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Paper money occupied a deeply ambivalent place in works of British monetary writers in the late eighteenth century. On the one hand, writers like Adam Smith and Jeremy Bentham thought that paper money's ability to represent wealth in exchange without itself containing any intrinsic value was an unparalleled benefit to commerce and industry. On the other hand, having disburdened itself of any intrinsically valuable commodity, the abstract monetary sign of paper money gave rise to a fear of excess, a fear that in essence there was nothing which could limit its growth. In this paper, I will discuss the concept of paper money as it took shape in the writings of eighteenth-century British monetary writers, introducing the idea of a general economy of notes to help explore the ambivalent place it occupied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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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]

Copyright of MATRIZes is the property of Universidade de Sao Paulo, Programa de Pos Graduacao em Ciencias da Comunicacao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper will argue that both Bataille and Nietzsche embrace a rather idiosyncratic understanding of sovereignty (Bataille) and power (Nietzsche), according to which the sovereign moment is to be identified with a moment of profound loss. For both thinkers, sovereignty and power do not stand alone but are absolutely dependent on forces which threaten their integrity at every moment. For both, the ultimate powerlessness of power, or the loss of sovereignty, does not constitute weakness but precisely the opposite, strength and vitality. Nietzsche occupies himself with the problem of power through his examination of ancient agon, where he organises the limitations of power; through his occupation with the Will to Power, where he constructs an ontology of power; and finally through his meditations on the thought of the return, where the power of time manifests itself in the sovereignty of a moment which has liberated itself from the demands of various cultural and social power structures which have produced the human of the Christian Western civilisation: a human solely occupied with productions and results. Ultimately, this paper aims to elucidate that Bataille's sovereignty and Nietzsche's power win nothing specific; but that their sovereignty lies in their resistance to the Western cultural model of understanding life through the optics of productions, wins, and results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the crisis of 1929 in the French surrealist movement, focusing on the critiques of surrealism's political position advanced by Georges Bataille and Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes. As editors of the reviews Documents and Bifur respectively, Bataille and Ribemont-Dessaignes occupied similar positions in the cultural avant-garde, marked by proximity and distance, to the surrealist group gathered around André Breton. The value of their response to the crisis of 1929 is related to the subsequent status of each writer: whereas Ribemont-Dessaignes is regarded as little more than a footnote in the history of Dada and surrealism in France, Bataille is now considered a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French culture (famously described by Foucault as "one of the most important writers of his century"). Their critiques of surrealism differ in the position they assume towards the issues of individual creative freedom and autonomy. Surrealism's political impasse led Ribemont-Dessaignes to limit his activities to the province of art and literature, affirming creative endeavour as a manifestation of individual freedom and autonomy and effectively severing the tension between culture and politics that Breton sought to maintain as one of the defining characteristics of surrealism. Bataille, by contrast, ever sceptical of claims that surrealism could represent a radical political position, embraced the failure of surrealism as the premise of his own enterprise. For Ribemont-Dessaignes freedom remains an abstraction, manifested in the play of the literary or artistic work; for Bataille freedom was the lacerating limit-experience, one that questioned all certainties, including that of the subject itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of modern technological society on the human spirit and on human values is undeniable. But the ability to philosophically engage with this impact and also to gain the means whereby we could evaluate it lucidly and soberly is a whole other matter. It is difficult for us today to find a place where we could stand outside the contemporary cultural matrix that has come to create our very selves, so as to identify and assess the aspects of our humanity that have always managed to outstrip the cultural conditioning and construction of our most basic senses of identity and self. This paper will take this as a central theme by briefly looking at three specific philosophers of culture and humanity, and will explore their insights on the concepts of technology, culture, utility, and efficiency. By extension, all the perspectives outlined here will also imply a philosophical portrayal of the condition of contemporary man therein. Through examining some specific writings of Jacques Ellul, Georges Bataille and the Chinese sage Zhuangzi, as they bring to bear on these aforementioned concepts, it is my contention that we will be in a better position to assess the relationship between the human spirit, technology and society in general, as well as explore the ways in which we can reclaim the inalienable and fundamental existential sovereignty of the human spirit in particular. [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 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.

