Description: "Acquisto analyzes the writings of Georges Bataille, Emil Cioran, and Clâement Rosset during and shortly after the Second World War, which address the question of what it means to think and to constitute oneself as a thinking subject. He argues that Bataille and Cioran adopt an anti-systematic approach, using fragmentary writing to turn answers about subject-object relations into questions. This is in contrast to Rosset's affirmation of the inaccessibility of the real. Bringing together thinkers that have seldom been discussed jointly, this book examines the affective dimensions of thought as experience, considering the political stakes of postwar thought as "out of order" with what came before"--
Brief description: Joseph Acquistois Professor of French at the University of Vermont, USA. His books include Reading Baudelaire with Adorno: Subjectivity, Dissonance, Transcendence (Bloomsbury 2023), Proust, Music, and Meaning: Theories and Practices of Listening in the Recherche(2017), and The Fall Out of Redemption: Writing and Thinking Beyond Salvation in Baudelaire, Cioran, Fondane, Agamben, and Nancy(Bloomsbury 2015).
Review Quotes:
"The real value of Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset lies beyond the estimable exegetical work it does on the three principal thinkers it engages - for the book at once analyzes and extols a nonsystematic mode of dialectics that, refusing the totalizing tendencies of 'resolution, ' actively courts contradiction and paradox as the energetic sources for experiential thinking and experimental living. In a time of rampant nonthought and intensifying authoritarianism, readers should embrace Acquisto's account as a provocation to accede to the voluptuous agony of thinking without aim or end - the very conditions of a world transformed." --Jeremy Biles, Associate Professor, Department of Liberal Arts, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA
"Through careful attention to the question of what thinking means from an existential, political, as well as ethical point of view, Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset captures subtle and paradoxical movements of thinking in the three writers' works in the years during and shortly after the Second World War. Through the range of historical, political, and philosophical phenomena which Acquisto explores, as well as the conceptual sophistication of his analyses, this fascinating volume will become a crucial work of reference." --Arleen Ionescu, Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China "One might understandably be surprised, at first, by Acquisto's decision to read these three resolutely singular thinkers (Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset) with one another and, in the case of the third-and to illuminating effect-against or through the first two. But his meticulous examination of the multiple stakes of accounting for the affective aspect of thinking as an experience-an experience achieved, in turn, only in fiction, against the self, or tragically sought in 'idiocy'-is undeniably compelling and offers us, page after a page, a fascinating reading experience." --Éric Trudel, William Frauenfelder Professor in the College and Professor of French, Bard College, USA