François Bizet's study of communication in Bataille's works is framed by two essays written by the philosopher on the novelist, playwright and political essayist Jean Genet: ‘D'un caractère sacré des criminels’, written in 1949, and ‘Jean-Paul Sartre et l'impossible révolte de Jean Genet’, written in 1952, and republished in La Littérature et le Mal under the title ‘Genet’. Bizet describes how, in the first essay, Bataille defends Genet's glorification of vice, crime and solitude. Bizet then highlights the near total volte-face apparent in Bataille's second essay, where he condemns Genet of having neither the power nor the intention to ‘communicate’ with the reader. For Bataille, Genet betrays the reader: it is impossible to locate truth in his works, since he confuses autobiography and fiction, good and evil, masculine and feminine. While Bizet's study, for the main part testifies to Bataille's astute and complex critical theories, here he concludes that failure lies not in Genet's writing, but in Bataille's reading. Bizet explains that while in the first essay Bataille entreats the reader to make sense of Genet's texts, in the second, he seems to absolve the reader from this responsibility. Bizet's study unfurls into a broad and detailed analysis not just of Bataille, nor of Genet, but of literary communication and theories of aesthetic reception in general, from sociological, phenomenological and artistic perspectives. Most notably, he affords invaluable new insights into Genet's own theories of aesthetic reception elaborated in his texts on Rembrandt and on Alberto Giacometti. Bizet defines Bataillian communication as being founded not on the exchange of knowledge or reason, but on a descent into a void without transcendence or revelation. This ‘communication sans échange’, as Bizet describes it, is achieved during intense moments of violence, crime, death, transgression, eroticism, laughter, absurdity, anger, intoxication and poetry—the only linguistic form capable of transgressing the inevitable rationality of words. The subject and object of communication dissolve into a chasm, together losing their distinctness in an explosion of subjectivities. Bataille therefore rejects the sovereignty of the individual, since both subject and object are abolished at the vertiginous limits of communication. Consequently, he rejects the writer's authority, insisting that the creation of understanding belongs to both author and reader. It is therefore baffling, stresses Bizet, that Bataille, who champions the refusal of reason and reciprocity in Sade and in Nietzsche, fails to see Genet's works as a model of ‘communication’. Bizet does agree with Bataille's remark that communion or community between individuals is impossible according to Genet, who would not subscribe to Bataille's sociologie sacrée—his aspiration towards a mythical ‘us’: ‘Les solitudes chez Genet ne s'additionnent pas. Elles ne connaissent pas le mouvement fusionnel du ‘continuum des êtres’', writes Bizet (p. 397). I feel that here, Bizet perhaps disingenuously overlooks the fact that in his later life Genet's writings and activities were almost exclusively devoted to social causes. Nevertheless, Bizet's book is exemplary in its thoroughness, although the profusion of parentheses, footnotes, quotations and ‘amples détours’, as he himself puts it (p. 393), does at times impede communication in the non-Bataillian, profane sense.