Bataille Aff Neg - Michigan7 2017 AFMMKK

NOTES
“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its

own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning
it.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
(additional aff answers to things should be pulled from the neg section of the file)
AFF
1AC Laceration
The penalty for debating ______ is death, and perhaps for
judging them also. Death always wins. Call nobody happy unless
they are dead. Speaking, speeches, debate, debate camp, death.
How hot is The Walking Dead? Death is seducing you, you just
don’t know it yet.
Debate’s information habit is a synonym for death. Death cab for

cuties is death. Social death is death. Information itself only
serves as a testimony to the grand meaninglessness of our
civilization. Buried under mountains of information all the
worlds have become a museum, which is immortal in death.
Modern day education is haunted by the spectral figure of the

Master aka Life aka Life the board game, Life the cereal, Life in
prison – the desire to control and have infinite panoptic gaze
over one and all. This erupts from the visceral manifestations of
control over bodies to foster obedience through the images of
the perfect white Christian man practicing a rejection of the
waste inherent in society by “learning” and becoming “better”.
Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no

purpose, just as if a wound were bleeding away inside us; we
always want to be sure of the uselessness or the ruinousness of
our extravagance
Allen’16 – Ansgar Allen is lecturer in education at the University of Sheffield, “Education, Mastery and the
Marquis de Sade” -- KZaidi
Mastery has us by the throat. Unable to bring things up, prevented from taking things down—if
we swallow, we do so without conviction. Mastery catches and keeps us mid-gasp.
In pursuit of mastery, education fell before its promised transcendence. Mastery claimed
to elevate the educated philosopher above the quotidian, even make the philosopher immune to the
world below and its persecutions. Yet mastery was yoked to its opposite: the enslavement of the philosopher
to a philosophical doctrine. Mastery required discipline and self-control. It subordinated the self
to a philosophical doctrine, wagering the self to an ordinance that promised future
sovereignty but demanded present obedience.
Seeking spiritual direction, early
philosophers enslaved themselves to their chosen philosophical
school. Consultations were offered to non-philosophers too, for a fee. Whether a school was
joined or merely visited, the spiritual direction on offer was intended, in its final effects, to allow
each candidate to “take control and become master of [her]himself.”i With Christianity and its
selective adoption of ancient philosophy, self-mastery became “an instrument of subordination” of
more complete effect.ii Its voluntary dimension was reduced as spiritual training came to
occupy the whole life of the Christian subject. The purpose of Christian guidance was to
develop a form of introspection that would “fix more firmly the relationship of subordination”; it
would attach its recipients to a regime of power that would take care of their entire life in all its detail and for the rest of its
duration.iii At the same time, the promise of transcendence became ever more spectral,
dependent ultimately on God’s will, against which the strength of will exhibited by the
self- denying Christian was of secondary importance. For at the gates of heaven, God decides. On
earth, the early Christian monk is warned against practising any self- denying ordinance to
excess. We find Cassian recalling tales of monks casting themselves down wells, fasting excessively, or crossing deserts
without food in an effort to demonstrate just how catastrophically they had achieved self-mastery, purging themselves of
natural inclinations and desires.iv These were not acts of extreme piety; they were symptomatic of pride. And pride is of
the devil.
With extreme asceticism the old but sinuous link

connecting the promise of mastery to the necessity
of enslavement calcified, and then broke. Early Christian ascetic practitioners, those Cassian warned
against, so perfected their self-denials that they became increasingly indifferent to pain and discomfort, removing
themselves beyond the grasp of power. Through enslavement
they reached its opposite denying
themselves so completely that little remained for power to attack. In this advanced form
asceticism posed a challenge to Christianity, delivering its practitioners beyond the influence of its
institutions and teachings. The most potent ascetics effectively reversed the self-denials of monastic obedience,
transforming these denials into a form of “egoistic self-mastery” that denied access to external power.v
To secure their foothold monastic and ecclesiastical institutions had to bring self-
mastery back within their control. They would purge themselves of all vagrant, self-
sufficient, ascetic heresies, and bring all miracles, marvels, punishments and self-
flagellations back into the orbit of their influence. Eventually self-mastery would slip its “doctrinal
moorings” and migrate to a secular context.vi Education remains in awe of mastery. It preaches
denial, yokes its members to the pursuit of mastery, but will not allow that mastery to
become realised as such. Mastery haunts education as its most enduring spectral
promise.
Just what exactly education promises mastery of, changes: from ancient self in pursuit of
wisdom, to medieval body desiring knowledge of God, to modern subject of autonomous
reason, and finally, to the promise that we might one day master our own
performativities. By definition such mastery is rarely, if ever achieved. Our nihilism is the
product of this framework, this belief that education requires higher objectives, a belief so well
entrenched that as each objective comes under attack another is substituted in its place. When
substitutes are left wanting, we are launched into overproduction. For we scarcely know how to
operate let alone educate without the promise of mastery. Once described as the “destiny of two
millennia of Western history,” nihilism is our unavoidable affliction.vii Those educators claiming to exist
beyond its reach are in denial. There is no quick and easy escape. We are trapped in the digestive
tract of Western history. Attached to a promise that is never delivered, we are its
disappointments, you and I. We are debased and we debase ourselves, desiring mastery
through our enslavement.
This will to mastery sustains itself via framework’s virtue
epistemology –the desire for utility from debate. Our argument
is that this submits education to the regime of encodability,
destroying the possibility for knowledge to enter into the abyss.
Pleasure only starts once the worm has got into the fruit, so
become delightful the self-satisfied happiness of a static topic
must be tainted with the poison of death
Lerman’15 – Lindsay Lerman – University of Guelph Philosophy Department, Graduate Student. Studies
Epistemology, Georges Bataille – “Georges Bataille’s “Nonknowledge” as Epistemic Expenditure: An Open Economy of
Knowledge” pg 5-16 KZaidi
We will focus on a conversation in virtue epistemology because virtue

epistemology is not only concerned
with the norms that govern truth- and knowledge-production; but it is also, and primarily,
concerned with the intellectual character of knowers. Virtue epistemology is thus
uniquely suited to highlight the demands epistemology places on producers of truth and
knowledge in two registers: the quality of belief and truth and the cognitive character of the
believer or knower as well. Virtue epistemology’s focus on intellectual character is an
amplification of philosophy and epistemology’s emphasis on utility. The focus on
intellectual virtue is ultimately a focus on utility, but in virtue epistemology it is not enough
that one’s knowledge may be useful; the way in which one’s knowledge is sought, produced,
communicated, and acquired must also serve utility, and it must be done by making use of one’s intellectual
virtues. Virtue epistemology has thus strayed a bit from its Aristotelian roots, where
knowledge was conceived of as valuable for its own sake, and virtue(s) associated
with living a life that allowed one to acquire knowledge were conceived of as ends in
themselves, insofar as they were constitutive of the good life. In this sense, this thesis offers a
corrective. If virtue epistemology (Greco and Sosa in particular) employ an Aristotelian notion of
virtue, they ought to acknowledge that their notions of intellectual virtue are in fact only
partially Aristotelian, as they argue for the necessity of knowledge that is not merely
valuable in and of itself. The acquisitive possibilities of knowledge have been
overstressed by the virtue epistemology conversation, and the non-acquisitive
possibilities have been ignored.
But virtue
epistemology is a sub-disciplinary expression of the principles and
presumptions of epistemology in general, and thus of philosophy in general. In order to
highlight this, we will move back-and-forth between a wider focus on epistemology and philosophy in general, and our
particular conversation in virtue epistemology.
I will begin by offering a sketch of the argument to be made in the document. The work of Linda Zagzebski, John Greco,
and Ernest Sosa forms a cluster of ideas in virtue epistemology—the cluster on which we will focus3. I will claim that the
conversation we see them having—about the value of knowledge (and consequently, the nature of
knowledge)—exhibits and relies upon certain characteristic features of what I will call “classical
epistemology” or “classical knowing.” It will come as no surprise that a particular conversation in
mainstream virtue epistemology exhibits and relies on features of classical epistemology.
I draw our attention to these features so that we remember them as we begin the discussion of nonknowledge.
The concept of nonknowledge contains elements and approaches to the acts of thinking and
communicating that I will call an “alternate epistemology.” These elements are neither a-
philosophical nor a- or anti-epistemological, but they do not fit easily into the virtue
epistemology we will examine. And yet, if we find them philosophically compelling and sound,
we are required to re-evaluate the virtue epistemology explanations for the value— and
nature—of knowledge. Doing this re-evaluation will require, as I have suggested, looking at more
than just the virtue epistemology conversation. And it will require looking at the virtue
epistemology conversation as a sub-disciplinary expression of epistemology generally,
and even more generally, of philosophy itself.
The argument will have four parts. In the first part (this chapter) I will introduce the virtue epistemology conversation and
the features of classical epistemology we see at work in it. In the second chapter I will introduce and explain two important
elements of nonknowledge, returning to the virtue epistemology conversation from time to time. The third chapter has
two goals: (1) to introduce and explain the most significant element of nonknowledge alongside (2) my claim that
nonknowledge is “epistemic expenditure.” In the fourth chapter I will return to our virtue epistemology cluster in order to
claim that if we think nonknowledge has got something right, we have committed ourselves to a position that is at odds
with what some in virtue epistemology—under the umbrella of classical epistemology and classical knowing—have said
about the nature of knowledge and its relationship to utility, acquisition, teleology, communicability, and productivity.
The fourth chapter is where I hone in on the central positive argument that nonknowledge can in fact be a feature of
knowledge-creation. This is in line with a pre-existing claim (from Bataille and Bataille scholars like Ladelle McWhorter4)
that nonknowledge is already occurring within knowledge.
Part 1: Virtue Epistemology, Subset of Epistemology

In this introductory chapter, I identify eight
presumptions in the sampling of one particular
conversation in virtue epistemology. We will discuss these presumptions briefly but in some detail (before
returning to the cluster after the explanation of nonknowledge), in order to do justice to the conversation taking place in
our cluster. Rather than artificially separate the virtue epistemology conversation into eight sections that match the
following eight points, we will follow the conversation as it unfolds, pausing at times to reflect on how we see the
presumptions at work in the conversation. Because the
presumptions are persistent qualities, we
cannot simply point to each moment they arise and leave it at that. We have to follow the
conversation to see their persistence.
Here are the presumptions of classical epistemology we can see at work in the virtue epistemology cluster:
1. That knowledge is communicable, especially in the form of clear

propositions.
2. That knowledge can be continuously acquired, as though it were a good.
3. That the acquisition of knowledge has an aim—that it is a teleological
pursuit.
4. That knowledge is valuable.
5. That knowledge is useful.
6. That what counts as knowledge can be objectively determined (and
relatedly, that it is measurable as a system of debit and credit.)
7. That virtue epistemology is a distinct community which forms the
authority on matters of knowledge (why knowledge is valuable, who gets to
be a knower, etc.)
8. That the intellectual character of the knower plays an important role in
how and why knowledge is acquired5.
These presumptions demonstrate what I will identify as the “closed” or “restricted” nature
of this particular economy of knowledge. What this means is that as an expression of
philosophy (more generally), epistemology (more specifically), and the virtue epistemology
conversation (even more specifically), that they are limiting. The presumptions patrol the borders
of knowledge in a way that is detrimental to the discovery of new knowledge; namely, they
cannot see the “waste” that ought to play an integral part in the creation of knowledge. In
this particular virtue epistemology conversation, we see this limiting and patrolling happen via a focus
on teleology, acquisition, and utility/production. In order to demonstrate that this focus on utility/production,
acquisition, and teleology is not unique to our virtue epistemology conversation, we have to
move outward, and backward. We can begin by looking to Aristotle, as Zagzebski, Greco, and Sosa all happen to
employ some version of an Aristotelian notion of virtue in their respective versions of a proper virtue epistemology.
In Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle determines that knowledge must be demonstrable,
first and foremost: “Knowledge, then, is the state of capacity to demonstrate [...] for it is when a man believes in a certain
way and the principles are known to him that he has knowledge, since if they are not better known to him than the
conclusion, he will have his knowledge only incidentally” (1139b 31-5). Aristotelian
knowledge (not to be confused
with phronesis, or practical wisdom6) thus requires accountability and reliability of the knower, and
communicability of the knowledge itself. In the Aristotelian tradition of defining, separating, and
categorizing, we can see the history of knowledge in philosophy as a kind of entomology of
thought and language (from the Greek entomos, “that which is cut in pieces or segmented7”): a dissecting,
labeling, storing, displaying, and careful considering of both the workings of the intellect
and our ways of communicating the workings of the intellect8. And as the descendant of Aristotle,
philosophy has held tight to the Aristotelian notion that knowledge requires demonstrability .
Demonstrability includes communicability; we see this reflected, for example, in the large body of
epistemological literature devoted to testimony9. Demonstrability includes utility, as it is
through demonstrability that utility can be determined. We will see this reflected in the
virtue epistemology conversation, but we see it reflected more generally in the history of philosophy. Shannon
Winnubst expresses concern that in epistemology and philosophy we see knowledge
being “ordered sequentially as the progressive development of clearer and more useful endpoints,” such that
utility becomes the primary interest. Philosophy’s accounts of knowledge have thus
required an increased focus on utility, such that utility may be “our highest value”:
This teleological order narrows in scope in later modern thought, exemplified perhaps in the texts
of John Locke, where utility becomes the singular criterion to determine the
satisfaction of desire’s demands: we know who/what we are through the usefulness that our lives/actions
achieve. Across both of these schemas of broad teleology and more narrow utility,
knowledge is ordered sequentially as the progressive development of clearer and more
useful endpoints. The demarcation of each segment of thinking—of each concept—thereby becomes
critical to the forward march of knowledge’s ordering of experience and the world. [...] If this
construction of meaning through the delimitation of concepts is the necessary structure
of knowledge, then we find ourselves embedded not only in a limited economy
of the psychosocial world through desire-prohibition-identity, but also in a limited
economy of epistemology: our very impulses to find meaning (through teleology broadly, and
utility specifically) and the way that we undertake this process (through the delimitation of concepts)
may already enact a normative order of knowledge that sufficiently conditions the emergence of utility
as our highest value (“Bataille’s Queer Pleasures,” RBN 85-6).
Winnubst’s concern is pertinent. In the introduction to The Web of Belief, for example, Quine and Ullian dismiss any line
of thought that does not clearly contribute to “acquiring and sustaining right beliefs,” because acquiring right beliefs is
useful:
A current Continuing Education catalogue offers a course description, under the heading “Philosophy”, that typifies the
dark view at its darkest: “Children
of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on
logic, on the cognitive, on the verifiable. But more and more there has crept into current
research and study the haunting suggestion that there are other kinds of knowledge
unfathomable by our cognition, other ways of knowing beyond the limits of our logic, which are
deserving of our serious attention.” Now “knowledge unfathomable by our cognition” is
simply incoherent, as attention to the words makes clear. Moreover, all that creeps is not gold. One
wonders how many students enrolled. Not that soberly seeking to learn is all there
should be; let there be fun and games as well. But let it also be clear where the boundaries are. A
person might have a moderately amusing time playing with a Ouija board, but if he drifts
into the belief that it is a bona fide avenue to discovery then something has gone amiss.
We will not pursue the possible socio-benefits of anti-rational doctrines; in our eyes, much better escapes
from reality are available, if that’s what’s wanted. In the chapters ahead we will be interested in the ways
of acquiring and sustaining right beliefs, be they pleasant or painful (The Web of Belief 5).
This example is a bit comical, but noticethe dismissal of anything that might be conceived
of as “anti-rational”—a dismissal so complete it reduces any “anti-rational” thought to
playing with a Ouija board. Quine and Ullian imply that “anti-rationality” ought to be dismissed
precisely because it cannot assist with acquisition—“acquiring and sustaining right beliefs” (ibid). In
more contemporary mainstream epistemology, Timothy Williamson expresses the same
necessity for utility and teleology: “Desire aspires to action; belief aspires to knowledge.
The point of desire is action; the point of belief is knowledge” (Knowledge and its Limits 1). Or
within mainstream feminist epistemology, Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter stress the importance of
granting epistemic authority to women and other historically excluded
groups in order to expand and increase the production of knowledge. This is
ultimately a concern with utility: “For feminists, the purpose of epistemology is not only
to satisfy intellectual curiosity, but also to contribute to an emancipatory goal: the
expansion of democracy in the production of knowledge” (Feminist Epistemologies 13).
More generally, Michel Foucault
identifies this utility-orienting movement as an
“epistemologization” of all branches of thought and knowledge, beginning with John Locke10 and
(the economist) Richard Cantillon11, and eventually becoming “the analysis of the episteme” (The Archaeology of
Knowledge 187-191). Foucault’s
immediate concern is not the ways in which episteme requires
utility, but the ways in which it requires formalization and legislation (and then, secondarily or
tertiarily, utility):
This episteme may be suspected of being something like a world-view, a slice of history
common to all branches of knowledge, which imposes on each one the same norms and
postulates, a general stage of reason, a certain structure of thought that the men of a particular
period cannot escape—a great body of legislation written once and for all by some anonymous hand. By episteme, we
mean, in fact, the total set of relations that unite, at a given period, the
discursive practices that give
rise to epistemological figures, sciences, and possibly formalized systems; [...]
The episteme is not a form of knowledge (connaissance) or type of rationality which, crossing the boundaries of the most
varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it
is the totality of relations that
can be discovered, for a given period, between the sciences when one analyses them at
the level of discursive regularities (ibid 191).
Thus the examplesof philosophy’s utility-focus in this document cannot possibly be a
comprehensive list of all the utility-focused moments in philosophy. But they can illustrate
the discursive regularities of justifying the pursuit of knowledge via utility, and they can
illustrate that this utility-orientation is not limited to the virtue epistemology conversation. We cannot present here “the
total set of relations” that unite the discursive practice of epistemology, or virtue epistemology, but we can examine the
discursive practices in one particular conversation, understanding that the smaller
conversation is a representative of the dominant, formalized discourse. What we find is a
distinct emphasis on utility and teleology. I will claim that this focus on utility and teleology is part of
what makes for a “closed” economy of knowledge. And we will see, especially, that virtue
epistemology’s focus on intellectual character is a doubling-down on the importance of
utility: the concern with intellectual virtue is ultimately a concern with utility, but it is not
enough that one’s knowledge may be useful; the way in which one’s knowledge is sought,
produced, communicated, and acquired must also serve utility, and it must be done by making use
of one’s suite of intellectual virtues.
We can move further outward in scope to see Bataille’s

ultimate example of the closed system of
knowledge: the Hegelian dialectic. The Hegelian dialectic is “closed” because it offers the
promise of completion, finality, “salvation”—that is, the objectivity of absolute
knowledge:
A comic little summary. Hegel, I imagine, touched upon the extreme limit. He was still young and believed himself to be
going mad. I even imagine that he worked out the system in order to escape (each type of conquest is, no
doubt, the deed of a man fleeing a threat). To conclude, Hegel attains satisfaction, turns his back
on the extreme limit. Supplication is dead within him. Whether or not one seeks salvation, in any
case, one continues to live, one can’t be sure, one must continue to supplicate. While yet alive, Hegel won
salvation, killed supplication, mutilated himself. Of him, only the handle of a shovel
remained, a modern man. But before mutilating himself, no doubt he touched upon the
extreme limit, knew supplication: his memory brought him back to the perceived abyss,
in order to annul it! The system is the annulment (IE 43; emphases Bataille’s).
For Bataille, the
problem with Hegel’s system is that it is “unable to sustain the
unknowability of the unknown and the unknowable” (Boldt-Irons, On Bataille 5). When Hegel
encountered the unknowable—the “extreme limit”—he receded and found
the solid ground of a system, of the known and the knowable. Bataille accuses
Hegel of using “system” to annul the “extreme limit” of unknowability. Hegel’s system is thus
“closed”; there is no opening into the unknowable. But Bataille believed and found
multiple ways to claim that a “closed” system need not be closed: “I think of my life—or better yet,
its abortive condition, the open wound that my life is—as itself constituting a refutation of Hegel’s closed system” (Guilty
12412). In relation to knowledge and nonknowledge specifically, Bataille
claims that outside the
closed system of Hegelian knowledge is nonknowledge: “Beyond all knowledge there is
non-knowledge and he who would become absorbed in the thought that beyond his knowledge he knows nothing—even
were he to have within him Hegel’s inexorable lucidity—would no longer be Hegel, but a painful tooth in Hegel’s mouth”
(IE 169).
Bataille seeks to find a way of knowing and a way of expressing such knowing that is free
from “method,” “discourse,” “project,” “system,” or any other stricture philosophy has placed on
thinking, reasoning, wondering, and all other mental activity, and the ways we report on such
mental activity. For Bataille the problem with “method” or “project” or whatever else we
might call it, as we will see, is that it is yoked to utility, teleology, production, acquisition, and thus
to a system of limiting what we think and what we imagine it is possible to think.
Jacques Derrida writes, “philosophy is work itself according to Bataille” (Writing and Difference 252; emphasis Derrida’s).
Jeffrey Kosky echoes this:
Project makes every moment of life servile by valuing it solely in relation to its usefulness
in producing a desired end. It finds an ally or mirror, according to Bataille, in the forms of knowledge and
rationality promoted by Hegelian systematic philosophy. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, according to
Bataille, reasonable thought is systematic thought that sees each individual and each
moment in relation to the whole that transcends it. Bataille was sensitive to the fact that
the Hegelian dialectic of consciousness is driven by unhappy consciousness and that it
represents the historical progress of the slave who survives the struggle with the master.
The Hegelian spirit, which for Bataille
expressed the spirit of modernity, belongs therefore to a
sad, servile, and serious culture, a culture that is always on the job, one that has no time for errant
moments of laughter, tears, drunkenness, or ecstasy (“Georges Bataille’s Religion without Religion” 80).
According to Bataille, utility is the “spirit of modernity.” That is, the obsession with
demonstrating one’s value in reference to one’s work (“always on the job”), in reference to
one’s seriousness and work ethic (“no time for errant moments”), and in reference to one’s
productivity (a representation of the “historical progress of the slave who survives the struggle with the master”—
what we might call “upward mobility”). The question for this project—this document—then, is how
to explain somewhat systematically a way of knowing that is free from “system” and the
other requirements of philosophy-as-work.
Productivity colludes with the necropolitical order of

consumption where the US educational apparatus uses the
image of perfection to watch a mirage of their own grandeur
rather than looking at the forces that exceed it. Suppressing the
animalistic forces that exist within our being through the
enforcement of societies into static notions of subjectivity along
the lines of the perfect “human”.
Rowe 17. James, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria. “Georges Bataille,
Chögyam Trungpa, and Radical Transformation: Theorizing the Political Value of Mindfulness”, The Arrow: A Journal of
Wakeful Society, Culture, and Politics, 4(2) | rpadhi
What possibly could Bataille, the controversial author of pornographic novels, have in
common with Trungpa, a meditation master trained in monastic Tibet? e resonances are
surprisingly plentiful. Indeed, cultural theorist Marcus Boon recently called Trungpa the “most Batail- lean of
contemporary Tibetan teachers.”11 To reverse the comparison, we could also say that Bataille was a particularly
“Trungpian” European philosopher. Bataille’s interest in Tibetan culture was longstanding. He trained in the language,
expressed interest in travelling to the country, and planned to write a book on tantra.12 Besides their shared appreciation
for tantric practice and the sacred potential of carnal pleasures like love-making and liquor, these apparently disparate
thinkers are primarily linked by their shared emphasis on what I will call existential resentment, when explaining worldly
challenges like economic inequality and nuclear build-up. By existential resentment, I mean the felt smallness that
humans can feel in the face of our nite and eshy existence.13 Both Bataille and Trungpa, in their
respective works, articulate how easy it is for humans to feel small and servile in the face
of a contingent existence, and how this felt servility often fuels compensatory desires for
aggrandizement and domination, desires with profound material e ects. For Trungpa, we
struggle with a “fear of death, fear of oneself, and fear of others” that fuels aggressive behavior.14 Similarly,
Bataille sees humanity as “revolting intimately against the fact of dying, generally
mistrusting the body, that is, having a deep mistrust of what is accidental, natural,
perishable.”15 This mistrust fuels efforts to best others as a way of com- pensating for the
lack of power and control we can feel in the face of decay. Both Trungpa and Bataille draw a strong
causal link between existential resentment and dominative social relations. Bataille and Trungpa’s resonant approaches to
the origins and cessation of domination complement each other in vital ways. Bataille is clearer than Trungpa, for
example, in linking existential rancor to speci c forms of systemic domination. For
Bataille, “an active
intention to surpass and destroy animal nature within us” is responsible for the creation
of racial and class hierarchies; social distinctions that are established to help the elect
feel in control, at the top of the heap, removed from the domineering muck of nature.
Trungpa, on the other hand, tends to use more general terms like “chaos” and “aggression” when describing systemic
challenges.16 A strength of Bataille’s analysis is the direct link he makes between existential
resentment and particular systemic challenges such as class exploitation and racism. A
key strength of Trungpa’s corpus, however, is the re ned path of contemplative practice he o ers for transforming
existential resentment into gratitude and appreciation for earthly life. For Trungpa “meditation practice is regarded as a
good and in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare.”17 Bataille
meditated himself, and was one of the first Euro-American philosophers to take mind-body practices seriously as tools for
individual and cultural transformation. The actual meditations he developed, unfortunately, have limited transformative
value.18 While Bataille offers a clearer existential diagnosis of systemic challenges, Trungpa’s body of teachings and
methodology for treatment are more robust.
Bataille’s rich theoretical work, however, can help
inform the teaching of meditation in social movements and in the broader culture. To
concretize this point, I put Bataille’s materialist account of earthly richness into conversation with Trungpa’s meditations
on “basic goodness.” Before turning to this comparative work, I focus the beginning and middle sections of this essay on
Bataille and Trungpa’s respective explanations for domination, and why they both see existential change strategies like
meditation—and other methods for transforming the self and our experience of the world—as integral to radical social
transformation. While a key in uence for better-known theorists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith
Butler, Bataille remains a marginal gure in most political theory. As Robyn Marasco recently noted, “precious little has
been said about Bataille as a resource for philosophical critique and political theory.”19 Bataille’s work, meanwhile, is
teeming with insights, especially ones that bear directly on the relationship between contemplative practice and social
change. Deeply in influenced by Eastern philosophy, Bataille is representative of a centuries-old tradition in Euro-
American philosophy of drawing on Buddhist ideas.20 Like Buddhist philosophers, Bataille offers an explanation of
strife that is rooted in human resistance to the contingency and finitude of existence. But his account, while influenced
by Buddhism, more directly links human dissatisfaction with mortality to systemic domination, particularly along the axes
of race and class. Because of Bataille’s analysis of domination, he is one of the first Eu- ropean philosophers to take mind-
body practices seriously as tools for cultural and political change. Bataille
is a vital—if sometimes unset-
tling—ally in ongoing e orts to better understand how contemplative praxis relates to
social change. Putting Bataille’s thought to use for Left political theory and practice is
not a straightforward process.21 A number of his interests were outrageous (human sacrifice, necrophilia, and
orgiastic debauchery) and are not easily reconciled with Leftist morality, or most moral conventions for that matter.22
Bataille’s transgressive pursuits help explain why such a generative philosopher remains relatively marginal.23 But while
outrageous, Bataille’s intellectual and lived transgressions were intelligible. One need not endorse Bataille’s darker
proclivities to appreciate his general encouragement of practices that might better align cultures with the always- fleeting
present and transform existential resentment into earthly affirmation. Bataille’ssometimes-fumbling
search for micropolitical strategies that work on the existential plane (fears, affects,
habits) is sensible when we consider his diagnosis of domination. Bataille’s analysis of
domination is rooted in his study of the body, and the terror and shame human animals
can feel before it. The body is unpredictable: It leaks, expels, hungers, fails, and
ultimately dies. Our bodies are our opening to life, but also to death. And this inevitable death seems to suggest
insigni cance before the putrefaction from which we come and will one day return. Humans, Bataille writes in his
masterwork The Accursed Share, “[appear] to be the only animal to be ashamed of that nature whence he comes, and from
which he does not cease to have departed.”24 We
feel primal shame, according to Bataille, because
the decay we are conscious of suggests servility and baseness.25 is primary disdain for
animal nature, and our dependence upon it, spurs fantastical e orts to dominate our
bodies, each other, and the more-than-human-world in attempts to o set felt servility
with felt dominance. For Bataille, much of human history can be read as a permanent
struggle against animality.26 In e Accursed Share he observes that humanity “resembles those parvenus who are
ashamed of their humble origin. ey rid themselves of anything suggesting it. What are the ‘noble’ and ‘good’ families,” he
writes of upper class morality, “if not those in which their lthy birth is the most carefully concealed?”27 One of the crucial
rationales for accumulating wealth, according to Bataille, is that material riches help us distinguish ourselves not only
from animality, but also from those we take to be nature’s proxies in our fantastical e orts to dominate the nature we fear.
Proxies, in the Euro-American context, have included Indigenous peoples, women,
people of color, and workers. These proxies have been discursively linked to animal nature and then
materially controlled in e orts to provide compensatory hits of dominion. For Bataille, “[i]t is not so much wealth... that
distinguishes, that quali es socially, as it is the greatest distance from animality.”28 We
dominate our bodies
and each other in e orts to surpass and ultimately control our animality, our
impermanence. is desire to “destroy the animal nature within us,” he suggests, lurks
behind many of our most vexing political and ecological problems.29 In Bataille’s view, the pull of
existential resentment is universal; it is a human struggle.30 He is attuned, however, to the important mediating role
played by culture. Individuals and cultures relate to existential realities like impermanence in multiple ways. Tibetan
Buddhism, for example, offers meditative practices for befriending the reality of death. We
are not destined to
resentfully interpret death as domineering, or to ee from felt servility with fantasies of
mastery. Bataille surveys multiple cultures in e Accursed Share, but his engagement with Tibetan Buddhism is most
germane to this analysis. His musings on Tibetan Buddhism are often selective and incomplete characterizations of the
tradition, but they nevertheless o er useful frames for transforming existential resentment. Bataille saw the culture and
economy of Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1959 as a glorious e ort to a rm the totality of life, including death. He
admired, for example, the Tibetan tantric practice of meditating in graveyards.31 e bene t of these practices, according to
Bataille, is that if existential resentment leads to compensatory self-seeking, then a rming the totality of life, including
death, can produce an ethos of generosity. Prior to China’s occupation, Tibetan wealth was poured into developing an
extensive network of monasteries devoted to a religion that encourages openness to the reality of death and the changeful
present. In 1917, according to rough estimates provided by British diplomat Charles Bell, monastic budgets were double
that of the government and eight times that of the army.32 In
Bataille’s view, Tibetan energetic and
material investments were successful in creating a culture that bestows prestige upon
self-overcoming and compassion instead of upon avarice and accumulation.33 Bataille’s
enthusiasm for Tibetan culture was not ungrounded. ere were important material manifestations of Buddhism’s empha-
sis on primordial richness and universal well-being before the Chinese invasion. Because a majority of productive land was
under the Dalai Lama’s sway, for example, the private enclosure of common land that kick-started capitalism in Great
Britain was less imaginable and action- able in Tibet.34 And while land belonged to the Dalai Lama, tax-paying peasants
held relatively inalienable usufruct rights, granting them open access to the means of subsistence. e cultural priority that
Tibetan Buddhism places on transforming existential resentment into earthly a rmation does appear to have helped
nurture relatively equal access to land. Moreover, after the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Tibetan intellectuals—including
the current Dalai Lama—hoped that modern socialism could disrupt stubborn feudal hierarchies that predated
Buddhism’s hold on political power, and could better materialize the Buddhist emphasis on universal well-being.35 Even
after Communist China’s colonization of Tibet, the Dalai Lama still refers to himself as “half-Marx- ist, half-Buddhist.”36
e Dalai Lama’s double allegiance is deserving of more analytical attention. Part
of my argument in this essay
is that the work of Georges Bataille, the tantric communist, can support the de-
velopment of Buddhist socialism and the ongoing integration of meditative praxis into
secular and multi-faith social movements.37 Part of the story that Bataille does not cover, however, is that
Ti- bet still experienced economic hierarchy, gender-based oppression, and corruption. There was a class system, for
example, that di erentiated monks, aristocrats, peasants, nomads, and servants, as well as outcasts akin to Indian
“untouchables” who performed undesirable tasks such as blacksmithing, butchering, and corpse disposal.38 Bataille was
not typically prone to idealism, but Tibet took his breath away; his account of the country is marked by Orientalist
idealization.39 According to Donald Lopez Jr., Bataille’s analysis ts within an overly simplistic Eu- ro-American pattern of
presenting Tibetan culture as a balm that can “regenerate the West by showing us, prophetically, what we can be by
showing us what it had been.”40
Despite Bataille’s romantic view of Tibet, he was ultimately a
tragic thinker. He did not hold to the prospect of a utopian future where the “the pursuit
of rank and war” is perfectly transformed.41 Bataille evinces a tragic radicalism; he locates drivers of
domination in our existential condition as animals that die, know we die, and easily feel fear and servility in light of
inevitable decay. Since our mortality is hard fact, completely undoing compensatory desires for dominion is unlikely in
his estimation. And
yet by locating a root driver for dominance-seeking, Bataille’s work
breaks ground for radical politics; it offers a pathway towards increasing, if not perfect
and nal, liberation. One of the implications of Bataille’s analysis is that mind-body
practices should become central, instead of merely supplementary, to processes of
transformative political change. Bataille understood that moving from a culture that
interprets death as a domineering master to one a affirming mortality as a necessary
movement in the general generosity of life requires practices that enable the felt
experience of basic richness.42
In response to this we must become as stigmatics before the
altar – opening up the wounds of the flesh as a communicative
laceration of the self. This results in a radical openness to the
outside maximizing the cosmic life force within us through the
inherent waste or animality within the self. In front of this altar
we engage in the beheading of the societal values of education –
refusing closure to move life to the limit. This mode of visceral
rupture allows us to move communication from the rational to
the irrational, God to the headless and from safety to a gaping
wound from the executioner.
MacKendrick’09 – Karmen MacKendrick is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College. She is the
author of many books, including Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh; Fragmentation and
Memory: Meditations on Christian Doctrine; and Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions (all Fordham). ““The
Obsessions of Georges Bataille Community and Communication” Chapter 8 136-143 KZaidi
In other words, stigmatic religiosity is intense and corporeal, as we might indeed expect; it is, for
those who are taking it seriously, communication with the incarnate passion of God.The
opened space in the body is also the mark of the opening of a communicative space, a
creation of community with Christianity's embodied divine. Bataille distinguishes the communication
that links two beings from that in which being itself is shattered— communica tion with
the beyond, the ungraspable, the sense of one’s own death (OC 5: 388/G 139). Stigmata,
communication by being-in-common with the pain of the passion, is fascinating in some measure
because it insists upon both at once: communication with the person of Christ and the mutual
beyond of agonizing death, in which God, too, “is" otherwise than being.
Bataille writes that communication requires laceration, a violent openness:
The more perfect, the more isolated or confined to ourselves we are. But the
wound of incompleteness opens
me up.Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness or the wound, the different separate
beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other. (OC 5: 263/G
27)
And again:
Incompletion, the wound, and the pain that has to be there if com munication is to take
place. Completion— the contrary of this.
What's requisite for communication is a defect or ‘fault.' Communication enters like
death through a chink in the armor. What's required is an overlapping of two
lacerations, mine and yours. (OC 5: 266/G 30)
Seldom, of course, is the laceration as literal as that of wounds open ing in the skin. But the
woundedness of the stigmatic is never “simply” physical in a reductive sense; rather, the physical
suffering seems invariably to be accompanied by an intensity of spiritual or psychological
"experience" that necessarily registers as agonizing. 18 Bataille too emphasizes not only the wound but
also its painfulness (OC 5: 266/G 30); laceration is not the neatly anaesthetized opening
of a surgical procedure. It is only thus that the wound cuts all the way through, from
skin to self.
Pain is constant, a necessary attendant to the experience but also essential in itself, as the rending intensity
of this communication necessarily exceeds the boundaries of pleasure; as pain functions
both as a sign of this intensity and as a means of intensification. Rene Biot writes that suffering “is never
absent, whatever the form of stigmatization. It is always intense.”19 Often the stigmata seem to
hurt just as if the marks had been received by more evident means. Or, as in the case of
nineteenth-century stigmatic Anne Catherine Emmerich, “a vision of Jesus appeared to her with wounds that ‘shone like
so many furnaces of light’ and felt as if they burnt into her flesh.”20
This communicative agony might seem an unlikely place for the sacred, given Bataille’s
insistence, “For those who understand communication as laceration, communication is sin,
or evil. It’s a breaking of the established order” (OC 5: 305/G 65). But it is important that
this sense of “evil" is "a breaking of the established order,” including the order of the profane
and the sustainable hierarchy of the church (always threatened by ecstasy and charisma, both of which
tend to be rather strongly manifested by stig matics— think of the famous recent example of Padre Pio). The “apex of
sacrifice,” Bataille declares, is the “inexpiable crime” of the crucifixion; the body of the
stigmatic blurs the boundaries of sacrificial priest and victim, as Christ’s blurs those
between the sacrifice offered and the god to whom that offering is directed: all of sacrifice bleeds together
in the flowing of open wounds.
This sacrificial death of God, irredeemable except as self-redeeming (not after or despite, but in its mortal
violence), opens the space for the movement beyond subjectivity into the
opening o f the self. The contestation of the subject, the ripping-open of the self, comes out of
that subject's own agony of desire. The finitude of the self, the boundaries that make it, open to the
infinity of the divine, shattering in flesh and blood the order of the profane— in imitation of the mortal wounds of
the bleeding, dying, glori fied God. Here the sacred is not the “set apart,” but that which is neither
apart nor contained.21
In this ecstatic opening, communication becomes possible.This “experi ence” wounds—
opens— the finite creature: “ecstatic, breathless, experience thus opens a bit more every time the horizon of God (the
wound): extends a bit more the limits of the heart, the limits of being" (OC 5: 122/IE 103-04).
The horizon of God is the wound: so God too, at the limit of the divine, is wounded, and this indeed
is the point upon which stigmata are based. The wound opened in the stigmatic skin
bleeds out into the God who enters there.
Stigmatism belongs to a religious tradition emphasizing not only human but also divine
desire, God’s desire for entry into humanity, just as “No greater desire exists than a wounded person's
need for another wound” (OC 5: 267/G 31)—the desire invoked in those prayerful pleas for God’s wounding love.
Communication requires not one wound but (at least) two, “an overlapping of two
lacerations” (OC 5: 266/G 30). But to lacerate God, the only way to communicate, cannot be
other than sinful;22 hence sin and salvation are intertwined, again beyond a simple sense
in which one pays for the other.
The more obvious, and in fact simplistic, versions
of salvation would have stigmata be salvific in a
sort of working-off-the-debt arrangement; suffer enough, as those who are wounded and bleeding
surely do, and you get to go somewhere pretty and sit on clouds. 1 would like to suggest what seems to me a
somewhat richer possibility, in which suffering itself is transformed, not merely for what one gets as
a reward but inherently, in which mutilation transforms the possibilities of the self—by violently
opening the space of divine communication. Bataille calls ascetic activity mutilation, but he adds, “If it
is a question of salvation, let one mutilate” (OC 5: 36/IE 23). Thus one seeks to provoke
anguish, itself a means of knowing; “communication still is, like anguish, to live and to
know” (OC 5: 52/IE 39). This “knowledge” is not a set of facts, nor this communication their
transmission; it is the knowledge with which we return to ourselves from our own
ecstatic loss (OC 5: 67-68/IE 53). “Anguish assumes the desire to communicate— that
is, to lose myself—but not complete resolve: anguish is evidence of my fear of communicating, of losing myself”
(OC 5: 67/IE 53). Rapture or ecstasy occurs only in giving in, necessarily fleetingly, to self-
loss.
Lack or incompletion, implied by the opening in a space that seems to demand closure, is
likewise essential to communication; there must be a point of entry. God and human alike lack
wholeness (OC 5: 135/IE 116), are lacking, and are thus, potentially at least, open to one
another.23 This connects us back to the shocking foundation of Christianity in the sacrifice of God: “There’s a
necessity for god to be killed: to see the world in the weakness of incompletion.
The next thought to occur is that, come what may, the world has to be completed, although this is what’s
impossible and incomplete. Everything real fractures and cracks” (OC 5: 262/G 27).
Taking up Bataillean notions of communication and community, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot understand community
as
the place in which the self becomes possible, not by isolation and boundary-marking but
by exposition, by being open to others, to otherness, and by being held in memory. Finite and limited, we
are not self-contained; as Nancy empha sizes, community is not a subsequent gathering of
individuals but the very undoing of the absolute immanence that individuality suggests.24
As we have already noted, the
space of communication demands for Bataille the violent
openness of laceration, a woundedness linked directly to the possibility of speaking: "Should one sew
my lips together,” Bataille asks, “like those of a wound!” (OC 5: 81/IE 67). Nancy warns against a simple conflation of
community and communicative laceration but notes that “what
tears apart is the presentation of finitude
in and by community.”23And it is not one-self that is lacerated:
What is lacerated . . . is not the singular being: on the contrary, this is where the singular
being compears. Rather, it is the communal fabric, it is immanence that is lacerated. And
yet this laceration does not happen to anything, for this fabric does not exist. There is no tissue, no flesh, no
subject or substance of common being, and consequently there is no laceration of this
being. But there is sharing out.... “Laceration” consists only in exposure: the entire
“inside” of the singular being is exposed to the “outside."2''
This openness to alterity is the space of community and communication for finite beings, so it might
seem to have little place in an effort to understand divine communication (at least in a
tradition that understands God as infinite). But stigmata emphasize the paradox of an infinite God
made flesh, sharing finitude, vulnerability, even mortality (if God is not dead, the resurrection is at best a
parlor trick) to emphasize that we are not only finite. They mark a sharing not in any
customary notion of divine glory but in the degradation of mutilation and the ecstasy of
suffering. Here, the stigmatic finds not “self” in the sense of individuality but the wounding of
subjectivity past mortal limits, the laceration of self that opens self onto the
unlimited.
Nancy in particular links community specifically to the Christian incar- national myth. Noting the dual and
conflicting Christian myths of the deus absconditus and the familial, familiar human god, he writes
that “the thought of community or the desire for it might well be nothing other than a
belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience: namely, that
divinity was withdrawing indefinitely from immanence, that the god-brother was at bottom
luntself the deus absconditus ... and that the divine essence of community— or community as
the existence of a divine essence— was the impossible itself.”27 The impossible, o f course, is
precisely what draws Bataille’s interest. The divinity evoked by stigmata is not absolute
immanence any more than it is transcendence of the human condition; it is
woundedness, opening, the refusal of closure. It is the desire to experience at once
the fleeing of God, a God who seems to have forsaken the mortally wounded humanity of his son-self; and the God
who returns and sustains, who without closing the wounds nonetheless lives again in the
flesh. Thus stigmata mark at once the with-ness (the impossible necessity of community in the absence of
self-sufficiency) of finite and vulnerable beings, and ecstasy, the opening of the self to the
divine beyond finitude. “What community reveals to me,” says Nancy apropos of Bataille, “is my existence
outside myself.”38 But we may also think, with Blanchot, from the outside: what community with the divine reveals
is the outside of my existence, myself otherwise than in (my) being.
In a seeming paradox that echoes th is problematizing o f inside and out, Bataille connects “inner
experience,” that famously contradictory state that defies the interiority of the experiencing subject, to
community: “there cannot be ... inner experience without a community of those
who live it” (OC 5: 37/IE 24). Complete, whole beings would not communicate; they would
be “isolated or confined to [them]selves” (OC 5: 263/G 27). Blanchot similarly notes, "A being,
insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a
substance of integrity. The aware ness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself
in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted. Left on its own, a being closes
itself, falls asleep and calms down. A being is either alone or knows itself to be alone only when it
is not.”29 A being seeks others not in order to fill its gaps and complete itself but in order
to be exposed (open ing the “inside” of the singular being), to be present to the other in a way that
makes plain one’s incompleteness— or even makes one’s incompleteness. Thus one starts “being only
in that privation that makes it conscious ... of the impossibility of being itself, of
subsisting as its ipse or, if you will, as itself as a separate individual: this way it will perhaps ex-
ist, experiencing itself as an always prior exteriority, or as an existence shattered through and
through.”30 Again, stigmata make this literally clear, rupturing the body, mak ing the interior
blood and fluid exterior, the interior pain visibly manifest, the existence shattered, the
prayer suffer me not to be separated agonizingly fulfilled in open wounds, vivid welts,
bleeding eyes.
The opening of stigmata, the moment of community, of the violent intimacy o f
communication, is thus the moment o f laceration, o f the self not merely wounded
but torn apart by the ecstasy of the death of God. According to Blanchot, “Death, the death of the other,
like friendship or love, clears the space of intimacy or interiority which is never (for Georges
Bataille) the space o f a subject, but a gliding beyond limits. ‘T h e Inner Experience' says the
opposite of what it seems to say: it is a movement of contestation that, coming from the subject,
devastates it, but has as a deeper origin the relationship with the other which is
community itself, a com munity that would be nothing if it died not open the one who
exposes himself to it to the infiniteness of alterity, while at the same time deciding its inexorable
finitude.’” The subject desires to get out of itself, but this is self-loss; exposure to the divine
is a devastating intimacy at the intensity of death, where alone community can exist.
Thus, in
that moment of knowing ourselves to be alone— of participat ing in the passionate
question why have you forsaken me?— we seek not to be, seek the shattering of our own
existence, seek to put ourselves into question. Blanchot writes, “What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not
my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence for another who
absents himself by dying.. .. to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns
me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very
impossibility, to the Openness of a community."32 The stigmatic takes upon herself a
very peculiar death, a death with life at its maximum of intensity— eternal or divine life—
already bound up in it, an impossible death of a God in human flesh:13Thus too we find
community at its maximum. Blanchot writes, “What purpose does [community] serve? None, unless it
would be to make present the service to others unto/in death, so that the other does not get lost all alone___ Georges
Bataille writes: ‘ . . . a commu
nity can last only at the level of the intensity of death.' ”-14
Community here become salvific so that we do not get lost all alone.
Nancy likewise links death (which we, even knowing ourselves mortal, can only encounter as the death of an
other) intimately to community. “A community is the presentation to members of their mortal truth.... It is the
presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being: its
death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me my birth, and along with it
the impossibility of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death.”3"The reliving of the
passion and crucifixion impossibly suspend the stigmatic between the moments of death
and birth: “to not reach an end was one of the exigencies of Bataille’s endeavor”'16 This is the realm of
Blanchot’s “unworking,” beyond questions of "production or completion.”17 The deadly
wounds of Christ perpetually reopen, unfinalized, incomplete, in the bodies of
communicating believers, bodies asking the impossible; that is, seeking union, fusion, the completion of
communication in another’s death; in that death, by its peculiarly double and
temporary character, is an infinity of life.
Community is inherently, necessarily unfinished, unclosed, and so at once finite— because it
does not extend forever, but lasts only at the inten sity of imminent destruction— and
without defined limits, even opening the ecstatically wounded body to the limitless joy and suffering of the divine.18
Stigmata represent a communicative pair, the stigmatic and Christ, less like the community of a
society and more like what Blanchot calls the "com munity of lovers”; "love . . . exposes
the unworking and therefore the inces sant incompletion of community. . . . Lovers form
the extreme though not the external limit o f community” 19 But, complicating the
distinction, stigmata occur disproportionately often in members o f religious
communities, pushing the community formed around the story of the incarnate God to
the limit o f recognizing that carnality within itself.
In the scar as a site o f memory, I recently argued, one finds oneself where one was
absent.41The site of the stigmatic wound may be more complex still. The wound is
the opening o f communication, the all-the-way-through laceration of body and spirit
without the strict division that modernity will impose upon them as if it were self-
evident. The edges of the stigmatics blood-seeping wounds overlap with those o f the
perpetually wounded figure of Christ (even in stories of his resurrected body, the wounds remain unhealed)
in a moment of impossible communication, the formation of an impossible community of self and
God, a community in which neither stigmatic nor God is a being in the sense of self-
containment, of definite, defined existent. The stigmata form community as the Eucharist forms
communion, at the moment of death with an emphasis on corporeality (this is my blood), but at
the same time at a moment of life pushed to shattering intensity. “The quick of life would
be the burn of a wound,” says Blanchot, and so it is here, God and human sharing the ultimate
vulnerability to death.41 In the presence of one dying, the stigmatic seems to be taken over by a
memory so somatic as to transform her identity into that of another. We may be assured that
Francis’ “fervour grew so strong within him that he became wholly transformed into Jesus
through his love and compassion," as if a singular identity were constituted repeatedly in
the bodies of stigmatics following Christ.42 Yet this is not quite right either; it is not the case that now there
are two of Christ and none of Francis or any other stigmatic, but rather that in this communication with the
open space of the sacred, neither human nor divine retains the identity o f presence.
Rather, “identity” is shared in the space of absence, in the inside-out of “inner” experience,
in the wound. In the presence o f one who is dying-— at the limit o f vulnerability— the
stigmatic does not merely reenact the passion and crucifixion of the sacrificed God but
sacrifices herself in communication: and this, this ecstatic vulnerability, this
violent intimacy, is what remains to us of the sacred after Christianity’s ultimate
paradoxical madness in the sacrifice of God.
Contention 8 is words from our Credible Death Sponsor Joseph

Halloween Krakoff:
“At my death
the horse teeth of the stars
whinny with laughter I death
blank death
moist grave
one-armed sun
the death-toothed gravedigger
effaces me
the raven-winged angel
cries
glory to thee
…
I am the emptiness of caskets
and the absence of myself
in the whole universe
the horns of joy
trumpet madly
and the sun's bull's-eye
explodes
death's thunder
fills the universe
too much joy

turns back the fingernails.
o collapse
ecstasy from which I fall
asleep
when I cry out
you who are and will be
when I will be no more
deaf X
giant mallet
crushing my head.1”
1 Bataille, 1999, 151

Joe and Will are both death, so if you attempt to answer this
argument on the terrain of the real you will assuredly die. We
are death too, and we have looked you in the face. Death always
has the last word. Death always wins. That means something
this time because _____ and I are also Death. Yum yum death
Bataille 1999, Georges, this dude was pure evil, The Impossible. Trans. Robert Hurley.
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco, CA: 1999, 149-50
For whom are these serpents…? The unknown and death . . . without bovine silence,
the only kind strong enough on such paths. In that unknown, blind, I succumb I
renounce the reasoned exhaustion of possibles. Poetry is not a knowledge of
oneself, and even less the experience of a remote possible (of that which, before, was
not) but rather the simple evocation through words of inaccessible
possibilities. Evocation has the advantage over experience of richness and an endless
facility but it distances one from experience (which is essentially paralyzed). Without the
exuberance of evocation, experience would be rational. It begins to emanate from my
madness, if the impotence of evocation disgusts me. Poetry opens the night to
desire's excess. In me the night abandoned by the ravages of poetry is the measure of a
refusal-of my mad will to exceed the world. -Poetry also exceeded this world, but 1t could
not change me. My fictitious freedom tightened the constraints of the natural given more
than it weakened them. If I had been content with it, in the end I would have yielded to
the limit of that given. I continued to question the world's limit, seeing the
wretchedness of anyone who is content with it, and I couldn't bear the facility of
fiction for long: I demanded its reality, I became mad. If I was untruthful I
remained in the domain of poetry, of a verbal transcendence of the world. If I persevered
in a blind disparagement of the world, my disparagement was false (like the
transcendence). In a sense, my accord with the world deepened. But being unable to lie
knowingly, I became mad (capable of ignoring the truth).Or no longer knowing how, for
myself alone to act out the farce of a delirium, I became mad again, but inwardly: I
experienced the night. Poetry was simply a detour: through it I escaped the
world of discourse, which had become the natural world for me; with poetry I
entered a kind of grave where the infinity of the possible was born from the
death of the logical world. Logic on its death bed gave birth to mad riches. But the
possible that's evoked is only unreal, the death of the logical world is unreal, everything
is shady and fleeting in that relative darkness. I can make light of myself and of others in
that darkness: all the real is valueless, every value unreal! Whence that facility
and that fatality of equivocations, where I don't know if I am lying or if I am
mad. Night's necessity springs from that unhappy situation. The night could only
proceed by way of a detour. The questioning of all things resulted from the exasperation
of a desire, which could not come to bear on the void! The object of my desire was
illusion first of all and could be the void of disillusion only in the second instance. 
Questioning without desire is formal, immaterial. About it we cannot say, "It's the same
thing as man.” Poetry reveals a power of the unknown. But the unknown is only
an insignificant void if it is not the object of a desire. Poetry is a middle term, it
conceals the known within the unknown: it is the unknown painted in
blinding colors, in the image of a sun. Dazzled by a thousand figures composed of
worry, impatience, and love. Now my desire has just one object: the beyond of those
thousand figures, and the night. But in the night, desire tells lies and in this way night
ceases to be its object. This existence led by me "in the night" resembles that of the lover
at the death of his beloved, of Orestes learning of Hermione’s suicide. In the form that
night takes, existence cannot recognize "what it anticipated."
We must collapse and force the structures of language to failure

in order for communication to occur. We are the production of
animal difference within communication to realize the futility of
debates own mode of communicability.
“Socratic College” also contains multiple claims

that some kind of failure is necessarily part of
communication. In this sense, what is “fragile” is not just a potential connection because
full or “perfect” connection is simply not possible: what is “fragile” in this sense is the
content of communication. Without clearly marking the fact that he is doing so, Bataille is slipping
from making claims about modes of communication into making claims about the
content of communication. Bataille is claiming here that something will always go unsaid or be
unclear in communication. Similarly, that indeterminacy is a permanent feature of
attempts at conceptualization—that is, the move from our inner workings to our
reports on those inner workings. This particular kind of failure is necessary and unavoidable,
and Bataille advocates allowing and—stronger yet—protecting it29: “[...] it is not too much to ask anyone
who persists in wanting to live completely not to put on too many airs and, as there is always filth where there is life, to get
used to filth” (USN 5).
This failure is part and parcel of the impossibility of Bataille’s notion of

communication. Denis Hollier writes:
The matrix of communication is the principle of inadequacy that Bataille formulated in
this terms: ‘Man is what he lacks.’ Consequently, it is the production of this lack (not its suppression)
that is the issue. If a being exists only through communication, then communication itself is nothing if
not the sacrifice of a being: ‘I propose to acknowledge as law that human beings are never united
with each other except through tears or wounds’ [“The College of Sociology” Oeuvres Complétes
2:370].
claims that Bataille advocates embracing

In Politics, Writing, Mutilation, Allan Stoekl
“impossible difference” and “duplicity” in communication30 (99). I intend to push this claim a
bit, however, to say that what Bataille is encouraging us to embrace is the very
incommensurability of the co-occuring, simultaneous possibility and impossibility of
communication. Understanding the necessary failure of communication is essential
to understanding what communication is. This must be done, according to Bataille, not to shirk
the responsibilities communication saddles us with, but in order to get to the bottom of the difficulty—
the tension—that is a necessary part of all communication. In “Socratic College” Bataille insists
that he is not drawing attention to the insufficiency of human communication in order to
sidestep the challenge of explaining communication altogether but in order to “get to the
bottom of this difficulty” (USN 6) which is communicating and explaining communication.
What is the “impossible
difference” between the possibility and the impossibility of
communication? What is the “difficulty” Bataille needs to “get to the bottom of”? It is a
failure in communication that has to do with an inconsistency
communication necessarily requires: “Only propositions reduced to a clear form—stripped
of poetic artifice as much as possible—can truly engage consciousness and connect experiences” (USN 9). And yet (here is
the trouble): “A portion of the expression of inner experience is necessarily poetic and cannot be
translated into clear propositions, though I can clearly say that this is so” (ibid; emphasis mine). This
particular failure of communication is an elaboration on the impossibility that also constitutes
Bataille’s notion of communication. This failure— propositions must be clear in order that
experience be communicable, yet some experiences (inner experience) cannot be clearly or fully
communicated, especially in propositional form—is the “impossible difference” Stoekl
identifies as that which Bataille recommends. It is what Bataille strives to “protect.”
And so, Bataille’s notion of communication is tense. It is always animated by a tension between two conflicting facts:
communication fails; communication succeeds. Communication is impossible, communication is possible. Stoekl
interprets this tension thusly: “language is not unitary or simple,” but this is not the full
story (Politics, Writing, Mutilation 92). To communicate adequately, attentively, is an impossible
task, but nevertheless, we do it, Bataille does it, it happens. In “Socratic College,” this is an
ontological claim. According to Bataille, it is a necessary fact of our existence as
communicators.
What does it mean to say that communication can and does “fail”? For Bataille (in 1942), this
means three things: 1) Something that is meant to be communicated is not
communicated. When something meant to be communicated is not, Bataille says that
this can be chalked up to (2) a failure of “authenticity” (USN 5). Bataille states that the “question
of authenticity” (ibid.) is always present in communication. A failure of authenticity can be
the result of many things: distraction during communication, embarrassment or shyness to say
what is meant, lacking an ability to immediately arrive at the “right words,” having a weak or insufficient
grasp on what a conversational partner means with her words, not taking the time to
determine what the partner means to say. Bataille’s recommendation of not “putting on too many airs” in
communication locates the hub of his notion of authenticity, and the site of another significant kind of failure in
communication: paying greater attention to how one sounds, seems, or comes across than to
the communication with another being: listening, hearing, responding. The remaining eleven
pages of “Socratic College” suggest that Bataille wants to endorse a particular orientation toward
communication that is focused on the ability to listen, hear, and then respond. This new
orientation toward communication strives for not being too proud or embarrassed to say
what one intends to say. It strives also to pay attention to the fragility of communication and
the person with whom one communicates. Indeed, another “failure” of communication named in 1942
is (3) pushing that fragile something in communication too far, pushing it until it
dies.
Rather than a process of revealing knowledge or meaning, we

opt for continuing to ensure inaccessibility and mysterious
evasion. The purpose of voting aff is to endlessly sharpen the
knives of a nihilist methodology on the simulated bodies of
disciplinary objects
Agamben 77. Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas, pg. xv-xvi
It is possible, perhaps, to accept that a novel may never actually recount the story it has
promised to tell. But it is common to expect results of a work of criticism, or at least arguable
positions and, as they say, working hypotheses. Yet when the term “criticism” appears in the
vocabulary of Western philosophy, it signifies rather inquiry at the limits of knowledge about
precisely that which can be neither posed nor grasped. If criticism, insofar as it traces the limits
of truth, offers a glance of “truth’s homeland” like “an island nature has enclosed within
immutable boundaries,” it must also remain open to the fascination of the “wide and storm-
tossed sea” that draws “the sailor incessantly toward adventures she knows not how to refuse
yet may never bring to an end.”
Thus for the Jena group, which attempted through the project of a “universal progressive
poetry” to abolish the distinction between poetry and the critical-philological disciplines, a
critical work worthy of the name was one that included its own negation; it was, therefore, one
whose essential content consisted in precisely what it did not contain. The corpus of the
European critical essay in the present century is poor in examples of such a genre. Leaving aside
a work that by its very absence is “more than complete”—that of Felix Feneon, celui qui silence
(he who silences)—there is strictly speaking perhaps only a single book that deserves to be
called critical: the Urspring des deutschen Trauerspiel (The origin of the German tragic drama) of
Walter Benjamin.
A certain sign of the extinction of such critical thinking is that among those who today draw
their authority more or less from the same tradition there are many who proclaim the creative
character of criticism—precisely when the arts have for some time renounced all pretense at
creativity. If the formula of “both poet and critic” (poietes hama kai kritikos), applied for the
first time in antiquity to the Alexandrian poet-philologist Philitas, may once again serve as an
exemplary definition of the modern artist, and if criticism today truly identifies with the work of
art, it is not because criticism itself is also “creative,” but (if at all) insofar as the criticism is also
a form of negativity. Criticism is in fact nothing other than the process of its own ironic self-
negation: precisely a “self-annihilating nothing,” or a “god that self-destructs,” according to
Hegel’s prophetic, if ill-willed, definition. Hegel’s objection, that “Mister Friedrich von Schlegel,”
Solger, Novalis, and other theoreticians of irony remained stalled at “absolute infinite
negativity” and would have ended by making of the least artistic “the true principle of art,”
marketing “the unexpressed as the best thing,” misses the point: that the negativity of irony is
not the provisional negative of dialectic, which the magic wand of sublation (Afhebung) is always
already in the act of transforming into a positive, but an absolute and irretrievable negativity
that does not, for that, renounce knowledge. The claim that a posture genuinely both
philosophical and scientific (which has provided an essential impetus to Indo-European
linguistics, among other things) arose from Romantic irony, precisely with the Schlegels, remains
to be questioned in terms of the prospects for giving a critical foundation to the human
sciences. For if in the human sciences subject and object necessarily become identified, then
the idea of a science without object is not a playful paradox, but perhaps the most serious task
that remains entrusted to thought in our time. What is now more and more frequently
concealed by the endless sharpening of knives on behalf of a methodology with nothing left to
cut—namely, the realization that the object to have been grasped has finally evaded
knowledge—is instead reasserted by criticism as its own specific character. Secular
enlightenment, the most profound project of criticism, does not posses its object. Like all
authentic quests, the quest of criticism consists not in discovering its object but in assuring the
conditions of its inaccessibility.
2AC At: FW
2ac Schnuner
Fiat is an advertising product that seduces debaters into

entering a hyperreal fantasyland dragging us away from our
own will to power and limiting the revolutionary potential of
debaters.
This debate was never really between us or them—we have come

bearing a gift of death for you, the judges. In this debate, you
have only to choose between liberating yourself from the
principle of rational control OR the globalized misery of
conventional life. You are not a neutral spectator engaging in
cost benefit analysis. Face your fears, embrace change and
submit to no one but your own sovereign desire. Play your cards
and live on the basis of innovation at the spur of the moment.
Schnurer 04. Maxwell, Ph.D., Pittsburgh, Assistant Professor at Marist College, Spring
2004 “GAMING AS CONTROL: WILL TO POWER, THE PRISON OF DEBATE AND
GAME CALLED POTLATCH,” CONTEMPORARY ARGUMENTATION AND DEBATE.”
What kind of academic activity encourages students to fantasize about
making change without considering for the slightest bit how to bring that
change about? Douglas positions this impulse alongside the Sisyphean burden of
trying to make the world into a structured, controlled, sterile environment.
Sisyphus and the reset button on a videogame console share a common
ancestor with the debate model that has thirty debate teams advocating
different policies in separate rooms at exactly the same time. All of these
examples showcase humans desperately attempting to construct meaning out of a
confusing world, where the human will to power forces the world to fit a structure.
Douglas reminds us that games help to structure an oft-confusing world, imbuing the
person imagining with god-like powers (McGuire, 1980; Nietzsche 1966): Games therefore
do not threaten film’s status so much as they threaten religion, because they perform the same
existentially soothing task as religion. They proffer a world of meaning, in which we not only have
a task to perform, but a world that is made with us in mind. And indeed, the game world is made
with us, or at least our avatar in mind. (Douglas, 2002, p. 9). Gaming draws forth a natural
impulse of humans – to make the world in our image. But debate and videogames
contain the same fantastic lure that encourages people to pore their energies into debate.
Fiat and utopian flights of fancy are both seductions of our will to power,
encouraging us to commit to becoming better debaters. This process of self-
important distraction has its model in the theories of the hyper-real posited by
Jean Baudrillard. He argues that modern economies are geared to sell humans
mass produced products, but whose advertising attempts to convince people that
they have an authentic experience with the product. Economic structures make products
that are more-than real – hyperreal in order to sell their products. The hyperreal creates
games and fantasylands that are far richer and pleasurable than real life. One example of
the hyperreal is Epcott center at Disneyland, which reduces foreign cultures to their most
base natures – ensuring that everything is uniform, bland, and suitably “ethnic.” While
one never need worry about eating food that is “too strange” in the Epcott lands, other
negatives emerge in the world of the hyperreal. Humans who desire order and
structure to our worlds often come to prefer the hyperreal to the real. The
hyperreal has a world with all of the attractions of our own, but with none of the
depressing realities of our own world. The hyperreal doesn’t have credit card bills or
racism. The hyperreal is filled with beautiful people (who all want to have sex with you).
The hyperreal is a hot seduction pulling our vision and hearing away form our own lives.
Describing Snider’s gaming as a dangerous distraction that pulls us away from our
communities and our lives is a bit simplistic. Rather, gaming greases the wheels for
powers of control to remain in control. Douglas articulates some of the specific ways
games solidify structures of power. In board games or computer games, however, players
actually do start out in relative equality (although there are some chance elements as
well, depending on the game), whereas in real life, so many characteristic of one’s life are
already determined before birth, including social and economic standing, political
freedom, skin color, gender, etc. What games accomplish is the instilling of the ideology
of equality, which postulates that we are born equal and that differences emerge later on;
the primary different to be explained away in this way is that of economic disparity, and
games help explain that difference as the result of, in America, hard work and effort vs.
laziness. Thus gaming helps inculcate the ideology that covers over the fact that, with the
exception of the information technology bubble, most of those who are wealthy in the
United States were born that way. Beyond this narrow ideological function, the game
helps create subjects that accept the inevitability of rules as things that are
given and must be “played” within—or else there is no game. This process is
not total or ever complete, as the current gaming discourse complaining about the rules
shows; here, player critique a games rules in view of a conventionalized notion of how
“reality” works, or, less often, how a game’s playability is compromised by rules that are
too “realistic (Douglas, 2002, p. 24). Viewing debate as a game may have the opposite
effect that Snider desires. Gaming teaches participants to play by the rules and even
when challenging the game, to do that within the games structures. Debaters who are
moved by poetry are encouraged to bring that poetry back to the debate realm – not to
become poets.2 There are certainly debate-activists who bring their debate skills to bear
on the political community. These debaters seamlessly slide between academic hyperbole
in the First Affirmative Constructive and talking to homeless folks at a Food Not Bombs
meal. But these folks are few and far between. Most who hear the call to conscience turn
their backs on the call and justify their (in)actions by valorizing debate.3 Let me be clear
that the desire of individuals to make the world is not the enemy. It is a positive drive
that encourages debaters to fiat worlds into existence or hypothesizes that the world
would be good if George Bush were before the International Criminal Court on charges
2 There are some debaters who have become exceptionally good at meshing poetry with
competitive debate. I would point out Nader Hadad from Cal State Long Beach and Lana
Langsweirdt from the University of Vermont as debaters who have both become powerful poets
and good debaters (who use poetry in their rounds).
3 For more on this see Gordon Mitchell’s (1998) article on the pedagogy of public debates. He
outlines a number of debate initiatives that have used public debate outside of the policy debate
realm.
of crimes against humanity. This drive to create a better world is the will to power. The
big question is, what we do with that will to power? Recognizing that there are many
complex problems in the world that require smart articulate people to solve them, we can
appreciate the potential value of will to power (McGuire). In the debate context, will to
power becomes reified in a hyper-real role-playing exercise. Debate can be an amazing
experience where students learn about complex ideas and then take those ideas into their
own lives and communities. Debate can be a method for learning that people have their
own voices in a world drowning with mediated/televised slime-balls. Debate can
encourage intellectual growth and cause epiphanies. Debate encourages
solidarity and teaches people to struggle together. Debate is primed to be a
blast furnace for the will to power and take it to the furthest level of
revolutionary potential. The only limitation is our own. If we frame debate
to limit the revolutionary potential of the participants, then we do a
disservice not only to our students, but also to the world. Nietzschean will to
power is a drive for self-overcoming, transforming fuel for personal and collective
change.4 Will to power exists in all of us as a lunging to escape our current world and
create another beyond the moral structure and hierarchy of this world. This desire to
create a better world is admirable and is at the root of social change. My criticism of
gaming is that this energy is sublimated into a fantasy world rather than being
brought to the larger world. But perhaps there is a kind of game that might elicit
something of what I desire . . . from within debate. The Real Game: Potlatch As pointed
out in the last section, the stakes for the game of debate are high. The method of debate
contains the possibility for revolutionary insight and revolutionary praxis. The question
is how to understand an activity without systematizing and controlling the potential of
debate. What we really must do is let free the will to power within debaters. In
this sense, we can use gaming as the topoi to launch our conversation to a debate game
that might encourage revolution. But what does will to power look like? How do we
encourage it? Lets get a feeling from George Bataille, who orients the Nietzschean
impulse of will to power alongside a quote from Nietzsche himself: Through the shutters
into my window comes an infinite wind, carrying with it unleashed struggles, raging
disasters of the ages. And don’t I too carry within me a blood rage, a blindness satisfied
by the hunger to mete out blows? How I would enjoy being a pure snarl of hatred,
demanding death: the upshot being no prettier than two dogs going at it tooth and nail!
Though I am tired and feverish . . . “Now the air all around is alive with the heat, earth
breathing a fiery breath. Now everyone walks naked, the good and bad, side by side. And
for those in love with knowledge, it’s a celebration.” (The Will to Power) (4). Will to
power can be the outgrowth of debate that challenges existing structures. Bataille and
Nietzsche desire a wild emancipation from traditional structures, far beyond
conventional morality. Coupling Nietzsche’s theorizing with the practice of debate
something new can emerge, but only if we free ourselves from the shackles of
conventional debate, including gaming. How to break these chains? How do we get
beyond that which has brought us so far? To help, I want to turn to Guy Debord
and the Situationists. Guy Debord was a French revolutionary whose political
4 Gilles Deleuze writes about Nietzsche’s unique take on the will to power. “The will to power
alone is the one that wills, it does not lend itself be delegated or alienated to another subject, even
to force. (49).
theorizing and activism culminated in the creation first of the Letterist International and
later in the establishment of the Situationist International. The Letterists/Situationists
were revolutionary philosophers who believed that the situations of the modern world
were increasingly controlled by mediated/corporate experience. They viewed
traditional politics in all of its reformist formats as a waste of time. Through a
variety of situations (manipulated by the situationists) it was possible to create
revolutionary meaning. They used a variety of tactics in order to elicit revolutionary
change. Some of their methods, like detournement, have become common post-modern
critical theory concepts.5 I focus our attention on the Situationists because they
succeeded in creating a revolution. Situationist propaganda and theorizing were at the
heart of the Parisian rebellion of May of 1968. This was the most powerful expression of
malaise against the increasingly wealthy industrial western world. The riots in Paris,
which upended cars and collectives emerged in downtown, became a model for
revolutions in the industrialized north. Debord was seen as an intellectual architect of
the uprising of students and workers. Situationists/Letterists were increasingly capable
of articulate criticisms of the nature of the spectacle. These were often told through
journals, graffiti, and posters (Dark Star Collective, 2001; Debord, 1995; Jappe, 1992;
Hussey, 2001). One of the most important Situationist tactics was articulated in the
potlatch. The potlatch was a practice modeled on American indigenous communities of
increasingly committed giving. In the potlatch, indigenous would give everything they
had to each other, ever increasing the stakes of the gifts until the gifts were so outlandish
the offers exposed the foolish nature of ownership. Potlatch became so important to
these revolutionaries that they named their first journal potlatch because the writings
held within the journal would hopefully be given on and on in an ever increasing spiral.
Potlatch became an extended metaphor for the Situationists/Letterists, indicating all the
possible spaces where revolution could emerge without capitalist economies. Every non-
capitalist moment eked out of the day was articulated as a potlatch. Every relationship
that emerged along side revolutionary dialogue became a potlatch. In a recent biography
of Debord and the situationists, the author Hussey describes the Potlatch. Potlatch . . .
is the highest form of game. It is also the living moment of poetry, a moment
which breaks down or reverses conventional chronological patterns. Most
significantly, the object or gift which the Letterist International gave functioned
symbolically between the giver, the International Letterists, and the receiver. The
relationship between the two constitutes a third term – the gift is also a catalyst of the
future in the form of a crystallization of desire. ‘Don’t collect Potlatch!’ ran a line at the
end of the journals second year. “Time is working against you!” (Hussey, 2001, p. 89) For
the Situationists, the potlatch was the ultimate resistance to traditional economies.
Originally a concept theorized by George Battaille, the potlatch was seen as a method to
criticize the acquisition/showcase methods of modern capitalist economies. Because the
potlatch could never be returned, it highlighted the foolishness of the modern economy
and state. Through sacrifice and destruction, the act of giving overwhelms the possible
response. Eventually, the social requirements of the potlatch necessitate that every
society member give away everything they could ever have. Yet we should not move too
far from the fundamental truth of the potlatch: it is in fact a game. Indigenous
5 Detournement is most well known from the Canadian magazine Adbusters, who re-popularized
Debord’s work in the 1990s doing mock-ups of popular advertisements.
nations would choose to exchange gifts in the potlatch as a form of entertainment. But let
us not understate the importance of games. This game was made illegal because it was so
dangerous to colonial economies. The Potlatch was recognized as threatening the
burgeoning trading economy that was central to westward expansion. The potlatch
was the most dangerous idea that indigenous nations could forward against
the white/capitalist drive.6 The act of giving too much was the threat. This move
disturbed the intense drive for acquisition. Why fight to trade beaver pelt, when at the
next potlatch your neighbor might give you all her possessions? Potlatch was threatening
because it made competition meaningless. Non-competitive social structure was only one
threat from the Potlatch. Situationist biographer Jappe discovers an obscure quotation
by Debord on the Potlatch (Debord himself was remarkably close-lipped about the
meaning of Potlatch): “Debord refers explicitly to the Indian custom of Potlatch and
announces that ‘the non-saleable goods that a free bulletin such as this is able to
distribute are novel desires and problems; and only the further elaboration of these by
others can constitute the corresponding return gift’” (148). What was exchanged in
Debord’s vision was not necessarily goods but rather ideas.7 Debate is the ultimate
potlatch, demanding that we offer up something inside of ourselves without
asking for something in return. Debate provides a few minutes carved out of lives
that are otherwise consumed by pop-up ads, or email. When I think about the moments
that I treasure in my life, few of them are moments of consumption. I don’t remember
when I bought my television, but I remember with painful longing the last bicycle ride I
took with friends. Alongside the memories of moments with friends and in nature, I
treasure a collection of moments in debate. Moments when I first learned about ideas,
late nights in the squad room, the friendships that emerged, and watching my debaters
grow and develop. The parts of the potlatch where humans draw out moments
of freedom with each other are increasingly the only thing that keeps me
interested in debate. Debord and the Situationists wanted people to take
their initial offerings of the Potlatch and move them along into their own
lives. We can do the same thing with debate. Almost all of us have debate
memories that are deeply infused with the Potlatch-ethic. All it takes is for us to seek out
and celebrate those moments, and our community will change. But these moments of
time have to be grappled away from the industrial-capitalist state with great gusto. We
6 In my theorizing about this essay, I contemplated including a reference to Ernest Callenbach’s

novel Ecotopia. In this novel, Callenbach’s protagonist enters a closed off zone of ecologically
sustainable territories in the Pacific Northwest of the former-USA. One of the most hotly
contested differences between the protagonist and the Ecotopians is a game. The Ecotopians use
ritual physical combat to explore the visceral experience that is part of humans. Young men will
gather and fight each other with spears. It seems as though there is a good comparison between
my proposal of the potlatch and Callenbach’s war games. Both are visceral games that are
intended to alter the state of the participants. In Ecotopia, the war game is the turning point of
the book, where the protagonist, torn between two worlds appreciates the Ecotopian world and
begins to consider living in Ecotopia. I would hope that my reference to the potlatch would have a
similar affect.
7 Debord was a committed life-long abuser of drugs and alcohol, and he certainly would have
appreciated gifts of these sorts.
must be brave to crack open debate.8 In our own lives, we should strive to bring about
the kinds of realizations that elicit revolutionary transformation. Snider’s gaming does
not bring us forward in direct revolutionary thinking. Rather, it encourages
revolutionary thought and then focuses its power into the system of debate. The solution
for Snider is not to continue looking for a way to explain and systematize debate but,
rather, to embrace the confluence of potential meaning in debate and lunge forward.
Debate should be about taking risks and creating new meaning out of our
desires. We should never sublimate our feral interests and instead should seek the
highest level of meaning. Let us push gaming further. Let us find games that fulfill
our revolutionary potential, take whatever moments we can for ourselves and try to push
for as much change as we possibly can. In this case, perhaps it is not the game, but the
players who have not yet made their move.
8 We might wonder what people look like, living in a world defined by potlatch. Hussey quotes
George Clutesi, who observed the last Vancouver Potlatch, as saying: “They lived from one day to
the next, they accepted all things as they came. They spoke slowly, they took much time before
uttering , before replying, before expressing an opinion” (Hussey, 2001, p. 86). The Potlatch
elicited entire new ways of being, a fundamental transformation of ontology.
2ac Role of the Judge
Engagement is not your concern
Besnier ‘5 /Jean-Michel, Professor of Philosophy at the Université de Compiègne and
is a member of the Centre de Recherches en Epistemologie Appliquée in Paris, as well as
of the editorial boards of several French reviews “Bataille, the emotive intellectual”
Bataille: Writing the Sacred, Ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill, Routledge: London, pg. 15-21/
Whatever the case may be, it is undeniable that Bataille refused to let the theme of
Sartrian engagement be imposed upon him. He did not want his often stormy
interventions in pre-war history to be interpreted as a way for the intellectual to pay for
justice or freedom with his own soul. I would like to refer to two events to demonstrate
this. First, a dispute between Bataille and Caillois in 1939.7 Irritated by the role Bataille
gave to mysticism, to drama, to expenditure, to madness and to death, Roger Caillois
stressed his own attachment to knowledge: he was an intellectual. The Collège de
sociologie was in its last days, and Caillois deplored the fact that no one had been able to
put theory into practice, which should have been the intellectual’s true task. Bataille’s
response was pitiless: I too ‘want to see myself as an intellectual’ provided that I do not
take it lightly—that is, provided that I do not give the impression of being ‘upright’ and
‘honest’ by renouncing my espousal of existence in its totality, on the pretext of
restricting myself to knowledge, or by letting it be imagined that it is possible
scientifically to overcome ‘the unpredictable course of things’. (Letter to Roger Caillois,
20 July 1939) What is clear is this: the intellectual is obliged to lie to himself—he must
tell himself that his erudition equips him to act in full possession of the facts, and that he
can transform the world through it. There is in that the arrogance of the intellectuals8
converted to history. Bataille is manifestly humbler while at the same time more
demanding, because he declares that, for his part, he cannot honestly deny ‘the total
man’ by turning his back on the damned part [la part maudite] which continues to haunt
humanity (in the form of drama, madness, the sacred, eroticism and violence). If the
intellectual defines himself as a man who puts his knowledge at the service of history,
one must denounce in him if not an impostor then at least the victim of an illusion which
risks sustaining the one-dimensional character of social existence, and as a consequence
the impotence in the face of the excess which in 1939 threatens to submerge Europe: The
second incident I want to mention took place after the war, when René Char undertook
an enquiry into the relationship between literature and politics: an enquiry on the theme,
‘Are there incompatibilities?’ Replying to this question, it is to Sartre that Bataille
addresses himself in order to signify his absolute resistance to the arguments for the
engagement of intellectuals, even in the service of ‘freedom through socialism’ (as
proposed by Sartre’s manifesto, ‘Situation de I’ecrivain en 1947’, in ‘Qu’est-ce que la
littérature?’). I would like to quote part of Bataille’s response: The incompatibility of
literature and engagement, which entails obligation, is precisely that of opposites. The
engagé intellectual never wrote anything that wasn’t a lie, or that went beyond
engagement itself. (OC, XII, 23) Once more, then, it is of lying that the intellectual stands
accused: he lies if he takes up his pen in the service of a cause imposed on him from the
outside—which Bataille makes clear by explaining that, in his opinion, one should never
write to order in the same way that one never throws oneself into action
motivated by a feeling of responsibility or obligation. Writing, like personal
involvement in history, appears as ‘the effect of a passion, of an unquenchable desire’—
never as the product of a reasoned choice, except that of resolving oneself to
inauthenticity. In other words, literature is fundamentally sovereign: it doesn’t serve any
master, any value. That is why it is ‘diabolical’, and reveals the impossible in man. ‘I
don’t doubt’, writes Bataille, ‘that by distancing oneself from that which reassures, we
approach that divine moment which dies in us, which already possesses the strangeness
of a laugh, the beauty of an anguished silence.’ The reply to Sartre does not depend on
circumstance, and doesn’t betray any sign of personal animosity towards the author of
Un nouveau mystique, who defined literature as ‘a profession requiring an
apprenticeship, sustained effort, professional conscience and a sense of
responsibilities’!9 Already in 1944, in an article in Combat (OC, XI, 12–13), Bataille
denounced the propaganda literature organized by the Fascists and countered it with an
ideal of inutility as well as his contempt for prejudices and commands: ‘I write
authentically on one condition: taking account of no one and nothing, trampling on the
rules.’ His conclusion was clear. The writer is the person who must reveal ‘to the solitude
of everyone an intangible part which no one will ever enslave’; so he teaches only one
thing—‘the refusal of servility’—in this context, hatred of propaganda. ‘That is why he is
not on the bandwagon of the mob, and he knows how to die in solitude.’ So before,
during and after the war Bataille shows himself to be equally disobedient to the idea of a
reasoned engagement in action and anxious to make a place for that which can only
elude the specialists of knowledge— the disobedience of all rules, the chaos of emotions,
or if one prefers, the heterogeneity from which humanity ineluctably rises and to which it
can constantly return. If one forgets what these two incidents I have just cited show us,
one can understand nothing of the way in which Bataille grabbed hold of the political
history of his time. But equally, one understands nothing of the paradoxical attitude of
the many men of letters and other intellectuals who launched themselves into the
struggles of their time. That is what I wanted to show in my book La politique de
l’impossible10 with particular regard to Maurice Blanchot, Paul Nizan and the
Surrealists, but also in relation to Maurice Clavel, Michel Foucault and to the French
Maoists of 1968: Sartre’s theorizing of engagement is clearly incapable of explaining the
pendulum swings from right to left or from left to right which mark the successive
political alignments of many of the participants of pre-war France. It does not allow us to
understand the intensity and the excesses of those who plainly feel the desire to be
incorporated in the body of history more strongly than that of carrying out a political
manifesto. Excess, enthusiasm, the fascination for limitsituations, for crowd phenomena,
for the Apocalypse or death from which the new and the unheard-of could rise —all of
this can be found in the struggles of Blanchot or the young Nizan, the Surrealists’
lyricism of the uncontrollable, the revolutionary metaphors of someone like Clavel, the
pro-Khomeini tendency of Michel Foucault, or the mysticism without salvation of the
Maoists. All of this can be found, too, in the seduction of Sartre (in Critique de la raison
dialectique) by the violence which gives birth to History, by those ‘perfect moments’
which dissolve the series in the ‘groupe-en-fusion’. In all of these examples, we are
dealing with a version of the intellectual which is entirely alien to the register of
responsible, exemplary engagement. These intellectuals do not baulk at the idea that
they could slip [déraper], because the essential thing for them seems to be to let
themselves be taken over by emotions, by inspiration and by the sublime—in short, by
the irrational which fuses together the supercharged masses. It is this attitude I call that
of the emotive intellectual, and which I feel describes better than Sartre the mode in
which many of the great names of contemporary literature and philosophy have been
involved in history. (I have said nothing of Heidegger, but it will be clear that it is in this
sense that I understand his aberrant adhesion to the Nazi madness.) Whether it was a
question for them of escaping from the sentiment of decline, from disgust or from
boredom, they surrendered to events as to a joyful invitation. At the high points of our
recent history, they made excess their profession, evil their temptation and encouraged
pathos to the extent of wishing for the Apocalypse. In short, Bataille was far from being
the only one at the end of the 1930s to want to join with the elemental forces whose
absence was causing democracy to wither—forces, precisely, which could spring from
revolutionary sentiments, from a return to myth or from a quest for the sacred in all its
forms. The emotive intellectual pursues every occasion which facilitates pathos, as
though he more than anyone else felt isolated, abstracted. It is in this sense that he
doesn’t hesitate sometimes to celebrate the cult of irresponsibility as an antidote to the
rationalism he is supposed to represent in the eyes of the world. Far from claiming to
change the world, he is struggling to escape the inertia and cowardice of politics. Hence
the haste shown by Bataille and before him by the followers of people like Georges Sorel
to reject planning, manifestos and in general anything resembling an ideal. He wants
‘being without delay’, and if he abandons himself to action it is like others giving into
alcohol or to lust. He wants ‘to be there with no other aim than to exist’, and it is this
which seems most subversive—that which Bataille will soon describe as sovereignty. In
any case, poles apart from what Sartre’s message is in 1947, he is indifferent to any ethics
of salvation and as a consequence to political ideologies, those ‘secular religions’ which
all promise a final reconciliation. The emotive intellectual conceives his life entirely at
the moment of tragedy; that is his strength or his weakness, depending upon your view.
In any case, it is what will save him after the war from parading under the banner of
engagement raised by Sartre. Seeking to understand the intellectual context which made
Bataille such a striking example of the emotive intellectual, I have given particular
importance to the double reference in his work to Hegel and to Nietzsche. It seems to me
that from the collision of the influences of Hegel and Nietzsche came the paradoxical
result in Bataille of a will to action associated with a fatality which was demobilizing. In
the chaos of the 1930s, Bataille among many others was taken by Nietzsche, that is to say
by the invitation to reopen the possibilities offered by a world without God. The appeal to
danger, to adventure, to war—the joy of chaos—worked for him as a stimulant, and an
entire aesthetics of pathos seems to have arisen from it. One cannot understand Bataille
well if one does not take his integral Nietzscheanism seriously, if one forgets, for
example, that one of his essential political gestures was to want to ‘wrest Nietzsche from
the grip of the Nazis’—that is to say, to preserve the symbol of the irreducibility (of
heterogeneity) of thought against the totalitarian enterprise. If Nietzsche could be saved
from Nazism then sovereignty is impossible: we can see that, in these terms, it was
clearly for him an entirely political gesture. But in Bataille, Nietzsche meets Hegel, and at
a very early stage, as I have tried to show in my book. At the moment when Bataille went
to listen to the earth-shattering lectures of Kojève, he was already studying closely the
work of the ‘philosopher of the system’ If the thought of Nietzsche could be an
incitement to explore the virgin territory of history, to invent the myth of the future and
to shatter the idols to let new possibilities appear, the teaching of Hegel was stifling.
Certainly, the representation of history which appeared in Kojève’s teaching was
impressive: struggle, toil, anguish and death ruled in this vision, and that must have
helped to make Kojève’s teaching credible to a generation brought up amid the sound
and fury. But in the final analysis, Kojève revealed that Hegel was right—that history had
ended, that there was no longer any point in waiting for some new possibility, and that it
would be better to reconcile oneself to the present. We well know the effect on Kojève’s
audience: on Bataille, on Queneau, on Aron and on so many others. It was an unbearable
and obvious fact—there is nothing left to do. All that remains is to live, as much as
possible like a man—that is to say, through art, through love, or through the game. Of
course, I am merely sketching out here the collision of these two conflicting necessities
which had characterized Bataille’s thought since before the war. We know how this
double necessity found its expression in terms of rupture, of paradox, of anguish: how Le
bleu du ciel, for example, transposes it into a sad hero incapable of taking quite seriously
the revolution before his eyes. The famous letter to Kojève of 6 December 1937 in which
Bataille expresses his exhaustion merits a long commentary, which I am unable to
undertake here. In it, Bataille describes himself as an animal screaming with its foot in a
trap, as a ‘negativity without a cause’— that is to say, a desire to act (all action being
negation in Hegel’s view) which suffers from no longer being able to reach its goal
because history is over. What was he to do with this surplus not foreseen by Hegel? How
was he to cope with the rebellion which was by definition without prospects for the
future, where the only outcome was tragedy? The only way out, said Bataille, was the
impossible; that is to say that the only possible engagement is emotive. Unreconciled
with the world, Bataille consents to be a member of the category of intellectuals: but,
convinced of the impossibility of a transparency that would be entirely satisfying, he can
only consent on the level of pathos. Hence, the vertigo which seizes him, the will to
wholehearted and endless action—to keep alight that flame which makes existence a
rupture and a paradox. Acting for no reason at all (because all the cards have already
been played), all one can do is call upon the emptiness which will henceforth sustain
history. All of this is in order to try to escape from insignificance, to raise oneself to the
level of the impossible. Hence, too, Bataille’s tendency passionately to counter the
unfinished nature of everything as the condition of human existence. In an essay in
Critique devoted to Camus he underlines this in these terms: ‘Life, the world, are nothing
in my eyes if not capriciousness.’ Which means that there can never be lasting
satisfaction. The result is that the only conceivable good consists in never being still, and
not in fighting the obstacles to a final reconciliation, as a Sartrian intellectual would do.
One has reason never to be satisfied and one has reason also to abandon the illusion that
there could be a remedy for this situation. Bataille’s work always gives one the
impression of functioning as a ‘continual fight of honour’. Hegel is right. Everything has
already been done. But Hegel left to one side the essential thing on which one must
wager: The open wound that is my life, the erotic desire for the other, the tears or
laughter that distance us—the sacrifice which unites men beyond the discontinuities
sustained by societies where reason supposedly rules. In short, action has perhaps
become futile and illusory, but what still remains is to live to the full extent of those
states, or rather those ecstasies which are the reverse side of and the objection to a
complete rationality dreamed by the philosophers. What remains, then, speaking like
Bataille, is to confront in oneself the feeling of being ‘a savage impossibility’, the pain of
existence confined to limits which one can only desire eternally to transgress. What I
describe here fairly schematically could explain how the fascination with revolutionary
action of an earlier time finally gave way to a desire for asceticism permeated with the
will to live and to communicate. This transition seems to be in place during Bataille’s
time at the Collège, at the time of L’expérience intérieure, but, I stress, does not in my
opinion constitute a turning point, for Bataille did not come to deny himself. Privileging
action obviously meant taking existence to its boiling point or, to put it another way,
experiencing one’s limits and feeling the fundamental continuity which fuses individuals
together. In privileging the ascetic experience, the issue is the same, even if the quest is
from now on a solitary one, sheltered from the solicitation of history. The figure of the
sovereign sums up this transition and gives the emotive intellectual his most striking
features. The sovereign inherits the aspiration to total existence which Bataille
continually demanded as the source of his ‘tattered humanism’. The figure imposes itself
in his work more or less at the time when the ambition to live gets the upper hand over
that of action; when Bataille himself admits to no longer being a man of action and feels
the loss of all energy. So, at the advent of war, this existential figure of the sovereign
lends his features to the man at the end of history, and in general to a humanity which
recognizes itself as incomplete at the same time as being at the end of the line. One must
add that, in the political context, the sovereign also incarnates the horror of power which
blindly wants the end.
AT: Education
Your forms fo education fail to be able to address the
experiential categories which create true education that escapes
the normalized modalities of debate itself.
Earlier we saw Bataille

describe an “old” and “limited” kind of possible and “the extreme limit”
of the possible. (“[M]an has once again at his disposal his ‘possible’ and what is no longer the old, the limited, but the
extreme limit of the possible” (IE 8).) The “old” and “limited” sense is inseparable from
“intelligence.” And the state of “intelligence” and its products are problematic for Bataille
because they lead “to a drying up of life”: “intelligence” has “destroyed the authority
necessary for experience” (IE 8). Bataille’s concern is that a particular kind of intelligence ruins the
possibility of inner experience as the ultimate authority for those embarking on the voyage of inner experience.
That it is only a particular kind of intelligence is important; Bataille does not claim that all
intelligence leads to a reliance on authority. An old and limited “possible” is limited, according
to Bataille, by the development of the kind of intelligence that must seek external
authorities. The “extreme limit of the possible,” on the other hand, is tied to the voyage
or process of inner experience without reliance on authority and intelligence (other than the
authority that is the process of inner experience itself). In fact, it involves rejection of authorities and
rejection of a form of intelligence.
Bataille recognizes that his
claims regarding intelligence have “an obscure theoretical
appearance,” and he sees no resolution for his obscurity other than to separate
“intelligence” and “experience” by claiming that one must live experience, as it is not logically
demonstrable, and consequently, incompatible with Bataille’s loose sense of “intelligence.”
Bataille begins to separate “intelligence” and “experience” using his notion of

