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This paper argues that the dominant modes of academic address, the conference paper, the journal article, and the monograph, reinforce problematic and exclusionary assumptions concerning what counts as legitimate research, whilst also restricting academic enquiry and impoverishing intellectual life. It makes its case by exploring in some detail the intellectual commitments of one the West's more wayward 20th century thinkers, Georges Bataille. It suggests that Bataille presents not simply a conceptual armoury (and one among many) for critiquing Western logocentrism from within, but offers an example of what a less domesticated, less stylistically narrowed mode of thinking might look like. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes on and explores the disturbing and perhaps counter-intuitive notion that the university is the place where the intellect goes to die. This idea is explored alongside Georges Bataille's suggestion that the death of thought might actually be a worthy pursuit and only thought which seeks its own limits is worth striving for. The deleterious effects of the university upon thought are nonetheless contrasted to Bataille's own attempts to take thought to the point of its expiration. The key difference between the 'teaching of death' that Bataille has in mind, and the enactment of the death of thinking that the university achieves is this: Bataille seeks, however impossibly, to bring death "into the field of vision". Academic knowledge production, by contrast, with its systematism, its rigor, its proceduralism and its subsumption by work, merely abandons the thinking subject to the inevitable result, which for Bataille, is unthinking servility, a premature, utterly suppressed, and domesticated, death-in-life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work on the global far right has highlighted its coordination with fossil capital, what Clara Daggett calls "fossil fascism." The far right has embraced climate denial as part of its fantasy of a conspiracy against the white race, while fossil capital has embraced the far right as its most enthusiastic defender in the face of calls for decarbonization. This paper analyzes the political theology of fossil fascism, arguing climate denial is of a piece with the far right's broader denial of historical and contemporary violence. The paper draws on James Baldwin and Georges Bataille to understand climate denial as the will to innocence in face of the scientific fact that combustion of fossil fuels in past acts of racial domination has ongoing climatic effects in the present. The will to innocence intensifies the very violence it disavows, and resisting fossil fascism may require retrieving the theological concept of guilt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sheds light on some aspects of what contemporary clinical theory calls "borderline" condition providing a description of a key figure of late-modern culture that I will call Homo dissipans (from Latin dissipatio, -onis = scattering, dispersion). Homo dissipans is the opposite of Homo œconomicus, the form that "narcissism" takes on in contemporary "achievement society," solely concerned with rational action aimed to utility and production. In order to define Homo dissipans, I follow French philosopher, anthropologist, and novelist Georges Bataille's descriptions of two core phenomena: "excess" and "expenditure." The former can be defined as a surplus of energy that according to Bataille characterizes human existence, animated by a general movement of exudation and dilapidation and an inexhaustible drive to "pour out" of oneself, especially outside the limits of composure and reasonableness. The latter is an ethical attitude which gives its approval to excess and to its metamorphic and destructive power. The Homo dissipans' credo is to profitlessly dissipate the surplus of energy, escape into a world of pure intensities in which all forms – including identity – dissolve and surrender themselves to transformation. I argue that Bataille's ideas about "dissipation" can help us reconsider two features attributed to borderline personality disorder which have been extensively described and sometimes stigmatized – "identity diffusion" and "stable instability" – and to better recognize, understand, and make sense of their phenomenology in the clinical context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the shortcomings of Georges Bataille's writings in terms of his failure to address white supremacy and blackness by critically engaging and expanding his cosmological metaphor through the figure of the black hole. The sun is a timeless figure in the history of western thought as an epistemological and ontological metaphor. Bataille offers alternative cosmological interpretations whereby luxurious excess and waste aim to transfigure the traditions of metaphysics, ethics, and political economy. This paper confronts Bataille's cosmologies and heliotropes through an afropessimistic lens whereby blackness proves to be an ontological positionality that is not simply marginal to whiteness, but antagonistic, thus allowing for an expanded critical cosmology that incorporates the figure of the black hole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent increased prominence of far-right movements and nationalism has led to a renewed focus on the political thought of the early twentieth century. This era is defined by large strands of anti-liberalism, fascism, communism, and other political inclinations and practices that have largely fallen out of favour. Nevertheless, there are a multitude of thinkers that occupy unique niches that avoid these classifications but are associated with these movements to categorise and minimise their heterogeneous thoughts. This paper counters arguments that claim that Georges Bataille is a fascist or left-fascist