Most writers define evil in terms of actions; Bataille defines it in terms of motive. “Sadism is Evil,” he writes. “If a man kills for a material advantage his crime only really becomes a purely evil deed if he actually enjoys committing it, independently of the advantage to be obtained from it.” I winced at the Machiavellian notion that deliberately hurting others to accomplish economic gain is not evil because the pleasure comes from accomplishing the goal and not from the hurtful act itself.

Bataille uses Wuthering Heights as the model for Evil in literature. (He always capitalizes Evil to great effect. Capitalized, it becomes bolder, stronger, more threatening. As reader, I react, unable to think of the concept in purely intellectual terms.) Emily Brontë’s dark story of a spurned lover who destroys his own life in the process of executing his revenge seems a classic tale of Good versus Evil and, quite literally, the wages of sin are death. Bataille looks beyond that, proposing that Brontë’s characters are an expression of her own rebellion against the strict Christianity of her home life—in other words, a way to morally embrace evil thoughts.

I found the text awkward, sometimes obtuse. I suspect that my problems lie in an awkward translation. This little book is a reduced-size facsimile of a nicely typed text, suggesting a bargain publishing job for a limited audience. ( )

La presente serie de ensayos, unidos bajo una misma sombra, recoge gran parte de los postulados filosóficos y estéticos que rigieron el quehacer creador de Bataille: el exceso, la soberanía, la transgresión, la libertad. Conceptos dispuestos aquí al servicio del desciframiento del lenguaje y de la literatura. ( )