Georges Bataille is a pivotal thinker in the history of twentieth-century thought, in a literal sense. His work serves as a pivot between any number of significant early twentieth-century trends, and later movements such as postmodernism and deconstruction.

The extremely eclectic Bataille was first, and perhaps most deeply, influenced by the Marquis de Sade. This scandalous thinker had an enormous impact on avant-garde French thought of the post-World War I period, most notably among the surrealists and their followers. Bataille, loosely associated with and against the surrealists, appropriated from Sade the notion of a violent, merciless natural order, and of man as a mimic of the destructive (and hence reconstructive) power of nature through the boundless expression of destructive sexual impulses. Bataille, like Sade, while a proclaimed atheist, nevertheless linked man's necessary violence to the blaspheming of God; in this way God, though denied...