Writer, thinker, essayist, Georges Bataille (1897–1962) was not a “professional” philosopher. But he “always, above all else, turned towards philosophy,” as he himself stressed (Chapsal 1961, p. 34); and “philosophers” can hardly remain indifferent to the radical calling into question of their discipline that his heterological body of work occasions, in its devotion to the other and to the subversion of the Logos. It is no longer possible to trivialize, or even to reject Bataille's contribution, as Sartre once did under (...) the label of “new mysticism” (Sartre 1943). In 1970, while presenting the Oeuvres Complètes (Complete Works) [henceforth OC], Michel Foucault stated: “We owe to Bataille a large part of that which is our present moment; but without doubt we also owe to him that which remains to be done, to be thought and to be said, and this will be the case for a long time to come” (OC, vol. I, p. 5). If such a prophecy is by its nature difficult to verify, Bataille's contribution to philosophical “modernity” is nonetheless largely recognized, in as much as it deals with the destruction of the Hegelian “closure” of Discourse (Derrida 1967) and, more generally, with the emancipation of thought from the limits of Reason (Habermas 1984). (shrink)