thinker. Specifically, these arguments claim that his "anarchism" is founded on a valorisation of violence and reckless usage of social effectivities. However, these arguments often misinterpret his writings or force his thought into easily understandable categories in which it does not fit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an interpretation of the Midsommar movie, directed by Ari Aster, who purportedly recreates archaic Nordic rituals (Hårga), with sacrifices, witchcraft, and sacred copula scenes. Opposing the criticism that sees the movie as belonging to the horror genre, we understand the movie offers an archaizing fiction whose aim is to question the emptiness and lack of meaning in contemporary relationships. We access the "continuity" and "discontinuity" concepts of George Bataille, to discuss the relations between the human being and the primitive forces of death and eros. In this way, we analyzed different aspects of the film narrative in relation to the radical experience of the ego suspension and the union with fundamental life forces, in the context of post-industrial individualism and loneliness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over 20 years J K Gibson‐Graham and the Community Economies Collective have endeavoured to reveal the diversity of economic practice already operative in our so‐called capitalist world. The aim of this paper is to further this ambition by illuminating an occlusion in Gibson‐Graham's own political vision. It argues that diversity, in Gibson‐Graham's thought, is primarily conceptualised as something produced. Drawing upon the work of George Bataille, this paper conceptualises the economy as a superlative and prodigal system of energy exchange that, by definition, is over‐productive and wasteful. In this framing, diversity is not the result of positive relations but emerges from the prolific nature of the general economy. The idea is developed through a discussion of the Detroit urban farming movement. Specifically it argues that the inefficient, redundant and wasteful nature of urban farming is an appropriation of potentialities resident within the general economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like all discourses on the ‘other’, Bataille’s heterology is faced with the problem of conceptualizing the heterogeneous (the other of thought, reason and language), while preserving its alterity, its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille’s notion and some of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille’s heterology, are always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task of conceptually framing an experience that, per definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation. In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille’s thinking from an initial rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille’s notion of sovereign art presents an implicit attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of heterology. This development in Bataille’s thought is analysed in the context of his changing relationship with Surrealism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores a polemic between André Breton and Georges Bataille around the question of the politics of the avant-garde. Focussing on texts composed in the late 1920s, principally Breton's Second Manifesto of Surrealism and Bataille's 'The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist', this paper argues that in examining this debate around matter and material, it is possible to extract two distinct conceptions of the places of subjectivity and revolution in avant-garde aesthetics. While Breton wishes to separately define the idealist aesthetic projects of Surrealism and the materialist project for revolution, Bataille argues that a commitment to that materialist project requires a similarly materialist aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Outlining a minimal retrospective on the debate of community in the contemporary French philosophy, in which the names of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe are enclosed, the paper intends to walk into a practically untraveled path in this debate, which is: the nexus between ethnography (specifically that of Pierre Clastres) and philosophy. This in order to glimpse the concepts of retreating and friendship, set on the questioning of the common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a twofold ontological conceptualization of technology in the Anthropocene. On the one hand, we aim to show how the Anthropocene occasions an experience of our inescapable inclusion in the technological structuring of reality that Martin Heidegger associates with cybernetics. On the other hand, by confronting Heidegger's thought on technology with Georges Bataille's consideration of technological existence as economic and averted existence, we will criticize Heidegger's account by arguing that notwithstanding its inescapable inclusion in cybernetics, technology in the Anthropocene itself fosters an experience of what remains excluded. We conclude by indicating how such an experience is relevant for contemporary philosophical investigation of technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the affective dimensions of what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "exscription," particularly the affective dimensions of failure, or even more specifically, those of the failure to die at the right time, all of which I find bracketed out, or even "exscribed," in Nancy. I argue, however, that those dimensions, along with the sense of needing to die at the right time (yet failing to do so), are but an undeniable part of existence for some of us, a sense of existence by which one wants a real out of existence, a real ek-in ek-sistence. "Exscription," if it is to be attentive to the sense of existence in all its senses, as Nancy would want it, cannot ignore or exclude that sense of ek-sistence and all its affects, therefore. Put another way, as long as we fail to sense and acknowledge that particular ek-sistence and its affects, "exscription" will only mark our failure as such. That latter failure is what I try to reduce here in my readings of Georges Bataille's citation of the Aztec myth and Édouard Levé's Suicide, both of which I also propose to be regarded as "exscriptions." