Talk:Georges Bataille

Death date

I didn't look much into this, but there appears to be some disagreement between sources about his death date. Brittanica reports it as July 9th, Surya's bio reports it as July 8th. Suriname0 (talk) 18:41, 7 August 2024 (UTC)

Base materialism?

Can this really be considered one of Bataille’s Key ideas? I’ve only seen it mentioned by Bataille in Visions of Excess, which what has been cited. While Its hard to delineate Bataille’s core concepts as he repeatedly tweaks and reworks the same ideas using different terminology, maybe focusing on his notion of Sacrifice would be more useful for people looking to get an overview of what Bataille is trying to do. Lesanol (talk) 12:47, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

If you look at secondary literature about Bataille or drawing from Bataille (such as Solar Politics by Oxana Timofeeva) Base Materialism definitely is one of Bataille's key concepts. His work on sacrifice and waste is also key and should be described. The article does not need to choose to explore one or the other. We can do both. Simonm223 (talk) 13:09, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

In fact (sorry, just had a thought after clicking post) there is an interconnection between Bataille's work on sacrifice and base materialism. Remember that Bataille had a functionalist perspective of sacrifice as being a socially constructed form of waste in order to syphon off the excess energy of an economic system. This is derived from Bataille's focus on solar-productive economic inputs as being constantly in excess of entropic-wasteful outputs in a general economy and that, in turn, is tied directly to base materialism. Simonm223 (talk) 13:12, 8 August 2025 (UTC)

Children?

Article seems a bit unclear regarding his daughters, making it seem as if his only child was with Diane. In fact, Bataille had one daughter with Diane (Julie, not the singer), and one daughter with Sylvia (Laurence). See Surya's bio.... would edit myself but I've only just joined. HenriTroppmann (talk) 01:57, 11 October 2025 (UTC)