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Bataille's early interest in theology led his philosophical works, his fiction and his essays into probing investigations of sex, death, eroticism, base materialism (economy), power and rupture (often involving the potential and radical re-mappings offered by the obscene). His oeuvre over the many years of his career has a remarkable consistency; he had an intimate distrust of rational individualism, preferring the power of trauma, the economies of the sacred and the profane as well as violence to annihilate the individual in a transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Phillipe Sollers, Rosalind Krauss and Jean-Luc Nancy have written enthusiastically about his work.
"The actions of religious sacrifice and of erotic fusion, in which the subject seeks to be 'loosed from its relatedness to the I' and to make room for reestablished 'continuity of Being', are exemplary for him. Bataille, too, pursues the traces of a primordial force that could heal the discontinuity or rift between the rationally disciplined world of work and the outlawed other of reason. He imagines this overpowering return to a lost continuity as the eruption of elements opposed to reason, as a breathtaking act of self-de-limiting. In this process of dissolution, the monadically closed-off subjectivity of self-assertive and mutually objectifying individual is dispossessed and cast down into the abyss.
(Jürgen Habermas in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 1987).
The writings of Bataille are difficult to classify and are often overlooked for their complexity. He corresponds to the model neither of the solitary Romantic visionary nor the father-founder of a tradition of thought like Freud or Marx. The general points of Bataille's interest upon which he sought the underlying mechanisms of a sacrificial economy — unto meaning — are: experience, communication and community, eroticism, negativity, economy, gift and sacrifice, consumption, expenditure and sovereignity. These he addressed over his career with such a consistency that some have regarded the various works as one long text, which is not to say that Bataille was attempting to engender a new discursive practice. Evoking something irreducible to sense or meaning, Bataille's writing refuses conventions of form and the accompanying securities of discourse. Central to his work is the refusal to allow totality sovereign power over the indestructible, yet repressed, bond between desire and "its" dissatisfaction. To attempt to write on Bataille threatens to give form to his work, arresting the movement of desire in the appropriation of his text. Bataille's writing must exceed commentary, or as Jean-Luc Nancy puts it:.
"What matters, what thinks (at the very limit of thought if necessary) is what does not lend itself wholly to a univocal meaning and throws it off balance. Bataille never stops exposing this. Alongside all the themes he deals with, through all the questions and debates, 'Bataille' is nothing but a protest against the signification of his own discourse. If he is to be read, if reading rebels straight away against the commentary which it is, and against the understanding which it ought to be, we have to read in every line the work of the play of writing against meaning."
(Jean-Luc Nancy, Excription, 1991, 62).
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