Bataille, Georges (1897—1962) French religious historian, philosopher and novelist. For most of his professional life he worked as a librarian, which not only gave him access to vast collections of arcane texts and items but also plenty of free time to trawl through them, as his various works amply evidence. Contradicting the stereotypical image of the librarian as an anti-social type who prefers books to people, Bataille was a great organizer: he was one of the founding members of the Collège de Sociologie (along with Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris) and its journal Documents; he was co-founder of the journal Acéphale and its associated secret society; and he was the founding editor of Critique. He also was affiliated with the Surrealism and helped establish the off-shoot anti-fascist group Contre-Attaque. Born in Billom in the Auvergne district of France, Bataille initially wanted to be a priest, but abandoned these plans in his late teens and instead studied medieval history, particularly religious history, focusing on working with books and manuscripts. His first job was at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, where he remained for over twenty years. Then following a seven-month spell of medical leave, convalescing with tuberculosis, he worked at libraries in Carpentras and Orleans. Fittingly, it was to Bataille that the German Jewish writer and philosopher Benjamin, Walter entrusted his manuscripts when he fled Paris in 1940 after the German Army occupied the city. Bataille’s name is inexorably tied to the concept of transgression. His entire career can be seen as an investigation into both the actual ontology of transgression and the anthropology of its apparent necessity. For Bataille transgression is inherent in any and every system, no matter how rigorously it seems to be excluded. His exploration of transgression takes two main forms. First, and probably best known, is his fiction---part essay, part treatise; his erotic novels Histoire de l’oeil (1928), translated as Story of the Eye (1967), and Madame Edwarda (1941) have been admired in print by Yukio Mishima, Sontag, Susan and Barthes, Roland and are a staple part of any course on experimental fiction (that André Breton attacked him for being an ‘excremental’ writer hasn’t hurt his reputation in this respect). Second is his philosophical and historical accounts of the centrality of transgression to social life, the best known work being La Part maudite (1949), translated as The Accursed Share (1988). Bataille’s theory of transgression is this: every ‘restricted economy’, his word for any putatively closed system or self-contained idea or concept, always produces more than it can contain and is fractured by this unacknowledged excess. Thus a notion like chastity only has meaning insofar as it is acknowledged that it is the negative of carnality; the fact that being chaste means choosing not to have sex means that the idea of actually having sex is never far from the surface. By the same token, the pleasure of transgression depends upon such restrictions being imposed in the first place (this is what theorists like Foucault, Michel and Deleuze, Gilles mean when they say power is productive). Outside of philosophy, Bataille’s most enduring influence has been in the field of art history, particularly the group surrounding the journal October which is interested primarily in modern and contemporary art. Further Reading: F. Botting and S. Wilson Bataille (2001). M. Surya Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre (1992), translated as Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (2002).