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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]

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]

The article takes up diverse strands of psychoanalytic thinking to investigate how desire is manifested in male team sporting environments. In particular, it is posited that sporting desire shares a remarkable structural similarity to the joking relationship in that they both work through the overcoming of obstacles. In doing so unconscious desires are long-circuited and only emerge in radically altered form, upending traditional gender and sexual subjectivities in the process. The paper explores the concept of desire from perspectives that are either straightforwardly psychoanalytic or heavily influenced by psychoanalytic thought. Initially, I examine desire from a Freudian viewpoint before looking at how Jacques Lacan extended Freudian analysis through a linguistic lens. I then explore desire in terms developed by Gilles Deleuze before turning, in the second part of the paper, to an examination of the work of George Bataille to consider the desire of sport through the mechanism of the joke to trace the complex routing that it often takes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how pregnancy discrimination at work is perceived by both employers and pregnant employees. Using a public, qualitative dataset collected by the UK Equality and Human Rights Commission that offers perspectives from both employers and pregnant employees, we explore the unfair and unethical treatment of pregnant employees at work. Our findings show how pregnant workers are expected to conform with workplace systems that are treated as sacred. We suggest that employer valorization of the mythical figure of 'ideal worker' disadvantages pregnant workers. We observe how, even if this contravenes maternity protection laws, some employers self-justify discrimination against pregnant employees who they perceive to have transgressed 'appropriate' workplace behaviors as ethical and reasonable. To illuminate and conceptualize the notion of transgression, our analysis has led us to the ideas of philosopher Georges Bataille, specifically his reflections on how individuals who 'transgress' social norms are treated as taboo, as well as his metaphorical descriptions of people and practices as either sacred or profane. We theorize that pregnant workers who are treated as profane should be reclassified as sacred, opening up this idea for debate so as to disrupt long-standing patterns of discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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 deals with the initial reception of the Marshall Plan by Georges Bataille and François Perroux in light of the discussion they held in the journal Critique, during the second half of 1948. I argue that Bataille and Perroux took the Marshall Plan as an enigma that current economic and political theories were not able to explain fully. In response, both authors contributed a unique and sophisticated economic analysis to transcend what they perceived as the limited scope of economics. By focusing on this interdisciplinary dialogue, this paper is intended as a contribution to a history of economic thought, taking in the economic inquiry of non-economists and the ways in which they relate to professional economists. [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]

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 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]

Swahili poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have foregrounded adapted perfumery customs with great reverence in their works. It functions as a vital cue to trans-Indian Ocean commonalities and as a marker of the influence of Arabian-Manga civilisation and perfumery practices on the Swahili customs. This paper examines the culture of scent in selected poetic works attributed to Fumo Liyongo and Mwana Kupona Mshamu. Interestingly, the geography of the female body parts is fused with oriental scents to excite consensual romantic intimacy. We argue, besides historically echoing the sensuousness of oriental perfumery in Swahili culture, that these two poets subliminally de-odorise body, mind and soul of their readers to experience imagery of passionate intimacy. Specifically, this article intends to focus on two prominent motifs of cross-cultural adornment: the use of Manga attar unguent, fragrance and perfume, and the scenting of genitalia. The article confronts these postulations concretised on an approach based on Georges Bataille's theory of eroticism. According to Carl Olson, Bataille was an influential French postmodern thinker and writer who argued that human life could best be understood by the interconnections and workings of eroticism (1994:231-250). He mixes philosophy and anthropology to talk about eroticism. According to Minguy, Bataille, through erotic transgressions, saw the possibility for true human freedom and communication. This theory, therefore, guides our arguments and counter-arguments, in the present article. It is the fulcrum upon which our discussions are premised. [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]

Copyright of Filozofija i Drustvo is the property of University of Belgrade, Institute for Philosophy & Social Theory 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 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.)

