In this comprehensive and engaging study Georges Bataille s central ideas: the sacred, community and eroticism are explored in detail. Bataille s project to understand social bonds and energies at their most fundamental level and to re-energise society by challenging individualism, is argued to be of continuing relevance to sociological thought. Bataille s infamous College of Sociology is placed in the intellectual context of Durkheimian and Maussian sociology. Social effervescence, gift exchange and the ambivalent and volatile nature of the sacred emerge as the central threads of Bataille...