A searing personal record of spiritual and
communal crisis, wherein the death of god announces the
beginning of friendship. Guilty is a
searing personal record of spiritual and communal
crisis, wherein the death of god announces the beginning
of friendship. It takes the form of a diary, recording
the earliest days of World War II and the Nazi
occupation of France, but this is no ordinary day book:
it records the author’s journey through a war-torn world
without transcendence. Bataille’s spiritual journey is
also an intellectual one, a trip with Hegel,
Kierkegaard, Blake, Baudelaire, and Nietzsche as his
companions. And it is a school of the flesh wherein
eroticism and mysticism are fused in a passionate search
for pure immanence. Georges Bataille said of his work:
“I teach the art of turning horror into delight.” This
new translation of Guilty is the first to
include the full text from Bataille’s Oeuvres
Complètes. The text includes Bataille’s
notes and drafts, which permit the reader to trace the
development of the book from diary to draft to published
text, as well as annotations of Bataille’s source
materials. An extensive and incisive introductory essay
by Stuart Kendall situates the work historically,
biographically, and philosophically. Guilty is
Bataille’s most demanding, intricate, and multilayered
work, but it is also his most personal and moving
one. “This important new edition and translation of
French philosopher and poet Georges Bataille’s wartime
diary, first published in 1944, stands as a crucial
record of the intimate thoughts and imagery that would
become the ground for his later, and better known, works
on eroticism and mysticism … Highly recommended.” —
CHOICE
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