The stories compiled under the title "The Obscene Work" (first published in German in 1972 by Rowohlt) were described by Susan Sontag as the "chamber music of pornographic literature." In the more recent intense French reception of Bataille—by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Pierre Klosowski, or Philippe Sollers—his erotic writings do not merely belong to this genre. Bataille tragically encapsulates the truth of eroticism: in conscious contrast to both societal condemnation and the hygienic sterilization of sexuality, he identifies it with horror, dread, and death.