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 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]

This essay turns to Georges Bataille's The Solar Anus to expose the brain of the contemporary neurosciences as a parody. The brain plays the light of consciousness illuminated in the penetrating glow of the brain scanner but cannot recognize itself in the brightly colored image. Bataille's critique of Western philosophy and its pursuit of totality amid helpless partiality and mindless materiality proves fitting to today's "neuro-everything." The essay ends with the suggestion, following Bataille, that scholars and artists can perform the parody to push neuroscience to pore over its repressions and re-gear its penetrative pistons on transformative action, pursuing a creative study of bodily generativity, the only visible alternative to the solar anus of blinding light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is, firstly, an analysis of Kreia, a character from the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II--The Sith Lords video game, a character whose role in the game is pivotal: the conversations the player has with Kreia serve as the main narrative basis for the entire game experience. Secondly, on the basis of a collection of quotations from these conversations, this article juxtaposes Kreia and Georges Bataille. An intriguing variant of the blind seer trope is revealed in Kreia through studying the game's poetics, in which a focus on the sense of hearing is discerned. Kreia and Bataille are compared in their understandings of the universe, and a similarity between their ulterior motives is discovered: both of them struggled against something which was considered to be an inextricable element of their respective universes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Desubjectivation is central to Agamben's political thought. In the Homo Sacer project, Agamben identifies two different forms of desubjectivation: the first is the stripping of identity by the state; the second is an experience of letting go of the self which, he argues, provides resources for resisting contemporary biopolitics. In Homo Sacer, Agamben is also profoundly critical of Georges Bataille's thought for reproducing the logic of the sovereign ban, which is the most extreme mechanism that the state uses to deprive people of their identity. In this essay, however, I argue that Agamben's first account of the emancipatory potentials of desubjectivation, his 1970 essay On the Limits of Violence, echoes themes that are central to Bataille's thought. Agamben argues that violence can only break with the history of domination through a non-instrumental action that involves the negation of both self and other, and he formulates this idea by drawing on the example of sacrifice, Marx and Engels' analysis of proletarian revolution, and the existential problem of mortality and the limits of language. I show that while Agamben's analysis of selfnegating violence draws on a range of sources, including Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, the key claims of the essay reflect the account of desubjectivation that Bataille develops through his reflections on sacrifice, subjectivity, and the social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses Kafka's short story 'Before the Law' to offer a reading of Al Ewing's The Immortal Hulk. This is in turn used to explore our desire to encounter the Law understood as a form of completeness. The article differentiates between 'the Law' as completeness or limitlessness and 'the law' understood as limitation. The article also examines this desire to experience completeness or limitlessness in the work of George Bataille who argued such an experience was the path to sovereignty. In response it also considers Francois Flahault's critique of Bataille who argued Bataille failed to understand limitlessness is split between a 'good infinite' and a 'bad infinite', and that it is only the latter that can ultimately satisfy us. The article then proposes The Hulk, especially as presented in Al Ewing's The Immortal Hulk, is a study in where our desire for limitlessness can take us. Ultimately it proposes we turn ourselves away from the Law and towards the law that preserves and protects our incompleteness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Antiguo Oriente is the property of Pontificia Universidad Catolica Argentina and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article contrasts Paul Otlet's epistemology of documents with that of Georges Bataille's in the late 1920s and early 1930s in regard to the body parts that they assign as sites and analogues for documents. A double meaning to the notion of documents emerges, defensive and offensive of and to twentieth-century European scientific epistemology, morality, and aesthetics: documents as the full and truthful representation of reality, and documents as the material inscription of social, cultural, and physical affordances leading to the reality of irrational drives. The brain as the site of the mind is said to be the physical location given to the former, and "the body" is the physical site given to the latter, reinforcing a traditional Western anatomical psychology determined by ideational and materialist ontologies and corresponding traditional bodily tropes for "reason" and "the senses." [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 authors comment on Mayfair Mei-hui Yang's article on economic hybridity, ritual expenditures and Georges Bataille's concept of "general economy." They present queries about the models presented focusing on the Yang's sources of theoretical inspiration and not her use of them. They question whether Bataille's vision of capitalism is not itself caught in capitalism's self-mythologization as a desacralized and productivist space and worry about the slippage between the linguistic and the biological notion of hybridity.

In this article, the author focuses on need of use of evil in literature, and mentions work of philospher Gilles Deleuze on evil and judgment in life and compares them with work of french philospher Georges Bataille.

Drawing from notes taken during repeated visits from 1985 to 2002 to one multiethnic sugar- plantation company compound in the Caribbean nation of the Dominican Republic and taking inspiration from the cultural theorist Georges Bataille, I present evidence that expenditure to excess is today a widespread human striving and an ethical battleground even among materially impoverished people who inhabit the far termini of global commodity chains. Expenditure (in the Bataillean sense of activities that gain their full meaning through loss, not gain) stands as a source of meaning in the domains of personally enhancing consumption, eros, and ritual. While certain plantation residents conceptually thread together phenomena in each of these activity domains as generators of treasured and celebrated brightness, rhythmic energy, ceaseless flow, and life-affirming spiritual animation, other residents, most prominently the community's evangelical Christians, denounce the prodigality of customary payday-weekend binges and devotions to the gods of Vodou. I propose that cultural anthropologists may gain a fuller understanding of the motivations and impulses that stand behind recent massive increases in commodity consumption worldwide through study of the immanent, nonrational satisfactions of discretionary consumption and other acts of expenditure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents literary criticism of the book "Thoughts for the Times" by Sigmund Freud. It discusses that Freud's third proposition that death is inaccessible to the mind, is contradictory to his first two propositions in his book. It also emphasized the paradox of the irrepresentability of death and its consequences as related by Freud in his book. Also presented is the comparison of Sigmund Freud's propositions as against that of philosopher Georges Bataille.