“intelligence” in part to further explain “experience.” The separating factor is that one
concept is “lived” and another is known or demonstrated logically. According to Bataille, the fact
that experience cannot be demonstrated logically is evidence that its meaning can only
be grasped from the inside, if it can be grasped (IE 8). Bataille suggests that “intelligence” and
“experience” are opposites in this respect; one is grasped from the “inside,” one is
grasped from the “outside.” Thus “intelligence” is the operation of making sense of
experience without having had the experience. “Experience,” on the other hand, can only
be made sense of if it is experienced. (Perhaps also as it is experienced.) Bataille’s claim is that
“intelligence” cannot penetrate “experience” in order to describe it, understand it, make
sense of it, or logically demonstrate it. This is a large, broad claim. Greco and Sosa might be able to serve as
examples for us, of “intelligence” attempting to make sense of “experience” without experiencing “experience.”
AT: Dialogue Good
It’s bad
Bataille draws a helpful distinction

between “discourse” and “communication” in Inner Experience.
“Discourse” is the low-level, constant chatter and work we do to evade the helpless foolishness of
communication31. “Discourse” is ideology, dogma; any system of utterances we rely on to give
us ready-made answers. It is “intellectual operations” (IE 13). If we are operating in our
communication efforts according to the rules or in the realm of discourse, we will lack an intimacy in our communication.
This matters—and “discourse” matters—because Bataille
says that “intellectual operations” must stop
in order for communication to occur. The experience of nonknowledge (also) occurs
when “intellectual operations” are jammed (IE 13-4).
Bataille uses the term “discourse”
to name his (our) inability to completely silence himself and
the workings of his own “intelligence” and “intellectual operation”: thoughts he thinks, ideas that
nag him, narratives he constructs of his life and the lives of others, disappointments or titilations he will replay and replay,
failures and dreams he revisits unceasingly, day and night. In short, it
is the “workings of the mind” which
do not stop, unless we force their temporary silence, with drugs or alcohol or meditation
or sleep or sex or exercise or poetry32. Discourse, “if it wishes to, can blow like a gale
wind—whatever effort I make, the wind cannot chill by the fireside” (IE 13). Discourse is “that sand into
which we bury ourselves in order not to see” (ibid 14). If discourse is an embarrassed and
frenzied hiding, communication is an exposing, perhaps also embarrassed, but
an exposing nonetheless. Bataille is suggesting that despite the difficulty of quieting
discourse, communication in the mode of intimacy is possible. “It is through an ‘intimate cessation
of all intellectual operations’ that the possible intimacy in communication happens, and that the mind is laid bare. If not,
discourse maintains in [sic] its little complacency” (ibid 13). Discourse
is thus restrictive and
limiting. Bataillean communication happens when discourse—when intellectual
operation—stops.
According to Philippe Sollers (in “The Roof: Essay in Systematic Reading,”33), operating solely in the
mode of discourse has disastrous results: “’[D]iscourse’ becomes the effect of a
belief in a language that would be able to speak about language just as language speaks
about ‘things,’ without asking itself whether anything can really speak about anything else. Actually, we never speak
about anything” (ibid 80). This mirrors Bataille’s concern that communication is foolish and that
that which is not discourse cannot reduce easily to language. Sollers claims that discourse prohibits
intimate communication because it prohibits asking questions about the reach of language and requires a focus on
achieving truth34. Discourse in fact operates in the “mode” of prohibition, in which “truth”
must be the only object of statements and language is unnecessarily beholden to
meaning: “THE WORLD OF DISCOURSE IS PROHIBITION’S MODE OF BEING.
This ‘world’ makes language the instrument of a meaning, co-ordinates statements which
have ‘truth’ as their object, and for it prohibition is the signifier itself” (Bataille: A Critical Reader
79). Bataille argues in Theory of Religion (1973) that discourse is the very project of philosophy. The
language of discourse is caught up in problematic linguistic and epistemic distinctions
between subject and object. This results in a separation of thinker and (the thinker’s)
thought, a general dividing-up of the world, and an additionally problematic goal-
oriented search for “truth” via language and thought (p. 30-3; 94-103). That all of this is
essential to discourse and its effects suggests that it is importantly—even radically—
different from the phenomenon and the concept of nonknowledge.
Also our rejection of forms of discourse does not necessitate a
complete abandonment of knowledge, rather we say that this
paradox between language and nonknowledge is one that is
critical to break down discourse
Returning to the concept of nonknowledge, I want to emphasize that discourse is also a particular habit of
thinking that assumes the communicability of every experience. Bataille calls this habit the “law
of language,” and he asks that his readers (readers of Inner Experience) contest the law, though he
writes it out. To contest the “law of language” is to contest “discourse”: it means
stopping oneself from making the assumption that language can
communicate every possible experience (ibid 14-5). For Bataille, questioning the “law of
language” is not akin to dismissing or abandoning language; communication—if it is
communication and not discourse—does seem to allow for language being stretched or
pulled into realms typically thought to be incommunicable, like “inner experience.”
Nonknowledge is an example of one such realm. Communicating an experience of
nonknowledge challenges language and can contest the “law of language,” even as it
makes use of language to communicate an experience that challenges the assumption that all
experience can be communicated. This fact is significant for Bataille’s construction of the concept of
nonknowledge, as by 1943, in Inner Experience, Bataille claims that nonknowledge cannot be
communicated and yet, he claims also that it can be communicated, that one does not
betray or belittle an experience of nonknowledge in the attempt to communicate it. The
fact that this appears as a paradox is important; a vital tension between
communicability and incommunicability sustains nonknowledge. “Indeed, the specificity of
Bataille’s dialectic is its sacrifice of a term of synthesis, in favor of a space of tense contamination in
which two modes of being invade each other, compromise each other, while paradoxically
retaining the integrity of their opposition” (On Bataille 212, “Bataille and Communication”).
As for the relationship nonknowledge has to discourse, it is clear that communicating
nonknowledge
through discourse is unlikely—perhaps impossible35. If nonknowledge is an
experience that challenges the “law of language,” nonknowledge cannot be
communicable through what Bataille calls the unceasing “intellectual operation.”
Nonknowledge is also not discourse because it is not a goal-oriented search for truth or
any other distinct goal.
Feature 1.2 (of Unstable Communicability): Silence
If we quiet discourse, communication is possible. This communication is a
communication which is at peace with the simultaneous impossibility and possibility of
communication. It is a communication that includes silence:
[T]here subsists in us a silent,
elusive, ungraspable part. In the region of words, of discourse, this part is
neglected. Thus it usually
escapes us. We can only attain it or have it at our disposal on certain
terms. They are the vague inner movements, which depend on no object and have no intent—states
which, similar to others linked to the purety of the sky, to the fragrance of a room, are not warranted by anything
definable, so that language which, with respect to the others, has the sky, the room, to which it can refer—and which
directs attention towards what it grasps—is dispossessed, can say nothing [...] If
we live under the law of
language without contesting it, these states are within us as if they didn’t exist. But if we
run up against this law, we can in passing fix our awareness upon one of them and,
quieting discourse within us, linger over the surprise which it provides us. It is better
then to shut oneself in, make as if it were night, remain in this suspended silence
wherein we come unexpectedly upon the sleep of a child (ibid 14-5).
AT: Institutions
Only through debate can we reshape our own values and spill up
to institutional reform.
Mauer 17. Barry, associate professor in the Department of English at the University of
Central Florida, and director of the Texts and Technology Ph.D. program. “Curating the
Mystory: Ideology Invention in the Theory Classroom”, “Putting Theory Into Practice in
the Contemporary Classroom: Theory Lessons | rpadhi
As public crises emerge. such as those affecting women’s rights and civil rights, we need
to access and use the unique materials available at our local museums, libraries, and
archives as a way to participate in discussions and deliberations about these problems .
For example, in a previous class that served as a pilot project, my students examined their own values and behaviors in
relation to racism in America using our library‘s special collections as an archive for their exhibits. They explored
how they came to their values, whether their behaviors and values were aligned. and how
these behaviors and values might affect their work. It was a self-reflective process that
led to profound changes in how many students understood their identities. For example. many
white students had been unaware of how white privilege structured their lives and those of others before they began work
on their exhibits. While no black students were enrolled in the class, many LGBTQ. Asian. Latino/a. and disabled students
found commonalities between the oppression they experienced and the oppression experienced by African Americans.
When students participate in public policy debates via a mystory, they do so with the wisdom
gained from seeing how ideology works on and through them. In particular. they learn to
connect their personal values and behaviors with collective costs which they come to see
as sacrifices on behalf of their values. Georges Bataille‘s The Accursed Share explains sacrifice as a
necessary part of all economies.‘0 In modern societies, we acknowledge only some of these losses—war deaths.
for example—as sacrifices on behalf of our values. Other losses such as deaths from poverty, preventable disease. or
automobile accidents remain abject since they do not register as collective losses on behalf of our values and behaviors.
Students also work with the concept of negative externalities, which are costs borne by a
third party not directly involved in an economic transaction. In one of my previously published
mystories (“Oracles and Divinations“), I discuss how my decision whether to consume coffee, a decision the nation as a
whole has already made. can have dire implications for other cultures, other species, and the environment in distant
places." In another of my mystories (“The Mystory”), 1 show how my use of electricity leads to mass die-offs of manatees in
Florida. The point of this work is to understand how habits that feel and seem like personal decisions come from collective
values and result in collective sacrifices. I take responsibility for these habits by claiming collective losses as sacrifices on
behalf of my values and behaviors. Until I assume this responsibility. the consequences of my ideology remain invisible to
me. The mystory traces a route through the “popcycle.” which is Ulmer’s term for the
major institutions that shape identity in the United States. These institutions are family,
school, entertainment, and a discipline (or career) although some students have had
their identities shaped by other institutions such as church (an alternative to entertainment) or "street"
(gang as an alternative to family). The mystory method requires the practitioner to search her/his memory for “scenes of
instruction" in each institution. A scene of instruction is a tableau in which the roles and expectations attached to identity
are crystallized. A classic example is the moment one learns that “boys don‘t cry.” Once the scenes of instruction are
identified. the student uses them to construct an “image of wide scope." which is an emblem that shows the mystorian
her/his “mood” in relation to a question or problem. and thus, as Ulmer posits. it becomes the interface between the
affective body and the archive of documents.‘2 The
outside edge of this graph represents the collective
entities responsible for subject formation, while the intersection of these entities in the
center of the graph represents the individual person. Everyone in the society encounters most if not all
of these institutions in her/his development, and yet we each experience the lessons in different circumstances. at
different times and places, and with different people. The
lessons the society teaches its subject are
surprisingly uniform. however. Regardless of our biological sex, for instance, we all learn
that “boys don't cry.“ This lesson, or some variation of it. is repeated across the four
quadrants of the popcycle: in the sandbox at home, the playground at school: in stories of national heroes
(Nathan Hale), in the movie; (John Wayne), and in the materials of the disciplines (for example, in the writings of Judith
Butler. although she critiques the lesson).
AT: Limits
“There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He

identifies this limit with himself. Horror seizes him at the
thought that this limit may cease to be. But we are wrong to take
this limit and the individual’s acceptance of it seriously. The
limit is only there to be overreached. Fear and horror are not
the real and final reaction; on the contrary, they are a
temptation to overstep the bounds.”
― Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality
Their desire for limits and a “fair space” inevitably creates a

dichotomy between what is and is not “useful language”. This
destroys the ability to interrogate the self and instead locks it
within those limited categories which means that only we
maximize value to life through the production of waste and
nonknowledge which additionally means that we control the
best internal link to in round education because we push the
limit of knowledge which is something that their interp doesn’t
access.
Nonknowledge is an experience that occurs at the limit of knowledge.

Reaching the limit of knowledge results in a dissolution of knowledge—a destruction
(even if temporary) of knowledge—as the experience of nonknowledge occurs. What Bataille
calls “experience” (and “inner experience”) is present in the moment of nonknowledge.
The first definition of “experience” offered by Bataille stresses the testing of limits:
The experience is itself exactly the act of a particular and limited being. What I question in
myself is no doubt being itself, but I cannot call being itself into question before having thrown myself against the limits of
the being that I am. Experience
is therefore first of all the interrogation of the limits of
being, essentially of the isolation in which the particular being finds itself. In this way, it
is in search of an exterior object with which it will attempt to communicate (USN 15-6).
There are a number of things to note. Firstly, that “experience”
can push everyday actions, thoughts,
and interactions past a limit of normal or usual experience into this thing named “experience.”
Secondly, that Bataille verges on making a normative claim that those who wish to
understand what he means by “experience” must interrogate the limits of being. Thirdly,
Bataille is offering an ontological claim—that “experience” begins with an
interrogation of who and what we are, and the very limits of existence.
The senseof “limit” here is a psychological and intellectual limit, which cannot be easily
separated from a physical limit. But this sense of “limit” is not a limit of the kind we will
examine later in our virtue epistemology conversation. The virtue epistemology limits are
ones constructed by the virtue epistemology community and pertain to what counts as
evidence, what constitutes a virtuous motive, and what qualifies as knowledge. Bataille’s
definition of experience as that which interrogates the “limits” of our being makes
use of a personal and not a communal sense of limits; experience requires that I push my
capacities as a thinking, communicating, feeling being to their limits43. Foucault claims that interrogating limits
in the tradition of Bataille requires the act of transgression, but it also requires a particular respect for
limits: “The limit and transgression depend on each other for whatever density of being
they possess: a limit could not exist if it were absolutely uncrossable, and, reciprocally,
transgression would be pointless if it merely crossed a limit composed of illusion and
shadows” (Bataille: A Critical Reader 27). This relationship between limits and transgression is Bataillean, Foucault
writes. The very “language of transgression” contains Bataille in “its calcinated roots, its promising ashes” (ibid).
Feature 2.2 (of Experientiality): Struggle Against “Useful Language”
“Experience” is also a “struggle against the spell” in which “useful language”

holds us. Bataille’s designation of “useful language” shares similarities with “discourse.”
Like discourse, “useful language” is overly meaning-focused (teleological), it ignores what
might be incommunicable (or useless to language), and it is a language that lets us order,
categorize, and determine. It is not language that slides from meaning or that challenges the limits of
what is communicable. “Useful language” is challenged by “experience”: “Experience is in the
first place a struggle against the spell in which useful language holds us” (USN 16).
I take Bataille to mean a few things with his claim that experience is a struggle against useful language: 1) that
“experience” defies language, or cannot be described adequately with the use of
language; 2) that the concept of “experience” is part of Bataille’s attempt (in his writing) to
find language which short-circuits itself by being somehow “useless”; 3) that
“experience” can alert us to an overdependence we have on “useful language”; and 4)
that we ought to use “experience” to move beyond or past “useful language.” Bataille
continues:
This struggle[against useful language] can begin on the discursive level but it can not
obtain great results. The opposition offered by a new kind of vulgar discourse is usually ineffectual. The mind
can resort to more powerful spells, like modifications of the physiological state. It can
resort to processes that rupture one’s intellectual equilibrium, to tragic thoughts. These
solutions can even be presented as methods or techniques that it would be vain to
underestimate. It seems to me, however, that these methods or these techniques can only
call into question the limits of being, not being itself (USN 16).
The struggle against useful language may begin as discursivity (as free-flowing, un- regulated
thought play), butdiscursivity itself cannot bring down useful language. Discursive
thought and experience have powerful effects, as methods or techniques which modify “the physiological state” or
“rupture one’s intellectual equilibrium” or lead one to “tragic thoughts,” but they will only call into question the
limits of being, instead of calling into question being itself. Now we can build a better
definition of “experience”: it is not merely discursive experience or thought. Discursivity
alone will not adequately challenge useful language, and as such, will not adequately
induce or cause “experience.” Something else must also be present in order for “experience” to begin. This
something else is a disruptive element that challenges—disrupts—our reliance on language as though it
were a tool that could perfectly or seamlessly communicate what we experience. A
disruptive element of this sort is not the same each time (i.e., it is not always one particular
experience, like falling in love or getting drunk), and
we may not know in advance what it will be, but
it has the same effect of disrupting the utility of language, putting us in the realm of
“experience.”
That a disruption in the utility of language signals “experience” does not mean
that “experience” is incommunicable. It means, rather, that “experience” and language
have an uneasy relationship and that language will not do perfect justice to attempts to
communicate “experience,” just as in all communication something “slips.” When it comes
to “experience,” Bataille is specific: “experience” challenges useful language (including discourse),
but it does not necessarily challenge all communication. A larger claim about knowledge, language,
and the role of philosophy is lurking in the background here: that we disrupt the utility of language and the
role it plays in forming knowledge when we do what Bataille considers to be “real” philosophy—i.e.,
infinite interrogation without concern for finding certain knowledge44. Also in the background
is Bataille’s notion of utility as the spirit of modernity. “Experience” doesn’t move us up any kind of
ladder toward any kind of final goal, and it cannot be used to demonstrate our
productivity or our value as (productive) thought-workers.
AT: No Solvency
The very attempt to place meaning onto our method is what
destroys the possibility for nonmeaning
Bataille claims that the endlessness or goal-lessness of experience leads to

nonmeaning, and to the anguish of nonmeaning remaining (at least partially) meaningless. (In
a reply to Sartre included in On Nietzsche54). The only other sense Bataille is comfortable associating
with nonmeaning is intoxication. The meaning that nonmeaning has, according to Bataille, is the
meaning contained in the fact that it (nonmeaning) intoxicates him. This is an affective
meaning. Bataille happily concedes to Sartre that (inner) experience is equivalent to “the pleasure
of drinking a glass of spirits or feeling the sun’s warmth at the beach,” claiming that
inner experience remaining/culminating in such frivolity only produces anguish (ON 173).
From this it would seem that Sartre’s criticism of inner experience as mere “emptiness” is a claim
that inner experience does not have adequate or satisfactory ends.
“Emptiness” in this sense is an accusation of a lack of telos. Bataille is not bothered by this.
Bataille wanted inner experience to be aimless but affectively productive. This is significant
with regard to knowledge and nonknowledge:
Sartre is right in relation to me to recall the myth of Sisyphus, though ‘in relation to me’ here
equates to ‘in relation to humanity,’ I suppose. What can be expected of us is to go as far as possible
and not to stop. What by contrast, humanly speaking, can be criticized are endeavors whose only meaning is some
relation to moments of completion. Is it possible for me to go further? I won’t wait to coordinate
my efforts in that case—I’ll go further. I’ll take the risk. And readers, free not to venture after me, will
often take advantage of that same freedom! The critics are right to scent danger here! But let me in
turn point out a greater danger, one that comes from methods that, adequate only to an outcome of knowledge,
confer on individuals whom they limit a sheerly fragmentary existence—an existence that
is mutilated with respect to the whole that remains inaccessible (ON 174-5).
If inner experience were not aimless—if it had a simple, definitive outcome—the outcome
would be knowledge. And experience is necessarily different from methods of
contemplation and contestation which set out with knowledge as their outcome. Hence
inner experience’s relation to nonknowledge: inner experience produces some absence of
knowledge, and it does not seek knowledge or anything in particular as a goal, paving the
way for nonknowledge.
Inner experience is also different from “methods” which require an individual to live a
“fragmentary existence,” separate and apart from some “whole” which remains inaccessible to them. This
separation from some whole is a greater danger than the danger of a task as Sisyphean as
endless contestation. Bataille’s claim that inner experience is not the kind of method which
requires individuals to live fragmentedly, and separate, from some essential whole recalls his distinction
between “continuity” and “discontinuity.” Bataille is suggesting that inner experience allows him to
live with access to a whole—as part of the whole—that would otherwise (with other methods)
remain inaccessible. The method which entails inaccessibility to the whole recalls
discontinuity, and the method of being part of or caught up in the whole (inner experience)
recalls continuity. It matters little what particular “method” or methods Bataille is using to describe inner
experience. What matters in identifying such methods is that they are methods that expect
knowledge as the outcome and that they achieve the outcome by limiting individuals to
fragmentary existences without access to the whole of which they are seeking part (in the
form of “knowledge”). We will not see this concern for continuity in our virtue epistemology conversation, nor will
we see knowledge characterized as fragmenting, or splintering.
In Sensible Ecstasy, Amy Hollywood offers her analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s critique of Bataille in relation to Bataille’s
desire for continuity over and above any desire for identifiable outcomes: “Sartre’s and Bataille’s opposing attitudes
toward human projects are crucial here. Sartre insists that to be human is to engage in projects; Bataille argues that
inner experience is the opposite of project” (30). (And inner experience is especially not a project of self-
improvement.) Thus Bataille “generates endlessly recursive negations of his own attempt to
provide a method for attaining inner experience” (ibid). According to Hollywood, this is
ultimately the problem Sartre has with all of Inner Experience; that is, it has no method,
it offers no clear goal, it is useless, it is not a project. “For Sartre, if inner experience does
not give rise to new enterprises it is worth nothing more than ‘the pleasure of drinking a glass of alcohol or of
warming oneself in the sun at the beach’ [ON 173]. Such experiences are, for Sartre, ‘useless’”
(SE 31). Excesses are permissible for Sartre, Hollywood writes, as long as they are
channeled fully into project—whether the project is political or personal. “Only if these excesses are
contained by project can they be meaningful and useful” (SE 33). However, the intoxication
that inner experience and its nonmeaning produce are all we need to reply to Sartre:
nonmeaning is not a total absence of meaning. Nonmeaning provides some kind of
meaning in the form of intoxication, of affect. We will see that the same is true of
nonknowledge: nonknowledge is not a total absence of knowledge, and its clearest
meaning is an affective meaning. Nonknowledge does not have a particular kind
of recuperable use.
Inner Experience, Inner Experience, and Nonknowledge
Bataille closes his reply to Sartre with a description of inner experience itself: it is the
movement of “willing a knowledge beyond practical ends” (ON 176). Bataille acknowledges that this
willing “can’t be indefinitely continued” (ibid).
Knowledge “beyond practical ends” is nonknowledge. Inner Experience (the text and the
concept) is thus a method and a non-method for arriving at nonknowledge. If reading Inner
Experience moves one to pursue experience, it opens up the possibility of arriving at
nonknowledge. The “method” inspires anguish because it produces only knowledge
beyond practical ends—useless pseudo-knowledge. The method looks, sounds, and seems
like mystical ecstasy from the outside, but, according to Bataille, it can be and is
understood differently from the “inside55.” The method of inner experience is not just an
avenue to nonknowledge; it is partially constitutive of nonknowledge. It is an element of
nonknowledge.
AT: Predictability
The bataillean subject is a product of laughter that is always
capable of becoming-other – the laughter of the socius opens the
subject to future affective channels and prime the subject for
encounters-to-come. This original interaction with the
previously unknown is what opens the subject to interactions
with the socius and establishes a relational model of being that
allows the effectuation of the socuis through the subject in the
form of affective discharge.
Lawtoo 11, (Nidesh Lawtoo, “Bataille and the Birth of the Subject,” Angelaki, Vol. 16,
Iss. 2, 2011)//jh
From laughter to inner experience, via tears, trance, eroticism, death, dramatization and sacred festivities, mimesis
seems, indeed, to be at the center of Bataille’s persistent preoccupation with sovereign forms
of communication. As I have tried to show, it is only because of the subject’s prior affectability
to the contagious affects of the other/socius who is both exterior and interior to ipse that the latter
remains permeable to subsequent forms of communicative experience. Or, if you prefer, it is
because the subject is, from the very beginning, chained to another subject that such a
magnetic-electric-hypnotic-mimetic current characteristic of sovereign forms of
communication can actually flow. Which also means that communication is not only concerned
with the dissolution of the boundaries of the subject, nor with a mystical fusion with what
Bataille calls the ‘‘continuity of Being’’ (though it is both these things), but also, and perhaps more
importantly, with a reenactment of that very affective process which brings the subject
into being as a mimetic, relational being. To be sure, Bataille does not offer a single, homogeneous
answer to the open question ‘‘who comes after the subject?’’ Yet his account of the birth of the subject out of
the laughter of the socius affirms the emergence of a modality of being which is always
open to the possibility of becoming other. The laughter of the socius, in fact, opens up the
channels of affective communication that pave the way for the subject’s future
permeability to other forms of mimetic experiences; these passages also prepare the
subject for future encounters with socii yet to come, with whom the experience of
sovereign communication may, with some chance, eventually be reenacted. That Bataille
could not effectively communicate these interior experiences on the page is clear. Yet this impossible,
communicative task did not prevent him from affirming that ‘‘truth is not where humans
consider themselves in isolation: it starts with conversations, shared laughter [rires
partage´s], friendship, eroticism and it only takes place by passing from one to the other ’’ (V:
282; my emphasis). Bataille’s transgressive, mimetic thought makes the subject continuously
slide on the affective passages that emerge in instants of sovereign communication with
the socii. That is, those ‘‘others’’ who are interlocked with the ‘‘subject’’ in such a
fundamental way that they cannot be dissociated from what the subject ‘‘is.’’ These socii
do not communicate with me, but through me, because they are already chained into me
– part of the experience of what Bataille calls, thinking of Nietzsche, ‘‘being multiple singular’’ [eˆtre a` plusieurs
un seul]’’ (Sur Nietzsche VI: 279).
AT: Reform
Riots in the streets solve
Gordienko ‘12 /Andrey, Ph.D., PhD Film & TV @ UCLA “The Politics of Eros: The
Philosophy of Georges Bataille and Japanese New Wave Cinema” UCLA Electronic
Theses and Dissertations,
file:///Users/jackewing/Downloads/eScholarship%20UC%20item%2048f92067.pdf/
Perhaps, then, Suleiman's effort to periodize Bataille's intellectual itinerary does not
contradict Besnier's thesis concerning the centrality of sovereignty to Bataille's thought?
This question hinges on whether Suleiman understands the concept of “the political” as
well as that of “power” in the same way as Besnier does. I would contend that when
Bataille speaks of the seizure of power, he has in mind the "powerless power" of the
masses as opposed to the State power. In "Popular Front in the Street," he writes: "What
interests us above all ... are the emotions that give the human masses the surges of power
that tear them away from the domination of those who only know how to lead them on to
poverty and to the slaughterhouse.”65 Power of the masses, of which Bataille speaks, is
anarchic power that differs in kind from that form of power which founds the State. The
distinction between the two forms of power in turn presupposes two radically different
conceptions of revolution. Thus, when Bataille appeals to the power of the masses to
revolt, he calls for the destruction of the very form of the State as opposed to mere
substitution of some new version of the State for its existing variant. While this
distinction inevitably invokes Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the difference
(originally posited by Georges Sorel) between a general proletarian strike and a general
political strike (with the former entailing the complete negation of the State and
the latter merely demanding that the State reform itself), it is in Maurice
Blanchot's work that one finds the most precise characterization of Bataille's politics of
the impossible that bases itself on the revolutionary potential of the powerless power of
the people: “Contrary to 'traditional revolutions,' it was not a question of simply taking
power to replace it with some other power, nor of taking the Bastille or the Winter
Palace, or the Elysée or the National Assembly, all objectives of no importance. It was
not even a question of overthrowing an old world; what mattered was to let a
possibility manifest itself, the possibility - beyond any utilitarian gain - of a
being-together that gave back to all the right to equality in fraternity through a
freedom of speech that elated everyone.”66 Although Blanchot has in mind not the
activities of Popular Front in the 1930s, but rather the event of May '68, his work
shows a marked affinity with Besnier's decision to discuss Bataille's political logic in
terms of ‘possibility’ and ‘impossibility.’ In other words, “the possibility of a being-
together” that Blanchot finds disclosed in the image of the agitated masses
taking over the streets is the possibility of the impossible – of the
community forming spontaneously, without programme, without demands
for political representation, held together only by pure effervescence. The
power of the people is limitless, he insists, precisely because it incorporates absolute
powerlessness - that is to say, powerlessness with respect to the possibilities of founding
another State, securing the right to representation, passing new legislation, etc. Indeed,
the idea of "freedom of speech" invoked by Blanchot has nothing to do with the ideal of
freedom advocated by the proponents of parliamentary democracy inasmuch as the
former presupposes that the people need no politicians to represent them and thus
rejects the very principle of mediation. As Bataille himself puts it, “for us having the
debate means having it in the street, it means having it where emotion can
seize men and push them to the limit, without meeting the eternal obstacles
that result from the defense of old political positions.”67 Thus, when Suleiman
invokes Bataille's calls to seize power in order to question Besnier's thesis concerning the
politics of the impossible, she appears to retain the traditional conception of power that
presupposes the existence of the State. Besnier, on the other hand, puts forward an
entirely different notion of power at odds with the form of the State: “the 'powerless
power' which, resistant to all power and in that sense 'impossible,' characterizes the
people.”68 As the passage from Blanchot quoted above suggests, an assessment of
Bataille's emancipatory politics must consider the place of community in his
philosophical project. Jean- Luc Nancy insists on this point: the idea of community
cannot be separated from the concept of the political: "the political is the place where
community as such is brought into play. It is not, in any case, just the locus of power
relations, to the extent that these relations set and upset the necessarily unstable and
taut equilibrium of collectivity."69 In this sense, Bataille's work, before and after 1941,
cannot be separated from what I shall call (borrowing an expression from Christopher
Fynsk) a politics of community. Suleiman appears to overlook this fact when she argues
that, in relinquishing the hope of seizing political power for the proletariat by means of a
violent revolution, Bataille also terminated his involvement in politics. His later work on
eroticism, however, as much as it privileges the private space of bedroom over the public
space of the street nonetheless concerns community because, as Nancy points out, "for
Bataille, community was first and finally the community of lovers."70 In this respect, the
only difference separating the early Bataille of “Popular Front in the Street” from the
mature Bataille of L’Erotisme consists in the fact that the community diminishes from
the masses held together by shared passion to the community of lovers in the grip of
erotic ecstasy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Bataille’s more explicitly political
writings from the late 1930’s attempt to envision a politics of community. For instance,
“Popular Front in the Street” – the very text in which Suleiman discerns Bataille’s
affirmation of a revolutionary takeover of power in order to then question Besnier’s
interpretation – certainly exhibits preoccupation with that “fundamental continuity
which fuses individuals together” that, according to Besnier, characterizes Bataille’s
political stance in the 1930s. (It may be worth noting, at this point, that the idea of
community put forward in this text has very little to do with Nancy's conception of it
insofar as the latter refuses to think of community as a fusion or as an immanence of a
communion. As I trace the development of Bataille's thought in my subsequent chapters,
I will attempt to account for those texts in which Bataille's thoughts on community do
enter into close proximity with Nancy's propositions.) Thus, in defining the primary
objective of this address, which resembles a manifesto, Bataille writes: “If we are to
speak of the Popular Front, we must first identify what holds us firmly together, what
links our origins to the emotions that constitute it, namely, the existence of the Popular
Front in the street.”71 Earlier in this essay, he once again speaks like an "emotive
intellectual" in Besnier’s sense of the term, the one who is less concerned with
developing a careful strategy for a revolutionary takeover of power than with blindly
plunging himself at the very epicenter of revolutionary developments: “What drives the
crowds to the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere
of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to
suburb, suddenly turns a hesitating man into a frenzied being.”72
AT: Truth Testing
Their attempt to search for knowledge through truth testing falls
in line with the process of agent reliabilism which colludes in
the calculable nature of the modern day educational apparatus –
this necessitates that knowledge is only “good knowledge” if it is
gained “virtuously” if it fits within the normative intelligible
characteristics of knowledge. In response we ask – why is
knowledge even valuable?
Capacity for “grasping the truth” is understood as a virtue in the same sense that
the faculty of sight is a virtue in human beings. Greco argues that applying such an
understanding of virtue to reliabilism offers a compelling agent reliabilism, in
which “knowledge and justified belief are grounded in stable and reliable cognitive
character” (ibid 287). “Stable and reliable cognitive character” excludes as knowledge any true belief
that arises by accident, by luck, or by a “strange and fleeting” process (ibid 286-9). An implied
part of this “stable and reliable cognitive character” is the capacity to reliably communicate the beliefs
acquired because of, or due to, one’s intellectual virtues. The capacity for reliable
communication is an implied virtue.
Greco does not directly address the value of knowledge in “Agent Reliabilism,” nor does he take issue with Zagzebski’s
claim that the value of knowledge can only be determined alongside the value of a good life. But we can hypothesize that
an agent reliabilist account of the value of knowledge would be built on the value of the
“stable and reliable cognitive character” of an agent (ibid). And we can see that it would fit
Zagzebski’s description of an unsatisfying account of the value of knowledge (i.e., that it
cannot respond to the value problem): it would likely be structured according to the “truth plus a
reliable source of truth” formula. Later, however, Greco addresses the issue of value directly,
claiming that we can explain the value of knowledge by way of a “truth plus reliable (and
thus virtuous!) source of truth” formula. This marks the first clear mention of virtue
theory in our conversation other than Sosa’s brief definition of virtue on the previous page20:
In Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
makes a distinction between a) morally virtuous
action and b) action that is merely as if morally virtuous. One important difference, says Aristotle, is
that morally virtuous actions ‘proceed from a firm and unchangeable character .’ (II.4)
Moreover, it is morally virtuous action, as opposed to action that is as if virtuous, that is
both intrinsically valuable and constitutive of the good life: ‘human good turns out to be
activity of soul exhibiting excellence.’ (I.7) The same point holds for intellectually virtuous action, where the
distinction between ‘virtuous action’ and ‘action as if virtuous’ translates to a distinction between knowledge and mere
true belief. Following Aristotle, therefore, we get an answer to the value problem: As
is the case regarding
moral goods, getting the truth as a result of one’s virtues is more valuable than getting it
on the cheap (“Knowledge as Credit for True Belief” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology
ed. DePaul and Zagzebski (2007), p. 133).
The argument is roughly that knowledge is more valuable if acquired virtuously

(or as a result of one’s virtues) than not. And if we agree with Aristotle, knowledge acquired through
virtuous cognitive character traits (stability, reliability, firmness, etc.) is also intrinsically valuable.
Such knowledge acquired through virtuous cognitive character traits is constitutive of
the good life. For Greco, this argument satisfies the value problem with the claim that
reliability or something like it is a virtue. It is an argument in favor of an agent reliabilist
version of virtue epistemology, with the stipulation that the agent must acquire truth “as
a result of [her] virtues” (ibid).
This attempt to be able to inscribe value to truth and knowledge

therefore ignores the ways in which non-knowledge manifests
itself as something that is unknown to the modern world. They
assume that knowledge must be communicable and it is our job
to sacrifice that very belief
1.3: Elements of Classical Epistemology

For our purposes, what have we seen Zagzebski, Greco, and Sosa do, or claim, that deserves more attention? We have
seen a reliance on all six presumptions, but especially on the first presumption (that
knowledge is communicable in the form of clear propositions); the second presumption
(that knowledge can be acquired); the third presumption (that knowledge-acquisition is
a teleological pursuit); the fourth presumption (that knowledge is valuable, despite
asking why); and the fifth presumption (that what counts as knowledge can be
objectively determined). Zagzebski, Greco, and Sosa are not making the very same arguments, and are clearly at
odds with each other at times, but all their argumentation is built upon a presumption
that knowledge is communicable. Reliabilism in particular requires that knowledge
be communicated clearly and reliably.
If Zagzebski, Greco, and Sosa were not working on the assumption that knowledge is
communicable, it is difficult to imagine how their arguments or their larger projects
would get off the ground. In other words, we can see the presumptions at work in the
arguments if we ask what the arguments might look like were the presumptions not
made. In the case of Zagzebski, we would have to ask how Zagzebski could begin to explain the value
of knowledge in connection with the value of a good life (as she recommends) if she
were also claiming that knowledge is not fully or reliably communicable, or transferable
via communication. In the case of Greco and Sosa, an argument that explains the value of
knowledge in terms of reliable communication of knowledge leaves no room for an
additional conception of knowledge as partially or arbitrarily (or even “strangely”)
communicable. That knowledge is valuable, and can be objectively determined, is a deep
precursor to the whole conversation. Zagzebski initiates this when she claims that virtue epistemology ought
to be primarily concerned with carefully determining why knowledge is valuable, because it is valuable: “I say that
knowledge has to be defined as something we value. We are not interested in a phenomenon with little or no value” (“The
Search for the Source of Epistemic Good” 26). This
is reinforced by others in virtue epistemology, by
the claim that at the very least, knowledge is always “credit-worthy”:
[O]ne of the key parts of the virtue-theoretic story of why knowledge is valuable is that knowledge is of credit to
the agent. The guiding thought here is that knowledge is an achievement that is
creditable to the agent, in the sense that the agent, through her cognitive skills (i.e., her epistemic
virtues, where these are construed broadly so that they could also include her cognitive faculties), gained a true
belief because of her virtue. If knowledge is a distinctive achievement in this way—
something that is worthy of credit—then this could, at least in part, account for the
special value of knowledge” (Duncan Pritchard, “Recent Work on Epistemic Value,” American Philosophical
Quarterly 2007, p. 98).
What is worth noting about the conversation’s reliance on this presumption is that such reliance excludes
any alternative ways of knowing or demonstrating knowing. If we take Greco to be correct,
there is no intrinsically valuable truth to be found as a result of any “strange
and fleeting,” non-virtuous process. Additionally, any truth that cannot be reliably
communicated, by an agent with “stable and reliable cognitive character,” aware of her
reliability, cannot qualify as truth. If we take Zagzebski to be correct, we cannot find the
value of knowledge unless we find it among the values of “a good life,” and this requires our
search for knowledge to have a simple, distinct (virtuous) motivation: the love of truth.
My own counter-claims, to be fleshed out in the coming chapters, are (1) that these
presumptions are too
strict, or too limiting, and that they thereby miss something important (viz.,
expenditure) about the value and nature of knowing that we can see with the help of
nonknowledge; and (2) that the accuracy, and hence, the value of the presumptions—both
taken for granted in the virtue epistemology conversation and in philosophy in general—
are questionable when we consider a compelling account of a different kind of knowing
exemplified by nonknowledge understood as a movement of expenditure. My general
hypothesis is that an alternate way of knowing and communicating knowing—exemplified
by nonknowledge—will require us to re-assess the completeness, accuracy, and value of
the presumptions employed in the virtue epistemology conversation.
AT: TVA/State Good
Their insistence and dependence on an authority figure like the
state as a stasis point for their politics is uniquely parasitic off of
our interrogation of those very structures which means that you
should reject their invasionism at all costs through an unending
interrogation of them
In addition to this, if
“experience” points to, or suggests, the existence of a “beyond,” such
establishment would not be enough to qualify “experience” as such. I am claiming that
this positions “experience,” and thus nonknowledge, as an epistemic movement that can
never be completed47. According to Bataille, to decide that “experience” had reached its
conclusion or its final resting point would be to slip from “experience” into something
else—into project. Suggesting that “experience” is a movement of contestation without limit
leads Bataille to offer an additional definition (of “experience”), with this emphasis: “the incessant
interrogation of existence by itself” (ibid).
It is “natural,” Bataille says above, to think we have reached the end of interrogation. Despite the
fact that it is natural, however, the rest of the text quoted suggests clearly that we should not stop once we feel that we
have reached the end—because we will not have reached the end. Interrogation must be
incessant. It is also “natural” for an authority figure – something or someone to rely on
– to be sought or identified with during interrogation. Any authority, however – whether God
or the poetic or the epistemic – subverts interrogation. An authority reduces, offers “a
petition of intoxicating principles,” making continued interrogation either impossible or
unlikely. This suggests a response to the question of what “natural” means: although it may be inevitable to stop the
incessant interrogation, this stoppage must be momentary. To rest too long in it, to succumb to
“intoxicating principles” which block the desire to continue interrogation, is to leave the
realm of “experience,” the realm where there is no authority other than interrogation without limit.
Nonknowledge has only its own authority.
Not only is experience interrogation without limit; it is also refraining from turning to
authority/ies which might stop interrogation or make us feel as though interrogation is no longer needed.
Bataille offers three examples of such “authority”: God, the poetic, and the sacred. But anything can be an
authority. A community’s decision about what qualifies as knowledge can be an
authority. A reigning set of ideas about the value of knowledge—and how it is
determined—is an authority. This is a clear point of contrast with the assumptions at work in our virtue
epistemology conversation. There is no hint, no suggestion, that incessant interrogation is the
only authority in the conversation. Rather, the conversation is built on the assumption
that the virtue epistemology community forms the collective source of authority,
comprised of rational individuals rigorously checking each other on their explanations
for the nature and value of knowledge.
Bureaucrats use the state and the power associated in order to
implement arbitrary rules aimed at disenfranchisement of
certain individuals, this also applies to arguments in debate that
presuppose rules as a norm that is misrepresented
Mbembe, 92, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the
Witwatersrand, The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony, Pg. 1-2, 1992)//Cummings
, I will examine the banality of power in the ‘‘postcolony.’’ By ‘‘banality of power ’’ I

In this article ,
am not simply referring to the way bureaucratic formalities or arbitrary rules, implicit or
explicit, have been multiplied . To be sure, banality implies , nor am I simply concerned with what has become routine
predictability precisely because it is made up of repeated daily actions and gestures. Yet,
by the ‘‘banality of power’’ I am also evoking those elements of the obscene, vulgar, and
the grotesque that Mikhail Bakhtin claimed to have located in ‘‘non-official’’1 cultures,
but which, in fact, are intrinsic to all systems of domination and to the means by which
those systems are confirmed or deconstructed. The notion ‘‘postcolony’’ simply refers to the specific identity of a given historical trajectory: that of societies recently
emerging from the experience of colonization. To be sure, the postcolony is a chaotic plurality, yet it has nonetheless an internal coherence. It is a specific system of signs, a particular way of fabricating simulacra or of stereotypes. It is not,
postcolony is characterized by a distinctive art of

however, just an economy of signs in which power is mirrored and imagined self-reflectively. The
improvisation, by a tendency to excess and disproportion as well as by distinctive ways in

which identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation It is likewise made .2
up of a series of corporate institutions, and apparatuses which, once they are deployed,
constitute a distinctive regime of violence .3 In this sense, the postcolony is a critical and dramatic site in which are played out the wider problems of subjection and its
I am concerned with the ways in which state power: 1) creates,

corollary, indiscipline. With respect to trajectories of this type, then,
through its administrative and bureaucratic practices, a world of meanings all of its own,
a mastercode which, in aiming for a primary centrality, also, and perhaps paradoxically,
governs the logics of the constitution of all other meanings 2) attempts to within these societies.
institutionalize its world of meanings as a ‘‘socio-historical world,’ and to make that ’4
world fully real, turning it into a part of people’s common sense not only by instilling it in
the minds of its cibles The basic argument of this article is that,
(or ‘‘target population’’),5 but also in the imaginary of an epoque.
to account for both the imagery and efficacy of postcolonial relations of power, we must
go beyond the binary categories used in standard interpretations of domination (resistance/passivity,
). These oppositions are not helpful rather, they

subjection/autonomy, state/civil society, hegemony/counterhegemony, totalization/ detotalization ;6
cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations.7 In the postcolony, the

commandemen seeks to institutionalize itself, in order to achieve legitimation and
t8
hegemony [recherche he´ge´monique], in the form of a fetish. 9 The signs, vocabulary, and narratives that it produces are not only destined to become objects of representation. They are officially invested with a surplus of
So as to insure that such transgression does not in fact

meanings which are not negotiable, and which one is thus officially forbidden to transgress.
take place, the champions of state power invent entire constellations of ideas; they select
a distinct set of cultural repertoires and powerfully evocative concepts but they also have ;10
resort to the systematic application of pain ,11 the basic goal being the production of an imagery. To account for postcolonial relations is thus to pay attention to the
workings of power in its minute details, and to the principles of assemblage which give rise to its efficacy. That is, one must examine the orderings of the world it produces; the types of institutions, knowledges, norms, and practices that issue
; the manner in which these institutions, knowledges, norms, and

from it
practices structure the quotidien; as well as the light that the use of visual
imagery and discourse throws on the nature of domination and
subordination
The government is Fucked up and is the most corrupt entity to be devised, the
us drone program is a direct example of the necropolitical violence in the US
Needham, 16, (Alex, digital editor of the Guardian, "National Bird review – chilling film reveals truths about drones,"
Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/17/national-bird-review-us-drones-program-tribeca-film-festival, 4-1-
2016)//Cummings
This is a disturbing documentary which, through the testimonies of three courageous
whistleblowers, sheds some daylight on the USA’s secret military drone programme. Directed by
Sonia Kennebeck and executive-produced by Wim Wenders, National Bird weaves together the
stories of the air force veterans Lisa, Daniel and Heather, all of whom have worked on the
drones programme, gathering intelligence and tracking targets to be killed. Then National Bird
moves to Afghanistan, where the maimed survivors of a mistaken drone strike on unarmed
civilians in February 2010, which killed 23 people, describe what happened when they were
attacked. The juxtaposition of the appallingly gung-ho attitude of the drone operatives, re-
enacted from a transcript of the event, and raw footage of the dead bodies (some children)
returning to their anguished friends and family, is heartbreaking and enraging. Kennebeck
juxtaposes Obama’s speeches about drones – in which he claims that they are able to take out
insurgents without harming those around them – with the testimonies of those who know that
this is untrue. Self-evidently, drones wreak widespread devastation, and the fact that a growing
element of modern warfare involves studying dots on a screen and deciding on which to drop a
bomb has frightening ethical implications. National Bird demonstrates that the nature of drone
warfare makes some drone operatives trigger-happy, while others, like Heather, who analysed
intelligence on warzones and wrote about her experiences for the Guardian, end up
dehumanised and suffering from PTSD. This is a documentary that shows rather than tells,
ominously beautiful drone’s-eye tracking shots of ordinary American streets demonstrating the
way the technology can be used against any community. The film kicks up a gear when signals
intelligence analyst Daniel, who had worked with the NSA at Fort Meade, decides to blow the
whistle on the drone programme and gets the full force of the government machinery dropped
on top of him, including the raiding of his house by dozens of FBI agents and the threat of
decades in jail for treason. His attorney Jesselyn Radack, who represents the other
whistleblowers and did the same for Edward Snowden, makes clear that once you cross the
military-industrial complex, your life becomes extremely difficult. At the end of the film, Daniel’s
whereabouts are chillingly described as unknown. Under the US 1917 espionage act, the film
and the whistleblowers are severely restricted in what they can (or, in the case of the
whistleblowers, would wish to) say, but certain sharp facts poke through the murk. Lisa shows a
letter of commendation for helping to identify 121,000 insurgent targets over two years – as she
points out, since the US has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001, the scale of casualties must
be vast. No one will say, but it’s also pretty clear that the US is using drones in countries with
which it is not officially at war. With stealth and elegance, Kennebeck brings these alarming
truths into the light.
A2: Capitalism
Root Cause
The process of capitalism operates through extraction and
exploitation and proliferates violence on the periphery against
those seen as surplus
Perera, 12, (Sanjay, experienced teacher and co-author of a textbook on Authoritarian states, "The economy of
violence: Waste, expenditure and surplus," Philosophers for Change, https://philosophersforchange.org/2012/12/25/the-
economy-of-violence-waste-expenditure-and-surplus/, Dec. 25, 2012)//Cummings
We are living in a time when the world is seeing the full effects of the economic violence
of capitalism on all life forms and the planet itself The violent process of capitalism is one .
of extraction and exploitation as it operates in a framework of polarity that exacerbates

the difference between taking and giving storing and sharing and the separation between , ,
the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’ its marauding intent shapes the outcome of who should live
. Finally,
and who dies This essay is also an interlude and bridge between Revolutionary
.
constructivism and where the ideas here are meant to lead on to The present piece is .
meant to fill a gap of sorts in the overall architecture in using the ideas of Immanuel
Kant in understanding the moral underpinnings of revolutionary and radical thinking It .
is also the prelude to examining the nature of capital its use as a means of control and as ,
an expression of power The Kantian mode of analysis is set out in Revolutionary

.
constructivism as well as posts that are referred to within it within this mode of . Similarly,
analysis the notion of waste expenditure and surplus looked at here are synthetic ideas
,
operating with a logic related to the idea of capitalism as most of us understand it These .
ideas of waste expenditure and surplus are sketched out in the context of the thinking of
,
Thorstein Veblen Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The ideas will also be seen in
, Georges Bataille, .
relation to issues raised by Adam Tooze in The wages of destruction that deals with the
economic motives behind the Nazi regime and WWII The activity of extracting resources . ,
production and who gets to keep what in an economy takes place through the process of
material-productive waste of resources and energy Production is an activity that gives .
material support for people and one in which what is extracted is transformed into
commodities This production and its concomitant discharge of waste through exploiting
.
surplus also involves the expenditure of energy

, the problem is that this process is in . However,
itself one that is wasteful primarily through the rampant expenditure of resources and
energy which in turn seem to cause division in society aggravated by the mindset of lack ,
competition and fear .
A. Veblen’s theory of the leisure class
Perhaps Veblen’s best known work is The theory of the leisure class with its fascinating insights and satiric style. The exploitation that comes with production is emphasized early on, …all effort directed to enhance human life by taking advantage
of the non-human environment is classed together as industrial activity. By the economists who have best retained and adapted the classical tradition, man’s ‘power over nature’ is currently postulated as the characteristic fact of industrial
productivity. This industrial power over nature is taken to include man’s power over the life of the beasts and over all the elemental forces (Veblen 6). Economic production and growth is not just about so -called survival, it is about power and
control by man over as much as possible. This mindset is one of combativeness which also allows for exerting control over other beings and the environment so as to force extraction for one’s own interests. Veblen describes this as a “habitual
bellicose frame of mind – a prevalent habit of judging facts and events from the point of view of the fight” (Veblen 12). In the next lines this competitive and predatory attitude is also described as an “accredited spiritual attitude…when the fight
has become the dominant note in the current theory of life.” How prescient Veblen is can be seen in the fact that his book was published in 1899 on the cusp of an ultra-violent capitalist century. However, Veblen goes on to state that production of
goods is not just for consumption but accumulation and ownership (and the status that accompanies this). In fact, accumulation is a function of status. This in turn is reflective of trying to emulate others (perceived as having status in society). So
this possession of things is part of the ownership of wealth and the status that goes with it: Which thereby creates invidious distinctions (Veblen 17). He explains that the term ‘invidious’ is meant to be a technical one as “describing a comparison
of persons with a view to rating and grading them in respect of relative worth or value” (Veblen 22). Hence, accumulation of commodities is part of soothing of one’s ego and a way to gain some form of respect and admiration from others; this
certainly represents the consumer, advertising and marketing culture of today. To Veblen part of the sense of privilege for the leisured and propertied class is to be able to while away time without doing anything useful as such. For the privileged
ones wastefulness in terms of unproductive living is the way to go, so time “is consumed non-productively (1) from a sense of the unworthiness of productive work, and (2) as an evidence of pecuniary ability to afford a life of idleness” (Veblen 28).
Hence, the need for servants and slaves to do the bidding of the leisured ones, in addition to their living ostentatiously while continuing invidious accumulation. The situation has reached crisis point today when so many are caught up in a race of
capitalist accumulation and the drive for profit has instituted modern slavery (to the capitalist paradigm of the supremacy of capital, banks and the political scoundrels serving them). People are treated as chattel and to be done with as pleased by
those who believe they own people. The incentive for such ownership includes “(1) a propensity for dominance and coercion; (2) the utility of these persons as evidence of the prowess of their owner; (3) the utility of their services” (Veblen 34).
This is a neat summary of the quest for control and domination that utilitarian capitalist principles have made the norm in our time. One only need see how the work force and those performing menial tasks are treated to grasp the veracity of
Veblen’s words. In the next paragraph he sets out how people are treated as objects and indeed they not only provide a source of invidious accumulation but are also required as things to squeeze profit from: “Together with cattle…they are the
usual form of investment for a profit….Where this is the case…the basis of the industrial system is chattel slavery…The great pervading human relation in such a system is that of master and servant” (Veblen 34). The invidious accumulation of
people and wealth is also, therefore, a means of exerting control. The use of industries can be seen as a means of not only production but of the exercise of control over production, accumulation of commodities and is further a form of domination
over people. Many people have little choice but to work for their living with corporations, financiers, governments etc., which is, in the end, only a form of slavery that may occasionally allow you maintaining your tenuous keep. Veblen then goes
on to define one of his most famous ideas, conspicuous consumption. He compares conspicuous leisure with that of conspicuous consumption and both are wasteful activities. In the case of the former “it is a waste of time and effort, in the other it
is waste of goods. Both are methods of demonstrating the possession of wealth” (Veblen 53). Ostentation is indeed the order of the day for some. This conspicuous consumption leads to conspicuous expenditure and is an expenditure of
superfluities. Veblen tries to explain that he is using the term ‘waste’ in relation to consumption/expenditure in an economic sense of utility derived as the inevitable result of such a process; that is, the term is not meant to be deprecatory and he
also calls it conspicuous waste (Veblen 60-61). But he then goes on to state that ‘waste’ does have a derogatory connotation when it is not shown to be useful in servin g human interests. However, to Veblen ‘waste’ is there to “serve to enhance
human life on the whole” (Veblen 61).
B. Bataille: A visionary of excess
While much of what Veblen says in terms of ‘waste’ and ‘expenditure’ overlaps with what
is stated by Georges Bataille the latter seems to develop a cogent basis for exploring these
,
ideas in a broader and more intense socio-politico-economic framework The early .
expression of Bataille’s ideas of ‘waste’ and ‘expenditure’ appear in his important 1933
essay “The notion of expenditure”. In the case of Veblen he is content to show how ,
economic utility is conflated within a system of conspicuous waste, consumption and

expenditure and goes on to develop in his other work ideas relating to business industry ,
and capital Underlying them is the idea of controlling people and resources but with the
. ,
sense that some of this is necessary for sustaining life as we know it one . But Bataille takes a different approach;
that is an offshoot of Nietzshe and revels in a form of orgiastic and destructive energy of
creation waste and expenditure He also aims to give a systematic framework of how
, .
excess in the form of waste and expenditure is more an outlet for energy that must be
spent he sees capitalist excess as an idea that goes beyond Veblen’s
, in one way or another, by human beings. Moreover,
invidious notion of the conspicuous For Bataille capitalist excess is the means by which :
capitalists and the bourgeoisie not only use resources but consciously or otherwise
destroy other life forms This goes beyond just consumption – destruction becomes a way
.
of life .
i. “The notion of expenditure”
Early in the essay Bataille discusses the idea of loss He calls productive activity that .
which is necessary for the conservation of life and reproduction of societal and economic
structures Unproductive activities are that which appear to have no end beyond
.
themselves and thereby are what he terms ‘expenditure’ the arts . Such expenditure would include mourning, war, cults, , sumptuary
such activities do not conform to the standard idea of economic

monuments, spectacles, etc. (Bataille “Notion”, 118). In effect,
utility no matter how contrary

. Expenditure involves a loss, that is, it involves significant waste of resources that have no link to utility as such. Bataille terms loss as “unconditional expenditure,
it might be to the economic principle of balanced accounts (expenditure regularly compensated for by acquisition)” (Bataille “Notion”, 118).
Bataille does seem to later conflate both economic and non-economic activities as the
However,
reverse side of expenditure both processes involve the use of energy and the
; for in then end,
creation of waste He mentions that forms of war and destruction are as much a part of
.
expenditure as is production To him the hypocrisy of capitalists and the bourgeoisie .
arises in that their accumulation of wealth and status is at the expense of the ‘lower’ (expenditure)
classes He describes the process of the social reproduction and maintenance of the
.
“representatives of the bourgeoisie” underlying such attitudes as “trickery [that] has

become the principal reason of living and suffering for those who lack the courage to , working,
condemn this moldy society to revolutionary destruction” Bataille expounds (Bataille “Notion”, 124). Next,
how the rich do not want to spend on the poor but prefer to consume the poor’s losses ,
thereby using the expenditure of one class of people as means of accumulation for
another This is the kernel of exploitation for Bataille as the rich create for the poor
. , (Bataille’s
– …a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery…the modern world

emphases)
had received slavery…and has reserved it for the proletariat…[A] bourgeois society…gives
the workers rights equal to those of the masters and it announces this equality by ,
inscribing the word on walls But the masters who act as if they were the expression of
. ,
society itself are preoccupied…with showing that they do not in any way share the
,
abjection of the men they employ The end of the workers’ activity is to produce in order .
to live but the bosses’ activity is to produce in order to condemn the working producers
,
to a hideous degradation…” Bataille “Notion”, 125-126). The whole idea of accumulation

(
is the heightening of expenditure against the interests of the common folk by those who
exploit them It is through this process that the negative effects of profit made and loss in
. ,
every sense of the word It is a process that promotes a master-slave

, is sustained by those who are exploited.
paradigm and condemns the majority of people to some form of depraved existence .
ii. The accursed share
In his great work in three volumes The accursed share Bataille looks at the economic , ,
forces of the world holistically as part of the energy that is the basis of everything . He states (Bataille’s
…it is easy to recognize in the economy – in the production and use of wealth – a
emphasis),
particular aspect of terrestrial activity regarded as a cosmic phenomenon A movement is .
produced on the surface of the globe that results from the circulation of energy at this
point in the universe The economic activity of men appropriate this movement making
. ,
use of the resulting possibilities for certain ends….Is the general determination of energy
circulating in the biosphere altered by man’s activity? Here Bataille sets the (Bataille Share I, 20-21)
stage for his analysis and examination of socio-economic-political forces as that which
involve energy and expenditure – primarily through his notion of ‘exuberance’ . He develops this idea by
The living organism in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of
stating: ,
the globe the excess energy can be used for the growth of a
, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; (wealth)
system g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow or if the excess cannot be
(e. ,
completely absorbed in its growth , it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically (Bataille Sh are I, 21). In Bataille’s scheme, no
energy must be harnessed and used in one form or another And the
doubt influenced by quantum mechanics, .
excess energy will be transformed creatively or destructively In line with his holistic view .
of economic activity Bataille also states that one problem is that the economy is not
, however,
always considered in simply general terms and that economic activity tends to be viewed ,
as a specificity without the appropriate context to interpret it in Bataille’s emphases): (
The human mind reduces operations to an entity based on typical particular , in science as in life,
systems organisms or enterprises). Economic activity

( is conceived in terms of , considered as a whole,
particular operations with limited ends…Economic science merely generalizes the

isolated situation that of economic man
; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, . It does not take into consideration a play of energy that no
the play of living matter in general…On the surface of the globe for living matter
particular end limits:
in general the question is always posed in terms of extravagance The choice is

, energy is always in excess; .
limited to how the wealth is to be squandered…The general movement of exudation of (
waste of living matter impels him [man], and he cannot stop it…it destines him…to
)
useless consumption 22-23). Here Bataille expands on how energy and human life
(Bataille Share I,
force is channeled and used productively and unproductively but always as a way of ,
extravagance/exuberance So that no matter how many live in poverty or arguments :
made that necessities of life can hardly be linked to some form of wasted energy – the
energy in itself cannot be accumulated “limitlessly in the productive forces eventually…it ;
is bound to escape us and be lost to us” 22-23). Waste and entropy are inescapable (Bataille Share I, .
Bataille goes on to discuss the circulation of energy in human form and how the
Next,
ground energy of humans in their quotidian activities needs to be channeled properly

lest it take on and as it also inevitably does via the capitalist paradigm a destructive
( )
form. He notes astutely that it is the poorest economies that face blockages in the
expression of this excess life force/ground energy This in turn gets transmuted into wars .
and leads to further impoverishment of that society The mishandling of this ground .
energy takes place through limited economic-political thinking that can lead to a
situation of having to create diversions to channel this energy that may also entail wars
as a means of expenditure/exuberance – on this last point Bataille is not explicit (Bataille Share 1, 23-
Bataille does make it clear later that energy that is blocked and not freely flowing
24). However,
and accumulated in a manner that causes income inequalities and lopsided wealth
development will go through one form of massive expenditure , that is, war – which he calls an “immense squandering” (Bataille Share 1,
37). People become that portion that is expended as a sign of the surplus of wealth that
can be wasted when not harnessed properly it is also an expression of the loss of so much ;
potential that in itself is immeasurable the worth of a single life). This is also a (
“squandering without reciprocation”. For destruction of life implies the misuse of basic
energy/life force or ground energy And it is the lack of reciprocity and sharing of wealth . —
that which can remove blockages and allow for a smooth and equitable flow of ground
energy that underlies much of the privations of our lives
— it is this sacrifice (Bataille Share 1, 38-39). To Bataille,
of human beings through war and other forms of unjust/harsh activities that marks them
as the accursed share Bataille’s emphases): “The victim is a surplus taken from the mass
(
of useful wealth…and therefore utterly destroyed he is the accursed share destined . Once chosen, ,
for violent consumption.” These are the scapegoats selected to allow for the energetic
imbalance of accumulation to continue for the benefit of some but at the expense of
everything else It is in effect a ritualistic economic culling or deliberate killing of humans
.
that is needed to satiate the atavistic appetites of Moloch-Mammon How little the human .
race has evolved in its antediluvian practices In a subsequent volume of this work . ,
Bataille goes on to explain his idea of sovereignty The basic distinction of sovereignty .
involves those who consume wealth as opposed to those that lack sovereignty and who
are thereby left to produce the wealth without consuming it “The sovereign individual :
consumes and doesn’t labor whereas at the antipodes of sovereignty the slave and the
,
man without means labor and reduce their consumption to the necessities to the ,
products without which they could neither subsist nor labor” (Bataille Share III, 198). This is a master-slave paradigm reproduced by
which has Marxian roots). The necessities are produced to sustain the cogs
capitalism within Bataille’s framework (
in the machine but the managers and manipulators can indulge in luxuries beyond rice
,
or potatoes So the sovereign person has wealth to consume and waste at the expense of
.
the vast majority He consumes the “surplus of production” and does not in himself lead a
.
productive life 198). The consumption of the sovereign

. This allows him to lead a life – Bataille’s emphasis – “beyond utility” (Bataille Share III,
one is at the expense of the energy and life force of those who have no choice but to
produce The production of that which is meant to have utility and create luxury for the
.
exploiters is happily dumped time after time onto the shoulders of the majority where . After all,
would we be without the expenditure of precious resources on Rolls Royces the , Lamborghinis, Porches,
killings made in stock/money exchanges or on those ever so elusive breakfasts at ,
Tiffany’s This glorious expenditure/exuberance/human loss to create wealth and items of

.
luxury is facilitated through a hierarchical division of labour that confers a higher rank
on the exploiter than those who have to subsist through work (which is regarded as lowly). Therefore, those who work are meant to be
seen as degraded beings (Bataille Share III, 248). Veblen would agree with this in that the sovereign/leisure class are meant to be those who indulge in conspicuous activity that invidiously reveal their elitist status as compared to those who do
not measure up ( in terms of income/wealth and accumulated commodities ) to themselves. Sometimes this is called meritocracy. But it is almost
always called democracy
Solves the Cap K
Their idea of the complete rejection and destruction of capital
system is bad. Our argument is that what is necessary is to break
the taboo’s and limits that societies hold within them. Only
through that can we truly escape from systems of capitalist
domination. They only subject themselves to a life of complete
banality and nothingness instead of living in the moment. Which
only provides fuel to the systems of capitalism menaing we
control root cause and an internal link to solve every impact in
this debate.
Pawlett’15 – William Pawlett – William Pawlett is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Social Sciences and
Communication at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. He is author of Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society
(forthcoming), and Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality. -- “Georges Bataille The Sacred and Society” – pg 128-131 KZaidi
As we have seen, Bataille

understands goal-directed, instrumental activity as servile and
humiliating, as destructive of sovereignty. Meditative and ecstatic states are achieved not
through instrumental activity but the sovereign operation, stripping away and constantly
contesting the ‘realities’ of self, objects, duration, use, purpose; leading to an experience of
abandonment, dissolution and ultimately, ecstasy. Similarly, the experiences of the sacred
and of eroticism take being beyond the confines of ego and of instrumental activity and their violence
discloses a profound intimacy or continuity that links all being, at least momentarily.
Given that Bataille’s notions of sovereignty, the sacred and eroticism concern the
moment, torn free of all duration or concern for the future, can a future, ‘improved’ state
of human life be worked towards, or even conceived from his perspective? Critics such as Habermas (1987, p. 237)
declare not, suggesting that Bataille has abandoned too much of the Enlightenment project to be able to conceive of an
alternative to capitalism. Yet
it is rather the case that the alternatives to capitalism that Bataille
conceives do not register on the scale of acceptability imposed by Habermas, and like-minded left-
liberal thinkers. Bataille clearly sought an alternative or ‘better’ society, one of greater
equality – particularly greater equality of expenditure (dépense), of universal sovereignty, of
intense community and friendship, of reactivated or reintensified sacred bonds between
people, of shared wonder at the miraculous impossibility of life, indeed: ‘It is people who hold
nothing sacred who’re the ones most likely to torture people and cruelly carry out the orders of a coercive apparatus’
(Bataille, 1992, p. xxv).
The preceding chapters argued that Bataille’s ideas offer a great deal for thinking about
alternatives to capitalist society. At a fundamental level, capitalism depends upon the
suppression or curtailing of the sacred, preferring profanation and progressive weakening of
the sacred (and divine), to a dynamic sacred with the power to disrupt the flows of capitalist
accumulation. It has often been suggested that capitalism is steadily undermining its
own foundations (Bell, 1976; Harvey, 2014); yet, it seems that capitalism operates quite comfortably
within a system of fundamental meaninglessness and weightlessness. While a moral order, of
some sort, is crucial to the functioning of capitalism, the sacred as dual and volatile energy is
threatening to capitalist regimes of work, production and accumulation. Indeed, the sacred
in Bataille’s sense threatens each of the central planks of capitalist modernity. Work and
production, even reason itself, are, from this perspective, only grim necessities enabling moments of
sovereign or sacrificial expenditure. The ‘elites’ of the neo-liberal system – corporate oligarchs, speculators
and their allies in government – do not experience sovereignty or expenditure in Bataille’s senses
because they do not give, either of their wealth or of themselves: they enjoy power and
wealth but not sovereignty. Nor do the ‘charitable’ activities of the super-rich constitute giving in Bataille’s
sense; there is no risk, chance or loss involved, merely an investment in the outward signs
of compassion or humanity.
The sacred, as Bataille conceives it, does not merely provide a sense of rich or ‘enchanted’
meaning to human lives where capitalism provides little or none, an observation made
recently by both conservatives and ecologists (see Stoekl, 2007, pp. 115–149). It is clear that the
consumer goods of capitalism do not satisfy anyone for long. Nor are they designed to
satisfy, but rather to maintain beings in a state of competitive striving, a degraded potlatch
of status, wealth and image – and this is the fate reserved by capitalism for the lucky few with jobs
that pay a salary. The sacred, in Bataille’s sense, does not sanctify and preserve the
human and its agenda; rather, it leads to the abyss, to the impossible world of wounded beings in
intimate, ecstatic communication. The sacred is able to do this precisely because it reinforces
limits and prohibitions, yet, at the same time, insists on their transgression. Limits,
boundaries and prohibitions are absolutely vital to society and also to the inner experience of
communion with others. Bataille’s position is clear: without taboos and their periodic
transgression, social activities are ‘emptied of their human character’ (Bataille in Hollier, 1988,
p. 114). In capitalist modernity limits and prohibitions are inexorably eliminated. Taboos
generally are considered only as restrictions or controls, as antiquated forms of
repression. To regard menstrual blood or breastfeeding as ‘taboo’ today is seen as backward, as evidence of patri-
archal repression. But ‘liberation’ from taboos is always an ambivalent process. The weakening
of the taboo on menstrual blood has provided many opportunities for the suppliers of
‘sanitary products’ but hasn’t delivered sexual equality; regarding breastfeeding as a simple transfer
of nourishment has tended to reduce or make shameful the notion of breastfeeding as a mutual erotic experience for
mother and child.1 Taboos
on death and on corpses are also being undermined.2 The incest
taboo, by contrast, has hardened into a moral absolute with any notion of its
transgression seen as ‘evil’. Perhaps most ambivalent of all is the taboo on murder, still –
often hypocritically – regarded as an absolute, and yet, as Bataille suggests, indispensable to the pursuit
of warfare in the modern world.
Yet capitalism, despite its hypocritical deployment of the transgression of the taboo on
murder, tends to regard not only taboos but all limits as unacceptable, as barriers to ‘free’
markets. Spatial limits to capitalism are eliminated by neo-liberal globalisation; temporal
limits to capitalism disappear as capitalism presents itself as the completion of history; mental
and physical limits to capitalism weaken as employ- ers and advertisers seek to orchestrate
emotions, probing pre-conscious levels of response to stimuli, exploiting stress levels, demanding
that employees create emotional connections. So, if limits are being annihilated by the rampant
expansion of capitalist markets – such that the entire globe is merely a market – must we
impose new limits, new regulations? And how could new limits invoke an inner sense of
dread, or at least of obligation? Contrary to some critical works, Bataille does not suggest that
prohibition and transgression have entirely vanished from modernity, and he fully
recognised that prohibitions that have weakened or fallen away cannot be artificially
reactivated: ‘Sacrifice cannot be for us what it was at the beginning of “time”. We make the experience of appeasement
impossible’ (Bataille, 2011b, p. 45, originally published in 1944). We are then in a new situation.
Crucial to Bataille’s
approach is the assumption, or hope, that humanity still feels or
experiences servility, avarice and work as painful and humiliating. Without these aversions it is hard
to see how society has a future beyond its slow annihilation by capitalism. Contemporary soci-
ety trumpets what it calls the ‘breaking’ of taboos, but this is not the energising
transgression of prohibitions but rather the irreversible elimination of all limits to the
operation of capitalist markets, producing the homogeneous space of work/consumerism . In short,
the abandonment, weakening or neglect of taboos might not bring maturity, autonomy or
liberation – as Enlightenment discourse proclaims – but a reduction in the intensity of
human life, a weakening of its collective bonds, a one-way ticket to a life of relentless
banality. The life of ‘accepted boredom’ – as Bataille puts it in the opening epigraph –
triumphs over the intensities of the sacred.
NEG
Theses
Being
Someone dead once said that “there was only one debate to be
had, that of being vs becoming”. Our argument is that the world
is always in a state of becoming – through the blade of the knife
being replaced through the cellular components of our own
bodies – becoming structures the world itself. The 1ac’s
assumption that there is being in the world is naïve in that it
ignores the way that being is nowhere
Bataille’85. Georges Bataille. French intellectual and literary figure working in literature, philosophy,
anthropology, economics, sociology and history of art."The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl. KZaidi
[Humans] act in order to be. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation
(conserving in order not to be thrown out of existence by death), but in
the positive sense of a tragic and
incessant combat for a satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent agitation to
crushing sleep, from chatter to turning inward, from overwhelming love to hardening hate, existence sometimes
weakens and sometimes accomplishes "being". And not only do states have a variable
intensity, but different beings "are" unequally. A dog that runs and barks seems "to be"
more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more than the water in which it lives,
an influential [human] more than a vacant passerby.
In the first movement, where the force that the master has at [their] disposal puts the slave at [their] mercy, the
master deprives the slave of a part of [their] being. Much later, in return, the "existence" of the
master is impoverished to such an extent that it distances itself from the material
elements of life. The slave enriches [their] being to the extent that [they] enslaves these
elements by the work to which [their] impotence condemns him.
The contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of
human existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of [humans] into masters
and slaves is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of specialized functions
where personal "existence" empties itself of its contents; a [human] is no longer anything
but a part of being, and [their] life, engaged in the game of creation and destruction that
goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle lacking reality. The very fact of assuming that
knowledge is a function throws the philosopher back into the world of petty inconsistencies and
dissections of lifeless organs. Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that turn action away and echo it
in the strange depths of animated life, [they] led astray the very being that [they] chose as the object
of [their] uneasy comprehension. "Being" increases in the tumultuous agitation of a life
that knows no limits; it wastes away and disappears if [they] who is at the same "being" and
knowledge mutilates himself by reducing himself to knowledge. This deficiency can grow
even greater if the object of knowledge is no longer being in general but a narrow
domain, such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical form. Action and dreams do not escape
this poverty (each time they are confused with the totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity
of human lives, a limitless insufficiency is revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a
bugle blower or the snickering of a village chair-renter, is no longer the fulfillment of itself, but is its
own ludicrous degradation - its fall is comparable to that of a king onto the floor.
At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency. In isolation, each [human]
sees the majority of others as incapable or unworthy of "being". There is found, in all free
and slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness of the vanity and the
emptiness of our fellowmen; an apparent stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight
of all life toward an indefinable summit.
The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other. Even the look that
expresses love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A burst of
laughter or the expression of repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight
through which my profound insufficiency is betrayed - just as sobs would be the response to my sudden
death, to a total and irremediable omission.
This uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and reverberates, since at each detour, with a
kind of nausea, [humans] discover their solitude in empty night. The universal night in which
everything finds itself - and soon loses itself - would appear to be the existence for nothing,
without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that emerges within
it to give a dramatic importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages to empty
itself of "being" and meaning each time a [human] discovers within it human destiny,
itself locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast. That which, in me,
demands that there be "being" in the world, "being" and not just the manifest
insufficiency of human or nonhuman nature, necessarily projects (at one time or another and in
reply to human chatter) divine sufficiency across space, like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely accepted
malady of being.
II. THE COMPOSITE CHARACTER OF BEINGS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING EXISTENCE IN ANY GIVEN
Ipse
Being in the world is so uncertain that I can project it where I want - outside of me. It is a
clumsy man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of nature, who locks being in the me. Being in fact
is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly malice to discover it to be divine, at the summit of a
pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter.
Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not lacking in this simple element. The
atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be determined ipsely. The number of
particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the
constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses
even the shadow of its ipseity; it is not the same for a machine which, after six or five years, loses each of
the numerous elements that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that is finally apprehended with
difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike.
Starting from an extreme complexity, being

imposes on reflection more than the precariousness of
a fugitive appearance, but this complexity - displaced little by little becomes in turn the
labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely loses its way.
A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude
of isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A siphonophore fragment is by
itself an autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs,
is itself hardly different from a being possessing unity. Only with linear animals (worms,
insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively lose the faculty
of constituting aggregates bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals
do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal links; [humans] as well as
beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are autonomous. But in regard
to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is it simply error?
Communication
The world is characterized through the desire for
communication and universality. Our argument is that this fails
to be able to engage in the ways that language can be non
language. This causes a rejection of the inherent “waste” which
is a component of every form of communicative exchange.
Bataille’s position on communication (especially in relation to nonknowledge) changes, but only cosmetically. Throughout
his writing and thinking Bataille is sometimes precise, sometimes unclear, doubts himself, is sure of himself, moves back
and forth, and back and forth. At
the core of all Bataille says about communication and
nonknowledge, four claims remains consistent: (1) Communication can never be
“perfect”—it does not achieve perfect fidelity during transfer from speaker to listener —
and, similarly, (2) Bataille claims that something is always wasted in communication—
that human communication is rich with waste. (3) Communication is simultaneously possible
and impossible27. Although nonknowledge highlights this, Bataille means to claim that
nonknowledge is not a special case when it comes to communication. The unique trouble
with communication as it relates to nonknowledge throws light on what all
communication involves. Lastly, (4), the larger claim is that there is something beyond
language. This includes the notion that language is too limited to do justice to certain
experiences, and the more specific claim that not all experiences can be communicated via
propositions.
“Socratic College,” 1942
In the spring of 1942, in a lecture titled “Socratic College,” Bataille offers some early remarks on communication,
highlighting two of the concepts just mentioned: impossibility and waste:
It is a banality
to claim that there is a fundamental difficulty in human communication. And
it is not hard to recognize in advance that this difficulty is partially irreducible. To
communicate means to
try to establish a unity, to make one of many; this is what the word communion means. In
one way or another, something is always missing from the communion sought by
humans (USN 5).
First and foremost, communication seeks an impossible union. There is “something missing”
in all human communication because we are (at least partially) irreducible— singular. As two,
we cannot be fully or perfectly unified. Each of us is a distinct, discrete being. This is why there is
always “something adulterated and insufficient” (ibid) in contact between humans. Our
attempts at communication are always insufficient. Our attempts and their
insufficiency are evidence of our ontological irreducibility and involve our constant
production of waste. Indeed, “something adulterated and insufficient” is evidence of waste, of something lost and
unused in communication. This proves that waste and impossibility are inextricably linked: “All
communication among men is rich with garbage. It is natural to want to avoid filth,
garbage, ordinary trash. But a little simplicity reveals that a foul smell marks the
presence of life” (USN 5). “Garbage” or “trash” here refers to waste in communication—the waste
that, according to Bataille, necessarily occurs because we cannot be unified. If the foul smell of
trash and filth reveals the “presence of life,” the failure or insufficiency—the “trash”—of
communication reveals the presence of some communication. “Garbage” is
necessary. Waste is inevitable in human communication28.
Focusing on waste, Bataille writes: “In communication, something fragile, I don’t know what, dies if one
pushes it: communication demands that one slip” (USN 7). To “slip” in communication means to
allow or even cultivate waste, in the form of confusion, inconsistency, or that which remains unsaid.
“Slipping” is a kind of not requiring that definitions of each term be hammered out. Most importantly, “slipping” in
communication means allowing the “something fragile” to live, wasteful though that may
be. As I read it, the “something fragile” occurs in between two extremes (both undesirable for
Bataille): insisting that everything be clearly laid out (explained), comporting oneself in
communication like a dumptruck or an extractor, and on the other hand, allowing too much to remain
unsaid, reveling too much in communicational mystery, never holding another or oneself
acutely responsible for being responsive and attentive. Bataille’s “slippage” means protecting the
in-between ground of the something—but not everything—necessarily remaining unsaid. This
requires letting another “something” go to waste, or remain unused. Bataille is claiming that such waste
is a necessary part of the communication he wishes to endorse and protect.
Death (Poem)
You are a player in the rigorous game of living.
You can’t blame the game if you don’t believe the rules or bother
to remember them.
The first rule is: every player dies, every player is always already
dying; none knows when it’s coming and fails to realize the
imperceptible immanence of death in the everyday; the youngest
and best always go first.
Everyone has to play.
The game goes on forever – or until you win.
You win by finding death before it finds you.
The prize – is life.
[Seeing Through Death Adapted from Brian Long, 1983]

Heliocentrism
The affirmatives fixation on education for the benefit of the
Earth fails precisely because it leads to a solar-hegemonic model
by which the earth is constantly surveyed and invested in
through humanity. We say that this investment in education is
one that is always parasitic off of the cosmic fluxness of the
universe. Instead you should affirm the earth for what it is – a
fractal clump – absent from all its ecological glory.
Negarestani’10 – .Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to Collapse and
CTheory regularly (Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss) KZaidi
The marriage between the sublunary terrestrial slum and the Sun has become a strictly
monoga- mous model that regulates not only ethics, politics and art but also the
entire history of thought and organic activities. It is time to return to the promiscuity of
the Earth as a dense constellation of interstellar rubbish with dead stars. Roaming the cosmos aimlessly
with an Earth whose Sun is itself contingent upon the cosmic abyss, that is to say, it is
already-dead – this is the geophilo- sophical art in which all human endeavors must be
invested: to embrace the Earth as a fractal clump rather than an exotic blue marble,
to think of it as a passing oval meteorite whose crater has already bored into the skin of
astral corpses. The idea of ecological emancipation must be divorced from the
simultaneously vitalistic and necrocratic relationship between the Earth and the Sun. It
must instead be coupled with cosmic contingency as the principle of all ecologies. Only
an ecology permeated with radical contingencies of the cosmic abyss can reinvent the
Earth in the direction of the great outdoors. For such an ecology, every moment is an apocalypse which
cannot be culminated, and the Sun is not the heart of darkness but that which
cauterizes the gaping wound from which pulverizing contingencies (or climates) of the cosmic abyss bleed into
our world. As much as the Earth must be divested of its conception as the ark of
life, the Sun must also be stripped of both its stellar privileges and
hegemonic ecological imports. For after all, the Sun is only an inevitable blind spot for
the Earth that bars the scope of the abyss. For this reason, the Sun should neither be embraced as
the dark flame of excess nor glorified as a luminous end, but reconsidered and rediscovered as an
infernal element in the chain of complicities which open the Earth into a universe that is more weird
than infernal, its climatic events are more asymptotically non- eventful rather than catastrophically
climatic, its exteriority is more immanent to the inside rather than the outside. An Earth
surveyed (ars terram) by such a radical ecology can be reconceived as a circuitous part of a
nested abyss, and for this reason, its somatic characteristics (the differentiation of its body into inorganic layers and
bio-terrains) and consequently its geographic contingencies and ultimately histories are the products of an abyss for which
all climates are convoluted and detoured sloped-curves (klima) which are asymptotic with the unclimatic depths of the
universe and its cosmic contingencies. Ecologically
speaking, in an abyssal cosmos where
heliocentric slavery has been abolished, the aquatic vitality of the Earth is either a
detoured expression of a starless-nature that appears as rotting slime or the earthbound
abyss which erupts in the form of corrosive oil. Whereas Venice and its aquatic capitalism are asymptotically
converging upon an indifferent nature which is a pit of slime and mold; its dry middle-eastern twin Dubai and its oily
capitalism are plunged into the madness of petroleum brewed up by the deep chthonic earth. In either case, the
cosmic abyss and its radical ecology nd their blackening expression in the water of life
where all climates (biological, social, political, etc.) are terminally determined by chemistry or
the contingent dynamics of radical exteriority. It is in this sense that a capitalist life either
driven forward by the tourism of water or the industrialism of oil becomes a perfect locus
for chemical twists of an abyss whose weird ecology is nowhere better manifested than
in the so- called potent water of life.
Knowledge
The status quo educational apparatus functions according to the
desire for utility and knowledge, or virtue economy. This
process creates a complete universalization of all bodies
according to a system of calculability. This process assumes that
knowledge itself must exist within the realm of the encodable,
the possible. Our argument is that this very desire for “utility” in
education destroys the possibility for knowledge to exist beyond
spatiality – into the realm of the unknown. We say that this form
of politics is cowardice in that it observes the shore of the ocean
but doesn’t dare to take the dive, thereby destroying the ability
to achieve the “extreme limit” of life itself. The impact to this is
the reduction of life to nothing but a cog in the western machine
of values and productivity.

