Literary Polemics Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton Literary Polemics Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton Suzanne Guerlac ; stanford university press stanford, california © 1997by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University Printed in the United States of America cipdata appear at the end of the book For my mother, and in memory of my father Acknowledgments An earlier version of Chapter 1 was published as “‘Recognition’ by a Woman!” in YFS78(1990). An earlier version of Chapter 2appeared as “Transgression in Theory” in Ethics, Politics, and Difference in Julia Kris- teva’s Writing, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Routledge, 1993). I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for helpful discussion and suggestions concerning various parts of this study: Scott Bryson, Margaret Cohen, Jonathan Culler, Vincent Descombes, Marc Gotlieb, Josué Harari, James Meyer, Claire Nouvet, Clark Poling, Michael Randall, and Philip Wood. I would also like to thank graduate students both at Johns Hopkins and at Emory upon whom I tried out many of the ideas developed here, as well as my very helpful copy editor, Ann Klefs- tad, and editors, John Ziemer and Helen Tartar, at Stanford University Press. Last but not least, I am very grateful to Clifford Holland for his love and support throughout and to my daughter Catie—for being Catie. S.G. Contents Introduction, 1 part i Abstract, 9 1. Bataille: The Fiction of Transgression, 11 2. Kristeva: Reconciliations—In Theory, 38 part ii Abstract, 55 3. Sartre: Reading Engagement, 57 4. Valéry: The Work of Perfecting and the Chemistry of the Mind, 95 5. Breton: Angelic Truth, 125 part iii Abstract, 163 6. The Voluntary and the Automatic: Sartre, Valéry, Breton, and Bergson, 165 7. The Politics of Erasure: The Modern and the Postmodern, 194 Conclusion, 211 Notes, 225 Bibliography, 271 Index, 283