Un An unsubmissive materialism. Bataille and Leiris in Documents

Abstract

It’s from the lecture of Documents magazine, that we are interested in reading several texts by Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris that configure certain unsubmissive materialism. Documents intended to put into contact culture with base material, knowing that matter is not conceived with any ideal form. This intention is taken to its maximum expression by Bataille and Leiris who, from certain materialism that attacks Hegelian idealism and mechanistic materialism, dirty the senses adjudicated to the human and the culture. In the first section, we develop our bet in documenting the matter (the most important being the unformed images and the entrance of a critical dictionary); in a second section we consider a certain disproportion and base on the trace of unsubmissive materialism; in a third section, we focus on detours of anthropomorphism and delayering of human (in the game of metamorphoses and metaphors). Finally, we point out how Bataille and Leiris, in Documents, opened another materialist tradition and gave clues to think about the unsubmissive fold between material/image/language, questioning humanism.