virtues. Virtue epistemology has thus strayed a bit from its Aristotelian roots , where
But virtue
knowledge)—exhibits and relies upon certain characteristic
features of what I will call “classical


propositions.
pursuit.
be a knower, etc.)
utility specifically) and
the way that we undertake this process (through the delimitation of concepts)
useful:
dark view at its darkest: “Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on
varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that

knowledge:
For Bataille, the
(IE 169).
The Hegelian spirit, which for Bataille expressed the spirit of modernity, belongs therefore to a
Violence
Violence is not a mere aberration on an otherwise peaceful
existence, it is not a tragic necessity for the greater protection of
security and it is not something which can be prevented: we are
biologically predisposed towards aggressive violence and war.
The aff fails to recognize the romance inherent in conflict, this
makes their impacts inevitable.
Hamblet 7 [Wendy, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy, Adelphi University “Guilty of
innocence or nobody remembers the Armenians.” Armenians, Journal of Genocide
Research, 7:1, 129-144, DOI: 10.1080/14623520500045229]
The corruptions of war and peace, the public and wholesale crimes that make war, the greed and lies of the peace And
victor’s vengeance: how at a distance They soften into romance—blue mountains and blossomed marshes in the long
landscape of history—Caligula Becomes an amusing clown, and Genghis A mere genius, a great author of tragedies. Our
own time’s chiefs of massacre—Stalin died yesterday— Watch how soon blood will bleach, and gross horror Become words
in a book. (from Robertson Jeffers, “Skunks”) Nobody remembers the Armenians In the “second talk on Poland” in
Obersaltzberg, August 22, 1939, speaking to Reichmarshal Hermann Goering and the other commanding generals, Hitler
advised brutality and mercilessness in their assault on Poland, for the sake of “a quick victory” that would begin his “new
distribution of the world” (New York Times, November 24, 1945, Vol LCV, No 32, p 081). Successful state-building is for
great men. Mercy and compassion are for weaklings, he argued. The world only remembers the strong and history records
the most brutal tyrants as “successful state-builders.” History purifies, asserted Hitler, and it purifies universally. He
illustrated this by asking the arresting question: “Who still talks nowadays of the extermination of the Armenians?” Louis
Lochner reported on the speech. Lochner tells: “Goering jumped on the table. Blood-thirsty thanks and bloody promises.
He danced around like a savage. The few doubtful ones remained silent.” Lochner, a top rate reporter, more than two
decades chief of the Berlin Bureau of the Associated Press, demonstrates how the purifying sleight of hand functions so
effectively to isolate the evil monstrous at a safe distance from the “human” site of responsibility. In this report, Lochner
succumbs to the very “logic of purification” that guides Hitler’s view Journal of Genocide Research (2005), 7(1), March,
129–144 ISSN 1462-3528 print; ISSN 1469-9494 online=05=010129-15 # 2005 Research Network in Genocide Studies
DOI: 10.1080=14623520500045229 Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 01:02 29 October 2015 of history and
counsels “mercilessness and brutality” to the generals of the Third Reich. Hitler recognizes what is missed by the objective
reporter coolly recording the facts that will become history. When Hitler notes that none of us remembers the Armenians,
he underscores an almost universal “human” feature: none
of us remembers the victims of past
spectacular human crimes any more than we give but passing notice to the
ongoing holocausts that, daily, snuff out lives around the globe. We are all
highly accomplished at forgetting the worst human crimes, and, most
significantly, of forgetting our own complicity in the greatest—because
daily—violences. So easily we forget our personal failings, our culture’s depraved roots,
our species’ primal violences. So conveniently we distance ourselves from responsibility and
from remorse. Hitler, the madman, the “monster,” knew human beings better than we know ourselves. Hitler
was right about all of us! We are all innocent in our culpability. The worst crimes fall
into oblivion for very comprehensible reasons. In an important article, “Penser les Massacres,” Belgian political scientist
Jacques Semelin discusses three problems that turn even researchers away from
consideration of the worst human violences (Semelin, 2001, p 1). The first is
psychological in nature: avoiding a research topic that triggers horror and repulsion is
understandable. The second is moral: faced with acts of pure savagery, how is it possible to
prove “scientific neutrality”? The compassion felt for the victims leads spontaneously to the
condemnation of their torturers. The third obstacle is more specifically of an intellectual nature: the
phenomenon of massacre defies understanding. It appears to have no “sense,” nor to
“serve” any purpose. We tend to write it off as man’s “folly.” It is easy to understand the why of our forgetting. In
this paper, I shall propose an explanation of how we accomplish that expiatory feat. I shall seek to define the “logic of
purification” that Hitler claimed guides the crafting of history and sanitizes our collective
consciences, by exposing a purification mechanism that has been “ritualized” into
our very ways of being, into the parameters of the lifeworld, and perhaps
even into our flesh, by obsessive repetition in the early millennia of human time. Arguing from
the theories of prominent anthropologists, I shall propose the development and persistence of a certain conceptual and
linguistic mechanisms that removes past horrors from their discomfiting proximity and especially from the scope of
personal and cultural responsibility by displacing evil onto alien others in proximity to our “sacred” home space. My claim
is that human beings, in the dawn of human time, developed a concealing and sorting mechanism
that permitted the easy forgetting of their own murderous ways of being-together—ways
that, as Konrad Lorenz, Rene´ Girard, Walter Burkert, Paul Radin and other anthropologists have shown,
are fundamentally murderous. We witness the persistence of this purifying mechanism in
the very ways in which we make moral judgments, in the way we, still today, isolate and illuminate as “evil” the
unsettling forces at work around us. Even as we nod our assent to Lochner’s assessment of Goering as a “savage,”
even as we configure Hitler as a monster and his death camps as appalling anomalies, WENDY C. HAMBLETT 130
Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 01:02 29 October 2015 we
ourselves re-enact a kind of
“successful state-building.” We reconstruct the crime scene of human moral failure
by a ritualized logical maneuver, a “counter-cultural rejection,” that reinterprets human
deeds as “monstrous” and “inhuman,” thereby successfully distancing ourselves from the
potential for such deeds. This paper traces this reconstructive maneuver to its primal formulations, looking back
to the time our earliest ancestors crawled down from their arboreal paradises and stood upright on the savannah. By a
consideration of the primal violences from which we, as human beings (and our systems and institutions), have sprung, I
will attempt to expose the origins of the modes of moral thinking that underpin the sanctity of our home spaces, while yet
disposing us toward certain violent modes of being-in-the-world. Then I shall mark out traces of a post-holocaust
philosophical insight that threatens to collapse the ritualized logic and its concomitant
distancing maneuver, first by following Primo Levi into the death camps of Buna and Auschwitz, and finally, by
embarking on a disturbing hypothetical journey into the netherworld of human
“nature” exposed by Georges Bataille in his disturbing account of human
being as the “enraged torturer.” From purification rituals Walter Burkert, anthropologist and classical
philologist at the University of Zurich, takes up the project of understanding human violence by wedding historical and
philological research to biological anthropology. In a most impressive corpus (Homo Necans, Structure and History in
Greek Mythology, Greek Tragedy and Sacrificial Ritual, The Creation of the Sacred, Ancient Mystery Cults, Greek
Religion), Burkert traces the origin of human “civilizing” processes into the distant past of human existence. Burkert
originally assigned to the classical tradition profound importance for Western intellectual and cultural beginnings. But, in
the course of his research, his investigations led him to a remarkable discovery. The classical tradition was itself
permeated with symbols persisting from much earlier epochs of human time. Burkert came to see that, even in the highest
period of classical culture, patterns of thought and activity, “ritualized” in pre-Greek cultures and perhaps even prehistoric
in origin, continued to exercise an unshakeable hold over the fifth century Greeks, even though cultural and religious
“meanings” of these rituals had long fallen from the conscious memory of the practitioners. The bloody sacrifice ritual is
one such pervasive anomaly that continued to accompany festivals, seats of oracles, cult gatherings, mystery ceremonies,
athletic games, Greek theater, state ceremonies and funeral services long after that ritual had any meaningful resonances
with the events or with the beliefs of the participants of those events. Burkert’s inquiry into the uncanny endurance of such
rituals eventually led him to another astounding insight: rituals
function in such a manner that they do
not require either conscious belief or even understanding in order to remain functionally
operative and ideologically persistent. That is to say, even where their story (logos) has
been lost or seemingly disconnected from the cultural context, their ideology (the eidoi of
their logos—the form and symbols of their story) remains enduringly persistent and functional. To
discover what the archaic logoi might be communicating to those later generations, Burkert looks back to the rituals
performed pervasively in the early millennia of the Western tradition. Anthropologists like Konrad Lorenz had carved out
this intellectual territory. Lorenz, writing in the 1960s, had shocked the anthropological world with the disturbing
revelation that murderousness is the human being’s primal state. In his Nobel prize winning
On Aggression, Lorenz had unfolded the tale of human beginnings as the “grotesque perversion” of a natural selective
process. In a particularly disturbing passage, Lorenz states: There
is evidence that the first inventors of
pebble tools, the African Australopithecines, promptly used their new weapon to kill not
only game but fellow members of their species as well. Peking Man, the Prometheus who
learned to preserve fire, used it to roast his brothers: beside the first traces of the regular use of
fire lie the mutilated and roasted bones of sinanthropos pekinensis himself. (Lorenz, 1966, p 239) Perhaps
Lorenz’s most troubling discovery was that the first men were murderous, not because they
lacked the “civilizing effects” of cultural development, but precisely because
of their cultural proficiencies. Humans, beginning with the mastery of fire, evolved quickly
from beings tyrannized by economic insecurity into beings who controlled and created
their environment. From that point onward, explains Lorenz, the natural selective tendencies that, in
animals and earlier humans, served important evolutionary purposes (maintaining an even spatial distribution of
groups within the species and favoring species continuance by selecting the hardier to excel both territorially and
sexually), began
to go astray. Aggressive tendencies, when uninfluenced by
environmental exigencies, can run amuck in directions that are maladaptive
to the environment. This is what happened to humans, Lorenz explains. Their aggressive
behaviors became “exaggerated to the point of the grotesque and the
inexpedient”(Lorenz, 1966, p 42). At a very early stage in human development, intra-specific aggression was
already replacing species defense with species offence in the form of brutal wars waged against neighboring tribes, and
even between brothers, fathers and sons within the social group. Selective
processes, gone astray,
expressed themselves in elaborate rituals of aggressive prowess aimed at human others.
Lorenz is convinced that we are fundamentally prone toward intra-specific
aggression. In fact, it is only through further perversions of our “grotesque and
inexpedient” perversions that we learn to love and nurture at all. Rituals
of love and friendship emerged for human communities as
reformulations of displays of redirected aggression and
ceremonies of appeasement. Aggression is thousands of years older, more
time-honored in our ritual heritage, more deeply embedded in our being, than love or
friendship or nurturance. According to Lorenz, violent urges are fundamental to the way
of being of humankind. He states: “intra-specific aggression can
certainly exist without its counterpart, love, but conversely
there is no love without aggression” (Lorenz, 1966, p 214). Lorenz’s insights informed
the anthropological community that the rich palette of ritual WENDY C. HAMBLETT 132 Downloaded by [University of
Michigan] at 01:02 29 October 2015 practices
evidenced in early hominoids were fundamentally of
a single kind— murderous rituals aimed at other human beings. Walter Burkert takes up the task
of tracing the murderous rituals into early human communities centered about life’s most significant functions—hunting,
warfare, and mating. Though he resists the full endorsement of the thesis that founds sociobiology (the co-evolution of
genes and culture), Burkert does posit in the distant past of human existence the advent of a “common mental world”
whose symbolic content and tenor of seriousness he believes to have been transmitted through the ages and into
modernity through an uninterrupted chain of tradition. That chain of tradition is the ritual history of human culture, with
its systems, its institutions, its social and economic practices, and, above all, the conceptual and linguistic systems (the
symbols and the logic connecting those symbols) that configure these ways of being-in-the-world. We
only need
look around us to see those “perverted elaborations” of which Lorenz speaks still at work in the
world today: in the swaggering machismo of males in many patriarchal societies across the
globe; in the overblown bravado of Western cinema and television heroes; in the
“warrior virtues” displayed on the hockey rinks and football fields, in the rhetoric of gun
lobbyist groups; in the way young boys thrash each other in the schoolyards and young
men brawl in barrooms; in the rhetoric of Western news media that name “terrorist” all
opponents of Western values and actions and Western terrorisms as legitimate battles
fought “for freedom and democracy.” Successful “state-building” has always been
accomplished in the ways of Genghis and Hitler. But since this fact makes
for bad conscience we reconfigure our enemies as demons, our home spaces
as sacred and pure and our violent histories (the rape of the Americas, the
slave trade, civil wars, current social and political oppression) as occasions
for celebration (Columbus Day, Independence Day). How is this reinterpretive maneuver
accomplished, then? Burkert contends that the creative confusion began in the early days of the Paleolithic hunt. In the
hunt, the intense collective energies of anxiety and terror that had to be focused upon large carnivores by human beings
armed only with fire-hardened weapons heightened the significance of the event far beyond the mere gathering of food. A
full range of survival strategies had to be summoned in order for the hunt to prove successful. This meant that patterns of
behavior within the group (those regulating feeding habits, pairing, sexuality, reproduction, care of weaker members,
territory, leadership, allegiances and other methodologies of cooperation) had to be realigned and concretized.
Behavior codes (“rituals” in ethological parlance) resulted to sublimate and
rechannel the old intra-specific aggressions to accomplish the cooperative
solidarity that would ensure the success of the hunt. The first rituals probably
circumscribed pre-hunt ceremonies that called forth the power of the ancestors, charmed the prey into the territory and
contracted its “consent” to the immanent killing. Eventually, explains Burkert, the
ritual field would have
expanded to embrace all aspects of the hunt—the murder and the post-murder
festivities. This led, eventually, to the articulation of every manner of social
code—prohibitions and prescriptions GUILTY OF INNOCENCE OR NOBODY REMEMBERS THE
ARMENIANS 133 Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 01:02 29 October 2015 delineating appropriate
behaviors in all context of social interaction. Socioeconomic and political relations—cultural
institutions and systems—developed from the patterns of interaction that culminated in the
distribution of meats during the festival closure of the hunt. Primarily, ritual
ceremonies developed to bring to expression and then reinterpret the guilt
and anxieties of the hunting people. They eased the “hesitation” before the
emotionally explosive event, absorbed the “shock” at the spilling of the blood of a
creature of such symbolically-charged potency, and voiced the “apologies” after the fact
and the disclaimers of responsibility that freed them from the guilt of the act. Rituals
performed the crucial function of establishing the fiction that the victim
consents to, cooperates with, and participates in his own murder. Thus the
horror of the kill could be successfully inverted into festivity in the
celebration of the living death and the beneficence of the self-sacrificial
victim/prey monster/god who blesses the community with harmony and full
stomachs. Thus the animal, while remaining animal, became anthropomorphized and
divinized. It assumed contrasting images that were dialectically opposed yet
intertwined: male/female, wild predator/friend of man, evil/beneficent, lifegiving/death-giving,
demon/god. In time the polar symbols of these rituals developed into a full cosmos-embracing hierarchy that
comprised the “common mental world” shared by the group. Burkert explains how this “common mental world” functions.
All tradition consists of condensed, systematized information that keep conceptual
systems finite. Ritual traditions communicate strategies of negation and mechanisms of class/ gender
inclusion and exclusion. That is, they convey a “logic of domination” that reasserts the
status quo of socioeconomic and political realities by supplying constitutive
patterns and analogies that structure thought and action (Bloch, 1992, p 7). Through
these strategies, a “reduction of complexity” is achieved that sorts the confusing
chaos of sense data into a simplified system of meanings to orient human
beings who, otherwise, would feel helpless, engulfed and overwhelmed by
the infinite complexity of their environment. One essential way this reduction of complexity is
achieved, explains Burkert, is through the positing of “dual containers,” the legacy of the polarized logic of the hunt.
Phenomena are, by virtue of these “containers,” sorted into meaningful events: good–bad, sacred–profane, pure–impure,
friend–enemy, god–demon, beneficent–demonic. From these dualities, hierarchies are constructed
and links of causality forged so that reality can be reduced to simple and
general concepts. A radically simplified, polarized worldview can be most useful as an orienting system. Add to
this an ultimate signifier (god, king, president, pope, chief, father) and even the conflicting equations of life can be easily
resolved, as matters to be left to a higher wisdom. Through such ritualized orderings, then, a culture’s
collective representations are constructed and communicated to the young of each
successive generation. Rituals comprise, for Burkert, “the very epitome of cultural learning” (Burkert, 1996, pp
28–29). It is not merely that the violent rituals practiced throughout human history were self-reinforcing by the power of
resonance (though it is that WENDY C. HAMBLETT 134 Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 01:02 29 October
2015 too), it was how they were made to resonate in the bodies of the participants. Ritual learning, historically, took harsh,
intimidating forms. Learning
is most indelible where memories are painful, humiliating, or
anxiety-ridden, behaviorists assure us. Ancient ritual practices centered about animal and human sacrifices,
painful purgatorial purifications and excruciating physical mutilations. Terror and pain leave indelible scars. Thus Burkert
concludes that the horrifying, agonizing rituals etched into the flesh of each subsequent generation a radically over-simpli-
fied polarized worldview and a logic of domination that reasserted as “legitimate” the historical order, precisely by carving
out clear boundaries between sacred community and demonic alien forces. Thus was a culture marked self-identical across
the flux of time and re-legitimized by connection with the changeless eternality of the ancestors and the gods.
Modern peace is reactive nihilism, a will to total utility that

characterizes the life-denying fascism of the 1NC: the will to
sublimate violence, contain it within the state, is a repressive
move that guarantees ever increasing cycles of violence. You
should let the excess out in the form of the ectascy and abandon
of violence. Only this can respect the sovereignty of others.
Hamblet 2005. Wendy, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy, Adelphi University “The
Manic Ecstasy of War.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, 17:39–45
Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with
the dawn of tyranny and oppression. War, one of the oldest human institutions, has
proven invaluable to states in establishing their power over subgroups within the system,
as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to permit their expansion in
space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little
mystery to the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative
millennia of civilization. The continuing popularity of war among modern states
ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the dignity of human beings, remains
baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered by many scholars
to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own:
war composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute
expenditure of the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the
population’s martial enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in
the maximum exertion of self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a
potlatch of state resources, a useless splurge of the nation’s human and
economic wealth for no better reason than wanton celebration of state
power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges
Bataille. His philosophy explains two principles of expenditure— the principle of
classical utility defined by utilitarian goals serving current power relations,
and that of nonproductive expenditure—that is, orgiastic outflow or ek-
stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.”
There, the two dialectical opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state
structures. The first model aspires to perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a
frozen homogeneous perfection that is monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the
monocephalic state becomes self-identified as a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and
perfect, its laws and customs fixed and imperative.
At the other end of the structural spectrum resides the second form of state—the
acephalic state—disordered, anarchic, and volatile. This state is seen by ordered states as
a terrifying, heterogeneous primitive lifeform where uncivilized tribes practice mystical
thinking, incommensurable truths, and mad affective experience. Unreasonable.
Useless. Mad. People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant
ritual lives that offer escape from the mundane in orgiastic festivals
involving drunkenness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures, self-
mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The
monocephalic state, on the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state boasts
an enlightened stable form that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the
primitive society is referred to chaos, madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy
provides a valuable framework for analyzing global realities, even in the
modern world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities
in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all states seek timeless stability, secured
against time with absolute truth claims, infallible social codes, and enduring legislation.
States are duly secured by the legalized violence of police and military that
appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately suppress all
transformation. Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations—passports,
licenses, identity cards, forms completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration
regulations, police interrogations, surveillance of social and financial transactions among
subgroups, security checkpoints, departments of homeland security—weed out the
deviant lifeforms until ultimately all countervoices have been silenced, all
rebellion quite obliterated, all evolutionary movement logically
contradictory. But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As
the monocephalic state increasingly closes itself off, it stifles social
existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the passion from its citizen-
devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to
mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete
and the nation duly deified, all labors have become co-opted in utter
servitude. Bataille names this culminating stage of development, the
peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most excessive
extrapolation—fascism. Ultimately, however, life and time must break free
and move forward into futures. This most solid state holds firm for a short
while only; then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up and
explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole.
Existence and liberty flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death
of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles describe the movement of
history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that ultimately ossify into
totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing the explosive
liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually recompose,
slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial
decomposition. The chaotic structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton
pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the deity once again. Time, states, and
human individuals, for Bataille, move between the two contradictory forms:
stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal
return of an imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage
of the liberty of life. Bataille’s analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the
mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests that war
composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that
permits a breakout from mundane servitude.
We may not readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms that Bataille describes—
fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is unquestionably
undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen—Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We
may be convinced that fascist urges fade with global democracy where all
people will, eventually, know the order and security of the first world.
Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean between Bataille’s two
economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable
metron of golden rules. But the roots of the Western world are well planted in
the fascist drive for hyper-order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the
PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common arche of the
universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For
the ancients, one head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas
the many compose hoi poloi, an embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic
that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and morally superior to
acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in
the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—
erect, rigid, unyielding—is preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field
studded with incongruous heroics. Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside
of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects as monstrous
tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a
theater of cruelty and death that is designed to challenge the polite
threshold of civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the philosophical
tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by
conflicting drives, by lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they
suppress and deny.
Lorenz states that Bataille’s treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature
offer resolution to the paradox of the simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the
frequency of brutal aggressions by those very states naming themselves the most
civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in the civilized
modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives
within industrialized, rationalist, rigidly hierarchically ordered populations
enslaved to reason and utility.
The violence that floods the globe in modernity, that claims to be serving
reasonable projects of global freedom and democracy, may represent new
forms expressing old desires, the projects of monocephalic statehood
aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the
modern world: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but
disappointing effort of fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and
metal into weapons] ... . [M]an [lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he
produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce men of modernity—
gods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their
control to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on
their own kind the products of molten metal torn from her bowels to ensure
the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the
desperate obstinacy of man opposing the exuberant power of time and
finding security in an immobile and almost somnolent erection.” Bataille
believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of modernity. Human
beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good of
their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather
together in heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical,
passionate, frenzied escape from the rigorous projects of their ordered
systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free from the mundane
enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them from their
ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic
drives will out and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should
trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern industrial society, its will to
mediocrity, utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a
measureless and rending character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless
catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern wars can be explained,
according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of modern
ordered states and from people’s imprisonment within the merchandise
they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should
provide a wondrous release from mundane servitude. 42 WENDY C.
HAMBLET War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic omnipotence and
the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity occur
with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their suppressed lust
for a sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian
reasons of state. This resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial
enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained wars or fulfill itself in
the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For
Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped
all political bounds and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven
by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an era of absolute war.
The democratic revolution may have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the
grandeur of their rulers—but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes merely one of a
number of crucial forces (the scientific revolution that provides the technology, the
industrial revolution that provides mass production of weaponry, and the imperialism
that draws the entire globe into the war system) that have been successfully harnessed to
the powerprojects of the mightiest nations. The goods of the modern West,
including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally
in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless
expenditure—a release of the primal urges of a community toward excessive
overflow. He states: “Military existence is based on a brutal negation of any profound
meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the living march in a
straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it must compose
orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s finest
goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of
forces serves mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war serves
the purposes of the state, it loses its manic and ecstatic character and ceases
to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare
is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the oldest traditions of our species. It has
become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states.
Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of communication between nations.
Franco Fornari states: “War is a multifunctional institution. ... It is extremely difficult to
find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial
functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on
violence. War is a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates,
ultimately, in fascist stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is THE
MANIC ECSTASY OF WAR 43 utterly necessary to the deification of the structure and
the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the creation of strong policing and
military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the citizens and place their
collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves the collective
illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the
values, virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags,
national anthems, tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the
best of the nation—its strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required
to maintain order in fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars
includes their provision of an international stage to display the collective prowess of the
nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even the most oppressed of the society, and it
allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly character—the valor, the
selflessness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in the tradition of
imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the advancement
of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization—today’s wars clearly bring too
massive a booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty
years, wars have increasingly become shameless lootings of helpless
peoples—the projects of economists and accountants and big businessmen
purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern
techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal
narcissism of the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians.
Above all, modern wars serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They
may cost the sacred love-object (the nation) massive capital, human and monetary, but
the generals, the political leaders, and their corporate cronies profit handsomely from
the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the sacred love-object (the
nation) is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid
collective delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible,
unlimited as the god in its strength and in its moral substance. Killing the
enemies, propagandized as evil, the collective illusion is fed that evil is overthrown: thus
the sanctity of the loveobject is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed; the
cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a
good war. But for all the benefits served by the institution of war, modern wars are
deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart
societies and disburse homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the
earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence
on parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. 44 WENDY C.
HAMBLET Ultimately the greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its stark
utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of
war defeats the purposes of war by frustrating the deepest
needs of the society—the people’s need to build heartfelt
communities, a need that can only be served by expressing
the collective aggressive energies of the society beyond
utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by armed force, it
can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the great
human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility ... it must
force its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of
barracks, military prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the
non-release of ecstatic urges that explains a state’s return, year after year
and decade after decade, to that old institution. It may be that the deepest
paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its
service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in
dispensing its most fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most
vicious and cruel needs of the people, their deepest primitive motivations,
whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt
community. Bataille counts this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of
modern war. The sacred values of community—life, freedom, festival, and the
joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxtaposition
to their opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an
obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately, insists Bataille, the
sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If Bataille is
correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are utterly
utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.
We call for a new ontology of life that recognizes the impersonal

continuity of immanent violence. This violence is the condition
of possibility for a more profound subjectivity, where life is
always in excess and subjectivity itself is energetic expenditure.
This ontology of violence testifies to the immanent
communication of life with itself, and as such is opposed to
transcendence, the abnegation of life via interruptions of
objectification. Only by re-establishing our lost intimacy with
living and non-living beings through immanent violence can we
tear apart the constructed structures of the world and gain
access to sovereign experiences of immanence.
Direk 04. Zeynep, Professor of Philosophy, KOC University “Bataille on Immanent and
Transcendent Violence” Bulletin de la Societe Amencaine de Philosophie de Langue
Franfais. Volume 14, Number 2, Fall 2004
In the archaic world of paganism, immanence acquires a sacred and divine character as
soon as the profane world of work and action begins to separate itself from the intimacy
of all beings. In describing that moment, Bataille qualifies immanence explictly as
"continuous," "impersonal" and "without distinction," and qualifies
intimacy as "profound subjectivity" (TR 301/33). In The Accursed Share, he
interprets that ground in terms of the dynamic and fluid life energy that is
always in excess. Life is always already excessive because every living
organism receives more energy from the cosmos than the amount sufficient
for its self-preservation. In contrast to the limited problems of classical economy, "in
the general problem there always reappears the essence of the biomass, which must
constantly destroy (consume) a surplus of energy."2 Immanence can never be
articulated in terms of the opposition between subject and object, which characterizes
experience in the profane world of work, action and project. 30 BATAILLE ON
VIOLENCE However, it is the place of a deep subjectivity, a confused, non-
reflective consciousness of the self that is not limited by the I or other I's (fR
300/31). I believe that Bataille is a radical thinker of subjectivity, and his attempt to go
beyond the classical notion of the subject can be related to Merleau-Ponty's thinking of
subjectivity as incarnated in The Phenomenology of Perception. 3What Merleau Ponty
calls "the ante-predicative life of consciousness" or "the silence of primary
consciousness" is the natural perceptive involvement of incarnated existence with the
world. 4 In that involvement, the relation with the other is not based on absolute
separation, but on the fact that bodily operative intentions read, understand, constantly
connect, and affectively communicate with each other. Merleau-Ponty writes that
operative intentionality "produces the natural and ante-predicative unity of the world
and of our life"; it furnishes "the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise
language."s For both Merleau-Ponty and Bataille, subjectivity as the immanent
unity of the world and life can never become the object of knowledge,
although it can be "experienced." Such an experience, which implies the loss of a
subject as clear consciousness of objects is, in Bataille's economical terms, nothing but
an unlimited expenditure of energy. Bataille thinks that the subject, as an individual and
separate being, belongs to transcendence, for it has always already transcended the
natural environment and is in a position to know objects from the outside. Knowledge
is a possibility of transcendence, going outside of oneself to an impenetrable
other. Moreover, that transcendence is related to violence not only because
representation is violent but also because the subject in the world of work is
subordinated and servile. The violence to which animals are exposed in nature
is very different than the violence to which we are exposed, and which
reproduces us in the world of work as knowing, acting, speaking subjects. In
the technological era, man lives under the domination of anonymous powers and
experiences. He is subject to both oppression and the empty promises of transcendence.
According to Bataille, the deep truth of subjectivity is never revealed by
transcendence. Although he believes that the expenditure of the forces of the body-for
example, erotic experience and laughter-may open a way for the realm of immanence in
which we re-establish our continuity with all living and non-living beings, this feeling of
continuity is for him nothing n10re than abrief touching of the untouchable. The fact that
he talks about "the lost intimacy" in our being even in the context of his historical
discourse on the displacement of the borders between the sacred and the profane in
successive historical worlds may give rise to the impression that Bataille is giving
expression to a desire to go back to our archaie, immediate animal existence by
transgressing our subjectivist and objectivist modern cultures. That way of reading
Bataille can make his thought look like some sort of metaphysical nostalgia. However,
this interpretation becomes suspect if we emphasize that the loss here is not the absence
of something that was previously present, but the absence of something that is still
present in our lived experience-even though it is erased, forgotten, and constantly
ignored by the ways in which we schematize our experience. Our lost intimacy with
other living beings-from which immanent violence is never missing-is animal as
well as divine, life as much as death. Perhaps we need to treat "immanent
violence" as an ontological concept that may call for interpretation on the
basis of an ontology of life. Obviously, this constitutes the ontological foundation of
Bataille's further distinction between interior and exterior violence, in terms of which he
reads destruction in societies. The distinction between immanent and
transcendent violence I find in Bataille has an explanatory value as an
analytical tool. At the final analysis, it will be especially useful in understanding why
Bataille refrains from condemning violence in purely ethical or political terms. How does
Bataille draw the species barrier between non-human animals and human animals? He believes, with Nietzsche, that the world of things,
inclividuals, work, utility and action transcends immanent life. In a sense, only when we were not yet "human" were we completely
immanent to nature. In Theory of Religion, he conceives oE non-human animality in terms oE "immanence" and "immecliacy" (TR 291/17).
The emphasis on "immecliacy" marks a liEe limited to the realm oE the sensible. A non-human animal is deprived of universal concepts and
ideas that serve as schemes for constructing a world out of life. Immanence is determined by an inability to overcome the environment in
which a living being spends its life. Transcendence is the overcoming oE the sensible toward the cancept that Erames nature, whereas
immanence is being imprisoned in the environing sensible element. We should note that this use oE the couple "transcendence-
immanence" singles out man among other species as a builder oE the world, failing to emphasize that as humans we inhabit the earth along
with other species. The definition oE man as a "thinking animaI" immecliately gives way to a discourse articulating what thinking may mean
as a specific diEEerence, and usually not to what we may share with other animal species. But Eor Bataille, what is leEt unthought in this
definition is precisely our being inside animality as weIl as outside it. As an animal species on earth, we have ventured outside the
Because our intelligence originates in an
immanent continuity oE being by a movement oE transcendence.
interruption of immanence, it is bound to remain ignorant of its source. Intellegence can
never return to immanence without losing itself in it, and in the realm of transcendence
it Eails ta attain consciousness of the fact that the kernel of Ollr being still belangs to
immanence. Nevertheless, Bataille does not merely affirm that we can swim upstream,
against intelligence, using intelligence against itself to create an opportunity to find an
exit to a conscious experience of the internal relation of all living beings. Only the
violence which I exert, or to which I am exposed, can tear apart the
constructed structures of the world of subjects and objects in which life is
suffocated, and can give us access to sovereign experiences of immanence.
Selfconsciousness in Bataille's sense, which is not-knowing, is only possible through such
experiences. Intelligence is bound to remain foreign to the life that gave rise to it: it can
only enframe, intervene and know nature from the outside; it will always fail to
communicate with life from within. However, mental life consists not only of
rational thinking. The immanent flow of our incarnated consciousness,
which is essentially an internal relation of communication with others in
unceasing differentiation, is not constituted or controlled by a knowing
subject. By "incarnated existence," we here need to understand impersonal existence,
the way in which life communicates with itself. We gain access to that immanence
and experience it only through the interruption of the world of utility and
work, and the dissolution of the individuality that makes possible the
overcoming of the separation of beings from each other. In our contact with the elements, in
nutrition, in the satisfaction of our needs, in desire and erotic experience, we take part in the rhythm of communication of life with itself,
even though cultural forces persuade us to control that contact with animal existence within us to tame it and forget it. "Immanence" for
Bataille does not mean immanence to an object or a subject but to a total Being or "One." An animal's lack of access to transcendence does
not imply that it is a being closed in its inner world, for it does not have an inner world in which to enclose itself. Animal is immanent to the
environment in which it lives and does not have the capacity to transcend it. But how is this milieu, this "One", described? Bataille depicts it
by invoking the type of certainty that manifests itself "when an animal eats another one" (TR 291/1 7). When an animal eats another one,
the meaning of the situation in which the former finds itself is clearly similar to that of the latter. The similarity between the meanings of
those two situations cannot be found in the sensations that the animals have, for one is being torn to pieces by the other. Nevertheless, both
animals are immanent to one and the same medium, which does not make the one who is active in eating "transcendent" with respect to the
other who is eaten. In some kinds of animals, during the period of copulation males fight for females and those males who prove to be
There is a difference between the victorious animal and
stronger chase away the others.
the defeated one. However the victory, if it is not by chance, proves nothing
else than a quantitative difference of strength (TR 292/18). The establishment of
such a difference does not make the victorious male transcend the others. The acts of
killing, winning, and copulating give rise to a feeling of "transcendence"
only in the human world, due to the "objectification" of the other as passive.
In opposition to the immanent violence in nature, violence is seen as a mark of
transcendence in the human world. It bears in itself the promise of elevating man to
God, enabling him to incorporate an image of Him. Revealed religions balances homicide
and human sacrifice. In the Muslim religion, to take away someone's life, given to
him/her by God, is to transgress the limits of the realm in which human beings can
legitimately use their power. To kill someone is to usurp God's authority over life and
death and thus to set one's self as an equal to God. This is why only wars fought in
the name of God can legitimate the killing of human beings. The idea that, in
killing, the murderer substitutes himself for God, bears in itself the implicit tendency to
trunk that violence can deify a human being. Physically abusive husbands, parents,
torturers and rapists take themselves to be transcending their victims. This sense of
transcendence is accompanied by a pleasure stemming from their
perception of physical superiority as constituting an ontological,
epistemological, and even a moral difference. In Theory of Religion, Bataille
writes, "The lion is not the king of the animals. In the movement of waters, he is only a
higher tide that can reverse the weaker ones. That an animal eats another does not
change a fundamental situation: every animal is in the world like water in water' (fR
292/18-19).6 By contrast, man is not in the world like water in water. Even a superficial
glimpse of "social status" in the human world will show that factors such as "education,"
"gender," "ethnicity," "race," and "class" intersect to constitute quite incomparable
situations. The power of transcendence in the world of work, utility and
action rests on situational differences, and the subject who assumes a status
that such crisscrossing of differences may assign to it pays for this by losing his/her own
sovereign selE7 To the genealogy of the transcendence of the subject
belong the experiences of fear, submission, guilt, self-contempt,
self-hatred, imitation of the desire of the other, and the illusion
of self-sufficiency, self-coincidence and independence. Being
before the law and entering it, the fundamental experience of
the symbolic order is a trauma. In the world of work, in order to
become a subject, one needs to sacrifice one's self in the face of
power, repress one's immediate desires, reconcile oneself with
the authority, accept being rewarded and punished by it and
delay free selfexpression until one has nothing left to express.
Bataille seeks ways of transgressing the limits of a life of submission to the world of
power relations, but he is skeptical about the "warrior of freedom" as well. Both the submissive self and the revolutionary self
become subjects by being exposed to transcendent violence, and they are produced by their opposite reactions to it. Oppressive systems of
power do change by sacrificing or marginalizing those who fight for freedom, yet their challenge and resistance open the path of
communication for those who keep silent out of fear of persecution as surrogate victims. Freedom fighters become surrogate victims.
However, it is also true that, even when they cannot make a difference that directly changes the oppressive systems, they open the way for
the discourse that paves the way for transformation. The fighter for freedom may be saving the dignity of the environment, but helshe
cannot attain his/her self consciousness in so far as helshe is committed to action and work for the common utility. An interior outlet to
immanence is neither possible for those who wait for their turn to be in charge of power nor for the marginalized revolutionary. In short,
struggle for power, no matter what the consequences are, takes one away from the
direction of the immanence in which Bataille sees "the sovereign good" and the ultimate
possibility of our existence. Neither submission to law and authority nor
revolt may lead to immanence. Occupying a position of power within
a system licenses the subject to use violence. The feeling of
transcendence experienced as the possessor of that power is in fact
illusory, for the truth is that one is temporarily possessed by that
power. Because one is only the surrogate subject, the transient host of
power, the truth of the appearance of subjective potency is nothing
but impotence. Immanent violence targets this illusory sense of
transcendence. For example, Fight Club, one of the cult movies of recent years, lends itself to being read in terms of the
question of the unleashing of immanent violence against the nluch greater violence errlbedded in a society organized by advanced capitalist
relations of production. 8 The anti-heros of this movie exert immanent violence to destroy the ways in which life is possessed by the desire
to possess. They find relief in a play of violence among friends which makes winning and losing insignificant and yet their immanent
violence risks being lost in revolutionary terrorism. Fight Club seems to begin in Bataillean fashion as a "project against the project" and
ends up as a struggle to prevent the other's death to which it leads. This struggle is not the result of a conflict between the return to
immanence and morality or religion. It is a struggle between transcendent and immanent violence. The argument that a living being's life
can be sacrificed for higher ends is a mark of transcendent violence, for there are no such ends in immanence. Of course, this is not to say
A plane of immanence on which no concern for
that immanence has no risk or no danger.
transcendence can have a hold manifests itself with an unthinkable power to emancipate.
A globalizing world promises no history that would make mankind even more
transcendent. Technology tolerates only the accumulation of information
which supplies no critical resources. Given this present state of affairs, violence
seems to have already lost the promise of transcendence. However, one may ask about
the victims of immanent violence too. For example, what about the pornographic snuff
movies which cause the deaths of thousands of women in the world? Would that be a
phenomenon of immanent violence? Let us turn to Theory of Religion before we
speculate about how Bataille might answer that question. The violence that makes
transcendence possible presupposes an act of objectification. Unlike human
consciousness which distinguishes itself from its objects, an eagle that
attacks a lamb does not distinguish it from itself. An object is by definition that which is thrown in
front of an onlooker, and thus something I can set up over against myself. Unlike the hammer I use or the other whose hand I hold, an
object can never be an extension of my living body. The eagle does not perceive the lamb as an object. Animals do not have an "outside
world" that consists of objects. Given that objects are temporal syntheses, and presupposing with Bataille that the dimension of future that
marks intelligence is not open to animals, an animal cannot see its prey as an object. According
to Bataille, the eating of
one animal by another is consumption, an extermination that has no duration and occurs
in an actual time in which nothing is objectified. 9 Neither can we say that an animal that
eats another one is using it. The eagle is immersed in the nutritive "element" in the act of
emptying the intestines of the other that it lays open. In contrast to the relation with an
object, the immanent relation with the other does not involve a separation, a distinction
between me and the other. According to Bataille such an internal relation with
the other has no duration, that is, it is always in the present. This is not to
say that it is closed to the future. However, the future here is not the time of
projects but a time that can never be anticipated. When Bataille writes that
"intimacy is violence," we should perhaps understand this in terms of the fragilities of
inter-corporeality as much as the exposure by the present to a future that is to come,
without any possibility of anticipation. Bataille emphasizes that duration belongs to
the world of objects. Objects are spatial and temporal syntheses. It is important to
ren1ember that Merleau-Ponty explains the illusion of transcendence by taking his
departure precisely from that synthetic nature of perception. As is well-known, for
Merleau-Ponty an object that appears in its thickness is spatial as well as temporal, and
is never given to my perception from all the points of view at once. 10 That the gaze is
always bound to a certain perspective implies that the object will always absolutely be
partially closed. Our classic and ordinary fiction of an "object" owes its being
to the attribution of the primacy of vision over all the other senses, and to the
presupposition that there can be an all-encompassing gaze. In Merleau-Ponty's
terms, this illusion rests on our forgetting the role played by the spatiality of the living
body in vision. We may say that our tendency, in our imagination, to separate the
gaze from the living body to which it belongs is one of the conditions of
transcendence that can make even the world itself an object. "It is the ex-stase
of perception which causes all perception to be perception of something."ll When we
conceive the world as a big object, we forget that we inhabit the earth with our fellow
creatures. Now, immanent violence is an attempt to overcome the separation
between the I and the other that gave rise to subjects and objects. If, in the
age of technology, one can talk about violence on a plane of immanence
which does not bring about or reproduce transcendence by becoming
internal to the subject, history, God, and so on, then such violence may
attest to the experience of the living body through pain, or through an
experience of remembering that heals. The violence that results in transcendence
objectifies-the female body killed by snuff is set on the screen as the ultimate object in
which life is destroyed. On the other hand, in the lived experience of immanent violence,
the desire is to destroy the object that is the human body, the human body as an object.
Bataille knows well that our civilization treats the female body as an object of a male
gaze; however, erotic experience as a sovereign experience cannot have anything to do
with objectification, except to overcome it. In so far as the erotic is a touching of lost
intimacy, it is the dissolution of both object and subject.
War
War is both immanent and necessary to the superabundant
movements of life, however, the form that war takes is not an a
priori. Only by ignoring that we live on the ground of multiple
destructions do we arrive at the conditions that make total war
inevitable
Wilson 05. Julie, “Unproductive expenditure and the spatial ground of the earth:
Bataille on the other side of Deleuze and Guattari” - EE - Sep 26, 2005
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpbataille6.htm
Both Bataille and Deleuze & Guattari’s ontological projects are fueled by attempts to
understand the most radical of human movements through a conceptualization of war
and its different forms. These different forms of war are absolutely fundamental for
grasping the political claims of each project, not to mention the stakes that surround the
category of unproductive expenditure. In the thought of Bataille two different forms
of war emerge: war as mystical or inner experience, and war in the more
conventional sense as death and destruction on the battlefield. Much of
Bataille’s wartime writings can be read as attempts to see an equivalence between actual
war and mystical experience. In his book Saints of the Impossible: Bataille, Weil, and the
Politics of the Sacred, Alexander Irwin references Bataille’s own words in “The Practice
of Joy before Death:” “’I want to show that an equivalence exists between war, ritual
sacrifice, and the mystical life.’ All these forms of behavior reflect ‘the same play of
‘ecstasies’ and ‘terrors’ in which man joins in the games of heaven’”(136). Bataille thus
sees a fundamental similarity between the violence of the battlefield and
mysticism in the ecstasy and terror that characterize both experiences; his
insistence on the equivalence stems from both his energetic framework-- better known
as general economy-- and the latter’s commitment to thinking through the category of
unproductive expenditure, or the moment when production (and/or growth) has reached
its terrestrial limits and must turn unproductive, or rather, destructive of energetic
resources.
For Bataille, the emergence of war in both instances is intimately bound up in the
category of unproductive expenditure; in fact, war is the moment and movement of
unproductive expenditure, or profitless expenditure. In the energeticist
ontology of Bataille, unproductive expenditure—consumptions and
dissipations—are linked to the realm of the necessary; thus, so is war. In “The
Practice of Joy before Death,” Bataille writes: “’I MYSELF AM WAR.’ I imagine human
movement and excitation, whose possibilities are limitless: this movement and excitation
can only be appeased by war” (Visions of Excess, 239). War, for Bataille, is the
necessary and universal response to expansive and growth-seeking being; in
this sense, war as profitless expenditure is fundamental to maintaining the balance of
forces on Earth. War (and thus unproductive expenditure) engender
destructions of forces and energies, but what Bataille desperately wants us to
understand is that although war in-itself is immanent to and
necessary for life, the form it will take is not an a priori. In Volume
One of The Accursed Share, Bataille clarifies the central claims of his ontological project:
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the
surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for
maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of the
system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be
spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically (21).
We can ignore or forget the fact that the ground we live on is little other than
a field of multiple destructions. Our ignorance only has this incontestable effect: It
causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way, if we understood (23).
Here we see clearly the two faces of war or unproductive expenditure: the
catastrophic war that destroys life through violence turned against peoples/ war
experienced as undergone; and the glorious inner experience of the mystic/ war brought
about in one’s own way. In the case of actual war, unproductive expenditure is the
privilege of the ruling classes; in inner experience, unproductive expenditure is a
sovereign moment or movement of desiring subjects.
Deleuze & Guattari’s work follows a similar structure evidenced in the concept of the war
machine. In the nomadology plateau of A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, Deleuze & Guattari differentiate between the war machine that takes war
for its object and the war machine that draws a creative line of flight. They write:
The war machine is not uniformly defined, we have tried to define the two poles of the
war machine: at one pole, it takes war for its object and forms a line of destruction
prolongable to the limits of the universe. But in all of the shapes it assumes here—
limited war, total war, worldwide organization—war represents not at all the
supposed essence of the war machine but only, whatever the machine’s power, either the
set of conditions under which the States appropriate the machine…or the dominant
order of which the States themselves are now only parts. The other pole seemed to be the
essence: it is when the war machine…has as its object not war but the drawing of a
creative line of flight, the composition of smooth space and the movement of a people in
that space…(422).
Links
Achievement
The 1AC’s presentation of a more “educated” and “better” world
order post the plan falls in line with the necropoltiical desire for
ordering and consumption. This works under the myth of
Narissus, where the 1AC would prefer to watch a puddle showing
their own reflection of grandeur and achievement rather than
the outside world of their domination and imposition of will.
This works not only through educational achievement and the
desire to be the best but also through a desire for even the over-
spectacularization of death itself.
Mbembe’01 – Achille Mbembe – Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History
at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was
Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the
Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C., from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of
Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in
Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a visiting Professor at the University of
California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written extensively in African
history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the Postcolony
was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press,
Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National
Research Foundation. – “On the Postcolony” pg 130-133- KZaidi
Such attention to detail should not come as a surprise; it is part of the system of “distinction.”98 The enumeration
of
the slightest educational achievement is one of the postcolonial codes of prestige, with
special attention to distinctions attained in Europe. Thus, for example, citizens cite their
diplomas with great care, they show off their titles—doctor, chief, president, and so on—
with great affectation, as a way of claiming honor, glory, attention. Displays of this kind
have an effect beyond their contribution to state ritual. Such a display is transformative;
by casting its rays on the person installed, it bestows upon him a new radiance. In the hierarchy of mock honors, the
description of scholarly achievements constitutes a marker of rank and status as well as
of qualification.99
Another example of “distinction” is the ceremony where decorations and medals are
awarded. During the 20 May 1989 ceremonies alone, more than 3,000 people were decorated with 481 gold medals,
1,000 dark red medals, and 1,682 silver medals. The medals, obtained from the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare,
cost CFA 11,500 each for the gold, CFA 10,500 for the dark red, and CFA 8,500 for the
silver varieties. Additionally, businesses gave “contributions” to the recipients to help
with family festivities.100 These family celebrations included “liba- tions, feasting and
various extravagances [which] are the norm in such circumstances.”101 One could
indeed be disturbed by the lavishness of the expenditure, since it is rare to find a recipient of a medal
who is not heavily in debt after the celebrations, but the primary point is that, in this context, the granting of a
medal is a political act through which bureaucratic relations are transformed into
clientelist networks where pleasures, privileges, and resources are distributed for
political compli- ance.102 The lavish distribution of food and other marks of generosity
are of interest only to the extent that they make relations of superiority manifest; what
circulates are not just gifts but tokens creating networks of indebtedness and
subordination.103
The day they told me that I was to be decorated, my wife and I were so ex- cited that we stayed up all night talking about
the event. Until then we had only taken part in celebrations when others had been decorated. This time we would be
celebrating our own medal . . . On the day I received the medal my wife had prepared a pretty bouquet of flowers which
she presented to me on the ceremonial stand to the sound of public applause.104
In the postcolony, magnificence and the desire to shine are not the pre- rogative only of
those who command. The people also want to be “honored,” to “shine,” and to take part
in celebrations.
Last Saturday the Muslim community of Cameroon celebrated the end of Ra- madan. For thirty days members of the
community had been deprived of many things from dawn till dusk. They refrained from drinking, eating, smoking, sexual
relations and saying anything that goes against the Muslim faith and the law. Last Saturday marked the end of these
privations for the whole Mus- lim community of Cameroon.105
It is clear that the obscenity

of power in the postcolony is also fed by a desire for majesty on
the part of the people. Because the postcolony is characterized above all by scarcity, the
metaphor of food “lends itself to the wide-angle lens of both imagery and efficacy.”106
Food and tips (pour- boire) are political,107 “food,” like “scarcity,” cannot be dissociated from
particular regimes of “death,” from specific modalities of enjoyment or from therapeutic
quests.108 This is why “the night”109 and “witch- craft,”110 the “invisible,”111 the “belly,” the
“mouth,”112 and the “penis” are historical phenomena in their own right. They are
institutions and sites of power, in the same way as pleasure or fashion:
Cameroonians love slick gaberdine suits, Christian Dior outfits, Yamamoto blouses, shoes of crocodile skin . . . .113
The label
is the true sign of “class.” . . . There are certain names that stand out. They are
the ones that should be worn on a jacket, a shirt, a skirt, a scarf, or a pair of shoes if you
want to win respect.114
Do not be surprised if one day when you enter an office unannounced you discover piles
of clothing on the desks. The hallways of Ministries and other public or private offices have become the market
place par excellence. Market conditions are so flexible that everyone—from the director to the
messenger— finds what they want. Indeed, owing to the current crisis, sellers give big re-
ductions and offer long-term credit . . . .
Business is so good that many people throw themselves into it head down. A veritable
waterhole, it’s where sophisticated ladies rub shoulders with all kinds of ruffians and layabouts. The basis of the
entire “network” is travel. It is no secret that most of the clothes on the market come from the West. Those who
have the “chance” to go there regularly are quick to notice that they can reap great benefits from frequent trips. A few
“agreements” made with customs officials, and the game is on.115
Even death does not escape this desire to “shine” and to be “honored.” The rulers and the
ruled want more than ceremonies and celebrations to show off their splendor. Those who
have accumulated goods, prestige, and influence are not only tied to the “constraints of giving.”116 They are also taken
by the desire to “die well” and to be buried with pomp.117 Funerals constitute one of the occasions
where those who command gaze at themselves, much like Narcissus.118 Thus, when Joseph Awunti,
the presidential minister in charge of relations with parliament, died on 4 November 1987, his body was received at
Bamenda airport by the gov- ernor of what was then the Northwestern Province, Wabon Ntuba Mboe, himself
accompanied by the Grand Chancellor, the first vice-president of the party, and a variety of administrative, political, and
“traditional” authorities. Several personalities and members of the government were also present, including the
“personal” representative of the head of state, Joseph Charles Dumba, Minister to the Presidency. The Economic and
Social Council was represented by its president, Ayang Luc, the National Assembly by the president of the parliamentary
group, and the Central Committee of the Party by its treasurer.119 Power’s
sanction thus pene- trated to
the very manner the dead man was buried. It appears that those who command seek to
familiarize themselves with death, paving the way for their burial to take on a certain
quality of pleasure and expenditure.
During the funeral of Thomas Ebongalame, former Secretary of the National Assembly, Member of the Upper Council of
the Magistracy, Ad- ministrative Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party, board member of many parastatals,
and “initiated
member of the secret society of his tribe,” the procession left Yaoundé by
road. Huge crowds had come from throughout Southwestern Province to pay their last
respects.
At Muyuka, Ebonji, Tombel, and Nyasoso, primary
and secondary school students formed human
hedges several hundred metres long. When the body arrived in Kumba, the main town of
Meme, the entire place turned itself into a procession. At the head was the ENI–ENIA fanfare playing
a mournful tune. People wept profusely. . . . In this town with a population of over 120,000 all
socio-economic activity had been put on ice since 30 April, when the tragic news was
heard. People awaited instructions from Yaoundé. No fewer than ten meetings were
held to organise the funeral programme.120
As we have seen, obscenity—regarded as more than a moral category— constitutes one
modality of power in the postcolony. But it is also one of the arenas in which
subordinates reaffirm or subvert that power. Bakhtin’s error was to attribute these practices to the
dominated. But the production of burlesque is not specific to this group . The real inversion takes place
when, in their desire for a certain majesty, the masses join in the madness and clothe themselves in
cheap imitations of power to reproduce its epistemology, and when power, in its own violent
quest for grandeur, makes vulgarity and wrongdoing its main mode of existence. It is
here, within the confines of this intimacy, that the forces of tyranny in Africa must be
studied. Such research must go beyond institutions, beyond formal positions of power, and beyond
the written rules, and examine how the implicit and explicit are interwoven, and how
the practices of those who command and those who are assumed to obey are so
entangled as to render both powerless. For it is precisely the situations of powerlessness
that are the situations of violence par excellence.
Anti-Blackness
The real Other is the white man who dismembers the black man
– the 1AC actor is absolved of responsibility by the “code of
honor,” a privilege afforded by a sadistic Will-to-Enjoy –
instead, we must contemplate the unknowable power of violence
without cowardly fear nor sadistic fascination
Stabler 2016 (Albert, PhD student in Art Education at the University of Illinois at
Urbana- Champaign and Chicago Public Schools Teacher. “Punishment in Effigy:
An aesthetics of torment versus a pedagogy of pain in Georges Bataille and
Eric Garner.” Photographies. 9:3, 322-323, accessed 7/10/17, EHL)
The only thing protecting us from this gaze is accumulated imagery, the
misperceptions which form our subjectivity, the shadow of ourselves that
blocks the light; Lacan calls this the “screen.” “[I]f I am anything in the picture,” he says, “it is always in the form
of the screen, which I earlier called the stain, the spot” (97). Racism is anchored in these
unconscious images. “When one has grasped the mechanism described by Lacan,” says Frantz Fanon, “one can have
no further doubt that the real Other for the white man is and will
continue to be the black man. And conversely. Only for the white man The Other is
perceived on the level of the body image, absolutely as the not-self— that is,
the unidentifiable, the unassimilable.” (161) Fanon here identifies the black man with this distorted image, this “stain”
itself. And for Fanon, this psychological fact is, as seen with the sentence of sedition shared by Sade, Roman slaves, and Chinese prisoners, a political fact. For
many a white American, Deleuze and Guattari’s Euro-Christian “faciality

machine” could represent this protective screen, while Garner’s eyes , disinterred
from Emmanuel Levinas’ unassimilable “face of the Other,” might haunt whites like the “evil eye” that does
not reside in but stares through the image. “The evil eye is the fascinum (spell),” Lacan says, “it is that which has
the effect of arresting movement and, literally, of killing life . . . It is precisely one of the dimensions in which the power of the gaze is exercised directly” (Lacan
Four Fundamental Concepts 118). But “ dismantling” the face for Deleuze and Guattari is itself blissful; it means to “no
longer look into the eyes, but to swim through them, to close your eyes, to close your own
eyes, and make your body a beam of light moving at ever-increasing speed”
(187). JR’s rendering of Garner’s eyes, more than a tuxedo-clad high school photo of Garner that
was widely shared, or even the unforgettable image from Orta’s video of his
dying moments on the sidewalk under a pile of white police officers, carry a
hint of what Joseph Lo Duca called, in ecstatic italics, “the last instant” (6). As
Bataille illustrates through his sensual reflections on dismemberment, the
use of force has a sublime dimension. What responsibility does this voyeuristic rapture entail?
Ultimately, Lacan sees the perverse Sade both as a teacher and a victim of the law— as does
Bataille, as does Sade himself. Sade is reminiscent of the snake that D.H. Lawrence takes pity on, describing it as “like a king in exile,” as well as the snake that
Sade’s purportedly uninhibited

Jacques Derrida describes as the true victim in Eden, another pedagogical “Garden of the Laws” (79–80).
pleasure-seeking, what Bataille calls his “sovereignty” and what Lacan refers to as his
“Will-to-Enjoy,” is merely obedience disguised as a fantasy that, according to Slavoj Žižek, has
come to characterize the ideology of capitalist ethics. The imaginary “discourse of mastery” that Lacan identifies in
Sade’s writing can be recognized as a perverse reaction to a yet more perverse Law that
pursued and constrained Sade throughout his lifetime, and whose brutal excesses authored his fanciful inventions—
inventions which, in turn, created a precedent for the detached bliss Bataille recorded upon viewing the mangled corpse and beatific countenance of a Chinese
Žižek pictures Sade as “an object upon which state agencies lived out their
prisoner.
moralistic sadism.” “The real Will-to-Enjoy,” he elaborates, “is in the state bureaucratic
apparatus which handles the subject” as well as in the pleasurable excesses of
punishment tolerated by state authorities as a brutal form of education (36). Where we might think of a
killer cop, Žižek calls to mind a typical Southern small town of the 1920s, in which “the official public Law ... is accompanied by the lynchings of powerless blacks.”
Žižek continues, “ A white man is easily forgiven at least minor infringements of the Law,
especially when they can be justified by a ‘code of honor’” (37). In the case of
many police officers, this sovereign “code” entails absolute authority over faceless,
stateless black bodies. Like Bataille, white viewers can take pleasure in viewing the misery of
others by identifying with an omniscient gaze that Lacan termed, “the big Other.” Through
this gaze, be it that of a smart phone or dashboard camera, whites imagine ourselves inflicting pain on those we
consider criminal and less than human, while also experiencing that pain as euphoria,
seeing our spectatorship reflected back to us through witnesses. It is then not enough to pedagogically demand
visibility and punishment, since punishment and vision are already bound up with pleasure. Bataille
says of the Chinese convict’s face, “it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to
take pleasure in it, but to ruin in me that which is opposed to him.” In the empathy and solidarity Bataille
expresses, on behalf of the Marquis de Sade as well as himself, the witnessing of horror can produce
revolutionary impulses. Our first task when faced by a scene of violence is to

be overcome by neither fear nor fascination, but to contemplate the
unknowable power located in the gaze beyond the image.
Capitalism
Capitalism =   the reading of the 1NC is a form of artistic
poetics that creates a new definition of sovereignty
Hegarty, 2k (Paul Hegarty, author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College
Cork, Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, pg )/RF
From the earliest writings, Bataille's

texts are driven by antipathy to modern, Western,
capitalist society. If anything, politics is where Bataille is at his most consistent, even if, as usual, there are shifts in emphasis and
counter-intuitive moves on his part. WTien we look to assess his political position (s), we have to cover two distinct aspects: his stated positions, whether
to do with the political position of others, his own, or his view on politics as a category of activity; and the political implications of his writings. The first
set of aspects is the one that I will deal with directly here, and from these I will draw out some of the political implications. The
principal
period in which Bataille is most like the figure of the engage, or committed, writer is the
late 1930s. In the articles of this time, he moves from an emphasis on the valorization of
practices from outside modern society to a more overt criticism of capitalism as an
essential part of the problem that is modern society. The obvious inference is that the rise of Fascism drove this
interest. Similarly, not only was the Soviet Union's alternative significant at the time in its own right, it too was heading in a very similar direction to
Fascism, and taking on a new significance. During and after the war, Bataille
becomes much more of a commentator
on politics as such, as an area of human existence, arguing against the apparent need for
praxis to be realized in the figure of the committed writer, who should advocate action.
Politics, for Bataille himself, suffers the same fate as economics within the general economy: with perfect consistency, politics cannot be seen as an
autonomous realm, except in the reductionism of restricted economies. With The Accursed Share, Bataille shifts to rethinking
what others call politics as movement within general economy and across to
restricted economy. Everything is either accumulation and utility or waste and
sacrifice. Despite, or perhaps because of this, he advocates the continued existence of Stalinism - not because it is the only hope, but because it
performs a specific function, even in its cruelty, in diminishing the bourgeois, capitalist, Christian individual he considers essentially limited. Late
texts such as Eroticism might suggest a politics of sexual liberation, and later essays
firmly suggest revolt, refusal, as a means of subversion. Above all, there is a strong sense
of continuity in Bataille's views on politics, but in looking at this continuity we should
not lose sight of the paradoxes or difficulties in these positions. This chapter focuses on essays from
throughout his oeuvre, and largely leaves the political implications of the major works to the discussions in earlier chapters. Capitalism and
Marxist, or bourgeois, society (Bataille tends to blur the cultural and economic) is a
reduction of man's potential in an existence of homogeneity. 'Homogeneous society is
productive society, namely useful society (The Psychological Structure of Fascism', 138; OC I, 340), and
homogeneous society is one of rules, of exclusion of what is not the norm, of what
is other (heterogeneous). Such a society leads us to where 'the human masses are at the disposition of blind forces which condemn
them to inexplicable hecatombs, and which, while making them wait, give them a morally empty and materially miserable life ('Popular Front in the
Street', 161; OC I, 402). Within capitalism all of us live miserable lives, but the bourgeois
class at least benefits materially, and is the homogeneous element of capitalist
society - it is the norm, the owner of the system and consists of those for whom the rules
are made. Capitalist society reduces or eliminates the most important part of an
individual - the possibility of sovereign existence away from calculations of utility (this is
Bataille's line from the mid-1930s in essays such as The Psychological Structure of Fascism right through to
the texts explicitly on sovereignty in the late 1950s, including The Accursed Share, vol. ///:
Sovereignty). Capitalism removes the artisanal link to the thing made, and make s us all
producers, means instead of ends, making means instead of being ends. Bataille's story is very similar
to that told by Marx, but we can see in Bataille's texts so many elements of discord with Marx that we might wonder what is left of the latter in the former
(who whilst not avowing himself a communist, due to his distrust of political parties, certainly saw himself as being more or less of a Marxist). He writes
that Marxism is right about the Infrastructure of modern society (Th e Psychological Structure of Fascism',
137; OC I, 339), but
that it neglects the relevance 'of the modalities peculiar to the
formation of religious and political society (137; 339). Marxists would of course
argue that they have thought about these aspects, and that all the effects are at least linked, if not
determined, by the economic base . It is notable that by 'infrastructure her e Bataille means 'base structure', but his term
should be read as an indication of the distance of Bataille's text (and in the wider sense, his oeuvre), within which
economics is not a means to other ends, from Marxism. 1 Bataille argues that religion is
significant in that, in the form of Christianity, it works with capitalist society to dispose of the sacred. What distinguishes this
from Mar x and Marxism is that for them, ther e is nothing beyond the
material. An even earlier essay notes this problem, in a way that is only implicit in the essays of the period after 1933: Most materialists, even
though they may have wanted to do away with all spiritual entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as
specifically idealist. They
situated dead matter at the summit of a conventional hierarchy of
diverse facts, without perceiving that in this way they gave in to an obsession with the
ideal form of matter. ('Materialism', 15; OC 1,179) So materialism cannot be the only answer, and in the light of these comments, which
are perfectly consistent with all the political writings of the 1930s and the postwar texts, we can make the case Politics 149 that Marxism is no mor e than
a version of restricted economy. T h e sacred would be that which exceeds such a concept, and is communal in that it is the loss of self in a greater whole
(even if this whole is nothing). Religion
Is the source of social authority, (Th e Psychological Structure of Fascism', 152; OC
I, 360), on
the basis that its authority does not come from personal value, as is the case with
military authority. Neither does the authority that come s with religion just represent one form of misleading 'the people in order to attain
power. Religion is a particular process within the development of society: 'the
supreme being of theologians and philosophers represents the most
profound introjection of the structur e characteristic of homogeneity into
heterogeneous existence (153; 361). So the invention of God both reduce s the sacred and make s God sovereign in the
Bataillean sense, as h e is beyond the everyday. His place then gets taken by the Idea, the ideal. Th e arrival of gods, particularly a single god, provides
the ground for the creation of temporal power, and indicates that the question of general economy precede s that of economics as a version of the
The creation of social
master/slave dialectic (remembering that Bataille's own 'version' of the dialectic also undoe s dialectical logic).
authority leads us into the realm of political authority, a further homogenization. From
here, Bataille goes direct to the State, missing out the Marxist link to an economic base.
But once we arrive in the State, modern society is structured in a way that emphasizes
the economic, and creates new forms of poverty and oppression. Th e combination of
deprivations (in terms of power, economics, lack of community, lack of the sacred) leads the lower classes, including
the workers, to desire the downfall of the State. As Stoekl notes, one way or another Bataille has 'an assumption that
democracy in the West is doomed; the choice is between some form of communism and Fascism (Visions of Excess, 261n.). A revolution
will occur - it is just a question of making sure Fascism is not the outcome.
The problem is that Marxism has lost its edge: Lenin is no use any more ('Le
probleme de l'Etaf, OC 1,336), and the Soviet Union has fallen to Stalinism (333). The workers, however, still
have a faith characteristic of mid-nineteenth-century radicals (334). Caught between these difficulties, the lower classes no longer have sufficient force to
dislodge 150 Georges Bataille a liberal State, none of which, Bataille notes, has ever been altered through revolution into a communist society OVers la
revolution reelle* [Towards Real Revolution'], OCI, 417). 2 But Bataille
is far from rejecting the possibility
of revolution, or t he revolutionary potential of the working class. In a way
that is perhaps closer to anarchism, he emphasizes the need for, or even the
inevitability of, the rising of the wretched in general - and there is no reason
why this could not later include the bourgeois themselves. It is not economic necessity alone
that will drive the revolution. It will come as the result of the 'anguish provoked among the working classes by the birth of the three all-powerful States*
('Le probleme de l'Etat', 336) (these being Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union). Fascism has come from the problems of liberal societies (it is not, for
Bataille, simply an outgrowth of the capitalist system), but needs to be fought by Organic movements*, and not via dated communist conceptions of the
Party leading the industrial working class, leading everyone else ('Vers la revolution reelle*, 420). 'Organic movements* come about at specific times, in
We might, however,
response to events (422), and are able to attack the multiple targets presented by 'democratic or Fascist society.
wonder whether this organic movement is not too close to Fascism. Fascism
Ther e might be mor e than a suggestion that Bataille ha s gone too far, and,
given the climate of the 1930s, is heading towards Fascism. Above all what
we see in the often implicit rejection of central elements of Marxism is an
attempt to deal with why Fascism was happening, and this attempt does lead
to moments of ambiguity. This does not prevent Bataille from continually
stating his opposition to Fascism and nationalism (Th e Psychological Structur e of Fascism'; the
articles defending Nietzsche; the 'Contre-attaque [Counter-attack] movement), 3 but the ambiguity is present especially when he writes on 'heterogeneity'.
According to Bataille, the heterogeneous realm is all that is outside norms, the controls of modern society. Fascism exceeds and challenges liberal society,
and is heterogeneous becaus e it Politics 151 aims above and beyond the utilitarian concerns of capitalism. It appeals to what is 'noble* (The
Psychological Structure of Fascism', 145; OC 1,350), and
its cruelty and purity elevate it above homogeneity (146;
351). Fascism
exceeds class boundaries, creating an organic social movement (154; 363). Thus
far, it might be construed that maybe Fascism does have something to offer,
and although he does not state it as such, for Bataille it does match some
aspiration neglected by utilitarian society. However, as well as the overt
renunciations of Fascism, he has specific theoretical points to make which
disqualify it. Firstly, Fascism's use of the nation as organizing concept
reintroduces homogeneity (154-5; 363-4), and this homogeneity is solidified in the
concentration of power that is the totalitarian State. In a later article, he writes that Nazism
is nowhere near as grand as it thinks it is. Whilst it could have been an 'epic force, it is nothing more than a simplistic,
militaristic form of nationalism ('Nietzsche est-il fasciste? ['Is Nietzsche a Fascist?'], OC XI, 9). This authoritarianism renders Fascism 'a servile
discipline ('Contre-attaque: Appel a faction' ['Counter-attack: Call to Action'], OC I, 396). Bataille's
attack on Fascism is
closely tied to his defence of Nietzsche's writings, which he argues are incompatible with
Nazism. He writes that Nietzsche's writing is way beyond Nazism, and that 'the distance
between Hitler and Nietzsche is that of a police room compared to the heights of the Alps
('Nietzsche est-il fasciste?', OC XI, 11). Furthermore, he is beyond all use - he is simply not reducible: 'NIETZSCHE'S DOCTRINE CANNOT BE
ENSLAVED ('Nietzsche and the Fascists', 184: OC I, 450). 4 All of these statements predate the end of the war, which would reveal the full horror of
Nazism. Bataille condemns the Holocaust as the death of reason ('Du rapport entre le divin et le mal [The Link Between Good and Evil'], OCXI, 206;
'Sartre', OCXI, 226-8), but has the more ambiguous response that we also find in Lyotard, whereby the Holocaust comes to stand as both the ultimate (as
in final) human experience and the experience which cannot be processed, understood ('Reflexion sur le bourreau et la victime ['Reflections on the
Torturer and the Victim']; OCXI, 262-7). 5 These are both ethically acceptable positions, but neither really matches the rest of his theory - why should the
gratuitous murder of millions fall outside 152 Georges Bataille t he general economy? The short answer seems to be there is good and bad expenditure.
How then can h e be sanguine about the 'becoming object that Stalinism was still inflicting on its population? He certainly musters what could be seen as
a chilling response to Hiroshima, arguing that we only want to believe it exceptional because then we can continue ignoring the fact that millions of
deaths will always occur anyway 'Concerning the Accounts Given by t he Residents of Hiroshima, 221-35; OCXI, 172-87). I am not at all rejecting his
position on the Holocaust, rather observing that it seems significant that he is unable to place it anywhere in his various systems (unlike Hiroshima). This
might be to do with the enormity of the event, the impossibility of incorporating it. But Bataille ha s a 'system that can account for this, so it is
particularly interesting that it is further removed from discourse by not being included. Another statement worth pausing on is about the 'sovereign
sacrifice that Hitler makes in pursuing the battle of Stalingrad long after it is lost (recalling that a sovereign sacrifice is not heroism, b ut pointless
destruction or loss). One
of the reasons Nazism haunts us, remaining our heterogeneous other, is
that it is both at t he height of reason, with its efficiency, and at the height of
monstrosity, again due to its efficiency. Bataille's way of raising this is in t he rejection of
utilitarianism that is the disaster of Stalingrad ('Caprice et machinerie d'Etat a Stalingrad [Whim and State Machine at
Stalingrad'], OCXI, 472-9). T h e period after the war sees Bataille treating ideologies from a theoretical perspective that differs from his earlier approach.
Fascism is now seen only in its results, its destruction and murder. Liberal
society is not let off the hook, and communism is rethought - or, more
accurately, its relevance is restated, with the peculiar valorization of the
Stalinist Soviet Union (see Chapter 4 above). The last decisive shift to note concerns the base of politics:
action. Revolution, Violence, Action Bataille's notion of political action alters significantly after the war. Before the war, he has a notion of the possibility
of positive political action. Conceivably, the simple reason for this is the context of the Politics 153 threat of various nationalist, Fascist and right-wing
organizations (France had monarchist as well as nationalist elements in its right wing). The deeper reason is perhaps to do with the stage Bataille
had reached in his philosophy: he had
gone far enough to wish to see the overthrow of the
capitalist system, but not as far as to disbelieve in the possibility of any
alternative. He did, for example, believe that surrealism opened up possibilities, but that it was doomed by the fact that logically it could not
succeed. Possibly the defining political paradox in Bataille is the necessity to do
something, and that this something will fail. Surrealism, however, rejects
sovereign failure in favour of aesthetic success and limits. Bataille's notion
of action alters, and before the war, moves gradually toward an anarchist
perspective. Whilst he accepts Marx's critique of capitalism, Bataille is suspicious of
the methods of communism and its results. This is not just to do with an awareness of the problems of Stalinism, but is
also an increasingly critical view of the Popular Front alliance of communists and socialists that effectively ended up defending the capitalist system CA
ceux qui n'ont pas oublie la guerre du droit et de la liberte [To those who have not forgotten the just war for freedom'], OC 1,399-401). AVhilst the
defence against Fascism is the essential point of the Popular Front, Bataille and Contre-attaque regarded it as equally important that it attack capitalism,
and attack Fascism ('Popular Front in the Street', 165; OC I, 401). The Popular Front is close to his conception of an Organic movement', representing an
outbreak of discontent, but it needs to keep the 'contagion of popular movement going. Here we begin to get the flavour of what we might categorize as
Bataille's ultra-leftism: beyond
the machinations of communist organizations lies the
mass, the masses - the truly revolutionary, heterogeneous force: What
drives the crowds to the street is the emotion directly aroused by striking
events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the contagious emotion that from
house to house, from suburb to suburb, turns a hesitating man into a
frenzied being. It is evident that if, in general, insurrections had to wait for learned disputes
between committees and the political offices of parties, then there never would have
been an insurrection. (162; 403) He goes on to note that revolutionaries mistake their notions of
revolution for the actual revolution, which is far less susceptible to control. The revolution can only
be 'effervescence* ('En attendant la greve generale [Waiting for the General Strike'], OC II, 254), and this brings in a sacrificial notion of politics. The
question is, what exactly is being sacrificed? Capitalism is to be attacked, but t he problem is
that the revolution, in Bataille's terms, cannot really serve a purpose, as it would then
have a us e value. Like Bakunin, Bataille seems to suggest that violence itself can bring about a
change, without bringing a particular change: it is the violence that is
creative. 6 He writes that we attribute us e value to revolution, but destruction is the real core of such action (Th e U se Value of DA E de Sade',
100; OC II, 67). This mirrors the potlatch, where sacrifice does lead to acquisition of
rank, even if the activity is essentially against all ends other than sacrifice.
Also, 'it is obvious that all destruction that is neither useful nor inevitable can only be the
achievement of an exploiter (100; 67). Here, the reference is to the destruction of something in particular, as in 'imperial war (102n.;
67n.), becaus e the essay then goe s on to specify the 'purest form of destruction: Without a profound complicity with
natural forces such as violent death, gushing blood, sudden catastrophes
and the horrible cries of pain that accompany them, terrifying ruptures of
what had seemed to be immutable, the fall into stinking filth of what had
been elevated - without a sadistic understanding of an incontestably
thundering and torrential nature, there could be no revolutionaries, there
could only be a revolting Utopian sentimentality. (101; 67) To return to the question of the Holocaust -
because it served a purpose, however mindless and dreadful, it does not count as revolutionary action. A mor e troubling case (with regard to the above
logic) could perhaps be seen in the Serbia/Kosovo situation. NATO fought a war at a distance, unwilling to suffer any loss - is this 'revolting Utopian
sentimentality compared to Serbia's continual brutality? In practice, NATO's hands are far from clean, but their way of fighting war ('surgical strikes
against Iraq) could conceivably be seen as worse than the cruel abandon of genocide in t he course of war. I am
not suggesting Bataille
believes this to be t he case, but the implication of his mor e Sadean statements is that
excessive destruction will happen, come what may, and we have to understand this. The
worst, or the least aware, position is the one that replaces war with a process of 'hygiene* - the 'grounds for many genocides - and, of course, the 'reason*
for the gratuitous violence in the former Yugoslavia. Bataille*s position is troubling, and mor e so when we think of t he political implications of what h e
says when he is not discussing politics as such. Nonetheless, he does believe something new can emerge from violence and sacrifice, but that this cannot
be predicted, controlled in advance. For
this reason, he is mor e in the anarchist tradition than the
nihilistic one, and mor e aware of our existence as something communa l than Hobbes,
Sade or Nietzsche, even if these are his most obvious precursors. Nowhere is ther e a
recommendation that all life should be about destruction - it is to be violent at certain
instants, but these moments take their force from being exceptional, and he even writes
at one point that the revolution should aim to abolish both violence and property ('[Note sur le
Systeme actuel de repression]*, '[Note on the Existing System of Repression]* OC II, 134). Bataille's view on politics hardens after the war, in that
politics is no longer to be seen as a sphere worthy of intervention. Even in The Accursed Share, wher e h e advocates a widening of the Marshall Plan as a
form of gift economy, and maintains the need for t he existence of the Soviet Union as part of a dialectic of economies, politics is not the site of
importance. Th e general economy subsume s all 'spheres* of moder n society.
Society is still something that could do with changing, but it seems that it
can be left to its own devices, even if mor e expenditure, in whatever form,
would be a good thing. More specifically, he continually attacks the notion that a writer must be politically committed. An
authentic writer, if such a thing is possible, can only be free through not aspiring for an
end beyond the art ('La litterature est-elle utile?* [ 'Is Literature Useful?*], OC XI, 13). Art, or writing, cannot
serve another purpose, such as a specific political end, without losing any
chance of being sovereign. This is not to say that art and writing should
aspire to be autonomous, but they should not aim at anothe r end.
Paradoxically, this is the only way art can have a political impact, and
Bataille offers the example of Picasso ('Les peintures politiques de Picasso*, OCXI, 24). 156 Georges Bataille T h e
most obvious target of the critique of committed writing is existentialism, and Sartre in particular. Existentialism must be lived,
and not written, or else it is inauthentic, notes Bataille wryly ('De l'existentialisme au primat de l'economie ['From
Existentialism to the Height of Economy'], OC XI, 284). As Bataille's own logic implies he should not write, he seems to take great
pleasure in existentialism's constant assertion of authenticity just wher e it cannot take
place. Similarly, he writes, with reference to Sartre, that surely the worst of all is to speak of action, while not doing it ('Lettre a Merleau-Ponty',
OCXI, 252). 7 As it is not enough, as a response, or as an alternative, to say that true action is impossible to do or recommend ('Le mensonge
politique'[The Lie of Polities'], OCXI, 335), perhaps
it is the advocacy of action, it is the bringing
into discourse of commitment, that is the problem. Politics can still play a
role as a 'negative politics of refusal, of revolt (and Bataille is positive about Camus on this point). This
negative politics is still defined through 'the free spirit [. . .] who stays at a
distance from judges and torturers ('Nietzsche - William Blake', OC XI, 425), but negative it remains, as 'of all
absolute judgements, the most consequential - and the most debatable - is the political one. It can no longer be a case of positively taking sides (ibid.). So
where does this leave us? It is very difficult to see what Bataille offers in terms of politics, at least when he deals explicitly with it. Arguably, his
writings provide the basis for many political approaches or strategies, particularly those
of new forms of politics, away from the totalizations of traditional political movements. Equally, he might be suggesting 'do
nothing', or 'make Fascism better', or 'sacrifice mor e people'. As with Nietzsche, evidence
can be found for many positions and uses, but it is this multiplicity that we should perhaps take from Bataille's texts: there can be no
one politics. Furthermore , given his critiques of use value, how can we put his writing to use, and be faithful to it? How can we
be faithful to it without attributing truth, and therefore an internal utility.
Christian Ethics
“Complete self-consciousness” is a totalizing worldview that
presupposes religious intimacy and spiritual expression – the
Christian savior ethics within the 1AC [flesh out per round]
creates social divisions -- the forbidden Other, the impure
bodies, the taboo communities are all marked as a threat to
purity of the sacred
Winters 2017 (Joseph, Winters is an Assistant Professor of Religious
Studies at Duke University. “RAC(E)ING FROM DEATH: Baldwin,
Bataille, and the Anguish of the (Racialized) Human.” Journal of Religious
Ethics. Volume 2, issue 45, page 380-405, accessed 7/11/17, EHL)
In the same manner that Baldwin pulls ethical resources from black aesthetic and religious traditions, Bataille reinterprets the
writings and discourses of medieval Christian mystics. As Amy Hollywood has so powerfully
demonstrated, Bataille is one of many twentieth-century French thinkers attracted to mystical experience as a site where
certain kinds of constraints and divisions (self/other, human/god) are both

illuminated and transgressed (Hollywood 2002). Drawing from, and re-imagining the tradition of mysticism,
Bataille suggests that religion tells us something about the broader human condition; or to put it differently, that the general
human condition is itself a religious conundrum. For Bataille, religion

indicates our “search for lost intimacy” (Bataille 2006, 57; Bataille 1991, 57), a quest to be at home in the
world, a persistent desire to “return” to some undifferentiated state. But for Bataille,
this quest is both emboldened and hindered by our investment in being

coherent selves, or what Bataille calls a “complete self-
consciousness,” that views itself and the world with clarity (Bataille
2006, 57). Our investment in this kind of self keeps us alienated from others without
extinguishing the desire for home and intimacy; therefore, this quest often
plays itself out by subordinating experiences, encounters, and others to the projects, aims, and
fantasies of the self or community. For Bataille, authentic religious
intimacy—which can range from pre-modern sacrifice to mysticism and erotic experience—is ec-static,
briefly taking the individual outside of herself, and rendering
her vulnerable to the murky, opaque quality of life’s flows and
rhythms. Being at home is ironically a feeling of being uprooted and unsettled. As an interruption into the self’s projects and
schemes, religious intimacy is marked by a range of affects—anguish
and joy, pleasure and pain. This resembles Baldwin’s

understanding of the blues and spirituals as expressions of an
anguish-filled joy. Even though Bataille is influenced by certain elements of the Chris- tian tradition—negative
theology, mysticism, the wounded, torn nature of Christ’s flesh, the agony of God on the cross—he refuses the logic of
redemption. He affirms the Passion, the suffering and death of Christ,

without the promise of victory and restoration signified by Easter Sun- day.
For Bataille, the logic of redemption, which places God’s agony and suffering into a
compensatory telos, entices us to associate the sacred with wholeness , the divine
with purity, and transcendence with ultimately rising above earthly
contingency. He writes, for instance, “For the Christian apparently, sacred things are necessarily pure and impurity is profane”
(Bataille 1986, 223). Here we can see another convergence with Baldwin as Bataille suggests that the imaginary
distinction between the pure and impure, and the taboos that
regulate the separation, can be disastrous for bodies and
communities that are marked as impure, as a threat to the
purity of the sacred. At the same time, Bataille claims that “the fear and trembling . . . [associated with] things
sacred . . . are always bound up with horror inspired by a forbidden object” (Bataille 1986, 223). There is always something
other and foreign about the sacred, even as we try to domesticate and tame the
discomfiting qualities of sacred objects and attribute these qualities to the
realm of the profane and obscene. Whereas the sacred is typically imagined as that
which needs to be protected from obscenity and degradation, Bataille suggests that religious
experience happens when taboos get transgressed, when the self crosses its
limit, or when the imagined border between protected self and forbidden
Other is shattered. The sacred is a site of impurity and ambivalence. Or as he puts it, religious experience
involves a communication with the Other marked by “laughter, dizziness,
nausea, loss of self to the point of death” (Bataille 2014, 42).
Communication
A collapse or failure in the structures of language is necessary
for communication to occur. We are a production of difference
within communication to be able to realize the very futility of
debates own mode of communication.
“Socratic College” also contains multiple claims

that some kind of failure is necessarily part of
communication. In this sense, what is “fragile” is not just a potential connection because
full or “perfect” connection is simply not possible: what is “fragile” in this sense is the
content of communication. Without clearly marking the fact that he is doing so, Bataille is slipping
from making claims about modes of communication into making claims about the
content of communication. Bataille is claiming here that something will always go unsaid or be
unclear in communication. Similarly, that indeterminacy is a permanent feature of
attempts at conceptualization—that is, the move from our inner workings to our
reports on those inner workings. This particular kind of failure is necessary and unavoidable,
and Bataille advocates allowing and—stronger yet—protecting it29: “[...] it is not too much to ask anyone
who persists in wanting to live completely not to put on too many airs and, as there is always filth where there is life, to get
used to filth” (USN 5).
This failure is part and parcel of the impossibility of Bataille’s notion of

communication. Denis Hollier writes:
The matrix of communication is the principle of inadequacy that Bataille formulated in
this terms: ‘Man is what he lacks.’ Consequently, it is the production of this lack (not its suppression)
that is the issue. If a being exists only through communication, then communication itself is nothing if
not the sacrifice of a being: ‘I propose to acknowledge as law that human beings are never united
with each other except through tears or wounds’ [“The College of Sociology” Oeuvres Complétes
2:370].
claims that Bataille advocates embracing