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This critique of Lawrence Josephs's paper on sexual disgust offers an alternate understanding of what is meant by the term "relational." To this end, the work of Georges Bataille is appropriated toward a relational understanding of sexual disgust, both as it relates to the content of the phenomenon and as a model for investigation. The perspective adopted from Bataille is then applied to Josephs's clinical case material. The critique testifies to the need for a more expansive relational perspective, including cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Definition of Heterology’ illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of ‘attraction and repulsion’ at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the ‘science’ (logos) of the ‘totally other’ (hetero), may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the Anthropocene humanity acquires a new collective geologic identity. There are two contradictory movements in this Anthropocenic thought; first, the Anthropocenic trace in the geologic record names a commons from below insomuch as humanity is named as an undifferentiated “event” of geology; second, the Anthropocene highlights the material diversities of geologic bodies formed through historical material processes. This paper addresses the consequences of this geologic subjectivity for political thought beyond a conceptualization of the commons as a set of standing reserves. Discourses of limits and planetary boundaries are contrasted with the exuberance and surplus of fossil‐fuelled energy. Drawing on the political economy of Georges Bataille and the material communism of Maurice Blanchot, I argue for the necessity of a political aesthetics that can traverse the difference between common and uncommon experience in the formation of an Anthropocene commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although Georges Bataille (1897-1962) wrote only uncompleted theoretical texts on “abjection” that remained unpublished during his lifetime, he remains a key, if often hidden, figure in the contemporary discourse on abjection, forming one basis of Julia Kristeva's seminal, psychoanalytically informed work inThe Powers of Horror. Inspired by Bataille's anti-systematic thought, this paper eschews linear argumentation in favor of an abject mode of writing that sketches obscure associative connections between two stories of rats: Bataille's novellaThe Impossible(with its “Story of Rats”) and Freud's case study on the “Rat Man.” In doing so, the paper takes up Pierre Klossowski's formulation of the “simulacrum,” advancing the idea that Bataille's “abjection” is simulacral—not a closed, well-delineated concept, but a notion that always opens up beyond itself, forever slipping, spilling, and shifting, thereby performing the very action of abjection. Bataille's performative simulacrum of abjection is read in relation to his notion of the “formless” as elaborated by Rosalind Krauss, as well as Kristeva's theorization of “abjection.” This investigation of notions of abjection and the formless generates associations and meditations on possibilities for thinking and performing abjection in the wake of Bataille. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers George Bataille's (1897-1962) conception of sacrifice from a particular perspective of his own inner experience, his quasi-mystical attempts of transgressing subjectivity in the limit experiences simulating death, of which sacrifice is a paradigmatic instance and which is usually not taken into account in interpreting Bataille's theory of sacrifice. After a general introduction that sets out the context for Bataille's theory of sacrifice, the first section of the paper deals with Bataille's interpretation of ancient sacrifices and shows how this interpretation is modelled on his own inner experience and thereby amounts to spiritualisation of sacrifice. After that, taking into account the inability of ancient sacrifices to deliver their truth to contemporary men and women, the following two sections briefly sketch two other activities in which the structure of sacrifice is at work for Bataille and which are more fathomable today - eroticism and literature. Next, there is a section describing Bataille's meditation on sacrifice using a photograph of Chinese death penalty execution "hundred pieces", dismembering the victim alive, followed by the concluding section that questions the possibility of sacrifice after the 20th century massacres and, following Jean-Luc Nancy's lead, calls for sacrificing sacrifice itself, which is in fact entailed by Bataille's own thinking of radical finitude and death, which is inadvertently obscured by his deliberations on transgression. At the same time, there is transgression in Bataille, but it is worldly and immanent, and the limit of death - real death, with no survival - in this perspective is even more denoting otherness and calling for anguish than belief in a hereafter disavowing death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At least twice, Georges Bataille commented briefly but memorably on photographs he owned of a Chinese prisoner being executed by dismemberment. The history of this punishment in China, known as lingchi, or “the death by a thousand cuts,” ended around the same time the photographs were taken, but Bataille’s comments evinced a modern sensibility of punishment that is aesthetic rather than