Vote on what comes next: https://www.sleepyphilosophyradio.com/vote
Becoming a member keeps these episodes coming and unlocks the members only library of exclusive book summary episodes, a growing shelf of great books read closely and explained in plain language.
Subscribe: https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/sleepyphilo/subscribe
By day a mild librarian, by night the philosopher of excess, eroticism, and the sacred where reason ends.
Georges Bataille kept one of the strangest double lives in modern thought. For decades he was a quiet librarian in Paris, courteous and unremarkable, while in private he wrote some of the most extreme and original books of his century. This episode follows him from a childhood shaped by a blind and dying father, through a lost faith and a notorious first novel, into the feuds and secret societies of the years between the wars.
It traces the ideas that made him a hidden source for a whole later generation, the economy of loss and useless expenditure, the sun that gives without return, the sacred glimpsed in transgression, a mysticism with no God at the end of it, and eroticism understood as the meeting place of desire and death. Along the way it restores the man behind the scandal, the gentle scholar drawn to everything orderly thought leaves out. Told as a serious essay and paced for rest.
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
00:00:00 The Blind Father
00:12:59 The Eye and the Egg
00:22:42 The Excremental Philosopher
00:29:12 The Low and the Formless
00:39:22 The Economy of Loss
00:46:20 Hegel's Wound and Nietzsche's Laughter
00:56:34 The Headless God
01:03:36 The Return of the Sacred
01:13:42 Laure and the Silence
01:20:00 A Mysticism Without God
01:33:08 A Theology Turned Inside Out
01:42:03 God in the Brothel
01:48:07 Love Among the Graves
01:56:30 The Sun That Gives Without Return
02:11:27 The Sovereign Moment
02:20:13 Desire All the Way to Death
02:34:31 Literature Is Not Innocent
02:44:02 The Community of Those Who Have Nothing
02:50:24 The Tears of Eros
02:58:01 The Mild Librarian
03:04:24 The Uses of Georges Bataille
Sleepy Philosophy Radio makes longform, carefully researched philosophy written as a serious essay and paced for rest.
All research and writing is done personally. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com), licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License.