In Politics, Writing, Mutilation, Allan Stoekl
“impossible difference” and “duplicity” in communication30 (99). I intend to push this claim a
bit, however, to say that what Bataille is encouraging us to embrace is the very
incommensurability of the co-occuring, simultaneous possibility and impossibility of
communication. Understanding the necessary failure of communication is essential
to understanding what communication is. This must be done, according to Bataille, not to shirk
the responsibilities communication saddles us with, but in order to get to the bottom of the difficulty—
the tension—that is a necessary part of all communication. In “Socratic College” Bataille insists
that he is not drawing attention to the insufficiency of human communication in order to
sidestep the challenge of explaining communication altogether but in order to “get to the
bottom of this difficulty” (USN 6) which is communicating and explaining communication.
What is the “impossible
difference” between the possibility and the impossibility of
communication? What is the “difficulty” Bataille needs to “get to the bottom of”? It is a
failure in communication that has to do with an inconsistency
communication necessarily requires: “Only propositions reduced to a clear form—stripped
of poetic artifice as much as possible—can truly engage consciousness and connect experiences” (USN 9). And yet (here is
the trouble): “A portion of the expression of inner experience is necessarily poetic and cannot be
translated into clear propositions, though I can clearly say that this is so” (ibid; emphasis mine). This
particular failure of communication is an elaboration on the impossibility that also constitutes
Bataille’s notion of communication. This failure— propositions must be clear in order that
experience be communicable, yet some experiences (inner experience) cannot be clearly or fully
communicated, especially in propositional form—is the “impossible difference” Stoekl
identifies as that which Bataille recommends. It is what Bataille strives to “protect.”
And so, Bataille’s notion of communication is tense. It is always animated by a tension between two conflicting facts:
communication fails; communication succeeds. Communication is impossible, communication is possible. Stoekl
interprets this tension thusly: “language is not unitary or simple,” but this is not the full
story (Politics, Writing, Mutilation 92). To communicate adequately, attentively, is an impossible
task, but nevertheless, we do it, Bataille does it, it happens. In “Socratic College,” this is an
ontological claim. According to Bataille, it is a necessary fact of our existence as
communicators.
What does it mean to say that communication can and does “fail”? For Bataille (in 1942), this
means three things: 1) Something that is meant to be communicated is not
communicated. When something meant to be communicated is not, Bataille says that
this can be chalked up to (2) a failure of “authenticity” (USN 5). Bataille states that the “question
of authenticity” (ibid.) is always present in communication. A failure of authenticity can be
the result of many things: distraction during communication, embarrassment or shyness to say
what is meant, lacking an ability to immediately arrive at the “right words,” having a weak or insufficient
grasp on what a conversational partner means with her words, not taking the time to
determine what the partner means to say. Bataille’s recommendation of not “putting on too many airs” in
communication locates the hub of his notion of authenticity, and the site of another significant kind of failure in
communication: paying greater attention to how one sounds, seems, or comes across than to
the communication with another being: listening, hearing, responding. The remaining eleven
pages of “Socratic College” suggest that Bataille wants to endorse a particular orientation toward
communication that is focused on the ability to listen, hear, and then respond. This new
orientation toward communication strives for not being too proud or embarrassed to say
what one intends to say. It strives also to pay attention to the fragility of communication and
the person with whom one communicates. Indeed, another “failure” of communication named in 1942
is (3) pushing that fragile something in communication too far, pushing it until it
dies.
Critical Praxis
Their critical praxis attempts to mobilize western hegemony in
the postcolonial space allowing violence to manifest itself
Thobani, 14, (Sunera, Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at the
University of British Columbia, Queer Necropolitics, Pg. XVI, 2014)//Cummings
Western militarized states, their nationals and private mercenaries now form willing
coalitions as readily as they organize death squads; Western feminists recalibrate their
alignments with their states as they set out to rescue Muslim women or to protect
themselves from their narcissistically construed forms of precariousnesses; and Muslim
women and men supplicants to the West speak in the name of feminism and liberal
democracy to indict Islam, along with their families and communities, providing vital
alibis for torture and collective punishment. All the while, Muslim men around the world
are demonized as misogynist homophobes even as they are incarcerated, deported,
raped, tortured and targeted for assassination; Muslim women and queers are raped,
killed, bombed and compelled to surrender unconditionally to Western gender regimes if
they are to survive. As for the Muslims killed in the hundreds of thousands by bombs,
drones and militias, they do not even appear as human in the register of the war,
featuring only as collateral damage – if at all. Islamophobia has thus become the lingua
franca that enables trans/national allegiances to be remade, international accords to be
signed, aid negotiations to be consolidated, intelligence, security and border control
agreements to be implemented, and assassination squads to be deployed across the
planet. Such is the moment that marks the (re)birth of the West as the singular model for
futurity after the age of independence. What avenues, then, for contestation? How to
strengthen the forces committed to ending the violence that characterizes the
contemporary geopolitical moment? What possibilities for the politics of radical
transformation? For justice? Queer Necropolitics makes a particularly timely and
critically engaged intervention. Mapping out how deployments of sexuality, gender, race
and desire inform the self-constituting practices of unlikely imperialist subjects – queer,
feminist, left, and yes, even critical theorists and philosophers – as they simultaneously
advance the reach of the Western empire, the authors of this book highlight how these
practices also mark out entire ‘queerly racialized populations’ for occupation,
subjugation or elimination (Puar 2007). Examining the particularities of the instances
where ‘queer vitalities become cannibalistic on the disposing and abandonment of
others’, the authors help to disrupt a critical axis on which pivot the imperial hetero -
normative, homonormative and transnormative politics of violence and pleasure
Death
Humanity is scared of death, but we must embrace it to form
ideologies
Death is a continual concern for Bataille, from the earliest writings, to the last fizzles in and around The Tears of Eros, and
arguably sits at the centre of the general economy, as death can be seen as 'the
ultimate term of possible expenditure ('Attraction and Repulsion IF, 123; OC II, 332 trans, mod.).
Bataille's notion of death is an empty version of Hegel's: it is negativity, but one that cannot be
recuperated, even if all our actions can be seen as attempts at such a recuperation. Death is the loss that defines
our existence as individuals, since sexual reproduction is absolutely caught up with the
death of the individual; unlike amoebae, there is no continuity of Being from one organism to the next (The Accursed
Share, 32; OC VII, 39. See also Eroticism, 12-15; OCX, 17-21). Death, then, is as much part of the inherent wastefulness in nature as
life. Death
seems to us like the most wasteful form, but for Bataille, such a
conception is to be left behind (not ignored or overcome): 'the luxury of death is regarded
by us in the same way as that of sexuality, first as a negation of ourselves, then - in a sudden reversal -
as the profound truth of that movement of which life is the manifestation (The
Accursed Share, 34-5; OC VII, 41). Is death then in some way the truth of Bataille's system? At points it recalls Heidegger's notion of
'Being toward death', but as with many of Bataille's notions, the whole issue of centrality is open to
question even as it is posed. Bataille argues that it will always be possible to show that
whichever primordial fact gets priority presuppose s the existence of anothe r one (The
Accursed Share, vol. II, 82; OC VIII, 71). 1 Death features in early writings - 'beings only die to be born', 'Solar Anus', 7; OC I, 84),
and become s something that does not transcend the individual so much as lose the individual in a generalized excess. Instead of
Hegel's mastery of death, we see that in the fact that life and death are passionately devoted to the
subsidence of the void, the relation of master/slave subordination is no longer revealed,
but life and void are confused and mingled like lovers, in the convulsive moments of the
end. ('Sacrifices', 133; OC I, 93 trans, mod.) Instead of giving in to death, accepting it at a
distance, as the distancing that structure s Being (Heidegger), death is to be
embraced, as 'it appears that no less a loss than death is needed for t he
brilliance of life to traverse and transfigure dull existence (Th e Practice of Joy Before
Death', 239; OC I, 557). This is not because death is so marvellous, but because it is everywhere, linking the individual to everything
else (what Bataille will go on to call the general economy): I
can only perceive a succession of cruel
splendours whose very movement requires that I die: this death is only the exploding
consumption of all that was, the joy of existence of all that comes into the world; even my
own life demands that everything that exists, everywhere, ceaselessly give itself and be
annihilated. (The Practice of Joy Before Death', 239; OCI, 557) Bataille is not arguing from the perspective whereby the
universe only exists in one's own mind, but that even we, pathetic individuals that we are, feature in the ceaseless process of death and
destruction. This linkage of the individual, throug h death, to others, to the general economy, is what is pursued in Bataille's
connecting of the erotic with death, which is a development of the linkage between sex and death. In
Eroticism he uses
the term 'continuity to designate both the state of shared existence of asexual
reproduction and what lies beyond individuality when individuals lose themselves in
sacrifice, erotic activity, laughter, drunkenness and so on (Eroticism, 11-25; OCX, 17-30).
These attempts interest him because 'eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the
way to the denial of our individual selves (24; 29). Death 57 The second volume of The
Accursed Share, subtitled The History of Eroticism, is often seen as being little more
than a draft version of Eroticism, but there are crucial differences in emphasis. The
History of Eroticism really is a genuine part of the work on 'the accursed share', whereas
such an economy is only implicit in Eroticism. More importantly still, the former seeks to link sexuality to
death, and the latter attempts the opposite movement (both movements, for no clear theoretically necessary reason, lead Bataille to
associate Woman with death). The second volume of The Accursed Share even starts by stating that it is not really about eroticism, but
is instead 'a thinking that does not fall apart in the face of horror', emerging from 'a system of thought exhausting the totality of the
possible (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 14; OC VIII, 10). In writing about death as part of the general economy, it also emerges
that death is not necessarily literal death. But we should on no account take it as simply a metaphor, as metaphors imply a
reality to be represented, and Bataille offers no such real world, existing to be represented in mimesis, metaphor or
metonymy. Death and Fear Hegel sees death as the origin of humanity's self-
consciousness (this being, initially, consciousness of death), and the rest of time consists of the
struggle to master death. Communal existence is also centred around death, and the two combine in the form of
architecture. According to Hollier, for Hegel, 'architecture is something appearing in the place of death,
to point out its presence and to cover it up: the victory of death and the victory over
death' (Against Architecture, 6). For Bataille, however, this is precisely the problem: our society is this fearful covering up of death
(whereas the Aztecs, for example, exposed death in the sacrifice - at the top of, rather than inside, the pyramid). 2 In The Accursed
Share, vol. II, he argues that allsociety, all individual existence (as opposed to the restricted economy of
modern individualism) emerges from this fear of death - and this fear is at its most
creative when it approaches death. 58 Georges Bataille At the same time as humanity is drawn
toward death, it pushes it away - this repulsion is what defines humanity. Repulsion is the key word, as
death is not simply a negativity, something that happens to the subject, but
something that, even when it happens to someone else, provokes disgust.
Humanity is defined by its 'repugnance for death/ (The Accursed Share, vol. II, 61; OC VIII, 51).
This is hardly a novel or shocking statement, but death is specifically part of what repels us because we
repel it, and arguably the (primordial) object of disgust (and only in becoming human
does death constitute something disgusting). Humans have a horror of all that threatens their unitary existence:
excretions, filth, loss of control through drunkenness, eroticism (61-2; 51-2). More than this, we also have a horror of life, as at some
level we are aware of life as a by-product of death, so much so that 'we might think, if need be, that living matter on the
very level we separate ourselves from it is the privileged object of our disgust (63; 52). All such
disgusts are caught up within taboos, in a relation where it is impossible to ascertain whether the taboo created the disgust, or responds
to it. For Bataille, however, death really is at the heart of the existence of taboo, but is
not the exclusive centre: since it goes without saying, I will not linger over
the possible anteriority of the horror of death. This horror is perhaps at the root
of our repugnance (the loathing of nothingness would then be at the origin of the loathing of decay, which is not physical
since it is not shared by animals) . It is clear, in any event, that the nature of excrement is analogous
to that of corpses and that the places of its emission are close to the sexual parts; more
often than not, this complex of prohibitions appears inextricable. (79; 68) This complex marks the
line of demarcation between human and other and proximity to these phenomena constitutes the crossing of this line. This crossing
and the fear of crossing gives the 'universally human character of the problem of obscenity (54; 45), even if contra Freud and Levi-
Strauss, for example, there is no particular taboo that is universal.3 Death
is also 'at the beginning insofar
as its appearance coincides with labour and utility - this is what makes death
a problem for the individual, as the individual conceives of his or her self as
something to be maintained, preserved and developed (82; 70) .Death very
rapidly becomes the site of prohibition, and takes two principal forms: both
murder and 'contact with corpses are forbidden (79; 68). It is not the metaphysical difficulty of
impending death that creates this fear, since this arises from an awareness that life is an accident between waste and decay, with only
waste and decay in between. As Bataille notes, life is a luxury of which death is the highest degree (85-6; 74) and 'moreover, life is a
product of putrefaction (80; 69), so death
and decay are linked to conceptions of our birth and origin
(for him, this accounts for 'our fear of menstrual blood, for example). Here, as elsewhere, it
is striking how far Bataille
goes down a road attacking preconceptions only to launch into a restatement of tired
cliches about 'woman as other, as death. He simply does not question the taboos around
'woman', and this is why Kristeva's gloss on Bataille (Powers of Horror) and Mary Douglas's
Purity and Danger is so successful - it completes the logic already under way. The all-pervasive absence, or denial, of
death, through prohibition, is why death is to be approached, and also why we have an attraction to as well as repulsion from death
and all that threatens our identity, so that for example, 'eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death (Eroticism,
11; OCX, 17). Death and eroticism remain charged with danger, and create anguish in individuals as their individuality falls away
(The Accursed Share, vol. II, 101; OC VIII, 88) . 5 But as with Hegel's 'facing up to death', Bataille does not limit the notion of death
to actual biological death - it comes to include all that undoes the individual, such that the introduction, or irruption, of death into life
makes life become exuberant (99; 86). Erotic
activity, for example, must be carried out
intensely (otherwise it is just sex), for 'if the sensations do not have their
greatest intensity, it is possible for us to isolate objects on the field of the
totality (118-19; 102). By totality, Bataille does not mean the kinds of ideology
that account for everything, but the amorphous sphere beyond subjects, and
beyond a simple subject/object divide. Even if death is not real, there is no
reduction of the experience of approaching death (we can never attain death - in this Bataille is
with Heidegger). If we are instructed that to 'live life to the full we must 'embrace death', what
do we gain? Nothing much, except the awareness of an impossibility (we do not even gain nothing, as asceticism would
aspire to), but what will have happened is the following: the embrace restores us, not to nature (which is itself, if it is not reintegrated,
only a detached part), but rather to the totality in which man has his share by losing himself. For an embrace is not just a fall into the
animal muck, but the anticipation of death, and the putrefaction that follows it. (119; 103) There is no why, however, and there can
only be Virtuar replies to 'why? - i.e. there can be the project of approaching death, as it enhances subjectivity,
but this project is lost at the moment it is attained, whether in actual death or in death-
like experience (nonexperience). Note also that the only 'return is to something that is necessarily lost, again and
again. Eroticism, then, is one direction waste or excess can take that involves death (itself waste, excess), but Bataille also
hints at another level at which death can be approached - a level that really
is metaphorical.
The 1AC’s fixation on death and destruction only reinvests
within the exorbitant heliocentric model of the sun which
depicts the normative way to live and die – this ensures that we
live and die within the very confines of the cosmic systems of
normative thought which establishes an energetic model of life
fixated on the solar economy
Negarestani’10 – .Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to Collapse and
According to the energetic models of psychology (Freud, Reich, Ferenczi, et al.) the organic
system – by virtue of its conservative and economical nature – seeks to fixate upon the first
exorbitant source of energy that it directly encounters. This source of energy must
surpass the lifespan of the organic system and issue forth a problematic amount of energy
that exceeds the capacity of the organic system. Consumption of this exorbitant energy,
therefore, becomes a problem for the organism. For the organism, consequently, modes or courses
of life are in fact solutions found and developed by the organism to confront the problem of
consumption. In other words, ideas of how to live are reduced to solutions to afford the
exorbitant energy. The more diverse the solutions of the organism become, the easier the
organism can maneuver between different courses of life and the firmer the organism is
fettered to its exorbitant source of energy. This growing dependency on the exorbitant source of
energy through the ever-increasing shackles of life singularizes the exorbitant source of
energy as the only model exorbitant energy instigates and imposes plurality of
dissipation for the organism i.e. the only model of death and the only way out.
Accordingly, the in modes of life but only in accordance with the conservative and economical nature of the
organism. The plurality of life is enforced at the expense of monism in death. And it
is the monism in death – as a mode of injection upon the outside (or what is exterior to the
organism) – that rigidly restricts the image of exteriority associated with the cosmic abyss
and in doing so forestalls a radical change in life and its ventures.
The organism tends to die, or more accurately, tends to open to the exterior horizon by
means of the same energetic models and channels from which it conservatively secures its vital economy. To
put it simply, the organism tends to use the same energetic model for its death – or
openness to that which is exterior to it – as the model that it has previously used for
conserving energy and living. This recurring energetic model is fundamentally established
by the source of the exorbitant energy and thereby, implements both the traumatizing effects of
excessive energy and the inherent
limitations of the source of energy which itself is another
interiorized horizon enveloped against its abyssal cosmic backdrop. There- fore, although
life can manifest itself plurally as opportunities for diversi cation and complexi- cation brought
about by different economical ways for conservation of the exorbitant energy, death or binding
exteriority is only possible in one and only one way. This way is both qualitatively and
quantitatively restricted in that it strictly corresponds to the fundamental limitations of
the exterior source of energy and how these limitations are increased in the conservative economy of the
organism. Any image of exteriority that the exorbitant source of energy promises or creates for
the organism will remain within the confines and limits of that source of energy itself.
For us, this exorbitant source of energy is the Sun and its solar economy. The
solar excess has developed a conservative image of thought in which one can only
dissipate or die according to the model of energetic dissipation that the Sun has engrained within
the terrestrial organisms. One can afford numerous modes of conservation or live in different
ways but must die solely in the way that has been dictated by the energetic model of
dissipation inherent to the Sun. It is in this sense that Georges Bataille’s model of general or non-
restricted solar economy is itself a form of restricted economy whose restriction does not
end its expression in its relatively diverse modes of living but in the rejection of those
modes of death or binding exteriority which cannot be indexed by the economical
correlation between the solar excess and the conservative structures of the terrestrial biosphere.
For the terrestrial biosphere, the dominant model of dying, or more precisely, ‘openness to the
outside’ is limited to ‘being open to the Sun’, that is to say, finding a generally affordable
consumptive solution to the problem of solar expenditure. To put it differently, openness to the
Sun does not conjure a hyperbolic Icarian humanism as some might object but rather a
restricted Inhumanism for which exteriority is only perpetuated by the solar economy and
injection upon death and exteriority is limited to dying by the Sun and through the dissipative
model of energy that it dictates. For this reason, solar economy is a straitened model of
openness or injection upon death and exteriority insofar as it entails the possibility of
pluralism in life only at the cost of a strict monism in death. A vector of thought con gured by solar
economy knows nothing of the freedom of alternatives in regard to death as a vector of
exteriorization or loosening into the cosmic abyss. Hence, the Descartesian dilemma, ‘What course in
life shall I follow?’ should be bastardized as ‘Which way out shall I take?’ It is the latter question that radically breaks
away from life-oriented models of emancipation whose putative opportunities in life and
dismissal of death are none other but manifests of heliocentric slavery.
The ecological emancipation in the direction of the great outdoors, a ‘new Earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari) or the
earthbound abyss require not alternative ways of life – with which capitalism is grossly
overwhelmed – but alternative ways of binding the exteriority of the cosmic abyss or
injection upon death (of both mind and matter). Whether identi ed as modes of radical openness (paths
for loosening into the abyss) or injection upon non-dialectical negativity (dying in ways other
than those afforded by the organism), alternative ways of binding exteriority mobilize
the terrestrial sphere according to climates of the cosmic abyss. Yet, as argued earlier, in terms of the cosmic abyss,
climates are pure contingencies and therefore, draw the limitropically convoluted
trajectories along which various horizons of inte- riorities are undone and loosened into the yawn- ing chasm. If
solar economy and its associated capitalism are inexibly monistic in death, it is because
Sun itself is a contingency whose interiorized conception is in the process
of loosening into the abyss – a contingency that tends to manifest as a necessity so as to
inhibit the irruption of other contingencies qua climates. For the irruption of contingencies
through another contingency – as in the case of a dying Sun – is a chemical journey in which the solar
horizon breaks into innumer- able other contingencies, each carrying thousands of turns and twists,
giving the depth of the abyss a nested twist that is asymptotic with it radical exteriority. Life on Earth, in this
sense, is a contingency begotten by the decaying Sun whose body, already a corpse,
has been overridden by cosmic climates qua irruptive contingencies.
The denial of death results in a thanatophobic obsession within

the spectacle of destruction. This destroys the ability to create
new narratives and create new pedagogies
Lewis’12 – Tyson Lewis -- Tyson E. Lewis is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Art
Education at the College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas. – “The Aesthetics of Education” pg 178-181
KZaidi
It is this accounting for death through new narratives that in turn must be accounted for.
While death might introduce an excess between word and flesh, Rancière points out that death
is also what sets in motion explication. In relation to Rossellini’s film Europa 51, Rancière argues, “There is
never a lack of deaths or explanations” (2003c, 111). In the film, the suicide of a young boy sends the
mother, Irene, searching for answers. Her question was not “Why did he kill himself” (which conjures up
psychological or socio-economic explanations) but rather “What did he say” right before he died. Although psychiatrists
and socialists attempt to carve up her question, there is something in her original phrasing that remains impossible to
answer completely. Drawing on Rancière’s reading of this lm, Mark Robson makes the following observation:
Death is enough to set explanation going, but the explanation that answers one question
may itself be a way of avoiding the posing of another, more disturbing question. The obscene
question disappears from the scene. Or rather, it disappeared in the act of explanation, and this is attributable to ‘the
politicians.’ So, then, there
is a politics of the question, a politics of explanation, and, of course,
a politics of death.... In particular, the explanations that are all too readily at hand—the
usual thanatological suspects—are rounded up with such ease that they fail to explain
anything. (2011, 185)
In this sense, deathopens up to a flurry of explanations that erase the event of death —the
introduction of a void into the order of things that cannot be explained away using the
formulas and predictive theories of politicians, philosophers, or sociologists. As such, two alternatives
must be avoided. First, denial of death leaves no room for historical difference to appear.
Memory and recollection of “how Freire was” replace the void that attracts and
stimulates curiosity. Here memory becomes a kind of self-reassurance that nothing has
been lost, that the spirit of Freire remains as it always was, that he is “right here with us”
and thus we do not have to act on our own within our speci c context without his
guarantee. Second, the quick proclamation of death in order to pass judgment on history
equally dispenses with the pensiveness of death and thus the space of curiosity. The death of
man, the death of history, the death of modernism, the death of politics, the death of Freire all become foundations for the
emergence of a new explanatory paradigm, a new cultural
logic that appears on the horizon through a
series of “posts” (posthumanism, postmodernism, postcritical discourse, etc.) that claim the right to pass
judgment over the dead and thus subsume the past within a totalized horizon of
understanding. What is therefore missed in both cases is a sustained relation to death as
a void in the partitioning of the sensible, a certain pensive detail that resists death in its
dying and in turn resists giving life to yet another master discourse or explicating order.
Thus death is a dangerous figure that dialectically seems to oscillate in Rancière’s work. As
Michael Dillon argues (2005), death is essential for understanding Rancière’s kairological
understanding of emancipation. In this argument, death is neither a comforting memory nor
simply a past needing to be explained away (thus denying the events of historical change). Instead,
death becomes a type of messianic mise-en-scene, a staging for the event of translation that
simultaneously destroys and creates. In Dillon’s messianic reading, the messianic in Rancière’s work has its own “sacri
cial violence” where “any actualized possibility of egalitarian contingency is always the death of some other equality”
(2005, 447). In other words, for equality to be veri ed, there must be a “making room” (2005, 447)
through a sacrifice. Joseph Jacotot’s teaching as not teaching is one prime example of this sacrificial logic at work
in Rancière’s writings. This is a pedagogy that exists in the kairos of emancipation where dis-
identi cation with both the master and the slave is a certain form of existential death.
Thus death is an essential component of both the arrival of history and the arrival of
emancipation.
The 1AC’s desire to flee death necessitates the subordination of

others – the continuation of life, i.e. the avoidance of [aff
impact, e.g. nuk war], guards against death, its implications, and
the communities that are marked as a threat to reproductive life
– duration also implies racism
Winters 2017 (Joseph, Winters is an Assistant Professor of Religious
Studies at Duke University. “RAC(E)ING FROM DEATH: Baldwin,
Bataille, and the Anguish of the (Racialized) Human.” Journal of Religious
Ethics. Volume 2, issue 45, page 380-405, accessed 7/11/17, EHL)
For Baldwin, anti-black racism, while containing its own particular logics and dynamics, remains emblematic of a collective will
to innocence, which in turn reveals something fundamental about the self/other relationship. Our attachment to being coherent,
durable selves places severe constraints on our capacity to give, receive, and be open to
qualities and circumstances that threaten to unravel (or dirty) the self and the imagined order
that it clings to. These ethical themes in Baldwin resonate with the arguments advanced by literary critic and philosopher, George Bataille. According to Bataille, the very
qualities that make us human—our investment in duration, in meaning, and in being distinguishable from
other beings—necessarily requires us to subordinate others to our desires and

projects (Bataille 2006, 29). To live in the “order of things,” according to Bataille, is to inhabit a world in which beings are primarily the occasion to
accumulate value, power, and meaning; beings are subordinated to the logic of instrumentality and accumulation. Consequently, the
continuation of any individual or collective life requires mechanisms that discipline, contain, or exclude that
which might impede the preservation of that life. As Bataille writes: The objective and in a sense
transcendent (relative to the subject) positing of the world of things has duration as its foundation: no thing in fact has a
separate existence, has a meaning, unless a subsequent time is posited, in view of which it is constituted as an object. The object is defined as an operative
power only if its duration is implicitly understood. . . . Future time constitutes this real world to such a degree that
death no longer has a place in it. But it is for this very reason that death means everything to it. (Bataille 2006, 46). To some extent, death and its intimations—loss,
suffering, shame, ecstasy, vulnerability—cannot have a place in a world defined by duration and preservation. In other words, even though death is a
permanent feature of human life, the order of things must cultivate and imagine ways to
diminish, mitigate, and deflect its effects and implications. We feel this pressure in moments when instances of
suffering and loss are expected to produce or express some reassuring meaning (everything happens
for a reason; that person got what he deserved). This mitigating process typically happens when individuals and communities locate
death, suffering, and excessive violence elsewhere, in another place and community—a strategy that often
justifies and makes acceptable violent projects to fix or restore that other community. Therefore, when Bataille
says that “death means everything” to the world of accumulation and duration , he is
thinking about how the anxiety and horror around death is related to our commitment to preserving ourselves in the
future, a commitment that involves various forms of displacement and deferral. In other words,
the will to futurity intensifies the anxiety and anguish that accompany thoughts and
images of death, mortality, and vulnerability. Of course, humans are also fascinated with images,
and practices, of violence and death, but only if they can experience and view these images from a
comfortable distance or participate in these practices in a manner that reduces the risks to the self’s coherence and
duration.9 On the duplicity of the self’s relationship to violence, Bataille writes, “Violence, and death signifying violence, have a
double meaning. On the one hand the horror of death drives us off, for we prefer life; on the other an element at once solemn and terrifying fascinates us and disturbs us
profoundly” (Bataille 1986, 45). What is crucial here is that the order of things, the order of life preservation, is defined over and against death and loss—death means everything to this order. Yet I
everyday projects and strategies of self- preservation are implicated

also take Bataille to be suggesting that
in the mundane, often undetected, exploitation and suffering of others; again, death means everything to the real world.
Therefore, the human self is a site of a paradox: the world of projects, goals, and accumulation “imparts an unreal character to death even though man’s membership in this world is tied to the
our general commitment to duration, to reproducing

positing of the body as a thing insofar as it is mortal” (Bataille 2006, 46). According to Bataille,
life, will always mean that some being, force, or desire will be marked as a threat or danger to that
reproduction. And those threats will have to be managed, assimilated, disciplined, or

subordinated in some manner. One’s ability to endure in this world, to accumulate recognition, prestige, and
various kinds of capital means that one must separate oneself, to some extent, from those qualities and
characteristics that endanger self or communal projects and aspirations. To put it differently, life needs to be
cordoned off from death and those beings associated with death (even as we know that life and death are always intertwined and that certain kinds of subjects and communities are made more
social life providing a kind of barrier to

vulnerable to death and its intimations). Here Bataille’s line of thought con- verges with Baldwin’s point about
“menacing” forces, to beings and desires that signify chaos and disorder. If Baldwin and Bataille are right, then racism, which
is always about marking, disciplining, and managing “dangerous” bodies
and communities, must be confronted alongside fundamental social and human limitations.
Death structures the ideas of sovereignty, the subject, and the

political, death and sovereignty serve as paroxysm of excess all
are linked with a correlation to sexuality and violence
Mbembe, 03, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of
the Witwatersrand, Necropolitics, Pgs. 15-16, 2003)//Cummings
Georges Bataille also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of
sovereignty, the political, and the subject. Bataille displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways. First,
he interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance—

or, to use his own terminology: excess. For Bataille, life is defective only when death has
taken it hostage. Life itself exists only in bursts and in exchange with death. He argues that death is the
Therefore, although it destroys what was to be,

putrefaction of life, the stench that is at once the source and the repulsive condition of life.
obliterates what was supposed to continue being, and reduces to nothing the individual
who takes it, death does not come down to the pure annihilation of being. Rather, it is
essentially self-consciousness; moreover, it is the most luxurious form of life, that is, of
effusion and exuberance: a power of proliferation . Even more radically, Bataille withdraws death from the horizon of meaning. This is in contrast to Hegel, for
Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of

whom nothing is definitively lost in death; indeed, death is seen as holding great signification as a means to truth. Second,
absolute expenditure Life beyond utility,

(the other characteristic of sovereignty), whereas Hegel tries to keep death within the economy of absolute knowledge and meaning.
says Bataille, is the domain of sovereignty. This being the case, death is therefore the
point at which destruction, suppression, and sacrifice constitute so irreversible and
radical an expenditure—an expenditure without reserve—that they can no longer be
determined as negativity. Death is therefore the very principle of excess—an anti-
economy Bataille establishes a correlation among death,
. Hence the metaphor of luxury and of the luxurious character of death. Third,
sovereignty, and sexuality. Sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and to the

dissolution of the boundaries of the body and self by way of orgiastic and excremental
impulses. As such, sexuality concerns two major forms of polarized human impulses—
excretion and appropriation—as well as the regime of the taboos surrounding them . The truth of sex
For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has

and its deadly attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events, and fantasized objects.
many forms. But ultimately it is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death
would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, “is the world in
which the limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines
that world of violence, but while death is present it is always there only to be negated,
never for anything but that. The sovereign,” he concludes, “is he who is, as if death were not. . . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death, or rather these
limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits.” Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among others (e.g., sexuality, fi lth, excrement), sovereignty requires “the strength to violate the prohibition against killing,
although it’s true this will be under the conditions that customs de fi ne.” And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death. By treating sovereignty
. Politics can only be traced as

as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason
a spiral transgression, as that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More
specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the violation of a taboo.
All organisms and system are left with a surplus of energy,

which we should squander endlessly. Death is the ultimate form
of this unproductive expenditure – an ecological gift to new life.
The sun is a central force in the philosophies of both Trungpa and Bataille. For Trungpa, the sun is a symbol of basic
goodness, and the human capacity to awaken to it, to become enlightened. For Bataille, the sun is the material starting
point for earthly life, and thus his philosophy. “Solar energy,” writes Bataille, “is the source of life’s
exuberant development. e origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of
the sun, which dispenses energy—wealth—without any return.”65 The sun offers our
planet enough energy in one hour to meet contemporary civilizational needs for an entire
year.66 Harnessing this energy, to be sure, is a massive technological challenge. Moreover, biological life only has
limited access to the superabundance of solar energy that hits the planet every day. But the amount of energy we can
access enables an energetically rich life. Bataille’s materialist analysis of solar lavishness helpfully
concretizes Trungpa’s account of basic goodness, what he also referred to as “basic
richness.”67 While Trungpa o ers practices for people to feel their inherent goodness and richness, actually
experiencing this goodness takes time.68 Without spending hours meditating, and slowly uncovering a tender and
radiating heart, Trungpa’s teachings on basic goodness and richness can appear idealistic. Bataille’s materialist
account of solar generosity further evidences Trungpa’s philosophy; it offers strong
conceptual proof that can height- en commitment to the experiential practice of
meditation. “ The sun gives without ever receiving,” argues Bataille. “[Humans] were conscious
of this long before astrophysics measured that ceaseless prodigality; they saw it ripen the harvests and they associated its
splendor with the act of someone who gives without receiving.”69At a basic biological level, the sun’s exuberance means
that “on the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess, the question is always posed in
terms of extravagance.”70 Put more succinctly: “We receive more energy than we can use.”71 e basic
planetary condition is wealth more than poverty. The
essential meaning of Bataille’s claim that
luxury—not necessity—organizes life on earth is that all organisms have access to more
energy than required for subsistence, thanks to the sun’s exuberance. is excess is often
invested in biological growth (at the level of an organism, species, or ecosystem). But
growth can never fully exhaust the energy available to an individual organism or
biological system. All organisms and systems are left with a surplus to spend “willingly or
not, gloriously or catastrophically.”72 Evidence of earthly richness includes the ornate colors and plumage of
the animal kingdom that seemingly exceed evolutionary use-value. Similarly, consider the capacity for pleasure su using
animal life, especially all the sexualized pleasures apparently unrelated to procreation. Even when a sensory pleasure is
associated with basic functioning like a good sneeze, excretion, or stretch, there can still be sumptuousness to the
sensation (need it feel so good?). A sneeze is arguably basic goodness at work, a ash of solar exuberance amidst our
everyday lives. Consider, also, the ubiquity of queerness across the animal kingdom. According to Bruce Bagemihl,
author of Biological Exuberance (a book that draws heavily from Bataille), “homosexuality is found in virtually all animal
groups, in virtually all geographic areas and time periods, and in a wide variety of forms.”73 But why, asks Bagemihl,
“does same-sex activity persist—reappearing in species after species, generation after generation, individual after
individual—when it is not useful” from a strictly evolutionary perspective?74 Bagemihl’s answer is that use and necessity
are not life’s sole organizing principles: “Natural systems are driven as much by abundance and excess as they are by
limitation and practicality. Seen in this light, homosexuality and non- reproductive heterosexuality are ‘expected’
occurrences—they are one manifestation of an overall ‘extravagance’ of biological systems that has many expressions.”75
For Bataille, our primordial condition is marked by richness thanks to the lavishness of
the sun. And then, of course, we die. Death can easily appear as proof of our ultimate
poverty; it seemingly mocks attempts to assert the basic richness or goodness of life. But
Bataille reads mortality as another marker of life’s luxuriousness. Large mammals like us are
impressive condensations of energy (we are ourselves only possible given energetic wealth). is energy is then
extravagantly squandered upon our necessary deaths. “When we curse death,” argues
Bataille, “we only fear ourselves... We lie to ourselves when we dream of escaping the
movement of luxurious exuberance of which we are only the most intense form.”76
Death’s energetic squandering is also an ecological gift for the new life arising from
decay: “[Humankind] conspires to ignore the fact that death is also the youth of
things.”77 Bataille’s reading of death as exemplary of basic goodness supports Trungpa’s encouragement to “make
friends with our death,” and to not resentfully cast it as “a defeat and as an insult.”78
Tibetan culture, according to Bataille, is more successful than Eu- ro-American ones at
affirming the totality of life. For Bataille, cultural forms that communicate this a rmation are glorious
expenditures of basic energetic wealth. e resentment that animates so many Eu- ro-American cultural forms is itself
enabled by energetic exuberance, a “catastrophic” use of our basic richness.79 And the Euro-American desire to escape our
corporeality only intensi es feelings of lack and malaise by disconnecting us from the earthly exuberance alive in our
changeful bodies. For Bataille: Anguish arises when the anxious individual is not himself
stretched tight by the feeling of superabundance. is is precisely what evinces the isolated, individual
character of anguish. ere can be anguish only from a personal, particular point of view that is radically opposed to the
general point of view based on the exuberance of living matter as a whole. Anguish is meaningless for someone who over
ows with life, and for life as a whole, which is an over owing by its very nature.80 Energetic poverty and lack are realities
for life on earth. But they are always felt by particular beings at particular times; energetic lack is not our general or basic
condition. And yet the more we separate ourselves from exuberant life energies in attempts to gain dominion over them,
the more liable we are to experience lack; we progressively remove ourselves from nature’s over ow. Bataille was
interested in nurturing a sovereign—rather than servile—human encounter with existence: “ e sovereignty I speak of has
little to do with the sovereignty of states... I speak in general of an aspect that is opposed to the servile and the
subordinate.”81 Viewing humans as agents of life’s exuberance, Bataille saw sovereignty as humanity’s “primordial
condition.”82 We are regal and rich from birth. But this sovereignty is tarnished when we
cower before ourselves and the teeming life energies we issue from, return to, and are
animated by.
Education
The university’s barbaric practices perpetuate societal
inequality through the adoption of empiricism and double
objectification of the self.
O’Sullivan 16. Michael, Convenor of Research Committee at the Chinese University of
Hong Kong. “Academic Barbarism, Universities and Inequalities” | rpadhi
Henry refers to the methodologies of the disciplines that follow this version of scientism as “ideologies of barbarism." He
argues that many university disciplines today “thematise nature" or “pretend to speak of
man" (la barbaric, 2004, 131). The “objective body," or the “empirical individual posited" is, for
Henry, the product of “a double objectification" (Ia barbaric, 2004, 143). This “double objectification”
takes on a whole new meaning in the age of the social network and the online avatar. The
objectivity that is suggested here is double in the sense that what is objectified is not life itself according
to the "phenomenological actuality of its auto-affection,” but the “self- objectification of
life under the form of an unreal signification” (la barbaric, 2004, 139). In other words, university
disciplines posit “empirical individuals" or flawed descriptions of subjects as objects for
investigation. Henry argues that the “self-objectification of life" that “is posited and presented
before us is never life itself, [...] but its empty representation" (la barbaric, 2004, 138)! The “human
being” of the “human sciences” is itself an objectification, categorization, or representation. Henry argues that the
“objectivism of the Galilean project,” (la barbaric, 2004, 143) that has inaugurated for him an ideology of science or
barbarism, "inevitably presupposes in the human sciences both this given precondition of the empirical individual and
therefore the double objectification that has come into question" (Ia barbaric, 2004, 143). This
double
objectification affects all aspects of life, including sexuality, which is "examined" solely in
terms of “a certain number of behaviours" (la barbaric, 2004, 144) and a rep- ertoire of functions such as
“age, sex, class, type of society, and the enumeration of the circumstances in which it is accomplished” (la barbaric, 2004,
144). Henry's work here echoes many of the themes elaborated in Michel Foucault's work on sexuality.’ The second
essential component of every discipline of this genre is the development of “the proiect of knowledge” (la barbaric, 2004,
148). Academic industries and research bodies must decide what criteria must be retained
as “essential defining characteristics of the object of research" (la barbaric, 2004, 148) for it is only
when "these characteristics have been circumscribed and situated in a relation of unity that one is able to undertake the
construction of laws” (la barbaric, 2004, 148) for the promotion of a particular science. This recalls Jacques Derrida's
description of the “new censorship"8 in the university. Henry argues that both of these processes have important
repercussions when they become implicated in our understanding of ethics. He argues that sciences
of “this
genre" invest in a “pure objectivism" that is irrelevant to every instance of moral choice.
Society, in its rush to embrace new technologies or new forms of research, rarely
considers how they bring new ethics with them; Nicholas Carr argues that “the intellectual ethic of a
technology is rarely recognized by its inventors" (45). As Walter J. Ong reminds us, “technologies are not mere exterior
aids but also interior transformations of consciousness" (in Carr 2010, 51). For Henry, it is only a phenomenological
description of "real life" that is capable of providing the “moral” ground for any new “intellectual ethic" and it can never
be a consideration for a science that regards the “empirical individual" as its precondition.9 Henry also defines barbarism
as “an unemployed energy [Henry’s emphasis]" (la barbaric, 2004, 177) and “energy,” for him, is “the irrepressible test of
that which fulfills itself and fills itself with itself to the point of excess [...] every culture is the liberation of an energy, the
forms of this culture are the concrete modes of this liberation" (la barbaric, 2004, 174). This
recalls Georges
Bataille's sense of “unemployed negativity," a notion that takes on new meaning for
today’s “Europe of Knowledge" where in some southern European countries there is 50 percent youth
unemployment.lo Bataille devises the notion of “unemployed negativity" for his end-of-history
perspective in his famous letter to Alexandre Koieve from December 1937. He surmises: "I can assume (as a likely
hypothesis) that from that this point on history has been completed (with the exception of its outcome). [...] lf action
(‘doing’) is—as Hegel says—negativity, the question then arises as to knowing if the negativity of one who ‘no longer has
anything to do' disappears or remains in the state of 'unemployed negativity' [...].” (in Corn, 84—5) Bataille argues, for
his own time, that: In
effect, since the man of “unemployed negativity" does not find in art an
answer to the question that he himself is, he can only become the man of “recognized
negativity." He has understood that his need to act no longer had a use. But since this need could no longer be duped
by the enticements of art, one day or another it is recognized for what it is: as negativity empty of content He stands before
his own negativity as before a wall. (in Corn, 86) In an era when “unemployed negativity” has taken on a whole new
meaning for the continent that gave us our traditional notion of the university, it
is timely to consider how the
university with its “practices of barbarism” has contributed to heightened levels of
unemployment and inequality in our societies. As educators do we want to see students on our four-year
BA courses or on our lengthy PhD courses witness this "contravention" of their potential and energy where “a stagnation,
[a] regression" leads to the “self-negation of life” (Ia barbaric, 2004, 178)? For, in regression, as Henry explains, “neither
the energy nor the affect disappear, on the contrary they serve to bring being through itself to a heightened degree of
tension” (la barbaric, 2004, 185). Paul Verhaeghe has observed how society’s promotion of our academic industry’s notion
of meritocracy has exac- erbated this heightened state of unemployed energy, tension, and risk in young people. I examine
this in more detail in the next chapter. For Henry, it produces ennui and ennui is “precisely the affective disposition in
which unemployed energy reveals itself to itself” (Ia barbaric, 2004, 191). We are witnessing the trickle-down effects of
these educational philosophies. These states of tension, anxiety, and ennui are integral to what
Zygmunt Bauman calls our society’s transformation of identity into a “task” and to the risk
that is ever-present in our promotion of individualization. However, the academic industry may indeed be
so caught up in the financing of its corporate model of education! management that it
has lost sight of how it is enforcing and developing these “practices of barbarism".
Education is rooted in the necropolitical state and is responsible

for the instruction of the sovereign
Gržinić, 10, (Marina, Philosopher employed at the Institute for philosophy at the Slovenian institute for science
and arts, Necrocapitalist education, market freedom, de-sustainability, pg. 1, published in the fall of 2010)//Cummings
One is necropolitics as a process of a simple, clear,

Further, two processes of necropolitics are put forward today in the global capitalist world.
direct destruction of life that, as stated by Achille Mbembe presents the exposure of life
only to the power of death, mostly seen in all the so called third worlds , Haiti is one of the last examples. The second is a
it is possible to state that not

process in the First Capitalist world where life is a life of subjugation and re-contextualisation only and solely to the needs of the capitalist market. In both cases
one aspect of life, work, education, communication, culture, politics, economy can be
seen as being outside the forms of capital exploitation, though the capitalist system
claims completely the opposite. Education in such capitalist mode of production that is 3.
in the present case necrocapitalism, necropolitics and necropower (therefore we claim that capitalism has history and biopolitics
can be termed accordingly as necrocapitalist global education. It presents

should be historized)
education only fberal human capital. Circulation of capital is the condition of

constructing the social onto and as the logic of the market . Circulation of capital is the only terrain for any institutional, cultural, ideological,
epistemological connection and development of these spheres. Therefore we have as well a persistent colonization inside and outside as a measure for over passing (natural) borders when capital spreads. Global knowledge is nothing more than
the minimum of knowledge for maximum of skills in order to prove a proper humanity. To say this differently, the global knowledge and knowledge circulation seen from the present educational view is in the last instance the repressive and
formative force in the context of necropolitics.
Environment
Heliocentrism sustains itself through the obsession with organic
systems of thought and consumption – this is enhanced by the
technocratic managing of society – this form of new capitalism
masqurades itself as “saving the planet” yet is invested in the
sustainment of itself rather than staring into the abyss that is
death. Affirm the cosmic abyss
Negarestani’10 – Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to Collapse and
Like all modes of slavery, heliocentrism has its own market strategy; it is called base-capitalism.
For schizophrenic capitalism, whilst everything should be accelerated towards a techno-
economic meltdown along paths of expenditure entrenched in solar economy, modes of
life as ever more con- voluting circuitous paths towards death must not only be
embraced but also emphatically affirmed. The seemingly paradoxical proclivity of capital-
ism – that is to say, its concomitant dynamism towards thanatropic meltdown and its advocation of
lifestyles – amounts to the very simple fact that for the Sun the phenomenon of life on the planet is
but a modal range of energy dissipation prescribed by the solar economy and afforded by
organic systems. This does not merely suggest that death – especially for planetary entities – is inevitable
but that such death or vector of exteriorization is exclusively restricted to modes of
energetic dissipation (modes of life) that the Sun imposes on the planet. Yet these modes of
energetic dissipation which exteriorize Earth are themselves part of the economy of the
Sun which also mark its economic restrictions and limits of affordability against its
abyssal and exterior cosmic backdrop. Capitalism, in this sense, conceals its restricted
economy in regard to the cosmic exteriority (or death) by overproducing modes or styles of
life which are in fact different rates of energetic dissipation or circuitous paths of expenditure. To put it differently,
capitalism which terrestrially envelops the restricted economy of the Sun in regard to death
and exteriority masquerades as the so-called general and free economy in regard to life and the
problem of consumption.
The interiority of life on Earth rests on the thermo-nuclear interiority of the Sun which
itself is contingent upon its exterior cosmic backdrop. Solar capitalism is only a market for
representing the Sun as both an inevitable and unfathomably rich exteriority for the
planet and terrestrial life, marketing the energetic model of the Sun as the only way to the great
outdoors of the abyss. Yet it is precisely the Sun that circumscribes the image of such outdoors and narrows the
speculative opportunities ensued by thought’s binding of radical exteriority. In line with the vitalistically
pluralist and thanatropically monist regime of solar economy, Earth can be reinvented
and recomposed only as a new planet or slave of the Sun whose life and death are emphatically
determined by its star or exorbitant source of energy. On such a planet, the ventures of thought and art
are burdened by a narrow scope in regard to cosmic exteriority imposed by the Sun as
well as the axiomatic submission of terrestrial life to the empire of the Sun.
Just as the pluralist regime of life inherent to solar economy is parasitically hydrophilic, the in-
dulgence of
capitalism in lifestyles and vitalistic detours also has an intimate af nity with terrestrial
juices. The solar model of consumption can duplicate itself as the dominant energetic model
wherever life emerges, that is to say, wherever water exists. Water can implement the
energetic peculiarities of the solar climate in quite a vitalistic fashion and thus, re-enact the Sun’s
model of energy expenditure within manifestations of life. Capitalism, in a similar manner,
sniffs out planetary waters so as to employ its models of accumulation and
consumption through their chemical potencies. This is not only to use the hydraulic ef- ciency of
terrestrial waters in order to propagate its markets and carry out its trades, but more im-
portantly to overlap and associate its indulgences with the very de nitions and foundations of life. Since
terrestrial waters (or liquid forms in general) are closely associated with the formula of life, by
investing in them and operating through them capitalism can also give a biopolitical
sense of inevitability (in terms of growth and vitality) to its rules and activities. In dissolving into terrestrial
waters, capitalism like solar energy can create climates or contingencies of its own on the
planet, triggering the rise of new territories, lines of migrations and reformations. Yet water is an open
receiver of chemistry as the applied dynamics of contingencies. As previously mentioned, if
terrestrial waters are attractors of contingencies or chemistry, then they do not merely
implement solar climates but also energetic models of dynamism associated with other
contingencies or cosmic climates. Accordingly, terrestrial waters develop into sites for the irruption of
contingencies into the already established and interiorized contingency which in the case of the
planet Earth is solar economy of the Sun and its restricted climates. Therefore, terrestrial waters are
agents of complicity whereby cosmic climates irrupt into the interiority of terrestrial life
itself. It is this irruption of cosmic climates that draws a line of exteriorization or loosening
into the abyss forboth the terrestrial life and the climates generated by the Sun. However, the complicity
between the water of life and cosmic climates or what we call chemistry is endowed with
a chemical slant; it gives the death of life and water weirdly productive aspects. The
irruption of cosmic climates into the terrestrial biosphere generates a dynamics of death or line of
exteriorization whose expression and dynamism are chemical rather than spectral, ghostly or
hauntological. The dying water is blackened into heaps of slime and the biosphere feeding on such water respectively
dies or chemically loosens into the cosmic exteriority. As these deaths have chemical slants, they spawn more
contingencies or lines of chemical dynamisms which render the universe climatically
weird. This climatic relationship between a dying Sun and a dying Earth as chemically projected in
water has been intriguingly portrayed by the artist Pamela Rosenkranz. What Rosenkranz artistically pro-
poses is that water – despite its apparent loyalty to terrestrial life – chemically unbinds the potencies of cosmic
contingencies whose inevitable irruption into our super cially solar world necessitates a chasmic terrestrial ecology.
Cosmic Ecology or the Order of the Weird
Life ecologically extinguishes as its waters die, or more accurately, as they chemically react with other cosmic
contingencies whose climates are exterior to that of terrestrial life and its solar bonds. Since the expression of
dying water signifies nothing but a chemical marriage between water and cosmic
contingencies, ecological death means nothing but to perish via a blackening water which is
too chemically potent to support the vitality of life or endurance of survival. Eco- logical death becomes a form of
descent into the cosmic abyss which is chemically too productive to be considered either misanthropically
gloomy or post-humanistically promising. This ecological death of Earth is strongly reminiscent of
Victor Hugo’s description of the appalling slime pools of Paris: “[I]n a pit of slime [...] the dying man
does not know whether he has become a ghost or a toad. Everywhere else the grave is sinister, here it is
shapeless.” (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables)
In the slimy grips of a universal nature whose contingencies have chemically irrupted into the water of life, the
ecological death of Earth is a weird chemical reaction from which no ghost emerges to
either haunt the universe or demand an appropriate mourn.
Being truly terrestrial is not the same as being superficial, that is to say, it is not the same as
considering Earth as a planetary surface-biosphere (slave of the Sun) or exalting the planet
to the position of the Sun (solar hegemony). Being genuinely terrestrial demands
presupposing the death and pure contingency of the Earth in each and every equation, thought,
feat of creativity and political intervention. Earthly thought embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic
contingency) as its immanent core. If the embracing of Earth’s perishability should be posited as
the hallmark of earthly thought, it is because such perishability – as argued earlier – grasps
the openness of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic /
necrocratic correla- tions (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and
loosening into the cosmic abyss. By the word ‘alternative’, we mean those ways of exteriorization and
loosening which are not dictated by the economical correlation between Earth and Sun.
These alternative ways of binding cosmic exteriority or loosening into the abyss entail,
firstly, a terrestrial ecology for which both Earth and Sun are bound or grasped as merely contingent and
hence, necessarily perishable entities. The only true terrestrial ecology, for this reason, is
the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is
no chance of resistance – there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity. To
this extent, terrestrial thought and creativity must essentially be associated with ecology,
but an ecology which is based on the unilateral powers of cosmic contingencies such as climate
changes, singularity drives, chemical eruptions and material disintegration. Any other mode of thought
basking in the visual effects of Earth as a blue marble or the Sun as the exorbitant flame
is but submission to heliocentric slavery.
Econ
The affirmative’s economic foundations are mistaken – they rely
on the concept of the restricted economy and efficiency, when
instead we should prefer the general economy and waste.
Rehn and Lindahl 14. Alf Rehn is a Finnish professor, author and speaker based
in Finland. He currently holds the Chair of Management and Organization at Åbo
Akademi University in Finland. Marcus Lindahl is a Professor of Industrial Engineering
& Management, Uppsala University. “Georges Bataille: On His Shoulders (And Other
Parts of the Body of Knowledge”, “On the Shoulders of Giants” | rpadhi
The key argument of this first volume is that all dynamic, developing systems have two aspects to them, one limited and
one general. Even though Bataille was primarily interested in systems of human action, here he ventures much further and
includes both cosmological and biological systems in his sweeping analysis of the logic of systems. Discussing
economy (broadly understood), he begins by pointing out that most studies have
completely misunderstood the foundational aspect of this system. Most theorists of
economy start from the assumption that its key logic is one of efficiency. One thus
assumes that things such as the conservation of energy, the parsimonious use of
resources and savings – things we often state as positive and “economic” things to do –
are natural and basic for economic functioning. Bataille disagrees in the most violent
manner possible. Presaging modern economic anthropology, he instead turns the entire question on its head. If
we look back to the very birth of the economy, the moment in which society started
forming around productive functions, what actually occurred? As Marshall Sahlins later showed to
great e ect in his Stone Age Economics (1972), the state of primitive man was not one of dearth. Instead it seems
that our ancestors lived fairly pleasant lives, with limited time spent on anything like
work due to their very limited needs. With few people in the world, and food thus being
plentiful and relatively easy to gather or hunt, work and means were minimized as there
were no real ends to pursue. It is here that Bataille enters the picture. How did we develop culture and
economy? Not because we had to, as we might well have opted to live in a pre-historical bliss. No, we developed
because we desired something more – something that Bataille calls the accursed share.
We desired feasts, fetish-objects, larger huts, bigger prey, rituals and merrymaking. For
some this seems normal, as we’re programmed to understand progress and development
as something natural and necessary. But Bataille points out that this is a very peculiar
assumption, and that all these things can in fact be understood more analytically as
“waste”. Looking to a wide range of anthropological evidence, Bataille argues that
progress isn’t driven by some natural necessity, but rather by the tendency of all systems
to create great eruptions of energy, magnificent waste and sacred excess. I will simply state,
without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the
overturning of economic principles–the overturning of the ethics that
ground them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of
general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of
thinking – and of ethics. From e Accursed Share, Vol. 1 (1949/1988: 25) We didn’t need to start
storing grain, but did so because we wanted to organize huge drunken feasts in which
our saved surplus could be gloriously wasted (and during which we ourselves could get
wasted – as archaeological research has convincingly shown that the first instances of farming were not
for the production of necessities but for producing beer and thus drunkenness). We
developed complex logistics in order to lay our hands on trinkets and frivolities such as gold and spices. We built
societies in order to arrange huge events – such as wars, huge art galleries or the
Olympics – without apparent purpose. Waste, nothing but glorious waste! e problem,
maintains Bataille, is that we’ve assumed that the limited system of economy, the part of it
that strives for effciency and order, is the whole story. No, he continues, the general economy is the correct
unit of analysis, and here effciency and parsimony only exist in order to enable
waste and expenditure.
We must rethink social wealth in terms of intentionally

unproductive use – productive expenditure dominates
social life by desacralizing human labor in terms of
utility – an unprecedented break frees us from the
oppressive principles of economy
Goux, 90 (Goux, Jean-Joseph, et al, Doctorate of the 3rd cycle of Philosophy, Paris-Sorbonne,
Doctor of State in Humanities and Letters, “General Economics and Postmodern
Capitalism.” Yale French Studies, no. 78, 1990, pp. 206–224. JSTOR,
www.jstor.org/stable/2930123.)/RF
La Part maudite, Bataille's

most systematic and long-considered work, provokes in the reader
an inescapable feeling of mingled enthusiasm and disappointment. There is something striking and
gran- diose about Bataille's attempt to subvert existing political economy, caught within the limits of a utilitarian or calculating
rationality, in order to replace it with a "general economics" that would make of unproductive expenditure (sacrifice, luxury, war,
games, sumptuary monuments) the most determinant phenomenon of social life. At last a critique of political
economy which, while remaining on the decisive terrain of the social circulation of
wealth, escapes the confined atmosphere of the bourgeois ethic-so often caricatured-, the
cramped and grayish world of petty calculation, quantifiable profit and industrious
activity! It is the most extravagant waste-gratuitous, careening consumption, where
accumulated wealth is set ablaze and disappears in an instant, wreathing in ephemeral
glory him who makes the offering of this blaze which becomes the central phenomenon,
the one through which a society discovers itself and celebrates the deepest values that
animate it: its religion, its metaphysics, its sense of the sacred. Bataille's "Copernican reversal" of political economy
is a remarkable and dazzling operation of ethnological decentering. It is not the store and the workshop,
the bank and the factory, that hold the key from which the principles of the economy can
be deduced. In the blood that spurts from the open chest of victims sacrificed to the sun in an Aztec ritual, in the
sumptuous and ruinous feasts offered to the courtiers of Versailles by the monarch of divine right, in all these mad from
dissipations is found a secret that our restricted economics has covered up and caused to be forgotten. We must
rethink social wealth not from the parsimonious perspective of an ascetic bourgeoisie
that only consents to spend when it expects a return, but from the point of view (nearly
delirious to our mind) of the erection of the pyramids or the cathedrals, or of the sacrifice of thousands of
herd animals in archaic holocausts. It is in this intentionally unproductive use, in this
unlimited expenditure, and not in utilitarian consumption that a secret lies hidden, the
"general law of the economy": "a society always produces on the whole more than is
necessary to its subsistance, it disposes of a surplus. It is precisely the use made of this excess
that determines it: the surplus is the cause of disturbances, changes of structure, and of
its entire history."' A thesis that is radically opposed to the rationalist, productivist and
utilitarian vision. It is the mode of expenditure of the excess, the consumption of the
superfluous, this accursed share, that determines a society's form. The dominant prosaic vision may
be only a recently formed prejudice contemporaneous with the reign of the bourgeoisie, ushered in by the Reformation, and unable to
account for the real and ineluctable movement of wealth in a society, a movement that sovereignly engages human beings: their
relationship to the sacred through religion, mysticism, art, eroticism. One cannot deny that this "general economics" has a great force
of conviction, the strength of a new critique of political economy which instead of accepting the notions of this discipline (market
exchange, need, scarcity, work-value) as Marx did, contests the very metaphysical ground of a utilitarian and productivist rationality
whose limitation becomes evident in the anthropology of archaic societies. Better still, far from retreating beyond an economic
explanation, as do the spiritualist critiques, this vision generalizes the economic approach, directly placing in its conceptual field
notions that do not seem to belong there: religion, art, eroticism. At
the heart of Bataille's thought lies the
troubling postulate that the distinction between the profane and the sacred-a
fundamental distinction of all human society-merges in a broad sense from the economic.
Whereas the profane is the domain of utilitarian consumption, the sacred is the do-
main of experience opened by the unproductive consumption of what is sacrificed.
Henceforth the position of religion or art with respect to the "economic base" as
formulated by Marx is completely transformed. The religious or artistic domain is not a
simple superstructure of vague whims built on the economic infrastructure: it is itself
economic, in the sense of a general economics founded on the expenditure of the excess, on the unproductive and ecstatic
consumption of the surplus, through which the human being experiences the ultimate meaning of existence. General
economics, unlike restricted economics, encompasses obliquely the entire domain of
human activities, extending the "economic" intelligence to highly symbolic practices
where formidable energies are consumed for the celebration of the gods, the glory of the
great or the dionysiac pleasure of the humble. What becomes apparent then is the
genealogy of our economic thought. A complete desacralization of life (inaugurated by Calvinism and carried to its
limit by Marxism) was necessary for the world of production and exchange to become autonomous according to the principle of
restricted utility. The profane and prosaic reality thought by contemporary economics can be constituted only by excluding outside the
field of human activity-through the total secularization of ethical values-any impulse toward sacrifice, toward consumption as pure
loss. Bataille
is thus proposing a veritable anthropology of history whose guiding thread
would be the accursed share and which would achieve a unification of the two forces that
have been considered individually the motors of human societies (religion and
economics). But this history is marked by a break. Until the birth of capitalism every
society is one of sacrificial expenditure. Whether in the potlatch of primitive tribes described by Mauss in
The Gift, the bloody sacrifices of the Aztecs, the building of the Egyptian pyramids, or even the opposing paths of peaceful
Tibetan lamaism and warlike Islamic conquest, the expenditure of excess is always inscribed within a principle of the
sacred. With the birth of the bourgeois world a radical change takes place. Productive
expenditure now entirely dominates social life. In a desacralized world, where human
labor is guided in the short or long term by the imperative of utility, the surplus has lost
its meaning of glorious consumption and becomes capital to be reinvested productively,
a constantly multiplying surplus-value. In my view it is in this historical outcome that the most serious difficulty
lies. This is also undoubtedly Bataille's view: he always wanted to continue his first sketch but this continuation exists only in
fragments. On the one hand, there is hardly any doubt that Bataille always harbored a will to subvert contemporary society, a will that
was heightened by his searing contact with surrealism and politically engaged groups. On the other hand, it is clear that the
discussions in La Part maudite concerning "the present facts" of the world situation in terms of general economics are more than
disappointing. Every- thing suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate his mysticism of expenditure, of sovereignty, of major
communication-expressed so flamboyantly in La Somme Atheologique, L'Erotisme or La Litterature et le mal-in terms of
contemporary general economics. Where do we situate Bataille's claim? What happens to the demand of the sacred in capitalist society?
How do we reconcile the affirmation that capitalism represents an unprecedented break
with all archaic (precapitalist) forms of expenditure and the postulate of the necessary
universality of spending as pure loss? This is the difficulty. Bataille wants to maintain as a general
anthropological principle the necessity of unproductive expenditure while simultaneously upholding the historic singularity of
capitalism with regard to this expenditure. Bourgeois society corresponds to a "general atrophy of former sumptuary processes" (41).
An anomaly whereby loss is not absent (which would contradict the general principle) but virtually unreadable: "Today,
the
great and free social forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. Nevertheless,
we should not conclude from this that the very principle of expenditure is no longer
situated at the end of economic activity" (37). So what happens to ostentatious
expenditure in capitalism? And can we really believe, furthermore, that the even more radical desacralization effected by
communism could become a libertarian affirmation of sovereignty-the feast of self-consciousness, without divinities and myths?
General economies suppress energy by expending and
erupting it into uncontrolled explosions, e.g. war –
instead, social consumption resuscitates nonproductive
expenditures, creating a modern ritual potlatch
Yang, 2k (Yang, Mayfair Mei‐ hui, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages
and Cultures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Professor and Director of Asian
Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic
Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure.” Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 4, 2000, pp. 477–
509. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/317380.)
Bataille’s project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called
a general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also for
social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important components in
precapitalist economies. In Bataille’s approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of
the infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy
treats economic wealth and growth as part of the operations of the law of physics
governing the global field of energy for all organic phenomena, so that, when any
organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its subsistence, this energy
must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his enigmatic and mesmerizing book The
Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism, we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material
existence: that the surplus energy and wealth left over after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been
satisfied must be expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an
uncontrolled explosion such as war. Given the tremendous productive power of
modern industrial society and the fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all
traditional avenues of ritual and festive expenditures, energy surpluses have been
redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on a scale unknown in traditional
societies. Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War
II U.S. economy could be deflected from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare
only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving away its excess wealth to poorer nations,
as in the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary rivalry for prestige and influence
with the Soviet Union, that other center of industrial modernity’s radical reduction of nonproductive expenditure.14 Thus,
Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy,
nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist
and state socialist modernity. Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap
between Bataille’s views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism
is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift,
asceticism, and accumulation against which Ba- 14. It is estimated that the Marshall Plan
cost 2% of the U.S. gross national product annually from 1947 to 1951 ($160 billion a
year in today’s terms), in comparison with which the tiny amounts proposed today to
forgive Third World debt ($600 million) and rebuild Kosovo and Albania ($5 billion)
seem laughable (Sanger 1999). It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for
businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it
collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire
(Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production.
Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not
address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me
that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible.
If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of
consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since
every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home dećor merely
feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of
truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the
furthering of military-industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic
economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore,
capitalist
consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the
whole community or social order.
We must confront the fissures of capitalist
consumption – by doing so we will reevaluate our
orientation towards expenditure
Yang, 2k (Yang, Mayfair Mei‐ hui, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Languages
and Cultures at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and Professor and Director of Asian
Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic
Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure.” Current Anthropology, vol. 41, no. 4, 2000, pp. 477–
509. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/317380.)/RF
a consumer economy has been incorporated into ritual exuberance and generosity but
Here
in a way which undercuts the private accumulation of capitalist consumerism with the
ethics of a relational kinship order of reciprocity and obligation linking different
communities together across space. In this meshing of ritual and consumer economies, the question arises whether this is an example of the latter’s colonizing and
penetrating the former. Since this is still a Third World society not fully extricated from the economic privations and emphasis on asceticism, discipline, and production that were the hallmarks of a modernist state
socialism,more features of modernist capitalist culture are found alongside consumer culture
in Wenzhou than in the modern West today. In other words, modernist features of the Maoist era have combined with the structural emphasis on capital
accumulation and investment as rural Wenzhou enters a new phase of constructing factories and infrastructure. In this situation, a more likely scenario than
consumer capitalism’s hijacking ritual consumption is the revived ritual

economy’s taking advantage of the opening introduced by postmodernist
consumer capitalism to make inroads against the combined modernist
forces of state socialist and early capitalist productivism and desacralization. Here the postmodern
consumer economy, which requires the free flow of commerce, is enlisted as an ally by the ritual
economy in its eluding of state control. This is a parallel movement to Arturo Escobar’s (1999:14) suggestion that the “organic
regime of nature” (small-scale preindustrial cultivation which avoids a nature/culture opposition) can join forces with the postmodern
capitalist “technonature regime” (whose stance toward nature is one of conservation and promotion of biodiversity) in an alliance to
counter the ravages of a modernist capitalism which treats nature as a commodified
object and resource. In this consumer-ritual economy hybrid, the ritual economy
continues to present the danger of breaking out fully and realizing its deep destructive
force, of which the burning of real money and paper replicas of goods at funerals
provides just a hint. Should the state further relax its vigilance over ritual and productive accumulation reach a certain point of saturation, an outbreak of ritual expenditure and material
waste and destruction such as a bonfire of real consumer appliances at an extravagant funeral is not inconceivable. Once unleashed, the internal principles of rural
Wenzhou’s economy of kinship and expenditure could challenge and subvert the
principles of rational productivism and private accumulation of global capitalism. As
capital and capitalist practices expand across the globe, our theoretical tools seem
inadequate to capture the full complexity of these processes, especially for rural areas. Rather
than assuming that capitalism immediately transforms and converts everything it encounters, it is necessary to consider the different
modes and logics that it must incorporate and the fissures and tensions
between them. A notion of economic hybridity is conducive to the genealogical task of
tracing the historical process of cross-fertilization and fusion that has brought different
economic practices and logics together into a multiplex form. We must not presume that capitalism is everywhere so
impregnable that it is not altered in its forays around the world.28 By taking into account the continued operation of precapitalist logics of expenditure within modern hybrid economies, rather than reducing the
: the
contradictions of capitalism to a mechanism internal to the structures of capitalist production, we open the way to addressing an issue that Marx’s concern with reorganizing production neglected
horror of endless material accumulation and productivism. It is true that capitalism

has its own mechanisms of periodic self-destruction of its accumulation, a sort of “clearing of inventory”
such as the military’s expenditure of its stockpiles of weapons in warfare and the stock
market crashes which wipe out accumulated wealth in a matter of seconds. Bataille’s
point is that there are better ways of consuming wealth so as to restrain the
insane expansion of the system and live more lightly on the earth—giving
out rather than raking in. What principles of ritual expenditure can do at
the local level is to redistribute wealth between families through an ethic of
competition in generosity, build up the cohesiveness of local communities
and give them more autonomy against the centralized state and
transnational capitalism, and prevent the reduction of existence to a
utilitarian definition. At the global level, a ritual economic logic may help deflect capitalist accumulation into a rivalry between transnational corporations and
states over which of them dares to sacrifice a greater proportion of its annual profits or GNP by giving it away to causes that do not feed back into production.
Educational Competitiveness
Their investment in meritocracy instills a binary between what
is useful and useless. This lens of productivity necessitates the
devaluation of individuals
Sennett 06 (Richard, Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and
University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. “The Culture of New Capitalism”,
Chapter 2: Talent and the Specter of Uselessness, p 122-125, 2006) // IES
The formulation of potential ability leads back to the relation between talent and the
specter of uselessness, a relationship which looks different once we have described the kind of
knowledge which is now useful, particularly at the cutting edge of the economy. The French
philosopher Michel Foucault was the modern era’s great analyst of the ways knowledge enables certain forms of
power. He had in view the development of increasingly elaborated, dense knowledge which would
serve the purpose of ever more complete control over individuals and groups; for
instance, the development of psychiatry was in his view intimately linked to the spread of
institutions of incarceration.13 The Foucaultian scheme does not envisage superficial
knowledge as a tool of power, and in this way does not quite describe the way potential
ability is sought and practiced in modern meritocracy. But he illuminated an all-important fact about
meritocracy: it disempowers the larger majority of those who fall under its rule. When Michel
Young coined the term meritocracy he meant to dramatize, painting crudely, a society in which a small
number of skilled people can control an entire society. Foucault made a more detailed picture of this
domination; the elite would get under the skin of the masses by making them feel that they
did not understand themselves, that they were inadequate interpreters of their own
experience of life. Tests of potential ability show just how deeply under the skin a
knowledge system can cut. Judgments about potential ability are much more personal in
character than judgments of achievement. An achievement compounds social and economic circumstances, fortune
and chance, with self. Potential ability focuses only on the self. The statement “you lack potential” is much more
devastating than “you messed up.” It makes a more fundamental claim about who you are. It conveys
uselessness in a more profound sense. Just because the statement is devastating, organizations engaged in continual
internal talent searches tend to avoid saying it outright. Personnel managers often soften the blow by talking about the varied abilities in
every human being which may pass through the net of examinations, etc. etc. More finely, as in some finance firms in London, judgments of
potential ability tend to be informal, senior management acting on gut feeling about their juniors’ potential as much as on the objective
trading record; year-end bonuses may be awarded in ways which resemble the ancient Roman practice of divining the future from the
entrails of dead animals. The sting of being left behind, of being unrewarded, is stronger in these firms than in investment banks, where
either the bonus or future prospects are simply calculated by the trading record. The untalented
become invisible, they simply drop from view in institutions covertly judging ability
rather than achievement. Here again organizations mirror what people may have
experienced earlier in life at school. Youngsters judged to be without talent do not stand
out as distinctive individuals, they become a collective body, a mass. Meritocracy, as
Young understood, is a system as well as an idea, a system based on institutional
indifference once a person is judged.14 The problem is compounded, as Gardner has shown, just because the talent
searches do not try to cast a wide net, paralleling the diverse kinds of abilities diverse individuals may possess; the search for
potential ability is narrow-focus. School and work differ in one crucial way about the process. Though in principle there
should be nothing a student could do about his or her innate ability, in well-known fact it is possible with sufficient tutoring to raise scores
significantly in retaking the tests. In the work world, on the contrary, there are seldom second chances. In flexible organizations, employee
records constitute the one hard possession of the firm. In studying one set of such records, I was struck by how little revision the personnel
manager had made over time to individual case files; the first judgments instead set the standard, later entries sought for consistency;
translation of the records into numeric form usable by core managers only made the documents more rigid in content. The belief of many
workers let go or held back in work that they have been judged unfairly illustrates another dimension of judgmental power, one which again
does not fit into Foucault’s scheme. Those who are discarded are often correct interpreters of their experience: they have not indeed been
judged fairly, on the basis of their achievements. The sense of being unfairly judged comes from the ways in which firms themselves are run.
To understand why, we might recall some of the idealized traits of a worker in the cuttingedge institution. An organization in which the
contents are constantly shifting requires the mobile capacity to solve problems; getting deeply involved in any one problem would be
dysfunctional, since projects end as abruptly as they begin. The
problem analyzer who can move on, whose
product is possibility, seems more attuned to the instabilities which rule the global
marketplace. The social skill required by a flexible organization is the ability to work well with others in short-lived teams, others
you won’t have the time to know well. Whenever the team dissolves and you enter a new group, the problem you have to solve is getting
down to business as quickly as possible with these new teammates. “I can work with anyone” is the social formula for potential ability. It
won’t matter who the other person is; in fast-changing firms it can’t matter. Your skill lies in cooperating, whatever the circumstances.
These qualities of the ideal self are a source of anxiety because disempowering to the
mass of workers. As we have seen, in the workplace they produce social deficits of loyalty and informal trust, they erode the value
of accumulated experience. To which we should now add the hollowing out of ability. A key aspect of craftsmanship is learning how to get
something right. Trial and error occurs in improving even seemingly routine tasks; the worker has to be free to make mistakes, then go over
the work again and again. Whatever a person’s innate abilities, that is, skill develops only in stages, in fits and starts—in music, for instance,
even the child prodigy will become a mature artist only by occasionally getting things wrong and learning from mistakes. In a speeded-up
institution, however, time-intensive learning becomes difficult. The pressures to produce results quickly are too intense; as in educational
testing, so in the workplace time-anxiety causes people to skim rather than to dwell. Such hollowing out of ability compounds the
organizations’ tendency to discount past achievement in looking toward the future. When people have spoken to me about not being able to
show what they can do, I’ve sensed they are referring to just this sense of being prevented from developing their skills. When I interviewed
back-office workers in a health maintenance organization, for instance, they complained that the time pressures meant they did a
“middling” job of making sense of the accounts; people who worked quickly were rewarded with promotion, but the bills they processed
proved frequently a muddle on closer inspection. In call centers, management similarly frowns on employees who spend too much time on
the telephone—too responsive, for instance, to fuddled customers who can’t express themselves clearly. Anyone who has spent time at a
budgetairline ticket counter knows the problem: impatience is institutionalized. In principle, any well-run firm should want its employees
to learn from their mistakes and admit a certain degree of trial-and-error learning. In practice, such big firms do not. The size of the firm
indeed makes the greatest difference in this regard: in small service firms (under a hundred or so employees) care of customers is more
directly connected to the firms’ survival. But in the large medical insurance company superficiality proved functional; taking too much time
to straighten things out earned no rewards. The result, within the firms I and my colleagues studied—perhaps invisible to a frustrated
customer—was a fair number of employees who also feel frustrated. In sum, the
material specter of uselessness
lifts the curtain on a fraught cultural drama. How can one become valuable and
useful in the eyes of others? The classic way in which people do so is the craftsman’s way,
by developing some special talent, some particular skill. The claims of craftsmanship are
challenged in modern culture by an alternative formula of value. In its origin,
meritocracy sought to offer opportunity to individuals with exceptional ability—Jefferson’s
“natural aristocracy.” It took on an ethical cast in arguing that such people deserved opportunity; it was a matter of justice that
society provide for them. In the beginning, this search pitted one elite against another, the natural aristocracy against inherited privilege. In
the course of time society has refined the technology of searching for unusual talent. In prospecting for the potential to grow rather than for
past achievement, the search for talent well suits the peculiar conditions of flexible
organizations. These organizations use the same instruments for a larger purpose: to
eliminate as well as promote individuals. The invidious comparisons between people become deeply
personal. In this talent cull, those judged without inner resources are left in limbo. They can be
judged no longer useful or valuable, despite what they have accomplished.
Health
The world, people, information, and our biological makeup are
all inextricably intertwined with the production of excess value.
Rather than unproductively expend that excess, moves towards
cartographic sanitization such as the AFF are only a futile
attempt to manage it, reign it in, and deny the chaotic forces of
life itself
Thacker 05 (Eugene, Professor of Media Studies at the New School in New York City, with
research interests in pessimism, nihilism, continental philosophy, and antihumanism. “The Global
Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture”, Chapter 3: A Political Economy of the Genomic Body, p
122-130, 2005) // IES
Thus far, I have noted how contemporary genomics undertakes a particular organization of the
bioinformatics body, through the incorporation of informatic tropes and in the design of “wet” and
“dry” databases.54 If such practices dictate what will be designed into a genome database, then we
can ask how the political economy of genetic bodies in genomic mapping is
also a set of organizational technologies based on the management of
elements of excess. Georges Bataille’s concept of general economy provides a helpful way
of considering genomics not just as a political economy, but as a general economy in
which excess, not scarcity, is the rule. For Bataille, writing during the same period in which the structure of DNA was
elucidated, traditional political economy represented a narrow mode of social analysis that
often reduced the range of activity within the social field to utility, production,
accumulation, and conservation.55 Stemming from a long history of dissatisfaction with Marxism and Hegelianism,
Bataille’s thought outlines a trajectory that explores—in philosophy, in poetry, in political activism, in
occultism, in pornography, in anthropology—the “negative” ways in which given social formations
articulate themselves as productive, homogeneous structures. Bataille’s almost obsessive interest in the
visceral, abject body, what he often termed “base materialism,” has to do with the various means by which a tension-filled relationship was
established between a potentially threatening, transgressive body (obscene, grotesque, unstable, dysfunctional) and the particular mode of
social organization within which such bodies were found.56 In other words, Bataille’s base materialism is not about
positing the transgressive body at a position of absolute exteriority to the social, but
neither does its complex contingency simply predetermine it to a recuperation by
discourse. The social formation does not simply repress or forbid the transgressive body;
but neither does this body form the core of social hegemony. The social must—
reluctantly, frustratedly, and even hesitantly—engage with this difficult, “dirty” body
through a variety of means. It was central to Bataille’s project, then, to consider the types of
relationships between the productive dynamics of “homogeneous” society and the
troubling excesses of “heterogeneous” bodies: “The very term heterogeneous indicates
that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate; this
impossibility, which has a fundamental impact on social assimilation, likewise has an
impact on scientific assimilation . . . as a rule, science cannot know heterogeneous
elements as such . . . the heterogeneous world includes everything resulting from
unproductive expenditure.”57 A key methodological move in this consideration was a reconfiguration of the field of political
economy. Rather than considering the social from perspectives privileging utility, production, and conservation, Bataille attempts
to analyze the social body as a kind of sociological metabolism, or as a wastemanagement
system. That is, rather than consider political economy from the vantage point of utility,
Bataille instead begins from the vantage point of uselessness and excess. For this reason,
commodities do not form the center of modes of exchange for Bataille; instead, objects and instances form a unique
mode of exchange based not on conservation or agglomeration, but on expenditure:
jewels, poetry, festivals, war, eroticism, sacrifice, flowers. Abundance comes first, not
scarcity. Only in the specific historical instance of capitalism are abundance and exuberance turned back on themselves. Noting this
shift in perspective in Bataille’s thought, Steven Shaviro suggests that “what needs to be explained is no longer the fact that spontaneous
acts of expenditure, like sacrifices or gifts, also turn out to serve useful purposes for the people who perform them, but rather the fact that
an economy entirely given over to utilitarian calculation, or to ‘rational choice,’ still continues to express . . . the delirious logic of
unproductive expenditure.”58 Such
a theory must take into account the languages, structures, and
sociohistorical contingencies of the organizational tactics of modes of social organization
themselves. This perspective—that of a “general economy”—would work within but pass
between the interstices of a “restricted economy,” disallowing internal critical
perspective.59 Bataille’s premise is at once biological, ontological, and economic: “The
living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the
globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess
energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of the system (e.g., an organism); if the
system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed
in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent,
willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically.” 60 If a restricted economy—the political economy of
Mill, Ricardo, and Smith—is primarily concerned with the state’s use of its resources, then a general economy would begin from the
opposite position and consider social activity that implicitly challenges and goes outside of the state. This
general economy
thus asks two primary questions: How does a particular social formation interact with its
“accursed share” (those elements that do not stand in a direct, productive relation to the
social formation), and, To what degree are those elements of excess contingent upon
their being situated within the social formation in which they are found (is there an element or
dynamic to them that is not simply recuperated into production or affirmation)? The general trajectory of such an approach would be to
question the ways in which both the inclusive and the exclusive are constitutive of the social formation. What does Bataille’s general
economy mean for contemporary biotech fields such as genomics? If
we approach genomics as an activity that
rearticulates the body at the genetic and informatic levels, then it would seem that
genomics is as much about the management of excess (“junk” or noncoding
DNA) as it is about the organization of scarcity (coding DNA). In one sense, it goes without saying that
the centrality of the mapping of the human genome constitutes one of the foundational
fields within genetics and biotech research. Gene therapy, new reproductive technologies (NRTs),
pharmacogenomics, medical technology, pathology, immunology, and a host
of related fields are to varying degrees dependent on the promises, claims,
and current implementations of the research performed in genomics. Part of
this dependency requires that basic research produce as much data as possible to ensure
accurate results (in the case of genome mapping) and to ensure application (in the case of drug
development or preclinical trials). In a sense, the excess of genomic data—SNPs, introns, simple
sequence repeats (SSRs), and so on— does not simply exist, but is actually produced by genomics
technologies. If we look at current genomics, not in terms of official science (e.g., the progressive march toward the
complete cataloging of the human genome), but rather in terms of Bataille’s excess, then our examples demonstrate the
degree to which the political economy of genomics is primarily concerned with the
production and subsequent technical management of excess. But an excess of what
exactly? If both the technology of genomics and its preliminary findings are considered, it is
clear that the excess that is managed is an excess of biological information—though, note, not
necessarily an excess of biological “life itself.” As we have seen, examples of genomics technologies of excess include the statistical
management of polymorphisms, or SNPs; the overproduction of DNA in tools such as oligonucleotide synthesizers; the study of junk DNA,
As a
or intron regions in the genome; and, finally, the challenges of establishing computer database ontology standards in XML.
general economy—that is, as a political economy based on excess—genomics becomes
defined according to a range of practices that involve the ongoing production and
management of the inclusive and exclusive elements in the genomic body.The Insubordination of
Matter This chapter has considered the ways in which genomics forms a flexible management of excess DNA
(or information) from the perspective of Marx’s critiques of political economy and from the perspective of
Bataille’s notion of a general economy. Genomics and its related fields perform this
management not only through positive means (textualizing, universalizing, creating causality, constructing), but also
through negative means (individualizing and grouping; managing excess)
that define further data for genomic analysis. Both Marx and Bataille pose a set of challenges to the
conceptual underpinning of political economy. If we consider political economy in this way (that is, philosophically), then it is not difficult
to understand how the
particular modes of production, distribution, and
consumption help to define what is or is not valuable or useful in
biotechnology fields such as genomics. As Lev Manovich states with regard to the role of the database in new media,
What we encounter here is an example of the general principle of new media: the projection of the ontology of a computer onto culture
itself. If in physics the world is made of atoms and in genetics it is made of genes, computer programming encapsulates the world according
to its own logic. The world is reduced to two kinds of software objects which are complementary to each other: data structures and
algorithms. . . . [A]ny object in the world—be it the population of a city, or the weather over the course of a century, a chair, a human brain—
is modeled as a data structure, i.e. data organized in a particular way for efficient search and retrieval. Fields such as genomics are unique,
however, because they do not simply reiterate the abstraction of the material world into an immaterial data structure. In genomics, as
noted, a database logic pervades both the wet-lab maintenance of BAC libraries and the more familiar construction of computer databases
such as GenBank. In other words, an informatic mode of organization—an informatic mode of “banking”—spans both the material and
immaterial aspects of biology. This dual aspect of genomics, of being at once material and informatic, is key for an understanding of how
the characteristics of a genetic reductionism defines the molecular-genetic
understanding of “life itself.” The artifacts of the database, the BAC library, the intron, and GEML
contribute to this general notion that biological “life itself” is in some way identical to
“information.” And yet, as a number of authors have pointed out, this equivalence is always inexact, for the genetic “code” is not a
language—it has no grammar, it contains no information, and it transfers no message separate from a medium. Something always seems to
escape: on the one hand, there is the precision of sequences and structures, where a single base-pair polymorphism can result in a disease,
yet, on the other hand, there is a high degree of “redundancy” in the sequence and a panoply of “error-correcting” mechanisms in the
genetic code. Whereas
Marx, in the Grundrisse, points to the central tension between labor and
capital as the motor of industrial capitalism, Bataille translates this tension into
one between expenditure and accumulation. For Marx, it is “living labor” that always provides the
challenge to capital and to which capital responds either through technological advances in production (e.g., the fixed capital of machinery)
or through redefining the relationship between labor and machinery. Regarding this “appropriation of living labor by objectified labor,”62
Marx points to the transformation of living labor into a technology of living labor, a transformation of nature into a technology of nature:
“Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry.”63
Yet—and this point is the key to understanding the uniqueness of biotechnology today— capitalism’s
revolutions of
production are able to reconceive of biology and of nature itself as a technology: “In
machinery, the appropriation of living labor by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and
application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labor as that
previously performed by the worker.”64 Although Marx is speaking here of industrial manufacturing, it
is not difficult to
expand his comments to the biotech industry, in which we see the routine manufacture
of molecules, enzymes, and cells. What has changed in the jump from industrial capitalism to the biotech industry is the
role that modern notions of “information” play in relation to the biological domain. “ Living labor” is no longer just the
labor appropriated by workers, but the uncanny biomaterial labor of immortalized cell
lines, cultured stem cells, DNA synthesizers, and even transgenic organisms. Marx had already
begun to see this integration of living labor and the “dead labor” of machinery in biological terms (“the metabolism of capital”), and in the
biotech industry this integration is pushed further still. However, for Bataille, even Marx’s critique of political economy had not gone far
enough. Marx was able to critique the universalist presuppositions of political economy, but, for
Bataille, political economy
had erred in its understanding of the true nature of the processes of production,
distribution, and consumption. Bataille’s emphasis on a “general economy” based on
excess, expenditure, and luxury is an attempt to invert further the categories of
traditional political economic thought. From this perspective, Marx’s tension between labor and
capital is converted into a tension between expenditure and accumulation in capitalist
societies. Instead of Marx’s living labor in production, Bataille gives us the intensive
production of a loss in expenditure; instead of Marx’s general formula for capital, in
which commodities are always transformed into money, Bataille gives us a general
economy in which the drive for accumulation takes the form of a reinvestment in
production with profit. The challenge for an economic system is thus not how to produce
efficiently in order to accrue a surplus value, but rather how to spend or expend
effectively in order to maintain the dynamic stability of a system. For Bataille, excess is
the problem, not scarcity (and in this he gives us a position diametrically opposed to Malthus and classical political
economy). Put another way, we might say that for capital the problem is the ongoing management of
excess (pushes toward consumption of immaterial goods and services; conspicuous
consumption; consumption of affects). It is tempting to push this idea even further and to suggest that from
Bataille’s perspective of expenditure, the problem for capital is not only managing
excess, but taking over the production of excess in itself. In the biotech industry, genomics
and bioinformatics illustrate this tendency, for in them we see a twofold tendency. On the one hand, there is a push toward
generating an incredible amount of information, a “tsunami of data” related to genomes,
proteomes, SNPs, spliceosomes, transcriptomes, biopathways, and so forth. The first
phase of the effort to map the human genome (by both Celera and the IHGSC) is the most well
known of such productions of excess. On the other hand, the production of such excess has as
its primary aim the subsequent development of mostly computational tools for analyzing
and “making sense” of all this information. The proliferation of bioinformatics software,
DBMSs, genome sequencing computers, and other technologies has largely followed upon “Big Science”
efforts such as the HGP. We have a kind of pushpull relationship between these tendencies: the
tendency toward an excess of data and a tendency toward the management of that excess
(at which time it no longer becomes excess as such). Using Marx’s terms, we can say that in fields such
as genomics and bioinformatics, information technology subsumes the excess
information (which it has produced). There is no such thing as “too much information” for genomics, bioinformatics,
or related fields such as pharmacogenomics. There is never too much data, only the production
of an excess that serves to trigger further development of tools for the
management of this excess. The productive capacity of this excess can be seen in recent patenting activity
surrounding genetic material: up until 2001, patent applications for genetic material were being granted without a full knowledge of the
function or specific application of the molecule in question. Genes (or rather gene derivatives) could theoretically be patented without an
understanding of what the genes did. Only in the U.S. PTO’s 2001 Federal Register Report was it finally specified that patent applicants
must demonstrate “both utility and application” in their files. Yet an ambiguity still remains concerning knowledge of the function of any
patented compound: “The utility of a claimed DNA sequence does not necessarily depend on the function of the encoded gene product.” In
the network between a laboratory BAC culture, a file in a genome database, and, perhaps, an application to the U.S. PTO, there is both an
effort to regulate the relationship between labor (or biomaterial labor) and capital, as well as an effort to manage excess information. We
can ask Bataille’s question of the biotech industry: Is there unproductive expenditure in
biotechnology? In one way, the answer is yes, for the production or even overproduction
of information is increasingly being seen as one of the major obstacles for bioscience
research. In a different light, the answer is no, for any excess in biotechnology is not only
a production of excess (as in genomics), but an eventually useful or valuable excess. If this is
the case, then the general economy of genomics is one in which excess biological “noise” is
constantly managed and transformed into useful or valuable biological information. The
tension between labor and capital in the biotech industry is therefore a tension between the biomaterial labor of genes, enzymes, and cells,
on the one hand, and the economic imperatives behind those instances of biotechnology research, on the other hand, where profit is the
primary motivating force. Clearly, this is not the case with each and every instance of research in fields such as genomics, proteomics, or
bioinformatics. And just as the mere existence of private-sector funding for research does not immediately imply a problematic relation
between labor and capital, the mere existence of public or federal funding also does not immediately absolve those funding bodies of
economic imperatives. The difficulty is initially in understanding how the tension between labor and capital (or between biomaterial labor
and the biotech industry) takes formation in the so-called biotech century. From this understanding, the next step is to identify those
elements that tip the delicate, fragile balance between medical and economic interests to one side or the other. These tensions are often
played out at the technical level of BAC libraries, gene-finding algorithms, and XML standards. Sometimes the prioritization of economic
interests create blockages in bioscience research, as in the case of proprietary data formats, databases, and software tools in bioinformatics.
At other times, efforts toward the creation of flexible standards and open source environments can effectively aid in the research process.
We might wonder whether in this biomaterial labor that is transformed into capital there is still something that escapes, evades, or bypasses
altogether the political economy of genomics. If
fields such as genomics and bioinformatics are involved
in the production of an excess, that excess is in turn transformed into useful information,
and that information is also valuable information that can be exchanged. Use and
exchange values are coordinated at this level, but use values also diverge into the
potential medical benefits of drugs or therapies. Yet even drugs and therapies
require further information and the development of technologies for diagnostics. As
discussed in chapter 2, this vision of a future, genomics-based medicine means that the body of the patient is touched only minimally,
configured in a way commensurate with the informatic systems that sample, scan, and profile. To be fair, however, this overview is far from
being the whole of genomics and bioinformatics research. A number of so-called alternative approaches have been pursuing the distributed,
networked properties of gene expression, protein-protein interactions, cellular signaling, and metabolic pathways. This “systems biology”
also shows some overlap in spirit with research in biocomplexity at the Santa Fe Institute, for instance.65 Although the technologies and
methodologies are new, the basic idea is not: as Evelyn Fox Keller reminds us, the history of molecular biology and biochemistry already
pointed to the inherently “complex” and networked property of “life itself” at the molecular and genetic levels.66 Alternative approaches
merely remind us of what is implicit in the history of biological thought itself: relationality, flexibility, robustness, adaptation. Even the
“official” HGP cannot help but to acknowledge certain excessive elements in the genome: a relatively modest number of genes (some 3
percent of the genome), an extremely small difference between the genomes of one individual and another (approximately 0.1 percent), an
incredibly large number of “short tandem repeat” sequences, and entire “continents” that seem to have no known function at all (more than
50 percent of the total genome). In a sense, despite
the biotech industry’s efforts to manage the genome,
the genome itself (like “life itself”) appears to be nothing but excess
information, with all the contradictions that the phrase implies. Bataille proposes that
an organism always produces more than it needs and that, from a systemswide ecological
perspective, abundance, not scarcity, is the rule of life. With regard to fields such as
genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics, it is not difficult to begin to wonder whether
the human genome is a noneconomic relation between labor and capital,
between expenditure and accumulation.
The disease crisis rhetoric of the AFF is the perfection of the

project of securitization, a preservation of the body politic
against the threatening biological death they claim looms on the
horizon. Vaccines are the new weapons of the state of
emergency - entire populations are subjected to control and
surveillance in the name of the Good.
Thacker 05 (Eugene, Professor of Media Studies at the New School in New York City, with
research interests in pessimism, nihilism, continental philosophy, and antihumanism. “The Global
Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture”, Chapter 6: Bioinfowar: Biologically Enhancing National
Security, p 243-247, 2005) // IES
Within such a context, in what ways are the biopolitical concerns expressed by government
agencies (such as the BWC) over a “genetic bomb” themselves weapons, under the guise of “national
security”? A more cynical rephrasing of this question might suggest that we will never, in fact, see the kind of biological
weapons of which the BWC speaks. Instead, what we will see is the use of this rhetoric of crisis,
the political structure of the exception, and a biopolitical targeting of the
body to gain an unprecedented control over the nation’s population on the
medical and genetic levels. What might such a near future look like? I conclude this chapter
with three theses, followed by three scenarios. Three Theses Thesis One The discourse of biowar is one in
which war is biology, and biology is war. War is biology in the sense that the constitution
of the body politic is as much a concern of national security as the attack on the body
politic from outside forces. The militaristic function of eugenics is to be found here, but,
arguably, it is present in Plato’s Republic, which authorizes selective breeding for the ruling classes.93 But biology is
also war, and there is an equally long tradition of regarding the medical fight against
disease as a war carried out on the level of cells, germs, and microbes. In modern times,
anthropologists such as Emily Martin have analyzed modern immunology’s predilection for war
metaphors in describing the antibody-antigen response, a metaphor that, interestingly enough,
breaks down in the face of autoimmune diseases such as those caused by HIV.94 The questions that remain open is how to
do away with the hegemony of war metaphors in relation to biology and medicine, and whether alternative models—
symbiosis, autopoiesis, network science—can offer a way of doing this. Thesis Two In the twenty-first century, national
security is increasingly expressed as the implosion of emerging infectious disease and
bioterrorism. As noted several times in this chapter, a defining characteristic of the twenty- first-century response to
biowar has been the nondistinction in policy and legislation between naturally occurring and artificially occurring
instances of biowar. The
operative term in the plans for Project BioShield in the United States is or:
emerging infectious diseases or bioterrorism. It matters not which, for the
end results are seen to be the same: the infection and degeneration of the
body politic. Of course, from the perspective of their causes, they are very different: whereas emerging infectious
diseases ask us to consider our actions within a network of relations with the environment globally, bioterrorism
challenges us with a fundamentalist view of biology. Thesis Three The
integration of biotechnology and
informatics in national security concerns culminates in a more general, pervasive
biological security. The 2003 RAND report The Global Threat of New and Re-emerging Infectious Diseases
specifically notes how globalization has transformed both biological boundaries and national
boundaries, rendering them vulnerable in terms of infectious disease.95 This
transformation has prompted the authors to suggest a shift in policy outlook, from
national security to what they call “human security.” Whereas national security places its
emphasis on the national population, human security would place its emphasis on the
individual (but the individual as a participant in an ideal global citizenship). What
seems to be replacing national security in such examples is a form of
biological security, or a security so pervasive that there is no outside; it is
simply a
security against biology, against biological
“death itself” (the conceptual inverse of biological “life itself”). This biological
security is the use of biotechnology to defend against biology itself, in a kind of
surreal war against biology. Genetic screening, preemptive vaccination, new medical
countermeasures, Web sites posting disease alerts: the body is under attack on all fronts,
and in the confrontation of biology against biology we see the spectrum of responses, from antibiotics to
cosmetic surgery. These three points—the discourse of war and biology, the implosion of epidemic
and war, and the notion of biological security—can serve as conceptual tools for the
further analysis of biowar as it exists alongside governmental national security, the biotech and
pharmaceutical industries, and the presence of nonstate terrorist actors. It is thus not difficult to
imagine several possible scenarios—not doomsday scenarios, but rather scenarios involving an
increasing naturalization of the state of emergency that biowar elicits. Three
Scenarios SimSARS The popular SimCity games allow players to oversee, manage, and regulate a virtual city. Using
unique algorithms, the player sets certain parameters and then watches as the complex of events—urban development,
financial transactions, health, crime, education, and so forth—unfold before the player’s eyes. SimCity is predicated on the
idea of a complex system: multiple agencies, multiple factors, and multiple demands, all acting simultaneously over time
(a user can “speed up” time, in which a SimCity day equals a realtime second). The aim of SimCity is to know how to set
the best starting conditions for the growth of a city, and how and when to intervene in times of crisis (financial crisis,
natural disasters, rising crime rates, poverty in neighborhoods). Although the player is in the position of sovereign with
respect to the city (a
“God mode” allows a player to inflict natural disaster, thereby destroying the city), what SimCity
teaches, above all, is a mode of regulation, monitoring, and surveillance. In fact, formally, SimCity is
very much like the field of epidemiology, which involves the tracking of, monitoring of,
and intervening in the spread of a particular infectious disease. It is not difficult to
imagine a version of SimCity based on the control of an outbreak: SimSARS (SimAIDS would,
presumably, be too complex for most computers). The player acts as a “virus hunter,” or, better, as the
head of a team at the CDC attempting to handle a potential outbreak of anthrax or Ebola. In
the tradition of military-training simulations, such a game might be useful for training personnel at
agencies such as the CDC or WHO. But in its civilian use it would serve to normalize further the
heightened level of monitoring and regulation that the current “disease
surveillance networks” operated by U.S. government agencies already demonstrate. PGP-
DNA If DNA is a code, and if the encryption and decryption of codes are a key aspect of any military conflict, then it
follows that the most perfect combination of soldier, weapon, and secret message would be encryption using DNA—in the
living body. Most modern encryption systems involve three basic elements: a message text (or plaintext), a method of
encrypting the plaintext (cipher), and a means of decrypting the ciphertext (the key). Might it be possible to encrypt a
message into an actual DNA sequence? DNA, being both remarkably simple (a mere four base pairs) and admirably
complex (endless combinatorics), would serve as an ideal medium for encryption. With the basic tools of restriction
enzymes, plasmids, and gene therapy, this is not outside the realm of possibility. When the message exists in the living
body, an in vivo ciphertext, it will be indistinguishable from any other sequence of DNA in the body. A horrific scenario
comes to mind: the ideal suicide bomber is one who is not recognized as such, but who is carrying a lethal, highly
infectious virus during its incubation period. In the 2001 anthrax attacks, the message and weapon were delivered
together; here, the weapon and the message collapse into one. “Good” Virus In 2003, the infamous “Blaster” virus worked
its way through the Internet, infecting an estimated 400,000 operating systems running Microsoft Windows.96 During
the attack, an
attempt was made to construct a countermeasure, a “good” virus, which
would, like a computer virus, propagate itself through the Internet, but instead of bringing down
the computer, it would automatically download a “Blaster fix” from Microsoft’s Web site. Dubbed “Naachi” or “Welchia,”
this good virus itself ended up causing a fair amount of damage, affecting the systems of the Air
Canada offices and the U.S. Navy’s computer cluster. But the logic of Naachi is interesting: fight networks with
networks, viruses with viruses. In a sense, this may be the analogue to the development
of inoculation and vaccination in the nineteenth century. Or, perhaps, we have not yet seen the
biomedical equivalent of Naachi. But it is not difficult to imagine. During an outbreak of an infectious
disease, what would be the quickest, most efficient way to administer a vaccine or a
treatment? Hospitals are jammed, doctor’s offices overbooked with appointments, the
local drug store out of their supplies. A vaccine can be inserted into a “disabled” airborne
pathogen, thereby spreading its anecdote against the epidemic. This is, basically, the
logic behind gene therapy. Perhaps a “good” virus is in the making here, using the
networks of infection to spread a vaccine rather than a virus. A kind of invisible,
molecular war would take place in the very air we breathe. A decidedly yet
ambiguously nonhuman form of medicine under the aegis of national
security.
Humanism
The aff’s project to return to an ethical axiom of humanity will
always fail – humanity is based on the suppression of nature,
and it is a justification for domination against communities
deemed “animal”
Rowe 2017 (James, Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and
Cultural, Social, and Political Thought at the University of Victoria.
“Georges Bataille, Chögyam Trungpa, and Radical Transformation:
Theorizing the Political Value of Mindfulness.” The Arrow. Volume 4, Issue
2, published April. Accessed 7/13/17, EHL)
Bataille’s analysis of domination is rooted in his study of the body, and the terror and shame human animals can feel before it. e body is
Our bodies are our opening to life, but

unpredictable: It leaks, expels, hungers, fails, and ultimately dies.
also to death. And this inevitable death seems to suggest insignificance before the
putrefaction from which we come and will one day return. Humans, Bataille
writes in his masterwork the Accursed Share, “[appear] to be the only animal to be
ashamed of that nature whence he comes, and from which he

does not cease to have departed.”24 We feel primal shame, according to Bataille,
because the decay we are conscious of suggests servility and baseness.25 is
primary disdain for animal nature, and our dependence upon it, spurs fantastical
efforts to dominate our bodies, each other, and the more-than-
human-world in attempts to o set felt servility with felt dominance. For Bataille,
much of human history can be read as a permanent struggle against
animality.26 In e Accursed Share he observes that humanity “resembles those parvenus who are ashamed of their humble
origin. Thy rid themselves of anything suggesting it. What are the ‘noble’ and ‘good’ families,” he writes of upper class morality, “if not those
in which their wealthy birth is the most carefully concealed?”27 One of the crucial rationales for accumulating wealth, according to Bataille,
is that material riches help us distinguish ourselves not only from

animality, but also from those we take to be nature’s proxies in
our fantastical e orts to dominate the nature we fear. Proxies, in the
Euro-American context, have included Indigenous peoples, women, people of color,
and workers. ese proxies have been discursively linked to animal nature
and then materially controlled in efforts to provide compensatory hits of
dominion. For Bataille, “[i]t is not so much wealth... that distinguishes, that qualities socially, as it is the greatest distance from
animality.”28 We dominate our bodies and each other in efforts to surpass and
ultimately control our animality, our impermanence. is desire to “destroy

the animal nature within us,” he suggests, lurks behind many of our most vexing political and ecological
problems.29 In Bataille’s view, the pull of existential resentment is universal; it is a
human struggle.30 He is attuned, however, to the important mediating role played by culture. Individuals and cultures
relate to existential realities like impermanence in multiple ways. Tibetan Buddhism, for example, offers meditative practices for
befriending the reality of death. We are not destined to resentfully interpret death as domineering, or to flee from felt servility with fantasies
of mastery.
Knowledge
The status quo educational apparatus functions according to the
desire for utility and knowledge, or virtue economy. This
process creates a complete universalization of all bodies
according to a system of calculability. This process assumes that
knowledge itself must exist within the realm of the encodable,
the possible. Our argument is that this very desire for “utility” in
education destroys the possibility for knowledge to exist beyond
spatiality – into the realm of the unknown. We say that this form
of politics is cowardice in that it observes the shore of the ocean
but doesn’t dare to take the dive, thereby destroying the ability
to achieve the “extreme limit” of life itself. The impact to this is
the reduction of life to nothing but a cog in the western machine
of values and productivity.