pedagogical, and which Bataille often theorized with reference to the Marquis de Sade. In the contemporary US, this regime is intimately connected with the visual stigmatics of racism, and has resulted in two contrasting phenomena: capital executions giving way to solitary confinement, and the extrajudicial public killings of unarmed black people by police. In this paper, the purposes of hidden and visible torture by the state are compared through examples taken from premodern China, early modern Europe, and the contemporary United States, and interpreted with reference to psychoanalytic and post-psychoanalytic philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper seeks to give expression to notions of excess within economies of climate change. The paper begins by addressing the dominance of scientific modelling in the scientific and political constructions of climate change manifested through general circulation models and scientific visualisation. Considering this `digital earth', the paper further investigates how the unit-based accumulation of earth data has actively secured the production of political responses that have both emulated and reinstated a model of accounting (such as the Stern Review and carbon trading). Considering the rendering of digital earth as a specific assemblage of globalisation produced through digitalisation, I argue that the digital realm is productive of its own forms of excess (expressed in aesthetics and globalism). I suggest how this excessive globality reveals its own fragmentation through negative presentation. Drawing from Georges Bataille's notion of expenditure and Maurice Blanchot's writing of the disaster I seek to describe a terrain of knowledge and loss that breaks with this afore- mentioned circuit of accounting, and instead considers another kind of relation (Bataille's concept of expenditure) to account for the wasting of the world. The paper concludes with a Bataillean `sketch' to consider how this excess may be recuperated as an emergent ethic within the disaster yet to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an analysis based on the ethnography in sex clubs and sex bars for men in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil. The paper examines how the different markers that operate in such areas are being melted to produce desirable bodies and subjects. I locate these sites in the broader market for commercial sexual encounters among men in the city, exploring social conventions and practices that permeate the body, sexual practices and erotic choices. This is a starting point for inquiring the ways in which certain stereotypes of "masculinity" are provided with meaning and are embodied. I also propose a revision of the erotic choices and sexual practices, which challenges the idea of eroticism expressed by thinkers such as Georges Bataille. According to him, gender is fixed and crystallized, is linked to sexual dimorphism of sex/gender positions. The body "violated", passive and penetrated, is "feminine"- the opposite of the "masculine" ones, the "active", that penetrates. This design underlines the erotic within the heterosexual matrix, which prevents thinking beyond or outside the limits of its rules. Following post-structuralist thinking on gender and sexuality, as well as queer theory, I wonder if we could try to deconstruct the erotic in other terms, in order to interpret anthropologically the practices, discourses and talks discussed here as potentially transgressive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the implicit religiosity of compulsive buying. Much of the extant literature on the subject focuses on biological and/or psychological factors. I argue that the cycle of behaviour in compulsive buying, which oscillates between euphoria and depression, can be paralleled with Durkheim's exposition of collective effervescence. In my paper I argue that many ofthe behaviours expressed in the cycles of compulsive buying can be described as religious, and that the sense of fulfilment striven for in the pursuit of commodity after commodity can be viewed as a desperate need to heal the self and, invariably, to find salvation. My understanding of the religious is discussed in a relationship between the sacred and the profane in the context of Durkheim and then Bataille, which leads me to the conclusion that compulsive buying is an implicitly religious activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relation of eroticism, death and religion in the thought of the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Keeping in line with the writing style of Bataille himself, this paper is not so much a critical scholarly analysis than a free interpretation/improvisation on his texts relevant for this theme. The article is divided into two main parts. The first part, as already indicated in the title, traces the genealogy of the interrelation of eroticism, death and religion since the very beginnings of humankind, paying special attention to the role of taboo, sacrifice, etc. The second part, in turn, delineates three forms of eroticism-physical, emotional, and religious-and, most extensively, focuses on what the author of the article considers to be the meaning or intention of Bataille's writing on this theme, namely a kind of mystical transformation of consciousness by means of erotic transgression simulating death. In any case, the leading idea of the article can be formulated in this way: eroticism attains its religious meaning through the awareness of death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Bataille's role in the formation of the question of community, as developed by Nancy and Blanchot. The paper aims to situate the problematic status of Bataille's influence--as both formative but ultimately insufficient--in his relation to Nietzsche and what Bataille understands as the experience of an irrecoverable loss. What it would mean