Author: Georges Bataille

Bataille spent most of his working life as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale while producing explicit fiction, economics and theology that philosophers could not comfortably file. The Accursed Share argues that an economy's real difficulty is not scarcity but surplus, and that every society has to find a way of squandering what it cannot use, through festival, luxury, sacrifice or war. Blue of Noon is a novel of political and sexual disintegration set just before the Spanish civil war. He founded secret societies, edited journals, and left marks on Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. Those novels appeared pseudonymously while he lived.