L’Orestie
L’Orestie is one of Georges Bataille’s most concentrated and unsettling poetic books. Its title invokes Orestes and the tragic inheritance of guilt, blood and madness, yet Bataille offers no classical retelling. The book is instead a brief, severe cycle in which poetry places itself under pressure and almost turns against its own possibility. Published shortly after the war by Les Éditions des Quatre Vents, it retains the tension of the years in which it was written: hunger, fear, desire, religious emptiness and bodily dread. The edition is austere, but bibliographically precise in its limited printing on tinted nacreous paper. This copy belongs to the 175 copies issued for commerce and bears the very early number 7. Its uncut state heightens the sense of an intact, still-closed object from Bataille’s rare poetic production.
Quantity
Bataille, Georges
L’Orestie
1945 | Paris | Éditions des Quatre Vents
This early, uncut copy of L’Orestie preserves Bataille’s poetry in its barest and most dangerous form. The limited printing on tinted nacreous paper gives the book a quiet material refinement sharply at odds with the violence of the text. It is an austere and rare collector’s piece at the core of Bataille’s postwar literary trajectory.
L’Orestie is one of Georges Bataille’s most concentrated and unsettling poetic books. Its title invokes Orestes and the tragic inheritance of guilt, blood and madness, yet Bataille offers no classical retelling. The book is instead a brief, severe cycle in which poetry places itself under pressure and almost turns against its own possibility. Published shortly after the war by Les Éditions des Quatre Vents, it retains the tension of the years in which it was written: hunger, fear, desire, religious emptiness and bodily dread. The edition is austere, but bibliographically precise in its limited printing on tinted nacreous paper. This copy belongs to the 175 copies issued for commerce and bears the very early number 7. Its uncut state heightens the sense of an intact, still-closed object from Bataille’s rare poetic production.
€380
Condition Report:
In-Depth Study
References & Bibliography
Format
In-8 (Octavo) approx. 20 × 26 cm
Edition Particulars
One of 175 copies issued for commerce on tinted nacreous paper, within a total edition of 260; this copy is uncut.
Print Run
260
Copy Number
No. 7
Paper
Papier nacré teinté
Inscription
No inscription
Product DETAIL
L’Orestie consists of a sequence of short poems and prose-poetic fragments in which Bataille uses the name of Orestes as a bearer of guilt, violence and inner disruption. The book does not retell Aeschylus’s tragedy, but transfers it into a modern experience of anguish, desire and impossibility. The texts evoke blood, cold, hunger, wounds, death and a body that finds no rest. As the sections progress, the lyrical voice becomes less descriptive and more exposed to a mental and physical limit. Orestes is therefore less a character than a mask: a name under which poetry, madness and self-loss gather. The work’s core lies in the clash between the need to speak and the conviction that poetry itself is inadequate, even contaminated.
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