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 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]

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]

The present essay reconsiders Georges Bataille's politics of the impossible in light of Jean-Luc Nancy's and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe's collaborative work conducted at the Centre for Philosophical Research on the Political. In particular, my submission critically assesses Nancy's and Lacoue-Labarthe's concerted effort to displace the problematic of the subject to make room for a new ground of the political derived from Bataillean conception of community. While Bataille's philosophy proved to be decisive to Nancy's and Lacoue-Labarthe's exploratory research at the Centre, it also constituted a source of profound ambivalence insofar as Bataillean thinking of relation necessarily leads back to the question of the subject. The paper argues that Nancy's admitted failure to develop the unprecedented Bataillean politics is rooted in persistence of the subject in Bataille's philosophy. At the same time, it maintains that what Nancy perceived as a failure must be grasped as success since Bataillean determination of the political necessitates not so much an eradication of the problematic of the subject, as its re-elaboration. If, as Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe suggest, construction of the subject throughout the development of Western metaphysics has determined philosophical thinking of political community, then Bataillean sovereignty (with its presupposition of the acephalic subject freed from subjection to symbolic authority) allows for a new and non-identitarian conception of community not bound to the destiny of the state. [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]

This paper aims at gaining a better understanding of the inherent paradoxes within sustainability discourses by investigating its basic assumptions. Drawing on a study of the metaphoric references operative in moral language, we reveal the predominance of the 'well-being = wealth' construct, which may explain the dominance of the 'business case' cognitive frame in sustainability discourses (Hahn et al. in Acad Manag Rev 4015:18-42, 2015a). We incorporate economic well-being variables within a philosophical model of becoming well (Küpers in Cult Organ 11(3):221-231, 2005), highlighting the way in which these variables consistently articulate a combination of 'objective' and 'subjective' concerns. We then compare this broad understanding of well-being with the metaphors operative in the sustainable development discourse and argue that the sustainability discourse has fallen prey to an overemphasis on the 'business case'. We proceed to draw on Georges Bataille to challenge the predominance of these value priorities and to explore which mindshifts are required to develop a more comprehensive understanding of what is needed to enable 'sustainable development'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The spirit of capitalism shifted throughout the twentieth century, Boltanski and Chiapello place it sometime in the period between the 1960s and 1990s [2005,The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London], for Bell it had happened by the mid-1970s and its contradictions were already apparent [1998,The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, Basic Books, New York]. David Harvey is more specific and cites 1979 as the dawn of the new era [2005,The New Spirit of Capitalism, Verso, London]. This paper seeks to build on this scholarship of the changing spirit of capitalism and read it through the development of the heroic figure of the American imagination, through the representation of the capitalist hero. Its aim is to situate the figure of the capitalist hero in the post-crash era and ultimately to understand the seductive power of the new capitalism that enables it to thrive. My thesis is that the seductive power of the new capitalism can be understood as an oscillation between revulsion and awe, we are both morally repulsed by the venality of capitalism yet also captivated by it. Revulsion and awe are at the core of the libidinality of the new capitalism and can be seen through the representation of the heroic object of the capitalist imagination. [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]

An instructive comparison can be drawn between Jacques Ellul's 1936 Esprit article portraying "Fascism as Liberalism's Child" and Georges Bataille's 1938 lecture on "The Sacred Sociology of Today's World". Both rely on Durkheim's sociology in assuming modernity's amorphousness, leaving passive masses of atomized individuals susceptible to mobilization into totalized entities by charismatic leadership. Bataille welcomes the postwar intensification of social aggregates but criticizes their militant, militaristic regimentation as not violent and sacred enough, whereas for Ellul, the resurgent social sacred (whether orgiastic or dictatorial), as the active mass, is the enemy of the free person as the sole meaningful whole. [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]

