Although often considered an esoteric figure occupying the dark fringes of twentieth-century thought, Georges Bataille was a pivotal precursor to a generation of poststructuralist and postmodern thinkers--including Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lyotard. The Sunday of the Negative provides the most extensive English-language investigation of Bataille's critical treatment of the thought of Hegel, focusing on the notions of subjectivity, desire, self-consciousness, knowledge, and the experience of the divine. The book spans all of Bataille's writings, patiently navigating even the...

The concept of fetishism has long been a window through which philosophers, psychoanalysts and cultural anthropologists have looked in order to critically examine the nature of beliefs, sexual interests and material values, and it remains today a vital interpretive paradigm. The enduring interest in fetishism gives testimony to the fact that its status and significance have yet to be fully resolved. In the attempt to further clarify this ambiguous and often mystifying phenomenon, the contributors to Everyday Extraordinary: Encountering Fetishism with Marx, Freud and Lacan have taken a fresh...

'I sincerely believe that at the origin of teaching such as this we must always locate a fantasy'. This provoking remark was the starting point of the four lecture courses Roland Barthes taught as professor of literary semiology at the College de France. In these last years of his life, Barthes developed a perverse reading theory in which the demonic stupidity of the fantasy becomes an active force in the creation of new ways of thinking and feeling. The perverse art of reading offers the first extensive monograph on these lecture courses. The first part examines the psychoanalytical and...