With the publication of Georges Bataille, Critical Essays 1: 1944-1948 (trans. Chris Turner, eds. Alberto Toscano and Benjamin Noys), English readers now have access to most of the essays in volume 11 of Bataille’s Œuvres complètes.

I’ve updated the list of Georges Bataille – Oeuvres complètes and other French collections; English translations on this site.

Given the very useful “Bibliography and Notes” in Critical Essays, doing this was an easy task. With Volume 11, this site’s bibliography is now mainly of use for showing where the pieces which are not in Critical Essays can be found – mostly in The Absence of Myth and Essential Writings, with a one piece each in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge; and in Yale French Studies.

We should be grateful to the editors and translator for including all the hitherto untranslated pieces from volume 11, without leaving any missing from the years they cover, and for not providing new translations of ones already in English just for the sake of it. Given the sporadic and inconsistent approach to translations of Bataille before this, this more systematic approach is very welcome.

The two promised future volumes of Critical Essays should cover the rest of volume 11 (essays from 1949) and volume 12.