This article argues that historical existence in the Anthropocene is constituted by waste. As both act and product waste increasingly dominate natural, social, and political environments. The Anthropocene as a threshold in natural history then is inseparable from the profusion of waste that has accompanied its rise. Our insatiable wastefulness and our reforming of the planet with trash in turn create distinct consequences for historical consciousness and historical theory. Historical thinking and historical writing must reckon with waste in its physical and metahistorical registers. Key to this challenge is the thought of Georges Bataille, who attempted to reorient political economy by centering waste in place of production. With expenditure at the center of human existence, twenty-first-century historians can undertake an analogous restructuring of historical knowledge. Waste constitutes a central experience of sovereignty. In wasting, the consumer attains momentary sovereignty over self, world, and history. This article also examines Jean Baudrillard's articulation of the end of history as a moment of refusal in order to sketch how waste has emerged as a historical condition. As a consequence of this connection, it also considers how the historicity of waste might reshape the self-understanding of historians as they take stock of the Anthropocene. (7724 words) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the climate emergency's imperative has seemingly been delayed by Covid-19, this article identifies a disequilibrium problem applied to the general economical thought of capitalism and ecology. Drawing a correlation, it offers a conceptually communist, aneconomic configuration. Addressing how current practise both privileges the human as differentiated from the non-human, and simultaneously places ontology unequally within unsustainable ecosystems, it reads several texts of Jacques Derrida. Following a summary of recent ecological and non-ecological commentaries on the formulation of aneconomy, and a given revision of Georges Bataille's general economy, my Derrida exegesis is split between the early notion of différance, and its later concerns in post-1989 texts preceding his final seminar on sovereignty from 2001 to 2003. Concentrating on Derrida's formulations of immunology, mutation, and inequivalence, my argument for an ecological aneconomy builds by examining Derrida's deconstruction of oikos and the propre; a differentiation of excess and expenditure in material and idealist dialectics; his identification and subsequent expression of a proposition of irrefutable justice; and a challenge to animal-relegating presuppositions of human propriety. After Derrida, I argue for a necessarily valueless ecology, its imperative ontologically aneconomic and having no possible exception in necessitating a rethinking of the ontology of inequivalence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws from the reading protocols developed by José Esteban Muñoz to advance a political reading of Georges Bataille. It argues for a consistent and coherent anti-fascism across Bataille's work, from the early "political" writings to the mature turn toward mysticism. Focusing in particular on his writings from the 1930s, this article clarifies some of the key concepts in Bataille's critical theory of fascism: expenditure, heterology, base materialism, and democratic anguish. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the sacred and the level of sacrifice in the works of French intellectual Georges Bataille. Topics discussed include a two-fold effect of the ouroboric nature of discursive life, the first article of Bataille for the literary review "Acéphale," and his search for the sacred outside of the traditional forms of religion.

The author offers reflections on Acéphale, a secret society formed by Georges Bataille wherein the members engaged in some weird rites and that somebody as supposed to be sacrificed. He discusses an article by Bataille, "The Sacred Conspiracy," an argument on the absurdity of Acéphale, and the dissolution of the Acéphale group.

The article discusses the turn of French intellectual Georges Bataille to a theory of general economy. Topics include the argument of Bataille on the shared political-economic logic of capitalist accumulation and communism, Bataille's engagement with G. W. F. Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Karl Marx, and information on volume one of "The Accursed Share" by Bataille.

The article provides information on the collage entitled "Echo," occasioned by the work of collaborative artists Ryan M. Pfeiffer and Rebecca Walz. Topics discussed include comparison of the drawing and collages by Pfeiffer and Walz with those of Georges Bataille, role of surrealism in the work of Pfeiffer and Walz, and a recurring motif in Pfeiffer & Walz's collages and their wider corpus.

This essay takes up the question of community in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice (ca. 1600) to explore alternative models that challenge the violently homogenizing and xenophobic society of Christian Venice. Through Antonio and Shylock's bond-of-flesh, the play invites audiences to witness the genesis and development of a new mode of interrelationality, evoked by the melancholic condition, propelled by desire for violence, and ensured through risking death. Drawing from Georges Bataille's "law," which insists that human beings are only united to each other through rents and wounds, this article details the way that The Merchant of Venice mobilizes an imaginative possibility whereby damage and vulnerability constitute communion. Contrasting such communion with Venetian sociality, this essay identifies the paradox that sociality--premised as it is on the protection of integral, bounded selves and undergirded by the ideology of possessive individualism--disallows the union for which sacrificial communion strives. Unexpectedly, the destruction and self-abnegation expressed by both Antonio and Shylock catalyze a costly and crucial rethinking of community, one that privileges risk and loss over the rational self-preservation essential to the Christian republican view of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to reveal aspects of the relation between the image and the victim in Georges Bataille's writing, certainly as this applies to writings on art, but more particularly as it applies to Bataille's relation to the victim of torture in the photographs of Chinese lingchi punishment, which entails physical dismemberment. It will be shown that Bataille does not have a 'media specific' approach to the image but reflects Sartre's notion of the image. Critiques of Bataille's relation to the lingchi photos will be addressed (notably that of Hollywood), so as to clarify what is at stake in the relation between image and victim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of a "community of death" theorized by Maurice Blanchot with reference to George Bataille, and the discussion he pursued assuming Acéphale and May 68 as its concrete forms provides an important conceptual framework for the idea of emancipation‐oriented social movement. The thinkers discussed in here deliberated society or community as rather than being a platform of immanence that sacrificed the its singularity and the absolute otherness to an organic social ideal, connoting its singularity as the medium of revealing and sharing in a way that corresponds to a surplus within the community. Even if the most prominent aspect of the Arab Spring and Gezi Movement, storming through the Middle East, was the subsequent strengthening of the forces leading to blood and tears in these ancient lands, it is possible to answer questions about these phenomena such as "Are there any small sparks, glows or flares in the dust that can give lifeblood to the co‐existence of the inhabitants of these lands? What are the conditions?" by way of conceptual ammunition. Despite the subsequent antidemocratic pushbacks, this wave of social movements has now irreversibly placed new forms of individuality and subjectivity based on social and political freedom on the agenda of the masses in the Middle East. For the Arab Spring and the Gezi movement, the plurality of the public that emerged during the demonstrations, which could not be reduced to any identity or class, points to both the chances and the saddening misfortune of the social movements here, as Blanchot said. [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 questions how contemplative contemporary cinema "sexualize" the landscapes. Through the filmography of four directors, Abbas Kiarostami, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lars von Trier and Bruno Dumont, the relationships between nature and human body are highlighted. Furthermore, based on the "eroticism" notion developed by Georges Bataille, our study tries to emphasize how these relationships turn out to be synonymous with bliss but at the same time with terror. [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]

