Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century Responses to the Nietzsche Event

Featuring the first English translation of Jean Bruno's "Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille" (1963), this edited collection brings together an internationally renowned and interdisciplinary group of scholars to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the inaugural issue of the French interwar avant-garde journal founded by Bataille, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie (June 24 1936). In so doing, it also broaches the "ferociously religious" esoteric activity of the eponymous secret society, as well as the "sacred sociology" of the Acéphale-affiliated Collège de Sociologie. The Acéphale conjuncture--everything written, acted, drawn or imagined around André Masson's excessively iconic figure of the headless man for the "secret society" and journal founded by Georges Bataille in the 1930s, and everything that proliferated among the loose community around Bataille in those years--continues to demand responses, and to insist on them. Connole and Shipley's volume isn't the last word, but proposes a heterogeneous plethora of words, in varying modes, in this direction. It is also a form of response to the event of Nietzsche, which Bataille and friends reiterated, creating an event of their own; in this vein, the volume refuses the division of life and thought and pushes the forms of "discursive hybridity" to excess. The volume is both erudite and visceral, it comprises historical and biographical knowledge, illuminating the Acéphale conjuncture through research and interpretative, intertextual connectivities, and it is raw, it lives with its material; it asks us to both respect and transgress the orthodox modes of "scholarly" endeavour, to see both as complementary and necessary, in alignment with Bataille's proposition that: "We need the system and the excess." --Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King's College London (UK), and author of After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community, and Roland Barthes and Film there is much poetry and laughter amid the poly-swarm-cephalic headlessness of this volume, along with irreverently astute scholarship and canny theological mything, all enjoyed in gloriously bad company [(masson, bataille, laure, klossowski, caillois, weil, blanchot, nietzsche and sade).] [read it and shit.] [read it and scream.] [read it and die.] --Fred Botting is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University (UK), award-winning author of numerous works on horror fiction, and co-editor, with Scott Wilson, of The Bataille Reader 85 years after the release of the first issue of Acéphale, and the birth of the eponymous secret society, this volume enters inside the sanctuary to invite us on a crazy, labyrinthine journey punctuated by five "stations" where--under the joint sign of Nietzsche and expenditure--thought ceases to be separated from passion and madness, and writing is transformed into a process of self-sacrifice, "acéphale-graphy." --Marina Galletti is Professor of French Literature at Università Roma Tre (Italy) and co-editor, with Alastair Brotchie, of The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology