Dialogues des morts sur l'amour et la jouissance

Description

Georges Bataille talks about love and pleasure with Timothy Leary and Edith Piaf, Rosa Luxemburg with Nelson Mandela, Victor Hugo with Nina Simone, Maya Deren with Mahatma Ghandi. The free and fantastic atmosphere of this book, composed of dialogues of the dead and dream stories, is that of fairy tales, whose joyful knowledge is passed on by word of mouth. In the words exchanged by the dead, as in the prose of the night, the lines are brief and clear, the punchlines sometimes absurd in their morality, cruel too, but often tender. The dream narratives translate sensations, readings and experiences into fable: the dream of the house of dust, the dream of Goya's dog, the dream of the black viper, the dream of Robert Walser, the dream of Franz Kafka. The appropriation plays with the dilemma that arises between dreamed of and dreamed by, inviting the reader to become part of this dreamlike situation, through revealing anecdotes and stories.

All in all, the book suggests that we should take full advantage of our ability to imagine and narrate in the face of all that troubles us: love and gender, social relations and emotions, death and our place in the universe, madness and the logic of progress, the truth of language and the chaos of the world.