The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism - Softcover

Land, Nick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 041505608X ISBN 13: 9780415056083

Publisher: Routledge, 1992

An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

Review:

`This is an extraordinary book:genre-busting without being merely interdisciplinary, ferociusly argumentative, laden with polemics (some of which are better than Schopenhauer's) and written in a style that occasionally reaches a pitchof aphoristic beauty comparable with Cioran or Nietzsche ... If you want to hav fun thinking ... then this is a book for you;' - Parallax

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 041505608X
• ISBN 13: 9780415056083
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248