Staff Pick
Everything about and behind The Sacred Conspiracy is just so cool that I can barely handle it. Georges Bataille, who obsessed over (and indulged in) all manner of societal taboos and was ;the neurotic philosophical contemporary of French bigwigs like Camus and Sarte, was also known for being a staunch Marxist. He thought that fascism in its many manifestations was a cultural hydra that had to be defeated, but was sure it would continue to win because it excelled in one area Marxism severely lacked: mythology. Bataille got together with a bunch of surrealists and decided the answer to this was to make a secret society centered around the "Headless Man," who, among other things, represented the Nietzschean death of God. They literally wanted to sanctify the society by sacrificing one of the members, only to fail when some volunteered to be the martyr but none were willing to be the executioner. Because it was a secret society, most of this was kept hidden until a whole bunch of documents were found a few years ago. The Sacred Conspiracy collects all of these newly translated gems alongside Bataille's more public efforts in his founding of the College of Sociology, which sought to explore the sacred in a more academic setting. The point is that Bataille and his cohort dreamed big, and the result is absolutely WILD. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Georges Bataille's secret society, long the stuff of legend, is now revealed in its texts, meditations, rules and prohibitions
This book recounts what must be one of the most unusual intellectual journeys of modern times, in which the influential philosopher, cultural theorist and occasional pornographer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), having spent the early 1930s in far-left groups opposing the rise of fascism, abandoned that approach in order to transfer the struggle onto "the mythological plane."
In 1937, Bataille founded two groups in order to explore the combinations of power and the "sacred" at work in society. The first group, the College of Sociology, gave lectures that were intended to reveal the hidden undercurrents within a society on the verge of catastrophe. The second group was Ac phale, a genuine secret society and anti-religion whose emblem was a headless figure that, in part, represented the death of God. Until the discovery a few years ago of the group's internal papers (which include theoretical texts, meditations, minutes of meetings, rules and prohibitions and even a membership list), almost nothing was known of its activities.
This book is the first to collect a representative selection of the writings of Bataille, and of those close to him, in the years leading up to World War II. The texts published here comprise lectures given to the College of Sociology by Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris, essays from the Ac phale journal and a large cache of the internal papers from the secret society. A desperate narrative unfolds, wherein Bataille risked all in a wholly unreasonable quest--with a few fellow travelers, he undertook what he later described as a "journey out of this world."