L'Histoire-Bataille: L'écriture de l'histoire dans l'œuvre de Georges Bataille by Laurent Ferri, Christophe Gauthier

Abstract

244 Reviews merits continued attention. His studywill be of interestnot only to Mauriac special ists,but toall thosewho work on the relationship between intellectuals and themedia. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER PAUL COOKE L'Histoire-Bataille: l'eriture de l'histoire dans l'ceuvre de Georges Bataille. Ed. by LAURENT FERRI and CHRISTOPHE GAUTHIER. (Etudes et Rencontres de I'Ecole des Chartes, i8) Paris: Ecole des Chartes. 2oo6. I50 pp. f25. ISBN 978-2 90079I-78-3. Georges Bataille is best known to contemporary readers as a proponent of waste, prodigality, and transgression. But thewriter was also an illustrious if wayward son of theprestigious Ecole des Chartes, entrusted since its foundation in I821 with the task of training the archivists, librarians, and curators responsible forpreserving France's national heritage. This background was not unimportant: Bataille's firstpublications were in the fieldof numismatics, and his subsequent career was spent as an archivist at theBibliotheque nationale, inCarpentras, and inOrleans, and hewas due to return to theBN in I962 when death intervened. This apparent double lifehas long been an object ofwry, sometimes dismissive comment on the part of critics keen to point to the discrepancy between the ordinariness of Bataille's day job and the profligacy of his philosophical and literarywork, as though the one was destined by definition to discredit theother. Forty years after thewriter's death, as this volume records, a conference was held at theEcole des Chartes with the purpose of re-examining the relationship be tweenBataille's work and his historical and historiographical training.The aspects of Bataille's thinking on history covered here are several: the conception of art history at stake in his involvement with the art journal Documents (Christophe Gauthier); thehistorically urgent ifshort-lived political alliance with Andre Breton in 1935-36 that gave rise to the anti-Fascist (not to say: counter-Fascist) movement Contre attaque (Christophe Halsberghe); the treatment of the archival record inBataille's I959 edition of Le Proces de Gilles de Rais (Pierre Savy and Olivier Guyotjeannin); his fascinated account of theLascaux cave paintings (Jean-Claude Monod); the pre occupation with discontinuity and interruption at thecore ofhis own narrative fiction (Dominique Rabate); and the relationship with historiographical questions apparent inBataille's long-standing interest inuniversal history (Laurent Dubreuil). Through out, theemphasis fallsnot only on theuses towhich Bataille put his academic training, but also theway inwhich its legacywas displaced and refashioned in theprocess; and what emerges as a result is a clearer sense that,however much Bataille's thoughtwas drawn to the threator promise of the end of history, his work nevertheless remained embedded incontemporary historiographical debates. This is confirmed by the undoubted highlight of the book, which consists of Bataille's own notes, from the late 1950s, for a universal history, one of thework ing titles forwhich was: 'La Bouteille a lamer ou l'histoire universelle des origines a la veille d'un desastre 6ventuel'. The problems raised in thedraft are not inconsider able: theanthropo- and androcentric legacy ofKoj&ve informingBataille's thinkingof animality and sacrifice; theperils associated with any prognostication of the future (as Bataille should have known, accustomed as he was, elsewhere, alongside Nietzsche, to celebrate the 'uncertainty regarding the future'); and theunresolved problemof isolat ing the meaningful detail and separating what isessential from the merely contingent. The book as awhole serves at any event tocontextualize Bataille's writing insugges tiveways, and there isample evidence thatalongside thedissident surrealist, the theo ristofmyth and sacrifice, theauthor of scandalous fictionalor poetic texts,Bataille had MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 245 a less familiar face, too, thatof a thinker who, while maintaining a critical distance from theacademic discourse of his time,was nevertheless aware of its issues and challenges. UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK LESLIE HILL Baroque Fictions: Revisioning theClassical in Marguerite Yourcenar. By MARGARET ELIZABETH COLVIN. (Faux Titre, 27I) Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2005. I77 PP. ?36; $49. ISBN 978-90-420-I838-9. Marguerite Yourcenar has always been perceived as a paradox. In her lifetime, her contradictions, essentially seen in the discrepancy between her rather eccentric lifestyleand her classical authorship, entertained her viewers and readers. In France, at a timewhen ideologies and certainties were crumbling, she seemed to offerone of the last cultural bastions of certainty.The French...