Base Materialism and Surrealism. The Bataille-Breton Discussion

Abstract

By 1923, Georges Bataille was an unknown young man who was beginning to make friends and enemies within the surrealist and intellectual movement of Paris. Encouraged by some of those acquaintances, he reads Mauss and Durkheim, Nietzsche and Freud, thus shaping a thought that will be reflected in the creation of Documents. The relevance of this journal and Bataille’s works would be hardly understood without drawing attention to his first readings and the debate he engaged in early on with the major exponent of the surrealist movement, André Breton. There, Bataille coordinated a group of dissidents and turned the journal into a weapon against surrealism. This article examines Bataille’s development, highlighting the concept of “base materialism” that was built as a tension between the surrealist’s idealism and the different forms of materialism. Thus it is shown that Documents and base materialism combine the issues that will concern Bataille throughout his life.