In this rigorous and unsettling study, Boris Kriger reconstructs Georges Bataille’s vision of the sacred as a trembling border between reason and its own undoing. Moving beyond biography and commentary, the book situates Bataille’s thought within the crises of twentieth-century modernity—the collapse of transcendence, the exhaustion of eroticism, and the metamorphosis of sacrifice into aesthetics.

Kriger reads L’Érotisme, Inner Experience, and The Accursed Share not as eccentric provocations but as a coherent theology of limit, in which transgression becomes revelation and the sacred reveals itself only through violation. Drawing on anthropology, phenomenology, and political theology, he shows how Bataille transforms mysticism into atheology: a path toward divine absence rather than divine presence.

Across chapters that unite philosophical analysis with lyrical études—short existential parables of modern life—Kriger traces how eroticism, laughter, waste, and death form a single economy of excess. The book argues that Bataille’s “wicked sacred” exposes the metaphysical poverty of a culture that has lost both God and taboo, and that only by confronting this loss can thought recover its intensity.

At once philosophical and poetic, The Wicked Sacred offers the first sustained synthesis of Bataille’s mystical materialism and its implications for contemporary metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics. It will engage listeners in philosophy, religious studies, literary theory, and anyone drawn to the luminous border where holiness and horror meet.