Search Results

Advanced Search

31 to 38 of 38 results

Sort by:

Filter by:

Contributors

Article Types

Authors

She Who Can Do No Wrong

Jenny Turner, 6 August 1992

Curriculum Vitae 
by Muriel Spark.
Constable, 213 pp., £14.95, July 1992, 0 09 469650 0
Show More
Show More
... of Catholic kitsch and cruelty which included such apostate writers as Antonin Artaud and Georges Bataille, whose blasphemy would have been pointless had they not had the body of Catholic ritual there to egg them on. Catholicism, unlike Protestantism, is a religious tradition that is rich in irony. It’s hardly surprising then that after she had ...

Against Passion

James Meek: Passionate Politics, 30 November 2017

The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics 
by Mark Lilla.
Harper, 160 pp., £19, August 2017, 978 0 06 269743 1
Show More
The Shipwrecked Mind: On Political Reaction 
by Mark Lilla.
NYRB, 166 pp., £9.99, September 2016, 978 1 59017 902 4
Show More
Show More
... to Kojève and his initiates was that they were engaged in ‘passionate thinking’. Lilla quotes Georges Bataille as saying that each encounter with Kojève left him ‘broken, crushed, killed ten times over: suffocated and nailed down’. Bataille felt it necessary to validate an intellectual experience by ...

The Right Kind of Pain

Mark Greif: The Velvet Underground, 22 March 2007

The Velvet Underground 
by Richard Witts.
Equinox, 171 pp., £10.99, September 2006, 9781904768272
Show More
Show More
... similar to those to be had from ‘underground’ books in the hip-Gothic tradition of Sade, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr and whoever serves as a present-day inheritor (Chuck Palahniuk?). Reed rewrote these books, in essence, as songs. The most famous literal example is ‘Venus in Furs’, a musical setting of a book ...

The Things We Throw Away

Andrew O’Hagan: The Garbage of England, 24 May 2007

... when it comes to it, looking after the bins. It’s how we used to think. “Sovereignty,” Georges Bataille wrote, “is the freedom to waste.” At festivals, at Christmas, and every day, we waste, we give things away, that is what seemed normal to us.’ The area around the waterway in Bristol has been reinvented. The architects have had a field ...

Fumbling for the Towel

Christopher Prendergast: Maigret’s elevation to the Panthéon, 7 July 2005

Romans: Tome I 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1493 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011674 3
Show More
Romans: Tome II 
by Georges Simenon.
Gallimard, 1736 pp., €60, May 2004, 2 07 011675 1
Show More
Show More
... from public view. Who would have predicted Maigret’s return – or rather that of his creator, Georges Simenon – in the grand Pléiade collection? To be sure, it is Simenon-lite, a two-volume selection of 21 novels. His total output was a prodigious 192 novels as well as 150 novellas and short stories, a figure that puts even Balzac’s demonic ...

The Force of the Anomaly

Perry Anderson: Carlo Ginzburg, 26 April 2012

Threads and Traces: True False Fictive 
by Carlo Ginzburg, translated by Anne Tedeschi and John Tedeschi.
California, 328 pp., £20.95, January 2012, 978 0 520 25961 4
Show More
Show More
... Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique; and the presence of Georges Bataille in the composition and character of Picasso’s Guernica.2 That said, we may still ask how the cascades relate to the broader waters of intellectual history, as it has developed since the 1960s. Here the problem of polythetic classification ...

Union Sucrée

Perry Anderson: The Normalising of France, 23 September 2004

Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires 
by Daniel Lindenberg.
Seuil, 94 pp., €10.50, November 2002, 2 02 055816 5
Show More
Esquisse pour une auto-analyse 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Raisons d'Agir, 142 pp., €12, February 2004, 2 912107 19 9
Show More
La République mondiale des lettres 
by Pascale Casanova.
Seuil, 492 pp., €27.50, March 1999, 2 02 035853 0
Show More
Show More
... the wars with a semi-surrealist tint, in the theories of the sacred proposed by Roger Caillois and Georges Bataille at the Collège de Sociologie. In the late 20th century, this intellectual line has seen yet further avatars in the work of two of the most original thinkers of the left, at odds with every surrounding orthodoxy. In the early 1980s, Régis ...
Adventures on the Freedom Road: The French Intellectuals in the 20th Century 
by Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by Richard Veasey.
Harvill, 434 pp., £20, December 1995, 1 86046 035 6
Show More
The Imaginary Jew 
by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Kevin O’Neill and David Suchoff.
Nebraska, 230 pp., £23.95, August 1994, 0 8032 1987 3
Show More
The Defeat of the Mind 
by Alain Finkielkraut, translated by Judith Friedlander.
Columbia, 165 pp., $15, May 1996, 0 231 08023 9
Show More
Show More
... highly than literature’. Indeed, from Barrès and Péguy to Gide and Malraux, from Breton and Bataille to Camus and Mauriac, the history of French intellectuals is largely a history of literature: the intellectuel is first and foremost a writer, whose status as an intellectual is defined in reference to literature. However, as Lévy’s interview here ...

Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.

Sign up to our newsletter

For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.

Newsletter Preferences