Collège de Sociologie and Acéphale

Frank Pearce

Between 1936 and 1939, Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001), and Georges Ambrosino edited and published the journal Acéphale . On its cover was André Masson's drawing of a headless man, with a skull covering his genitals. The journal was notable for its recuperation of the work of Nietzsche from its fascist appropriations and for its attempt to explore the radical forms of social order that Nietzsche's work might herald. In its second issue, in his “Propositions,” Bataille argued that the death of God opened the possibility of the “formation of a new structure, of an ‘order’ developing and raging across entire earth”; this could not be monocephalic, no matter how formally democratic such a political system might be, for “the only society full of life and force, the only free society,” was “the bi- or poly-cephalic society that gives the fundamental antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet, reduction ...

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