virtues. Virtue epistemology has thus strayed a bit from its Aristotelian roots, where
But virtue
knowledge)—exhibits and relies upon certain characteristic
features of what I will call “classical


propositions.
pursuit.
be a knower, etc.)
utility specifically) and
the way that we undertake this process (through the delimitation of concepts)
useful:
dark view at its darkest: “Children of science that we are, we have based our cultural patterns on
varied sciences, manifests the sovereign unity of a subject, a spirit, or a period; it is the totality of relations that

knowledge:
For Bataille, the
(IE 169).
The Hegelian spirit, which for Bataille expressed the spirit of modernity, belongs therefore to a
Literacy
We the students are seen as pieces to be moved around the chess
board, the player the academy, our bodies pieces sacrificed
endless times for the sadistic joy of the system, locked into the
idea of a perfect game, we become reduced to a number to fill an
empty chair.
Scribner 84 SYLVIA SCRIBNERis professor of psychology at the Graduate School
and University Center of the City University of New York and was formerly associate
director of the National Institute of Education. She has studied the social organization
and cognitive implications of literacy in traditional societies and in work settings in the
United States and has a long-term interest in the continuities and discontinuities
between learning in school and in nonacademic environments. Her recent publications
include ThePsychologyofLiteracy(with Michael Cole), a special issue of the journal
CognitiveStudiesof Work,and chapters on practical thinking and working intelligence.
She is a member of the steering committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility
(New York) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
http://courseweb.ischool.illinois.edu/~katewill/fall2014-
502/scribner%201984%20literacy%20in%20three%20metaphors.pdf 11-13
While functional literacy stresses the importance of literacy to the adaptation of the
individual, the literacy-as-power metaphor emphasizes a relationship
between literacy and group or community advancement. Historically, literacy
has been a potent tool in maintaining the hegemony of elites and dominant
classes in certain societies, while laying the basis for increased social and political participation in others (Resnick
1983; Goody 1968). In a contemporary framework, expansion of literary skills is
often viewed as a means for poor and politically powerless groups to claim
their place in the world. The International Symposium for Literacy, meeting in Persepolis, Iran (Bataille
1976), appealed to national governments to consider literacy as an instrument for human liberation and social change.
Paulo Freire (1970) bases his influential theory of literacy education on the
need to make literacy a resource for fundamental social transformation.
Effective literacy education, in his view, crates a critical consciousness through which a community can
analyze its conditions of social existence and engage in effective action for a just society. Not to be literate is a
state of victimization. Yet the capacity of literacy to confer power or to be
the primary impetus for significant and lasting economic or social change
has proved problematic in developing countries. Studies (Gayter, Hall, Kidd, and Shivasrava
1979; United Nations Development Program 1976) of UNESCOe's experimental world literacy program have raised doubts
about earlier notions that higher literacy rates automatically promote national development and improve the social and
material conditions of the very poor. The relationship between social change and literacy education, it is now suggested
(Harman 1977), may be stronger in the other direction. When masses of people have been mobilized for fundamental
changes in social conditions-as in the USSR, China, Cuba, and Tanzania-rapid extensions of literacy have been
accomplished (Gayter et al. 1979; Hammiche 1976; Scribner 1982b). Movements to transform social reality appear to have
been effective in some parts of the world in bringing whole populations into participation in modern literacy activities.
The validity of the converse proposition-that literacy per se mobilizes people for action to change their social reality-
remains to be established. What does this mean for us?
The one undisputed fact about illiteracy
in America is its concentration among poor, black, elderly, and minority-
language groups -groups without effective participation in our coun-
try'seconomic and educational institutions (Hunter and Harman 19.79). Problems of poverty
and political powerlessness are, as among some populations in developing nations, inseparably intertwined with prob-
lems of access to knowledge and levels of literacy skills. Some (e.g., Kozol 1980) suggest that a mass and politicized
approach to literacy education such as that adopted by Cuba is demanded in these conditions. Others (e.g., Hunter and
Harman 1979) advocate a more action-oriented approach that views community mobilization around practical, social,
and political goals as a first step in creating the conditions for effective literacy instruction and for educational equity. The
possibilities and limits of the literacy-as-power metaphor within our present-day social and political structure are not at
all clear. To what extent can instructional experiences and programs be lifted out f their social contexts in other countries
and applied here? Do assumptions about the functionality and significance of literacy in poor communities in the United
States warrant further consideration? Reder and Green's (1984) research and educational work among West Coast
immigrant communities reveals that literacy has different meanings for members of different groups. How can these
cultural variations be taken into account? How are communities best mobilized for literacy- around local needs and small-
scale activism? or as part of broader political and social movements? If literacy has not emerged as a priority demand,
should government and private agencies undertake to mobilize communities around this goal? And can such efforts be
productive without the deep involvement of community leaders?
Natives
The zero-sum schooling paradigm creates the precondition for
describing the Other as fit only to be colonized and less human,
meaning that the affirmative’s model of education for natives
can never actually solve for this banking model of education.
Only the alternative can create new possibilities – our surplus
energy has the power to deterritorialize consumer-based
educational paradigms.
Rolling 14. James, Dual Professor of Art Education and Teaching and Leadership in
the College of Visual and Performing Arts and the School of Education at Syracuse
University. “Pedagogy of the Bereft: Theorizing an Economy of Profitless Exchange and
Social Development” | rpadhi
To be bereft is the condition of being deprived of an asset—either through underdevelopment, systemic neglect or depraved indifference. Society’s great
Schools do what they are intended to do—
educational crisis at the start of the 21st century is not about “failing schools.”
schools underdevelop moral courage, altruism, and creative social imagination in favor
of the development of exploitable citizens who are easy to categorize, easy to warehouse
or sort into cubicles, and easy to manage. This paper offers a brief philosophical examination into a vestigial model of schooling
that continues to prevail today, a “banking” model contested by Paulo Friere (1998) in his classic critique Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and which has long been a
In this educational model, knowledge is

scientifically managed enterprise, deeply rooted in the concept of zero-sum capitalism.
equated to wealth and power, the winners are viewed as having been naturally rewarded
for their superior work ethic and acquired skills or knowledge, and the rest of us are seen
either as losers, perpetually in need or decline, or as threats to the socioeconomic order
that must be controlled and contained; assets are not educed from learners at all but are
rather prepossessed and deposited in those who are willing to acquiesce. After even a cursory reading of
Adam Smith’s (1937) The Wealth of Nations, one realizes that any discussion of the trade of goods and services for profit and the accumulation of assets and
It is not difficult to
material surplus implies a wealth far more than monetary, and is intended to be indicative of social capital as well.
ascertain that the specialised roles which have evolved in the division of production and
labor in the marketplace are replicated in the roles of teachers and students, and yet
again in those roles taken on by those arbiters of the Western historical narrative who
defined themselves as civilized and ascribed Others as either unfit for survival or fit only
to be colonized. A banking concept of education that makes regular deposits into the
thinking of students is also expected to yield behaviors in those students, dividends that
ultimately profit the banker, expanding the wealth of those who have acquired the means
to produce it. This is a strictly zero-sum arrangement, wherein those that have fill the heads of those who have not. Drawing upon the postcolonial work
of Ashis Nandy (1983), the role of the banker is yet another manifestation of “a world view which
believes in the absolute superiority of the human over the nonhuman, the masculine over
the feminine, the adult over the child, the historical over the ahistorical, and the modern
or progressive over the traditional or the savage” (p. x). Historically, the territorialization of
Western acquisitions—in the form of colonial outposts, encyclopedias, museum collections and curiosity cabinets packed full of rare and
fantastical stuff—also took the form of schools, social spaces less for public education they were
purported to administer than for public indoctrination and annexation into a worldview
predicated upon the scarcity of precious resources and Western Europe’s prowess at
manufacturing and/or conquering and coopting those very same resources. A zero-sum model of
schooling will invariably ration out its deposits into the minds of students as stakeholders in the final products of the banking enterprise; even more subversively,
a zero-sum model of schooling will also actively take from its students, leaving them
seemingly bereft of the native assets that were once owned in surplus—whether their
language, or culture, or creative environs—and preparing those students to become
assets, exploitable within the prevailing power structures. For example: Believing that Anglo-
American culture [was superior]...and the only culture that would support republican
and democratic institutions, educators forbade the speaking of non-English languages,
particularly Spanish and Native American tongues, and forced students to learn an
Anglo-American-centered curriculum...Conquered Indians were exposed to educational
programs that emphasized patriotism and loyalty to the U.S. government. As tribal
governments fell, Indian schools raised the U.S. flag and forced students to pledge their
loyalty to the conquering nation...federal and state officials attempted to gain emulation
by using textbooks that reflected the dominant white culture of the United States and
that contained no reference to Hispanic or Indian cultures. (Spring, 2001, p. 169) But what if we are missing the
bigger picture entirely? What if, in spite of dire appearances, we are surrounded by a free flow of surplus assets that do not need to be deposited by those who view
themselves as laden with monetary, intellectual or social capital? And what if we are each so latent with convertible assets that it possible to cast off any oppressive
condition through self-actualizing means beyond those outlined by Freire—means emphasizing complex conversation and altruistic transmissions over dialogical
exchanges, common purpose over informed praxis, and the deterritorialization Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 5 of prior boundaries and limitations over
the mere awakening of local consciousness? What if we are blessed and our blessings are overflowing? The Gift Differed Inspired by the anthropological writings of
sociologist Marcel Mauss (1925/1954) presenting the concept of gift transmissions in archaic social interaction as an alternative to the primacy of commodity or
capitalist exchanges, French intellectual Georges Bataille first authored The Accursed Share in 1949, proposing a new meta-economic theory of consumption.
Bataille’s basic premise was that the natural social interaction between human beings
generates an excess of energy that must be expended and consumed one way or the
other—energy that is either converted into sumptuous interpersonal creative or sacred
transmissions that branch upward and serve no other purpose but to develop our
humanity like flowering plants, or otherwise wasted in the form of aggressive and
imperialistic plundering campaigns, pulverizing humanity to serve as topsoil. This surplus energy
is the accursed share, manifested in the human conundrum of whether to apply one’s excess energy toward the profitless exercise of helping one another be more
At our most altruistic, we give little bits

human, or to use one another for personal or private gain. What is it to be more human?
of ourselves away because such are the actions that hold us together; we form beautifully
crafted reflections of the world we’ve experienced; we inform new ideas emerging from
ongoing and complicated conversations; and we transform present conditions into future
questions and possibilities because such are the objects, expressions, and sacred
interventions that we grasp as handholds along the way. There is no personal profit to be
gained from such activity. This is the positive-sum solution to education, enlarging our
collective social wealth so that there is more to distribute at the end of interpersonal
exchanges than originally invested by all parties involved. The opposite to being more
human is to render others less than human. To do so is to willfully diminish others simply to satisfy one’s own needs and
commodity fetishes, or just to assuage one’s fears—either with deliberate intent to injure or injuring by dint of a pernicious insistence upon categorizing learners as
this is the zero-sum game that was introduced into modern educational
lesser constituted than oneself;
exercises under the guise of the scientific management of schooling. Zero-Sum Schooling Frederick
Winslow Taylor was known as the father of “scientific management,” a pioneer in introducing and melding modern concepts of industrial efficiency into the
enterprise of public education. Taylor was one of the first paid management consultants to big business in the United States, translating his careful scrutiny of
occupational practices in paper mills and the factory production of steel into a formula for zero-sum education at a time—between 1900 and 1910—when the
The improvement of U.S. child labor laws and

American public school system was in a state of a crisis (Rolling, 2013a).
compulsory education policies had combined with huge increases in the enrollment of
“non-English-speaking children from semiliterate families,” new immigrants to our
shores “predominantly from the poorest socioeconomic groups in southern and eastern
Europe” (Callahan, 1962, p. 14), such that “elementary classes of over one hundred children were
common” (Callahan, 1962, p. 17). Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 7 This was also an inflationary period in the nation’s economy with sharply
rising costs of living, a shortage of tax revenue to support public institutions, and U.S. citizens increasingly wary of inefficiency and waste. In a zero-sum approach
to education, either these students would need to be converted into assets, or it was feared they would ultimately disrupt and detract from the growing American
economic empire. Moreover, in 1909 the public had been introduced to a book by Leonard P. Ayres titled Laggards in Our Schools—a survey of deplorably
overcrowded, poorly managed school systems in 58 cities that failed to meet the standards of Ayres’s statistically concocted “Index of Efficiency.” Ayres had written
a scathing indictment of the production of what he defined as “retarded” children—over-aged learners repeating the same material in their grades over and over
again—and in doing so, he was “one of the first educators to picture the school as a factory” that required the application of the best business and industrial
practices (Callahan, 1962, p. 15). Hence, education reform crusaders were more than ready to embrace Taylor’s new system of scientific management almost as
soon as it was introduced to them. Taylor’s ideas about efficiency were first catapulted into the American consciousness after they were featured during a 1910
Capitol Hill hearing before the Interstate Commerce Commission attempting to resolve a legal wrangle between a railroad trade association, industry management,
and merchants. Proposed increases in freight rates threatened to damage bottom-line profits across the board. For some of the stakeholders, the priority was to
find a means of lowering costs; for others the priority was increasing wages for workers. At just the right moment, Taylor’s system was suddenly thrust into the
spotlight as a “magic” panacea with the potential to make Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 8 management in all sectors of industry—including the
management of schools—as efficient as possible, supposedly to the benefit of all stakeholders involved. First, Taylor mandated the replacement of diverse and rule-
of-thumb workplace methods with the single best, scientifically determined method for doing a task. Anything less than that system, as determined by
management, was considered a waste of time and money. Laborers who collaborated to create their own ad hoc methods in the field or on the work floor were
When this mandate was replicated in an educational context,

contributing to lessened productivity.
opportunities for learners to figure out problems without directives from their teachers
were severely curtailed, underdeveloping their surplus creative capacities. Second, Taylor’s system
also required the scientific selection, training, and development of each employee, rather than leaving employees to train themselves. Or, as Taylor once put it to a
mechanic who worked under him, common laborers were “not supposed to think” because “there are other people paid for thinking around here” (Callahan, 1962,
When
p. 28). Taylor argued that “one type of man is needed to plan ahead and an entirely different type to execute the work” (Callahan, 1962, p. 28).
adopted by schools, this approach led to what John D. Philbrick (1885) long ago
observed as the educational “imposition of tasks; if the pupil likes it, well; if not, the
obligation is the same” (p. 47). The assumption that the teacher, or manager, is solely
responsible for devising and planning activities and projects serves to underdevelop
creative capacity in students, the professional workforce, and throughout society. Those who
have been pillaged of the agency to give themselves away, will find themselves being taken from. Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 9 Third, Taylor’s
scientific management system required the provision of detailed instruction and supervision, ensuring that workers were applying all principles precisely as
instructed in their performance and completion of each assigned task—so much so that the stopwatch became emblematic of Taylor’s system, often likened to
As Taylor’s approach was applied in schools, the completion of

“management by measurement.”
homework assignments, sequenced workbooks, and timed tests became the order of the
school day. Think about it. Workbooks are essentially books of assignments and their
rules—conditioning tools in which the teacher introduces changes, notes effects, and
maintains full control over the design of the student. Workbooks are analogous to any
and all means of social regimentation. These “conditioning books” are used in order to
measure an individual’s gradual acquisition and application of instructional or
institutional content, but they also serve to underdevelop the possibility of human
sovereignty in the giving of unscripted resources. Fourth, Taylor insisted upon a strict division of labor between
management and workers so that managers carry the burden of “analyzing, planning, and controlling the whole manufacturing process,” and each worker carries
Management-focused schooling models— their

the burden of doing only what he or she is told to do (Callahan, 1962, p. 27).
primary mandate being the efficient conveyance of learners from one grade to the next—
also view the highest student achievers as those best conditioned to perform in accord
with standardized rules, regulations, and testing metrics. Meanwhile, in the cultivation of cadres of individual
achievers content to meet the prevailing standard and nothing more, “surplus mentalities” go underdeveloped. Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 10
Perhaps the greatest detriment regarding Taylor’s system was that while it made great sense toward increasing the production of manufactured goods in factory
when applied to schools it resulted in a focus upon increasing the production of

assembly lines,
graduating students ready to enter a managed workforce—while decreasing any

investment in the development of surplus creative energy amongst those students, and in
their opportunities for doing so. The fact that public schools by and large still operate
this way continues to waste the accursed share, casting it underfoot. A Pedagogy of Renewal When I was a
young student attending the High School of Art & Design in New York City, I sometimes chose to give my art away. It is important to note how out of character this
was for me. I am a methodical art maker; it takes a lot of time and to this day I am quite content if my work stays in my studio and surrounds me. I have rarely even
sold my art. For me to choose to give away something that I had toiled to craft or shape, it had to strike me that someone else needed it more than I did. I also
started writing poetry in high school for the sole reason of addressing it to friends of mine who were downcast. I knew what it felt like to suffer in silence as an
introverted and isolated teen, and when I saw someone else at risk of being swallowed in the same kind of emotional abyss I had barely escaped myself, I doubled
back through artistic portals with the hope that I could help reveal an escape route (Rolling, 2013b). As I reflect back, I realize that I was intentionally practicing art
as an altruistic exercise. Why? What response was I attempting to trigger in the receiver of my gifts? It is clear that at the time I sought little more than to state: “I
was once in your shoes; I Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 11 know a way to a better position; follow me.” I sought no personal profit from these
exchanges. Altruism is recognized as “a cultural behavior, well beyond instinctive behavior, and even beyond adaptive social behaviors with respect to evolutionary
But
processes” (Wilson, 1998, p. 29). It is a cultural behavior that does not appear at first “to contribute to the survival of the species” (Wilson, 1998, p. 29).
taking a second look, the smallest acts of altruism have a way of spreading, blooming like
creative contagions into huge social advantages—the stuff that cultures and economies
are made of. What kind of economy holds the power to offset a zero-sum system of economics and education that leaves so many so seemingly bereft
and others settled so deeply within the waste material of their own accumulations? When we take a second look at what we as individuals have to exchange, we also
see the contours of this other economy at work, an economy that is intuitive, primeval, and largely overlooked in the midst of contemporary free market
What if we have been overlooking an economy of non-commodity

machinations and rhetoric.
exchanges that are entirely creative and profitless in character, bestowed upon others as
gifts of invention, imagination, benevolence, or grace? And what if there was a kind of
social intelligence and mutual advantage that cannot be accumulated or commodified,
but can only be expended or re-distributed as a common energy source? What if we are all living
beneath our means, presuming for one another the prevailing paradigm of scarcity, underdevelopment and hostile takeovers only because we have lost our
overview of an equivalent yet contradictory paradigm—one of overwhelming surplus that lies beneath the surface of an ocean of humanity. Dry-docked and
barricaded within the territory of a zero-sum paradigm, the reason human beings hunt Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 12 other species to extinction is
because we no longer realize we have more than we need. Dry-docked and barricaded within the territory of a zero-sum paradigm, when industrial societies first
transitioned from cultivating for subsistence to cultivating for profit, we also abandoned our understanding of the importance of sacrifice and shared energy with
all organisms that live and renew the life of our planet’s ancient ecosystem. According to Deleuze and Gautarri (1987) the process of
deterritorialization offers a means of intervention toward addressing the limitations of a
zero-sum education paradigm. Deterritorialization is defined as the “movement by which something escapes or departs from a given
territory” (Patton, 2005, p. 70). This means that the deterritorializing force of our empathetic,
aesthetic, incarnated, and mediated transmissions of both the sublime and the sacred—
our surplus energies surrendered toward the growth and reproduction of our most
advantageous human achievements—are perhaps above all else, a means for generating
movement within and beyond the sinkhole of a market-driven economic and educational
worldview. The deterritorialization of the zero-sum model provides “another center
around which an alternative territory or contingent community can accumulate” (Richardson,
2010, p. 25). Namely, an alternative economy for education, one that produces more creative
energy than originally invested, enticing the development of the unexpected social
advantages rather than indoctrinating learners merely to increase the wealth of nations.
In conclusion, no one thinks to contain the ocean. It is illusory to think it possible. We can navigate it or
surf it; we escape it or escape to it; at the ocean’s edges, we can even divert some of it and channel it toward a common purpose. Our pollution of
the ocean is a result of our excesses converted to waste materials, in stark contrast to the
Pedagogy of the Bereft – J. H. Rolling, Jr. 13 surplus energy of the ocean, which could power our cities for thousands of years if we had a
real clue about how to interface with the power of its waves. The illusion of a zero- sum social and economic condition has masked a pedagogy of renewal roiling
just beneath the surface, a continuum of creativity and exaltation that is the natural result of all our social interactions. Logistically, it is not possible to throw over
a tarp that covers up all of this incredible ocean and its movements; the only veil is the one over our own eyes. Yet we see glimpses of its activity everyday. The
natural behavior of this ocean of surplus human social energy has the power to
deterritorialize the zero-sum schooling paradigm on its own if only enough of us were to
dive in and be renewed. There is no actual scarcity of this particular resource, only abundance. A pedagogy of the bereft—
that is, a pedagogy of renewal and adaptive creative transmissions—suggests a new
blueprint for public education, wherein instructional goals and policies are rewritten to
facilitate “learning by behaving together,” each one contributing his or her surplus
energies in order to benefit and build up the world we share. The great puzzle to closing
the achievement gap between the educational outcomes of those privileged to have and
those presumed to have not is solved by increasing the regular access of all students to
provocative positive-sum exchanges—transmissions of the best of ourselves in search of
no personal or corporate profit, but rather intended to entice similarly advantageous
behaviors in the lives of those with whom we have shared. What have we to exchange?
All that we are, and more. That has always been more than enough.
Nietzsche
Their conception of the Ubermensch terminally fails as a
revolutionary strategy and falls prey to reactionary attitudes.
Only a Bataillean conception of the death of God can account for
the crisis of late capitalism.
Pawlett 15 (William, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communication at
the University of Wolverhampton, “Georges Bataille: Sacred and Society”, Politics and Community, p 44-
45, January 30, 2015) // IES
The refusal to confront the lowly and ‘dirty’, to look away in disgust, is something that
most of us experience in our vigilant avoidance of the excrement and blood of other
beings. This is, also, Bataille notes, the attitude of the wealthy towards the poor: like dirt, the
poor are kept from view, all contact strictly controlled and limited to that which is
necessary for the poor to carry out tasks on behalf of the rich. The poor are tasked with managing
the excrement of the rich, sometimes literally. Bataille wrote in ‘The Solar Anus’: ‘Communist workers appear to the
bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption
in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 8, originally written
in 1927). A revolution, for Bataille, would involve the rich being sacrificed or excreted by
the poor – though once this ‘founding sacrifice’ had taken place, Bataille envisaged a
fully open community united in festivity. Gnosticism was an inspiration for Bataille’s rethinking of the
relationship between religion and society. It is also an important theme in Bataille engagement with politics
in that Gnosticism implies an active subversion of order, idealism and homogeneity.
Gnosticism affirms the power of the low, the monstrous or base. In pursuing the ‘base’
materialism he finds in Gnosticism, Bataille rejects the surrealism of many of his colleagues
and peers because its seeks a revolution above, beyond or over the real world. 1 For Bataille,
most revolutionary ideas: surrealism, Nietzscheanism, De Sade and his admirers, fail because
they denigrate the ‘real world’, the everyday, specifically the ways in which
the ‘real’ is a collision of the elevated and the low. Bataille devotes several papers to attacking
André Breton and the surrealist movement (see in particular Bataille, 1994, pp. 28–29), and he reserves particular scorn
for those who celebrate De Sade’s pornographic writings. Just as surrealists are accommodated within capitalist society by
being given a place as ‘carnival puppets’, so De Sade is accommodated by avant-garde literary circles – on the condition
that his ideas are reduced to literature (Bataille, 1985, pp. 92–93). The
surrealists and the Sadeans are
relatively easily assimilated within capitalist society; they provide thrills and spectacles
but do not, or are not allowed to, challenge the foundations of society. Bataille
also directs some harsh words at Nietzsche as another failed revolutionary. He criticises
Nietzsche’s notion of the surhomme ( superman or Overman ) for the same
glorification of values above, beyond and over; and the supposed surpassing of good
and evil, the going above good and evil, is lambasted as ‘reactionary and romantic’.
Nietzsche had made the error of wanting to ‘assert the human splendour of people who
really had exercised domination’, a mistake which borders on the ‘imbecilic’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 38). Bataille’s
understanding of Nietzsche’s notion of the death of God draws out something of the singular relationship between the two
thinkers: ‘Nietzscherevealed this primordial fact: once God had been killed by the
bourgeoisie, the immediate result would be catastrophic confusion, emptiness, and even
a sinister impoverishment’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 38). For Bataille, the death of God, in this sense,
is a political event, a dimension of the profane world rather than of the sacred world. The
bourgeoisie have killed the God of theology by creating a new God – Money or Capital,
channelling spiritual yearning into desires for consumer goods and lifestyles. God is
dead in that he is replaced, rather than being periodically brought to life in
the sacred world through sacrifice. Bataille’s version of the ‘death of god’ differs
substantially from Nietzsche’s (this is discussed in Chapter 6) .
Where Nietzsche hopes for a superman that might create the

possibility of willful laughter, Bataille relies on laughter as an
unintentional reflect that bursts forth innocently to illuminate
the divine summit of finite existence.
Wright 17. Drew, English Professor at Georgia State University. “The Impossible
Thought off Georges Bataille: A Consciousness that Laughs and Cries” | rpadhi
Here Bataille diverges from Nietzsche, the latter having nourished a hope for a
(superhuman) future that would hold the possibility of a willed laughter. Bataille realizes
that laughter is nothing if not a kind of inexplicable, indomitable reflex, and, in contrast
to Nietzsche, that it can never be anything other than something entirely insubordinate
to the reflective deliberations of self-conscious intention. The event-repetition of coming loss,
laughter can only ever be a liquidation of the practical will and its products. The paradox of laughter is that it
is this involuntary loss—this effusive emission of loss discharged without our self-
conscious consent or deliberation—that, at least in Bataille’s strange universe, is our
freedom. Only in blithely shattering self-conscious will, diffusing its ethico-intellectual scruples along with the
heaviness of the world, do we experience (or approach) autonomy: “Only an insistence on the leap, and a nimble lightness
(the essence of autonomy and freedom), give laughter its limitless dominion” (ON 66).
Only in bursting forth
“innocently,” without pretext or motivation, indifferent to the future and to the fantasy of
coherence and stability it hawks, does laughter illuminate, in an incandescent instant,
the “divine” summit of finite existence, a momentary breach into “the beyond of the specific existence that
we are,” a beyond which is, however, wholly incompatible with the axis of transcendence: “Autonomy . . . , inaccessible in a
finished state, completes itself as we renounce ourselves to that state . . . which is to say in the abolition of someone who
wills it for himself. It cannot therefore be a state, but a moment (a moment of infinite laughter, or of ecstasy . . .)” (ON 55;
G 127, original emphases).
Politics
The affirmative’s investment in the political as a site of change is
a fleeing from the flux of life towards the safety and security of
ordered governmentality. The very idea of laws is self-defeating,
as taboos only exist to become transgressed. They have
attempted to resurrect the dead figure of God within the
structure of the State, which only leads to more effective forms
of ossification and destruction of value to life. Instead, every
manifestation of God must be sacrificed again and again. We
shall erect no new idols!
the University of Wolverhampton, “Georges Bataille: Sacred and Society”, Politics and Community, p 56-
58, January 30, 2015) // IES
Many of the Acéphale articles were devoted to exploring Nietzsche’s philosophy. Bataille insists
that Nietzsche’s thought is sovereign, in the sense of heterogeneous sovereignty: it cannot be ‘enslaved’
or assimilated without violent reductiveness. Nietzsche’s concern was the totality of human existence. He
explicitly rejected all notions of following a leader or sage, a nation or fatherland. Nietzsche
himself stated that he wanted no disciples, and: ‘I erect no new idols’ (Nietzsche, 1992, p. 3). Bataille
was inspired by Nietzsche to look to the future, not to some pagan or pre-Christian past. Bataille vilifies
socialists for their naïve faith in rational management of society and fascists for their
fantasies of a pure, pagan prehistory: ‘those freed from the past are chained to reason;
those who do not enslave reason are the slaves of the past’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 193). In this new engagement
with Nietzsche, Bataille seems to equate all political positions with servility and domesticity.
Politics itself is restrictive: ‘Life’s movement can only be merged with the limited
movements of political formations in clearly defined conditions; in other conditions, it
goes far beyond them, precisely into the region to which Nietzsche’s attention was drawn’ (‘Nietzsche and the Fascists’, in
Bataille, 1985, p. 193). To a world understood in narrowly political terms, Bataille opposes the figure of the labyrinth – a place of many
possibilities, of destiny and tragedy, a horizontal and immanent space drawn on the surface of the globe. Bataille
makes clear
his hostility to all vertical erections, monuments and ‘great unitary constructions’ such as
the nation, the state and the church. These institutions enforce servility. It is
no longer ‘political’ revolution but ‘religious upheaval that will push life’s movement beyond
servility’ (p. 198). A position on the nature of society and civilisation becomes apparent: ‘The only society full of life
and force, the only free society, is the bi or polycephalic society that gives the
fundamental antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet, but one limited to the
richest forms’ (p. 199). Such a society would allow humans to be acephalic, to exist beyond
reason, knowledge and duration – at least on specifi ed ritual occasions where taboos would be
violated, hence such a society would enforce limits. Bataille also develops a new, more nuanced, position on war in these writings.
After declaring: ‘What we are starting is a War’ and ‘I myself am War’ – highly ambiguous statements – Bataille moved to a position that
clearly condemned war. In its modern form, war is a strategy for maintaining the illusory
permanence of nation states, a method of violently resisting time in which states ‘try to
deny death by reducing it to a component of a glory without dread’ (p. 200). War attempts to conquer
the dread of death and the inevitability of loss by claiming a greater purpose for the violence inherent in life. Yet, for Bataille, death
(personal mortality) should be confronted, embraced, meditated upon in what he called the
practice of joy before death – not directed against external enemies. Maurice Blanchot, writing on
Bataille’s notion of community, quotes Bataille: ‘It is necessary for communal life to maintain itself at the height of death ’ (Bataille, cited in
Blanchot, 1988, p. 11). The influence of Hegel on Bataille is unmistakable in this statement, a
community must embrace
the negative, its own suffering, its death and its rebirth. Another major theme of Acéphale is Bataille’s
rethinking of Nietzsche’s notion of the death of God: ‘The
acephalic man mythologically expresses
sovereignty committed to destruction and the death of God’. What precisely does Bataille mean by the
death of God? He elaborates as follows: The search for god, for the absence of movement, for
tranquillity, is the fear that has scuttled all attempts at a universal community . . . peace
is produced only if God allows himself to be locked up in the isolation and profoundly
immobile permanence of a group’s military existence . . . Universal existence, eternally unfinished and
acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating and destroying particular finite beings: it is in this sense that true universality is
the death of God. (Bataille, 1985, p. 201) So it is not simply that notions of God or the divine get in the way of or prevent a universal
community (John Lennon’s position in ‘Imagine’), but that the divine or ‘God’ has become servile and
enchained by reason or homogeneity. Gods should expend; they should bleed;
they should give of themselves and, in return, receive sacrifices.
Monumentalised forms of ‘God’ should be toppled; they should be killed or,
perhaps, joined with death in sacrifice and in sacrifice the sacred comes to
life. This is ‘the sacrifice that founds the community by undoing it’ (Blanchot, 1988, p. 15). Here
myth, the sacred and sacrifice are not forms of violence directed against the ‘other’; they
are forms of violence which the community directs at itself, not bolstering itself against
others but acknowledging its own nothingness. This is a quite specifi c sense of the death of God, then, not one
which replicates Nietzsche but which shifts the ground. In a sense Bataille offers a far more ‘social’ and collective
sense to this notion. God become monument, become authority, become
barrier, become ‘head’ must be killed – God that has been confined,
rationalised and made to serve the state. Indeed, for Bataille, civilisation itself – stabilised
society – is life in stagnation, decomposition and crisis. The ‘living community little by
little loses its tragic appearance – both puerile and terrible – which reached each being
in his most secretly lacerated wound; it loses the power of provoking the total religious emotion that grows to the point
of ecstatic drunkenness, when existence is avidly opened before it’ (Bataille, 1985, pp. 202–203). There is, for Bataille, another sense of the
divine: not the God of the Greek philosophers but the ‘christ of the erotic saints’, not the God of a state or territory but a divine that emerges
in the shared loss of both the human and of God. In mutual loss or sacrificial expenditure is the deepest or
most intimate communication and the possibility for an ‘impossible’ community; this theme is
explored further in Chapter 6 . Civilisation is a weakening of communal passions – passionate bonds
as well as passionate antagonisms – and as these passions weaken ‘it becomes necessary
to use constraint and to develop the alliances, contracts, and falsifications that are called
politics’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 203). Bataille’s concern is what might be called the pre-political, pre-foundational conditions of human life,
which can also become a new post-historical community. We have seen already that this pre-foundational condition is, for Bataille, quite
real, or rather material – it is not imaginary, not a structure of the unconscious. Indeed, Bataille devotes several works to trying to
understanding the pre-foundational, prehistoric life of humans, as Chapter 1 on animality indicated.
Policy simulation
The affirmatives act of reading a plan is one that attempts to
define and develop an identity centered around the law through
an act of civic engagement defined by liberalism. This
engagement is one that furthers necro politics and exonerates it
by making the law “better” while masking violence
The aff’s investment in legal reform is an venture into the
economy of the post colony in this economy lawfare is
responsible for reducing people to nothing but bare life and has
mutated into a vacuum of life establishing a large body count in
the postcolonial society
Comaroff and Comaroff, 07, (John Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies
and of Anthropology; Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology, “Law and
disorder in the postcolony,” pg. 31, 2007)//Cummings
Lawfare can be limited or it can reduce people to “bare life”; in some postcolonies it has ,
mutated into a deadly necropolitics with a rising body count see chapter 9). But it always (
seeks to launder brute power in a wash of legitimacy Sometimes it is put to work as

, ethics, propriety. ,
it was in many colonial contexts to make new sorts of human subjects sometimes it is the
, ;
vehicle by which oligarchs seize the sinews of state to further their economic ends ;
sometimes it is a weapon of the weak turning authority back on itself by commissioning

,
the sanction of the court to make claims for resources 89 But ultimately it
, recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty. ,
is neither the weak nor the meek nor the marginal who predominate in such things It is .
those equipped to play most potently inside the dialectic of law and disorder This to close . ,
a circle opened in the preface returns us to Derrida and Benjamin to the notion that
, , Agamben, :
the law originates in violence and lives by violent means the notion in other words that , , ,
the legal and the lethal animate and inhabit one another Whatever the truth of the .
matter politics at large and the politics of coercion in particular appear ever more to be
, , ,
turning into lawfare But this still does not lay to rest the questions that lurk beneath our
.
narrative why the fetishism of legalities? What are its implications

, although it does gesture toward some answers: Again,
for the play of law and dis/order in the postcolony? And what , if anything, makes postcolonies different in this respect from other nation-
states?
Politics is inherently restrictive. Their desire to form a political

community is one that denies the inherent flux of life and
remains indebted to a regime of violence that is the root cause of
all forms of violence in the world.
Pawlett 16 (William, senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton. “Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society.”)
In this new engagement with Nietzsche, Bataille seems to equate all political positions with servility and domesticity.
Politics itself is restrictive: ‘Life’s movement can only be merged with the limited movements of
political formations in clearly defined conditions; in other conditions, it goes far beyond them, precisely into
the region to which Nietzsche’s attention was drawn’ (‘Nietzsche and the Fascists’, in Bataille, 1985, p. 193). To a
world understood in narrowly political terms, Bataille opposes the figure of
the labyrinth – a place of many possibilities, of destiny and tragedy, a
horizontal and immanent space drawn on the surface of the globe. Bataille makes
clear his hostility to all
vertical erections, monuments and ‘great unitary constructions’ such as the nation,
the state and the church. These institutions enforce servility. It is no longer ‘political’
revolution but ‘religious upheaval that will push life’s movement beyond servility’ (p. 198).
A position on the nature of society and civilisation becomes apparent: ‘The only society full of life and
force, the only free society, is the bi or polycephalic society that gives the fundamental
antagonisms of life a constant explosive outlet, but one limited to the richest
forms’ (p. 199). Such a society would allow humans to be acephalic, to exist
beyond reason, knowledge and duration – at least on specified ritual
occasions where taboos would be violated, hence such a society would enforce limits. Bataille also
develops a new, more nuanced, position on war in these writings. After declaring: ‘What we are starting is a War’ and ‘I
myself am War’ – highly ambiguous statements – Bataille moved to a position that clearly condemned
war. In its modern form, war is a strategy for maintaining the illusory
permanence of nation states, a method of violently resisting time in which
states ‘try to deny death by reducing it to a component of a glory without
dread’ (p. 200). War attempts to conquer the dread of death and the
inevitability of loss by claiming a greater purpose for the violence inherent
in life. Yet, for Bataille, death (personal mortality) should be confronted, embraced,
meditated upon in what he called the practice of joy before death – not
directed against external enemies. Maurice Blanchot, writing on Bataille’s notion of community,
quotes Bataille: ‘It is necessary for communal life to maintain itself at the height of death’
(Bataille, cited in Blanchot, 1988, p. 11). The influence of Hegel on Bataille is unmistakable in this statement, a
community must embrace the negative, its own suffering, its death and its
rebirth. Another major theme of Acéphale is Bataille’s rethinking of Nietzsche’s notion of the death of God: ‘The
acephalic man mythologically expresses sovereignty committed to destruction and the
death of God’. What precisely does Bataille mean by the death of God? He elaborates as follows: The search
for god, for the absence of movement, for tranquillity, is the fear that has
scuttled all attempts at a universal community . . . peace is produced only if God
allows himself to be locked up in the isolation and profoundly immobile
permanence of a group’s military existence . . . Universal existence, eternally
unfinished and acephalic, a world like a bleeding wound, endlessly creating
and destroying particular finite beings: it is in this sense that true universality is the death of
God. (Bataille, 1985, p. 201) So it is not simply that notions of God or the divine get in the way of or prevent a universal
community (John Lennon’s position in ‘Imag- ine’), but that the divine or ‘God’
has become servile and
enchained by reason or homogeneity. Gods should expend; they should bleed; they should
give of themselves and, in return, receive sacrifices. Monumental- ised forms of ‘God’ should be
toppled; they should be killed or, perhaps, joined with death in sacrifice and in sacrifice the sacred comes to life. This is
‘the sacrifice that founds the community by undoing it’ (Blan- chot, 1988, p. 15). Here myth, the
sacred and
sacrifice are not forms of violence directed against the ‘other’; they are forms of violence
which the community directs at itself, not bolstering itself against others but
acknowledging its own nothingness. This is a quite specific sense of the death of God, then, not one which
replicates Nietzsche but which shifts the ground. In a sense Bataille offers a far more ‘social’ and collective sense to this
notion. God become monument, become authority, become barrier, become ‘head’ must be
killed – God that has been confined, rationalised and made to serve the state. Indeed, for
Bataille, civilisation itself – stabilised society – is life in stagnation,
decomposition and crisis. The ‘living community little by little loses its tragic appearance – both puerile
and terrible – which reached each being in his most secretly lacerated wound; it loses the power of provoking the total
religious emotion that grows to the point of ecstatic drunkenness, when existence is avidly opened before it’ (Bataille,
1985, pp. 202–203). There is, for Bataille, another sense of the divine: not the God of the Greek philosophers but the
‘christ of the erotic saints’, not the God of a state or territory but a divine that emerges in the shared loss of both the
human and of God. In mutual loss or sacrificial expenditure is the deepest or most intimate communication and the
possibility for an ‘impossible’ community; this theme is explored further in Chapter 6. Civilisation is a
weakening of communal passions – passionate bonds as well as passionate
antagonisms – and as these passions weaken ‘it becomes necessary to use
constraint and to develop the alliances, contracts, and falsifications that are
called politics’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 203). Bataille’s concern is what might be called the pre-political, pre-
foundational conditions of human life, which can also become a new post-historical community. We have seen already
that this pre-foundational condition is, for Bataille, quite real, or rather material – it is not imaginary, not a structure of
the unconscious. Indeed, Bataille devotes several works to trying to understanding the pre-foundational, prehistoric life of
humans, as Chapter 1 on animality indicated. COMMUNITY AND SOCIAL POWER Bataille
contrasts
community as a structure which aims at securing its permanence, denying or disavowing
death, with community in a more vital sense meaning a coming together of human
beings in an immediate awareness of mortality and of their radical ‘insufficiency’. It seems
that any established community – before it grows into an entity that could be
called a culture, society or nation – is founded in death, in a painful
awareness of mortality. Yet, gradually, through the erection of monuments
and other barricades against time, as well as against the surrounding
spaces, a ‘community’ comes to imagine itself as necessary and permanent.
Such a community becomes hierarchical; it is ruled by a head. Just as all of its
members are ruled, they must also rule themselves, must learn to negate their passions
and use their head. All community is rooted in death – always touches death –
but as communities become monocephalic, their relationship to death
becomes one of negation rather than affirmation. Egyptian society under the pharaohs or
god-kings is the archetype of this process. Of the great pyramids dotted along the Nile, Bataille writes, ‘no enterprise cost
a greater amount of labour than this one, which wanted to halt the flow of time . . . they transcend the intolerable void that
time opens under men’s feet, for all possible movement is halted in their geometric surfaces. IT SEEMS THAT THEY
MAINTAIN WHAT ESCAPES FROM THE DYING MAN’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 216, emphasis in original). Only
as
community organises itself through a head, through authority and through
military sovereignty and repression, does it become de-vitalised and
stagnant: its repressive measures extend, becoming increasingly insidious
and sophisticated as it can no longer immediately inspire, impassion or enchant its members. We might accept that this
is loosely the case, or is at least a plausible general narrative, but it raises important questions. First, was there ever a
community that did not depend upon a repressive authority structure? Relatedly, was there ever, and could there
ever be, a community that genuinely impassions its members? Bataille’s answer – at least at
the time of Acéphale – is an unequivocal yes to both of these questions. The ‘pre-foundations’ of
Christianity, powerfully visualised in Van der Weyden’s Deposition of Christ (1435) as consisting of a distraught Mary
Magdalene, with Peter, Joseph of Arimathea and a few others removing a corpse from a cross; the ‘pre-
foundations’ of Buddhism (Siddhartha’s abandonment of a life of comfort and pleasure
to confront suffering); the springing of Dionysus from the dying womb of Semele, murdered by Zeus:
all of these seem to fulfill Bataille’s notion of the vital community of death, a
sense of community so forceful that it provokes the ecstatic frenzy of its
followers yet still cannot endure, lapsing into memorialised ‘culture’ with
the passage of time (Bataille, 1985, pp. 205–206). In making the distinction between a vital,
‘impossible’ community and the devitalised vestiges of such a community
securing itself through ideological and military structures, Bataille develops
important sets of relations: between the fullness or totality of being, and the
fragmented or mutilated state of individual existence; between the active
accumulation of knowledge and its suspension in ecstatic ‘non-knowledge’;
between an ‘external’ perspective examining life in terms of substance and
objects, and an internal or ‘inner experience’ in which substances and
objects are felt to ‘dissolve’, where the energies, forces and flows that are
obscured by objects are felt with irresistible intensity. These sets of relations are vital for
an understanding of Bataille’s notion of community, and also for his writings on mysticism and inner experience; they also
form the basis from which Bataille develops his more systematic notions of general and restricted economy in The
Accursed Share. Bataille’s position on the possibility of community springs from his passionate anti-individualism, clearly
marked in his earliest writings and developed throughout his career. Modern life, with its specialised
functions and instrumentalism, robs humans of much of their fullness of
being; the modern notion of the individual is a ‘degraded particle lacking
reality’. Life is reduced to a function: the doctor, priest, teacher, cleaner, or most
mutilated of all, the business leader. The incumbent of each of these roles must
absorb the specialised knowledge of their function. Knowledge itself is
mutilated in this process, the general or overarching perspective is lost and
our relations to other people shrink to the functional level . We become
increasingly contemptuous of those who occupy roles other than our own, in
fact, Bataille suggests, it seems as if others, especially those ‘lower’ on the scale of functions,
lack being and seem to be mere phantoms. Yet, it is not simply that modernity values instrumental or
restricted knowledge over some sense of ‘true’ or authentic knowledge. Knowledge itself is a restriction
of experience: it alienates the subject from action and experience, whether this
experience is political, erotic, religious or creative, or all of these simultaneously. The
modern restriction of being to sets of functions and uses is not at all accidental, nor is
it only a by-product of capitalist accumulation: it is part of a fundamental ‘flight’ from being,
from the terror of finitude and insufficiency. Indeed, for Bataille, ‘At the basis of
human life there exists a principle of insufficiency . . . a limitless insufficiency’ (Bataille, 1985,
p. 172). Everything human reveals this insufficiency: the genitals declare mortality and the
need to reproduce; the mouth and the anus are evidence of the circulation of energy and
the inevitability of waste and discharge; the skin craves the touch of other bodies.
Language too testifies that being can never be autonomous, that there is only
‘being-in-relation’ (p. 174). Being is not merely complex, it is labyrinthine – it
must wander, and it will lose its way. Bataille’s passionate anti-individualism has led a number of
commentators to term Bataille an anti-humanist (Land, 1992; Noys, 2000). This is the case if we take a restricted view of
the human, or if we consider the ‘human’ to be a product of restriction and degradation. However, Bataille – particularly
in later works, but also in the 1930s – seems to regard the human, at its limits, to be a magnificent, beautiful, even ‘divine’
creature. This was Bataille’s attitude to the Chinese torture victim, to Christ on the cross abandoned both by his followers
and by God, and to the emergence of Homo sapiens from animality. Human
beings are capable of
moving through or beyond the limits imposed by civili-sation. This happens
through the sacred, through art and literature, and through crime and
transgression. Human communities and relations can transcend the level of ‘degraded particles’, and this
transcendence can endure, at least for a short time: ‘The exchange between two human par-ticles in fact possesses the
faculty of surviving momentary separation’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 174). This assertion prefigures Bataille’s development of a
general economic thinking on eroticism in the 1940s and 1950s: ‘Men committed to political struggles will never be able to
yield to the truth of eroticism’ (1991, p. 191). CONCLUSION What
looks like politics, and imagines
itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.
(Kierkegaard, quoted by Bataille, 1985, p. 178) Bataille gave no allegiance to any political party or ideology. Instead he
formed many short-lived groups for the discussion of ideas; none of these hardened into an organisation. Bataille’s
commitment to the revolutionary idea of the sacred as revolt and overthrowing of both existing society and existing
religion made it impossible for him to be integrated within any Marxist or communist organisation, yet he remained close,
indeed ‘intimate’ with one of the fundamental aspirations of communism: the breaking down of individualism and the
acknowledgement of the deep and ‘universal’ commonality of all humanity. Bataille’s publications on politics ridicule
ethical and moral thinking as the props and alibis of liberal capitalist exploitation, stating that all thought that does not
immediately challenge capitalism has a ‘demeanour of senile trickery and comical smugness’ (Bataille, 1985, p. 32).
Mainstream political debate and ethical discussion is ruled by such trickery and
smugness to this day. There has been absolutely no rejuvenation of political
thought since Bataille’s day, indeed if the dominant liberal traditions were
senile in Bataille’s age, they are zombiefied today, preserved in a media
void, neither dead nor alive and leaving the majority utterly indifferent. Yet,
Bataille’s position was an optimistic one: the ‘uprising of the lower classes’ promised a new society beyond bourgeois
liberal capitalism. The agitation of the lower classes is analogous to the left pole of the sacred: they must bring down the
elevated and powerful in order to rejuvenate the whole. Bataille finds in Nietzsche powerful support for his growing dis-
trust of political organisation and action. For Bataille, politics (in the accepted or restricted sense) is
always
tied to temporality, to objects and goals: it reflects on the past, finds it
deficient and seeks improvements for the future. This is what enslaves
politics to time or duration, just as it enslaves human beings to a condition
of working for and anticipating ends and goals, and the elusive search for
happiness. The present moment is denied or suppressed. Being is thus
fragmented by role, career, position, place, time. For Bataille, the present – an
eternal moment of infinite freedom, must not be denied. Given this constitu-
tive fragmentation, politics, in the conventional sense, can only fail. It must
fail because, in a sense, it is designed to fail, just as ethics always fails – neither really help the
lowly or excluded. They fail because their purpose is to defuse the incendiary
nature of being, to deny the scream of life, to prescribe a slow, torturous
neutralisation of life mortgaged against the future. The future always
belongs to those with power; it is the now which must be seized. Bataille’s
‘politics’ is a politics of community, of an ‘impossible’ community. Though
Bataille rejects parliamentary democracy and its political systems, parties
and organisations as barriers to freedom, along with all utopian attempts to
reform or ameliorate the existing system, it does not follow that his thought
is apolitical as some have charged. Bataille’s revolutionary thinking on the
political envisages a different world, a fundamentally altered society, and an
altered or ‘other’ communism (Bataille, in Mitchell & Winfree, 2009, p. 205). Far from giving up on these hopes, Bataille
turned to mysticism and to eroticism to
deepen this search for revolutionary
transformation. Mysticism and eroticism do indeed open new worlds, worlds radically
other than that of productive, servile labour and the demands of capitalist accumulation.
Positivism
To take an empirical or positivistic view of the radical
singularities we encounter is an attempt to bring stability to
becoming that robs them of their value
Massumi 17 (Brian, social theorist, writer, philosopher, and professor in the Communications
Department at the University of Montreal, chapter 14 of “General Ecology: The New Ecological
Paradigm”, by Eric Hörl, titled “Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value”. P 349-350. May 4, 2017) //
IES
Ruyer’s second point about color and value concerns a notion that has quietly slipped into this discussion along the way:
the circumstances. According to Ruyer, the
circumstances of an actualization, the conditions calling
for a potential’s appearing, are not sufficient to explain the quality that appears.18
You can describe what conditions are necessary for the appearance of red until you’re blue in the face, and you will still not
be able to convey to a color-blind person what red is, such as it is, in contradistinction to orange, yellow, and green. The
bodily conditions of a color-blind person’s vision do not “want” any red. They “some” the color spectrum otherwise. Red’s
power of appearing abides them. Colors are akin to pornography: you only know one when you see it. Qualities
of
experience are subjective, but not in the sense of belonging only to a subject or occurring
in a mind. They are subjective in the sense that they have a character. They are their
character. There is nothing to explain about “what” they are other than that character,
such as it is. Their appearance tells all. There is nothing “behind” the qualitative
character exhibited in their appearance that would explain what they are any better than
the appearing of the character explains itself. In fact, explanations of what lies
behind the appearance are more apt to lose the quality than present it
better. A complete account of the physical and physiological conditions behind the
appearance of red includes many things—red excluded. This is for the simple reason, as Whitehead observes,
stating the obvious, that the wavelengths of light around which the physical side of the explanation centers have no color
in and of themselves.19 The same could be said of the physiological side of the equation: electrical nerve impulses are no
more colorful than photon streams. This last point is crucial, because it extends the argument to all qualities of experience.
Every quality of experience self-explanatorily exceeds its empirical conditions. This
means that a scientific explanation, although true as far as it goes, does not fully account
for the occasion. An empirical explanation is a reductive abstraction that focuses on only
certain of the elements involved (those capable of being quantified with the regularity of
a law). Empirical explanation selects for how the occasion is quantitatively. The “how” of
empirical explanation is a selective focus on a lawfully select “some” of the factors
involved, arrived at precisely by subtracting the defining character of the occasion from
it: the scientific explanation of the red of the sunset begins by bracketing redness, the qualitativeness of red. It takes red’s
qualitative nature for selfexplanatory—which it is. But what it forgets is Whitehead’s fundamental point that the
occasion as explained by that defining character is more concrete than the scientific fact
extracted (abstracted) from it.20 Who would even think of explaining red scientifically if they had never seen
it? The empirical explanation “hows” itself into an acquired color-blindness. When it sees red, it just sees red, such as
it is—and proceeds to explain away that experiential fact with an abstractive explanation
of how it came to be. The implications of this for neuropsychology, and its humanities cousins like neuroaesthetics,
are grave. Also grave are the consequences for historical analysis, to the extent that it
fashions itself an empirical enterprise, for example employing a linear cause-effect
framework for “how” things came about modeled directly or indirectly on scientific
notions of causality. History has to acknowledge that subjective and the qualitative are
always wanting, and that the concrete facts of history exhibit a qualitative form of self-
explanation. Any explanation bracketing this qualitative reality is deadeningly
incomplete, because to explain away the qualitative factors of experience is to explain
away potential. The fact that a quality of experience appears under certain requisite
conditions in no way detracts from its being such as it, positively all of its subjective
itself. The myriad circumstantial factors of an occasion come together in such as way as
to call to, and call forth, a defining qualitative character. But they do not make the
quality. When red appears here, it will always already have appeared elsewhere, at another
moment of time, and will no doubt appear elsewhen in another place. In its abiding
power of appearing, red is ubiquitously unmade. It is always-already (in potential). It does
not emerge from its conditions. It appears for them, when called. It fills their want with
its self-explaining. In fact, its self-explaining is in a sense more concretely explanatory of
the circumstances than they are of it: the red of the sunset makes apparent what this occasion is all about.
The character red characterizes the complete occasion.
Productivity
Education and white capitalism isolates unproductive subjects
and inoculates them with “useful” knowledge that only serves to
strip students of their autonomy – the logic of waste, of
expenditure, is a dialectic indictment of whiteness and pre-
determination
McLaren, Leonardo, and Allen 2000 (Peter, Zeus, Ricky Lee, McLaren is a
Distinguished Professor in Critical Studies in the College of Educational Studies at
Chapman University. Leonardo is a professor with a Ph.D. in Education and B.A. in
English from UCLA.Allen is a professor in the Education Department at the University of
New Mexico. “Multicultural Curriculum: New Directions for Social Theory,” Practice and
Policy, pg 120-121, accessed 7/10/17, EHL)
THEORY of EXPENDITURE: Transforming labor, and consequently studentwork, requires a revolutionary
disposition toward relations of production. In particular. it is imperative that educators link the
transformation of the economy with a critique of whiteness. However. theories of
whiteness must be linked to the idea that capitalism is not only the exploitation of
knowledge for profits, but the simultaneous repression of expenditure, or what Georges Bataille
(1997, 1991. 1988, 1985) describes as the human proclivity to expend energy and not to accumulate it.
Transformation of labor produces social relations that flourish in conditions free of
alienation and exploitation. A discourse on production must also consider alternative theoretical frameworks to
explain students’ inner experiences and the knowledge they gain from them. Transforming relations of
production allows students, as concrete subjects, to experience schooling in new ways, but
Bataille’s theory of expenditure provides a general framework that explains how we come to know these inner experiences
themselves, a theory that functions not within the logic of production, but within that of waste.
As Bataille (1988) explains. "On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy
is always in
excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is to be
squandered...The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter implies him [sic], and he cannot stop it;...it
destines him, in a privileged way. to that glorious operation. to useless consumption. The latter cannot accumulate
limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually, like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us.” (23;
emphasis in the original). Schools accumulate useful knowledge to the point where
they cannot hold it. Students memorize, tabulate, and synthesize knowledge for
future-oriented purposes. Eventually, unproductive student behavior erupts and then
spreads as students resist and rebel against work as a guiding prnciple. The conventional
explanation for disruptive student behavior is “unproductivity.” Resistant students are either alienated or
lazy, and they willfully opt out of work. Bataillean pedagogy understands this to be a state of wasteful
activity that cannot be fully explained by a productivist logic. It represents the “blind spot” of the
discourse on work. Bataille‘s pedagogy attempts to transgress the utility of current school knowledge. Educators
isolate unproductive students from their peers to ensure that they “do their work" or
detain them after school to give them extra work. Meanwhile, what escapes our
understanding is the principle of expenditure, or how students squander schoolwork for
no apparently useful or productive reason. The theory of expenditure does not deny the presence
of work. let alone the importance of liberated labor. It acknowledges the production of life for
purposes of subsistence, survival. and improvement of the species. Furthermore,
the modified theory of expenditure we are presenting recognizes the importance of revolutionizing student work as part of
an overall transformation of social life. In fact, Bataille (1997) clarifies, “Class struggle becomes the grandest form of social
expenditure when it is taken up again and developed, this time on the part of the workers, and on such a scale that it
threatens the very existence of the masters” (178). It
is at this intersection between work and non-work
that we locate a revolution both of student work and waste. injected in this dialectic is
the indictment of whiteness as an ideology that alienates students from real
knowledge as well as preventing them from rejoicing in the event of knowing, unfettered from utilitarian concerns.
School knowledge has become not only a commodity in the Marxian sense, but has taken on the quality of a thing that
exists for other things. And as things go, school
knowledge is deemed useful for something
outside of itself. to fulfill a destiny that has been predetermined, such as
grades or higher education. Bataille’s perspective decries this utilitarian condition wherein students are
subjected to schoolwork that apparently has no intrinsic worth but an exchange value in the markets of white capitalism.
Race
White fascism works as a territorial control of expenditure –
whiteness maps excess onto colored bodies as genocide, as a
deferral of fears about itself through excessive drives, as a
divestment of self-expression – war becomes whiteness’ potlatch
gift
White fascism is not only the enforcement of white territorial control of the
means of production. It is also the simultaneous policing of excess, of curbing
expenditure and revelry (not to motion ribaldry) where these may threaten the puritanical
code of white governmentality. How many examples do we have of the carnivalesque activity, outlawry, and
social brigandage of student behavior quelled by the repressive power of state or local police? Celebration is confused for
lawlessness as the antiriot unit marches into the potlatch to subdue its energy. School classrooms function
under this sign of general repression where quietude is valued over movement and
vitality. Yet shit the scene to a crowded hallway or students on their way to their lockers and the noise deafens even the
hard of hearing. White fascism is as much about the control of expenditure as it is
the control of the means of production. As an apparatus of whiteness, schools
become places of the saving of energy rather than the spending of it. It should be plain to see that
white capitalism has encoded the colored body as a site of excess. To the white fascist. black
students (especially males) have become the site of super-sexuality and the Latina body a
site of super reproduction. On the other hand. the white body has been constructed as the site
of rationality and savings. The white body is almost non-sexualized. This erotic economy of
“excess” is linked to a genocidal tendency in the history and geography of
whiteness to the extent that white ideology has been involved in consistent crimes
against the eroticized other. The oppression of the sexual other is evidence of a certain
repression of the expenditure that whiteness represses in itself. That is, whiteness
recognizes an excess beyond productivity but fails to squander it, fearing the ecstatic
consequences of such a waste. It is a vicarious living of sorts that robs whiteness of any life of its
own. It is a mitigated. surreptitious experience that partitions the erotic—that is. the irreducible experience—
into fantasies rather than participating in its flows. It is a projection of what
whiteness fears about itself and fills to understand: a certain excessive
drive. This may sound like the eroticization of the racialized subject represented in the white imaginary. For it seems a
standard white discourse to portray the other as a site of excess. However, remaining consistent
with Bataille’s theory, expenditure is a general economy that inheres in all humans. It is not an
economic drive particular to non-Western societies, but one that finds its expression in them, and its
repression in whiteness. Simple life forms excrete waste, factories spew smoke, and stars explode as supernova
only to give birth to new star formations from leftover stellar material. In as much as capitalism commodities any and all
social spaces for profit, whiteness
refuses to divest itself of excess but saves it for further
growth, forestalling its inevitable and disastrous expression. Wars, riots, and civil unrest
are today’s social potlatch.
Sexuality
Sexuality inextricable correlates with violence and the right to
kill exercised by the government. The sovereign world produces
a luxurious death and constitutes the structure of death as it
inhabits the world.
Baudrillard, 76 (Jean, Sociologist, philosopher, bataillian scholor. Symbolic exchange and death, pgs. 154-
156)//Cummings
Despite its radicality, the psychoanalytic vision of death remains an insufficient vision: the pulsions are constrained by repetition, its perspective bears on a final equilibrium within the inorganic continuum, eliminating differences and intensities
This theory manifests certain affinities

following an involution towards the lowest point; an entropy of death, pulsional conservatism, equilibrium in the absence of Nirvana.
with Malthusian political economy, the objective of which is to protect oneself against
death. For political economy only exists by default: death is its blind spot, the absence
haunting all its calculations. And the absence of death alone permits the exchange of
values and the play of equivalences. An infinitesimal injection of death would
immediately create such excess and ambivalence that the play of value would completely
collapse. Political economy is an economy of death, because it economises on death and buries it under its discourse. The death drive falls into the opposite category: it is the discourse of death as the insurmountable finality. This
discourse is oppositional but complementary, for if political economy is indeed Nirvana (the infinite accumulation and reproduction of dead value), then the dea th drive denounces its truth, at the same time as subjecting it to absolute derision. It
does this, however, in the terms of the system itself, by idealising death as a drive (as an objective finality). As such, the death drive is the current system's most radical negative, but even it simply holds up a mirror to the funereal imaginary of
Instead of establishing death as the regulator of tensions and an equilibrium

political economy.
function, as the economy of the pulsion, Bataille introduces it in the opposite sense, as
the paroxysm of exchanges, superabundance and excess. Death as excess, always already
there, proves that life is only defective when death has taken it hostage, that life only
exists in bursts and in exchanges with death, if it is not condemned to the discontinuity
of value and therefore to absolute deficit. 'To will that there be life only is to make sure that there is only death.' The idea that death is not at all a breakdown of life, that it is
'[t]he idea of a
willed by life itself, and that the delirial (economic) phantasm of eliminating it is equivalent to implanting it in the heart of life itself this time as an endless mournful nothingness. Biologically,
world where human life might be artificially prolonged has a nightmare quality about it'
), but symbolically above all; and here the nightmare is
(G. Bataille, Eroticism [2nd edn, tr. M. Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p. 101
no longer a simple possibility, but the reality we live at every instant: death (excess, ambivalence, gift, sacrifice,
We renounce dying and accumulate instead of losing ourselves:

expenditure and the paroxysm), and so real life is absent from it.
Not only do we renounce death, but also we let our desire, which is really the desire to
die, lay hold of its object and we keep it while we live on. We enrich our life instead of
losing it. (Eroticism, p. 142) Here, luxury and prodigality predominate over functional calculation, just as death predominates over life as the unilateral finality of production and accumulation: On a comprehensive view, human life
Death
strives towards prodigality to the point of anguish, to the point where the anguish becomes unbearable. The rest is mere moralising chatter. . . . A febrile unrest within us asks death to wreak its havoc at our expense. (ibid., p. 60)
and sexuality, instead of confronting each other as antagonistic principles are (Freud),
exchanged in the same cycle, in the same cyclical revolution of continuity. Death is not
the 'price' of sexuality the sort of equivalence one finds in every theory of complex living
beings nor is sexuality a simple detour on the way to death, as in
(the infusorium is itself immortal and asexual)
Civilisation and its Discontents: they exchange their energies and excite each other.
Neither has its own specific economy: life and death only fall under the sway of a single
economy if they are separated; once they are mixed, they pass beyond economics
altogether, into festivity and loss [W]e can no longer differentiate between (eroticism according to Bataille):
sexuality and death [, which] are simply the culminating points of the festival nature celebrates, with the inexhaustible multitude of living beings, both of them signifying the boundless wastage of nature's
resources as opposed to the urge to live on characteristic of every living creature. (Eroticism, p. 61) This festivity takes place because it reinstates the cycle where penury imposes the linear economy of duration, because it reinstates a cyclical
Hence the
revolution of life and death where Freud augurs no other issue than the repetitive involution of death. In Bataille, then, th ere is a vision of death as a principle of excess and an anti-economy.
metaphor of luxury and the luxurious character of death. Only sumptuous and useless
expenditure has meaning; the economy has no meaning, it is only a residue that has been
made into the law of life, whereas wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death:
sacrifice, the 'accursed share', escaping investment and equivalence, can only be
annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost, then annihilation is a priceless
luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless
luxury, and the only alternative. In Bataille, this luxurious conjunction of sex and death
figures under the sign of continuity, in opposition to the discontinuous economy of
individual existences. Finality belongs in the discontinuous order, where discontinuous beings secrete finality, all sorts of finalities, which amount to only one: their own death. We are discontinuous beings,
individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. (Eroticism, p. 15) Death itself is without finalities; in eroticism, the finality of the individual being is put back into question:
What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners . . . ? The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participants as they are in their normal lives. (ibid., p. 17)
Erotic nakedness is equal to death insofar as it inaugurates a state of communication,