Georges Bataille (1887–1962) is one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century, whose anti‐humanist anthropology influenced subsequent existentialist and post‐structuralist philosophy. His wide‐ranging writings (across philosophy, archaeology, economics, sociology, poetry, erotica and history of art) frequently mention children, childhood and childishness, and yet there has hitherto been little to no attention paid to this aspect of his work. This article opens up a neglected theme in Bataille studies, and also explores the consequences of Bataille's presentation of the human condition for our understanding of the pedagogical relationship. Of particular interest is the idea of the agentic child, which occupies such an important place in childhood studies, educational theory and public policy. In the light of Bataille's anthropology, I shall explore the idea that the pursuit of children's agency is the victim of its vaunting ambition. [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]

This article explores the ethical imperative to dramatise in the work of Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze, two of the most radical thinkers in twentieth-century philosophy, as a peculiar kind of askesis. Whereas askesis is often associated with asceticism or self-denial, in the sense of self-regulation and abstention, Bataille and Deleuze advocate training the self towards intensification of the liminal and extreme (disruption rather than composure), which can rather be understood as a denial of self – its dissolution or laceration. Few attempts have been made to compare their work, even though both share a commitment to resisting the closures that bind our desires and inhibit our full participation in and confrontation with the ebbs and flows of an impersonal, immanent life. Through careful consideration and comparison of their work, I argue that both offer important methods for engendering modalities of ecstatic being characterised by sensitivity to immanence, which have important ramifications for our ability to address phenomena of ethical indifference and resist the constrictions of social control mechanisms that decimate our political imaginations and inhibit our resolve to invent a different future. In the final sections, I interrogate the differences in their invocation of affect and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both classical and critical studies of warfare often comment on the relationship between war and excess. However, even in richly theoretical work, this connection is unanalyzed. This article focuses on the link between excess and war, and seeks to deepen our understanding of why excess reappears so frequently in the study of armed conflict and security studies. Specifically, the article turns to the work of Georges Bataille, an overlooked figure in the critical tradition, who extensively theorized linkages between excess and war. In Bataille's thought, excess is a key term for explicating the design, mobilization, and transformation of war. Moreover, Bataille sees the exposure to excess as playing a key part in social attachments to violence and armed conflict. The article unpacks how Bataille theorizes excess and applies his insights to the context of precision warfare. Using the case of the accident in the era of precision war, it reveals how Bataille anticipates many of the dynamics that structure late warfare through his understanding of excess. The article concludes by describing how Bataille's vision of excess would challenge critical war and security studies literatures in relation to the problems of war experience, relationships to death, and scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1930s, towards the beginning of a long and colourful career as a translator, writer, novelist and painter, Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) proved an attentive reader of the work of the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55). This article examines Klossowski's twofold engagement with Kierkegaard, the first in the form of a commentary, published in Bataille's magazine Acéphale in 1937 addressing the Dane's use of Mozart's Don Giovanni in his philosophical treatise Either — Or, the second, a year later, being a translation of an essay by Kierkegaard, also originally part of Either — Or, offering an alternative interpretation of Sophocles' Antigone to the one proposed by Hegel. The aim of the article is to examine how Klossowski, in these texts, problematizes the possibility of mediation and translatability, and emphasizes instead the irreducibility of immediacy, secrecy, indirection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]