[Eventually there will be ten volumes of Bataille's Oeuvres complètes, whose plan is chronological. What we have in the four volumes published so far] is a mass of erotica, review articles and poetry,… plus the liberal annotation of two editors…. (p. 233)

Since his death in 1962, Bataille has been hustled up into France's pantheon of sacred monsters, to stand with his seniors—Sade, Lautreamont, Artaud—in a thin black line against the literary establishment's vindictive drive for recuperation. The partisans of these rabid animals trust that they will resist vaccination by time or official criticism and will survive as tutors in subversion, ransoming literature in the eyes of those who see its main job as carrying up the munitions in the class war. It is far from certain, though that Bataille is too hard a case for treatment. His nonconformity was of a deliberately inward sort and never...