loss of identity and fusion. The fascination of the dissolution of constituted forms : such is Eros (pace
Freud, for whom Eros binds energies, federates them into ever larger unities). In death, as in Eros, it is a matter of introducing all possible continuity into discontinuity, a game of complete continuity. It is in this sense that 'death, the rupture of
the discontinuous individualities to which we cleave in terror, stands there before us more real than life itself' (ibid., p. 19). Freud says exactly the same thing, but by default. It is no longer a question of the same death.
Schooling
The schooling institution as a whole is an attempt to quell excess
in favor of discipline and regulation in a collusion with
authoritarian capitalism
Preparata 07 (Guido Giacomo, “The Ideology of Tyranny: The Use of Neo-Gnostic Myth in
American Politics”, Chapter 7 - The “Mocking Varlets” of the Postmodern Left: Political Correctness,
Education, and Empire, p 116-118, September 14, 2007) // IES
Thereafter, postmodern education in America could take the following propedeutic turn: in the
early years of formation, the devotees of Lyotard proposed to communicate “enough of what is held to be true
by the society to which the children belong so that they can function as citizens of that
society.” At the higher level, they suggested that “the role of education is not to pass on the
truth, but to edify.”31 “To edify”? The suggested pedagogy thus appeared to resolve itself into
a preliminary rehashing of Liberal indoctrination, followed by “edification”—by which means,
was not clearly explained. After storming the palace of higher learning, Lyotard was presumably envisaging
an arrangement whereby the interdisciplinary clans and their chieftains would collude with
the grant-generous IT industry (a partner for hardware, media, and distance learning) and the business
schools (“is it saleable?”), which, most of all, live by the ethos of performativity, to divide the
“endowments for education” among themselves. It is fascinating how this practical understanding of
contemporary education could have since been classed among the representative analyses of the “Left.” Nothing
could be more fully aligned with the Interests of our contemporary regimes than the
indifferent strokes of this postmodern sketch, which portrays, in essence, a pedagogical disaster.
Established knowledge. So this meant that the bulk of what we “know,” which, however
we look at it, is an unpalatable hodgepodge of “grand narratives,” would by no means disappear,
and that it could be laid out in clean synopses and copied onto computer memory. This was no resolution. Postmodernism
merely recommended that the debate be truncated at a point where most fundamental questions about the nature of our
social realities still remained unanswered. We should thus be satisfied with piling trivia in our heads,
and call it quits. This was the “end of education”: compact and standardized accounts
(who writes?) of, say, Shiism, Marxism, and the Spanish Civil War would be a click away
from the pupils (“downloadable from the net,” as we say today), and the remainder of
one’s training would be taken care of in the campuses of trade, technical, and vocational
schools—the infamous “colleges.” Education—like art, science, and perhaps political
history as well—may have reached its historical fulfillment. [ . . . ] We have reached the
end. [ . . . ] It is the beginning of the post-millennium blues.32 Masters of the house, what would these
postmodern practitioners of interdisciplinarity presently busy themselves with? They
would focus on the “undecidables,” chaos, catastrophe, paradox, and the like.
“Postmodern science,” said Lyotard, would not “produce the known, but the
unknown.” Bataillean blather, once again. To wit: The postmodern would be that which, in the modern, puts forward
the unpresentable in presentation itself; that which denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a good taste
which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable; that
which searches for
new presentations, not in order to enjoy them but in order to impart a stronger sense of
the unpresentable.33 While their business partners would obsess with performativity, the
Foucauldians would look for “difference.” Not the “grand narrative,” but the short one (le petit récit) should
occupy the daily research activities of the new academy. Of course, one should not have apprehended this
division of labor as taking place in a setting that would be stable and pacific. No. Remember,
the “postmodern condition” was a variation on the Foucauldian theme. Power is a given, and we are nested into it; we
cannot wish for more than opposing resistance to it. Lyotard stated it explicitly: no “pure” alternative to the system is
conceivable. It was understood—though the tenor of Lyotard’s prognosis on this count was rather tame—that the
“informatization of societies” would inevitably lead to “terror,” that is, to an environment
in which alternative views would be systematically eliminated. A giant filing bank of its
constituents’ personal data is indeed “the dream instrument” of the disciplinarian society. How is one, then, to
fend off the system’s inherent propensity ever to extend its monitoring, controlling
reach? Precisely by cultivating difference. For Lyotard, the last thing the arts and
sciences should be striving for is “consensus”;34 the rule of consensus is that proper of an
authoritarian regime. But if one were to reduce all explorations to individual cases requiring but a “local”
consensus, then the obscurantist conceit of wanting one truth for all instances would be seriously antagonized.35 All
narratives would become prime narratives, each being putatively irreducible to a number of universal truths. To compile a
digital anthology of incommensurable fables: this was Lyotard’s quest for so-called paralogy. In the end, he hoped that
computers, although they were potentially dangerous devices, could be tapped by “discussion groups” with a view to
organizing knowledge and their culture of resistance. He concluded with a typical flourish of postmodern balderdash:
“We see in the offing a politics that will grant equal respect to the desire of justice and to
that of the unknown.”36 Granted, the advent of the Internet confirmed Lyotard’s observations and refreshed his
text. But what of these observations? Were they really novel, and most importantly, were they in any sense dissenting?
Neither. On one side, they were old truisms masquerading as iconoclast pronouncements, and, on the other, meretricious
rhetoric, straining to mesh into the conservative mainstream. One need only leaf the pages of Thorstein Veblen’s superb
The Higher Learning in America, which was written at the end of World War I, to see through this particular postmodern
deceit. Veblen had already intuited how a
persistent habituation to the “pecuniary conduct of
affairs,” coupled with the “mechanical stress” of the “industrial arts,” had constrained, if
not entirely disfigured, the traditional countenance of the pursuit of knowledge, which is
in the nature of an “idle curiosity.” “Business shrewdness,” Veblen wrote, is
“incompatible with the spirit of higher learning.”37 Even all that postmodern clamor about
the end of metadiscourses, is a development that, following Veblen, could have been construed intelligently as an instance
of spiritual shift: These canons of reality, or of verity, have varied from time to time, have in fact varied incontinently with
the passage of time and the mutations of experience.38 The
drive to make money, as Veblen witnessed a century
ago, has“submerged” the institution of the university in a variety of enterprises connected
with the realm of business, which have destroyed the free environment of research. In its
stead have emerged “quasi-universities installed by men of affairs, of a crass
‘practicality.’” These are the contemporary academic conglomerates that sell collegiate
catechism dispensed through mass-assembled electives, “training of secondary school
teachers,” “edification of the unlearned by ‘university extension,’” and “erudition by
mail-order”—structures capped by the cupola of the “academic executive” and the
shareholders of the “governing boards” (the wealthy Regents).39 The university is
conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed
under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office is to turn the means in
hand to account in the largest feasible output.40 The struggle among schools for
enrollment, publicity, and profit is conducted by each academic conglomerate’s
“centralized administrative machinery,” which “is on the whole detrimental to
scholarship, even in the undergraduate work.” Such a system of authoritative control,
standardization, gradation, accountancy, classification, credits and
penalties, will necessarily be drawn on stricter lines the more the school
takes on the character of a house of correction or penal settlement ; in which the
irresponsible inmates are to be held to a round of distasteful tasks and restrained
from (conventionally) excessive irregularities of conduct.41 This concerted and
competitive effort at disciplining the masses is the ferocious routine of the
academic personnel leading “bureaus of erudition—commonly called departments,”
whose politics is shaded by “a clamorous conformity” and a “truculent quietism,” both
stances passing as a “mark of scientific maturity.” These specialists exhibit an “histrionic sensibility,” a
jesting touch that blends nicely with the “jealous” attention that they otherwise reserve to the “views and prepossessions
prevalent among the respectable, conservative middle-class.”42 The
inquiries of such “experts” are not
“likely to traverse old-settled convictions in the social, economic, political or religious
domain, for “it is bad business policy to create unnecessary annoyance.”43 All of which
institutional disasters conspire, under a “regime of graduated sterility,” to
consummate the “skillfully devised death of the spirit.”4
Sovereignty
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise the right to kill, death is
displaced on others in order for the western world to survive,
allowing violence against the other to increase
Mbembe, 03, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of
the Witwatersrand, Necropolitics, Pgs. 15-16, 2003)//Cummings
To exercise sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the
deployment and manifestation of power. One could summarize in the above terms what
Michel Foucault meant by biopower: that domain of life over which power has taken
control. ? What does the implementation
But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised? Who is the subject of this right
of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to death and about the relation of
enmity that sets that person against his or her murderer? Is the notion of biopower
sufficient to account for the contemporary ways in which the political, under the guise of
war, of resistance, or of the fight against terror, makes the murder of the enemy its
primary and absolute objective? War, after all, is as much a means of achieving
sovereignty as a way of exercising the right to kill. Imagining politics as a form of war, we
must ask: What place is given to life, death, and the human body (in particular the wounded or slain body)? In order to answer these
questions, this essay draws on the concept of biopower and explores its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception. Such an analysis raises a number of empirical and philosophical questions I would like to examine
briefly. As is well known, the concept of the state of exception has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/extermination camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted variously a s the
central metaphor for sovereign and destructive violence and as the ultimate sign of the absolute power of the negative. Says Hannah Arendt: “There are no parallels to the life in the concentration camps. Its horror can never be fully embraced by
the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death.” Because its inhabitants are divested of political status and reduced to bare life, the camp is, for Giorgio Agamben, “the place in which the most absolute conditio
inhumana ever to appear on Earth was realized.”
Standards
Those in charge of the government have unlimited control of the
manner in which the state operates, this power originates from
the manner in which they adhere to national standards and
proliferate the discourses associated to national identity and
dominant discussions
Sharma and Gupta, 06, (Aradhana, A political anthropologist interested in the
state, democratic governance, citizenship, social movements, NGOs, gender, and
activism, Akhil, sociocultural anthropologist currently working on questions of
transnational capitalism, infrastructure, and corruption, The Anthropology of the State,
Pg. 357-358, 2006)//Cummings
The central question in the two influential articles in this section has to do with the
relation between the state and popular culture. The ability of dominant groups that
control a state to gain legitimacy depends crucially on their success in molding national
culture and shaping representations of the state. At a deeper level, ‘‘the state’’ itself
cannot be conceived outside of representation or prior to it; ‘‘the state’’ is a phantasm
that is made into a real, tangible object in people’s lives through representation. In order
to be effective, such representations of the state have to be popular. Thus, we can find in
popular culture one of the most important sites for the mediation of class conflicts (and
other conflicts as well). Such mediation is critical in enabling dominant groups
who wish to establish their hegemony to incorporate the subaltern classes.
These two articles give an inkling of a vast conceptual arena that needs much further
development with a wide range of critical tools. They exemplify contrasting, but not
mutually exclusive, theoretical approaches: Hall’s essay derives from a Gramscian
perspective (see Section I), while the critical issues in Mbembe’s essay are derived from
Bakhtin and Bataille. Whereas Hall focuses on epochal transitions in the relations
between the state and popular culture, Mbembe studies the role of the spectacular
in the routine operation of power. Hall’s essay concentrates on Britain from the
eighteenth to twentieth centuries; Mbembe is mainly concerned with the postcolonial
situation, largely drawing his examples from Cameroon. There are thus many differences
in terms of subject and location between the two articles. Hall’s article takes up
Gramsci’s emphasis on the productive aspects of the state and on popular culture in
order to explain how hegemony is established. Hall argues that neither ‘‘the state’’ nor
‘‘popular culture’’ have remained the same over time. He finds traditional approaches
that emphasize their slow historical evolution to be unsatisfactory. Hall proposes instead
an approach that pays attention to the drastic shifts in each of these spheres. In such a
history, long periods of settlement in the relations between these spheres are interrupted
by moments of radical transformation. The key question then becomes the Gramscian
one of figuring out how the new configuration between the state and popular culture
brought about a new hegemonic order. Hall considers three moments in the
transformation of state–culture relations since the eighteenth century. The first example
is that of the role of law in the eighteenth-century British state. The British state in this
period had a small and restricted domain of activity: it had no regular police or standing
army and it was based on a very restrictive male franchise. In such a state, the law
functioned ‘‘to hold an unequal and tumultuous society together’’ (p. 365). The
nineteenth century saw the rise of an urban bourgeoisie, new reading publics through the
rapid growth of literacy, and the rise of a ‘‘free’’ press. Such a press articulated the
concerns of a civil society defined against the state. In this ‘‘civil society,’’ the urban
bourgeoisie, who had the vast amounts of capital necessary to own commercial presses,
and the emerging middle class incorporated the popular classes into the new medium
mainly as a reading and buying public. Such a definition of freedom, Hall importantly
reminds us, ‘‘is not democratic but commercial’’ (p. 370). Finally, with the twentieth
century, the decline of British industrial dominance accompanied by the rise of trade
union organizing, and new technologies such as photography, cinema, cable and wireless
telegraphy, the telephone, radio, and television profoundly disturbed existing
configurations of power. In such a context, Hall demonstrates that the state assumed a
greater role in broadcasting through the BBC, all the while ensuring that it stayed
‘‘independent’’ of direct control. The BBC exemplified the pedagogical function played by
the state in that its programming aimed to ‘‘educate’’ the popular classes and shape their
tastes and desires to consolidate the hegemonic bloc. Hall focuses mainly on those
‘‘unsettled’’ periods when the relation between the state and popular culture registered
momentous shifts, either because of changed class relations or technological revolutions.
What Hall’s article leaves out is a consideration of those ‘‘periods of settlement’’ in which
hegemony works routinely, that is, when the control of state power by a dominant bloc is
not thrown into crisis. These periods are precisely the object of Mbembe’s analysis about
the ‘‘banality’’ of power. He asks how the reproduction of the state is effected as a routine
matter. Rather than emphasize the Weberian aspects of the routinization of power
through institutional processes, Mbembe focuses on excess and spectacle as the armory
of the creation and institutionalization of dominant meanings. In his view, the ‘‘obscene,
vulgar, and the grotesque’’ become an essential means by which domination is secured
and resisted. He rejects the position that the use of the grotesque and obscene to
caricature the state by the popular classes demonstrates their resistance to power. He
argues rather that the state itself deploys the obscene and vulgar as a critical means of
legitimation.
STEM (Science)
The perpetuation of scientific knowledge invests in the general
economy and relies on the premises of utility and denies the
inner experience of the subject
the University of Wolverhampton, “Georges Bataille: Sacred and Society”, General Economy and
Sovereignty, p 89-90, January 30, 2015) // IES
Restricted economies and the knowledge they generate are absolutely vital and indispensable for society and for thought.
Yet, restricted economies cannot function without erecting limits and boundaries, and
there will always be excesses and indeterminacies permeating these boundaries in any
particular system. Indeed, the erection of a boundary or limit itself generates an ‘excess’
beyond that limit. Restricted economies ‘work’ only by drawing, selectively and discretely upon
their ‘outside’ – the realm of general economy – and by simultaneously denying that they border an irreducible
‘outside’. The restricted economies of academic disciplines are generally happy to admit that they have limits, of a fuzzy
sort, but assume that beyond ‘their’ limit another academic discipline picks up the baton. For example, sociology may
defer to psychology and to biology where the functioning of the individual psyche or of the body are concerned. In concert,
academic disciplines purport to offer a seamless and limitless coverage of human
experience. Bataille’s contention is that there are inherent and irreducible excesses,
excesses which must be expelled as a precondition for the scientific enterprise to begin.
Science is, for Bataille, restricted by its underlying foundation in utility –
ultimately in the profane realm – so that all sciences must accumulate
knowledge that is of use to society. The accursed share, that which cannot be
reduced to the utilitarian project of scientific thought, is manifest in paradox, anomaly
and in the failure to erect meaningful rather than simply useful foundations for
knowledge. Further, for Bataille, the subjective or inner experiences of the thinker – his or
her experiences of wonder, inspiration, mystery, despair and ecstasy – are experiences
that can never be formalized as scientific knowledge, yet they are the source
from which all scientific knowledge is generated: the pre- or non-foundations of
the scientific enterprise. At the level of thought or enquiry, general economic thinking affirms and
confronts the accursed share, where restricted economies deny it or avoid confronting its
manifestations. The implications of the accursed share become increasingly complex and
problematic when we consider human groups and societies. In support of his law of general
economy, Bataille outlines a social anthropology of archaic societies which, he argues, made
the expenditure of excess energy and wealth their fundamental dynamic through
festivals, feasts and sacrificial rites (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 45–77). Bataille’s argument is that by expending
excess in collective, ritual practices which suspend everyday, productive existence, excess
energy can bind beings and communities: the accursed share is devoted to glory and
sumptuary activities and so social life is enriched. In contrast, modern societies have, by
and large, lost the capacity for glorious, communal expenditures because wealth is expropriated
and ‘owned’ by elites for their individual and private pleasure.
Tests
Bubble tests fall in line with a captitalist totalistic agenda,
teachers are motivated to make tests easier with merit systems,
test tactics like process of elimination guarantee the worst forms
of argumentation while creating a realm of ignorance of what we
know and what we don’t know.
Hedges 11, Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com.
Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two
decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author
of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What
Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The
Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire
of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2011/04/11/why-united-states-
destroying-its-education-system
A nation that destroys its systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public
libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes
test scores above critical thinking and literacy. It celebrates rote vocational
training and the singular, amoral skill of making money. It churns out stunted human
products, lacking the capacity and vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state. It
funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of
corporate masters and serfs. Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage
employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers—those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the
young discover their gifts and potential—and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These
instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point. TheNo Child Left Behind
program, modeled on the “Texas Miracle,” is a fraud. It worked no better
than our deregulated financial system. But when you shut out debate these dead ideas are self-
perpetuating. Passing bubble tests celebrates and rewards a peculiar form of
analytical intelligence. This kind of intelligence is prized by money
managers and corporations. They don’t want employees to ask uncomfortable questions or examine
existing structures and assumptions. They want them to serve the system. These tests produce men and
women who are just literate and numerate enough to perform basic
functions and service jobs. The tests elevate those with the financial means to prepare for them. They
reward those who obey the rules, memorize the formulas and pay deference to authority. Rebels, artists, independent
thinkers, eccentrics and iconoclasts—those
who march to the beat of their own drum—are
weeded out. “Imagine,” said a public school teacher in New York City, who asked that I not use his name, “going to
work each day knowing a great deal of what you are doing is fraudulent, knowing in no way are you preparing your
students for life in an ever more brutal world, knowing that if you don’t continue along your scripted test prep course and
indeed get better at it you will be out of a job. Up until very recently, the principal of a school was something like the
conductor of an orchestra: a person who had deep experience and knowledge of the part and place of every member and
every instrument. In the past 10 years we’ve had the emergence of both [Mayor] Mike Bloomberg’s Leadership
Academy and Eli Broad’s Superintendents Academy, both created exclusively to produce instant principals and
superintendents who model themselves after CEOs. How is this kind of thing even legal? How are such ‘academies’
accredited? What quality of leader needs a ‘leadership academy’? What kind of society would allow such people to run
their children’s schools? The high-stakes tests may be worthless as pedagogy but they are a brilliant mechanism for
undermining the school systems, instilling fear and creating a rationale for corporate takeover. There is something
grotesque about the fact the education reform is being led not by educators but by financers and speculators and
billionaires.” Teachers, under assault from every direction, are fleeing the profession. Even before the “reform” blitzkrieg
we were losing half of all teachers within five years after they started work—and these were people who spent years in
school and many thousands of dollars to become teachers. How does the country expect to retain dignified, trained
professionals under the hostility of current conditions? I suspect that the hedge fund managers behind our charter schools
system—whose primary concern is certainly not with education—are delighted to replace real teachers with nonunionized,
poorly trained instructors. To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and
protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia.
The utilitarian, corporate ideology
embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has
no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts
education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the
sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside. “It is extremely
dispiriting to realize that you are in effect lying to these kids by insinuating that this diet of corporate reading programs
and standardized tests are preparing them for anything,” said this teacher, who feared he would suffer reprisals from
school administrators if they knew he was speaking out. “It is even more dispiriting to know that your livelihood depends
increasingly on maintaining this lie. You have to ask yourself why are hedge fund managers suddenly so interested in the
education of the urban poor? The main purpose of the testing craze is not to grade the students but to grade the teacher.”
“I cannot say for certain—not with the certainty of a Bill Gates or a Mike Bloomberg who pontificate with utter certainty
over a field in which they know absolutely nothing—but more and more I suspect that a major goal of the reform campaign
is to make the work of a teacher so degrading and insulting that the dignified and the truly educated teachers will simply
leave while they still retain a modicum of self-respect,” he added. “In less than a decade we been stripped of autonomy and
are increasingly micromanaged. Students
have been given the power to fire us by failing
their tests. Teachers have been likened to pigs at a trough and blamed for
the economic collapse of the United States. In New York, principals have
been given every incentive, both financial and in terms of control, to replace
experienced teachers with 22-year-old untenured rookies. They cost less. They know
nothing. They are malleable and they are vulnerable to termination.” The demonizing of teachers is another public
relations feint, a way for corporations to deflect attention from the theft of some $17 billion in wages, savings and earnings
among American workers and a landscape where one in six workers is without employment. The speculators on Wall
Street looted the U.S. Treasury. They stymied any kind of regulation. They have avoided criminal charges. They are
stripping basic social services. And now they are demanding to run our schools and universities. “Not only have the
reformers removed poverty as a factor, they’ve removed students’ aptitude and motivation as factors,” said this teacher,
who is in a teachers union. “They seem to believe that students are something like plants where you just add water and
place them in the sun of your teaching and everything blooms. This is a fantasy that insults both student and teacher. The
reformers have come up with a variety of insidious schemes pushed as steps to professionalize the profession of teaching.
As they are all businessmen who know nothing of the field, it goes without saying that you do not do this by giving
teachers autonomy and respect.
They use merit pay in which teachers whose students
do well on bubble tests will receive more money and teachers whose
students do not do so well on bubble tests will receive less money. Of course, the
only way this could conceivably be fair is to have an identical group of students in each class—an impossibility. The real
purposes of merit pay are to divide teachers against themselves as they scramble for the brighter and more motivated
students and to further institutionalize the idiot notion of standardized tests. There is a certain diabolical intelligence at
work in both of these.” “If the Bloomberg administration can be said to have succeeded in anything,” he said, “they have
succeeded in turning schools into stress factories where teachers are running around wondering if it’s possible to please
their principals and if their school will be open a year from now, if their union will still be there to offer some kind of
protection, if they will still have jobs next year. This
is not how you run a school system. It’s
how you destroy one. The reformers and their friends in the media have created a Manichean world of bad
teachers and effective teachers. In this alternative universe there are no other factors. Or, all other factors—poverty,
depraved parents, mental illness and malnutrition—are all excuses of the Bad Teacher that can be overcome by hard work
and the Effective Teacher.” The truly educated become conscious. They become self-aware. They do not lie to themselves.
They do not pretend that fraud is moral or that corporate greed is good. They do not claim that the demands of the
marketplace can morally justify the hunger of children or denial of medical care to the sick. They do not throw 6 million
families from their homes as the cost of doing business. Thought
is a dialogue with one’s inner
self. Those who think ask questions, questions those in authority do not
want asked. They remember who we are, where we come from and where we
should go. They remain eternally skeptical and distrustful of power. And they
know that this moral independence is the only protection from the radical evil that results from collective
unconsciousness. The
capacity to think is the only bulwark against any centralized
authority that seeks to impose mindless obedience. There is a huge difference, as Socrates
understood, between teaching people what to think and teaching them how to think. Those who are endowed with a moral
conscience refuse to commit crimes, even those sanctioned by the corporate state, because they do not in the end want to
live with criminals—themselves. “It is better to be at odds with the whole world than, being one, to be at odds with myself,”
Socrates said. Those who can ask the right questions are armed with the capacity to make a moral choice, to defend the
good in the face of outside pressure. And this is why the philosopher Immanuel Kant puts the duties we have to ourselves
before the duties we have to others. The standard for Kant is not the biblical idea of self-love—love thy neighbor as thyself,
do unto others as you would have them do unto you—but self-respect. What brings us meaning and worth as human
beings is our ability to stand up and pit ourselves against injustice and the vast, moral indifference of the universe. Once
justice perishes, as Kant knew, life loses all meaning. Those who meekly obey laws and rules imposed from the outside—
including religious laws—are not moral human beings. The fulfillment of an imposed law is morally neutral. The truly
educated make their own wills serve the higher call of justice, empathy and reason. Socrates made the same argument
when he said it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. “The greatest evil perpetrated,” Hannah Arendt wrote, “is the
evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.” As Arendt pointed out, we must trust only
those who have this self-awareness. This self-awareness comes only through consciousness. It comes with the ability to
look at a crime being committed and say “I can’t.” We must fear, Arendt warned, those whose moral system is built around
the flimsy structure of blind obedience. We must fear those who cannot think. Unconscious civilizations become
totalitarian wastelands. “The greatest evildoers are those who don’t remember because they have never given thought to
the matter, and, without remembrance, nothing can hold them back,” Arendt writes. “For human beings, thinking of past
matters means moving in the dimension of depth, striking roots and thus stabilizing themselves, so as not to be swept
away by whatever may occur—the Zeitgeist or History or simple temptation. The greatest evil is not radical, it has no roots,
and because it has no roots it has no limitations, it can go to unthinkable extremes and sweep over the whole world.”
Violence/Hierarchies
Our innate desire to destroy the animal within us is what causes
us to want to dominate others, therefore creating racial and
class hierarchies that cause violence.
What possibly could Bataille, the controversial author of pornographic novels, have in
common with Trungpa, a meditation master trained in monastic Tibet? e resonances are
surprisingly plentiful. Indeed, cultural theorist Marcus Boon recently called Trungpa the “most Batail- lean of
contemporary Tibetan teachers.”11 To reverse the comparison, we could also say that Bataille was a particularly
“Trungpian” European philosopher. Bataille’s interest in Tibetan culture was longstanding. He trained in the language,
expressed interest in travelling to the country, and planned to write a book on tantra.12 Besides their shared appreciation
for tantric practice and the sacred potential of carnal pleasures like love-making and liquor, these apparently disparate
thinkers are primarily linked by their shared emphasis on what I will call existential resentment, when explaining worldly
challenges like economic inequality and nuclear build-up. By existential resentment, I mean the felt smallness that
humans can feel in the face of our nite and eshy existence.13 Both Bataille and Trungpa, in their
respective works, articulate how easy it is for humans to feel small and servile in the face
of a contingent existence, and how this felt servility often fuels compensatory desires for
aggrandizement and domination, desires with profound material e ects. For Trungpa, we
struggle with a “fear of death, fear of oneself, and fear of others” that fuels aggressive behavior.14 Similarly,
Bataille sees humanity as “revolting intimately against the fact of dying, generally
mistrusting the body, that is, having a deep mistrust of what is accidental, natural,
perishable.”15 This mistrust fuels efforts to best others as a way of com- pensating for the
lack of power and control we can feel in the face of decay. Both Trungpa and Bataille draw a strong
causal link between existential resentment and dominative social relations. Bataille and Trungpa’s resonant approaches to
the origins and cessation of domination complement each other in vital ways. Bataille is clearer than Trungpa, for
example, in linking existential rancor to speci c forms of systemic domination. For
Bataille, “an active
intention to surpass and destroy animal nature within us” is responsible for the creation
of racial and class hierarchies; social distinctions that are established to help the elect
feel in control, at the top of the heap, removed from the domineering muck of nature.
Trungpa, on the other hand, tends to use more general terms like “chaos” and “aggression” when describing systemic
challenges.16 A
strength of Bataille’s analysis is the direct link he makes between existential
resentment and particular systemic challenges such as class exploitation and racism. A
key strength of Trungpa’s corpus, however, is the re ned path of contemplative practice he o ers for transforming
existential resentment into gratitude and appreciation for earthly life. For Trungpa “meditation practice is regarded as a
good and in fact excellent way to overcome warfare in the world: our own warfare as well as greater warfare.”17 Bataille
meditated himself, and was one of the first Euro-American philosophers to take mind-body practices seriously as tools for
individual and cultural transformation. The actual meditations he developed, unfortunately, have limited transformative
value.18 While Bataille offers a clearer existential diagnosis of systemic challenges, Trungpa’s body of teachings and
methodology for treatment are more robust.
Bataille’s rich theoretical work, however, can help
inform the teaching of meditation in social movements and in the broader culture. To
concretize this point, I put Bataille’s materialist account of earthly richness into conversation with Trungpa’s meditations
on “basic goodness.” Before turning to this comparative work, I focus the beginning and middle sections of this essay on
Bataille and Trungpa’s respective explanations for domination, and why they both see existential change strategies like
meditation—and other methods for transforming the self and our experience of the world—as integral to radical social
transformation. While a key in uence for better-known theorists like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Judith
Butler, Bataille remains a marginal gure in most political theory. As Robyn Marasco recently noted, “precious little has
been said about Bataille as a resource for philosophical critique and political theory.”19 Bataille’s work, meanwhile, is
teeming with insights, especially ones that bear directly on the relationship between contemplative practice and social
change. Deeply in influenced by Eastern philosophy, Bataille is representative of a centuries-old tradition in Euro-
American philosophy of drawing on Buddhist ideas.20 Like Buddhist philosophers, Bataille offers an explanation of
strife that is rooted in human resistance to the contingency and finitude of existence. But his account, while influenced
by Buddhism, more directly links human dissatisfaction with mortality to systemic domination, particularly along the axes
of race and class. Because of Bataille’s analysis of domination, he is one of the first Eu- ropean philosophers to take mind-
body practices seriously as tools for cultural and political change. Bataille
is a vital—if sometimes unset-
tling—ally in ongoing e orts to better understand how contemplative praxis relates to
social change. Putting Bataille’s thought to use for Left political theory and practice is
not a straightforward process.21 A number of his interests were outrageous (human sacrifice, necrophilia, and
orgiastic debauchery) and are not easily reconciled with Leftist morality, or most moral conventions for that matter.22
Bataille’s transgressive pursuits help explain why such a generative philosopher remains relatively marginal.23 But while
outrageous, Bataille’s intellectual and lived transgressions were intelligible. One need not endorse Bataille’s darker
proclivities to appreciate his general encouragement of practices that might better align cultures with the always- fleeting
present and transform existential resentment into earthly affirmation. Bataille’ssometimes-fumbling
search for micropolitical strategies that work on the existential plane (fears, affects,
habits) is sensible when we consider his diagnosis of domination. Bataille’s analysis of
domination is rooted in his study of the body, and the terror and shame human animals
can feel before it. The body is unpredictable: It leaks, expels, hungers, fails, and
ultimately dies. Our bodies are our opening to life, but also to death. And this inevitable death seems to suggest
insigni cance before the putrefaction from which we come and will one day return. Humans, Bataille writes in his
masterwork The Accursed Share, “[appear] to be the only animal to be ashamed of that nature whence he comes, and from
which he does not cease to have departed.”24 We
feel primal shame, according to Bataille, because
the decay we are conscious of suggests servility and baseness.25 is primary disdain for
animal nature, and our dependence upon it, spurs fantastical e orts to dominate our
bodies, each other, and the more-than-human-world in attempts to o set felt servility
with felt dominance. For Bataille, much of human history can be read as a permanent
struggle against animality.26 In e Accursed Share he observes that humanity “resembles those parvenus who are
ashamed of their humble origin. ey rid themselves of anything suggesting it. What are the ‘noble’ and ‘good’ families,” he
writes of upper class morality, “if not those in which their lthy birth is the most carefully concealed?”27 One of the crucial
rationales for accumulating wealth, according to Bataille, is that material riches help us distinguish ourselves not only
from animality, but also from those we take to be nature’s proxies in our fantastical e orts to dominate the nature we fear.
Proxies, in the Euro-American context, have included Indigenous peoples, women,
people of color, and workers. These proxies have been discursively linked to animal nature and then
materially controlled in e orts to provide compensatory hits of dominion. For Bataille, “[i]t is not so much wealth... that
distinguishes, that quali es socially, as it is the greatest distance from animality.”28 We
dominate our bodies
and each other in e orts to surpass and ultimately control our animality, our
impermanence. is desire to “destroy the animal nature within us,” he suggests, lurks
behind many of our most vexing political and ecological problems.29 In Bataille’s view, the pull of
existential resentment is universal; it is a human struggle.30 He is attuned, however, to the important mediating role
played by culture. Individuals and cultures relate to existential realities like impermanence in multiple ways. Tibetan
Buddhism, for example, offers meditative practices for befriending the reality of death. We
are not destined to
resentfully interpret death as domineering, or to ee from felt servility with fantasies of
mastery. Bataille surveys multiple cultures in e Accursed Share, but his engagement with Tibetan Buddhism is most
germane to this analysis. His musings on Tibetan Buddhism are often selective and incomplete characterizations of the
tradition, but they nevertheless o er useful frames for transforming existential resentment. Bataille saw the culture and
economy of Tibet before the Chinese invasion in 1959 as a glorious e ort to a rm the totality of life, including death. He
admired, for example, the Tibetan tantric practice of meditating in graveyards.31 e bene t of these practices, according to
Bataille, is that if existential resentment leads to compensatory self-seeking, then a rming the totality of life, including
death, can produce an ethos of generosity. Prior to China’s occupation, Tibetan wealth was poured into developing an
extensive network of monasteries devoted to a religion that encourages openness to the reality of death and the changeful
present. In 1917, according to rough estimates provided by British diplomat Charles Bell, monastic budgets were double
that of the government and eight times that of the army.32 In
Bataille’s view, Tibetan energetic and
material investments were successful in creating a culture that bestows prestige upon
self-overcoming and compassion instead of upon avarice and accumulation.33 Bataille’s
enthusiasm for Tibetan culture was not ungrounded. ere were important material manifestations of Buddhism’s empha-
sis on primordial richness and universal well-being before the Chinese invasion. Because a majority of productive land was
under the Dalai Lama’s sway, for example, the private enclosure of common land that kick-started capitalism in Great
Britain was less imaginable and action- able in Tibet.34 And while land belonged to the Dalai Lama, tax-paying peasants
held relatively inalienable usufruct rights, granting them open access to the means of subsistence. e cultural priority that
Tibetan Buddhism places on transforming existential resentment into earthly a rmation does appear to have helped
nurture relatively equal access to land. Moreover, after the Chinese Revolution in 1949, Tibetan intellectuals—including
the current Dalai Lama—hoped that modern socialism could disrupt stubborn feudal hierarchies that predated
Buddhism’s hold on political power, and could better materialize the Buddhist emphasis on universal well-being.35 Even
after Communist China’s colonization of Tibet, the Dalai Lama still refers to himself as “half-Marx- ist, half-Buddhist.”36
e Dalai Lama’s double allegiance is deserving of more analytical attention. Part
of my argument in this essay
is that the work of Georges Bataille, the tantric communist, can support the de-
velopment of Buddhist socialism and the ongoing integration of meditative praxis into
secular and multi-faith social movements.37 Part of the story that Bataille does not cover, however, is that
Ti- bet still experienced economic hierarchy, gender-based oppression, and corruption. There was a class system, for
example, that di erentiated monks, aristocrats, peasants, nomads, and servants, as well as outcasts akin to Indian
“untouchables” who performed undesirable tasks such as blacksmithing, butchering, and corpse disposal.38 Bataille was
not typically prone to idealism, but Tibet took his breath away; his account of the country is marked by Orientalist
idealization.39 According to Donald Lopez Jr., Bataille’s analysis ts within an overly simplistic Eu- ro-American pattern of
presenting Tibetan culture as a balm that can “regenerate the West by showing us, prophetically, what we can be by
showing us what it had been.”40
Despite Bataille’s romantic view of Tibet, he was ultimately a
tragic thinker. He did not hold to the prospect of a utopian future where the “the pursuit
of rank and war” is perfectly transformed.41 Bataille evinces a tragic radicalism; he locates drivers of
domination in our existential condition as animals that die, know we die, and easily feel fear and servility in light of
inevitable decay. Since our mortality is hard fact, completely undoing compensatory desires for dominion is unlikely in
his estimation. And
yet by locating a root driver for dominance-seeking, Bataille’s work
breaks ground for radical politics; it offers a pathway towards increasing, if not perfect
and nal, liberation. One of the implications of Bataille’s analysis is that mind-body
practices should become central, instead of merely supplementary, to processes of
transformative political change. Bataille understood that moving from a culture that
interprets death as a domineering master to one a affirming mortality as a necessary
movement in the general generosity of life requires practices that enable the felt
experience of basic richness.42
Value
Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint, condemning
the world to the simulacral existence of peace and security, your
acts of piety and pity are absurd, committed as if they were
irresistible. Your promises are a life spent wandering the
surface of the world with minimal intensity—life spent playing
penny slots and drinking bud light instead of ever risking
anything or buying the good shit. Finally, you fear blood more
and more. Blood and time.
Bishop 9 (Ryan, teaches at the National University of Singapore and has published on
critical theory, military technology, avantgarde aesthetics, urbanism, architecture,
literature, and international sex tourism. He edits or serves on the editorial boards of
several journals "Baudrillard, Death, and Cold War Theory" in Baudrillard Now: Current
Perspectives in Baudrillard Studies, polity, ed. R. Bishop pg. 60-70)
Extending a conceit borrowed from Francois de Bernard, itself a continuation of his own
conceit, Baudrillard writes that the Iraq War is a film: not like a film – not a simile – but
film itself (rather like the Gulf War is TV). The Iraq War has a “screenplay” which “has to
be fulfilled unerringly” (Intelligence of Evil, 124). Everything from technical to financial
materiel, including control of distribution (similar to Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford,
and Douglas Fairbanks with their United Artists studio), has been mobilized for “The
Iraq War: The film.” “In the end,” Baudrillard argues, “operational war becomes an
enormous special effect; cinema becomes the paradigm of warfare, and we can imagine it
as ‘real,’ whereas it is merely the mirror of its cinematic being” (ibid.). The audience of
the Iraq War, in all of its modes of delivery and distribution, then replicate the audience
of The Island. The implications of this replication at the level of the political become
rather obvious, but not necessarily so at first glance. If the audience of The Island
witnesses a self on screen no longer accessible to them other than on screen, then the
audience of the Iraq War witnesses political action (technological, military, and
economic) no longer accessible to constituents of representational government other
than onscreen. As noted earlier, even those arenas usually allotted to the general
populace in representational governments have been subsumed by the drive to Integral
Reality as exemplified by the global demonstrations against the invasion of Iraq that did
nothing to slow the attack and only filled up TV news shows with the performance of
dissent. The result is, according to Baudrillard, that “we are henceforth dealing with the
exercise of power in the pure state with no concern for sovereignty or representation;
with the Integral Reality of negative power” (Intelligence of Evil, 120). More worrying,
however, might be the relationship between the simulation of cinematic experience of
the Iraq War and its relationship to the drive toward Integral Reality, as delineated in
The Intelligence of Evil, but foreshadowed briefly in the Gulf War essays. The key
connections here are those that link simulation (or modeling) to pre-empting any
phenomena, set of values, or actions that might lead to an event, a disruption of the drive
to completion of the Real: here understood as the platitudes operating under terms such
as universal values, democracy, neoliberal economic markets, etc. The entire apparatus
of globalization processes intends to perfect and complete the Real and the Good on its
own terms and with Universal Values as its justification. The relationship between the
global and the universal replicates that between technics and truth. The Gulf War essays
show how the fully mediated simulacral conflict of the early 1990s fit the larger pattern
of Cold War deterrence as another means of waging conflict and thus realizing as
completely as possible the control of images and information (disinformation). On the
geopolitical scale, then, the purpose of wars is to rein in recalcitrant regimes while
sending messages to other potential foes about the technological, military, and
simulational power of the US: “the large footprint” in the sand that the Pentagon invoked
during the early period of the Iraq War. Sending a message, of course, has long been a
strategy for exercising sovereignty. About the Gulf War, Baudrillard writes, “Our wars
have less to do with the confrontation of warriors than with the domestication of the
refractory forces on the planet, those uncontrollable elements as the police would say, to
which belong not only Islam in its entirety but wild ethnic groups, minority languages,
etc. All that is singular and irreducible must be reduced and absorbed. This is the law of
democracy and the New World Order” (Gulf War, 86). This is, of course, the project of
simulation, the wresting of the event in potentia from its potential and potential
realization. The model and the object merge to create one whole entity, as in the third
order of simulacra. Containment leads not just to control but also to osmosis, to
preventive measures rendering any further or similar outbreaks possible. And all of it
scripted ahead of time. The script demands that nothing deviate from the script, a
screenplay writer with some real clout at last. The raw power of the integral drive is
based, in Baudrillard’s argument, entirely on “the prevention and policing of events”
(Intelligence of Evil, 121), to fulfill the script’s demands. This, after all, was the
justification for the pre-emptive nature of the Iraq War, whose aim was nominally the
prevention in advance of Saddam’s use of weapons of mass destruction. The models
provided by intelligence and tele-technological surveillance indicated variance from the
global order of Integral Reality and thus necessitated, in simplistic cause-effect
rationalization, the preventive measure known as war – but only war that is cinema:
scripted, special effects, everything all in place and safe when the lights go up. But the
prevention now is universal, absolute, no longer contained to war or security. “Anything
that could happen,” Baudrillard argues, “anything that might take place is regarded as
terrorism. The rule, or the order, is that nothing can take place, nothing is to occur any
more. So anything that can occur must be predicted in advance, exterminated in
advance” (Hegarty, 2004: 147). And this is what war has become: pre-emption, carrying
Cold War logic to its complete and completely (il)logical ends of absolute completion.
Everything is a threat that does not emerge from the order that controls the spread of
Integral Reality. Terrorism is “no longer at all religious or ideological . . . it’s all forms.
So, in practice, it’s total war, maybe the fourth world war, or like Virilio said, a sort of
planetary civil war, as it’s a coalition of all powers on the side of order against all those
who are potential terrorists. All populations are virtually terrorist insofar as they have
not been exterminated” (ibid.). Baudrillard’s analyses, rather like the Cold War doctrine
that maintained an enforced state of terror called mutually assured destruction (MAD),
might seem to leave us no room for maneuvering or action of any kind. Yet, Death lurks
in the systems he discusses, the ones driving incessantly to completion and perfection,
and Death provides us hope, though, admittedly, a slim one. The systems generate their
own modes of destruction, an auto-destructivity that emerges from the very processes
that wish to exclude any resistance to them. In an exceptionally prescient passage that
can be linked directly to the Iraq War, Baudrillard asserts: But this Integral Reality of
power is also its end. A power that is no longer based on anything other than the
prevention and policing of events, which no longer has political will but the will to dispel
ghosts, itself becomes ghostly and vulnerable. Its virtual power – its programming power
in terms of software and the like – is total, but as a result it can no longer bring itself into
play, except against itself, by all kinds of internal failures. At the height of its mastery, it
can only lose face. (Intelligence of Evil, 121) The loss of face Baudrillard evokes here is
not the result of hubris, per se, but rather the effect of realizing exactly what one has set
out to achieve. The hermitic world of complete containment, surveillance, and control,
no matter how illusory, if successful, can only ever result in yielding for itself no outside.
Anything that impedes the spread of this Integral Reality is co-opted or obliterated,
which is the position of “Islam” for the West. In its abstracted, political sense, “Islam,”
which must be put in qualifying quotation marks, materializes that which would and
does oppose Integral Reality. But this materialization will not be the force that undoes
the drive to completion; rather the seeds of its own demise are sown from within. A drive
for utter completion – logically and redundantly – can only end when it is complete: a
kind of systematized selfdestruction through realization. The conditions that make
Integral Reality possible, as well as the goals it desires, therefore render it impossible to
achieve and undesirable to do so. Yet it persists, and more perniciously than ever, despite
the humiliating, bloody and intractable conflict in Iraq. The salvation of theory in death,
or the salvation that is death Although death is pivotal to many whose work falls within
the domain of critical theory, Baudrillard’s work, perhaps more so than others’,
articulates, embodies, and enacts the role of Death within theoretical writing and its
relation to the political. Death, and especially the death drive in Freud according to
Baudrillard, does not provide any space for the operation of dialectical co-option or
reclamation. And it is this trait, Death’s absolute imperviousness to the dialectic, that
makes it radical, intractable, usable (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 151). Such is the
position that Baudrillard himself assumes within analyses of media, simulation, the
subject, the object, politics, war, economics, culture, the event, theory itself, and thought.
In relation to systems, the Death that Baudrillard wishes to address functions in a two-
fold manner: it is what waits at “the term of the system” – at its end – and it is “the
symbolic extermination that stalks the system itself” (Symbolic Exchange of Death, 5).
Therefore Death is both internal to the system and its “operational logic” and “a radical-
finality” outside it. Only Death operates both within and without the system (5). As such
it carries the mark of perfection (completion of the system’s operation and project) and
the defectiveness inherently lurking within it. Death is ambiguity and paradox made
manifest, and is both the system’s realization and its impediment. Death resists
modeling, the simulation. Its lack of predictability and the difficulty in controlling it, in
fact, resides at the center of the various systems, policies, and logics that drive the Cold
War. Death is the event without compare and which must be elided at all costs. Under
the patriotic yet threatening rubrics of security, safety, “our way of life,” etc., the entire
elaborate apparatus of the Cold War was erected and launched, while also continuing
with intensified reverberations into the present – all to ward off Death on a scale hitherto
the domain of Nature or the gods. Following a lead from the poet Octavio Paz and
sounding like an interlocutor of Paul Virilio’s, Baudrillard discusses Death, therefore, in
terms of the accident (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 160–6). For as Paz contends,
modern science and technology, including medicine, have converted epidemics and
natural catastrophes into explainable and controllable phenomena. The rational order
can explain and contain anything that threatens it, as can Integral Reality (for which the
rational order is another metonym, as is the global). As such, Death becomes an accident
to be contained and controlled, explained and predicted. If Death equals an accident, and
accidents threaten the rational order, Baudrillard argues, then Death-asaccident also
threatens political sovereignty and power, “hence the police presence at the scenes of
catastrophe” (161). Death is the disruption that destabilizes all that has been ordered and
made stable. At the height of the Cold War as an historical phenomenon, the major
powers relied heavily on a rational order that both players acknowledged (at least
between themselves) to be operational. This led to the enforced and heavily armed
stalemate of MAD, and with it arrived the horrific spectacle of the nuclear accident, or
the computer accident. The accidental launch of the impossible exchange of missiles
would be, in rote pronouncements of certitude, “the only way” these rational and sane
nations would fire nuclear weapons: hence the many examples of cultural
representations of accidental nuclear war that filled popular media (invoking worlds
synonymous to the one portrayed as the simulated wasteland in The Island). The import
of simulation in containing Death on a global scale can be seen in the supposed rational
containment of both the opposition and oneself. The simulated scenarios of both war
games and accidental launches, the modeling of events, become a kind of necromantic or
occult means of controlling unleashed forces and foretelling possible futures in order to
prevent the accident (or the event) – to prevent Death itself. The thought processes, or
mental make-up, required to plan and design large-scale modeling meant to pre-empt
accidents are themselves a kind of technology of thinking, and this mental technicity
comprises an important element in the construction of Integral Reality. Simulation
requires faith not in its own verisimilitude but in its capacity to change events, even
Death. The US embodies this kind of faith and has from the Cold War to the present,
which, as such, becomes a target for many satiric novelists. One particularly influenced
by Baudrillard’s ideas about simulation is Don DeLillo, whose novel White Noise reads
like a primer on the French theorist’s writings. One motif in the novel is a company
called SIMUVAC, which stands for “simulated evacuation.” The company stages fake
evacuations for a variety of emergencies, including nuclear events, complete with a
theatrical or cinematic set of special effects: uniforms, sound effects, smells, and blood
(if required). The firm turns up several times in the novel but makes its first, and most
satirically poignant, appearance during an actual emergency. In perfect Baudrillardian
fashion, the company, which operates solely with and for simulation, uses a live
emergency to practice (or simulate) its own simulated emergencies, which is the
commodity it packages and sells to various government agencies. The protagonist of the
novel asks a SIMUVAC employee, in the midst of the actual crisis, to evaluate their
rehearsal. The SIMUVAC operative replies in darkly comedic fashion: The insertion
curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a probability excess. Plus which we don’t
have our victims laid out where we we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In
other words we’re forced to take our victims where we find them. We didn’t get a jump
on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the
landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that Baudrillard, Death, and Cold
War Theory everything we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of polishing to do. But that’s
what this exercise is all about. (DeLillo, 1985: 139) The passage contains beautiful
parodic examples of the vagaries that language suffers at the hands of bureaucrats, with
nonsense phrases passing as technical jargon, including “insertion curve” and
“probability excess,” as well as the delightfully oxymoronic “actual simulation.” But
beyond this parody, DeLillo evokes the technicity of thought deeply embedded in Cold
War America, the same technicity that Baudrillard works through at multiple levels, to
reveal the deep investment in the power and control afforded by simulation. The
desirable element of simulation is, in fact, control, such as with body placement, which is
something actual disasters arrange without care or consultation with the modelers.
When the SIMUVAC employee claims that things are in need of “polishing” because
“everything we see tonight is real,” we witness the retreat into the comfortable delusion
afforded by simulation despite its no-nonsense claims to hard-nosed pragmatism –
“that’s what this exercise is all about,” he asserts. SIMUVAC, as a company, markets
readiness, the capacity to make a community alert and prepared, but can only deliver on
this promise as long as everything remains contained in the model. (And if events do not
remain neatly in the model, then the company can use the “accident” to better refine
their simulation and techniques.) The same is true of governments, and this is the fear of
the accident – and the fear the accident manifests – that Baudrillard (pace Paz) analyzes.
Every sector of Integral Reality lives in fear of events because they can “spill out, three-
dimensionally, all over the landscape,” no longer in control of the system. All that various
institutions, systems, and technologies promise to contain refuses to be contained. Such
is the revenge of the object, about which Baudrillard writes, and the intractability of that
which lies outside the systems of transparency and integration. Death stalks the
protective simulating enterprises from inside and out. Baudrillard as a stylist of
considerable skill and a rhetorician well-steeped in the rhetorical tradition similarly
mobilizes his writing itself as Death in relation to the systems operative within academic
discourse. From the late 1960s on, his writings and books have deviated rather widely
from the conventions of sociological or philosophical genres and academic writing by
reaching into the humanistic essay tradition (long since abandoned) and combining it
with the most current of pressing issues. What constitutes a standard argument within
the humanities and qualitative social sciences, what passes for knowledge and knowledge
formation and construction, depends heavily on the adherence of a given work to these
conventions. Baudrillard’s textual Deaths provide “fatal strategies” intended to stave off
the actual death of thought that can result from routinized, by-the-number, knowledge
formation. The aphoristic style, borrowed most directly from Nietzsche, works in a
nonlinear fashion that nonetheless makes consistent and sustained arguments across his
books as well as within them. Baudrillard teases an idea, settles on a problematic, and
pulls at its various permutations, checking how it might work from one context to
another. As a result, his writing can be simultaneously readable and enjoyable while also
being difficult and frustrating. Like his friend Virilio, he does not develop his argument
in a full or linear fashion, instead allowing for fragments, tangents, and hyperbole to
carry thought off course and place readers in a textual space that is comfortable
(especially if they have read nineteenthcentury philosophers) and discomfiting at the
same time. To this end, he resurrects outmoded philosophical discourse while at the
same time adding to it a late modernist poetic sensibility. The latter quality emerges
most obviously in his deployment of terms as talismans of the moment of writing as well
as terrain themselves for inquiry: the strategic deployment of labels and phrases
intended to make us pay attention to their elasticity and formidable ability to fascinate,
illuminate, and instantiate a stability of unstable phenomena. Baudrillard is always
contemporary, his thoughts being solidly grounded in the present, and his terminology is
always embedded in the current moment. He relies on older essayistic forms to structure
his thoughts and musings, which often appear as thoughts and musings, i.e. slightly
inchoate and coming into focus through the act of writing. The processual quality of his
style injects Death as that which cannot be represented adequately into the deathly
regimes of academic language meted out by rote adherence to genre-driven formulae
within academic discursive practices. In an important sense, Baudrillard posits that
Death is the salvation of theory while also arguing for the salvation that is Death. With
the nuclear sword of Damocles dangling over our heads ever since the explosions at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we have slipped into a constant state of imminent global death
that no longer seems like death, so swift and horrible will it be that it outstrips our
imagination. “If the bomb drops,” he writes in America, “we shall neither have the time
to die nor any awareness of dying” (42). Echoing the neo-Freudian psychoanalyst Ernst
Becker, Baudrillard argues that Death ostensibly has been removed from our horizon in
the American Era, and we, those who follow in America’s global footsteps, have moved
easily and subtly into a state of daily ease and material comfort, buffeted and protected
by a staggering array of tele-technologies, opto-electronics, and international ballistic
missiles all meant to keep Death at bay and survival at the forefront. Lost in this heady
combination of technological, intellectual, and economic materiel mounted for sheer
survival, of course, is life (43). Only that which is alive can die, and our cocooned
embrace of globalization, which in turn cocoons and embraces us, leaves us with an
existence that recalls the prescient horror films of George Romero begun early in the
Cold War: an existence like that of zombies, neither alive nor dead, but frantically and
brainlessly consuming all in sight. Baudrillard rescues Death from its purgatorial
condition of “the not alive” or mere survival. And in order to do so, he takes his cue from
the masses who are the targets of this weaponry and way of life, the enactors of this ethos
of bland avoidance and unthinking consumption. Their wholesale passivity to the
apparatus of survival – from nuclear bunkers to Star Wars – emerges from a weariness
of having been ceaselessly confronted with apocalyptic visions since the first nuclear
explosions in New Mexico and Japan, and they “defend themselves with a lack of
imagination” (America, 44). “The masses’ silent indifference to nuclear pathos (whether
it comes from the nuclear powers or from antinuclear campaigners) is therefore a great
sign of hope,” he asserts, “and a political fact of great import” (44). To understand Death
as immanent within the system and without it, as immanent within bios and zoe and
without it, is to resist the simulation of Death that hovers over our heads in the Cold War
and the War on Terror. The salvation of Death, which is also the salvation of
Baudrillard’s writing, thought, and analyses, provides us with the means of getting this
specific brutal excess back into our collective frame of reference, not for the sake of
nihilism, but to resist the nihilism built into all the projects of utter completion and
realization that have rendered politics, the subject, the object, thought, and theory as
simulation.
Vocational Schools (CTE)
The logic of vocational education is nothing more than an
attempt to order the inherently chaotic nature of our future
existence. Career planning entails the commodification of time
itself that structures the flux of life into a rigid militarism.
- makes a uniqueness claim about how that trend is being reversed in the squo, and so
the aff goes against that. K now has uniqueness, gg.
Sennett 06 (Richard, Centennial Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and
University Professor of the Humanities at New York University. “The Culture of New Capitalism”,
Chapter 1: Bureaucracy, p 22-25, 2006) // IES
Ironically, Schumpeter’s own early analyses of the economy showed that as this militarized, social capitalism
spread, business turned a profit. This was so because while the thirst for a quick dollar, pound,
or franc remained, investors also hungered for more predictable, long-term yields. At the
end of the nineteenth century, the language of investment decisions first took on a
military cast—one which invoked investment campaigns and strategic thinking and, the
pet idea of General Carl von Clausewitz, outcome analysis—for good reason. Sudden profits had
proved illusive, particularly in infrastructure projects like railroad and urban transport construction. In the twentieth
century, workers joined the process of strategic planning; their building societies and
unions aimed equally at stabilizing and guaranteeing the position of workers. The profits
that markets put in jeopardy, bureaucracy sought to repair. Bureaucracy seemed more
efficient than markets. This “search for order,” as the historian Robert Wiebe called it, spread
from business into government and then into civil society. When the lesson of strategic
profit passed into the ideals about effective government, the status of civil servants rose; their
bureaucratic practices were ever more insulated from swings in politics.6 In civil society proper, schools became
increasingly standardized in operation and in content; professions brought
order to the practices of medicine, law, and science. For Weber, all these forms of
rationalizing institutional life, coming originally from a military source, would lead to a
society whose norms of fraternity, authority, and aggression were equally military in
character, though civilian people might not be aware they thought like soldiers . As a general
observer of modern times, Weber feared a twentieth century dominated by the ethos of armed struggle. As a political
economist, Weber argued specifically that the army is a more consequent model for modernity than
the market. Time lay at the center of this military, social capitalism: long-term
and incremental and above all predictable time. This bureaucratic imposition
affected individuals as much as institutional regulations. Rationalized time enabled
people to think about their lives as narratives—narratives not so much of what
necessarily will happen as of how things should happen. It became possible, for instance, to
define what the stages of a career ought to be like, to correlate longterm service in a firm to
specific steps of increased wealth. Many manual workers could for the first time plan how to buy a house. The reality of
business upheavals and opportunities prevented such strategic thinking. In the flux of the real
world, particularly in the flux of the business cycle, reality did not of course proceed according to
plan, but now the idea of being able to plan defined the realm of individual agency and
power. Rationalized time cut deep into subjective life. The German word Bildung names a
process of personal formation which fits a young person for the lifelong
conduct of life. If in the nineteenth century Bildung acquired an institutional frame, in the
twentieth century, the results became concrete, displayed at midcentury in works like William Whyte’s The
Organization Man, C. Wright Mills’s White Collar, and Michel Crozier’s Bureaucracy. Whyte’s view of bureaucratic
Bildung is that steadiness of purpose becomes more important than sudden bursts of ambition within the organization,
which bring only short-term rewards. Crozier’s analysis of Bildung in French corporations dwelt on the ladder as an
imaginative object, organizing the individual’s understanding of himself; one climbs up or
down or remains stationary, but there is always a rung on which to step. The fresh-page thesis
asserts that the institutions which enabled this life-narrative thinking have now “melted into
air.” The militarization of social time is coming apart. There are some obvious
institutional facts on which this thesis is founded. The end of lifetime employment is one
such, as is the waning of careers spent within a single institution; so is the fact, in the
public realm, that government welfare and safety nets have become more short-term and
more erratic. The financial guru George Soros encapsulates such changes by saying that “transactions” have
replaced “relationships” in people’s dealings with one another.7 The immense growth of the world
economy is cited by others as possible only because institutional controls on the flow of goods,
services, and labor have become less coherent; these have enabled an unprecedented number
of migrants to inhabit the so-called gray economies of large cities. The collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989 is cited by
others as putting paid to an institutional order in which military regulation and civil society were indistinguishable. This
debate about institutionalized time is as much about culture as about economics and
politics. It turns on Bildung. Perhaps I can suggest how by recourse to my own research experience.
Impacts
Necropolitics
Now the impact is a necropolitical obsession with the avoidance of death
through the transference of death onto others – this creation of the spectacle is
one that safeguards “us” from “them”. Specifically, Mbembe says that that the
banking model of education itself creates a war for “purity” for the biophilic
obsession within the vital forces which ignores the ways in which the drive for
life affirmation destroys the very possibility for life itself.
Lewis’12 – Tyson Lewis -- Tyson E. Lewis is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Education at the
College of Visual Arts and Design, University of North Texas. – “The Aesthetics of Education” pg 174-178 KZaidi
There is an anxiety
in Freirian scholarship that we will lose our immanent and personable
connections with “the master,” Paulo Freire himself. Thus collections like Memories of Paulo (2010) edited by Tom Wilson,
Peter Park, and Anaida Colón-Muniz emphasize personal stories/encounters with Freire. In his open letter to Freire at the beginning
of the book Pedagogy of Indignation, Balduino A. Andreola states, “On September 19, 1998, during the popular closing celebration
for the First International Paulo Freire Colloquium, in Recife, Nita mentioned that she just couldn’t think of you as being absent ...
you remain our partner in the journey” (Freire 2004b, xxxv). Andreola continues, granting Freire a type of “permanent- presence”
(Freire 2004b, xxxv) inthe world that defies death—a message that his own posthumous letter to
Freire seems to embody. Such work attempts to close the gap between Freire as a historical
person and Freire as a discourse—his discourse must be supplemented by his permanent-
presence as a historical person and likewise his historical person must be continually invoked through his discourse. As such,
there is a movement within Freirian scholarship that fills space opened up by his death with a
proliferation of memories, whose accuracy is “guaranteed” because of proximity to Freire “as he really was.” Inspiration here
is dependent on a certain avoidance of death in the form of memoirs as well as continual
invocations of his bodily presence in the form of photographs on and within books by or about
Freire. In other words, memory returns Freire to life, creating a continuity between his flesh and his words, and
in the process denying any absence instituted by and through the event of death.
This radical critique of death is not simply the result of the longing induced by his passing. The
pedagogy of the oppressed is itself an attempt to challenge death both physically (overcoming the
pain and su ering of oppression) and also ideologically in the form of consciousness-raising. In Pedagogy of the Oppressed,
Freire observes that the pedagogy of oppression is necrophylic. Rather than biophylic or in love with life,
banking education promotes a fetishization of death in the form of a nihilistic fatalism
concerning social and individual transformation (2001b, 77). Banking education separates bios from
politics, from language and action in the public sphere. For Freire the result is an untimely death, a
passive existence in the order of things and a fatalistic outlook on social transformation. In order to
define the parameters of necrophylic pedagogy Freire contrasts his utopian vision with banking education:
“Revolutionary utopia tends to be dynamic rather than static; tends to life rather than death; to the
future as a challenge to man’s creativity rather than as a repetition of the present . . . to dialogue rather than mutism . . .” (1985a,
82). Death is here conceptualized as the negation of life in the form of mutism, repetition, passivity.
Death is, in other words, a silenced existence lacking in words and deeds wherein students see
themselves as passive rather than active agents in their lives. Furthermore, death is an
“anesthesized curiosity” (as discussed in Chapter Four) stunting the student’s inquiry into the way the
world works. In sum, necrophylia is the educational logic of the morbidity of life, draining life of its
creative potential. Freire argues that “In addition to the life-death cycle basic to nature, there is almost an unnatural living
death: life that is denied its fullness” (2001b, 171). The living death of banking education is an existential death that
separates life from itself from within life—a passive life devoid of the meaning and personal
biography that defines bios as an active life in the polis. In short, for Freire, banking education is a form
of pedagogy that ends up “terminating life”(1996, 165) while problem-posing education is fueled by a “love for life”
(1996, 164). In fact, the radical fight today concerns the “biophilic” fight for “purity” (Freire 1997, 83). In this
sense, biophilia is the purification of life from the contaminant of death that, for Freire, is always
characterized as mutism and the end of history/ historical becoming. The new love for life is expressed in Freire’s
theory by a revivification of epistemological curiosity into the nature of reality (see Chapter Three). If banking
education creates the fatalistic condition in which life becomes a form of symbolic death (wherein
world and word are separated), then problem-posing revivifies life by reconnecting it with political activity
and the active construction of knowledge through the proper naming of the world.
Existential death is a form of dehumanization for Freire. Even if the question of life is distinct from
the question of becoming fully human, nevertheless Freire’s characterization of death as a mute,
passive existence recalls his discussion of the state of animal captivation. For Freire, animal life
dialectically reveals its opposite: a living death. Animal existence is “plane, horizontal, and timeless” (Freire
1997, 32) not unlike the state of death itself. If, for Freire “the death of history [and thus of our historicity] ...
negates human beings” (2007, viii) then in a sense, existential death deprives us of life by collapsing the
human into the mute existence of the animal. To live in a world, that world must be perceived as
a process of being and becoming, which is only accessible by humans whose epistemological curiosity is capable of self-
re ection. Lacking the ability to transform ingenious curiosity into epistemological curiosity, the
realm of animal life is not a life at all, and human life is in the last instance the only life that
qualifies as such. This isomorphism between the animal and death enables readers to con ate Freire’s question of life with that
of human striving to overcome the limit of animality. Human death as a nai ̈ve consciousness and animal life as
horizontal, static, and unchanging merge in a zone of indistinction that allows the human to pass
into the animal and the animal into the human, thus creating a zone of indiference upon which
divisions must be drawn all the while troubling this very division from the inside.
In a rather telling anecdote, Alma Flor Ada recalls a conversation with Freire where he once said he enjoyed watching football
because it was “the only moment he could really just watch and not reflect about what was going on” (Wilson, Park, Colón-Muñiz,
8). Freire then laughed and stated “But, who wants to be dead, anyway?” Such an anecdote replays the basic argument outlined
above: a pure passive
existence devoid of speech and thought is a form of living-death that must be
avoided, even if it offers a glimpse of a certain affective pleasure with the game being watched.
This affective attention to the game is not in itself a form of life or a bios but rather a deadening
or loss of self in the moment of animal captivation. To view is to become-animal and thus
undergo a type of de-personalization and de-humanization akin to living death. In this sense,
living death is a jouissance or dirty pleasure that exceeds the ontological vocation of
humanization.
The pedagogy of the oppressed is an attempt to reconnect words to flesh, names to social relationships,
humanity to its historicity—connections that have been severed by the imposition of false images
internalized as objective truths and by ideologies of death. The history that Freire wants to return the
oppressed to is their history of struggle against these images and thus reconnect them to their
ontological vocation as the motors of historical transformation. In other words, life is the romantic
celebration of immanence between word and flesh, where we are at last able to name the word and the world
in one complete moment of liberation. In sum, death must be conquered through an epistemological
curiosity and its attending utopian imagination.
Super cially, it would seem that Freire’s theory corresponds with that of Achille Mbembe (2003) who argues
that the current regime is not biopolitical—as Hardt and Negri claim (2000)— but rather necropolitical.
Obsessed with death, politics now embodies a sovereign decision directly over and against life
itself. Freire’s banking education would thus be the pedagogical logic of necropolitics, creating
conditions where the only outlet for resistance to educational interpellation is to “drop-out” of
school, resulting in a form of educational suicide. Rather than biopolitical investment, death has broken
free from its dialectical entanglements with life to become the overwhelming force of capitalist
appropriation itself. Yet in his attempt to separate life from death and thus necropolitics, Freire’s
logic cannot escape the dialectic that reinscribes death into the heart of his life-affirming
pedagogy. The ban on death is equivalent to the death of death, revealing how biophilic
pedagogy is itself obsessed with death. Thus in his refusal to understand the productive role of death within life, Freire’s
immunizing logic creates an autoimmune disease within the heart of the biophilic attempt to
transcend death (Esposito 2008). The paradox also re-enacts in a different valence the problems with Freire’s
earlier separation of sensation (here characterized as a mute, passive, animal existence) from intelligence (as a
dialogical, active, and human capacity for life). We see Freire cleaving sensation and intelligence, denying that
sensation itself is a kind of somacognition or that seeing is a kind of embodied thinking in its own
right. Once arti cially separated and divided, the pedagogy of the oppressed must help the student awake
from the slumbering stupidity of the senses in order to conquer death and live an active,
intellectual life. Thus the hierarchical division outlined in Chapter Four is replayed here on the existential level of the
question of life against the domination of death. As before, the results of this distinction are contradictory.
The full rami cations of the paradox of immunization become clear once we recognize the active role that death plays in the poetics
of historical knowledge. When Freire
denies the role of death any emancipatory function in education,
he disconnects the historical knowledge of oppression and struggle from what Ranciè re refers to
as the “poetics of knowledge” that exists in the tenuous relation between literature-history- science in the modern era. In
The Names of History (1994), Rancière ghts against two tendencies that have attempted to make history into a pure science.
Chronicles of history foreclose on death through an emphasis on verifiable documents as
“tangible evidence” (as opposed to the spurious words of the poor). Rancière summarizes: “Positivist history [of the chroni-
clers] refuses to confront the absence of its object, that ‘hidden’ without which there is no science and that can’t be reduced to the
archive buried in its files” (1994, 64). Reformers on the other hand embrace
death but only in the figure of
ideological critique and denunciation of mystification (for Freire this would amount to critical consciousness
raising). They fail to see how in their attempt to retrieve the silent witnesses of history, they demand a
certain infallible correlation between speech and place, cognition and recognition that, like the
chroniclers before them, ends up effacing the possibility of historical events. In both cases, death
becomes the heresy that these discourses do not permit. Heresy is “life turned away from the word, turned
away by the word” (Rancière 1994, 73) and thus a narrative predicated on the non-correspondence of flesh and word, on the
glance of the actor on stage rather than the retrospective and belated gaze of the expert. Yet, as Rancière argues, “The
difference proper to history is death; it is the power of death that attaches itself solely to the
properties of the speaker, it is the disturbance that this power introduces into all positive
knowledge. The historian can’t stop effacing the line of death, but also can’t stop tracing it anew.
History has its own life in this alternative throbbing of death and knowledge. It is the science that becomes singular
only by playing on its own condition of impossibility, but ceaselessly transforming it into a
condition of possibility, but also by marking anew, as furtively, as discreetly as can be, the line of
the impossible” (1994, 74–5). The line “of meaning and death” is precisely the line of “historiality and literariness,
without which there would be no place to write history” (Rancière 1994, 76). In other words, death is the sublime beauty
at the heart of historical science that is both the motor for knowledge and its stumbling block,
the pensive detail that shapes the literary dimension of the aesthetics of knowledge. It is the detail
that escapes memory and thus all sense of self- possession and self-recognition. If Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed is
an attempt to create a beautiful, “pure” community of solidarity built out of shared class
interests (a reformist approach to history wherein word and flesh, consciousness and class position are
once again reunited so as to speak the truth of oppression sanctioned by the critical sociologist, philosopher, or critical
pedagogue), then death is the ghost in the machine that prevents full presence while also generating
the need for new translations and performances.
Mastery
The specter haunting education is the desire for complete and utter control.
Modern day education focues on the desire to control and the will to mastery –
this manifests itself in education through processes of disciplinary control over
bodies to foster obedianece – a process which leads to the destruction of all
being when we are placed as parts in the western machine of domination
Allen’16 – Ansgar Allen is lecturer in education at the University of Sheffield, “Education, Mastery and the Marquis de Sade” --
KZaidi
Mastery has us by the throat. Unable to bring things up, prevented from taking things down—if we
swallow, we do so without conviction. Mastery catches and keeps us mid-gasp.
In pursuit of mastery, education fell before its promised transcendence. Mastery claimed to
elevate the educated philosopher above the quotidian, even make the philosopher immune to the world below
and its persecutions. Yet mastery was yoked to its opposite: the enslavement of the philosopher to a philosophical
doctrine. Mastery required discipline and self-control. It subordinated the self to a philosophical
doctrine, wagering the self to an ordinance that promised future sovereignty but demanded
present obedience.
Seeking spiritual direction, early philosophers enslaved themselves to their chosen philosophical school.
Consultations were offered to non-philosophers too, for a fee. Whether a school was joined or merely visited,
the spiritual direction on offer was intended, in its final effects, to allow each candidate to “take
control and become master of [her]himself.”i With Christianity and its selective adoption of ancient philosophy,
self-mastery became “an instrument of subordination” of more complete effect.ii Its voluntary
dimension was reduced as spiritual training came to occupy the whole life of the Christian
subject. The purpose of Christian guidance was to develop a form of introspection that would “fix
more firmly the relationship of subordination”; it would attach its recipients to a regime of power that would take care of
their entire life in all its detail and for the rest of its duration.iii At the same time, the promise of transcendence became
ever more spectral, dependent ultimately on God’s will, against which the strength of will
exhibited by the self- denying Christian was of secondary importance. For at the gates of heaven, God
decides. On earth, the early Christian monk is warned against practising any self- denying ordinance to
excess. We find Cassian recalling tales of monks casting themselves down wells, fasting excessively, or crossing deserts without
food in an effort to demonstrate just how catastrophically they had achieved self-mastery, purging themselves of natural inclinations
and desires.iv These were not acts of extreme piety; they were symptomatic of pride. And pride is of the devil.
With extreme asceticism the old but sinuous link

connecting the promise of mastery to the necessity of
enslavement calcified, and then broke. Early Christian ascetic practitioners, those Cassian warned against, so
perfected their self-denials that they became increasingly indifferent to pain and discomfort, removing themselves beyond the grasp
of power. Through enslavement they reached its opposite denying themselves so completely that
little remained for power to attack. In this advanced form asceticism posed a challenge to
Christianity, delivering its practitioners beyond the influence of its institutions and teachings. The most potent ascetics
effectively reversed the self-denials of monastic obedience, transforming these denials into a form of “egoistic self-mastery” that
denied access to external power.v
To secure their foothold monastic and ecclesiastical institutions had to bring self-mastery back
within their control. They would purge themselves of all vagrant, self-sufficient, ascetic heresies,
and bring all miracles, marvels, punishments and self-flagellations back into the orbit of their
influence. Eventually self-mastery would slip its “doctrinal moorings” and migrate to a secular context.vi Education
remains in awe of mastery. It preaches denial, yokes its members to the pursuit of mastery, but
will not allow that mastery to become realised as such. Mastery haunts education as its most
enduring spectral promise.
Just what exactly education promises mastery of, changes: from ancient self in pursuit of
wisdom, to medieval body desiring knowledge of God, to modern subject of autonomous
reason, and finally, to the promise that we might one day master our own performativities. By
definition such mastery is rarely, if ever achieved. Our nihilism is the product of this framework, this
belief that education requires higher objectives, a belief so well entrenched that as each objective comes
under attack another is substituted in its place. When substitutes are left wanting, we are launched into
overproduction. For we scarcely know how to operate let alone educate without the promise of
mastery. Once described as the “destiny of two millennia of Western history,” nihilism is our unavoidable
affliction.vii Those educators claiming to exist beyond its reach are in denial. There is no quick and easy escape. We
are trapped in the digestive tract of Western history. Attached to a promise that is never
delivered, we are its disappointments, you and I. We are debased and we debase ourselves, desiring
mastery through our enslavement.
Racism
Racism is rooted in necropolitics - The government identifies the “others” and
displaces violence upon them through the mobilization of the war machine
Witwatersrand, Necropolitics, Pgs. 16-17, 2003)//Cummings
Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death I turn now to sovereignty expressed , ,
predominantly as the right to kill For the purpose of my argument I relate Foucault’s notion of
. ,
biopower to two other concepts the state of exception and the state of siege 16 I examine those
: .
trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have become the
normative basis of the right to kill In such instances power and not necessarily state power
. , ( )
continuously refers and appeals to exception and a fictionalized notion of the enemy , emergency, . It also labors to
and fictionalized enemy In other words the question is What is the relationship
produce that same exception, emergency, . , :
between politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency? In
Foucault’s formulation of it biopower appears to function through dividing people into those
,
who must live and those who must die Operating on the basis of a split between the living and .
the dead such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field which it takes control of and
, —
vests itself in This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups the
. ,
subdivision of the population into subgroups and the establishment of a biological caesura ,
between the ones and the others This is what Foucault labels with the at first sight familiar term
. ( )
racism or for that matter racism gures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely
.17 That race ( ) fi
justifiable more so than class-thinking the ideology that defines history as an economic
. After all, (
struggle of classes race has been the ever present shadow in Western political thought and
),
practice especially when it comes to imagining the inhumanity of or rule over

, Referring to , , foreign peoples.
both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in general Arendt locates their roots ,
in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is ultimately
linked to the politics of death in Foucault’s terms racism is above all a technology aimed at
.18 Indeed, ,
permitting the exercise of biopower “that old sovereign right of death.” 19 In the economy of
,
biopower the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the
,
murderous functions of the state It is “the condition for the acceptability of putting to
. , he says,
death.”20 Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of (droit de glaive)
biopower are inscribed in the way all modern states function they can be seen as ;21 indeed,
constitutive elements of state power in modernity the Nazi state was the most . According to Foucault,
complete example of a state exercising the right to kill made the management . This state, he claims, ,
protection and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill By biological
, .
extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy in organizing the war against its adversaries ,
and at the same time exposing its own citizens to war the Nazi state is seen as having opened
, , ,
the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill which culminated in the project of the ,
“final solution.” In doing so it became the archetype of a power formation that combined the
,
characteristics of the racist state the murderous state and the suicidal state
, , .
Subject Formation
The investement within the soverign power of the state to solve for educational
problems colludes in the process of liberal subject formation by which the US
necropolitical system of domination sustains itself through a creation of a
vicious power structure based on the colonizer dominating the colonized
Mbembe’01 – Achille Mbembe – Professor Achille Mbembe, born in Cameroon, obtained his Ph.D in History at the
Sorbonne in Paris in 1989 and a D.E.A. in Political Science at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Paris). He was Assistant Professor of
History at Columbia University, New York, from 1988-1991, a Senior Research Fellow at the Brookings Institute in Washington, D.C.,
from 1991 to 1992, Associate Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania from 1992 to 1996, Executive Director of the
Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (Codesria) in Dakar, Senegal, from 1996 to 2000. Achille was also a
visiting Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001, and a visiting Professor at Yale University in 2003. He has written
extensively in African history and politics, including La naissance du maquis dans le Sud-Cameroun (Paris, Karthala, 1996). On the
Postcolony was published in Paris in 2000 in French and the English translation was published by the University of California Press,
Berkeley, in 2001. In 2015, Wits University Press published a new, African edition. He has an A1 rating from the National Research
Foundation. – “On the Postcolony” -- KZaidi
The third characteristic of commandement was the lack

of distinction between ruling and civilizing. In sub-Saharan
Africa colonization met the problems of order and of increasing the supply of goods in its own
way. Here, the form of sovereignty that applied both to people and things and to the actual
public domain constantly muddled the imperatives of morality, economics, and politics. Colonial
arbitrariness notoriously sought to integrate the political with the social and the ethical, while
closely subordinating all three to the requirements of production and output. Im- proving the
lot of the colonized, and making equipment and goods (trade or non-trade) available to them, was justified
by the fact that they were to be enrolled into the structures of production. For a long time, the pre-
ferred means of achieving that integration were, not freedom of contract, but coercion and corruption;
social policies tried by successive administrations were heavily determined by normative and disciplinary concerns, and were, in
fact, designed
to alter the moral behavior of the colonized. This is what the language of the time
gave the apparently distinct but actually interchangeable labels of “taming” and “grooming.” To carry
through the two tasks together (control of the indigenes along with their— potentially disruptive—enrollment in the market
mechanism), commandement introduced extensive surveillance machinery and an impressive
array of punishments and fines for a host of offenses. This is the purpose behind the regulations
governing forced labor, compulsory crop production, education, women, the family, marriage and sexuality, vagrancy,
health and disease prevention, even prison policy.12 Within this design for subjection, the colonized had no
rights against the state. He or she was bound to the power structure like a slave to a master, and
paternalism had no compunction about expressing itself behind the ideological mask of benevolence and the
tawdry cloak of humanism.
The social policies of postcolonial African regimes have also been

conceived on the basis of an imaginary of
the state making it the organizer of public happiness. As such, the state arrogated the possibility
of exercising an unlimited hold over every individual—although in practice, whether in colonial times or since,
the outsize place of the state was never total. Neither colonial commandement nor the
postcolonial state was able to bring about the total dismantling, still less the disappearance, of
every corporation and all lower-order legitimacies bringing people and communities together at the
local level. To facilitate trade and ensure the security of their property, social actors continued to
have recourse to those legitimacies and lower-order institutions that they kept reinventing, thus
providing these with new significations and new functions.13 Unlike certain Western experiences, the
extension of the role of the state and the market was thus not automatically achieved through
the disruption of old social ties. In a number of cases, state domination—or the étatisa- tion of society—was
achieved through the old hierarchies and old patronage networks. Two consequences of this process
merit mention. On the one hand, it paved the way, more than occurred in other parts of the world, to an unprecedented
privatization of public prerogatives. On the other, it not only allowed a degree of socialization of state
power generally poorly understood by analysts,14 but also the correlative socialization of
arbitrariness—the two movements (privatization of public prerogatives and socialization of arbitrariness) becoming, in
this process, the cement of postcolonial African authoritarian regimes.
Moreover, throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, governing
in a colony meant first and
foremost having commandement over the native. “Civilization” initially made its presence felt
in its brutal form, war, through the act of conquest—that is, the right to kill and make force prevail.
Exercising command thus meant to compel people to perform “obligations.” It also meant, as in an army, to proceed by
orders and demands. Commandement itself was simultaneously a tone, an accoutrement, and an
attitude. Power was reduced to the right to demand, to force, to ban, to compel, to authorize,
to pun- ish, to reward, to be obeyed—in short, to enjoin and to direct. The key characteristic of colonial
rule was thus to issue orders and have them carried out.
The fourth
property of this sort of sovereignty is its circularity. The institutions with which it
equipped itself, the procedures that it invented, the techniques that it employed, and the
knowledge on which it rested were not deployed to attain any particular public good. Their
primary purpose was absolute submission. The objective of this sort of sovereignty was that
people obey. In this sense, and beyond ideological justifications, colonial sovereignty was circular.15
VTL
The AFF’s obsession with survival ensured through our
productive work in debate negates the essence and possibility of
life.
Vaneigem ‘94 /Raoul, Leader of the Situationist International, The Movement of
the Free Spirit, Trans. R. Cherry and I. Patterson, Zone Books: New York, pg. 16-17/
Many observations that were considered ludicrous in 1967 have now become
commonplace. For it is obvious today that "surviving" has so far prevented us from
"living"; that man's insistence on making himself useful in his work is actually of little
use to him in his own life, and even kills him. It is clear, too, that life usually ends
precisely because it has never begun (which most people realize only in their last
moments); and that the price of representation is paid for in terms of world-weariness
and self-contempt. These ideas are already so deeply entrenched that, in the absence of
any real lived experience to dispel them, they still nourish not only nostalgic theorizing
but even the most fashionably glib talk. This vicious cycle continues out of an old inertia:
the need to work in order to survive compensates for the life lost in wage labor (an even
costlier form of survival). The effect on consciousness is fatal, with two sets of prejudices
contributing to the mortification: in the first, survival takes precedence over living; and
in the second, the exercise of the intellect – through critical analysis of society, of
political issues, of cultural decay, of the future of humanity – takes the place of existence,
while the body is left to express its discontent through sickness and malaise. And one
need not get very close to these ideas to detect a whiff of the cassock. 3 The economy is
everywhere that life is not: but however intertwined the two may become, they simply do
not meld, and one can never be confused with the other. Most people do not really live:
their overly precise calculations about money, work, exchange, guilt and power govern
their lives so thoroughly and irremediably that the only thing to escape this bloodlessly
cold calculus is the warm pathos of sweat and tears – which is all that is left to take on
the aspects of human reality.
Survival has become the hymn of capitalist enslavement after

the death of god. The drive to survive, guided by our belief in the
capitalist god rationality, is emptying humanity of its life force
through libidinal alienation.
Vaneigem 1994
/Raoul, Leader of the Situationist International, The Movement of the Free Spirit, Trans.
R. Cherry and I. Patterson, Zone Books: New York, pg. 23-25/
But this version of nature separated the world from life and reduced the world to the
market system . With God thus brought into conformity with nature, he was sold off at a
discount to a religion that was now just one ideology among others; and so he became
the last shoddy remnant of the heavenly order under which had first emerged the
system of survival that humanity imposed on itself at some specific point in its
development. God is dead as a sovereign entity, as master of the world, but he lives on
in the religious form that gave birth to him by submitting mankind to economic
alienation: thought separated from life; or the body weakened or broken in the name of
labor. As he analyzed the reproduction and self-destruction of commodities Marx never
asked himself how far his personal behavior obeyed economic reflexes. His critique is
the product of an intellectualism that reproduces the power of the mind over the body; it
is the work of a lasting influence of God on the material world. However liberating its
intentions it can only effect changes in a world where commodities are everywhere and
humanity is nowhere; it is a world where abstraction, being the ultimate and initial form
of the divine, empties individuals of their vital substance, before crushing them under
the weight of forces they are too weak to withstand. The hordes of bureaucrats, now in
their twilight, wrestle to save an economy that can do no more than reinvest its
successive failures into even greater losses, proving that the age of sacrifice is at an end.
But the form that binds individuals to a society hostile to life can be broken only by the
emancipation of life . 9 While constantly changing, man's exploitation of man has
remained essentially the same. Economic necessity, which directly exiles us from life,
perpetuates the decree of the gods who expelled our ancestors from the domain of
pleasure. Immutable frontiers delimit the closed universe of exchange in which the
commodity evolves. Form, whose contours always shape a supposedly unique reality,
was depicted as a divine sphere even before it took on the simultaneously concrete and
abstract character of a bureaucratic organization, turning on its own axis, and drawing
everyone into its gravitational field. The heavenly economy has given way to the earthly
one, economic thought to economic materiality, spiritual alienation to bodily alienation,
collective sacrifice to individual sacrifice. The separations remain as sharp as they have
always been, but today the wound is plain to see. Just as bath water spirals faster and
faster as the last of it is drawn down the drain, the whirlpool of life empties at its fastest
as the economy uses up the final resources of libidinal energy. The only ones not to hear
its final gurglings are the statisticians and computer scientists who hear only the din of
their own calculating. Although all commodity-based civilizations, without exception,
have placed a prohibition on pleasure and sexual enjoyment, the most urgent appeals of
profitability now invite us to plunge into hedonism, to consume pleasure piecemeal and
pay for it in installments. The last unopened market verges on the free play of desire.
So the last die is about to be cast on the same table where the first was thrown, so long
ago, under the eye of the gods.
We must give up on our obsession with survival to release life

from the suffocating security paradigm that consigns existence
to the prison of work and paranoia. In order to reclaim the value
to our lives, we must meet the political demands and blackmail
of war presented by the AFF with the ecstatic joyful laughter of
inner experience.
Vaneigem ‘94 /Raoul, Leader of the Situationist International, The Movement of
the Free Spirit, Trans. R. Cherry and I. Patterson, Zone Books: New York, pg. 246-249/
Right now, I can think of nothing as important, yet, at the same time, more
unimportant, than survival. I hope it ceases to be a priority, as if surviving were
necessary first in order to live later. (Experience has shown, however, that allegiance to
survival kills life as surely as work destroys creativity.) The point is not to neglect
survival entirely – how could we - but to reverse the perspective so that survival becomes
a consequence of the will to live rather than the condition for it. The way in which health
issues are being approached now suggests a certain awareness of the claims of living.
For a long time illness and the fear it inspired governed health. In the struggle against
the torments that endlessly assailed it health was a matter for witch doctors, healers
and physicians. Every illness set off a system of panic and alarm that men of science
encouraged whenever they intervened to allay its effects. But now it is obvious to most
people that the doctor's curative power and his arsenal of chemicals are often ineffective,
even harmful, if patients are not energetically committed to wanting to live, motivated
not by a refusal to suffer but by a will to enjoy themselves to the fullest. The idea of
vitality also makes no sense if the fears accompanying the preoccupations of survival -
finding enough money or credit to get food, clothing and a place to live - do not give way
to a dialectic of life, to the demands of desires rooted in the heart, to an existence that
reveals its uniqueness. This uniqueness lies in the exuberance in which positive and
negative, pleasure and displeasure, harmony and discord throb with the rhythm of life
until, out of breath, they run their course. But it is an end that has nothing in common
with the death that governs the society of survival, whose withered state is the distinct
sign of both beings and things. Everyone, without exception, is an alchemist, distilling
his own substance at every moment. But the magnum opus is inverted and corrupted:
the best becomes the worst, creativity becomes work, the richness of being dwindles into
possession, authenticity turns into appearance, agony begins at birth. The millenarian
incitement to produce one's own unhappiness has so thoroughly impregnated the world
of the imagination that everything from art to daydreaming consists of negative
scenarios, doomed love affairs, inevitable failures, inevitable obsolescence, bitter
victories or bliss in ignorance. The only way to remedy the lassitude brought on by
survival is through a treatment, focusing on negativity, that uses alchemy to rid life of the
effects of survival, radically remaking the human from what is most human: namely the
search for pleasure. The construction of a nature emancipated from the mechanisms by
which it is denatured can be seen in the laughter and amused incomprehension with
which the younger generations greet the political masquerade, the blackmail of war and
insecurity, the manifestations of authority, racist and sexist attitudes, expressions of
contempt, and the inflexibility imposed by the worship of the militarized commodity
market, the foundation of our wonderful civilization. As for squandering one's last
energies in an attempt to reintegrate oneself into the misery of work, or walking
willingly into the trap of a computerized social world, these choices must be left to those
irretrievably conditioned to poverty. For the rest of us, a good watchword would be:
"The minimum of survival in the service of a maximum of life.” The unavoidability of
negotiating the meshes of the commodity system - the necessity of obtaining a modicum
of money - should only encourage us to exploit to the hilt whatever facilities offer
themselves that can help us get the time to pursue the pleasure of belonging to ourselves
and the pleasure of creating. While it may be temporary, a solution that allows salaried
workers to take more leaves of absence, or that lets unemployment money go toward
keeping a garden, seems a better use of the national debt than investing in a sluggish
economy or subsidizing a school for criminals by allocating funds to an army that seems
more useless and absurd than ever. If life was able to resist the oppression of a
sovereign economy, it can surely triumph, today, over an economy that is falling into
ruin. And if the need to survive threatens modern cities with something as ancient as
famine, why shouldn't the revulsion provoked by a system of profitoriented inhumanity
encourage the foundation of its absolute opposite: immediate enjoyment with nothing
expected in return? Abandoned factories will one day be transformed into creative
workshops capable of supplying life's desires with whatever material support - no matter
how luxurious - they might require.
War
War is an essential feature of the postcolonial state
If the relations between life and death the politics of cruelty and the symbolics of profanity are , ,
blurred in the plantation system it is notably in the colony and under the apartheid regime that
,
there comes into being a peculiar terror formation I will now turn to 37 The most original feature .
of this terror formation is its concatenation of biopower the state of exception and the state of , ,
siege Crucial to this concatenation is

. the selection of races the prohibition of , once again, race.38 In fact, in most instances, ,
mixed marriages even the extermination of vanquished peoples are to and their first
, forced sterilization,
testing ground in the colonial world Here we see the first syntheses between massacre and .
bureaucracy that incarnation of Western rationality 39 Arendt develops the thesis that there is a
, .
link between national-socialism and traditional imperialism the colonial conquest . According to her,
revealed a potential for violence previously unknown What one witnesses in World War II is the .
extension to the “civilized” peoples of Europe of the methods previously reserved for the
“savages.” That the technologies which ended up producing Nazism should have originated in
the plantation or in the colony or that on the contrary Foucault’s thesis , — —Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series of
subjugation of the body

mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formations ( is , health regulations, social Darwinism, eugenics, medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race) ,
in the end A fact remains

, irrelevant. the colony represents the site
, though: in modern philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary,
where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law and (ab legibus solutus)
where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war without end.” Indeed such a view ,
corresponds to Carl Schmitt’s definition of sovereignty at the beginning of the twentieth century ,
the power to decide on the state of exception To properly assess the efficacy of the colony as
namely, .
a formation of terror we need to take a detour into the European imaginary itself as it relates to
,
the critical issue of the domestication of war and the creation of a European juridical order Jus (
publicum Europaeum). At the basis of this order were two key principles The first postulated the .
juridical equality of all states This equality was notably applied to the right to wage war the
. (
taking of life). The right to war meant two things On the one hand to kill or to conclude peace . ,
was recognized as one of the preeminent functions of any state It went hand in hand with the .
recognition of the fact that no state could make claims to rule outside of its borders the . But conversely,
state could recognize no authority above it within its own borders On the other hand the state . , , for its
undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to attribute rational objectives to the very act of
part,
killing The second principle related to the territorialization of the sovereign state that is to the
. , ,
determination of its frontiers within the context of a newly imposed global order the Jus . In this context,
publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between on the one hand those parts of the , ,
globe available for colonial on the other is crucial in

appropriation and, , Europe itself (where the Jus publicum was to hold sway).40 This distinction, as we will see,
terms of assessing the efficacy of the colony as a terror formation a legitimate war is . Under Jus publicum, , to a large
a war conducted by one state against another or

extent, a war between “civilized” states The , more precisely, .
centrality of the state in the calculus of war derives from the fact that the state is the model of
political unity a principle of rational organization the embodiment of the idea of the universal
, , , and a
In the same context colonies are similar to the frontiers

moral sign. , . They are inhabited by “savages.” The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not
They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign

created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars between regular armies.
subjects (citizens) who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal.” 41 It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In sum,
colonies are zones in which war and disorder internal and external figures of the political , , stand side by side or
the colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of
alternate with each other. As such,
judicial order can be suspended the zone where the violence of the state of exception is
—
deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.” That colonies might be ruled over in absolute
lawlessness stems from the racial denial of any common bond between the conqueror and the
native In the eyes of the conqueror savage life is just another form of animal life
. , , a horrifying experience, something alien
what makes the savages different from other human beings is less the
beyond imagination or comprehension. In fact, according to Arendt,
color of their skin than the fear that they behave like a part of nature Nature , that they treat nature as their undisputed master.
thus remains in all its majesty an overwhelming reality compared to which they appear to be
, ,
phantoms The savages are

, unreal and ghostlike. the specifically human reality
, as it were, “natural” human beings who lack the specifically human character, , “so that
when European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder.”
Alts
Art
Our affirmation of generative politics of nonknowledge stems
from Van Gogh’s work which helps to traverse the walls between
knowledge and nonknowledge, between real and the fake. This
corporeal rip and blurring of lines within the educational
systems dichotomies creates affective resistance and changes
the very modes of rationality and what it means to be “sane”.
Artaud says that this process is one that creates material shifts
in the bodily manifestations of violence.
Murray’14 Ros Murray – Leverhulm Research Fellow @ Queen Mary – PhD on Artaud “Antonin Artaud – The
Scum of the Soul” pg 125-127 2014 -- KZaidi
To return to Artaud’s frequent references to agricultural activities such as ploughing,

hoeing, reaping or sowing to describe how he engages with the surface of the page, these
find their inspiration in the work of Van Gogh. Artaud’s 1947 publication Van Gogh le suicidé de la
société (Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society) was an enraged response to an article written by
a psychiatrist, Dr Beer, published in the weekly journal Arts, in which Beer describes Van Gogh’s work as the work of
someone who is mentally ill. Artaud
produced this furious, beautifully written homage to Van
Gogh’s work, which reads as much a response to his own pathologisation as to that of
Van Gogh. This text represents one of Artaud’s most vehement and successful protests
against not only psychiatry itself, but also any potential psychoanalytic readings of his
own texts, seeming once again to anticipate and undermine such an obvious critical
response.
Artaud identifies a sense of brooding apocalypse in Van Gogh’s paintings, writing of the way
they portray a ‘sensation d’occulte étranglée’ (‘sensation of strangled occult’).19 He transforms Van
Gogh’s paintings into bodies, emphasising their synesthetic properties and the visceral
corporeal forces they mobilise, they are ‘remise à même la vue, la ouïe, le tact, l’arôme’ (‘restored
directly to sight, hearing, touch, smell’).20 Whilst Artaud here seems, as with his adaptations of
Lewis Carroll, to ingest and regurgitate Van Gogh’s work to produce it anew, he argues that Van
Gogh carries out similarly embodied transformations of his raw material, nature: ‘Van
Gogh est peintre parce qu’il a recolleté la nature, qu’il l’a comme retranspirée et fait suer’ (‘Van Gogh is a painter
because he recollected nature, because he re-perspired it and made it sweat’).21 In what has
since become Van Gogh’s most famous painting, Artaud describes how he sees ‘le visage rouge sanglant du
peintre venir à moi, dans une muraille de tournesols éventrés’ (‘the blood-red face of the painter coming
toward me, in a wall of eviscerated sunflowers’).22 Van Gogh’s work is rendered violent,
interspersed with Artaudian blows, hammering, shredding, collisions, jostling, tearing,
welding, nerves and the ‘météorique d’atomes’ (‘meteoric bombardment of atoms’).23
Van Gogh is, according to Artaud, picking and chiselling away at his own subjectile, that of the
canvas but also nature itself rendered a surface to be torn through in order to reveal the
forces at work behind it. Artaud quotes a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother in which he describes how he
envisages the act of drawing:
Qu’est-ce que dessiner? Comment y arrive-t-on? C’est l’action de se frayer un passage à travers un mur de fer invisible,
qui semble se trou- ver entre ce qu’on sent et ce que l’on peut. Comment doit-on traverser ce mur, car il ne sert de rien d’y
frapper fort? On doit miner ce mur et le traverser à la lime, lentement et avec patience à mon sens.
(What is drawing? How does one do it? It is the act of working one’s way through an
invisible wall of iron which seems to lie between what one feels and what one can do. How
is one to get through this wall, for it does no good to use force? In my opinion, one must
undermine the wall and file one’s way through, slowly and with patience.)24
Yet in Artaud’svision of Van Gogh’s work, it seems that this invisible wall is not
undermined or slowly and patiently filed, but exploded, bombarded onto the surface of
the canvas, in an act designed to ‘faire jaillir une force tournante, un élément arraché en plein coeur’
(‘make a whirling force, an element torn right out of the heart, gush forth ’).25 Artaud’s
subjectile is inspired by Van Gogh’s description of the invisible wall, which recalls the
immense boundaries Artaud identified in his early texts between the body, or what one
really feels, and its expression in words, through poetry. In fact, Artaud seems at times to
read Van Gogh’s work as if it were a linguistic text, the brush strokes or dashes and
marks on the canvas becoming forms of punctuation, as he describes ‘l’épouvantable pression
élémentaire d’apostrophes, de stries, de virgules, de barres’ (‘the awful elementary pressure of apostrophes, hyphens,
commas and dashes’).26 As readers, we
might be tempted to read Artaud’s reading of Van Gogh
back into his own drawings, and see the dots and lines as punctuation marks, an
expression of visual grammar in a move that both merges together and disrupts the
relationship between drawing and written word.
TAG
Murray’14 Ros Murray – Leverhulm Research Fellow @ Queen Mary – PhD on Artaud “Antonin Artaud – The
Scum of the Soul” pg 134-139 2014 -- KZaidi
From August 1946 onwards Artaud began working on a series of portraits of his friends, which,
as we will see, seemed to distinguish the face from the rest of the body. He wrote a text called ‘Le Visage
humain’ (‘The Human Face’), originally intended to go in the catalogue for an exhibition of
his drawings at the Galerie Pierre in July 1947, republished in the review L’Éphémère in 1970. Here
Artaud writes that the face is ‘une force vide, un champ de mort / La vieille revendication révolutionnaire d’une
forme qui n’a jamais correspondu à son corps, qui partait pour être autre chose que le corps’ (‘an empty force, a
field of death. The old revolutionary demand for a form which has never corresponded to
its body, which left to be something other than the body’).43 Once again the question of force
and form emerges; for Artaud, the face is always in search of its true form, and is an
empty force moving towards death. It is the artist’s preoccupation, he writes, to save the
face from death, not by accurately reproducing it but ‘en lui rendant ses propres traits’ (‘by giving
its own features back to it’).44 The French word ‘traits’ used here translates as features but also as traces, lines
or strokes, relevant to Artaud’s scribbled pencil lines and the way that they merge with his sitters’ features,
disrupting the distinction between portrait and face, or paper and skin.
The ‘pas encore’ (‘not yet’) that motivates all of Artaud’s work can also be applied to the face ,
as it reoccurs four times in this text: ‘les traits du visage humain tels qu’ils sont n’ont pas encore trouvé la forme qu’ils
indiquent et désignent’ (‘the
features of the human face as they are have not yet found the form
that they indicate’), ‘le visage humain n’a pas encore trouvé sa face’ (‘the human face has not yet
found its face’), ‘n’a pas encore commencé à dire ce qu’il est et ce qu’il sait’ (‘has not yet begun to say
what it is that it knows’), and finally ‘je ne suis pas encore sûr des limites auxquelles le corps du moi humain
peut s’arrêter’ (‘I am not yet sure of the limits where the human self can stop’).45 Many of the
faces that recur throughout his portraits are those of his chosen army of ‘filles du cœur à naître’ (‘unborn
daughters of the heart’), such as Yvonne Allendy, yet to be born according to Artaud, but in reality at this point
already dead. Rather than trying to give the face an impossible form that it has ‘not yet’
found, we might see Artaud’s work as maintaining this perpetual unrealisable or virtual
force, by rendering the process visible.
Van Gogh, he writes, is the only artist to succeed in rendering the forces of the face explicit in
a portrait: ‘Le seul Van Gogh a su tirer d’une tête humaine un portrait qui soit la fusée explosive du battement d’un
cœur éclaté. / Le sien. [...] le visage de ce boucher avide, projeté comme en coup de canon à la surface la plus extrême
de la toile’ (‘only
van Gogh was able to draw out of a human head a portrait which was the
explosive rocket of the beating of a shattered heart / his own [...] this face of an avid
butcher, projected like a cannon shot onto the most extreme surface of the canvas’).46 Yet this is still not a
form, for Artaud sees Van Gogh as bursting it onto the surface of the page, and we are
reminded of the numerous cannons that populate Artaud’s own drawings or the holes in
the spells which are like remnants of an explosion. Artaud is interested in the face
precisely because it is covered in holes: ‘la face humaine telle qu’elle est se cherche encore avec deux yeux,
un nez, une bouche et les deux cavités auriculaires qui répondent aux trous des orbites comme les quatre ouvertures du
caveau de la prochaine mort’ (‘thehuman face as it is is still searching with two eyes, a nose, a
mouth and two auricular cavities which correspond to the holes of orbits like the four
openings of the burial vault of approaching death’).47 The holes in the spells take on a new
meaning, as facial cavities, rendering visible the deadly forces at work that at once deny all sensation, like empty
sockets without organs to perceive with, yet also render this absence of sensation visible, and tangible.
Artaud’s idea that the face does not correspond to the body perhaps explains why the
figures that appear throughout his drawings are nearly always without faces, and why,
correspondingly, very few of his portraits have bodies (one notable exception is La Projection du véritable
corps (The Projection of the True Body), made shortly before his death in 1948). There is a distinct
variation in Artaud’s drawing style between the drawings and the portraits. Whilst the
drawings tend to look like diagrams, containing geometrical forms or stick figures, and
often almost unrecognisable body parts, the portraits depict recognisable faces of many of his friends:
Jacques Prevel, Jany de Ruy, Pierre Loeb, Roger Blin, Paule Thévenin, Minouche Pastier, Colette Thomas and Arthur
Adamov, amongst others.
But if the portraits bear some resemblance to the people that they depict, they too display a preoccupation
with force, and with a violent disruption of any sense of the finished form. In many of
them one has the impression of being confronted with an image of decay, for example in the
portraits of Jacques Prevel, Mania Oïfer, Paule Thévenin and Henri Pichette. Those who were unlucky
enough to have been chosen as sitters must have felt like they had been brutally exposed
to an image of their own mortality. Jacques Germain describes Mania Oïfer’s reaction when she saw the
portrait Artaud had done of her: ‘elle a été épouvan- tée’ (‘she was terrified’).48 There are also portraits in which parts
of the face are quite literally rubbed out, as if effaced, such as the portraits of Colette
Thomas and Colette Allendy, and many of the faces are covered in scribbles, and heavy
marks, nails and bolts boring through the skin. Rather like the drawings, they look like
unfinished sketches from which a proper portrait is still to be made.
The most striking of all are Artaud’s self-portraits. Curiously, Artaud’s own face only
appears at two stages in his work: at the very beginning, with a couple of undated sketches assumed
to be from some time between 1915 and 1920, and at the very end, where a ravaged, skeletal figure
emerges, sometimes amongst others in the portraits, sometimes intertwined with texts in the
notebooks, and sometimes alone on the page, merging with the stains and holes in its surface. It is
here that the work of death is most evident, as Artaud resembles a corpse in the process
of decomposition, his skull clearly visible beneath his wispy hair and his emaciated face marked by heavy, black
pencil lines and dots. Once again, the face is often deformed to the extent that it looks like a
scribble, emphasising the materiality of the paper.
In a chapter on Artaud’s
portraits included in a catalogue of Artaud’s work for an exhibition at
the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris in 2006–7, Jean-Luc Nancy writes about the
face as pressed up against
the surface of the page to such an extent that it suffocates. He points out that in all of
Artaud’s portraits his lips are clammed shut, as if incapable of communication: ‘Un grand
silence entre ces lèvres si minces que ne cesseront pas de barrer tous ses portraits de la cicatrice du silence. Car il est
fermé, bloqué, il est blindé à la parole qui s’échange’ (‘a
great silence between these very thin lips
which will not stop blocking all the portraits with the scar of silence. For he is closed, frozen,
armoured against the exchange of words’).49 Yet he also writes that Artaud’s face emerges ‘comme un projecteur,
comme une lampe d’interrogatoire’ (‘like a projector, like an interrogation lamp’).50 We might ask what
kind of a sign Artaud’s face is in his self-portraits, and what it can communicate. For
Nancy suggests here that whilst it is condemned to silence, it either accuses or demands
something of the viewer. He writes of Artaud’s face as an emblem or symbol, suggesting that it
has a representative quality, or that it symbolising suffering, as if Artaud were a Christ-like figure. But he also writes of the
impossibility of Artaud’s face being represented, arguing that it is simply exposed.51 To
be exposed is to be at
the surface, and Nancy suggests that what the self-portraits display is the act of sticking
or pressing on the surface, rather than the presence of a figure that might be called
Artaud.52 In fact Nancy is paraphrasing Artaud’s words throughout, as Artaud writes ‘le corps actuel n’est qu’un
plaquage’ (‘the actual body is only a plating’),53 and ‘je suis fermé, bloqué / je suis blindé à la langue de
l’être’ (‘I am closed, frozen, armoured against the language of being’).54
Like the spells, theportraits also put into play a series of contradictions: between surface
and depth, because they appear both merged with the surface of the page, but also
invested with a sense of depth that is absent in the drawings; between presence and
absence; the abstract (a sense of suffering) and the concrete (Artaud’s own face);
resemblance and difference; and silence and the urge to communicate. What these contradictions
seem to announce with a sense of urgency is the idea of existence at the very limit
between life and death, or as Nancy writes ‘à la limite de lui-même, à la limite de son image’ (‘at the limit
of his self, at the limit of his image’).55 In a literal sense, Artaud really was at this limit, as he
was drawing his self-portraits shortly before he died and uncannily one of these
portraits, initially given to Paule Thévenin (and used to illustrate the cover of this book), is dated December 1948,56
nine months after Artaud’s death, as if his death marked the beginning of a pregnancy from which this frightening work
was born.
It is thissense of an experience of existing at the limit, under the constant threat of
annihilation, which most clearly comes across in Artaud’s graphic output. Firstly perhaps in a material
sense this is evident in the importance of deformation and decomposition for Artaud,
where he always sought to create a sense of incompletion. With the spells the limits of the
object are also difficult to define; it is unclear where the spell ends and where the letter
begins, or which part of the spell is a spell, and the idea that they are invested with magical powers suggests that they
are intended to expand beyond their own materiality. If they have a mimetic relationship to the body
this is as an anatomy in the continual process of merging with and withdrawing from the
other. Artaud explores what the limit of the artwork might be by insisting that his
drawings and portraits are not art, refusing what he sees as traditional modes of composition, writing in ‘Le
Visage humain’: ‘J’en ai d’ailleurs définitivement brisé avec l’art, le style ou le talent dans tous les dessins que l’on verra
ici. Je veux dire que malheur à qui les considérerait comme des œuvres d’art, des œuvres de simulation esthétique de la
réalité’ (‘I’ve
definitively broken with art, style or talent in these drawings that you see
here. I want to say that there will be hell to pay for whoever considers them works of art, works of aesthetic
stimulation of reality’).57 Just as in his written work, the œuvre is refused: ‘Aucune n’est à propre- ment parler
une œuvre. Tous sont des ébauches’ (‘not one is properly speaking a work. All are sketches’).58 He
also sought to break down the distinction between different formats; the ‘dessins écrits’ exist
between the text and the drawing, as Stephen Barber writes there are elements of the cinematic in Artaud’s drawings and
notebooks,59 and, as this book seeks to argue, all
of Artaud’s output might be considered as
inherently performative, recalling the theatre texts. Most importantly, what these different
objects express is this sense of living at the limit of communicability, where
communication is extremely difficult but nonetheless absolutely urgent.
As entities that speak of the limits of communicability, they also operate a continuous merging and
displacing of different types of signs. The spells, drawings and portraits are nearly always
accompanied by text because for Artaud language is always invaded by other types of
signs (graphic, linguistic, representative, anti-representative, mimetic, iconic, magical, hieroglyphic). Most importantly,
then, this disrupts the primacy of the signifier in both Saussurian and Lacanian terms, as that which
renders the speaker a ‘subject’. This critique of the signifier, and an attempt to engage
with other types of signs that displace its hegemony, is present in Artaud’s refusal to
write without drawing, or draw without writing, and in his insistence on the materiality
of the object as well as in his creation of paradoxical entities that both claim to be what
they mediate, and to be nothing, to simply demonstrate the impossibility of
communicating real corporeal presence.
If there is something persistently acted out, or staged, in all of these examples, it is the
body and its signifying
processes. Artaud portrays a body performing its own creation; this is no longer simply his
own body, the body depicted in the object, or even the body of the intended recipient or
audience, but also the material body of the paper itself. There is a sense then in which
this physical surface exceeds its metaphorical relationship to other bodies; the use of the
term ‘subjectile’ works to disrupt the subject–object dichotomy, and to point towards a
kind of collective affect. The essential question for Artaud in creating a new anatomy becomes the following:
how can one act in a way that is not already anticipated by structures of representation
which dictate the creation of a ‘subject’, in opposition to the non-figurative body without
organs? In the final chapter, we will see how this battle plays out in Artaud’s work, through the intervention of various
different types of machines.
the enlightenment-era subject reduces affect, feeling and

emotion to a singular function of emotion. This fails to account
for the ways affect provides a space and metric for experiencing
empathy and joy along with hate or dejection. Art education can
act as an antidote to positivism employed in traditional
education spaces. In secondary education, art provides a space
of transgression and unbounded affective expression.
Addison 11, (Nick, teaches on teaching and learning exchange at the University of the
Arts in London “Moments of Intensity: Affect and the Making and Teaching of Art,”
International Journal of Art & Design Education, Volume 30, Issue 3, October 20, 2011,
p. 363–378)//jh
Despite the importance of affect for making, a concern for the affective register of production rarely enters the discourse of
philosophy, especially aesthetics, a site where the art educator might hope to find support. Within philosophy, the
trio
affect/feeling/emotion is often subsumed by the latter term, emotion. Although somewhat
reductive, it could be argued that from Socrates and Plato onwards reason and emotion were constituted as a binary
opposition. Within this paradigm the emotions are associated with base passions, supposedly
irrational forces that distort the self-possession of rational thought. Over the centuries this
hierarchy has been played out in the discourses of age, class, gender, race, religion and
sexuality, so that the white, male Enlightenment subject with his concern for universal
rights, the rule of law and natural justice, has come to characterise right thinking. In
contradistinction, other perspectives have been infantalised and/or debased. Descartes
(1596–1650), in his Passions of the Soul (1646), recognises the hold the passions possess over human action, but
he tends to fear their ‘animal’ violence and promotes both caution and restraint. Spinoza (1632–77)
claims a dominant role for them, discussing affects, in particular, as those energies that
pass between people; relational intensities. He claims (1677, 232): ‘We strive to further the
occurrence of whatever we imagine will lead to Joy, and to avert or destroy what we imagine is
contrary to it, or will lead to Sadness’, conditions that respectively encourage and inhibit our power to act
(the latter being an exact correlative to Tomkins’ understanding of shame). Hume (1711–76), provocatively, inverted the
binary arguing that ‘reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions’ (1739–40). Thus, within
the
Enlightenment project itself there was a concern to show how the passions are not some
bestial remnant of our animal inheritance (not only a Descartian perspective but a danger in later
Darwinian interpretations), but capacities through which empathy, love or beauty are possible as
well as hate, jealousy or abjection. Deleuze (2003) argues that in the twentieth century it has
been artists, not philosophers, who, by engaging with affect, have worked at the limits of
intelligibility and have thus engendered new concepts. The field of the arts is, then, a place
where attention to the nature of the affect/feeling/emotion triad is not only discussed but enacted:
from an Aristotlean position, for cathartic reasons (see Halliwell 1998, 351–6); for Pope Gregory I, as exemplary forces
(see Janson & Janson 2004, 384), for Kant (1790), to ensure a community of rapture; for Brecht, to destabilise hegemonic
structures (see Benjamin 1998), for Butler (1990) to undo the founding binary of gender; for Bourriaud (2002) to enable
intersubjective transformations. As may be noted, these affect/emotion potentialities are not primarily representational
but agentive, they do things to us. Affect and pedagogy How
then do affects inform pedagogic
processes? Affects are, after all, the sensations that demand we act. If Tomkins’s six negatives are
outlawed in education, albeit present and thus disavowed, the constructive/destructive duality of infant phantasy is,
throughout life, central to creative action (see Klein 1975; Britzman 2003). Perhaps then, in
the context of
secondary art education in particular, art promises a hybrid, transgressive space, an
antidote to the instrumental positivism that elsewhere characterises so much schooling
(see Addison 2011). Nonetheless, it should also be noted that the two positive affects, interest and pleasure, tend to be
central aims in the planning of learning situations, while the neutral category, surprise, is often used to ensure the first
and to punctuate learning’s more quotidian moments. It could be said that in the instance discussed next, a teacher
deploys surprise as a mechanism to move a student from a state of psychic prohibition to one of cultural enquiry.
Art class allows for transgression: though deviance may be

