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Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Bataille's positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward. Included here are Bataille's polemics against Andre Breton; his conception of his own project as a kind of intellectual offal defying both idealism and traditional materialism (and his concomitant theory of a virulent materialism); the positing of the fall of allegory through the death of God and the fall of "man" through the counter-evolution represented by the myth of the pineal eye; the rethinking of Marxism, the revalorization of Sade and Nietzsche; the unrelenting critique of fascism and of reductive Hegelian dialectic. These essays, articles, fragments, and meditations, while often necessarily repugnant, are nevertheless indispensable for an understanding of the future and of the past of current critical theory that is, of a general theory encompassing literature, economics, sociology, and philosophy Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.