Abstract

This is an expanded edition and new translation of Bataille’s Sur Nietzsche, which was written during the final months of the Nazi occupation of France in 1944. Bataille’s book offers a highly unorthodox appreciation of Nietzsche. Stuart Kendall, the translator, comments on the startling heterogeneity of the book and incisively describes it as an “assemblage,” being at once commentary, chronicle, diary, lecture, and meditation. Kendall thinks the preface of the work situates it as a work of social and political philosophy or, at the very least, as an anti-fascist work “written under conditions of enemy occupation, which is to say as a book written as a covert act of war”. He notes that a band wrapped around...