On Nietzsche

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"Hailed as "one of France's best minds" by Martin Heidegger, Georges Bataille has become one of the most influential thinkers in America. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, and Kristeva all acknowledge their debt to him." "For the first time translated into English, On Nietzsche is the third and last volume of Bataille's crowning achievement, The Atheological Summa, which includes the books Inner Experience and Guilty. Originally published in France in 1945, On Nietzsche comes as close as Bataille could ever come to formulating a system of his own - an "atheology."" "Nietzsche was a major influence on Bataille's life. In 1915, in a crisis of guilt after leaving his blind father in the hands of the Germans, Bataille converted to Catholicism. It was Nietzsche's work that led him to abandon Catholicism for an idiosyncratic form of godless mysticism. In this volume Bataille becomes, and goes beyond, Nietzsche, assuming Nietzsche's thought where he left off - with God's death. The heart of this book explores how one can have a spiritual life outside religion." "Throughout, Bataille argues against fascist interpretations of Nietzsche. He writes of Nietzsche's falling out with Richard Wagner and his disgust for German anti-Semitism. He lauds Nietzsche as a prophet foretelling "the crude German fate," and in the appendix Bataille defends himself against Sartre." "On Nietzsche is essentially a journal that brilliantly mixes observations with ruminations in fragments, aphorisms, poems, myths, quotations, and images against the background of the war and the German occupation. Bataille has a unique way of moving breezily from abstraction to confession, and from theology to eroticism, skillfully weaving together his own internal experience of anguish with the war and the destruction raging outside. This volume reconfirms Michel Foucault's words: "[Bataille] broke with traditional narrative to tell us what has never been told before.""--Jacket