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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]

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]

Copyright of HORIZONTE: Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciências da Religião is the property of HORIZONTE: Revista de Estudos de Teologia e Ciencias da Religiao 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.)

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.)

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]

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]

Copyright of VLC Arquitectura is the property of VLC Arquitectura 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 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]