Georges Bataille Phenomenology and Phantasmatology [Hardcover]

This book investigates what Bataille, in The Pineal Eye, calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasch? probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasch? concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs low materialism. Phenomenology, Gasch? argues, thus paves the way for a new science of phantasms.

Rodolphe Gasch? is Distinguished Professor and Eugenio Donato Professor of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Stanford recently published hisEurope, or The Infinite Task(2009).The book situates the philosophical significance of Bataille's anthropological reflections within the fourfold made up by the names of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. A splendid introduction to a revolutionary thinker, still not as known in this country as he ought to be, written by a renowned commentator on twentieth-century French thought. An important book!