Le Cinema du diable: Jean Epstein and the Ambiguities of Subversion

The words Georges Bataille used to introduce La Littérature et le Mal (1957) are well known: “Literature is the essential, or else it’s nothing. Evil—a heightened form of Evil—of which it is the expression, has for us, I believe, the supreme value. […] Literature is not innocent, and, being guilty, it should in the end admit to it” (171-72). With these words, Bataille defends a sacrificial conception of literature and of the subversion of which it is the agent. In spite of everything, and contrary to his anthropologically inspired writings, Bataille is not concerned here with the social repercussions of evoking Evil as a category of symbolic representation. Despite the influence of Marcel Mauss, the principle of expenditure that invests the reader is not the object of his study; La littérature et le Mal is not about the sociology of gift exchange.