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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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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 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.)

Copyright of Cuadernos de Filología Italiana is the property of Universidad Complutense de Madrid 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 paper discusses Georges Bataille's endeavor to express "the Impossible" by means of specific language employed first and foremost in his works of literary fiction (L'Histoire de l'oeil (Story of the Eye), Madame Edwarda, Le bleu du ciel (Blue of Noon). This is carried out by first providing a general outline of Bataille's philosophical thought with due attention drawn to the aporias that open up before all projects of heterology inasmuch as they seek to both approximate and communicate the experiences that elude rational thought and language which traditionally works at its service. What follows is a description and explication of the literary and performative means which Bataille employs in his fiction in order to authenticate his depictions of the "inner experience" and the figure of "the Impossible". Several of the most prominent theoretical approaches to the specificity of Bataille's transgresssive écriture are referred to and further contrasted with the philosopher's consistent dissatisfaction with the limitations that language and rational, sense-oriented thought poses to the task of voicing the essence of the "inner experience". The article concludes with the argument that even literature cannot free itself from pragmatic utility resulting from the structural limitations of language. What literature can achieve, however, is to point to the Impossible and inexpressible, and endlessly invoke and respond to it. Regarded in this way, Bataille's revelatory language can be considered in a wider, French poststructuralist context, which emphasises the position of Heidegger as a reference point for Derrida and Blanchot. [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 aim of the paper was depiction the language of erotic scenes in Polish crime novels after 2000. The writers describe sex scenes in different ways. They use, among others, vulgarisms, euphemistic, metaphorical or biological and medical language. The analysis of the language was based on the books of such writers as Paulina Świst, Katarzyna Bonda, Małgorzata and Michał Kuźmińscy, as well as Gaja Grzegorzewska. Moreover, it was essential to describe these scenes’ functions and determine what the writers show in these scenes show and how they characterise the protagonists. The article includes references, among others theory of erotism of Georges Bataille. [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]

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 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.)

Copyright of Doxa / Doksa is the property of I. I. Mechnikov Odessa National University 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]

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.