration or a rash generalization, it would be simply an understatement to say that a large part of Latin American erotic literature is deeply rooted in mysticism. One needs no more than a superficial glance at the region's fiction to apprehend that erotic mysticism is a literary tremor that inhabits its different aesthetic trends. This may be perceived either in the metaphysical neobaroque Jose Lezama Lima of Paradiso or the Spencerian primitivist Alejo Carpentier of Los pasos perdidos [The Lost Steps] (1953), in the surrealist-existentialist Julio Cortázar of Rayuela [Hopscotch] (1963) or in the neo-Parnassian Mario Vargas Llosa of Elogio de la madrastra [In Praise of the Stepmother] (1988), in the avant-garde neobaroque Severo Sarduy of Cobra (1972) or in the Musilian classicist Juan Garcia Ponce of La cabana [The Cabin] (1969), in the experimental Carlos Fuentes of Aura (1962) or the cold Kafkaesque detachment of Virgilio Piñera's La came de Rene [Rene's Flesh] (1952), and in the rupturist écriture feminine of Alejandra Pizarnic's La condesa sangrienta [The Bloody Countess] (1971) or in the surrealist Octavio Paz of Piedra del sol [Sunstone] (1957) As the reader proceeds to complete the list on his/her own, he/she will inevitably wonder: How can this be so? How can such different writers equally choose to imbue their erotic writing with mysticism? The answer to these questions may be found in their inversion. How can this not be so? How can the atheist or agnostic writers raised in the strong Catholic tradition of an incompletely modern continent not channel the remnants of their religious spirit toward erotic literature?
Let us elaborate a bit on these rhetorical questions. Building on Cassirer's insights, David Harvey observes that the project of mo¬dernity (as conceived in the Enlightenment era) was eminently a "secular movement" that "embraced the idea of progress" while actively seeking "the demystification and desacralization of knowl¬edge and social organization in order to liberate human beings from their chains" (1990, 12). Whether one describes Latin America's modernity as imperfect, defective, incomplete, uneven, peripheral, or merely idiosyncratic, it is clearly the case it has not yet taken its secular aspirations as far as to demystify and desacralize the synch¬retic Catholicism that has variously shaped the region's social orga¬nization. Raised in a strong religious environment, the Latin American writer came to question at some point of his/her life the orthodoxy of his/her religious faith. It would be somewhat naive, however, to believe that the assumption of metaphysical doubt or unbelief could have simply extinguished the religious fervor that came with his/her strong Catholic socialization. In my view, this fervor pervaded his/her mature existence as an elated extra-rationalist manner of looking at the world--in short, as a symptom that clings to modernity's secularized rationalism. It is indeed hard, if not impossible, to detail the different infiltrations of this religious drive into the existence of different writers. To briefly advance a few bold examples, in the personal arena, this drive metamorphosed into a heightened devotion to romantic love and sexuality (or even to the brothel, in the case of male authors), and in the political arena, it evolved into a theological embrace of Marxism or the mystification of Che Guevara and Eva Perón. Coming now to the field of literature, it pushed the limits of literary realism toward the Mayan and Incan weltanschauungen of Miguel Angel Asturias and Jose Maria Arguedas, the marvelous American real ("lo real maravilloso americano") of Alejo Carpentier, and the magical realism ("realismo mágico") of Juan Rulfo and Gabriel Garcia Márquez. And remaining within literature so as to return finally to the object of our concern, this impulse toward the sacred found a discursive outlet in erotic fiction as a mystification of the sexual act and writing itself.
Now, unbeknownst to them, many Latin American authors echo Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in their complex turning away from religious tradition. The former as an adolescent, the latter as an adult, Bataille and Klossowski entered the Catholic seminary only to eventually question their faith. Just like their Latin American counterparts, they did not turn their open defiance of church and God into an embrace of a rational modernity; instead, they transposed their religious spirit onto a vital, intellectual, and literary quest for an absent sacred. During the interwar period, for example, this quest materialized as an attempt to revive the sacred in modernity through the creation of Acéphale (a secret and ritualistic pagan society) and the foundation of the College de Sociologie (a community of knowledge dedicated to the study of past and present manifestations of the sacred). But more importantly for thefocus of this study, their rejection of Catholicism led them to search for the sacred in eroticism and to ultimately become perhaps the most important fiction writers and theorists of eroticism in interwar and postwar Europe.
Since Bataille and Klossowski share with many Latin American authors the double defiance of modernity and religious tradition along with the maintenance of a quasi-religious desire for an inti¬mate relation to the world, it is not surprising that the erotic theories and novels of the former two have had a considerable impact on the erotic writing of so many among the latter. What calls our attention instead is that there is almost nothing written on the subject. Although few in number, there are some articles along with book chapters written on the influence of Bataille or Klossowski on a particular Latin American author. But regarding a comprehensive study of this intercontinental influence, there is only Graciela Gliemmo's insightful twelve-page article "La inscripción de una escritura: Georges Bataille en America Latina" [The inscription of a writing: Georges Bataille in Latin America] (1993). Why, one must ask, have critics in the English- and Spanish-speaking academia neglected this important chapter in the history of Latin American literature?
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Text in French & English ... Read more