Bataille reads Hegel and Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Freud; Also to Stirner and Marx, Weber, Durkheim, and Mauss; He reads to the Gnostics and the alchemists, to San Juan de la Cruz and to Sade; He reads Bergson, Jaspers, and Heidegger; Read Zen, Zusuki and the Christian mystics, Yogis and Persians; Malinowski and Lenin, the Greeks and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun ... He will want to make an extensive synthesis not only of Western culture but of all cultures, including the Eastern, the ancient American peoples and that of the Africans.

     The heaviest currents of our time feed the channel of his speech and in it come together in an unusual way. Is Georges Bataille the key stone of the immense church that is culture? It was his intent.

     But hidden under the appearance of a chaotic and therefore supposedly libertarian discourse, the whole of Bataille's work constitutes a unitary thought, a system. The negative foundation of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit is the axis of that system in which a peculiar reading of the work of the Marquis of Sade plays a central role, a reading that recaptures and synthesizes previous attempts by authors like Maurice Heine, Jean Paulhan, Pierre Klossowski , Maurice Blanchot, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, and later to be watered by others like Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jürgen Habermas ...

     In this book, Jorge Veraza complements his earlier work on clarifying and criticizing the overall coherence of the Bataillean system (Subverting to Bataille, Ithaca, 1986), the first that has been tried, with the deciphering of Bataille's procedure in his reading of Sade's work in the context of this system.

     This volume continues the study El otro Sade. Direct democracy and comprehensive criticism of modernity. The political writings of D.A.F. Sade (Itaca, 2013), in which Veraza proposes, for the first time, another reading that rescues the coherence of the work of this revolutionary thinker, so distorted for more than two centuries.

     Veraza carries out a detailed commentary on the essay on Sade published in Literature and Evil, 1957, in which Georges Bataille deals with the marquis's thinking, summarizing his reflections begun in 1929 and continued in his most important works.