Hailed by Martin Heidegger as "one of France's best minds," Georges
Bataille has become increasingly recognized and respected in the realm
of academic and popular intellectual thought. Although Bataille died in
1962, interest in his life and writings have never been as strong as
they are today--Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva have all
acknowledged their debt to him.
In his book, On Nietzsche, as translated by Bruce Boone, Bataille
comes as close as he would ever come to formulating his own unique
system of philosophy. One could say that reading Nietzsche was something
of a revelation to Bataille, and profoundly affected his life. In 1915,
in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the
Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that
lead him to abandon traditional religion for an idiosyncratic form of
godless mysticism.
In this volume, Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming
Nietzsche's thought where he left off--with God's death. At the heart of
this work is Bataille's exploration of how one can have a spiritual life
outside religion. On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that
brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms,
poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of World War
II and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving
breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism.
He skillfully weaves together his own internal experience of anguish
with the war and destruction raging outside with arguments against
fascist interpretations of Nietzsche and praise for the philosopher as a
prophet foretelling "the crude German fate."
With an introduction, "Furiously Nietzschean," by Sylvere Lotringer, an
Appendix in which Bataille defends himself against Sartre, and an Index,
this volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's assertion that Bataille, "broke
with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before."
