Abstract

The recent publication of a new translation of On Nietzsche invites renewed consideration of one of Georges Bataille’s most intriguing and complex texts. This work was originally situated within La Somme athéologique, Bataille’s unfinished project for a set of texts exploring the paradoxes of religious atheism. These texts are often consumed with a religious fervour and seem far from the explicitly political considerations of Bataille’s anti-fascist texts in the 1930s, or from the more measured analytical tone of The Accursed Share. However, as some critics have suggested, these texts have a political significance of their own. This review essay will thus consider the tensions between Bataillean perspectives which put more weight on either the ‘political’ or the ‘religious’ as modes of analysis. It begins with an analysis of On Nietzsche before moving to a broader thematic discussion of religion in several recently published texts related to Bataille. The central question posed in the latter half of the article is the following: how can Bataille’s thought be deployed to theorize the religiosity of contemporary capitalism?