to share such loss, what is at stake in bringing that experience to articulation, and what happens to those who endeavor to do so constitute the recalcitrant elements in Bataille's thought, which solicit but cannot sustain a renewal of the question of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I compare the works of Paul Virilio and Georges Bataille through a discussion of their theories of vision, the image, and destruction. The first section of the paper is a consideration of Virilio's philosophy of speed (dromology) that turns off an interpretation of Theodore Géricault's 1819 work, The Raft of Medusa , moves through a discussion of the Greek mythology of the Gorgon, and ends with an analysis of contemporary military technology. In the second part of the paper I explore Bataille's critique of ocularcentrism through an examination of his famous novel Story of the Eye and a consideration of his concepts of the pineal eye, the limit experience, and the labyrinth. The final section of the paper contrasts the theories of Virilio and Bataille through an examination of the political implications of their ideas about vision, the image, and destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Datocracyis a compound neologism that embraces transhistorical liberations and reconfigurations of data, in its multiple perceptual-linguistic forms, into new value relations and systems of governance, democratic or otherwise.Datocracyevolves from the often-violent separation of data from its habitual matrices, by virtue ofdispositifs, or apparatuses, as defined by Michel Foucault and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze. This paper examines material examples of the functioning of suchdispositifsthrough Georges Bataille, Walter Benjamin, François Rabelais (through Mikhail Bakhtin) and William Burroughs. These examples demonstrate how emancipated data are readily recuperated into new relations of governance, as liberatory socio-political tools (or apparatuses), or vehicles of tyranny. In its passage between liberation and recuperation, in its state of utterance, perhaps, data experience a protosemantic moment, a pre-definitional state, which offers the promise of a momentary escape from, or rather within, value relations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article we explore the possibility of viewing complex systems, as well as the models we create of such systems, as operating within a particular type of economy. The type of economy we aim to establish here is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s reading of George Bataille’s notion of a general economy. We restrict our discussion to the philosophical use of the word ‘economy’. This reading tries to overcome the idea of an economy as restricted to a single logos or master narrative. At the same time, however, Derrida illustrates that we always operate from a restricted framework and as such something will always escape and interrupt our understanding of the world. In this paper we will propose that one could use Derrida’s reading of Bataille, along with notions such as différance, in order to move towards an understanding of complex systems as existing within certain sets of possibilities and constraints. We argue that this view of an economy agrees with the work of Edgar Morin on complexity and his conceptualization of general complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I focus on the term 'immanence' in Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex and show how it relates to her historical account of sexual oppression. I argue that Beauvoir's use of Hegel's master−slave dialectic and of Claude Lévi-Strauss's reflection on the prohibition of incest lead her to claim that in all societies 'woman' is constructed as 'absolutely other.' I show that there is an ambiguous logic of abjection at work in Beauvoir's account that explains why men are the only examples of transcendence in history, whereas women lack it. Finally, I discuss the way in which the relation between immanence and abjection helps to explain the intellectual relation between Georges Bataille and Beauvoir. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acute hospital setting can be psychologically demanding for medical professionals generally. Working within the medical model, with its focus primarily on the physical, and faced with the patient's fear and suffering, the clinician's self-defence can be to hold back from an empathic response, to concentrate upon attending to the patient's body rather than the mind. To empathise with the patient's suffering is often felt on some level by the clinician to be potentially self-destructive. The psychotherapist however, is, by definition, up close to the mind: that is the main focus. So how does one offer existential psychotherapy in an acute hospital setting with patients who are up against their own mortality, and their imminent death, and, moreover who may be in pain and suffering, without it having a destructive impact on the therapist? How does one face up to the physical process of dying - both others' deaths and one's own? This paper attempts to open up this question with reference to my own experience working within Palliative Care in the acute setting and with reference to the writings of Georges Bataille and the latter work of Heidegger. