Georges Bataille (September 16, 1897 - July 9, 1962) was a French writer. First he was tempted by priesthood and went to a Catholic seminary but lost his faith in 1922. He then worked as a librarian, thus keeping his freedom not to have his thinking as his work.
Founder of several journals and groups of writers, Bataille is the author of an oeuvre both abundant and diverse: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, in passing of poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism...). He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some publications were banned. He was relatively ignored in his lifetime, but has had considerable influence after his death on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers and Jacques Derrida, all of whom were affiliated with the Tel Quel journal.
Bataille had an amazing interdisciplinary talent -- he drew from diverse influences and used diverse modes of discourse to create his work. His novel The Story of the Eye, for example, published under the pseudonym Lord Auch (literally, Lord "to the shithouse" -- "auch" being slang for telling somebody off by sending them to the toilet), is pure pornography, and yet it has the philosophical and emotional depth of a great novel. The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle.
