Georges Bataille: an intellectual biography - Michel Surya, translated by Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardso

In her memoir The Sexual Life of Cathérine M, Cathérine Millet claims that she and her fellow late-Sixties swingers "found a ready-made philosophy reading Bataille". Even allowing for the statistically impressive levels of Millet's "copulatory obsession", nothing could be further from the true spirit of Georges Bataille's writing than her mild-mannered enthusiasm for multiple couplings.

Bataille died in 1961, too soon to witness a carnival of liberation he had dismissed in advance as based on a hopelessly wrong-headed conception of sexuality. According to a distinction he insisted upon, Bataille was no mere libertine. He was "debauched". His territory is not the placid expanse of endless sexual adventure, but a darker world in which erotic excess touches the limits of the human. He was, as Michel Surya's accomplished biography has it, "the saint of the abyss".

He is perhaps best known to English-speaking readers for the wildly inventive pornography of The Story of the Eye, whose scenes of murder and eye-gouging could hardly be harnessed to any notion of sexual liberation. His conception of eroticism is based on taboo: there is no true sexuality without sin. His vision of the world is split between the strictures of civilisation and a frantic sexual excess, which only makes sense in the context of the law.

Bataille was interested in excess as a general principle, even an economic one. He replaces the capitalist and Marxist concept of an economy of production with one of massive expenditure. He was, himself, ruinously profligate with his perfectly respectable salary from the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris.

All this suggests considerable religious leanings. One has to go back to William Blake to find an English writer with anything like so perverse a take on Christian orthodoxy. Surya identifies the roots of Bataillle's "mystical turn" in his youthful dalliance with Catholicism.

A good Nietzschean, Bataille was convinced of the death of God, but could not leave the corpse alone. His God, however, appears in the form of a prostitute, baring her genitalia in grotesque parody of the wounds of Christ. This sort of scene earned its author the scorn of Christian writers, but also of communists. The latter made a leap from his sexual deviancy to political perversion. Surya, however, calmly demolishes the case for Bataille's supposed fascism. Sartre saw him as merely pathological, the madly grieving widow of God.

Such is Surya's intimacy with this material that each of his short, thoughtful chapters could serve as an introductory essay on Bataille. A particularly French biographical scruple presides here. He passes over the precise details of his subject's "disordered" private life, and avoids over-interpretation of pivotal moments: the deaths of his mad, syphilitic father, and of his lover Colette Peignot.

This is also a book that presents an astonishingly detailed panorama of French intellectual life in the first half of the last century: a milieu of extraordinary vigour and meticulous viciousness, dedicated to a kind of orgy of seriousness. That seriousness was also, in Bataille's work, a laughter turned on the world from depths that the world would deny, from "his dark determination not to surrender to any hope".