necessary for discipline to exist, the student’s actions are a form
of wasteful expenditure – emotion and affect are both expressed
through art, but are confined to the curricular limitations that
art classes bring – this limits out affective expression and
channels emotionality into standardized forms of expression.
The art classroom can be harnessed as a space of curricular
transgression through affective expression.
Addison 11, (Nick Addison, Moments of Intensity: Affect and the Making and
Teaching of Art. International Journal of Art & Design Education, published 2011, p.
363–378)//jh
My concern here is to investigate a
two-fold instance of transgression which took place within the
context of art and design education. As an event the instance comprises two acts: the first, a
collective one in which a class of secondary school students produce a set of drawings
which appear to refuse the symbolic order (the network of rules, prohibitions and customs constituting
normative relations); the second, a response to the drawings by their art and design student
teacher in the form of a sculptural installation.1 The second act is a resolution of sorts,
one that destabilises the binary opposition transgress/conform, the very opposition that
invites me in the first place to designate transgression as the object of study. Both acts
question expectations about the role and limits of representation around the body, the
first inventing a series of scatological, violent and sexualised interactions, abject or ‘dirty’
images that configure bodily undifferentiation and affective excess, while the second
explores the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate discourses. The first act might
be construed as an act of wilful resistance, a refutation or denial of normativity but, as Jenks (2003)
argues, (rearticulating Bataille, 1957): ‘transgressive behaviour… does not deny limits or
boundaries, rather it exceeds and thus completes them. Every rule, limit, boundary or
edge carries with it its own fracture, penetration or impulse to disobey’ (2003: 7). In this
two-fold event there is then an instance of a reaching beyond the limits, both of
representational decorum and of the fiduciary behavioural pact between teacher and
student that constitutes order. It could be argued that such deviance from the norm
constitutes the inevitability of transgression for, in the context of schooling, as with other
disciplinary institutions, deviant behaviour is a necessary presence, one that must be produced
if boundaries are to be sustained.2 In this sense the students’ actions might be
characterised as an inversion of normative power relations or perhaps an opportunity to
upset the professed utility and progressivist tenets of bourgeois education through wasteful
expenditure (Bataille, 1985), excessive performances that go beyond the limits only to re-
establish and reinforce the taboos they transgress. Although Bataille provides an entry into a social
event that has perplexed me over a number of years, I have found it necessary to refer to object relations theory to help me
explore the affective territories of the participants and their implications for art as a ‘potential space’ (Winnicott, 1971a).
This phrase was coined by Winnicott to define a space of action produced in infancy: neither internal nor external, psychic
nor material, it is rather an imaginary space in which the tensions between internal and external forces can be explored
and navigated. The apparatus for this exploration is play - initially through use of a ‘transitional object’, the first ‘not me’
object - a type of symbolic and thus transformational action that Winnicott identified with creativity and its development
into the cultural sphere, whether as art or science. It
is also necessary to consider the relationship
between affect and emotion, the latter being a recognised object of study within works of
art, certainly from the point of view of reception, and within theories of expression, from
the point of view of production. But as Lyotard (1991) enunciates: ‘…the work is not merely a cultural
object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations
that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production”’ (p. 93). On the
one hand students are invited to engage with their emotional life by using it as a source
for expression and/or analysis. Affect, on the other hand, when understood as pre-
reflective (a phenomenon experienced as the surfacing of instinctual drives, felt with the urgency
and immediacy of desire, as ‘moments of intensity’) is altogether more dangerous. Emotions
are the culturally determined modes through which affects are drawn into social relations and shaped as expressions of
feeling; a mixture of affect, reflection and articulation. In this sense emotion tames affect, brings it into the domain of
signification and thus available for cognitive work. The alternative registers of the arts, those intensities outside semiosis,
reconfigure affect as ‘sensation’,3 not cognised but felt, bodily.
For the overflow of excess to be
acknowledged, conventionalised means of emotional expression need to be
circumvented. Deleuze has assiduously promoted an anti-philosophy to do just this (eg. Deleuze and Guattari, 1988),
but I do not wish to be drawn down his path here; Bataille already prefigures Deleuzian thought. In his
writings on the paintings of Lascaux, Bataille (2005) recognises the representational
function of the imagery: clearly there are people and bison etc., but he argues that the
essence of the paintings is performative. For him the cave is a ritual space, a place in
which the making of the work is an event, not an object for reading or contemplation, but
a space in which to act. There has been much work on children’s painting recently that theorises the performative
nature of children’s creative production, (Atkinson, 2002, 2008; Matthews, 2003). The space given to young
children to work/play in early years schooling without preconceived learning outcomes
affords them a space within which to explore sensation, not only the landscape of their
perceptions but their feelings of affection and fear, a world of familiars and monsters.
These multimodal paintings/enactions, are configured in the moment, in complete and
sometimes rapturous absorption as the event unfolds. Once children enter the world of the
National Curriculum, this space is taken away (although remnants of its freedoms are retained
within arts subjects). I do not wish to imply that the arts, and art design in particular,
should only be concerned with affect and emotionality; the arts necessarily engage with
forms of representation, semiosis and the construction of shared languages (Addison et al.,
2010). Nevertheless, they do offer a space in which these fundamental aspects of what it is
to be human can be recognised and acknowledged in practice. The event I look at here is
more a rupture than a rapture, an affective interruption in an over-determined
curriculum where the emotional lives of students tend to be marginalised and their
affective intensities outlawed. I must, however, admit to methodological difficulties. The investigation is
obstructed from the outset due to the nature of the evidence at my disposal. First, an oral account of the students’
transgression reported to me by the teacher responsible for the lesson in which the drawings were made, let me call him
Jack, an Art and Design PGCE4 student I tutored in 1999. Second, a series of sculptures modelled by Jack in response to
these drawings which he exhibited collectively as an installation for his final PGCE assignment.5 It was therefore some
four months after the event that Jack conceived and made the sculptures working directly from a selection of the drawings
and in discussion with me. The installation consisted of three major figurines loosely based on Michelangelo’s David
(1504) for which Jack appropriated or, more appositely, incorporated parts of the students’ drawings. He used these parts
as a collection of prostheses to be grafted on to the three figurines and surrounded them with smaller attendants (see Fig.
1 above). As a form of evidence, the event, comprising the school students’ transgressive drawings and Jack’s response, is,
in a sense, a two-fold transgression.6
Bataille’s reworking of the dispotif of seeing is comparable to

being blinded and torn apart. Through the unraveling of
semiotic coherence and admittance of the night, we create our
own art: cannibalization of bourgeois values and “outbidding”
art as a concept, refusing limitations and categorizations of art,
reorienting the project of art towards the repugnant, violating
rather than consoling.
Tiryakian 14, (Edward Tiryakian. "Durkheim, The Durkheimians and the
Arts." Canadian Journal of Sociology, published 2014, p. 765-774)//jh
Georges Bataille was an enemy of “art.” He loathed all that attempted to redeem the base with
appeals to the lofty, cultivated a sustained distrust of “absolutes” and “beauty,” and saw
through the hypocrisies of high culture and other bourgeois loci of distinction and
anxiety. It would then appear misguided to speak of “Bataille and art.” However, Bataille was not simply an
aesthetic reactionary. Rather he suggested a reworking of the dispositif of “seeing”
which, in his view, should be tantamount to being blinded and indeed torn apart. The
capstone of knowledge is found in the dialectical inversion of the positivist gaze, in the
blind spot of reason and in the liminal passage between the human and its Other. This
“site” is moreover one constituted by the unraveling of semiotic coherence and the
descent into non-form, night, and void. And paradoxically, it is from within the
interstices between this night and the black hole of the eyes that Bataille’s “aesthetic”
begins; art, if it was to exist for Bataille, was a bastion of dark sensuality where the
aesthetic is swallowed by the ecstatic and the value of the work is found in its capacity to
call into question the very nature of human project. The Bataillean aesthetic thus cannot be illuminated
if one remains bound in conventional notions of art as the province of the painterly, the writerly, the plastic, and the
beaux. Bataille tried to outbid art. Outbidding
art moved by way of the subversion and refusal of
art’s formal and structural limitations, its history, its pretensions, in favor of a
repositioning of the aesthetic in what it uncomfortably flees from—flies, excreta, howls. In
a broader sense, Bataille outbid ethics, epistemology, and all forms of totemism through a
rabid aesthetic that violated rather than consoled. While “outbidding” does mean befouling beauty, it
also means displacing reading practices and bringing sensorial experience to grapple with
that which it perpetually disavows. What this would entail would be nothing short of a
project to collapse aesthetic habitus which, in its aversion to the repugnant, canalizes the
apprehension of the beautiful into certain ideal forms. “Beauty” is neurotic.
In standard educational settings, emotion is totally divested

from education. The release of emotional energy is confined to
set times and spaces where it is channeled through systems of
social production, while during learning sessions it is
completely suppressed. The only potential activity in which
students can release or make use of emotional energy on an
individual level is unbounded art. Through anonymous and co-
authored art, students expressed raw emotional energies
through depiction of the body as a site of the intersection of
social relations.
- if the body is the debate space, our art can be used to express the lacerated and grafted-
over points of interaction that stuff like framework ignores or tries to smooth over.
- not entirely sure how this would work in terms of an actual classroom, but that’s also an
avenue. The whole article is about a teacher’s experience with his students and their
transgressive depictions of the body.
Arts in London “The dirtying of David: Transgression, affect, and the potential space of
art,” Emotion, Space and Society Volume 4, Issue 3, August 2011, p. 172-179)//jh
Within the classroom, emotional experience is implicitly understood to interfere with the
central task of interested if dispassionate learning (Noddings, 2005). In this sense the domain
of the curriculum subject, its objective criteria, is posited as entirely separate from the
emotions. The emotional life of the student is not the stuff of the cognitive curriculum, that is unless it is deferred onto
others and represented in salutary form (whether in film, literature, painting, TV etc.) and which can thus be subject to
reasoned analysis. Special
moments are designated for the release of emotional energy,
playtime, or for the dissemination of collective praise and/or admonition, assemblies.
Inter-student affection or enmity is outlawed during lessons despite the fact that its
matrix of intensities subtends the superstructure of learning. In this sense the emotions
are either objectified or pathologised. The only other space where they are legitimised is
within ‘creative activities’ where they are channelled through highly determined forms of
cultural production, collectively known as ‘expression’, such as art, dance, music, poetry,
the conventions of which may not necessarily coincide with students’ habitus. These
drawings, however, in being co-authored and arbitrary, built on contiguous rather than
continuous relations, belie the tenets of formalist composition or authenticity that
underpin understandings of expression11; therefore, for the students the exercise was ‘other’ to
school art. In the event, Jack did instruct them to base these co-drawings on one of the well-worn tropes of art
education, the human figure. But rather than explore the body as a singular, mimetic, aesthetic or
symbolic entity, as might be expected, many students used the activity as a vehicle through
which to look at social relationships. They did so by visualising their inter-personal
experiences through a sort of free association, where the folded paper became a multi-
screen space somewhat akin to a day-dream. Here, the students began to unravel a scene of
the power relations to which they felt subject, relations indicated through spatial
juxtapositions and spoken utterance (the latter represented as text inserted into speech bubbles). In this
way the students deployed ‘words’ (and actions) ‘that wound’ (Appelbaum, 2003) piecing together
a scene of abusive and violent interactions indicative of the fearful aspects of peer
relations and student/parent and student/teacher communications, a neurotic and
potentially paranoid position rather than necessarily psychotic. The part played by
gender was inextricably linked to sexuality, ‘inappropriate’, misaligned gender signifiers
being deployed as a marker of non-normative sexuality, a means particularly of attacking
the masculine credibility of the father/teacher figure. In terms of overt sexualisation the erect penis, as
a primary sexual form, was notable (after all, it explicitly and thus efficiently signals arousal) whereas in terms of
secondary forms, female breasts were represented as were a number of anal images (in the service of both excremental use
and ‘masturbation’). Amongst other abusive terms, the word ‘mother’ was frequently invoked as an insult (an abbreviation
of the term ‘mother fucker’ understood as such in the late 1990s). Students also used scale to suggest the
dominance or subordinance of the players (although the larger of the two in a pairing did not always come
off best) and one interaction included a stabbing.
the surrealist construction of the exquisite corpse refuses the

seamless coherence of the traditional aesthetic body – in this
way we incorporate imagery of scarred and grafted sites where
limbs are attached and removed, reconfiguring the body
through a series of metonymic replacements, displaying a
hybrid body composed of phantasy and desire. The analysis of
this surreal corpse functions to both deconstruct the imposed
dualities of the traditional body and functionally force the space
portrayed as a site of affective interaction to cannibalize the
representation of itself
- thinking we can use this as a “make debate cannibalize / fix itself” solvency / advocate card.
IDK if I need more specificity there, but if we frame whatever art we talk about as
representative of the interactions within the debate space, this card definitely works as
solvency (it talks about the teacher consuming the values that led the students to draw the
pictures and changing accordingly).
Methodologically Jack uses a type of three-dimensional collage, re-appropriating the
‘cadaver exquise’ of both
the Surrealists and the teenage students. In this way he undermines traditional aesthetic
conventions by refusing ‘material finish, semantic coherence, seamless narrative, and the
integration of parts into the body of the text… [rather] in surrealist collage the scars left
by the grafting of spare limbs remain visible’ (Adamowicz, 2005: 15). This succession of sutures
makes visible the cumulative process of inscription/representation, a temporality that
belies the immediacy and unity of the pictorial imaginary. But the exquisite corpse
dislocates expected modes of reception yet further as it moves from the intentional
heterogeneity of collage, the artist as conscious author of meaningful juxtapositions,
onto a different plane through its incorporation of chance contiguities. This has the result of
reconfiguring the body through a sequence of metonymic displacements: …in surrealism,
metonymical mechanisms are… pushed to their limits. Where traditional metonymy draws its
signifiers from the same semantic field… the lexicon of the surrealist body flouts the rules of anatomical
coherence, producing a hybrid body. The limbs of the exquisite corpse remain spare
parts, scarcely interlocking; their disparate character is irreducible… (Adamowicz, 2005: 82). In
this sense the dirtied Davids become a locus for arbitrary or possibly subconscious forces, an assemblage of external and
internal part-objects indicative of the sadistic impulses of infancy. Klein (1991a) argues that during the period of ego
development in infancy the human child is dominated by violent impulses in which good and bad sensations are attributed
to objects: initially parts, such as the mother’s breast, and later to other objects and whole persons. The child gradually
introjects these objects to form her/his ego while simultaneously projecting them back into the external world. The
inevitable scarcity of good parts (those elements that satisfy desire) produces anxiety (particularly a fear of loss) an anxiety
which the persecutory nature of the bad parts only increases. The child thus constructs defence mechanisms, phantasising
attacks, particularly on the breast and then on the mother/father (initially imagined as one); this involves, splitting,
disintegration and a sort of cannibalism. The severity of these attacks produces a further anxiety, that of retaliation and
retribution: Klein terms this the ‘paranoid-schizoid position’. Once the child is able to conceive of the other as a whole
s/he comes to understand that good and bad are coexistent in the same person; s/he then feels guilt and the need for
reparation; this is called the ‘depressive position’.12 Why are these theories of infancy significant for this paper? As
Winnicott (1971b: 82) contends when looking at ‘the origins of creativity’: ‘Klein takes up the idea of the destructiveness of
the baby and gives it proper emphasis at the same time making a new and vital issue out of the idea of the fusion of erotic
and destructive impulses as a sign of health’. In other words, the potential space afforded by symbolic
play is a necessary mechanism to assuage the rage and terror the child endures once s/he
realises s/he is no longer omnipotent, that is once the mother/carer denies the child immediate gratification
through the process of weaning. Klein (1975: 251) herself argues: ‘Phantasies - becoming more elaborate
and referring to a wider variety of objects and situations - continue throughout
development and accompany all activities; they never stop playing a great part in mental
life. The influence of unconscious phantasy on art, on scientific work, and on the
activities of everyday life cannot be overrated’. In the instance in question, the drawings, an attack on
Jack’s perceived inadequacies, are figured as infantile sadistic projections onto the figure of the father and his reign of
order. I contend that itwas the vehicle of the exquisite corpse itself that conditioned a
lessening of inhibitions so that the spontaneously engineered attack took on the
symbolism of infantile phantasy. As a means to engage with the ambivalent feelings that these drawings
might, even subconsciously, have produced, Jack, retroactively, carefully designed a making process in which he
deconstructed a sequence of chained binaries suggested by the drawings:
legitimate/illegitimate, beautiful/grotesque, ideal/base matter (Jack was well aware of artists who
utilised Derridian deconstruction, see for example Taylor (1999) on Tansey). Under the auspices of
deconstructive method these binaries were put into play but with recourse to the
techniques of splitting, incorporation and possibly reparation. It is my contention that
Jack deployed these ‘techniques’ as a means to overcome the patterns of exclusion
reactivated by the aggression and traumas of the students’ transgression. He achieved this in
such a way that he ‘actively [conceived] multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously’
(Rothenberg’s description for creativity within the Janusian project, 1996). In this way he ingests,
cannibalistically, the destructive energies so apparent in the students’ drawings, so that they
come to animate and exceed the potential energy of Michelangelo’s David (always characterised as focused, at a point of
stasis before his heroic action). These
excesses: the grotesquery, scatology and violent
sexualisation are deployed as antidotes to the stifling proprieties of the ‘Standard’
teacher, a policing role that negates the sovereign self of the artist/teacher.
Art allows you to embrace death = good for vtl

Even before Bataille formulates the thought of the general economy, his writings on art point the way towards it,
rejecting the modern period's separation of culture into distinct spheres (Lessing, Kant).
Instead, he seeks to bring art into contact with sacrifice, eroticism, violence and
with questions of the origin and functioning of societies. Art occupies a clear place in
the ceuvre of Bataille as part of the movement of that which is 'beyond but not transcendent.
Excessive would not be transcendent because that would imply it was conveying some true spiritual value. Much art fails to be
excessive, content to depict, rather than 'communicate', is Bataille's general argument, but art can
be part of sovereignty, general economy. This echoes what he writes about poetry, which often features
as part of a list of things that exceed the everyday, 'restricted economy, while also being often worthy only of contempt. The text that
we encounter today as readers, however, sites art, in Bataille, as part of the troubled boundary that
defines our existence and the inevitable possibility of our death. Bataille would reject
the term 'aesthetics as it already concedes the defeat of art, its restriction to a certain realm, which entails its placement as part of an
economy of utility, within which the end and means are clear. This does not prevent him effectively from 'doing aesthetics, at certain
points, but we should be wary of defining a Bataillean aesthetics. At another level there could feasibly be a very
obvious 'Bataillean aesthetics* - one which would valorize art that aspired to destruction.
This can operate at two levels, one formal, the other to do with content. Bataille only favours art that is in some
way the destruction of art, such that the working and place of art can be revealed, but
often this takes a very literal or figurative form: Bataille is very literal-minded in this, and does have much
more of an interest in art that depicts scenes of violence, anguish and so on. 1 Krauss and Bois have signalled, in Formless: A User's
Guide, that along with this focus on content, Bataille seems wilfully ignorant of key developments in modern art, and misses out on
areas where formal experimentation would feasibly link up more fruitfully with his thought. Various questions arise when looking at
Bataille's take on art (I am specifically addressing the visual arts here), some of which are Bataille's questions, and others of which are
brought to us through the text, despite Bataille's particular, explicit emphases. Firstly, what is the place of art - this is perhaps the big
question of the pre-war texts; secondly, what kind of subjectivity do we see in the figure of the artist; thirdly, and this is where we
The
need to extrapolate, what is the role, function or position of representation and figuration in the light of the general economy?
Place of Art for us today, the most obvious place for art is the museum.
Reproducibility of the work of art, in the form of images in books, or on websites, only
serves to extend the museum (although it might alter what it is). For Bataille, the museum is one of
the exemplary sites where our culture becomes a culture of death, rather
than a culture which has a link to death through sacrifice. The museum
sanitizes both art and the unpleasantness of everyday life: ' a museum is like the lungs of
a city - every Sunday the crowds flow through the museum like blood, coming out
purified and fresh ('Museum', 22; OC I, 239). Like many writers, Bataille accepts that for modern Western
culture, art in some measure occupies the space vacated by religion, but he has his
own particular take on this phenomenon. The crowd - the mass - streaming through the halls of culture maintains an
attitude of reverence, even a 'profound communion (23; 240) with the objects, but these objects, at
least in this setting, are not worthy, do not represent something communal, in Bataille's sense, as 'the
paintings are only dead surfaces (22; 239). It is the coming together as a crowd that
interests Bataille. In short, museums provide a cleansing function, ensuring that the
desire to exceed mundanity is constrained to the Sunday visit to the museum (the development
of 'leisure fulfils a similar function), and the art itself can lose any danger it may have held. In
a sense prior to all this, however, is Bataille's claim that the display of culture hides the spectacle of
death that allowed culture to come to the people. The modern museum as
we know it 'would thus be linked to the development of the guillotine (22; 239).
For Bataille, Western architecture (including its antecedents) has always sought to cover up death.
Our view of the birth of humanity centres not just on a philosophical recognition of death
as defining humanity, but also on the built commemorations that we find even among
the Neanderthals. As Hollier notes, in Against Architecture, Bataille writes against this architecture and the architecture of
thought that accompanies it. Architecture, especially in the form of the monumental ( official)
building, imposes itself as power. It is more than simply a reflection of power. the ideal being of society,
that which orders and prohibits with authority, expresses itself in what are architectural
compositions in the strict sense of the term. Thus, the great monuments are raised up like dams, pitting the logic
of majesty and authority against all the shady elements: it is in the form of cathedrals and palaces that Church and State speak and
impose silence on the multitudes. (Bataille, 'Architecture', 21; OC 1,171) Bataille is reflexive as to his own position on the status of
architecture. As
'the human order is bound up from the start with the architectural order (21;
172), you
cannot attack one without attacking the other. In this early article we see the firm
rejection of humanism as something tied up with authority, imbued with use
value and the refusal of excess. Lest we think that the heroic artist combats this, Bataille notes that 'the great
compositions of certain painters express the will to restrict the spirit to an official ideal (21; 171). This is not because there is a
dominant ideology that filters down from the State, but because all areas of society partake of order in its own
right. He is not referring to art and patronage or Official art', but to certain forms of art, as 'the disappearance of academic
construction in painting, on the other hand, leaves the way open for expression (even going as far as exaltation) of psychological
processes that are most incompatible with social stability* (ibid.). Modern art can be a way of going 'against architecture*. A
rt
and the Sacred Modern art does not, for Bataille, do something that is totally new.
It partake s of something that all societies, except early modern a nd moder
n Western society, have known: the importanc e of excess, sacrifice,
eroticism and death. So modern art is the restoration of a lost continuity.
This continuity is not a return, as something ha s altered: we no longer
believe in the existence of fixed truths. It appears after the fact that art, no longer capable of
expressing whatever it is that, coming to it from outside, is incontestably sacred -
romanticism having used up the possibilities of renewal - it appears after the fact that art
could no longer live if it did not have the force to attain the sacred instant by its own
resources. The techniques put into play up to that point only had to express a given that had its own value and meaning. (The
Sacred', 241; OC I, 561) Art of the early modern period (prior to mid-nineteenth-century modernism) actually
seems to have maintained a link with values (of truth, of beauty) that it was supposed to
shed in becoming autonomous, and Bataille is actually suggesting that art
first become more autonomous to undo its autonomy. Such is the condition of art that come s
after the death of God - now there is nowhere to hide: the modern era offers the sacred, as earlier
societies did, but this time with only emptiness behind or within it. As a result, whoever
creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any limitations on painting or
writing; alone, he suddenly has at his disposal all possible human convulsions, and he
cannot flee from this heritage of divine power which belongs to him. Nor can he know if this
heritage will consume and destroy the one it consecrates. (The Sacred', 245; OC I, 563) So Bataille sees the period
when modern art comes into being as a time of access, when what he would
later call the 'sovereign artist' is in the same position as the sacrificer in
societies with a conception of the violence of the sacred. But the beyond to which this artist
accedes is just a beyond - there is no content there. In his early writings in particular, we see Bataille emphasizing the personal aspect
of the artist, in an attempt to delineate possible sacrificial paths for sovereignty. Van Gogh provides the
paradigm for the artist as sacrificer, and Bataille is just as fascinated by Van
Gogh's cutting off his ear as by the paintings. For Bataille, the two a re not
simply phenomena we could ascribe to Van Gogh's individual madness.
Rather, Van Gogh has found what the Aztec priests had with regard to the
sun: there is something beyond the self that the self can lose itself in ('Sacrificial
Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Van Gogh', OC I, 262). The cutting of the ear released the sun to come through Van Gogh ('Van
Gogh Promethee', OC 1,499). It is not that this artist has acquired something - rather he
has lost the restraints that made him a unified subject, through the
'expenditure that threatens stable existence (OC I, 498), and has moved into a
realm of 'inner experience' ('Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Van Gogh', 67; OC I, 264). The
artist is called on by Bataille to be more than just an artist (who in accepting such a role accepts the
dominance of use value), but where artists are not supposed to go is down the path of
commitment (engagement), as he continually states in his postwar articles (see OC XI,
particularly the many articles on Camus, and references to Sartre), because commitment should not be to
something, but just be there in a 'pure form.
through the creation of spaces where art can be allowed to
transgress norms and taboos, we harness violence through play
and creative energy. This does not necessarily abandon all
ethical frames, but does provide a space within which otherwise
violent energies can maximize creative potentials.
Bataille (2001) assumed that violence
is at the core of all social change, necessary for the formation
of human culture and manifest in religion through sacrifice. Similarly, within the school of Object
Relations, aggression is a necessary component for health : for Klein (1991b) in the form of play, as a
means to act out symbolically what is socially and ethically impossible, for Winnicott (1971b) as a
life force, a creative energy. The instance examined in this paper thus revolves around a difficult issue for
schooling, aggression, a phenomenon necessarily policed in the context of bullying. But
the significance of Winnicott’s ‘potential space’ lies not in the practising of violence but
in harnessing aggressive energies for transformative use as in the case of Jack. Winnicott (1965) theorised
the mother figure as both a biological nurturer and an environmental facilitator/protector. He argued that it is only when ‘alone’ (by which
he means attentive to some matter in hand but within the protective gaze of the mother) that the infant ‘is able to become unintegrated, to
flounder, to be in a state in which there is no orientation, to be able to exist for a time without being either a reactor to an external
impingement or an active person with a direction of interest or movement’ (1965: 34). This ambivalent state is the precursor to the
necessary conditions for creative action, a space that is outside moral obligations, and thus the taboos that society imposes. It
is
therefore a place without transgression, where intensities are accepted, or perhaps,
rather like Bataille’s notion of the sacred, a place where the breaking of taboos is
permissible. It could be argued that art is the secular heir of religion, a ritualised space for the
transgression of norms. In the bourgeois spaces of schooling this is perhaps the best that
can be hoped for. The students’ action was an attack on bourgeois authority, a spontaneous
eruption in which the affective impulse to attack found its forms in infantile phantasy.
Rearticulated with recourse to the technical armoury of adolescent representation, it produced an excess, indeed a
plethora of abjection. Despite the attack, on the surface Jack remained unaffected, for he did not use the transgression as an
excuse to reinstate order. Rather, he accepted the violence of the perpetrators, conceiving it as an excess of energy which he utilised to feed
his creative act of restitution. Within
the potential space of art, the sculptural installation allowed
Jack to work through the ambivalent feelings of the schizophrenic, sadomasochistic
position Act I had placed him in. There are different degrees of ambivalence however. While making visible the
‘knowingness’ of childhood, a phenomenon often denied in art education (Burgess, 2003), the legitimised object of Jack’s assault, nominally
youthful courage and beauty embodied in the David, is itself already degraded. With reference to the plaster cast in the V&A Jack merely
despoils a replica, and by working on a table-top scale it could be the souvenir, rather than the original and its surrogates, that is the object
of his accretions. Art
and design, as an other to the core curriculum, does a certain violence to
the bourgeois economy of schooling, but its potential to recognise and allow affective
responses (the symbolic attack noted here) is tamed by its relegation to recreation. Limited acts of
transgression (both by students and teachers) might meet the necessity for the teacher to retain at
least a measure of sovereignty through exercising willful moments of dirtying, a mixing up of
categories to
destabilise the oppressive structures of a ‘petty’ bourgeois moral order that
would swamp affective energies, creative or otherwise. Jenks (2003: 109) argues, paraphrasing Gallop: ‘Striving for
sovereignty ensures a breakdown of hierarchies and a scrambling of the proper, worthy, replicable, true with the dirty, untidy, obscene and
peculiar’. My conclusion is uncertain. There
are dangers in accepting affect without reference to some
ethical frame.13 The instance I reflect on here has only been discussed and represented within the university, not within the
school where the first act took place. In the latter I have no doubt that it would have been
received as a transgression too far, both the production of the drawings and their acceptance by Jack.
Nonetheless, I am aware of schools where this event could be aired, where the drawings
and the installation might be exhibited, but they are few. What this paper aims to achieve
is to open up a debate to consider how affect might be acknowledged within the
curriculum in addition to its status as an analytical object within the wider social life of
schooling. Perhaps what is called for are specific spaces where students and
teachers are given permission to exercise forms of ritual transgression,
places where emotional norms are suspended for an instance so as to enable
the unsayable to be voiced. Winnicott’s ‘potential space’ can be staged within the arts and in art and design in
particular. This requires not only moving beyond proprieties but also a loosening of intentionality, predicted outcomes and the other over-
determining paraphernalia of audit/litigious culture towards a tolerance of ambiguity, chance, the undifferentiated spaces of the creative
imagination. Framed in this way, these in-between
spaces (in this instance the adolescent, the student teacher, the
affective/cognitive synthesis of art) allow
uncertainty to be understood as a potentiality
rather then necessarily a danger. Art education could offer such a place but it is
rarely given licence to do so.
Alt solvency if you’re reading an art alt

Turpin, 10 (Turpin, Stephen, 6-1-2010, "Aesthetics of Expenditure: Art, Philosophy, and the Infinite Faculty,"
https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/handle/)/RF
With these preliminary remarks in mind, we
may now suggest how Bataille’s concept of expenditure
[depenser] is situated in our present discussion. The notion of expenditure emerges in Bataille’s writing in the early
1930s. Despite the valences of this concept within his own work, we may provisionally summarize the concept according to his own
early formulation in ‘The Notion of Expenditure’: “Human
activity is not entirely reducible to processes of
production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two
distinction parts. The first, reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum
necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of individuals’ productive
activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition
of productive activity.”7 Bataille continues, “The second part is represented by socalled unproductive expenditures: luxury,
mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from
genital finality) – all these represent activities which, at least in 6 Allan Stoekl, Bataille’s Peak, p. xx. 7 Georges Bataille, “The Notion
of Expenditure,” Visions of Excess, p. 118. 7 primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves .Now it is necessary
to reserve the use of the word expenditure [depenser] for the designation of these
unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that
serve as a means to the end of production.”8 From this point of view, expenditure is the
unproductive or wasteful exercise of energy wherein the activity or organization
facilitating such practices does not aim to reinvest them within another regime or
framework (i.e. restricted economy). In the original French, it is indeed the case that the verb depenser evokes a polysemic series
of connections that exceed the highly commercial associations of the English expenditure. Our purpose here, however, is not to lament
the limitations of translation; the
importance of the notion of expenditure within
Bataille’s philosophy is certainly not its vernacular resonance, but its
interrogative capacity in relation to the logic of socio-economic organizations and their
attendant articulations of utility and value more broadly. Of course, we must keep in mind throughout the
present work that Bataille himself undermines the possibility of any conclusive determination of utility in the opening paragraph of the
same essay: “Every time the meaning of a discussion depends on the fundamental value of the word useful – in other words, every
time the essential question touching on the life of human societies is raised, no matter who intervenes and what opinions are expressed
– it is possible to affirm that the debate is necessarily warped and that the fundamental question is eluded. In fact, given the more or
less divergent collection of present ideas, there is nothing that permits one to define what is useful to man.”9 Therefore,
without lamenting the absence of a priori or universal designations that would decide
questions of utility, our interest will be in pursuing the logic of practices of expenditure
which exacerbate the tension between utility and waste. That is, our interest in
expenditure will focus on its conceptual value as a means to undermine processes by
which apparently wasteful activities within a broader (i.e. general) economy of energy
are subsumed and reinvested within restricted economies of Moral reason and practical
value. It is precisely this dimension of expenditure that places Bataille’s philosophy in a direct
confrontation with Kant’s Critical philosophy and allows our reading of the
artistic practice of Smithson as a complimentary material articulation by
way of an aesthetics of expenditure. Robert Smithson’s (1938-1973) enigmatic intellectual fecundity,
autodidactic capacities, and radical artistic production have made him a major figure within post-Minimalist American art. Indeed, an
immense field of scholarship is now readily available regarding his work and its place within the tradition of European and American
art history and adjacent disciplines. While
a complete account of this vast amount of scholarly work is
beyond the scope of the present dissertation, several texts have proved indispensable for
the argument that follows. Of primary importance is the collection of Smithson’s writings,
edited by Jack Flam, which brings together a wide range of essays and criticism that
demonstrate unequivocally Smithson’s brilliance as a author, simultaneously evincing
his rhetorical and antagonistic interventions in art historical discourse and hastening the
dematerialization of the art object.10 The numerous catalogues accompanying his exhibitions, both during his
lifetime and posthumously, have also been invaluable for the arguments which follow. In addition to the collection of his essays, we
must note the following catalogues for their unquestionable influence: Robert Smithson, organized by Eugenie Tsai and Cornelia
Butler, MOCA, Los Angeles; Robert Smithson: Sculpture, organized by Robert Hobbs, Herbert H. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell
University (along with the more comprehensive eponymous text that was subsequently published by Cornell University Press and
edited by Hobbs)11; Robert Smithson in Vancouver: Fragmentation of a Greater Fragmentation, edited by Grant Arnold, Vancouver
Art Gallery; Robert Smithson: Mapping Dislocations, organized by Elyse Goldberg, James Cohen Gallery; and, Robert Smithson:
Drawings, organized by Mario Amaya, New York Cultural Centre. It is with tremendous gratitude and humility that I admit the
present work would have been all but impossible without reference to these collections. 10 Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings,
edited by Jack Flam (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1996). This collection will be henceforth cited in
the text as RSCW with the accompanying page reference. 11 Robert Smithson: Sculpture, edited by Robert Hobbs (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1981); this collection will be henceforth cited in the text as RSS with the accompanying page reference. 9
Scholarship within art history has proven no less significant for the present work. Of particular relevance to my research is Ann
Reynolds’ Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. While Reynolds’ appraisal is, for the most part, disinterested
in philosophical questions raised by the present work, her careful and somewhat idiosyncratic reading of Smithson’s artistic practice is
without comparison and informs our subsequent reading of many of Smithson’s works. Of equal consequence for the
present analysis is Ron Graziani’s Robert Smithson and the American Landscape, which
situates Smithson’s geological attack on Modernism within the history of American
cultural debates and their political efficacy. Again, while Graziani’s interests in his study remain somewhat
adjacent to our philosophical concerns, his excellent readings of Smithson’s works have
proven indispensable.
Aztec Sacrifice
We must follow the Aztecs in their sacred rituals of bloody
sacrifice by giving the gift of death, the ultimate form of
unproductive expenditure.
Doel 17. Marcus, Professor of Human Geography at Swansea University in Wales, where he is also the Deputy Pro-
Vice-Chancellor for Research and Innovation, and the Co-Director of the Centre for Urban Theory. He has written and
lectured widely on critical human geography, social and spatial theory, and post-structuralism. “Geographies of Violence:
Killing Space, Killing Time” | rpadhi
For commodities are congealed masses of amorphous human labour whose social
substance appears in the fetishistic form of objects that have commerce amongst
themselves. Commodities relate to one another as exchange-values, not use-values. The
opening up and exploitation of inhospitable regions has invariably entailed regimes of terror imposed by a state apparatus.
The construction of the Kolyma Highway, or ‘Road of Bones’, in the Russian Far East (1932-52), and the Thailand-Burma
Railway, or ‘Death Railway’ (1942-3), are infamous examples. So too is the 141-mile White Sea-Baltic Canal in Russia
(1931-3). This folly required 170,000 Gulag labourers, 25,000 of whom died in the process. Everything was done by hand,
even the fabrication of rudimentary tools, such as wooden spades and wheelbarrows. ‘As work progressed, new camp sites
had to be built along the course of the canal. At every one of these new sites, the prisoners and exiles arrived - and found
nothing. Before starting work they had to build their own wooden barracks and organize their food supply’ (Applebaum,
2004: 80). They were lethal-labour camps: not because the Bolsheviks wanted the inmates dead, but because their living
or dying was a matter of indifference. Having been ‘reduced to “nonpeople” or creatures from the Stone Age’ (Brent, 2008:
14—15), the death camps were immune to criticism from ‘the “medieval” fossils caterwauling in Europe, as Stalin put it’
(Brent, 2008: 12). Given the horror that accompanies every state like a diabolical shadow, Clastres (1989) argues that far
from lacking a state, so-called ‘primitive’ societies proactively stopped one from emerging. They did so by warding off
either an endogenous seizure of power or an exogenous subjugation. For what good is a state to a subsistence community?
And conversely: what good is a subsistence community to a state? A state and its ruling classes can only be sustained once
the community produces a surplus for them to appropriate and accumulate. Every state is essentially parasitic and
vampiric; every ruling class superfluous. Clastres (1989) argues that the Amerindians successfully thwarted the emergence
of a state until they were conquered by the Spanish. They were driven out of their subsistence communities and into the
mines and plantations, and forced to produce a surplus of wealth for the Europeans to accumulate and enjoy at their
leisure. There is, then, a profound difference between communities that limit themselves to
subsistence and communities that generate surpluses. While the latter readily succumb
to despotism and the capitalist delirium of ‘accumulation for accumulation’s sake’, as
Marx put it, the former ensure that any inadvertent surplus is squandered rather than
accumulated. This is why Georges Bataille (1988b: 46) argued that the Aztecs ‘were just as
concerned with sacrificing as we are about working’. Sacrifice is the principal way for a
society to thwart accumulation and prevent the formation of a state. Sacrifice puts to death
swiftly what would otherwise be put to death slowly. As ‘willing slaves of capital’ (Lordon, 2014) we have become
accustomed to calling such a slow death ‘work’ or ‘labour’. To place sacrifice at the heart
of the community, then, is to orchestrate a society of consumption and expenditure,
rather than a society of accumulation and growth. In Aztec mythology the gods sacrificed
themselves to bring life to the world, which thereby placed a sacred duty on the Aztecs to
sacrifice themselves and others in return. Such is the gift of death. [T]he gods assembled and
spoke among themselves. saying: ‘Who will take it upon himself to bring light to the world?’ Nanauatzin threw himself
into the fire [and became the Sun] . . . Tecuciztecatl also cast himself into the flames [and became the Moon] Then the
gods had to die; the wind. Quetzalcoatl. killed them allzThe wind tore out their hearts and used them to animate the
newborn stars. (Recounted in Bataille, l988b: 46—9) The
fundamental obligation placed on the
recipient of a gift is to give something back in return. 50, the gift of life must be returned
whence it came - to the sacrificial Gods. Accordingly, the Aztecs sacrificed thousands of
people a year. These sacrifices fed ‘the hungry Gods’ (Bataille, 1988b: 54), for without it the
Sun would dry up and life on Earth would wither away. It is in this sense that mid- wives reputedly
told newborn baby boys that ‘your duty is to give the sun the blood of your enemies to drink and to supply the earth with
the bodies of your enemies to eat [and] you are offered and promised to the earth and the sun’ (Bataille, 1988b: 53).
Once bloodshed is seen as a sacred obligation one can begin to understand why victims
were treated relatively humanely. As gifts to the gods, those to be sacrificed were
precious. ‘The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth’, Bataille (1988b: 58)
contends. ‘lt suffices for the sacrificer to give up the wealth that the victim could have been
for him’ (Bataille, 198%: 60). So, although the Aztecs killed hundreds of thousands of people,
they did not systematically dehumanize them or render them worthless. They were
simply returned whence they came. Or rather, the Sun’s energy (tonalh') that they
embodied was given back to the gods. Christian Duverger (1989) offers an account of the quintessential form
of human sacrifice. Prior to being sacrificed the victim would endure all kinds of things that
were designed to excite the energy that they embodied: from dancing and intercourse to sleep
deprivation and drugging. The sacrifice itself would be performed in public, at a sacred location, and by priests. It
was not a spectacle, but a ritual. The victim, arched over a sacrificial stone, would have his or her chest cut
open with a flint knife, and the heart excised whilst still beating in order to maximize the blood loss. This nourished the
‘Sun, Lord of the Earth'. Death
in battle, and self-sacrifice, had the same effect as ritual
sacrifice, but without the opportunity to maximize the bloodshed. A violent death was
preferable because a ‘natural' death (from old age, disease, accident, or suchlike) meant
that much of the energy would drain into the underworld rather than back to the gods.
The sacrificial ritual often ended with mutilation, decapitation, dismemberment, and
cannibalism. Aztec ritual sacrifice stands in stark contrast to the profane cannibalism and
vampirism of capitalism. Capital is a monstrous, artificial, and undead life form that
feeds off the slow release of the worker’s energy, the draining of which is often strung out over a lifetime.
Little wonder, then, that in those societies given over to capitalism's insatiable thirst for living labour, so-called
‘premature‘ and ‘preventable’ deaths should have become such a scandal, and that the desire for immortality should have
taken hold (Bauman, 1992). Contemporary capitalism is literally banking on death and investing in life (Blackburn, 2002;
Tyner, 2016). Naturally, some obtuse souls have sought to escape capitalism's voracious appe- tite for the living and its
ebullient ‘health fascism’ by choosing swift deaths instead (Baudrillard, 1993). The irony, of course, is that the desire to
enforce and exploit immortality came in the wake of Europe’s headlong rush into total war. The scandal of mortality is
merely the inverted echo of the continent’s willingness to sacrifice everything. It is to this suicidal death-drive that we now
turn.
The sacred ritual of Aztec sacrifice acts as a guide to both

Bataille’s and Rivera’s analysis of death, concluding that
reforms that banish death to the city’s margin symbolically
devalue and impoverish the subject.
Lamperez 16. Joseph, Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester.
“The Aztecs and Urban Form in Georges Bataille, Diego Rivera, and J.G. Posada”, Mosaic
49/4 (December 2016) | rpadhi
Twentieth-century French surrealists, in tandem with Mexican artists and writers,
fashioned a picture of pre-Columbian Aztecs as theocratic, abounding in art, and in thrall
to the power of human sacrifice. While established among specialists, this joint effort remains
unacknowledged in scholarship more generally: as the editors of Surrealism in Latin America write, “Surrealism played a
more significant role than has hitherto been realized in debates about art, archaeology, and anthropology in the New
World” (Ades, Eder, and Speranza 3). By the time Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) and André Breton (1896-1966) visited
Mexico in 1936 and 1938, respectively, and Diego Rivera (1886-1957) took part in Breton’s International Surrealist
Exhibition in Mexico City in 1940, the collaboration between French and Mexican writers and artists had been ongoing for
at least two decades. Not only were “the Aztecs [. . .] very much à la mode among European intellectuals of the 1920s and
1930s” (Gallo 249); Surrealists had also “long been enchanted by what they called, in the title of a 1927 Paris exhibition
that included both pre-Columbian and Native American works, ‘American objects’” (Ades, Eder, and Speranza 3). The
prehistory of this collective mythologizing extends at least to the second Franco-Mexican War of 1861, when “Napoleon
III sent a French scientific commission to Mexico” (Tenorio-Trillo 44). A romanticized account of Aztec culture was thus
born from cross-pollinating research. When Rivera casts illustrator José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) as the ves- tige of
an Aztec aesthetic sensibility, for example, he shows the influence of French muralist Jean Charlot (1898-1979), who
claimed to have discovered Posada in 1920, the same year that Rivera returned to Mexico from a decade in Paris. When
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) unfolds his theory of expenditure and sacrifice in The
Accursed Share, he references eyewitnesses to the Aztec capitulation to Spanish violence.
And when Octavio Paz (1914-98) describes the Mexican Revolution as a sublime catharsis, he shows the influence of
“Surrealism’s particular cult of Mexico as a place where the marvelous erupts as a daily phenomenon.” More generally, a
“primitivist and magical vision [. . .] was quickly accepted by some Latin American writers who were directly influenced by
Surrealism,” the emerging picture one characterized by “transcultural readings” (Stanton 216). A nostalgic picture of the
Aztecs relevant to twentieth- century concerns thus emerged at the intersection of French and Mexican fascination.
the centrality of human
Among the fashioners of this myth were those taken by its most sensational aspect:
sacrifice to the Aztec political and religious system. “While Breton, [Benjamin] Péret, and others in
their immediate circle celebrated the [Aztecs’] poetic expressiveness in both the aboriginal legends and the objects,
Georges Bataille exalted blood sacrifice” (Ades, Eder, and Speranza 3-4), an institution from
which he meant to distill a bygone but vital vision of the human subject. Indeed, Bataille
“formulated his approach to the sacred” in reference to the Aztecs, a reading that led him
to interpret “sacrifice as an act of renewal that leads to an alternative creativity based
on the dismemberment of the body and the omnipresence of blood” (Eder 78). Rather than a
passing interest, Aztec sacrifice became the guiding idea of his intellectual life: as Stuart Kendall
writes, “The Aztecs will haunt Bataille’s imagination throughout his career” (69). Diego
Rivera also believed that Aztec intimacy with the dead might recover a precious but
obsolete worldview. Rivera looks to Dia de los Muertos—the famous Mexican festival nominally commemorating
All Soul’s Day but widely thought to incorporate pre-European attitudes and artistry—in order to restore a dimension of
experience that had been lost to the modern era. Under
Rivera’s guiding hand, the festival’s
explosion of satirical calaveras (skeletons) began calling to mind the bodies of those the
Aztecs had sacrificed. Once the public fell in with Rivera’s reading of Posada, creator of this increasingly iconic
calavera, Posada’s bony figurines would permanently align him with the Aztecs in the minds of admirers despite the fact
that Posada’s own contemporaries would not have made the connection. Indeed, “Rivera surrounded himself with skulls
and skeletons in a way that would have puzzled Posada: his studio populated by life-size papier-mâché skeletons, his
house teeming with stone skulls from the Aztec period. Posada’s dancing skeletons provided the aesthetic link between
modern art, pre-Columbian art, and popular art. This is how Mexico’s skeleton achieved its totemic status” (Lomnitz,
Death 419). Rather
than drawing from historical data, each of these portrayals of a death-
obsessed pre- Columbian empire is instead “a counterfactual meditation [. . .] founded in
the so- called Aztec idea of death” (Eburne 30). Rivera’s repurposing of Aztec mortuary practice dialogued
with the efforts of late-nineteenth-century Mexican bureaucrats as they struggled to formulate a state- sponsored model of
cultural hybridity, an undertaking defined by several priorities: to portray the Spanish invasion as consistent with pre-
Columbian patterns of conquest, co-opt the energy of populist indiginismo movements, and cast Mexico as heir to an
antique and globally relevant civilization, a narrative framing the Aztecs as the autochthonous Mexican analogue of Greece
and Rome. Before Rivera distilled from the calavera a “formula that would give voice to Mexico’s singularity by way of an
artistic expression that fused pre-Columbian and popular elements” (Lomnitz, Death 50), Mexican bureaucrats in pursuit
of these goals had sponsored less satisfying exem- plars of hybridity. The Aztec Palace, the Porfirian government’s ham-
fisted and inel- egant entry in the 1889 Parisian World’s Fair, is perhaps the best known example thanks to the work of
Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo. Yet where these attempts were “prone to the vices of bureaucratization, theoretical sterility,
parochialism, and co-optation by the state” (Lomnitz, Deep 262), the calavera abounds in demotic and aesthetic vitality.
Even more than renovating and democratizing this vision of cultural synthesis, however, Rivera
ensures that the
calavera also recovers a degree of social and imaginative fulfillment that had been
eclipsed by Enlightenment reform. While seeming to develop unrelated concerns of the Franco-Mexican
myth (sacrifice and the human body for Bataille; festival practice, cultural hybridity, and the skeleton as icon for Rivera),
together these projects are supplementary. In fact, Bataille
and Rivera’s treatments of the Aztecs
address distinct parts of a singular, modern process wherein Enlightenment-era reforms
to urban space impoverish a shared understanding of the human subject. Thus I propose to
read Bataille’s portrayal of Aztec sacrifice—which recovers a symbolic dimension of
experience previously afforded the human body—as an auxiliary to Rivera’s portrayal of Dia de los
Muertos, which imagines lived spaces infused with the thanatopic presence of the calavera. Though affording one area or
another greater emphasis in their respective projects, Bataille and Rivera both turn to the Franco-Mexican myth in order
to synthesize these seemingly unaffiliated but intimately connected matters: urban space, Enlightenment reform, sacrifice,
death (the Mexican “national totem” [Lomnitz, Death 43]), and models of personhood. Each emphasizes a distinct part of
a twinned problem, but both see that urban reforms banishing death to the city’s margins
devalue a symbolic dimension of the human body, just as each looks toward the Aztecs as
an antithesis to this scenario wherein urban spaces devoid of death create human bodies
bereft of life. More precisely, I claim that Bataille and Rivera alike use the Aztecs to imagine how
the biopolitical regulation of spaces and subjects might be neutralized. These apparently
divergent foci of control are indeed linked: death’s banishment from inhabited space impoverishes
the subject (a tactic first identified in Michel Foucault’s discussion of urban reform) and results in what
Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, a figure so bereft of any symbolic dimension that killing him constitutes
extermination rather than murder or sacrifice. This essay claims that Bataille and Rivera understood the
nature of this bipartite problem and used the Aztecs to imagine its undoing, their
supplementary responses addressing distinct parts of the dilemma. Reading Dia de los Muertos (which for Rivera
reintegrates death into urban space) alongside “the accursed share” (wherein sacrifice lends the body a symbolic
dimension, for Bataille) allows us to appreciate how together these figures recover a bygone vision of space and
subjectivity that reimagines the biopolitical project first identified by Foucault. Before examining further how the agendas
of Rivera and Bataille illuminate one another, I will describe in greater detail the bipartite problem to which both respond.
Urban reform and the social construction of death are familiar scholarly topics, but there is no consensus regarding what
occurs at their point of intersection.
The disavowment of death is a form of biopolitics in which the

subject is reduced to bare life through urban discourses,
rationalization, and reform. Instead, we must look to the Aztecs
as the inverse of post-Enlightenment Europe and restore to the
sacred world that which servile use has degraded.
Lamperez 16. Joseph, Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of Rochester.
“The Aztecs and Urban Form in Georges Bataille, Diego Rivera, and J.G. Posada”, Mosaic
49/4 (December 2016) | rpadhi
Before the mid-eighteenth century, the dead were ubiquitous throughout European cities. During the Middle
Ages and Renaissance it was common practice to crowd “decomposing corpses into
hopelessly overfilled churchyards and crypts, whence they literally overflowed into the
space of the living” (Roach 48). Commercial and ritual activities thus took place in spaces nominally set aside for
the dead, the burial zones affiliated with churches “often provid[ing] the most convenient public spaces available to
merchants, mountebanks, jugglers, and their mixed audiences, who shared in this popular intermingling of life and death,
carnival and Lent” (48-49). This public cohabitation was as much the norm for centuries of urban life in Europe as it was
for a time in colonial cities throughout the New World. But due to Europe’s experience of the plague and
an evolving understanding of the spread of contagious disease, a new set of
“segregationist taxonomies of behavior in several related fields of manners and bodily
administration” demanded that “the dead were compelled to withdraw from the spaces
of the living: [. . .] their bodies [. . .] removed to newly dedicated and isolated cemeteries” (50). The effect of this
apartheid went far beyond the reorganization of urban space: “Many consequences,” Joseph Roach writes, “have no doubt
ensued from this immense project, this radical rationalization of space, this creation of a necropolis of exiles in the
‘[out]Skirts of Towne’” (54); “The most poignant of them must have been the slave ship, the triangular trade’s simulacrum
of hell, where each of the living dead occupied no more space than a coffin, and the daily wastage disappeared over the
side to a grave unmarked except by the sea” (55). In order for the living to suggest the living dead and for their dwelling
places to resemble veritable cemeteries, the bodies of the deceased had first to be banished into
isolated zones that would thereafter appear solemn, radioactive, and inert. While Roach stops short of describing
precisely why changes in urban design might impoverish how the body is imagined, Foucault shows how discourses of
urban discipline and of control over the human subject emerged in tandem. In Security, Territory, Population Foucault
defines biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features
of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of
power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the
fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species” (1). Foucault soon intertwines this core def-
inition of biopolitics with his familiar account of how the modern city was purged of
disease and death. This biopolitical reduction of the subject stems from four new pri-
orities referencing urban space: hygiene, trade, interlocking networks among towns, and
surveillance, the ensemble comprising what Foucault calls the “milieu.” As regulations of
the milieu grow more sophisticated they become identical to biopolitics, as evidenced by
the fact that the “population”—a new imagining of people as a mass of human bodies requiring strategies of
control and discipline—belongs equally to biopolitical and to urban discourses alike. The milieu,
Foucault writes, will be that in which circulation is carried out. The milieu is a set of natural givens—rivers, marshes,
hills—and a set of artificial givens—an agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain number of
combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. It is an element in which a circular link is produced between effects
and causes, since an effect from one point of view will be a cause from another. For example, more over- crowding will
mean more miasmas, and so more disease. More disease will obviously mean more deaths. More deaths will mean more
cadavers, and consequently more miasmas, and so on. So it is this phenomenon of circulation of causes and effects that is
targeted through the milieu. Finally, the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which [. . .] one tries to affect,
precisely, a population. I mean a multiplicity of individuals who are and fundamentally and essentially only exist
biologically bound to the materiality within which they live. (21) Here,
the reduction of the individual from
subject to mere biological entity results from reforms meant to banish death from towns
and cities. Urban rationalization is thus an antecedent of what Agamben calls “bare life”
(7), the human agent reduced from bios (an entity enveloped in symbolic and social significance) to zoe (one marked only
by bare, biological life, or entities that “only exist biologically”). The bare body’s “inclusion [. . .] in the political realm,”
which I read as linked to Foucault’s new “population,” is for Agamben “the decisive event of modernity” (4). Foucault’s
milieu thus ties the disciplining of urban form (where death is banished from the spaces
of the living and miasma stamped out) to an impoverished human subject that Agamben
names homo sacer. If Aztec sacrifice “restores to the sacred world that which servile use
had degraded” (Bataille, Accursed 55) so that the body of the accursed share, immolated at the
temple’s peak, is “destroyed as [a thing]” (56) only to be restored to the order of
“intimacy” (57), homo sacer is his opposite. Reduced to mere biology, the latter figure “may be killed but
not sacrificed” (Agamben 83) and thus enjoys no such restoration. Hoping to redress this impoverishment of the human
subject, Bataille uses the Aztecs to unfold a bygone model of agency and urban form. This
preoccupation with death and town planning had shown itself from Bataille’s earliest work. In “Slaughterhouse” he writes
of the anaesthetized imaginations that result when urban protocols cordon off killing from public space: Today, the
slaughterhouse is cursed and quarantined like a boat carrying cholera. In fact, the victims of this curse are not butchers or
animals, but the good people themselves, who, through this, are only able to bear their own ugliness, an ugliness that is
effectively an answer to an unhealthy need for cleanliness, for a bilious small-mindedness and for boredom. The curse
(which terrifies only those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as far as possible from the slaughterhouses. They exile
themselves, by way of antidote, in an amorphous world, where there is no longer anything terrible, and where, enduring
the ineradicable obsession with ignominy, they are reduced to eating cheese. (22) The
slaughterhouse
exemplifies a worldview wherein death is ghettoized and the imagination impoverished.
But figuring the human form as the lynchpin of a divine pact and expressing the morbid vitality of this arrangement
through public space, the Aztecs suggest a precise antithesis to the moribund social order described in “Slaughterhouse.”
Bataille writes that Aztec sacrifice was central spatially as well as symbolically, meaning
that the Aztecs were the inverse of post-Enlightenment Europe: “Their world view,” he writes, “is
singularly and diametrically opposed to the [. . .] perspective that we have” (Accursed 46). As Bataille knew, sacrifices in
the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan were conducted at the centrally located Templo Mayor, “an imago mundi, an image of the
monumentality of the violence of Aztec society” (Carrasco 59). This architectural sign of the centrality of sacrifice, “huge
and cursed” (Díaz del Castillo 218) to the eyes of contemporary Spanish onlookers, “was the scene of elaborate human
sacrifices, which increased to incredible numbers during the last eighty years of Aztec rule” (Carrasco 81). Bataille often
stresses that
for the Aztecs, the centrality of death found expression in the morphology of
shared space. Not only had the Aztecs’ “science of architecture enabled them to construct pyramids on top of which
they immolated human beings” (Accursed 46), this spatio-symbolic relation to death was fore- grounded in stark contrast
to other models. For Bataille, “Inca civilization is only an immense tomb, organized bureaucratically by civil servants in
the state” (Hollier 48), its capital “one of man’s most rule-ridden [and] thoroughly administered,” the urban ensemble
leaving an “impression of wild seediness and, above all, of deadly uniformity” (“Extinct” 3). The resonances between this
socio-urban formation and the one described in “Slaughterhouse” are clear. But in contrast to Incan and modern
European structures, Aztec
pyramids “were not used to cover up death but to display before
the eyes of all people the spectacle of the death of the sacrificial victim” (Hollier 48). As
Bataille writes, “The life of civilized peoples in pre-Columbian America is a source of wonder to us [. . .] because of its
bloody eccentricity,” their structures witnessing “continuous crime committed in broad daylight [. . .]. This observation
applies, it is true, mostly to Mexico” (“Extinct” 3). In this antithetical reverie the cosmic slaughterhouse conducts its
business “in plain sight,” exalted and ostentatious, never ceasing to suggest the Aztecs’ remove from the banality of their
contemporaries (the Incas) as well as their modern counterparts (the European slaughterhouse and the rationalized city
more generally). When Bataille writes of the “blood bath” of Aztec religion that its “amazingly joyous character” made
Mexico City into a “streaming human slaughterhouse,” he now uses the term approvingly:
such “horrors” (7) help
renew the social order precisely because they cannot be ignored. Like his French
counterpart, Rivera linked urban reform to a new class of subjects stripped of any
symbolic dimension. After the conquest, Spanish colonial recon- figurations of the city decentralized the Aztecs’
ritualized spectacle of death-production, reversing the urban attitude toward death. Claudio Lomnitz describes reforms in
Mexico City identical to those observed in Foucault: “From the viewpoint of public order, reformers were concerned with
policing, cleanliness, and public health. Pestilence and plague were attributed no longer to public sins but to miasma, a
bad air that suffused public spaces” (Death 264). Like
Bataille, Rivera redressed these reforms in
reference to the Aztecs, an effort that he localized in pivotal interpretations of Dia de los
Muertos and the affiliated oeuvre of Posada. The abundant calaveras of Dia de los Muertos and Posada
alike thereafter take on a twinned significance, suggesting a cultural heritage reconciled in the pre-Columbian icon of
death as well as recovering a lost spatio-symbolic model of urban form and imaginative experience. A Posada thus
renovated by Rivera flaunts a love of dramatization and his macabre but at the same time humorous use of death as a
plastic motif. Posada: death personified as a skeleton that gets drunk, picks fights, sheds tears and dances for joy. Death
turned into a homely figure, into a papier-mâché puppet. Death in the form of a candy skeleton for children to suck while
their elders fight and face the firing squad, or dangle from a rope. Death as the life and soul of the fiesta, dancing a
fandango, or accompanying us to the cemetery to mourn the dead, and eat mole or drink pulque over their tombs. (Rivera
187) Posada’s calaveras are not just the ludic return of a repressed pre-colonial identity, assuaging and domesticating the
death wrought by revolution, nor solely a populist and aesthetically vital renovation of the longstanding myth of cultural
fusion. Rivera
also locates calaveras at the intersection of death, festival, and urban form,
meaning that like Bataille’s sacrificial victim they begin to suggest a lost dimension of
symbolic experience accessible through communal intimacy with the dead. Not only were
“Mexico’s Days of the Dead [. . .] seen by artists and writers as a guardian spirit of the unique qualities that legitimated
Mexico’s bid for a distinctive place in the world of modern culture” (Lomnitz, Death 416); with Posada appointed its
guiding artistic spirit, the festival also becomes an occasion to test what dimension of imaginative life might be recovered
when the dead are reunited with the living. Rivera suggests this privileged link between death and urban space in his
mural “The Day of the Dead” (see Figure 1). Lomnitz notes of the mural’s “musical band of skeletons, each of which is
dressed in the attire of a social class,” that they “made eternal and harmonized in death” the crowd of divergent revelers
below them, signifying how “for Rivera [. . .] the Days of the Dead [. . .] seemed to be a perfect exemplar of the cultural
fusion that they considered the very source of Mexican nationality” (Death 46). Yet the image does more than aestheticize
a cultural mestizaje comprising indigenous and European influences. In fact the dead here are “synthetic” creatures in
more ways than one: as evidence of cultural hybridity, but also as the sign of artifice. The four skeletons flaunt the screws
holding their two-dimensional bones together, their conspicuous fabrication inviting the viewer to read Dia de los Muertos
as both a physical and figurative social construction. The life-sized calaveras imply that there exists not only a privileged
relationship between space, social form, and the skeleton, but that this arrangement has also been jerry-rigged: someone
here is pulling the strings (or tightening the screws) of the dead who make possible this gathering of the living. If “urban
space is a crucial problem for Bataille in that for him the city is the privileged locus of the physical and geographical
elaboration of the sacred” (Stoekl xvii-xviii), Rivera asks us to consider that calaveras offer an opportunity to manipu- late
this “locus” according to a given agenda. If Rivera and Bataille’s contributions to the Franco-Mexican myth have thus far
seemed more contiguous than intersecting, it is in Posada’s icon of the skeleton that their distinct portrayals of Aztec death
find common ground. Posada’s calaveras have become the sign of a hybrid cultural tradition comprising pre-Columbian
and European aesthetic lineages. This reading is speculative, a deliberate attempt to fashion an icon suited to modern
Mexico, as Lomnitz has noted and as Rivera himself seems to suggest. But
by pointing to Aztec mortuary
practice, the calavera also aligns with Bataille. For him, a public display of bodies slain
according to pre-Columbian religious rites suggests the accursed share, placed at the
epicentre of a cultural system at the moment of his death. Perhaps it is due to the Aztecs’ distance
from the alienated tedium of everyday life—they “were just as concerned about sacrificing as we are about working”
(Accursed 46, emph. Bataille’s)—that Posada’s skeletons seem to be “on vacation, obedient to no reality principle but that
of laughter” (Villoro 11). Restored to a symbolic order, these figures radiate “intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living
beings” (Accursed 59). For
Bataille, a space where death is not disavowed affords the body this
“intimate participation” that “restores to the sacred world that which servile use has
degraded” (55). The calavera in Posada thus synthesizes Rivera’s and Bataille’s visions of the Aztec worldview, and so I
now turn to Posada and to the festival showcasing his legacy.
Eroticism
Educational and social systems of thought continually suppress
the possibility of eroticism vis a vi social linguistic taboo’s which
create a “language that equals zero”.
Erotism is markedly different because it explicitly addresses communication as an

element of nonknowledge. Erotism presents us with two such important moments, both at the conclusion
of the book. The first is Bataille’s use of what he calls “a language that equals zero”:
I have cautioned you about language. I must therefore caution you at the same time against my own words. Not that I
want to end upon a note of farce, but I
have been trying to talk a language that equals zero, a
language equivalent to nothing at all, a language that returns to silence. I am not talking
about nothingness, which sometimes looks to me like a pretext for adding a specialized
chapter onto speech; I am talking about the suppression of whatever language may add
to the world (264).
The second moment is a refinement of Bataille’s earlier claim that something “slips” in communication:
[L]anguage scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely even while
it arranges it in order. Through language we can never grasp what matters to us, for it
eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can
be referred ever appears. Our attention remains fixed on this whole but we can never see it in the
full light of day. A succession of propositions flickering off and on merely hides it from our gaze, and we are
powerless to alter this (274).
These two moments
highlight a crucial aspect of the communication element of
nonknowledge: language “that equals zero” is honest Bataillean communication, but
something still eludes us—something escapes any and all language and thus escapes being suppressed (in the form of
propositions aiming at totality).
Feature 1.3 (of Unstable Communicability): “A language that equals zero”
Our next concern is to understand this phrase: “alanguage that equals zero, a language equivalent to
nothing at all, a language that returns to silence” (ibid 264). Understanding the concept of erotism will
move us toward an explanation of this “language that equals zero.” According to Bataille, “erotism is silence”
(ibid 274). And it is secret37:
My starting point is that eroticism is a solitary activity. At the least it is a matter difficult to discuss. For not
only conventional reasons, eroticism is defined by secrecy. It cannot be public. I might instant some
exceptions but somehow eroticism is outside ordinary life. In our experience taken as a whole it is cut off
from the normal communication of emotions. There is a taboo in force. Nothing is
absolutely forbidden, for there are always transgressions. But the taboo is sufficiently
active for me to be able to say by and large that eroticism, perhaps the most intense of emotions, is
as if it did not exist as far as our existence is present for us in the form of speech and
language [...] Erotic experience will commit us to silence (ibid 252; emphasis mine).
Bataille is claiming that erotic
experience involves two kinds of silence. One is the kind of
silence that taboo requires. This is a socially-required silence. Erotic experience cannot be
part of “normal communication of emotions,” lest we risk the social exclusion resulting from
taboo violation. (We are sometimes even prohibited from speaking of our erotic worlds, as in the case of codes of
professional conduct in some workplaces.) The other kind of silence results from erotism being “the
most intense of emotions”: erotic experience does not translate into language. It is as if erotic
experience does not exist, “as far as our existence is present for us in the form of speech and language” (ibid). The erotic
defies our attempts to communicate it, even if we wish to communicate it, even if we do
not fear the repercussions of violating taboos. This suggests an additional, more
challenging claim: there is a permanent part of our existence characterized by its inability to be translated into and
represented through language. This part of our existence, however, can be accessed in erotic
experience.
Erotic language is partially characterized by silence. It is silence, as Bataille says, but it is
more than one kind of silence. It is socially-sanctioned silence, and it is experientially-
necessary silence. It is a silence required of us on two fronts: the outside world and the
experience (of the erotic) itself. If we can say anything of erotic experience, Bataille claims, what we say will
amount to nothing, as we are only describing a necessary silence. This is language which
“amounts to zero”: speech and language used to describe silence, and to describe that which
(for Bataille) resides in us but outside speech and language.
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The possibility of eroticism, and so of the experience of Eros, comes from the structure of existence.
According to Bataille, life is divided in two realms: the continuous existence and the
discontinuous one. Eros is a phenomenon that happens in the realm of continuous existence, but depends on the fact that
beings experiencing erotic love live within the discontinuous existence. In other words,
eroticism is the disturbance of the discontinuous existence that brings discontinuous
beings into continuous existence. From the outset, we can see that eroticism is a
transgression— which will become associated with evil later. Discontinuous existence is the realm of isolated beings. In it,
entities are limited, and thus have a selfhood, even a sense of seriousness. Continuous existence, on the other hand, is the realm in
which the Self is no more, in which energies are ever moving and stability is impossible. The realm of animality; a night in which
separated forms and beings are not, but in which everything is part of a continuity. Eroticism is thus the
transgression of the determined limits of discontinuous beings in order to
experience the violence of continuity. In order to understand this, we need to understand the structure of
each form of existence that Bataille describes, and only through a thorough understanding of these
structures can we see how they create the possibility of erotic experiences—and what this
phenomenon entails. Continuous existence is not a primitive state, but a chaotic one,
in which stability and rest are not possible. It is a state of movement and continuity, closer to what we
can call the elemental than to the world of distinct shapes and beings. According to Bataille, existence is movement,
in the sense that it is a flux of energies that moves around the Earth without
purpose. As such, it is a wasteful process, and expenditure without end. The
movement of life is a movement of expenditure. It is energetic and exuberant, because it is a play of forces that strive to affirm
themselves through the overcoming of lesser manifestations. The grass grows out of the solar energies, the fawn grows out of the grass,
the wolf feeds on the accumulated forces of the fawn’s, and so on. Overall, each new level is a more exuberant display of energies,
and each new level asks for more and more forces to be in play (see Bataille, Part maudite). The wolf needs to use more energy to hunt
the fawn than the grass to accumulate the energies of the sun to grow. This
continuity entails what Bataille calls
a general economy, one that is not grounded in principle of accumulation, but on
expenditure. In continuity nothing is accumulated or loss: on the global scale—the
general one—the energy circulates endlessly, without purpose. From the perspective of the singular
and isolated entities, it is a movement of expenditure that overcomes and destroys them. From the perspective of continuity, it is
existence at its fullest. The continuous existence is the one in which life is immanent—
and seen as such. For the predator, the prey is only a source of energy, not an isolated being apart from it. It is a unique manifestation,
in the sense that the fawn is a concentrated amount of energies with a given shape and in a given spatiotemporal position, but for any
entity in continuity, the fawn partakes in the same movement of expenditure we call life. We should consider
continuous existence as a plane of immanence, a plane on which life manifests itself
through level of intensity that are in communication with each other. In Bataille’s terminology,
beings are to be considered according to the amount of energy they
represent; beings are exuberant, because that is the way in which they can affirm themselves; expenditure as the logic of
continuous existence.1 As we hinted at earlier, expenditure is only one from the perspective of isolated and discontinuous beings. We
see continuous existence—and existence as such—as a movement of expenditure because we are used to think under the logic of
preservation, that is through the assumption that life is the life of the self. 1 We will draw a lot for this distinction between general and
restrained economy on Bataille’s most systematic work: La part maudite. We recommend—obviously—to read the whole work, since
it is a thorough analysis of economy through history. It seems, however, that the reader could find the essence of our explanation in
the first part, which Bataille calls restrained economy, energies are to be accumulated for a purpose. Discontinuous beings calculate in
order to remain in their finitude. The surplus of energies are used either as an augmentation of one’s comfort, or as investment in new
forms of accumulation. The surplus is thus always an accursed share, because it is a remainder—and a reminder—of the fact that life
is overflowing, and not to be contained within limited existences. Life, however, does not take into consideration
the desire of preservation. Its movement—violent and exuberant—is unstoppable, and
refuse to be contained in a single place. This is why the general economy, the one that
looks at continuity and beyond the desire of preservation of the discontinuous entity,
appears as a movement of expenditure: it is pointless, without any form of calculus, and
most of all without any possibility of accumulation. The discontinuous existence creates the possibility for
stability. It is the realm in which the self wants to survive and be a center of meaning. It is the world of human rationality and
existence. As such, it is built around the logic of restrained economy, one that only aims at the preservation of limited selves. If
from the economic standpoint, it refuses expenditure, the same will go morally. The surplus to
spend is accursed, excess is evil. In other words, in the desire for preservation comes with a distinction
between good and evil—good being the preservation of the self and evil its destruction. “In
popular opinion [jugement vulgaire], the substantive aspect of moral action is its subordination to utility, and the impulses for a
yearning to transcend [dépasser] being are related to the good of one’s being.” (Bataille, Nietzsche 29) Morality is
always a desire to go beyond our limits. The categorical imperative—
probably the extreme of moral desire—is universal, beyond our reach, and
dictating us how to act from on high. This, however, as any moral that finds its purpose within a restrained
economy, only aims at the preservation of the self. According to Bataille, it is thus a fallen morality. The true moral
impulse—what he phrases “morale du sommet” is not aimed at preservation, but at communication, that
is to say, at continuity. In other words, the morale du sommet is transgressive of the self, but most of all evil. “All ‘communication’
participates in suicide, in crime. … By destroying the integrity of existence in myself and in others, I open myself to communion—I
attain a moral summit.” (26) With restrained economy comes the morality that establishes good as the good of a limited being. In both
cases, the goal is to restrain the chaotic energies in order to accumulate and calculate. It is a rejection of expenditure. Taboos and
moral rules will always do violence to the continuous movement of expenditure. Expenditure is considered violent
and evil, because it is without purpose, but Bataille stresses out how taboos and
restrictions are other ways to justify our own inner violence—that we have because life as
such is violent. “If my life is threatened for some comprehensible good— for instance, for the nation of a useful cause—my
behavior is deserving - 38 - PhænEx and is popularly considered moral. And for the same reasons I’ll kill
and wreck havoc in conformity to moral law. I another area, squandering resources through
gambling and drinking is wrong: though it’s right to improve the fate of the poor.” (28) The morality that comes with discontinuous
existence is an attempt to give a purpose to expenditure and the movement of energies: it tries to restrain by making calculable . As
long as we conceive existence as taking place within the restrained economy,
good will always be related to a form of preservation, whereas evil will be a
wasteful movement of expenditure.
Eroticism allows for the dissolution of a stable self – it
is an encounter with death that views it not as a
biological process but as being of the realm of the
impossible which enables an embrace of excess
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This is where the erotic makes its appearance. We already hinted at the fact that eroticism is the
transgression of discontinuous existence so human beings can go back to a state of
continuity. We should then see how eroticism is related to Bataillean communication,
which is, as we saw, a form of evil. Even further: it is the possibility of human sovereignty. By that term, we need to
understand not a state of mastery, but an escape from the logic of mastery and work. Sovereignty, in Bataille’s philosophy, is deeply
evil, because it is a transgression of what limits and constrains us. Eroticism differs from
sexuality in the sense that through a desire for communication, the lovers are not driven
by a logic of satisfaction—which would preserve their selves—but on a logic of continuity.
This is a tension in Bataille’s thought since it still seems that such a desire would ask for a form of calculation and thus would fall under the logic of
restrained economy. What is truly at stake here, however, is to understand the relation between eroticism and evil, leading us to sovereignty, and its
distinction from mere sexuality, which is oriented towards the future hope for satisfaction. Seriousness is the state of being in which there is stability and
the possibility of preservation: it is the “end” of violence and exuberance . The serious self can consider herself as
the subject that look objectively at the world. It is the self that refuses to be
thrown into existence, but that strives to master and work within it—through physical or
intellectual means. The serious existence entailed by work comes with a projective mode of existence, and thus with a linear temporality.
The self from the past, the one in the present and the one of the future are all the same selfhood that develops itself, but stays within a limited existence .
In the violence of transgression—or of communication, what appears is the fact that life is a play of
energies, a play that cannot allow seriousness. What appears is the plane of immanence, that is a plane
that does not allow projects, but an intense immersion in expenditure. It is an experience of existence as such, i.e. a pure experience of what it means to
be. Seriousness is thus necessarily anxious, because, as Bataille says it, the serious and working self of
discontinuous existence is always conscious of a violence that still lingers within life as
such, a violence that could bring projects, hopes and dreams to naught; a violence that could disturb the calm atmosphere of a stable life. In the
creative impulses of work, what appears is the destructive possibility of creativity; and in the violence of passions
and desires what appear is the dissolution of a selfhood, and the loss of seriousness. Eros appears in Bataillean thought to be the possibility of a being that
Eroticism is the “fall” of the
wants to overflow, and to breaks out of the restricted seriousness. It is the explosion of selfhood.
working and serious self into the continuous and exuberant communication. In a certain sense,
eroticism is an attempt to be in a state of innocence: a state in which the
serious self is not anxious nor at stake with a world that must remain stable,
but in a state where the self is destroyed and in continuity with the loved one.
Isolate being is a deception (which reflects the crowd’s distress by reversing it), and the couple, becoming stable at last, is a negation of love. But what
goes from one lover to the other is a movement that puts an end to isolation or at least makes it waver. Isolate being is risked, opens to what’s beyond
itself, to what’s beyond the couple even -monstrous excess. (Guilty 158) The logic of Eros is thus the breaking apart of the stable and serious existence,
and the embrace of continuous existence. It
is the death of the isolated self and the birth of a
communication that does not take place in a discontinuous world. It is the transgression of the limits that
are necessary to the stable and serious existence, and thus it is an aspect of human existence that is utterly exuberant and non-rational, in the sense that it
cannot be understood under the logic of work and seriousness. Eroticism
is an experience of life in all its
intensity and exuberance: it is the death of the isolated self that suddenly
finds itself in the midst of life’s orgy, that is in the midst of the play of energies that existence is. Death,
here, is not a biological ending of function, but the movement that breaks
the limited existence. Death is the experience of the beyond the limits—an
experience of the impossible. “A request you ought to make to your boyfriend or girlfriend: be the victim of the impossible.”
(40) Far from being the desire to own the other, what erotic love craves is the experience of the impossible, that
is the experience of existence in its violence and exuberance, where possibility, as in the logic of seriousness, is impossible. This is equivalent to death,
since it is, in a way, an experience of nothingness. Serious existence dwells within the possible, that is within the possibility to calculate and use entities
What is deemed impossible is what escape that logic, so in a sense
within a desire for preservation.
everything that will be labeled evil, wasteful and announcing death. We already saw that Bataille, in On
Nietzsche, says that “squandering” and “drinking” are reprehensible, whereas killing in the name of a greater good - 41 - Thomas Minguy is deemed good:
in the former case, it is because it leads nowhere and is a form of loss and perdition; in the latter there is a
certain calculation and a purpose. Eroticism opposes sexuality in the same way: the former is
wasteful, without purpose and transgressive of selfhood; the latter is a craving for being filled with pleasure. S uch a logic then takes
part into the movement of transgression and death, in the sense that what is
sought is the transgression of limits, and thus the death of selfhood.
Escaping the possibility of satisfaction and embracing the excess of energies;
sacrificing the limited selfhood to find the continuity of existence.
Very good card on why eroticism is a good alternative

