Here is a summary of key events in Bataille's life and writing during WWII.
Our protagonist: Georges Bataille, born in 1897, author, by the outset of the war, of Story of the Eye (published pseudonymously), The Solar Anus and Sacrifices. His lover, Colette Peignot, known as Laure, died in November 1938. Bataille frequents brothels and strip clubs in this period, and is involved with several women. His secret society, Acéphale, continues to meet; Laure’s tomb becomes another sacred site for Acéphale. He lives in a flat in Saint-Germain-en-Laye which he had taken with Laure. In this period, he also begins ‘The Manual of an Anti-Christian’. Bataille feels he is being deserted by his friends. His great communal experiments have come to nothing; he is alone. In 1938, learns to practice yoga.
1939
The last issue of Acéphale, the review linked to the group, is published anonymously in June under the title ‘Madness, War and Death’, two years after the previous edition. All of its contents were written by Bataille, including his first ‘mystical’ pages: ‘The Practice of Joy before Death’.
Guilty begun 5 September 1939. Bataille is reading Angela of Folingo, the Liber visionum.
The date I start (September 5, 1939) is no coincidence.
Alongside Guilty, Bataille drafts what will become, many years later, The Accursed Share.
On 2 October 1939, he meets Denise Rollin-Le Gentil, who is 32 and married with a young son, Jean. Surya writes, ‘She was beautiful, a beauty that would be described as melancholy if not taciturn. She spoke little or, for long periods not at all’. She joins him at his flat in October; thereafter, Bataille will spend time in her flat at 3 rue de Lille.
1940
Part of Guilty published as 'Friendship' in the Belgian journal Mesures.
Bataille meets Maurice Blanchot, who is about to publish Thomas the Obscure and the long essay How is Literature Possible? (Animadab would follow in 1942 and Faux Pas, a collection of articles, in 1943.)
1941
Madame Edwarda written September to October and published in 1941. Begins 'Le Supplice', the great central section of Inner Experience, immediately after.
Autumn 1941 sees the commencement of two discussion groups organised by Bataille in Denise Rollin’s flat. They consisted of readings of passages of Inner Experience, which Bataille was writing at the time. The first group includes Queneau and Leiris. Blanchot belonged to both groups. The meetings were, according to several participants, essentially a debate between Bataille and Blanchot. The meetings last until March 1943.
1942
Bataille is diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. He contracted it originally as a young man in an army bootcamp. For eight years, however, it has been dormant; eventually (in 1962), it will kill him.
Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer of the same year. At that time, he is staying with Marcel Moré’s mother at Boussy-le-Chatêau. It is published by Raymond Queneau, an old friend of Bataille's with whom relations have lately cooled.
He stays in a village called Panilleuse with Denise Rollin.
He writes The Dead Man.
Bataille's illness leads him to lose his job with the Bibliothèque Nationale.
'Nietzsche's Laughter' published in Exercice du silence, Brussels.
Denise Rollin leaves Paris for Drugeac; Bataille follows her, accompanied by his daughter Laurence, 10, and by his old friend André Masson and his wife Rose. Towards the end of the year, Bataille moves out of the flat he had shared with Laure. He takes a new flat in Paris at 259 rue Saint-Honoré in December (Paris VIII).
Gives the lecture 'Socratic College' (note that the date given in the Oeuvres completes is incorrect) which sets out a proposal to organise his discussion readings on a more programmatic basis. This move is rejected by the participants. In Inner Experience, he gives a summary of discussions that arose with Blanchot, presumably in the discussion groups.
There are three principles; experience will:
- only have its principle and end in the absence of salvation, in the renunciation of all hope
- only affirm that experience itself is the authority (but all authority expiates itself)
- only be a contestation of itself and nonknowledge.
This is nicely summarised by Stuart Kendall, one of the editors of The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge:
Their initial proposals were three: they held to the rejection of all hope for salvation, indeed all hope of any kind, the acceptance of experience itself as the only value and authority, and the recognition that experience meant self-expiation.
1943
Inner Experience is published. Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre's Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.
In March, moves to 59 rue Saint-Étienne in the village Vézelay with Denise Rollin and her 4-year-old son. His daughter, Laurence, now 13, moves with them. The house is ramshackle; the village austere. Between March and October, Bataille embarks on an affair with the Canadian born, half-Russian and half-English Diane Kotchoubey, an admirer of Inner Experience. She is 23, and has a 3 year old daughter. Diane Kotchoubey and Denise Rollin apparently are joined for a while with Bataille in a ménage-a-trois.
Bataille finishes Guilty in May 1943. In the same month, 'Nom de Dieu', a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.
Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.
Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille's reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.
Bataille splits up from Rollin after returning with her to Paris. Kotchoubey had already returned to Paris. Bataille finds lodgings with the painter Balthus through Pierre Klossowski, and spends the winter at Balthus's studio at 3 cour de Rohan. Bataille is at real risk from Kotchoubey’s husband.
1944
He regularly meets, as he is accustomed to do, with friends like Leiris and Queneau. He co-writes a film script, now lost. His co-author leaves the following record of Bataille’s appearance:
A very handsome face, a gentle voice, a very abstract way of moving in space, at once present and absent. When he spoke about the most everyday things, the impression he gave, without being aware of it, was that he was about to impart something of the utmost importance.
He publishes Memorandum, a collage of Nietzsche’s later writings.
Bataille keeps the diaries that will comprise a large part of On Nietzsche.
In March, Bataille gives the lecture, 'Discussion on Sin', based on the 'Summit and Decline' section on what would be published as On Nietzsche. Sartre, Klossowski, Blanchot and many others present. Here, Bataille meets Sartre for the first time. The men meet on several occasions thereafter.
In April 1944, he leaves the studio, moving out of Paris to the rue de Coin-Musard in Samois, near Fontainebleau, close to the house Diane Kotchoubey was living in. He visits her by bike. At the time he is often alone and miserable.
Marcel reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction.
Guilty is published.
Bataille is very ill in this period. He writes Julie. He also begins to write poetry, mostly at Samois. Some bear witness to his love for Diane Kotchoubey. He publishes Alleluia, a collection of poems, apparently reply to the questions she asked him (so Surya).
In October, he leaves Samois for Paris, taking a flat at 16 rue de Condé. He spends winter 1944-1945 there.
1945
In early 1945, Bataille leaves Paris for Vézelay, where he will live for several years with Kotchoubey, who had left her husband. He will remain there until 1949.
On Nietzsche published.
Blanchot commences an apparently largely epistolatory affair with Denise Rollin, which will continue until her death in 1978.
Just after the war, the journal Fontaine publishes extracts from 'Method of Meditation' under the title 'Devant un ciel vide', 'Before an Empty Sky'. Alongside this text, Bataille is also writing the fictional texts that will appear first as The Hatred of Poetry and, later, as The Impossible. He befriends Giacometti, Michaux and Merleau-Ponty and begin editing Critique. The Hatred of Poetry appears in 1947.