GUILTY . Georges Bataille “Bataille’s Guilty is a forceful work, a meditation in apho- Fisms on the problem of the writer face to face with the ne- cessity of a violent experience—sexuality and the ecstasy of the secular sacred—that by its nature defies the very lan- guage that must convey it. For language inevitably entails a constructive project—production and dignified labor_ while the experience is the downfall of usefulness, the point at which thought, at its most advanced stage, grovels.” —Alllan Stock! “This is Bataille at his most fluently meditative and infor- mal-a style that merges with translator Bruce Boone’s par- ticular form of intim: ate consciousness-scratching. In Guilty, Bataille offers up a wartime melodrama of moods and excesses: haphazard, unnecessary, and, more often than not, laceratingly insightful.” —Charles Bernstein “The publication of Guilty makes available at last, and in a Wanslation that brilliantly recreates the original, perhaps the most exciting and important book of the iconoclasne wizard of modern French letters.” —Harry Mathews Guilty is the first English translation of Le Coupable by French writer Georges Bataille. The book combines the Benres of fiction, memoir, and meditation in a philosophical interrogation of man’s entrapment within desire. Guilty is Pethaps the most poetic part of Bataille’s three volume, La Somme athéologique, his major philosophical meditation Which, since the publication of the frst volume in 1945, has had a formative effect on contemporary critical thinking throughout Europe and the United States. In Guilty Bataille transforms philosophy: language is re- on lyricism; theories are grounded completely in his the structure of the work is changing. The entire that sense, poetic. ‘Through this form of poetics, Bataille hoped to restore to ‘ts non-usefal side; as he said in one of his diary entries, to “make language swim... energetic and continuously work becomes non-categoric and, in Baraille was born in Billom, France ist 1897. At the age of 47, aftec troubled school years, he converted to Cathole ism. hat same year he decided that “his business in this~ Guilty