Georges Bataille's essays on Hegel, presented here for the first time in German, are only the visible part of a lifelong, often underlying engagement with his philosophy. They are fragments of an uninterrupted dialogue, as Hegel was one of Bataille's constant philosophical companions, without whom his thinking can only be partially understood. Just a year before his death, he wrote to Alexandre Kojève that he wanted to create something comparable to the Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, "but it would have to be infinitely more arbitrary and primarily based on the endeavor to interpret what Hegel did not know or overlooked (such as prehistory, the present, the future, etc.).".