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Georges Bataille's novel Blue of Noon (1935) appraises itself as disposing of a premonitory vision on 30th and 40th political and social convulsions. As a heterocritical narrative, it evokes an alternation of dreams and reality, quotidian events and historical facts, ammounting to comments about revolutionary values of its age. This paper aims to expose some notes on the narrative schemes of Blue of Noon. As a contest between writing and its own impossibility, Bataille's text shows fiction as the other side of theoretical optimism and reveals literature as the realm of transgressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Bataille's writings on primitive art, specifically his essay on the Lascaux cave, in order to elaborate a notion not of the informe (as contemporary art critics have done), but of the fictive figural image. It reads this "useless image"—a term borrowed from Bataille—in the work of Magritte through Bergson's notion of resemblance and the operation of attentive recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will consider three major conceptions of desire and how they relate to the human condition. For many desire is conceived either as lack, a 'desire-for', or as some affirmative force that enables us to 'reach beyond ourselves'. This is desire reduced to a dualism in order to negate one pole in favour of the other. Georges Bataille offers a third way, where the two form a complex dialectic such that desire is both tack and affirmation. His theory demonstrates how desire reveals the sacred as a transcendental immanence rather than psychic ideal and where the profane follows rather than precedes the sacred. His desire is one that conceptualizes us as humans that occasionally catch glimpses of the sacred but these glimpses are insufficient to have and to hold it. For Bataille we cannot become God, we cannot have the sacred because we are human all too human. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his masterwork. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading.The aim of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the work of Georges Bataille to claim that we Westerners seek to stave off death by engaging in various future-oriented projects,by organizing ourselves, each other, and our environments in particular ways. Given that we organize to try to forestall death, we therefore suggest that organizing is a much more widespread and significant process than organizational theory usually acknowledges. Indeed, although we define both productive labour (work) and reproductive labour (pregnancy and childbirth) as projects in this sense, we deal here with the latter because we wish to foreground the ways in which organizing occurs beyond the work organization. We aim to identify organizing as a generalized social process by revealing how Western society has turned reproductive labour into a project, a means of extending life both psychologically (producing offspring) and physiologically (ensuring the health and longevity of baby and mother). We analyse pregnancy manuals, birth plans and reproductive technologies to illustrate our claims, and draw parallels with productive labour as project where appropriate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a report on a conference on play as an anthropological phenomenon, held in Berlin, Germany, from October 4-6, 2012. Paper presented focused on the role of play in the development of subjectivity, as discussed in the works of such theorists as Friedrich Schiller, Johan Huizinga, and Georges Bataille, among others.

Text originally published in Po&sie, n. 47, 1988, and included in Une pensée finie (1990). The text is located in the context of works on the community and Georges Bataille. In the Spring 1983, came out the essay La communauté désoeuvrée (The Inoperative Community), in the magazine Alea (n. 4), later (in 1986) included in the homonymous volume, with two other essays. What is at stake in both instances is writing "in community with Georges Bataille". "Writing" written in this case in an exterior locus marked by the prefix ex-, therefore "ex-cription" (excrire). Writing, as "excription" (excrit), to which is added the homonophic meaning of "shouting" or "crying" (cri, to shout, in French). Writing for Georges Bataille, or "excribing" (ex-crire), points towards an essentially equivocal meaning: one always writes the cry and not "about" the cry, life, the "thing itself ", Being, which means, that which by definition cannot be written, that which precludes and excludes any possibility of writing. Ex-crit ("excribed") however does not refer to a referent such as, for example, Georges Bataille's life, but to something which inscribes itself (or ex-cribes) always and only in the ex-cription. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the potentiality of life's excess in situations such as detention at Guantánamo Bay and how these challenging and oppressive situations can constitute a different relationship between life and sovereign power/violence. Instead of condemning the concept of sovereignty as a whole, the paper first draws a distinction between sovereign violence (which aims to imprison life) and sovereign experience (as an experience of life's excess) and, following Georges Bataille, delves into the latter. In doing so, the paper engages with moments where life is at the limit of sovereign order and with its excess defies it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that Yang's paper has unsettled the dominant productivity stance which considered to be one of the major orthodoxies of economic anthropology. He asserts that Yang has offered a sobering reflection about the nature of global capitalism and on the current fascination in management-school circles with the phenomenon of the so-called Confucian capitalism.

The author comments on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." He states that religious practice and the ritual expenditure on spectacular performances of sacrifice and destruction are not activities usually associated with rapid regional economic development. He asserts that the paper did not unfold stories of religious squandering, general sacrifice, indulgent consumption and tomb building into the dominant narrative of global capitalist penetration. What Yang aimed to confront in her search for new conceptual vocabularies is the lingering influence of economic determinism.