Revisits Kate Chopin's novel "The Awakening" and compares its text to that of "Inner Experience," by George Bataille. Reconsideration of the apparently familiar notion of awakening; Consideration of consequences for feminist theorizing; Examination of the desires of the character Edna; Moment of laughter as the time when awakening acquires communal dimensions.

This article discusses a study on philosophical conceptions of modernism mentioned in author Georges Bataille's writings regarding surrealism. Nature of division between post modernism and modernism; Relation between surrealism and modernism; Elaboration of the structure of temporal experience appropriate to surrealism.

Focuses on the relationship between surrealism and the eye with regards to the books "The Hundred Headless Woman," by Max Ernst and "The Story of the Eye," by Georges Bataille. Views of Bataille towards the eye; Discussion on the first-person narrative of the book of Bataille; Analysis of several drawings in "The Hundred Headless Woman."

Investigates the literary theory and practice of Georges Bataille in relation to contemporary context of reading and theory. Account of the residual subjectivity at stake in communication; Assessment of the contemporary critical thought; Consideration of Bataille's communication as idiosyncratic and fairly conventional.

The philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche can be discusses in the contect of the work of Kant, Rimbaud, and Batille. Nietzsche described the Judeo-Christian representation of God as an archetypal sketch of pathological insecurity. Bataille proffers Nietzsche and the risk of chaos, war, eroticism, and submission to the sacred.

Argues against author Jeffrey Mehlman's assertion that the intellectual lineage of French post-structuralism can be traced back to the 17th-century apostate-messiah Sabbatai Zevi. Opinion of Mehlman that the subversive spirit of French theory can be seen as a manifestation of the Jewish messianism known as Sabbatianism; Mehlman's theory of a connection between Gershom Scholem, who studied Sabbatianism, Scholem's friend Walter Benjamin, and French thinker Georges Bataille.

Demonstrates the ways in which systems of valuations can function as violent forces of constraint. Arguments raised by French philospher and writer Georges Bataille; Overview of Bataille's `Literature and Evil'; Discussion on the ethics of sacrifice.

For sixteen days of celebration for a royal birth, Naples’s Palazzo Reale, the Teatro San Carlo, the Castel Nuovo, and their immediate surroundings were transformed by the temporary architecture of the court scenographer, Vincenzo dal Re. Both his innovative interventions within the palace and the theater and his more conventional ones outdoors advanced the politics of the regime by coordinating the behavior of the three recognized social classes in patterns consistent with Bourbon enlightened absolutism. The architectural thought of Michel Foucault and Georges Bataille helps shed light on dal Re’s strategies and their effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses Georges Bataille's study of religion. Composition of the book, `Inner Experience'; Relationship between inner experience and mysticism; Bataille's aspiration in developing atheology; Contradiction between Bataille's writings with the mystical theology, Angela of Foligno.

The article discusses the meanings of the terms "academic horse" and "sweating hippo" in reference to art styles. Georges Bataille has derived this symbolism from the observation of Greek money, whose emblem is a horse. Gaulish imitations became deformed, while the original coin remains solid. The imitations are compared to hippos, because the huge mammal sweats. These symbolisms are later reflected in paintings. Jean Dubuffet's March 1944 gift to Jean Paulhan, one of his recent pictures, has melted or sweated soon after. Claes Oldenburg hopes that the same thing will happen to his exhibits in the "Store" but they remain academic horses. Gordon Matta-Clark experimented with different materials to produce the picture-as-hippopotamus effect.

Copyright of International Political Science Review is the property of Sage Publications, Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

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 aims to unmask and undermine the larger economy's hegemonic principles subscribed as a mix of state socialism and market economy. He asserts that it is right to seek an alternative to privatized consumption and what is preferable in the ritual economy is that it enhances leisure and social generosity. He believes that ritual extravagance is local despite the fact that it is ancient and a fulfillment of a primordial need.

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 reveals the wizened features of the economy of ritual blowing apart the double repression of party and paradigm. He asserts that it is through Bataille that people came to know of a general economy which points to a human curse of wanton expenditure, taking people beyond rational calculation and into the realm of never-ending and destructive cycles of production and consumption.