GEORGES BATAILLE - Some would say the French have always had a discerning touch for the sexual as well as the bizarre and Bataille’s THE STORY OF THE EYE, imbued by the excesses of surrealism take sex into another dimension. Not for every palate but adds a fascinating philosophical layer to matters of the flesh. A controversial modern classic.

Synopsis

Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.

It appears here with Susan Sontag’s superb study of pornography as art, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, and Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’.

Reviews

‘His black masterpiece … #a# brilliant, exquisitely fetishistic tale of sexual agitation’ New Statesman

About the Author

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) wrote an extraordinary mixture of poetry, philosophy, fantasy and history. His influence on writers as various as Sartre, Foucault, Barthes and Lacan is incalculable. His major works (all published as Modern Classics) are the novels The Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon and the essay collection Eroticism. More books by this author Author 'Like for Like' recommendation