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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]

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]

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]