Georges Bataille was a librarian, author, philosopher, sociologist, and a founding member of the College de Sociologie. His work was heavily influenced by Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Kojeve, and the Marquis de Sade. His writings took on various genres and traversed a great number of themes from aesthetics, eroticism, and transgression, to philosophy, economics, and politics. Bataille was attracted to violence and the disruption it could cause capitalism and bourgeois values. He expressed this fascination through bodily “limit experiences,” such as cruelty, eroticism, transgression, subversion, sacrifice, and excess, that were beyond rational thought. For Bataille, these were all ways to gain personal “sovereignty,” where rationality was suspended as one abandons oneself to the objects of one's desires. While largely ignored during his lifetime, Bataille remains a central figure in French intellectual history for the influence he had on succeeding generations of scholars including Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard.