Jeremy Biles

"Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists - a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's "sacrificial" interpretations of Kojeve's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist Andre Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with "hyperchristianity"; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's "religious sensibility.""--BOOK JACKET.

Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form

Ecce Monstrum

Joshua Dubler

Winnifred Fallers Sullivan

M. Cooper Harriss

Courtney Bender

Erik Thorstensen

Liane Carlson

Hannah C. Garvey

"Min Kamp-or My Struggle in English-is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the year-by-year translation into English of the novels became something of a slow-gathering storm. Ambiguously figured as autobiographical by some, the six volumes present an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a Norwegian writer, an Everyman of sorts, one with the same name as the author. In its expansiveness, textures, and anti-romanticism, Knausgaard's is a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015 a small group of scholars, all admirers of Knausgaard's work, began meeting to discuss the peculiarly "religious" qualities of My Struggle and other writings. Some were interested in Knausgaard's attention to religious topics, his uses of religious histories, objects, and artworks, while others were curious about his capacity to engage various religious moods in ways that were not critical, suspicious, or celebratory. The group wanted to know, in part, what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, about themselves. The Abyss or Life is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor-a remarkable collection of interlocking essays on everything from ritual, beauty, writing, and morality to divine plans for the end of the world"--

Reading Knausgaard Writing Religion

The Abyss Or Life Is Simple

Kent L. Brintnall

Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

Negative Ecstasies

An absorbing collection of essays on religious textures in Knausgaard’s writings and our time. Min kamp, or My Struggle, is a six-volume novel by Karl Ove Knausgaard and one of the most significant literary works of the young twenty-first century. Published in Norwegian between 2009 and 2011, the novel presents an absorbing first-person narrative of the life of a writer with the same name as the author, in a world at once fully disillusioned and thoroughly enchanted. In 2015, a group of scholars began meeting to discuss the peculiarly religious qualities of My Struggle. Some were interested in Knausgaard’s attention to explicitly religious subjects and artworks, others to what they saw as more diffuse attention to the religiousness of contemporary life. The group wondered what reading these textures of religion in these volumes might say about our times, about writing, and about themselves. The Abyss or Life Is Simple is the culmination of this collective endeavor—a collection of interlocking essays on ritual, beauty, and the end of the world.

The Abyss or Life Is Simple

Jeremy Biles

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