Stuart Kendall

Paul Éluard

Paul Eluard (1895-1952) is widely considered to be one of France's most important poets. This bilingual edition translates Eluard's Love, Poetry (L'amour la poesie, 1929) for the first time into English. This popular work cemented Eluard's reputation internationally as one of France's greatest 20th century poets. Never out of print in France, this is it's debut in the English language.

Love, Poetry

Georges Bataille

On Nietzsche

Until his death in 1962, Bataille was an instrumental force in philosophical debate, acting as a foil for both Surrealism and Existentialism and advocating radical views that spanned the entire spectrum of political thought. Stuart Kendall chronicles these aspects of his intellectual development, as well as tracing his pivotal role in the creation of journals such as Documents and Acéphale, and how his writings in aesthetics and art history were the pioneering cornerstones of visual culture studies. Kendall positions Bataille at the heart of a prodigious community of thinkers, including André Breton, Michel Leiris, Jean-Paul Sartre, Alexandre Kojève, Jacques Lacan and Maurice Blanchot, among many others.

Scott Wilson

William Pawlett

Edia Connole

Gary Shipley

Vanessa Place

Karmen MacKendrick

Jacquelynn Baas

Martin Bladh

Karolina Urbaniak

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

Responses to the Nietzsche Event

Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century

Gilgamesh

Joseph Kessel

Originally published in Algiers in 1943, Joseph Kessel's Army of Shadows is one of the first books to have been written about the French Resistance. Now available in paperback, Contra Mundum Press is proud to present the first new translation in over 70 years, and the first edition since Jean-Pierre Melville's iconic 1969 film. "What, then, when it comes to recounting the story of France, an obscure, secret France, which is new to its friends, its enemies, and new especially to itself? France no longer has bread, wine, fire. But mainly it no longer has any laws. Civil disobedience, individual or organized rebellion, have become duties to the fatherland. The national hero is the clandestine man, the outlaw. Nothing about the order imposed by the enemy and by the Marshal is valid. Nothing counts. Nothing is true any more. One changes home, name, every day. Officials and police officers are helping insurgents. One finds accomplices even in ministries. Prisons, getaways, tortures, bombings, scuffles. One dies and kills as if it's natural. France lives, bleeds, in all its depths. It is toward the shadow that its true and unknown face is turned. In the catacombs of revolt, people create their own light and find their own law. Never has France waged a nobler and more beautiful war than in the basements where it prints its free newspapers, in its nocturnal lands, and in its secret coves where it received its free friends and from where its children set out, in torture cells where, despite tongs, red-hot pins, and crushed bones, the French died as free men."

Army of Shadows

Stuart Kendall

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