Georges Bataille

Georges' first wife Sylvia Bataille was an acclaimed French actress (Jean Renoir's The Crime of Monsieur Lange (1936) and A Day in the Country (1946), in which Georges played a priest). Bataille worked as an archivist, but had increasing difficulty finding a day job. Sylvia later married the psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, whose controversial theories were influenced by the Surrealists, with whom Georges had a turbulent relationship.

The Batailles' daughter Laurence emulated her stepfather, and her parents: she became a psychiatrist, and acted in Renoir's movie French Cancan (1954). Laurence was arrested for her support of the Algerian revolution.

Bataille's difficult childhood (his father blind and paralyzed, died when Georges was a teen; his mother attempted suicide) fuels his last novel, Ma mère, discovered after Georges Bataille's death. In the novel, a pious Catholic boy, planning to become a priest to spite his controlling, atheist father, reveres his free-willed mother. When the father dies, the unfettered mother propels her teenage son into a wild erotic journey. Georges Bataille himself was discharged from the Army during World War I for tuberculosis, studied to be a monk, then renounced Catholicism. He often battled poor health. Bataille's novels were mostly under pseudonyms, and all feature aggressive female protagonists. Artists some consider swayed by Bataille include musician/actress Björk, and her occasional collaborator, experimental film director Matthew Barney. To open his novel Deliverance (1972), James Dickey quoted Bataille. Bataille established and edited a respected scholarly journal, wrote poetry, and essays. Bataille founded a secret society, which was anti-fascist. Tears of Eros is his history of love and violence.