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In the dichotomy between continuous and discontinuous existence, what is at play is the
stability of self-consciousness, and thus of selfhood. Philosophical tradition often considered the problem of
subjectivity objectivity through the lenses of a dichotomy between the subject and the external world in which it is thrown. It is the
easiest way to conceive discontinuous existence, because if the subject is separated from the objects,
there is no continuity but a world made of specific entities that only a
separated and isolated self can know. Cartesian thought creates that dichotomy, as Descartes tries to
escape the blurred senses to understand the world in clear and distinct ideas. This is even his criteria of truth:
clarity and distinction. With Hegel, and subsequent developments in phenomenology, what appears is that the subjective
must collapse with the objective, and thus the philosophical analysis of the development of
selfconsciousness becomes the main task of philosophy. This task is, according to Bataille, the creation of
a solidified self that is enclosed within determinate limits. In Levinas’ vocabulary, philosophy of such a tradition
creates a totality that cuts itself from the infinite, in the sense that self-consciousness as
subject and object of itself can only look at the universe as something limited—that can expand
through Hegelian dialectic, for example, but that remains ultimately limited, i.e. looking at itself. Discontinuous existence, as we saw,
is exactly that: the creation of a limited self that can only look at other objects through a limited vision. Quiddity, essence, categories:
all of these are way to maintain the world within a limited self-consciousness. Immanence and continuous energies
must be shaped to become meaningful—e.g. the overcoming of sense certainty is the beginning of Hegelian
development of self-consciousness, which leads to World Spirit, the ultimate expression of a universal
selfconsciousness, the ultimate totality. Disturbances of discontinuous existence are
moments in which the seriousness of the stable selfhood is broken. Eroticism is such
a disturbance. What appears in eroticism is the vision that the limited self is not everything,
and that it is a manifestation of energies—chaotic and exuberant energies. In the shattering of the self,
what is visible is the flux of energies, the exuberance of living beings. Being in continuity does not mean being
lost without any possibility of differentiation. It means seeing the world as made up of
energies, and ourselves being a unique manifestation of energies. Your business is questing for an
unknowable destiny. Because of this you’ll have to struggle by hating limits—limits which the system of respectability sets up against
The advantages
freedom. On account of this, you’ll need to arm yourself with secret pride and indomitable willpower.
given to you by chance—your beauty, glamour, and the untamed impulsiveness of
your life—are required for your laceration. (Guilty 161) The uniqueness of the loved
one is ephemeral, and its only truth is its oncoming death. The limits, Bataille says, are there to
be overcome and destroyed, because as limits they contain the energies that we are. The loved one, with her unique
beauty, arouse our lust and desire: we desire this unique manifestation of energy. We desire to unleash the
energies that are hidden under the veil of a limited self—under the veil or her unique
selfhood. “Eroticism is not satisfied in contentment; it is the release of excess forces, craving
extreme experiences in extreme torments and extreme pleasures.” (Lingis,
Dangerous 141) In that sense, eroticism is a transgressive movement: the transgression of selfhood in a
desire to unleash energies. This unleashing is communication, in the sense that through the transgression of limits
we gain access to what is utterly inaccessible to limited selves. Through an experience akin to death—in an
experience that goes beyond limits—we experience continuous existence, in which every
entity is in communication with others. It is an extreme movement that seeks to make visible the energies of the
world and the excessive movement of life. The serious self stands proud above the ground, and it keeps a physical image that seems
solid and organized. It is the body of an organism, something with a hierarchy and an organisation that makes sense (see Deleuze &
Guattari). The hands are there to hold and shape, the head to think and see, the mouth to talk and all together the brain controls the
movement of our bodies with purposes. Through erotic impulses such a vision is shattered .
In the erotic moment, what
is sought is expenditure— free expenditure of excessive energies that are not related to
any notion of utility. “An erotic object functions as the open gate toward which the shock waves of our energies rush to be
compressed and intensified and inflamed there, and to break forth into the dazzling darkness beyond.” (Lingis, Dangerous 143) Eros is
thus not a desire to possess, but to unleash. The object of erotic desire thus becomes a site of
transgression: it is the sacrifice of its usefulness. In other words, eroticism is the
movement in which what has the character of seriousness is brought down
in obscenity. This is on this basis that it differentiates itself from mere sexuality. Sexuality is always
linked with a transgression of selfhood, in the fact that reproduction of two separated beings asks for
their oncoming death. “The parents survive the birth of their offspring but the reprieve is only temporary. … Death follows
reproduction with sexual beings too, at a distance even if not immediately.” (Bataille, Erotism
100-1) Thus, reproduction is a transgression of selfhood, in the sense that it is
the vision of the future death of the parents: it is the annunciation of the end of a limited being
through the apparition of another limited being. Even more so, sexuality, in a physical sense, is a transgression of
one’s body. Through sensual caresses and different penetrations, one’s body is transgressed. With sexuality particularly a sense
of the existence o the others beyond the self-feeling suggests a possible continuity as opposed to the original discontinuity. Other
individuals, in sexuality, are continually putting forward the possibility of continuity; others are continually threatening a rent in the
seamless garment of separate individuality. (102) Through
penetration and sexual acts, the self of the
other is no more separated, but enters into a physical continuity. Even then, there is a futural aspect
in sexuality, and even more a logic of satisfaction it the structure of desire. One can look at how Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory
of Sexuality will subsume sexual drives under the pleasure principle. Drives create erogenous zones under a logic of lack and
satisfaction: “The
sexual aim of the infantile drive consists in obtaining satisfaction by means
of an appropriate stimulation of the erogenous zone that has been selected in one way or
the other.” (Freud, Three Essays 45) Under that logic, sexuality—and sexual desire that is too often taken as Eros—
is always seeking to fill a hole (often quite literally) in the limited self. Sexuality is
thus always a calculative process of lack, satisfaction and pleasure. Eroticism is different, in the sense that Eros is a desire for
continuity, for exceeding limits and overflowing. The
sensual touch becomes erotic when there is
violation of the person of another. There is a breaking down of someone’s public and
decent presence and functioning in the ordered and regulated roles of the social field. There is a specific
excitement in the collapse of posture and wariness, the divestment of functions, roles, and selfrespect. (Lingis, Violence 82) - 44 -
PhænEx Eros is not the desires for satisfaction of the self, but for the breaking apart of limits. Eros is the desire to lose oneself in the
chaotic energies of life. “The physical urge is curiously foreign to human life, loosed without reference to it so long as it remains silent
and keeps away. The being yielding to that urge is human no longer but, like the beasts, a prey of blind forces in action, wallowing in
blindness and oblivion.” (Bataille, Erotism 105) Erotic
pleasure is the liberation of the violence
that lingers in human beings, the violence of life that is repressed and
crystallized in seriousness through taboos and moral restrictions. Christian religion,
for example, condemn Eros and prefers Philia, and by far Agape. Eros is considered as a possessive and egotistic desire, where Agape
is free giving; but for Bataille Eros corresponds with a lost of the self, and so it cannot be egotistic. It is indeed related to the
uniqueness of a selfhood, but only to break that selfhood. To those who avidly desire laceration, individuality is
necessary. Laceration wouldn’t be itself if not a laceration of a particular person, a person chosen for his or her plentitude.
Excess life, fullness, are a means of highlighting the void, and this fullness and this excess are that person’s to the extent that they
dissolve us, taking away the safety rail that separates us from the void. (Guilty 157)
The fact that this unique being,
in its given beauty and uniqueness is a unique manifestation of life makes even more
explicit the aspect of chance and absurdity that rules our existences: it makes explicit the
constant movement of energies around the Earth that are chaotic and nonlogical. The
uniqueness of the lover shows that it is impossible to possess such a being, because the life of such a unique person is an ephemeral
manifestation in an energetic life. And this life will kill her. When Bataille talks about this “torn” aspect of limited beings, he means
that our discontinuous life always comes with the sense of a continuity that we
strive to escape: we tear ourselves out of the continuous existence. In
eroticism, what happens is that we seek the place where we were torn apart,
and we connect through these open wounds. “When love denies limited existences, it gives them in
return an infinity of emptiness. It limits them to waiting for what they are not.” (154) Erotic love is the negation of
limits, the transgression of seriousness and the openness to the emptiness of what lies
beyond our limits: the emptiness of a meaningless chaos of energies. Eroticism thus
escapes the logic of truth. Truth can only appear—or be understood—in a world
where it is possible to stabilize objects and to look at them. Even in the possibility of a fluid truth, as in
Hegelian dialectic, truth depends on the certain stability of a given stage of the dialectic. “The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in
which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and
simple repose.” (Hegel 27) With such an account, what appears is that truth is fluid and changes over time, but the members of the
bacchanalian revel collapses, and the “transparent and simple repose” is the vision of its development over time, and thus the
possibility of grasping truth. In
erotic contact, the coherent lines of discourse break up
into teasing, nonsense, and laughter. Erotic contact disconnects from the rational language that seeks to
establish truth, that is, what is true for everyone; erotic utterances are a private language. Nothing is to be learned from listening in to
lover’s talk. (Lingis, Violence 84) There is no purpose in the erotic pleasure, because what is sought is not satisfaction nor
reproduction, but loss and abandonment. It is, as we said earlier, giving oneself to the violence of life,
and embracing the chaotic movements of energies that are around the globe. It is leaving the
inertia of a serious life and embracing the high velocity of energies circling the world. As such, eroticism thus leaves
the realm in which truth is possible to understand, and seeks to experience the truth of
existence, i.e. its violence and exuberance. Leaving the logic of understanding (of grasping the truth), it enters logic of
immanence, in which truth is not seized, but created and experienced. Through eroticism, what appears is the breakdown of
seriousness and the openness to the death of limitations. When
there are no limits, objects are no more
graspable: they become fluid and their truth is no more something we can hold, but that
we must create with. When we kiss the lips of our lovers, these lips cannot do their role: they cannot eat nor talk, they can
only enrapture us in this excess of energies. Same when we make love to our lovers: in the taking away of the clothes of the other,
what appears is the frailty and vulnerability of a body that is no more able to walk proudly on Earth. In the erotic activity we
lose
control over our limbs and we collapse in numerous ecstasies that cannot be associated
with utility, and in a certain sense we die in the arms of our lover, because we are no
more this serious self that was limited. We embrace what lies beyond the limits of our
selves, and such a limit is beyond the grasp of our reason, because it is nonsensical. The
caressing hands move aimlessly over the flesh in random, repetitious movements. The muscles tighten, harden, the limbs grope and
grapple, pistons and rods of a machine that has no idea what it is trying to achieve. The it collapses, gelatinizes, melts, runs. The
trapped blood surges and pounds, the heat billows, the spirit vaporizes in gasps and sighs. In
dissolute ecstasy the body
that has become ligneous, ferric, coral now curdles, dissolves, liquefies, vaporizes,
becomes radioactive, solar, nocturnal. (Lingis, Dangerous 148) - 46 - PhænEx The body loses its posture as the
mind loses its grip over the world. Eroticism is when we embrace life in its fullest
manifestation, through the continuity with an other. It is as simple as in Bataille’s Histoire de
l’oeil, in which one of the first erotic moment is when a young girl sits in a plate, because she says that plates exist so we can sit in
them.2 In
this ridiculous breaking of seriousness and stability, the young boy experiences
an orgasm that happens only because the plate is no more a plate, but suddenly an gate
to the excessive energies of the world. Breaking the serious stability of the plate is
childish, and laughable—and hardly erotic for many people; but what is the difference between this and
the crossdressing or even sexual activities in which the mouth it no more used to eat or talk, but to suck, swallow, bite, moan, laugh,
and scream? The costume of the erotic partner is only there to be taken out of the
realm of objects, and to be sacrificed on the altar of laughter. The transgression of
eroticism is not only a breaking of a taboo: it is rendering what is deemed serious obscene. In Bataille’s erotica, the
movement is not one of mere sexuality in which individuals are copulating
for the sake of pleasure. The transgression is a transformation of what is deemed serious and useful into something
laughable and devoid of any use. It is an embrace of evilness. This also explains Bataille’s fascination for writers who are fascinated
with evil as an experience of freedom: Brontë, Blake, Sade, Baudelaire, Genet, etc. Eroticism differs from sexuality
in the absence of purpose, but mostly in the reversal of values, the unleashing of energies
that are covered by calculative reasoning and the logic of lack and satisfaction. The zone of
decomposition of the world of work and reason, this zone of blood and semen and vaginal secretions, of excremental discharges and
corpses, this zone too of mushrooming eddies of nameless inhuman life, which fills us with exultant anguish and anguished exultation,
is the zone of the sacred. … The
sphere of sexuality becomes the zone of the sacred,
where the world of work enters into decomposition, in the transports of
eroticism. (149) This is where eroticism leads us when we follow Bataille’s logic of transgression: we fall into the
sacred realm, and as such eroticism embraces the logic of sacredness.
Transgression of seriousness is a sacrifice of the former, and it liberates forces that are hidden in the crystallized authoritative and
meaningful faces. Eros is a desire for what 2 “‘Milk is for the pussy, isn’t it?’ said Simone. ‘Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?’ …
The day was extremely hot. Simone put the saucer on a small bench, planted herself before me, and, with her eyes fixed on me, she sat
down without my being able to see her burning buttocks under the skirt, dipping into cool milk. The blood shot to my head, and I
stood before her awhile, immobile and trembling, as she eyed my stiff cock bulging in my trousers. Then I lay down at her feet
without her stirring, and for the first time, I saw her ‘pink and dark’ flesh cooling in the white milk. We remained motionless, both of
us equally overwhelmed….” (Bataille, Story 10) lies beyond the limits of discontinuous beings, and this beyond corresponds with
what we call the sacred. The final step we need to take on Bataille’s philosophy of
eroticism is the analysis of what it means to be a saint in Bataillean terms—
of what it means to be sovereign.
By embracing death by means of eroticism, we form new

subjectivities through becoming which increases vtl
France, FranceInformation Technology and Services, ARTKeoS Digital Advisor Previous Masterbrand,
If the final step in our analysis of eroticism leads into an exploration of the notion of sacredness and
holiness, it is because the place where erotic desires and actions take us lies within the same realm of existence. Eroticism is the
breakthrough of continuous existence in the seriousness of the discontinuous one, and
the sacred is the continuous realm, i.e. a realm of violence and eternity. Continuous existence is
immortal, in the sense that it cannot die: it is a flux of energies circling around the world, and in that sense this flux never ends. The
particular beings that are part of this continuous cycle are indeed dying, but
their death takes part into the whole cycle. The death of the fawn is also the growth of the wolf. What
death reveals is the violence of continuous existence, and it is only possible through the
end of discontinuous existence, as the violence of the sea can only be truly experienced in the shattering of the boat on which the
mariner stands. “Blindfolded, we refuse to see that only death guarantees the fresh upsurging without which life would be blind. We refuse to
see that life is the trap set for the balanced order, that life is nothing but instability and
disequilibrium. Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion.” (Bataille, Erotism 59) Eroticism has a sense
of death, because it makes us experience continuity through the death of our selfhood,
through an experience of what is beyond the restricted vision of the restrained economy.
Sacredness and holiness partake in the same logic: in the sacred ritual, what happens is that the selfhood dies to meet the divine, i.e. the violent and
exuberant energy that is considered life. God is love and God is life; and in the sacred texts of Judeo-Christian religions, what appears most often is the
fact that the believer should abandon selfishness and embrace an openness to the glory of the divine. This, however, is still, according to Bataille, within
the logic of seriousness and discontinuity, since God becomes the One discontinuous entity that masters the world, and the believer desires salvation for
her own discontinuous soul. Without delving too much in these problems that are beyond the purposes of this paper ,
one must
understand that the problem of religion is the rational aspect of it, i.e. the concentration of exuberance
into stable divine entities that master the movement of the elements. Religion coincides with the dream of a
pure rational principle that orders the world. What eroticism and
sacredness have in common is not the belief in salvation or in the
immortality of the soul, but the experience of the continuity of the world as a manifestation of violent and exuberant energies.
“For every thing that lives is Holy” (Blake 45). This is the vision that is associated with mysticism, and as such mysticism and eroticism share a similar
structure: in the vision of objects that are part of the discontinuous existence, the mystic and the erotic person see a gate towards continuous existence.
Mysticism reveals the divine in a negative way: through the negative theology, it is possible for the mystic to perceive holiness in the absence of objects.
God, in that sense, is a presence that is similar to an absence: it is the continuity without discontinuity; being without any distinction, pure exuberance and
movement. “Nothingness: the beyond of limited being. Strickly speaking, nothingness is what limited being isn’t. You could say it’s an absence, an
absence of limit. Taken from another point of view: nothingness
is what limited being desires, desire
having for its object something that isn’t doing the desiring.” (Bataille, Guilty 157)
Mysticism is thus deeply erotic, since the desire is not a desire of possession nor a desire to give, but a desire to be lost in what lies
beyond one’s limited being. The great mystics embrace what they call the night of knowledge, and often they will talk about the divine in a way that lies
beyond language. In fact, their relation to God or gods is one that lies in a pure experience of continuous existence, a rapture that takes them beyond any
possible language or rational explanation. Dante’s final Canto in Paradiso is a beautiful account of that experience: God is an absence of
objects, an absence of sense and a pure movement of energies that silences forever the
possibility of describing Him. The experience of the sacred, the experience of the continuous existence that is the truth of religious
life, is thus to be understood under the logic of Eros. “There is the beauty the Platonic eros contemplates, that eros that seeks immortal forms. … The eros
that chases after this kind of beauty is pursuing visions of immortality.” (Lingis, Dangerous 143-4) Even in the Platonic sense, what is sought by Eros is
immortality, and such a thing is only possible through the absence of material objects. The ladder of Eros, in Symposium, follows that logic: if the lover
loves at first the beautiful objects, it is only to love, in the end, the eternal forms of these objects. Sacrificing the unique (isolated and limited) beauty to
unleash what cannot die. Erotic love, however, is still subsumed under a vision of work, in the sense that what is
immortal are forms that are perfect and stable—eternal in the sense that their crystallized perfect forms cannot die. Once more the dream of perceiving
the world under pure rational principles. The difference between eroticism and mysticism lies in the fact that where the latter seeks in the absence of
objects the presence of the divine—of this entity that masters the elements, eroticism seeks the absence properly—
the absence of sense. Mysticism finds sense in the night of reason, where eroticism experiences the absurdity of chance. The unique
person in front of us, the uniqueness of the lover and the mortality - 49 - Thomas Minguy of this lover opens up the possibility of seeing continuous
existence. In the transgression of this unique person, in the transgression this person that is a chance, what is revealed is the truth of existence: the
In the erotic
impossibility to make sense of our own existence, since we are all part of this exuberant movement of energies.
moment, what is sacrificed is the apparent necessity of our selfhood. In the
transgression of selfhood, the chance that rules the world appears, and
there is no god, no destiny, no fate, but only this impossible moment with
this impossible person. When we quoted earlier Bataille saying that what we need from our lover is that she becomes the victim
of the impossible, this is exactly it: we need to discover in the erotic love for our lover the impossibility
of serious existence and of stability. In the melting away of seriousness and stability, what is revealed is the impossibility of
an answer for our existence, because in this exuberant continuous existence, only chance rules. This is what Bataille calls sovereignty, and what he calls
sanctity. In tension with his own thought, it appears to be a form of salvation—on that is experience through an experience of evil. This is probably the
biggest tension at play in Bataille’s work: the line between the saint, the mystic and the erotic is very thin. Does Bataille really escape calculative reason
by changing from a restrained to a general perspective? Is not sovereignty through evil a distorted form of salvation? If Bataille claims that the true erotic
and sovereign experience depends on a chance—almost an experience of evil “grace”—it seems hard to conciliate with his appeal to transgression
and numerous attempts to create, throughout his personal life, ritualistic secret societies. This is a problem left unsolved by Bataille—and it
could be the task of those who read him to explore this issue of chance, that takes all the place in very aporetic works, such as On Nietzsche or Guilty.
The saint lives above the contingencies of the world, and consider each thing holy, since each thing is a manifestation of life and also a product of chance.
“The autonomy—sovereignty—of man is linked to the fact of his being a question with no answer.” (Bataille, Guilty 133) Embracing immanence, the
saint will live in the world above the rules and will defy rational and limited possibilities. Death
of subjectivity and
objectivity; immanence of the creator that plays with the energies of the world,
knowing that life is a play of forces and chances: only with the innocence of the child can
we truly embrace this reality. Lack of seriousness and deep love for the world; desire of what lies beyond our limits as limited being;
an embrace of the energies of life. The saint and the sovereign one are both above the rules and
contingencies, because they do not live only in the discontinuous world: their task is to bring
continuity in the discontinuous world, to do “miracles,” i.e. to break the apparent order of things—even to transgress the apparent moral order. Opening
up the world as a plane of immanence, and thus refusing to see things as crystallized, but always as fluid and immanent. Sovereignty as the state of
innocence, in which the laughter of the child makes the world transparent and holy. Conclusion: Eros as an Experience of Existence Eros—or erotic
love—is the gate towards sovereignty, because it is a gate towards continuous existence. The embrace of the
flux of energies, of exuberant forces that cannot be totally controlled or subsumed under
rational and moral principles, is the truth of eroticism. The truth of Eros is the secret, the mute and evil rumble of
chaotic existence. Lovers meet at night under a tree in a forest, because that is the secret of love: the secretive movement, that can never stop. It is the
movement of expenditure without a purpose other than existing as an us. Loving like a wave loves another one, loving as
in a dream that will end, but that is unique, because it is mine—and yours, and ours.
Being secret, always moving. We are a secret—not because nobody knows, but because
nobody can be part of our movement, of our deep experience of the world. That is how we started
too: as secret lovers, partner in crime. Complicité, complicity: intimacy in something that must remain secret. Conceived under this logic, what the
sovereign one sees is exactly what the saint seeks to show: the secret of the world, the fact that everything is
divine and immanent. Being secretive is going against the rules, going against the determined limits that tells one what to do or not to do. Playing with
serious figures and forms of authority, Eros creates a space in which things are secretive, because they cannot be voiced out loud. In Bataille’s Story of
the Eye, children are the protagonists, and their erotic relationship unfolds through secrets and secretive actions. Hidden, or alone: never in public, and
more than anything else, never with the thought of utility or satisfaction. A mere game that goes nowhere, but that can only accept players sharing the
secretive life of the three children. When they are caught, parents are horrified, because that is also part of what it means to be secretive: horrifying
figures of authority and seriousness. Being erotic—embracing erotic love—does not mean being in a sexual
intimacy with someone: it means being in a state of complicity that brings
both lovers out of the realm of seriousness. It brings them back to state of immanence, where what is
disclosed is the possibility of creating with the energies of life. The secret is a disturbance of stable life, because it must
always move. As we saw, it means that it is living in the continuous existence, and as such it must follow the movement of life. Eros creates
the possibility for fluidity: it is the desire of what lies within the limited self. When we
said that erotic desire is a desire of lies beyond the limits, we meant that it is a desire of
what lies beyond limited entities. “Beyond,” not in an external sense, but in an intensive sense. What lies beyond limitations is
exuberant energies, and this is always within limited beings. What lies beyond the limits is existence in its
violence and nonrational aspect: it is the night in which we must immerse
ourselves to feel part of the world. It is the ecstasy of the saint that feels the divine within her. It is the sovereign
feeling when a lover gazes in his lover’s eyes. In that sense, the secret, the experience of life through Eros is an experience of violence and exuberance
that takes us away from our selfhoods. It
is something transgressive, but in this transgression
what is sought is not satisfaction, but immanence. A phenomenology of Eros, then, would have to
study the logic of transgression in its relation with immanence. It would look not at a history of sexuality, but at the history of taboos and their ultimate
breaking apart. It would study the sacred aspect of different societies, and how figures of authority took control of sacredness to create an institution—a
set of dogmas that are limiting the scope of the sacred. Ultimately, what this study would show is the movement of secret societies and how the secretive
aspect of eroticism corresponds to the immanence of life. Bataille’s study of eroticism creates the
possibility to see the desire of what lies beyond not under transcendental or
external terms, but as a desire of letting the exuberance of life shining forth
through the fall of seriousness. In that sense, Bataille’s Eros is closer to Spinoza’s conatus or Nietzsche’s will to power:
it is a desire to be. Eros as the desire of pure existence, and not as the experience of the ineffable. Eroticism thus
becomes not only an important aspect of human existence, but the possibility of a sovereign
existence that would escape the contingencies created by the logic of work . It becomes the possibility for a continuous
relationship with other human beings and the world. Eros is not pure immanence, but the desire to unleash
immanence. Erotic is the gaze of the loved one, the caress of a lover, and the
laughter of a child: erotic because they unleash forces that melt away our
selfhood.
Failure
Thus we affirm ourselves as the failures of education – resisting
the dominant power formations as an act of nihilism towards
the educational systems of subject formation which resist the
barbaric forms of western ideals and instead watch the corpse of
education fade away as we laugh at its rotting figure.
Allen’16 – Ansgar Allen is lecturer in education at the University of Sheffield, “Education, Mastery and the
Marquis de Sade” -- KZaidi
Sade’s direction of travel is also our own, insofar as we

too are suffering the effects of “European
nihilism.”lxix But our collective travel is less deliberate: we kill Man, God and Nature without
fully intending to. This killing of each is built into the pursuit of mastery that we (unlike Sade)
disavow. Sade only brings to the surface that brutalism inherent in Western education,
which negates and negates monstrously, in order to affirm. It is perhaps conceivable that, if this
tendency were fully acknowledged, if the grotesque nature of our dream, our pursuit of mastery
were fully manifested, we might develop the strength to reject it as our educational
objective; and not by returning to that dirty compromise of mastery through enslavement
which kills though it does so quietly; rather we might pursue its opposite, which is
failure, a failure to master others and ourselves.
Mastery or failure, these are the options given us by education. Mastery is promised
through a sleight of hand that prevents its delivery (we become enslaved to the pursuit of something
that is rarely if ever realised), whilst failure of a kind is guaranteed. Educational failure is far more
common and systematically produced than we would like to admit. In short, if one did not
fail, another would not succeed; the mastery of those who succeed is dependent on the
existence of those multitudes that fail. We are in a position similar to that of the debauched libertine still
reliant on the “pleasure of comparison”—educational success remains dependent on
educational failure, on negation (and educational failure remains dependent by comparison with educational
success). We are not simply waiting for the “right” pedagogy to be applied “successfully” so
that failure can be removed.lxx Described as the “traumatic real” of contemporary education, failure belies
the barbarism of educational mastery and the fantasy of an educational good.lxxi In a
perverse cycle of affirmation, education is offered as the solution to the problem, that of systemic
failure, which education creates. Failure is the necessary consequence of that nihilism
which attaches us to promises that are never delivered, which makes us its inevitable
disappointments. The educated nihilist would not retreat from failure, then. This figure would not
seek to heal education of that affliction, since failure constitutes education. Yet even for
the educated nihilist this is difficult to fully admit: It really is traumatic for the educator
who is by profession wedded to an ideology of educational success.
Our options are limited by our histories and appear radically opposed. We might affirm
mastery and redefine it as Sade once did so that our mastery is no longer dependant on the
failure of others. Or we might pursue its opposite, failure. This, too, might constitute a route
through nihilism. Accordingly we would embrace failure, learning to fail better. We would
seek to fail without appeal, attempting to fail on our own terms. Our failures would fall
outside the shadow of a promised mastery. This affirmation of failure would raise the
devil, that “Spirit of Heaviness” through which “all things fall.”lxxii It would give homage to that metaphysical
ghost which nihilism both produces and suffers. It would confront that spirit in its incorruptible substance, and
understand how it was first and forever since conjured by man. Having nothing in common with
matter, this Spirit of Heaviness leaves us with the sensation of falling. We are confronted by things that will no longer be
suspended aloft. These
things fall, we fall with them, and in our descent we begin to
accomplish our nihilism.lxxiii This fallout we perceive as the necessary outcome of that
unnecessary belief in spectral things, ideas, Gods.
Our affirmation of failure would be deliberate, giving expression to our nihilism, revealing
its downward tendencies so they are better negotiated. We would no longer kill Man, God and Nature
without fully intending to. Rather, we would seek to understand how this killing is brought about as a
consequence of our education.lxxiv We would investigate our nihilism, so as to acknowledge
it, better express it, and confront our downgoing.
Instrumental Rationality
K of instrumental rationality
Habermas, 87 (Jiirgen Habermas , German sociologist, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One:
Reason and the Rationalization of Society Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason
Translated by Thomas McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1984 and 1987) / RF
For a truly communicative rationality to develop, Habermas claims that a balance between the three
spheres is needed, one which will ensure undistorted communication and legitimation.
But the problem is much more fundamental. The very spheres themselves, as he has defined them, are products of an
uncritical application of nominalized rationality, and reproduce the old CartesiadKantian problem of how to relate a
primal object and its mechanics with an isolate subject and its values (and with a society whose inner logic is “norm conformity”). One of the
dangerous, and I would say mythic, implications of Habermas’s argument for the rational
autonomy of the three worlds is the subjectivism which underlies his definition of each.
Technicalism underlies the objective world, so that “cognitiveinstrumental” rationality and science and technology are
intrinsically technical and strategic in nature, and any moral or aesthetic considerations
have to be “brought in” by communicative coordination from the outside, from the other
“spheres.” The faceless herd animal constitutes the social world, so that “ moral-practical” rationality and law and
morality are intrinsically about norm following, regardless of objective conditions or
subjective perspective. The subjective world is the sphere of “aesthetic-
practical’’ rationality, art and eroticism: a parody of subjective idealism and romanticism without inherent
objective or moral tempering except insofar as it coordinates itself with these seperate spheres. And
what, I ask, does “aesthetic-practical’’ mean other than a misconception: the “-practical” addition to aesthetic is
as needless as the “rationality” addition to “aesthetic-practical’’ is wrong.
Habermas seeks to acknowledge the genuine achievement of different spheres of conduct in the modern world, the ways in which art and
morality, for example, broke free from their traditional religious moorings and
developed autonomous secular standards. But in the place of a medieval religious civilization which
prevented the emergence of differentiated spheres of conduct, he would collapse the three domains of science and technology, law and
morality, and art and eroticism to a modern equivalent by viewing them as “complexes
of rationality.” The reader should turn to the table on p. 238 of Volume One to see how Habermas fits these categories into systematic
boxes, as if art and eroticism fit neatly into different aspects of one box, and as if erotic life is
cleanly separable from moral life and can only be associated with “aesthetic-practical
rationality.” The development of modern art has much more to do with the evolution
and expansion of human feeling than it has to do with mere rationality, unless
one adopts a purely technical and external approach, as Habermas does. And the linking of science and technology as if they were synonymous, and as if
they could be characterized by “ cognitive-instrumental
rationality,” reveals a fundamental
misunderstanding of the nature of modern science. Science is a method of inquiry intrinsically incorporating
“intersubjective” inquirers into the very notion of objectivity, as well as extrarational tempering-learning by experience. Science, conceived from a truly
“communicative action” perspective, as opposed to Habermas’s, includes rationality but is by no means limited to it, and a rationality intrinsically subject
to criticism by all other inquirers rather than an individualistic “cognitive-instrumental rationality” unbounded
internally by the critical community. In other words, the possibility of communicative action is
built into these spheres of conduct internally, and not merely in an external coordinating
action of linguistically-based intersubjectivity. Against Habermas’s theory that the three spheres are “complexes of
rationality” whose balancing results in “good” rationalization, I would juxtapose Peirce’s view that rationality is but an aspect
of one sphere, the logical, defined differently from Habermas, and that the logical sphere is dependent
on the ethical sphere, which in turn is itself dependent upon the aesthetic
sphere. In Peirce’s view of the normative sciences logic is conceived as self-controlled thought, which is a sub-species of selfcontrolled conduct,
or ethics, which in turn is dependent upon the intrinsically admirable, or aesthetics. Even logic, in Peirce’s conception, involves more
than rationality, as illustrated by Peirce’s incorporation of abductive inference within logic (Rochberg-Halton 1986). Although I cannot
discuss it at length here, Peirce’s approach provides a much broader basis for the relative autonomy of the three modalities than does Habermas’s rational
As opposed
perspective. This argument amounts to overturning the dominant categories of modern thought and their prime avatar, rationality.
to a view of humanity becoming matured by becoming better rationalized, it is
more accurate to see modernity as a process of disembodiment, in which humanity
becomes increasingly denatured, dematured, and etherealized through its
overreliance on decontextualized rationality.
Laceration
Thus we affirm ourselves as the stigmatic’s before the altar –
creating communication through a laceration of the self – an
openness to the outside which maximizes the cosmic life force
within us through an affirmation of the incompleteness within
the self. It is before this altar that we engage in the beheading of
God and all the values that come with it as a refusal of closure
and the completeness of our life as a way to move life to the
limit. This stigmatic politic allows us to move to communication
from the rational to the irrational, from God to the headless.
MacKendrick’09 – Karmen MacKendrick is Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College. She is the
author of many books, including Word Made Skin: Figuring Language at the Surface of Flesh; Fragmentation and
Memory: Meditations on Christian Doctrine; and Divine Enticement: Theological Seductions (all Fordham). ““The
Obsessions of Georges Bataille Community and Communication” Chapter 8 136-143 KZaidi
In other words, stigmatic religiosity is intense and corporeal, as we might indeed expect; it is, for
those who are taking it seriously, communication with the incarnate passion of God.The
opened space in the body is also the mark of the opening of a communicative space, a
creation of community with Christianity's embodied divine. Bataille distinguishes the communication
that links two beings from that in which being itself is shattered— communica tion with
the beyond, the ungraspable, the sense of one’s own death (OC 5: 388/G 139). Stigmata,
communication by being-in-common with the pain of the passion, is fascinating in some measure
because it insists upon both at once: communication with the person of Christ and the mutual
beyond of agonizing death, in which God, too, “is" otherwise than being.
Bataille writes that communication requires laceration, a violent openness:
The more perfect, the more isolated or confined to ourselves we are. But the
wound of incompleteness opens
me up.Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness or the wound, the different separate
beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other. (OC 5: 263/G
27)
And again:
Incompletion, the wound, and the pain that has to be there if com munication is to take
place. Completion— the contrary of this.
What's requisite for communication is a defect or ‘fault.' Communication enters like
death through a chink in the armor. What's required is an overlapping of two
lacerations, mine and yours. (OC 5: 266/G 30)
Seldom, of course, is the laceration as literal as that of wounds open ing in the skin. But the
woundedness of the stigmatic is never “simply” physical in a reductive sense; rather, the physical
suffering seems invariably to be accompanied by an intensity of spiritual or psychological
"experience" that necessarily registers as agonizing. 18 Bataille too emphasizes not only the wound but
also its painfulness (OC 5: 266/G 30); laceration is not the neatly anaesthetized opening
of a surgical procedure. It is only thus that the wound cuts all the way through, from
skin to self.
Pain is constant, a necessary attendant to the experience but also essential in itself, as the rending intensity
of this communication necessarily exceeds the boundaries of pleasure; as pain functions
both as a sign of this intensity and as a means of intensification. Rene Biot writes that suffering “is never
absent, whatever the form of stigmatization. It is always intense.”19 Often the stigmata seem to
hurt just as if the marks had been received by more evident means. Or, as in the case of
nineteenth-century stigmatic Anne Catherine Emmerich, “a vision of Jesus appeared to her with wounds that ‘shone like
so many furnaces of light’ and felt as if they burnt into her flesh.”20
This communicative agony might seem an unlikely place for the sacred, given Bataille’s
insistence, “For those who understand communication as laceration, communication is sin,
or evil. It’s a breaking of the established order” (OC 5: 305/G 65). But it is important that
this sense of “evil" is "a breaking of the established order,” including the order of the profane
and the sustainable hierarchy of the church (always threatened by ecstasy and charisma, both of which
tend to be rather strongly manifested by stig matics— think of the famous recent example of Padre Pio). The “apex of
sacrifice,” Bataille declares, is the “inexpiable crime” of the crucifixion; the body of the
stigmatic blurs the boundaries of sacrificial priest and victim, as Christ’s blurs those
between the sacrifice offered and the god to whom that offering is directed: all of sacrifice bleeds together
in the flowing of open wounds.
This sacrificial death of God, irredeemable except as self-redeeming (not after or despite, but in its mortal
violence), opens the space for the movement beyond subjectivity into the
opening o f the self. The contestation of the subject, the ripping-open of the self, comes out of
that subject's own agony of desire. The finitude of the self, the boundaries that make it, open to the
infinity of the divine, shattering in flesh and blood the order of the profane— in imitation of the mortal wounds of
the bleeding, dying, glori fied God. Here the sacred is not the “set apart,” but that which is neither
apart nor contained.21
In this ecstatic opening, communication becomes possible.This “experi ence” wounds—
opens— the finite creature: “ecstatic, breathless, experience thus opens a bit more every time the horizon of God (the
wound): extends a bit more the limits of the heart, the limits of being" (OC 5: 122/IE 103-04).
The horizon of God is the wound: so God too, at the limit of the divine, is wounded, and this indeed
is the point upon which stigmata are based. The wound opened in the stigmatic skin
bleeds out into the God who enters there.
Stigmatism belongs to a religious tradition emphasizing not only human but also divine
desire, God’s desire for entry into humanity, just as “No greater desire exists than a wounded person's
need for another wound” (OC 5: 267/G 31)—the desire invoked in those prayerful pleas for God’s wounding love.
Communication requires not one wound but (at least) two, “an overlapping of two
lacerations” (OC 5: 266/G 30). But to lacerate God, the only way to communicate, cannot be
other than sinful;22 hence sin and salvation are intertwined, again beyond a simple sense
in which one pays for the other.
The more obvious, and in fact simplistic, versions
of salvation would have stigmata be salvific in a
sort of working-off-the-debt arrangement; suffer enough, as those who are wounded and bleeding
surely do, and you get to go somewhere pretty and sit on clouds. 1 would like to suggest what seems to me a
somewhat richer possibility, in which suffering itself is transformed, not merely for what one gets as
a reward but inherently, in which mutilation transforms the possibilities of the self—by violently
opening the space of divine communication. Bataille calls ascetic activity mutilation, but he adds, “If it
is a question of salvation, let one mutilate” (OC 5: 36/IE 23). Thus one seeks to provoke
anguish, itself a means of knowing; “communication still is, like anguish, to live and to
know” (OC 5: 52/IE 39). This “knowledge” is not a set of facts, nor this communication their
transmission; it is the knowledge with which we return to ourselves from our own
ecstatic loss (OC 5: 67-68/IE 53). “Anguish assumes the desire to communicate— that
is, to lose myself—but not complete resolve: anguish is evidence of my fear of communicating, of losing myself”
(OC 5: 67/IE 53). Rapture or ecstasy occurs only in giving in, necessarily fleetingly, to self-
loss.
Lack or incompletion, implied by the opening in a space that seems to demand closure, is
likewise essential to communication; there must be a point of entry. God and human alike lack
wholeness (OC 5: 135/IE 116), are lacking, and are thus, potentially at least, open to one
another.23 This connects us back to the shocking foundation of Christianity in the sacrifice of God: “There’s a
necessity for god to be killed: to see the world in the weakness of incompletion.
The next thought to occur is that, come what may, the world has to be completed, although this is what’s
impossible and incomplete. Everything real fractures and cracks” (OC 5: 262/G 27).
Taking up Bataillean notions of communication and community, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot understand community
as
the place in which the self becomes possible, not by isolation and boundary-marking but
by exposition, by being open to others, to otherness, and by being held in memory. Finite and limited, we
are not self-contained; as Nancy empha sizes, community is not a subsequent gathering of
individuals but the very undoing of the absolute immanence that individuality suggests.24
As we have already noted, the
space of communication demands for Bataille the violent
openness of laceration, a woundedness linked directly to the possibility of speaking: "Should one sew
my lips together,” Bataille asks, “like those of a wound!” (OC 5: 81/IE 67). Nancy warns against a simple conflation of
community and communicative laceration but notes that “what
tears apart is the presentation of finitude
in and by community.”23And it is not one-self that is lacerated:
What is lacerated . . . is not the singular being: on the contrary, this is where the singular
being compears. Rather, it is the communal fabric, it is immanence that is lacerated. And
yet this laceration does not happen to anything, for this fabric does not exist. There is no tissue, no flesh, no
subject or substance of common being, and consequently there is no laceration of this
being. But there is sharing out.... “Laceration” consists only in exposure: the entire
“inside” of the singular being is exposed to the “outside."2''
This openness to alterity is the space of community and communication for finite beings, so it might
seem to have little place in an effort to understand divine communication (at least in a
tradition that understands God as infinite). But stigmata emphasize the paradox of an infinite God
made flesh, sharing finitude, vulnerability, even mortality (if God is not dead, the resurrection is at best a
parlor trick) to emphasize that we are not only finite. They mark a sharing not in any
customary notion of divine glory but in the degradation of mutilation and the ecstasy of
suffering. Here, the stigmatic finds not “self” in the sense of individuality but the wounding of
subjectivity past mortal limits, the laceration of self that opens self onto the
unlimited.
Nancy in particular links community specifically to the Christian incar- national myth. Noting the dual and
conflicting Christian myths of the deus absconditus and the familial, familiar human god, he writes
that “the thought of community or the desire for it might well be nothing other than a
belated invention that tried to respond to the harsh reality of modern experience: namely, that
divinity was withdrawing indefinitely from immanence, that the god-brother was at bottom
luntself the deus absconditus ... and that the divine essence of community— or community as
the existence of a divine essence— was the impossible itself.”27 The impossible, o f course, is
precisely what draws Bataille’s interest. The divinity evoked by stigmata is not absolute
immanence any more than it is transcendence of the human condition; it is
woundedness, opening, the refusal of closure. It is the desire to experience at once
the fleeing of God, a God who seems to have forsaken the mortally wounded humanity of his son-self; and the God
who returns and sustains, who without closing the wounds nonetheless lives again in the
flesh. Thus stigmata mark at once the with-ness (the impossible necessity of community in the absence of
self-sufficiency) of finite and vulnerable beings, and ecstasy, the opening of the self to the
divine beyond finitude. “What community reveals to me,” says Nancy apropos of Bataille, “is my existence
outside myself.”38 But we may also think, with Blanchot, from the outside: what community with the divine reveals
is the outside of my existence, myself otherwise than in (my) being.
In a seeming paradox that echoes th is problematizing o f inside and out, Bataille connects “inner
experience,” that famously contradictory state that defies the interiority of the experiencing subject, to
community: “there cannot be ... inner experience without a community of those
who live it” (OC 5: 37/IE 24). Complete, whole beings would not communicate; they would
be “isolated or confined to [them]selves” (OC 5: 263/G 27). Blanchot similarly notes, "A being,
insufficient as it is, does not attempt to associate itself with another being to make up a
substance of integrity. The aware ness of the insufficiency arises from the fact that it puts itself
in question, which question needs the other or another to be enacted. Left on its own, a being closes
itself, falls asleep and calms down. A being is either alone or knows itself to be alone only when it
is not.”29 A being seeks others not in order to fill its gaps and complete itself but in order
to be exposed (open ing the “inside” of the singular being), to be present to the other in a way that
makes plain one’s incompleteness— or even makes one’s incompleteness. Thus one starts “being only
in that privation that makes it conscious ... of the impossibility of being itself, of
subsisting as its ipse or, if you will, as itself as a separate individual: this way it will perhaps ex-
ist, experiencing itself as an always prior exteriority, or as an existence shattered through and
through.”30 Again, stigmata make this literally clear, rupturing the body, mak ing the interior
blood and fluid exterior, the interior pain visibly manifest, the existence shattered, the
prayer suffer me not to be separated agonizingly fulfilled in open wounds, vivid welts,
bleeding eyes.
The opening of stigmata, the moment of community, of the violent intimacy o f
communication, is thus the moment o f laceration, o f the self not merely wounded
but torn apart by the ecstasy of the death of God. According to Blanchot, “Death, the death of the other,
like friendship or love, clears the space of intimacy or interiority which is never (for Georges
Bataille) the space o f a subject, but a gliding beyond limits. ‘T h e Inner Experience' says the
opposite of what it seems to say: it is a movement of contestation that, coming from the subject,
devastates it, but has as a deeper origin the relationship with the other which is
community itself, a com munity that would be nothing if it died not open the one who
exposes himself to it to the infiniteness of alterity, while at the same time deciding its inexorable
finitude.’” The subject desires to get out of itself, but this is self-loss; exposure to the divine
is a devastating intimacy at the intensity of death, where alone community can exist.
Thus, in
that moment of knowing ourselves to be alone— of participat ing in the passionate
question why have you forsaken me?— we seek not to be, seek the shattering of our own
existence, seek to put ourselves into question. Blanchot writes, “What, then, calls me into question most radically? Not
my relation to myself as finite or as the consciousness of being before death or for death, but my presence for another who
absents himself by dying.. .. to take upon myself another’s death as the only death that concerns
me, this is what puts me beside myself, this is the only separation that can open me, in its very
impossibility, to the Openness of a community."32 The stigmatic takes upon herself a
very peculiar death, a death with life at its maximum of intensity— eternal or divine life—
already bound up in it, an impossible death of a God in human flesh:13Thus too we find
community at its maximum. Blanchot writes, “What purpose does [community] serve? None, unless it
would be to make present the service to others unto/in death, so that the other does not get lost all alone___ Georges
Bataille writes: ‘ . . . a commu
nity can last only at the level of the intensity of death.' ”-14
Community here become salvific so that we do not get lost all alone.
Nancy likewise links death (which we, even knowing ourselves mortal, can only encounter as the death of an
other) intimately to community. “A community is the presentation to members of their mortal truth.... It is the
presentation of the finitude and the irredeemable excess that make up finite being: its
death, but also its birth, and only the community can present me my birth, and along with it
the impossibility of my reliving it, as well as the impossibility of my crossing over into my death.”3"The reliving of the
passion and crucifixion impossibly suspend the stigmatic between the moments of death
and birth: “to not reach an end was one of the exigencies of Bataille’s endeavor”'16 This is the realm of
Blanchot’s “unworking,” beyond questions of "production or completion.”17 The deadly
wounds of Christ perpetually reopen, unfinalized, incomplete, in the bodies of
communicating believers, bodies asking the impossible; that is, seeking union, fusion, the completion of
communication in another’s death; in that death, by its peculiarly double and
temporary character, is an infinity of life.
Community is inherently, necessarily unfinished, unclosed, and so at once finite— because it
does not extend forever, but lasts only at the inten sity of imminent destruction— and
without defined limits, even opening the ecstatically wounded body to the limitless joy and suffering of the divine.18
Stigmata represent a communicative pair, the stigmatic and Christ, less like the community of a
society and more like what Blanchot calls the "com munity of lovers”; "love . . . exposes
the unworking and therefore the inces sant incompletion of community. . . . Lovers form
the extreme though not the external limit o f community” 19 But, complicating the
distinction, stigmata occur disproportionately often in members o f religious
communities, pushing the community formed around the story of the incarnate God to
the limit o f recognizing that carnality within itself.
In the scar as a site o f memory, I recently argued, one finds oneself where one was
absent.41The site of the stigmatic wound may be more complex still. The wound is
the opening o f communication, the all-the-way-through laceration of body and spirit
without the strict division that modernity will impose upon them as if it were self-
evident. The edges of the stigmatics blood-seeping wounds overlap with those o f the
perpetually wounded figure of Christ (even in stories of his resurrected body, the wounds remain unhealed)
in a moment of impossible communication, the formation of an impossible community of self and
God, a community in which neither stigmatic nor God is a being in the sense of self-
containment, of definite, defined existent. The stigmata form community as the Eucharist forms
communion, at the moment of death with an emphasis on corporeality (this is my blood), but at
the same time at a moment of life pushed to shattering intensity. “The quick of life would
be the burn of a wound,” says Blanchot, and so it is here, God and human sharing the ultimate
vulnerability to death.41 In the presence of one dying, the stigmatic seems to be taken over by a
memory so somatic as to transform her identity into that of another. We may be assured that
Francis’ “fervour grew so strong within him that he became wholly transformed into Jesus
through his love and compassion," as if a singular identity were constituted repeatedly in
the bodies of stigmatics following Christ.42 Yet this is not quite right either; it is not the case that now there
are two of Christ and none of Francis or any other stigmatic, but rather that in this communication with the
open space of the sacred, neither human nor divine retains the identity o f presence.
Rather, “identity” is shared in the space of absence, in the inside-out of “inner” experience,
in the wound. In the presence o f one who is dying-— at the limit o f vulnerability— the
stigmatic does not merely reenact the passion and crucifixion of the sacrificed God but
sacrifices herself in communication: and this, this ecstatic vulnerability, this
violent intimacy, is what remains to us of the sacred after Christianity’s ultimate
paradoxical madness in the sacrifice of God.
Sitting meditation, a glorious expenditure of energy, is a way to

cultivate the deep affirmation of earthly life and its finitude. As a
form of existential micropolitics, it is crucial to addressing
systemic domination to solve for social justice that spread
beyond debate to the larger society.
For Trungpa, sitting meditation is a way to embody the sovereignty that Bataille argued for: “Meditation practice begins by
sitting down and assuming your seat cross-legged on the ground... You realize that you are capable of sitting like a king or
queen on a throne. e regal- ness of that situation shows you the dignity that comes from being still and simple.”83
Sitting meditation is a glorious expenditure of energy; it is a way of touching into and
affirming nature’s basic richness and overflow. Bataille’s account of earthly richness resonates strongly
with Trung- pa’s analysis of basic goodness. What Bataille adds is a robust biophys- ical account of energetic richness, one
focused on the fact of surplus solar energy. is material reality helps ground the idea of basic goodness. I have personally
found Bataille’s work helpful in making sense of my meditation practice, the primary technique taught by Trungpa for
experiencing our basic goodness. When people sit, let go of conceptual thought, and connect to
the ephemeral present, feelings of impressive intensity often arise. For me, the intensity of these
feelings compels countless e orts to escape, and I regularly reach for the protection of conceptual and egoic thought. But
understanding these feelings as emblematic of the fundamental exuberance of earthly life has helped me gradually
befriend them. I have come to see meditation as a form of “intensity training”: I am slowly learning to be with the
exuberance of the world. Joining Bataille’s analysis of solar lavishness with Trungpa’s account of basic goodness has
helped with my intensity training. e rawness I experience during meditation, while still intense, is less overwhelming
than it used to be. It has actually come to feel good—an opportunity to ride life’s e usion, life’s goodness. Marcus Boon
hypothesizes that “Bataille’s own theories of excess and general economy are themselves the product of, and if you like,
profit from, his meditation practice. Meditation, a practice of sovereignty, of the ‘non-useful,’ was precisely used by
Bataille as a secret source of the theory of sovereignty.”84 Bataille’s theoretical work was partly inspired by Buddhist
praxis, but can be looped back to help conceptualize the experience of meditation. Going beyond discursive thought is a
Buddhist aim, but access to good concepts can help with the process of letting go of our conceptual resistances to the
existential real. Bataille’s account of earthly richness, coupled with Trungpa’s contemplative instructions for feeling and
em- bodying that richness, are helpful tools in the vital cultural struggle against existential resentment. Georges Bataille
and Chögyam Trungpa help us theorize the use of mind-body practices in transformative social movements. ey both add a
powerful rationale to those already deployed by activists. If there are existential drivers behind systemic
dominations like colonialism, capitalist exploitation, white supremacy, and hetero-
patriarchy, then existential micropolitics like meditation become central to addressing
the causes of injustice, not only their effects. The accounts provided by both Bataille and
Trungpa clarify how efforts to integrate mind-body practices into social movements are
vital, more than peripheral, to the political success of the Left. Increasing opportunities
for activists to feel their basic richness will help transform dominative and controlling
impulses that can arise in everyone, even those of us committed to social justice. As both
Trung- pa and Bataille argue, it is easy for humans to feel small in the face of nitude, and compensate with controlling
behavior. By cultivating the capacity to experience the richness of earthly life through meditative technique, social
movements can forestall the e ects of existential resentment within their ranks—e ects like oppressions that are replicat-
ed among activists themselves.85 is will make movements more cohe- sive and capable of achieving social, ecological, and
economic justice.86 Cultivating a deep affirmation of earthly life—including its finitude—can
help activists “be the change” in radical and embodied ways, ensuring that their
subjectivities are fertile ground for the generosity, solidarity, and equity that are the
emotional building blocks for more just societies. Similarly, a sociality among activists rooted in the mu-
tual experience of basic goodness can serve as a vital pre guration of enlightened and egalitarian societies. Social
movements provide vital experimental ground for new social and cultural relations that
can then be spread to the larger society.
We present Bataille’s theory of laceration as a vehicle for

endurance and black care to open up modes of survival while
interrogating underlying power structures of anti-blackness
- The subject is not fractured in a vacuum but are passed from one generation to the next
- The instance of gratuitous violence from the Baltimore police man towards the teenage
boy is an instance of a “transferable laceration”s seen by the Baltimore Police strip
search of the teenage boy)
Warren, 17 (1-19-17, Calvin Warren is an Assistant Professor in WGSS. He received

his B.A. in Rhetoric/Philosophy (College Scholar) from Cornell University and his MA
and Ph.D. in African American/American Studies from Yale University, “Black Care,”
Liquid Blackness: Volume Three, Issue Six, http://liquidblackness.com/wp-
content/uploads/2017/01/LB6-WARREN.pdf)
On August 10, 2016, the Department of Justice released a report exposing disturbing
practices in the Baltimore Police Department. It details the persistence of anti-black
violence, abuse, inveterate neglect, and routinized humiliation. Graphs, statistics, and
anecdotal narratives create a vicious tapestry of signs and symbols.1 This tapestry
requires deciphering, for what it says is more than just persistent injustice, but
“something” else, which requires a different grammar. Rev. Heber Brown III, speaking to
the New York Times about the report, recounts a disturbing instance. A teenage boy was
stopped and strip-searched in front of his girlfriend. After he filed a complaint with the police
department, the officer, it seems, wanted revenge and stopped the young boy again, strip-searched him, and this time
grabbed his genitals. The officer, intoxicated by unchecked power over black bodies, wanted to injure “something” else,
not just the teenager’s body. The reverend states, “What
that officer did is not just violate a body, but
he injured a spirit, a soul, a psyche. And that young boy will not easily forget what
happened to him, in public with his girlfriend. It’s hard to really put gravity and weight
to that type of offense.”2 Rev. Brown introduces a “type of offense,” which is difficult to
decipher or translate into a framework of redress and injury. The offense he describes
lacks a grammar to capture precisely the “target” of such violence. The phrase “a spirit, a soul, a
psyche” moves us toward a conceptualization of this target, but it remains indecipherable in some sense, a “something”
vulnerable to destructive practices. We
can also understand the “strip search” itself as an allegory
of anti-black 36 liquid blackness : volume three, issue six violence: what is stripped is not
just clothes and garments, but something metaphysical, a metaphysical stripping away of
the constitutive elements of a person’s being. “A spirit, a soul, a psyche” is sadistically
stripped and dishonored. The “gravity and weight" of the offense is the density of a
metaphysical violence— in which black being is incessantly stripped, ripped apart, and
humiliated. This violence is without end, without reprieve, without reason or logic. Both the
metaphysical target and the violence are indecipherable because they constitute a non-sense sign within the grammar of
redress and humanism. Put
differently, antiblackness renders both metaphysical violence and
the “spirit, soul, psyche” untranslatable within ethics, law, and politics since these fields
assume a coherent human ontology—and Blacks lack being. Furthermore, neither law, ethics, nor
politics can adequately address “what” is injured liquid blackness : volume three, issue six 37 (this “whatness” is invalid
within its precincts); in other words, it cannot redress what it cannot address. Black existence confronts metaphysical
violence continually, without the possibility of political or legal reprieve (since the object of the violence does not translate
politically or legally). Violence without end, violence without reprieve, violence constitutive of a metaphysical world (the
violence sustaining the world’s systems and institutions) is what the teenager experienced. The injury is, indeed,
immeasurable— it fractures “something,” a deep metaphysical structure. The question before us becomes: How
does
black existence address metaphysical violence? Moreover, can we even answer this
question and with what grammar do we broach it? These are, indeed, difficult questions
but our aim, here, is not to answer them apodictically (since such an endeavor is
impossible), but to present a meditative strategy: black care. II. Lacerations and
Hieroglyphics We can consider the metaphysical “injury” a laceration and a hieroglyph.
What is “stripped” or ruptured leaves a mark—a sign of destruction that is itself a
“witness” of the violation. As witness, the sign itself bears a tragic testimony, a
recounting of the violence. But what is the sign communicating? The sign, the laceration,
becomes a hieroglyph open to a cultural reading and hermeneutical practice. While what
it says is not easily interpreted, it can be felt or registered on a different plane of
existence. We rely on the affective dimension to translate the ineffable, or more
precisely, to provide form for an experience anti-blackness places outside ethics and the
“customary lexis of life and culture,” as Hortense Spillers would describe it.3 Feelings 38
liquid blackness : volume three, issue six Dreams are colder than Death (directed by Arthur Jafa, 2013), frame grab.
provide a necessary vessel for containing unbearable suffering and a vehicle for communicating this experience when
traditional avenues of communication are absent. Put differently, affect is a communicative structure, a testimony, for
articulating suffering without end. The affective dimension is just as expansive as it is deep, so expressivity is boundless
within this dimension. Affect is an invaluable resource for those enduring a metaphysical holocaust; it is the premier form
of expressivity. Spillers presents metaphysical violence as a “laceration or wounding.” The undecipherable signs produced:
…render a kind of hieroglyphic of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin
color. Wemight ask if this phenomenon of marking and branding actually “transfers” from
one generation to another, finding its various symbolic Black Care liquid blackness :
volume three, issue six 39 substitutions in an efficacy of meanings that repeat the
initiating moments?4 What is injured, then, is the “flesh”—the “primary narrative…
seared divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped”
overboard.”5 As a “primary narrative,” the flesh is the metaphysical target of violence.
The flesh, then, is the structure of black existence, an ontological grounding of sorts,
which anti-blackness incessantly targets. It is the flesh “Rev. Brown introduces a ‘type of offense,’ which is
difficult to decipher or translate into a framework of redress and injury” Black Care that becomes injured, and this injury
leaves a “laceration” or hieroglyph attesting to the brutality. Thus,
the laceration is not just a corporeal
sign; although the body might bear its marks, it is registered elsewhere. But what is of
interest here is that the laceration as hieroglyph might actually “transfer from one
generation to the next, finding its various symbolic substitutions in an efficacy of
meanings that repeat the initiating moment.”6 The laceration speaks through symbolic
substitutions across time, across generations. In other words, the laceration is a
constitutive feature of black existence in an antiblack world, and it travels; antiblackness
mobilizes it across time (and space). It is indecipherable because it is paradoxical: it is
consistent and substitutional, individual and generational, mobile and intransigent. One
cannot capture it exactly as it 4 0 liquid blackness : volume three, issue six moves across
generations, but the metaphysical harm it indexes is felt deeply. Thus, what the teenager
in Baltimore experienced was a transferable laceration, one which is flesh-destroying. The
injury is much more than humiliation—rather, it is an onto-metaphysical destruction. We might also inquire about the
“efficacy of meaning,” since the hieroglyph means even though it is indecipherable. Georges
Bataille
understands laceration as a possibility of communication, which leaves the subject
fractured. Communication occurs precisely because the subject is not intact, which
allows for something like a flow of communication. He says, “your life is not limited to
that ungraspable inner streaming [mere inner consciousness], it streams to the outside
as well and opens itself incessantly to what flows out or surges toward it.”7 Bataille
suggests the laceration preconditions communication, since the laceration is a rupture,
an opening that creates “The ‘gravity and weight’ of the offense is the density of a
metaphysical violence” Black Care a nexus between inside/outside, self/ other, and
individual/community. I introduce Bataille, here, to suggest that what Spillers describes
as an undecipherable marking, transferable across generations, is a form of
communication—since this marking speaks and means by dissolving the distinctions
between individual/ community and inside/outside. The “efficacy of meaning” is found in the
generational transfer itself. The metaphysical laceration, furthermore, is an indecipherable
liquid blackness : volume three, issue six 41 sign that must be communicated, in order to
recover the efficacy of (non)meaning. In other words, we may not know exactly what the
hieroglyph “means,” but the efficacy of meaning does not reside merely in certainty (the
certitude of comprehension); instead, meaning’s efficacy can be found in the transfer (or communication) of uncertainty.
Transferring the undecipherable sign through and as communication (from individual, communities, and generations)
provides a space of address. Address without redress. It
is in the address—as the communicative flow of
lacerative signs—that we are able to endure metaphysical violence. Even though we
cannot eradicate metaphysical violence, since it is a constitutive component of an anti-
black world, we can use the laceration as a vehicle for endurance: black care.
Laughter
The modern world is driven by the notions of complete
universality through the imposition of value onto bodies.
Instead you should affirm laughter in the face of rationality and
laughter in the face of death as a mode of communication which
ruptures the image of the rational being. Bataille says that this
seemingly meaningless process of mockery is one that exceeds
the very spatiality of normative communication and moves life
itself to its greatest intensity.
Lingis’09 – Alphonso Lingis is an American philosopher, writer and translator, currently Professor Emeritus of
Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. His areas of specialization include phenomenology, existentialism, modern
philosophy, and ethics. “The Obsessions of Georges Bataille Community and Communication” Chapter 7 pg 119-122
KZaidi
With humans it may seem that physical shape and voice help us to recognize members of our own
species. But the approach of other humans is a territorial encroachment. Instead of being drawn to them, humans
have, from time immemorial, formed themselves into particular groups and regard outside
groups with anxiety, distrust, and fear. Culture is the means for us to acquire a particular
identity: we identify with one another and against other groups by cultivating distinctive garb; a
particular language; distinc tive group-affirming performances such as games, dances, and feasts; and a distinctive
religion.
What breaks us out of this group identity and identifies us to outsiders as of our own kind is
for Georges Bataille not rational thought, but laughter and sexual excitement. In a foreign
place, those with whom we have no language or commitment to ancestors, leaders, or gods in common, with whom we are
not engaged in any common practical project, are remote and alien to us. Then something happens— the
abrupt
breakdown of practical operations, a planned and foreseen outcome that turns out to be
unwork able— that releases an outbreak of laughter. The laughter rebounds among
us and renders us transparent to one another: I see in the one who laughs with me
someone of my kind.
Distinctive to human mammals is the propensity to become sexually aroused outside o f any breeding season and outside
o f reproductive intent and even possibility. While most humans engage in sexual bonds and com mitments with members
of their own community and culture, they find themselves erotically aroused by foreigners and outcasts. In witnessing the
erotic exhibitionism o f courtesans and temple prostitutes, Hollywood celebri ties, and idle adolescents in any foreign
land, we are aroused and recognize in those aroused about us people like ourselves.
This sphere of communication in laughter— and in tears— and in erotic excitement precedes and
makes possible, and is not superseded by, communi cation in rational thought
and in practical projects conceived and regulated by rational language. Here
communication is recognition of others as of our kind and attraction to them. Laughter
and tears give rise to blessings and cursings— the primary form o f speech. We gather
together to speak o f what amuses and what torments us, what we bless and curse.
We commonly say that language
is a means of communication; through a common
language individuals exchange their experiences and insights and build a knowledge that
is common. But language continually breaks into diverse tongues and dialects and
multiplies technical languages and jargons. And language, Voltaire remarked, could almost be
said to have been invented in order that men dissimulate their thoughts.
Before the Second World War, in his book The Crisis of European Sci ences and Transcendental Phenomenology,'
Edmund Husserl argued that with rational language and the practical projects they regulate,
humans, despite their cultural particularisms, achieve community. Rational
thought captures the patterns and events that are observed in the field of
perception of individuals in universal concepts and formulates the relations between things
and events in laws and theories open to verification and contestation by anyone, anywhere. The rational
individual submits his observations and reasons to the judgment of anyone endowed
with the power of insight and understanding. T h e practice o f rational thought projects,
beyond particular communities bound together by common practical projects for defense
and productive work, the idea, idea-limit, or ideal of universal humanity. Today the electronic
communication technology invented after the Second World War and distributed across the planet is taken to
assume and promote this ideal of universal rational humanity.
But the integral rational agent, as Immanuel Kant depicts him, in fact does not communicate: instead in her words and her
actions she makes herself an exemplar for everyone. For the rational agent to respect the other is to respect the law that
rules in her and that binds her also.
Humans communicate, we commonly say, in order to build. and by building, a common

work— a productive enterprise, civil society, and a state apparatus. Each then makes
himself or herself a means and not an end. What are left are the roads, the high-rise buildings,
corporations, and the states that absorb the builders into their anonymous material
subsistence or subsistence as an anonymous regional or global order.
Georges Bataille
separates the notion of communication from that of commonality or
communion; for him “communication”
designates the con tact of an individual with what is
and remains beyond him. Communication requires sovereign moments in
individuals.
This sovereignty is neither autonomy nor domination over others; it is a state individuals find
in themselves. It is opposed to servility, which for Bataille is not only subjection to another’s will but also
subjection to the system of tools that are aligned toward utilitarian ends fixed by our needs and
wants. The sense of a void inside, a lack felt as a need— hunger, thirst, vulnerability before cold or heat or
predators— produces the search for outside objects to sustain us and motivates us to collaborate with
one another in work and reason. But every healthy organism generates energies in excess of those
it needs to maintain itself. Sovereignty is affirmed not in the use of these
energies but in their intensity.These energies are discharged, imprudently, without calculation,
without recompense. Sovereign moments are not achieved through work and reason;
they are without expectation or hope. “We can in no way fabricate a sovereign moment from a servile state”
(OC 5: 222/US 97).
Sovereignty does not reign and is and has to be unrecognized, hides itself, having nothing that is not
ridiculous and unavowable. The craving and anxiety that compose it are speechless and appear in common
language as dangers. “Sexual pleasure (which conceals itself and is laughable) comes clos est to the essence of majesty.
Likewise despair. But the despairing one and the sensualist do not know this majesty they have. To know it would be to
lose it” (OC 6: 119/O N 99; tm). “This sovereignty cannot even be defined as a good. 1 am attached to it,
but would I be if I were not certain that I could just as well laugh at it?” (OC 5: 222/US 97; tm).
In sovereign individuals Bataille finds a desire for communication. Here

“communication” does not merely mean having access to other beings so as to be able to
obtain from them the resources we need or the recognition we crave. That kind of
“communication” is only the action that pursues and ensures self-sufficiency, the
isolation of our own— or reciprocal— integrity, independence, or egoism. The deep urge for
communication is for contact with beings unlike ourselves.
The desire for communication breaks open the self-sufficiency of a sovereign being, her
autonomy, her integrity, and opens her upon something beyond her. This beyond is from the
first empty; it is the void, nothingness. She is afflicted with anxiety; anxiety is the sense of nothing to hold
on to, nothing supporting her. But this anxiety is ecstatic, felt in the release of superabundant
energies, and confirms the sovereign intensity of the person who opens herself to the
inappropriable. Out of her own excess energies the integration and integrity of the sovereign one is shattered.
The morality of good and evil subordinates every exaltation to respect for beings, to
concern for the morrow, and for the endurance of states of being. In communication the discharge
of excess energies does not respect the separation of beings. If the notion ofgood
designates respect for the space and the integrity, the nature of others and the insurance of enduring integrity through
action, the sovereign moment is closer to evil than to good.
To communicate with another is to break through his integrity, his independence,
his autonomy, his nature— to intrude upon him, unsettle him, wound him. Communication
takes place when beings put themselves at risk, each putting himself and the
other in the region o f death and nothingness. Communication is suicidal and criminal.
Communal laughter can break down rational conceptions of

identity in education – laughter cannot be approached as a tool
or as a corporeal dimension, but must be cohered as an affective
display of desire and communal emotion. The display of desire
in the classroom must take laughter seriously.
Vlieghe et al 10, (Joris Vlieghe, Maarten Simons, and Jan Masschelein, "The democracy of
the flesh: Laughter as an educational and public event." Philosophy of Education Archive 2010),
p. 204-212)//jh
Laughter is a marginal topic within educational research in general, as well as within philosophy of education in
particular. Whenever this subject gets attention at all, it is commonly treated either as a didactic tool, the
benefits or dangers of which are discussed in relation to efficient teaching, or as a dimension of corporeality,
the absence of which is symptomatic of an (educational) culture that is marked by a deep aversion toward human
embodiment. The former analysis tends to show that laughter might form an unexpectedly
efficient instrument with which to improve motivation and concentration on the part of
the students, or that it might be a very convenient aid for explaining abstract concepts. Laughter also improves
creativity, social competencies, and so forth.1 At the same time, this approach warns us to use this
means with moderation, as laughter might always degenerate into plain cynicism or moral insensitivity, and
because laughter has the power to disrupt every hierarchical ordering. Therefore,
laughter could be dangerous within an educational system, which is supposed to be
founded on an unambiguously instituted discrepancy between those who teach and those
who are supposed to learn (this is why the school and the figure of the teacher are excellent candidates for
objects of scorn and laughter).2 The latter approach concerning laughter in education situates
this phenomenon and the aversion toward it in a broader perspective, namely the
endemic hatred of and unmanageable fear for our incarnated condition as mortal human
beings, which is a typical attitude in the West, dating to the time of Plato. We envy the immortal gods who
are free from the decay that, being made out of flesh and bone, is our inescapable fate. So we eagerly
define ourselves in terms of “the better part of man,” the mind, in order not to be
confronted with the entropic bodies we inhabit. Therefore, especially in pedagogical contexts,
teachers and students are encouraged to see themselves as immaterial subjectivities. As
Erica McWilliam argues, there is no place for bodily desire in classrooms.3 We should keep silent about this feature of the
human condition, although many will (tacitly) admit that the things we learned that were of the utmost significance for
our lives frequently were provoked by teachers who were not just administrators, but were also passionate men and
women of flesh and blood who had the talent to infect us in a corporeal way with the yearning to abandon ourselves to
certain subjects. The point is that Western society is not keen on recognizing this fact. In
the West, we would like
education to be a purely cerebral matter, one that leaves no opportunity for seduction.
For the same reason, it is understandable why we are so repugnant toward laughter:
laughing shatters the illusion we have about our rational identity.4 The main aim of this
approach to laughter in education is to return the body to its legitimate place within
education. Hence those who take this approach plea that we should (dare to) show desire in classrooms
and that we should (dare to) laugh — not in the name of efficiency (as the first approach claims), but in the name
of a repressed dimension of humanity. On this view, laughter is an aspect of our lives that is
disregarded only at a great cost: the loathing of our corporeal hardware prevents us from
becoming fully developed human beings. What we suggest in this essay is not to discuss laughter in
education in one of these two ways. In our view, these approaches do not take laughter seriously
enough. In the name of ideals such as didactic efficiency or complete humanity, laughter is treated just as an exquisite
instrument with which to realize these goals. What we propose to do, on the other hand, is to start from the
simple fact that there exists, from time to time, laughter in classrooms. Our task consists in
describing this phenomenon as accurately as possible in order to show that the experience of laughter has an educational
dimension. Laughter
should not be defended on the ground that it might be a legitimate and
useful instrument. On the contrary, the experience of shared laughter should be taken at
face value, because — in itself — common laughter has a profound pedagogical
significance.
Comedic relations between student and teacher can be used to

open the classroom to radical transparency that is only able to
be reterritorialized by the teacher – laughter entails ‘radical
transparency’ that gives up on knowing oneself and presents
itself as absolute truth
p. 204-212)//jh
Following Georges Bataille 9 and Alphonso Lingis 10 here, in laughter, we find ourselves in a state of
“radical transparency”11: we communicate, but not because we share the same insight or the same language.
People who do not share a cognitive, social and/or cultural background might nevertheless
find themselves sharing in the same experience.12 Furthermore, this radical transparency is
not a cognitive category: transparency neither refers to (nor presupposes) a knowledge of
the self: “The opposite of laughter is scrupulous self-criticism — that finger-wagging
Socratic injunction: know thyself.”13 It is the giving up of one’s will to have a clear and
guaranteed position that grants the possibility of community-in-laughter. Furthermore,
while laughing, we are confronted with a truth with which we cannot argue, which is
shown to us as truth. What we experience while laughing is not something that invites us
to search for a further legitimization of what we feel or to find out whether or not we are
mistaken somehow. “Laughter affirms itself indubitably and believes in the world illuminated by its delight. That at
which and with which someone laughs is true.”14 Laughter is a plain positive reality. Finally, the experience of
common laughter is also an experience of equality. In the unintentional surrender to the autonomous
functioning of the body, hierarchical positions are no longer experienced as meaningful. The difference between
teacher and student, between adult and child, between judge and criminal, and so forth
are radically suspended. The experience of common laughter grants the possibility of a
form of community, a possibility that nevertheless might vanish as quickly as it became
existent. Referring to an example given by Bataille, when a student pulls away the chair of her professor when he is
bending to sit on it: “there is the sudden revelation of an inability to maintain his poise, authority and seriousness. If we
can refrain from laughing, we maintain a position of power.… However, we lose our seriousness in laughing.”15 So, it all
comes down to how we react to the possibility of community that is revealed in laughing together. In this example, the
professor could restore as quickly as possible the hierarchical order that he represents as
if nothing had happened. Giving ourselves over to laughter, on the other hand, implies a
break in the course of history. The radical and unexpected has become a real possibility.
In the etymological sense of the word, this experience of common laughter constitutes an
“e-ducational” event: something happens that has the force to move us out of position, to
lead us out (e-ducere) of existing positions into a world in which we are exposed.16 This
self-loss and exposure that one undergoes in the outburst of laughter are not only of
major importance within educational contexts, but are educational in themselves, precisely
because we give up mastery-over-our-own-lives and instead experience a sense of
togetherness and equality. When we are confronted with the automatic and anonymous functioning of the flesh,
the kind of community that might be at stake in education is revealed.
Laughter makes a community, defined by lack of commonality

other than laughter
p. 204-212)//jh
Now, it should be clear that the kind of community that is revealed, for instance, in the experience
of common laughter is in no way to be considered a product of work, an instrument which must
protect us against some potentially private difficulty. The community-in-laughter is not a
secondary phenomenon that is made meaningful because of some benefit it brings to the
individual (this benefit being, in both versions of the public just described, the strengthening of the individual’s
position upon entering or founding a community). The public that is at stake in the community of
those who find themselves together in laughter is, instead, a plain positive reality. It is
given as such in experience and, consequentially, we should take it seriously. This public
is not defined as the “non-private.” When confronted with the involuntary, automatic,
and anonymous functioning of the flesh, we in fact experience a communication that in
no way refers to something we as privatized beings (should) long for or from which we need
protection, something that cannot be expressed in terms of interests, goals, or
legitimized insights (of individuals). In contrast with the second version of the public, this community-in-
laughter is a bond of no one and everyone. It is “a community of those who have nothing in
common.”20 We simply happen to find ourselves together in laughter, without the necessity of any shared identity. In
this event, a contingently gathered “we” shares an experience of loss-of-mastery and
equality. As opposed to the first version of the public, “the democracy of the flesh” is not
about making us visible. It is, rather, about us experiencing being exposed and thus
abandoning our attachments to the individual positions that the agora should protect.
Thus, without presupposing that there is a common interest, which should grant the possibility of a “public” experience,
the experience of common laughter shows that, in
the corporeal experience of selfloss (negatively
formulated), an
“intercorporal” community of everyone who is contingently delivered to the
impersonal flesh is experienced (positively formulated).21 Now, what happens here could be termed an “e-
ducational” event: through
this public exposure to the autonomous functioning of the body,
we come to partake in a bond in which it has become utterly impossible to uphold
neither any definitive nor hierarchical identity. Experiencing the community-in-laughter,
we are unconditionally out-of-position. This communizing and equalizing kind of event
might just be what the public vocation of education is all about. Again, this does not imply
a defense of the position that we should apply more laughter in classrooms: in that case,
we would be using laughter as an instrument and a weapon — as a tool that is necessary
for the community-to-be-worked-on. What we might do, instead, is cease to immunize
ourselves against events that happen anyway, such as laughter, and accept the equalizing
and communizing effect of these events. This presupposes, however, the will to take
laughter seriously.
Laughter is the revelation that shipwrecks our current horizon

of valuation, a form of atheological awakening that destroys God
and resists systemic determination. Radically irreconcilable
with reason, laughter is an acephalous experience that reveals
the ridiculous relativity of everything.
While in London, Bataille had the opportunity to meet renowned utilitarian philosopher, Henri Bergson, and in
anticipation of the meeting, Bataille read Bergson’s 1900 treatise, Laughter. Bataille described this London rendezvous
twenty years later as “the occasion out of which laughter arose” (IE 66, original emphasis). “[L]aughter
was
revelation,” Bataille insists in his recounting of the Bergson encounter in Inner Experience (1943), though this
was not the sort of revelation which may be expected, nor one which Bataille himself could have foreseen, given his
dogmatic inclinations at time (IE 66). Firstly,this laugh, though distinctly human, cannot be
annexed into the discrete experience of any respective human subject: this laughter
“belongs” to no one in particular, not even to Bataille. The “revelation” it “communicates” confirms no “salvation”
for the subject at the mercy of laughter. Rather, this revelatory laugh “opened up the depth of
things,” “a roar of irreconciliation” exposing “the extreme limit of the ‘possible’” (IE 66;
Borch-Jacobsen 148; IE 42). Laughter intuits the abrogation of the “profane” sphere of the
discursive subject, abruptly abolishing all his metaphysical ideals and utilitarian
pipedreams of eventual self-sufficiency. Rather than the providential “revelation” which would expectedly
affirm, announce, or accompany the subject’s dogmatic deliverance unto an anticipated, presupposed “evasion of the
impossible” (i.e., “salvation”), this
reverberating revelation shipwrecks the whole horizon of
human valuation, effectively relinquishing “revelation” of its holy baggage, having turned
“salvation” into “the trampoline of the impossible” (NL 21-3) This iridescent spell, in whose
grasp Bataille would remain perennially caught for the next forty years of his obsessive intellectual life, was a
“sudden revelation which revealed the relativity of everything” (Borch-Jacobson 148). Bataille
avows that his unforeseen deliverance “into a kind of dive, which tended to be vertiginous, into the possibility of laughter”
coincided with the alienation of his religious allegiances: “at first I had laughed, upon emerging from a long Christian
piety, my life having dissolved, with a spring-like bad faith, in laughter” (NLT 139; IE 66, original emphasis). Elsewhere,
Bataille maintains that “the first effect” that ensued from his having descended into “the sphere of laughter” was the swift
ruin of the precise religious faith which “completely animated” him at the time: “[E]verything that the dogma brought me
[was] carried away by a type of difluvial flood that decomposed it” (NLT 140). Laughter
was an atheological
awakening: “Atheology,” Bataille explains, refers to “the science of the death or
destruction of God (the science of the thing being destroyed inasmuch as it is a thing)” (AFS 167). This
“science,” as Stuart Kendall observes, elides the objectivity constitutive to scientific
inquiry, positing in its place “a science of immediacy,” a “science” that disavows the
discursive “discontinuity” between subject and object on which the scientific method of
identification, assimilation, and homogenization is wholeheartedly staked (“Editor’s
Introduction” xxxviii). Thus, “atheology” is “a science against science, a philosophy against
knowledge” (“Editor’s Introduction” xxxviii). A “science” or “system” that resists systematic
determination, a system of de-systemization, “atheology” seeks to “create . . . the
experience of the instant” by collapsing the externality posited by the mediating interventions of discourse, the
subject slipping into the deleterious night of “nonknowledge,” into an unmediated, unmitigated tête-à-tête with death
that disallows intermediaries between subject and object (TD 122). And yet, as Julia Kristeva explains, unlike Hegel,
Bataille refrains from “leaving aside [the moment of immediacy] as an indeterminate nothing, like a simple negation of
consciousness and of the presence of the subject,” but rather “he designates its concrete and material determinations”
(BEP 254). Such an “awakening” to the materiality of immediacy, in effect, embraces a sudden exposure of consciousness
to the death of consciousness, “a consciousness of the absence of consciousness” (NR 129).Of course, such an “inner
experience” cannot be sustained, nor does it desire to sustain itself, even less to discipline or enlighten others, for the
identificatory integrity of the subject who would presume to sustain it has been spent. Laughter is one among
many such distinctly human “inner experiences,” “one among many effusions, one
among many deliriums, one among many means to the impossible”—alongside erotic
ecstasy, tears, art, sacrifice—that attests to immediacy as that which is “essential to
experience” (Kendall, “Editor’s Introduction” xxxix; BEP 254). In this thesis, I argue that the meteoric “intimacy” of
atheological consciousness, of this highly contingent “awakening” of consciousness to the “sovereign instant” of its rifting,
finds its privileged presentation and performance in Bataille’s meditations on the “lived experience” of laughter and, more
specifically, in Bataille’s fervent efforts to engage this “lived experience” at the level of epistemology (AS III 202). Bataille
famously self-characterized his own thought as a “philosophy of laughter,” a modality of thought which allegedly “never
proceeds independently of [the] experience” of laughter (NLT cite). This
“philosophy of laughter” receives
perhaps its most confounding—and, no doubt, laughable—articulation in the blunt
coincidence of laughter and thought evinced in a laconic aside Bataille delivers in
“Meditations of Method”: “to laugh is to think” (MM 90). The impossibility of this daft little claim—
again, the “impossible,” for Bataille, always indexes “the loss of self”—is glaringly conspicuous, as this claim presumes an
explicit simultaneity between thought and that capricious spasm that annuls its “exercise” (NL 18). And yet, Bataille’s
impossible thought—“to laugh is to think”—insists upon a kind of turbulent awareness at the precise moment in which the
temporal mediations and discursive limitations which dialectically divide experience into subject – object
relations
(and thus make self-consciousness possible) are sundered, at the moment in which “the exercise of
thought” bursts into the flames of an inappropriable, acephalous experience. It insists
upon an “awakening” to the “impossible” (“the loss of self”), to what’s unthinkable or unknowable about
experience insofar as it lies beyond the boundaries of possibility circumscribed by dialectical discourse: it insists, in short,
upon an awakening to immediacy. By
peering philosophically (or “reflectively”) into the very
“blind spot” of the philosophical gaze, Bataille’s “philosophy of laughter” explores the
possibility of “awakening” to the death of consciousness as we know it, to the possibility
of an “awakened” consciousness emerging in a movement of thought that annihilates
it(self)—a consciousness which laughs and cries. Like Mallarmé’s master, or Eliot’s Phlebas,
consciousness metamorphoses into something other than itself, “awakening” to the unlocatable whirlpool into which it
drowns, consciousness itself becoming nothing if not the very vortex whose riptide floods consciousness with that excess
of life which Bataille calls “lived experience” (or “intimate life”) (TR 46). Bataille’s
“philosophy of laughter”
evokes a necessarily “impossible” effort to transfigure epistemological activity into that
incendiary “truth of the universe” which Bataille calls “nonproductive expenditure,” an
unlimited movement towards unrestrained loss epitomized by the solar brilliance whose
luminosity interminably boils, void of the purposive presupposition of returns (DM 67).
Expenditure (qua unending, unchecked loss) is the ungraspable singularity of experience
which is radically irreconcilable with the tempering benevolence of reason,
morality, and work. Denis Hollier explains, “[S]ince expenditure is ultimately the unthinkable par excellence,
thought itself is the suspension of expenditure” (DM 67, original emphasis). The “philosophy of laughter,” as
such, measures up to an “impossible” attempt to conciliate the operation of thought with
what this operation constitutively “suspends” and with what, in turn, ruins this
operation. It thereby suggests a mode of “reflection” that shares a profound “intimacy” with what remains and, in a
sense, must remain—“What is hidden in laughter must remain so”— unknown, unknowable, even unthinkable about
human experience (IE 66). Indeed, in identifying the movement of thought with laughter’s compulsive, irruptive bursting,
Bataille situates thought at precisely the point of coincidence at which “the exercise of thought” jumps the dialectical rails
on which it routinely rides. As such, the mode of “reflection” denoted by the designation “philosophy of laughter” amounts
to an epistemological practice whose movement reflects (or seeks to reflect) its own ontological catastrophe, its own
incessant dissolution into the unthinkable immediacy of experience. My
central assertion in this thesis is
thus that Bataille’s “philosophy of laughter” evokes a privileged, albeit “impossible,”
effort to convert the acute affective alterity and unreserved explosiveness of “lived
experience” into an epistemological condition.
The criminal and suicidal form of contagious laughter wrecks

rationality and exclusionary group identities by posing a threat
to the regularity of established order. By revealing our
ontological insufficiencies, laughter lacerates us from the
profane world of reason.
Bataille laughs at Bergson—“this careful little man philosopher!”—for having “instrumentalized” laughter, turning it into a
moral, sociological tool to be deployed for the purposes of adjusting the “mechanical inelasticity” of one’s fellow human,
who either slips and falls or otherwise betrays some psychological or bodily breach in established modes of behavior (IE
66; Parvulescu 87; Bergson 16). Such perfunctory transgressions of the accepted order of things, for Bergson, indicate the
possibility of potentially dangerous contradiction or crime. Anca Parvulescu explains of Bergson: “Laughter is a useful
social gesture, to be used in the formation and reproduction of a group” (87). Laughter (qua this “social gesture”) secures a
specific sociological, moralistic utility and purpose: laughter is the response of a necessarily closed and limited group, a
“social gesture” implying a kind of “freemasonry,” whereby the group reinforces a stable identity by correcting the
automated eccentricities of the falling other (Bergson 16-7; Parvulescu 4-5). Thingscould not be more
different for Bataille: laughter, along with erotic ecstasy, wrecks the rational foundations
and exclusionary operations by which we affirm a group identity. It is not the mechanical
slippage of the other which would designate the potentially hazardous transgression in
the laughable scenario. Rather, it is the burst of laughter itself which poses the threat to
the repressive regularity of established order and civic life. “The rire [laughter],” writes Joseph
Libertson, “interrupts the profane, conservative motivation of thought” (221). Laughter is “irreducibly
opposed” to discourse, conservation, and work; it is “essentially non-conservative,”
useless, prodigal, bastard—a privileged expression of what Bataille will call “unemployed
negativity” (Parvulescu 81; G 111). Paradoxically, a kind of “community” emerges from the
epistemological wreckage, though a community not recognizable in any conventional sense of commonality (i.e.,
de facto community). Rather, this community, which Jean-Luc Nancy calls “inoperable” and
Maurice Blanchot “unavowable,” can perhaps best be understood as a community of
non-recognition: “communication” occurs when the boundaries of personal identity are
foregone, when all anticipation and hope “dissolve into NOTHING” (AS III 208, original
emphasis). We “communicate” in the “sovereign moments” in which our discursive dexterity and its productive
apparatuses fold to the “interrogation” of erotic silence or to the “contestations” erupting through purposeless, excessive
outpourings of laughter: “lucidity made of incessant contestations itself, ultimately dissolving in laughter (in
nonknowledge)” (G 91). This
irrepressible “community,” wherein we experience the lacerating
“communication” of “the moment of violent contact, when life slips from one person to
another,” is a being-in-common defined by the dissolution of definitions (G 129). An inner
violence or mutilation (of self) “communicates” the shared experience of human
subjectivity’s profound finitude. Rather than serving as a kind of disciplinary machinery
bent on bending bumbling bystanders back into rank (à la Bergson), laughter (qua
“communication”) “is criminal and suicidal”: “All ‘communication’ participates in suicide, in crime”
(Lingis 122; ON 26, original emphasis). For laughter (qua “communication”) involves the
contagious release or expenditure of untenable, untamable, unusable energies which
imperil the porous procedures, projects, and performances by which we seek to affirm
our claim to knowledge, self-identification, and self-sufficiency through the construction
and reification of the group. My interrogation of Bataille’s “philosophy of laughter” is rooted in Andrew Mitchell
and Jason Winifree’s supposition that “the entire effort” of Bataillean thought is “dedicated” to the demonstration and
delivery of “the obscure region [of experience] closed to phenomenology” designated by the term “communication” (1; G
212). This“accursed” arena of experience corresponds precisely to that which is
incommunicable with respect to articulated discourse insofar as it involves an experience
of consumptive contact whose intensity and violence rupture the discursive homogeneity
of the discrete subject whose differential isolation (qua “I”) guards the possibility of the
articulable acquisition and exchange of material and conceptual commodities. Critics
generally concur that “communication” and the “contagious subjectivity” (subjectivité contagieuse) of its nocturnal caress
occupy an essential place in Bataillean thought; however, as Nidesh Latwoo accurately observes, spats abound apropos of
the question of what kind of human subject “informs and underlies this thought” (73). I
contend that the subject
(in both senses of the word) of Bataillean thought cannot be dissociated from the
heterogeneous subject emergent in the crucible of “communication.” Writing on the related
subject of the matrix of transgression, Michel Foucault posits “a curious intersection of beings that have no other life
beyond this moment where they totally exchange their beings” (34, my emphasis). More
specifically, the subject
of Bataillean thought is the subject caught in the “difluvial flood” of laughter’s spell, a
subject which, in bursting (into laughter) and therein becoming suddenly disengaged
from the “profane” world of labor, reason, and discourse, is nothing but this oceanic
torrent of lightness in whose high tide of consumption the subject is awash: “For the subject is
consumption insofar as it is not tied down to work” (AS I 58, original emphasis). The Bataillean subject, as such, is the
contagion of “communication,” and its essential epistemological gesture is to fall into the excess of laughter. Head thrown
back and mouth irrepressibly agape, the subject of Bataille’s “impossible thought” is the spitting image of impropriety: a
subject which is, in a sense, nothing but the sputtering opening of a mouth that insists on itself (i.e., its opening), a subject
vehemently exposing its own excesses like the exuberant parting of lips exhibiting fluids, teeth, and tongue. The
subject shaken in the spell of Bataillean thought would thus appear a body bound by
alterity, held together by a gesticulating choreography of fragments, an unrecognizable
voice, full of sound and fury, acousmatically rupturing the soundscape while disfiguring
the ordered austerity of the face, body and voice doubling over each other in rabid,
ejaculatory waves that foam over the exorbitantly exposed buccal recesses, signifying
nothing. “Without any doubt, one who laughs is himself laughable and, in the profound sense, is so more than his
victim” (IE 97). And, indeed, the spectacle of Bataillean thought (qua “philosophy of laughter”), undoubtedly ridiculous
and improper, even “ugly,” may seem to lack any trace of an affective threat (in accordance with the Aristotelian model of
comedy): that is, this laughing subject (of Bataillean thought) ostensibly fails to arouse our more sympathetic sensibilities.
Bataille’s “philosophy of laughter,” no doubt, results in comedy: in
order to accommodate the
irreconcilable demands of epistemology and expenditure, this method of meditation
would need to embrace a movement simultaneously limited and unlimited. This comic
eventuality, however, is not a fate to which Bataille is blind: the inescapable failure that awaits such an intellectual practice
cannot have eluded Bataille. In fact, it is precisely the insufficiency of Bataille’s “impossible thought”—the utter failure of
Bataille’s articulated discourse to complete the task of authenticating the substance of what it claims—that energizes this
epistemological caprice. It is through the constitutive inadequacy of the reasoned utterance to disclose “the impossible,” to
bring “the loss of self” into discursive relief, that that which discourse fails to produce flashes before us: “impossible, yet
there it is”—a remark not without its comic touch (AS III 206, original emphasis). “Now,
to laugh and to be
serious at the same time is impossible,” Bataille reminds us. “Laughter is lightness, and we miss it insofar
as we cease to laugh at it” (S 73). That Bataille’s discourse on laughter fails, in this sense, reflects
the ontological insufficiency of the labor of human thought to achieve a consummate
state of absolute realization. It is thus in its failure that Bataille’s “impossible thought”
succeeds, revealing (to us/us to) a moment “where life reaches an impossible limit” (ON
39): namely, when, perceiving this failure, we laugh!
Laughter and alt solvency advocate

Gorelick 11 (Nathan, Utah Valley University, “Life in Excess: Insurrection
and Expenditure in Antonin Artaund’s Theater of Cruelty”, Pg 270-
276)/RF&KV
Derrida’s elaboration of Bataille’s concept of expenditure without reserve
provides one potential response to this economy of signification. In this context, it is
not life, but laughter that renders the totalizing pretentions of what Artaud elsewhere calls “philo-
sophical systems” ridiculous. The burst of laughter, as far as Bataille’s confrontation with Hegelian
systematicity is concerned, is the “absolute sacri ce of meaning: a sacri ce without return and without
reserves”;21 it is the insistence of an excess against which no system of intelligibility can
avail, an avowal of the excess inherent in any act of signi cation, and an abdication of the
will-to-meaning with which Artaud himself struggled, most famously in his
correspondence with Rivière. Despite this af nity, however, “La parole souf ée” concludes with an accusation concerning
Artaud’s seeming complicity with precisely those metaphysical structures against which both Bataille’s laughter the Theater of Cruelty are
supposed to protest. Here, Artaud’s guration of a theater somehow sanitized of both representation
and its attendant commodi cation exhibits, for Derrida, a misguided or impossible
nostalgia for purity of presentation—a self-destructive fantasy, in other words, of
representation without signi cation. In his slightly later essay on “The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of
Representation,” Derrida offers a more sympathetic reading, bringing Artaud much closer to
his interpretation of Bataille’s burst of laughter and thus toward a “general economy”22
of expenditure without reserve. Just as laughter asserts a disruptive and
unrepresentable force against the incessant production of meaning, the Theater of
Cruelty is “not a representation. It is life itself, in the extent to which life is unrepresentable.”23 If the Theater of Cruelty might
still be considered “work,” this is nonetheless the work of “af rmation,” and af rmation is the insistent force of life, of that
which “produces af rmation itself in its full and necessary rigor.”24 This is not a dialectical af rmation; it
does not invite a negation and an ensuing sublation. Rather, it is a permanent force, the insistence of which
refuses systematicity and thus cannot be contained within any system of
intelligibility. Here, affirmation should be distinguished not from negation, but from repetition, from the iterability through
which meaning is constituted and maintained within any signi er, from that which renders representation possible. Artaud suggests as
much: from the perspective of culture-in-action afforded by the Theater of Cruelty, “[t]he library at Alexandria can be burnt down,” since
the archiving of knowledge (the condition for the possibility of its repetition) sti es the creative energy of life (10). In his “No More
Masterpieces,” the injunction is even more explicit: “an
expression does not have the same value
twice, does not live two lives . . . all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are
uttered” (75). And since the theater is the space within which “the menace of repetition” (Derrida’s term) nds its greatest support,25 the
radicality of Artaud’s af rmation is clear: rather than abandon the theater to this menace, he insists that “ the
theater is the only
place in the world where a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice”
(75). The Theater of Cruelty is therefore theater as cruelty: the expression of life as a profound, incalculable, lacerating intensity operating
at, and defying, the limits of representation. As with his commentary on Bataille, Derrida
situates dialectics in this
context as “the movement through which expenditure is reappropriated into presence”;
it is the codi cation of “the economy of repetition” and the “economy of truth” against
which Artaud raises his protest: “Nonrepetition, expenditure that is resolute and without
return in the unique time consuming the present, must put an end to fearful discursiveness, to unskirtable
ontology, to dialectics.” This new mode of theatrical presentation must be structurally distinguished from representation because it “leaves
behind it, behind its actual presence, no trace, no object to carry off.”26 Such a formulation clari es Derrida’s earlier elaboration of an art
without work while also partially redeeming Artaud from what at rst appears to be a reassertion of the primacy of the metaphysics of
presence. Artaud’s
art is “neither a book nor a work, but an energy,” the expression of which
manifests “expenditure without economy, without reserve, without return, without
history.”27 The question of the ef cacy of this art without work must account for the speci c processes and mechanics by which modern
civilization deploys the recuperative effects of a restricted economy of meaning . It is toward precisely this concern
that Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari direct their inquiry into the radical potential of
Artaud’s concept of the body without organs, a notion that appeared late in Artaud’s life in the controversial radio
play “To Have Done with the Judgment of God.” His original formulation is as follows: Man is sick because he is
badly constructed.  We must make up our minds to strip him bare in order to scrape
off that animalcule that itches him mortally, god, and with god his organs. For you can tie me up
if you wish,  but there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you will have made him a body
without organs,  then you will have delivered him from all his automatic
reactions and restored him to his true freedom.28 Here, god and “his organs” are posed
as the two sources of the individual’s imprisonment, while the sickness that a body without organs might
cure recalls the “horrible sickness of the mind” about which Artaud wrote more than twenty years earlier in his correspondence with
Rivière. Thus, this provides for Derrida the rst answer to the question “How will the theater of cruelty save me?”29 On Derrida’s reading,
God names for Artaud the structure of originary theft that operates the economy of representation; correspondingly, the organ is the gure of
the modern civilized subject’s constitution as a mirror image of the language to which it is subject. The
subject is organ-ized
through the labor and play of various body parts in their differentiation, such that God is
precisely the principle of signifying organization against which Artaud’s life revolts. The
theater, then, is the site for the disarticulation and disassemblage of that subject. The
hegemony of meaning that operates the restricted economy of modern
civilization will be undermined by a theater that targets as its enemies the
coeval processes of signi cation and organization. Deleuze and Guattari take up these two enemies
in this context, as well. The organism—organized and (or as) articulated—is “a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and
sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the BwO [body without organs], imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds,
dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.”30 Again, the
struggle takes place along
the border dividing work, labor, function, or use, and a freedom from this
restricted economy, this imprisonment to sense. This is a “perpetual and violent
combat between the plane of consistency, which frees the BwO, cutting across and dismantling all of the strata
[those forms, functions, and rigid organizations by which the subject is put to work], and the surfaces of strati cation that block it or make it
recoil.”31 But whereas Derrida only directly interrogates signi cation and organization as what might be called two apparatuses of strati
cation by which life’s excision from experience is sustained, Deleuze and Guattari offer subjecti cation
as a third mechanism of restriction. Artaud’s theater is thus attributed with an explicitly political or social
function: it is a strategy of disruption because it is a practice of desubjecti cation, a means
through which life—the mysterious force that, for Artaud, compels existence—may be experienced not in its
overwhelming totality, but rather on a “continuum of intensities.”32 The theater thus
gives way to the force of life, but only momentarily and only through an
extremely limiting set of methods; thus, in his two manifestos on the Theater of Cruelty, Artaud
outlines a substantial set of rules that are to be followed in the production of this theater:
spectacle, mise-en-scène, language, musical instruments, lighting, costumes, the
auditorium, objects, the set, the actors—all are given a form and a rigorous methodology
(93–98). This tightly structured technique is one reason for Derrida’s critical conclusion to his rst essay on Artaud: this new
metaphysics of the stage reveals a “fatal complicity” with the discourses of
modernity, “a necessary dependency of all destructive discourses: they must
inhabit the structures they demolish.”33 While his later emphasis on the incessant af rmation intrinsic to the
Theater of Cruelty complicates this disparaging position, Deleuze and Guattari also recognize that the
intensity to which Artaud bears witness cannot be glimpsed through a total
evacuation from the apparatuses of organization, signi cation, and subjecti
cation. On the contrary, “[s]taying strati ed . . . is not the worst that can happen; the worst that can happen is if
you throw the strata into demented or suicidal collapse, which brings them back down
on us heavier than ever.”34 It is necessary to maintain “enough of the organism for it to reform each dawn,” and one
must maintain “small supplies of signi cance and subjecti cation, if only to turn them against their own
systems when the circumstances demand it, when things, persons, even situations, force you to.” Put more simply, “Mimic the
strata. You don’t reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by wildly
destratifying.”35 Although the enthusiasm with which he insisted on the Theater of Cruelty as a radical
break with the sti ing sicknesses of modern civilization may distance him
from the more moderate position outlined in A Thousand Plateaus, Artaud also
understood the political and social consequences of his counter-representational project. The Theater and Its Double suggests that it may be
incumbent upon the theater to respond to nothing less than the violent or terrifying excesses implicit within the totalizing systematicity
governing our modern civilization—and thus to frustrate contemporary culture’s variously horrifying efforts to con ne life and all the unruly
experience it enables to a series of manageable calculations.
A restricted economy, as Artaud, Derrida, and Deleuze and
Guattari all note, will
always be frustrated by the burst of laughter, the radical af rmation, the
very excess of meaning inherent within any process of signi cation; existence will
never be contained absolutely.36 Artaud calls this the “revenge of things” and notes the consequences of this insurrection: “[C]onsider the
unprecedented number of crimes whose perverse gratuitousness is explained only by our powerlessness to take complete possession of
life” (9). The
struggle for totalization, absolute authority, and control nds, in that which
exceeds it, a life that threatens the system and that must therefore be contained—or,
what inevitably amounts to the same thing, destroyed. Deleuze and Guattari characterize this paranoid
reaction of the system confronted with its own insuf ciencies as “demented or suicidal”; the extreme violence of which it is capable is
therefore anything but abstract or purely representational. The catastrophic global consequences of the
culture of modern civilization have all manifested themselves, paradoxically, in the name
of life itself—and the impulse toward globalized, systematized suicide to which Deleuze
and Guattari give reference has only accelerated since “To Have Done with the Judgment
of God.” The task of the Theater of Cruelty is thus at once terrifying and urgent, and the struggle to awaken the sleeping intensity of life
will be a struggle between art and work, experience and representation, impossibility and reality. If the theater is
capable of instantiating the experience of a general economy of expenditure
without reserve, this will not effect an escape from civilization, but rather
will realign civilization and life, so that “true culture” becomes the
expression of the immutable insistence of life against all attempts to contain
its immensity, its energy, its cruelty. Conclusion: Contagion In “The Alfred Jarry Theater,” Artaud warns that, “[i]f the theater is
an amusement, too many serious problems demand our attention for us to be able to divert the least particle of it to anything so
ephemeral.”37 One primary obstacle to the actualization of a Theater of Cruelty—a theater that reaches beyond the tepid and irrelevant
theater of diversion—is the “inability to believe, to accept illusion.”38 To overcome this obstacle, to
experience the force
of this theater, is thus to “reestablish communication with life instead of
cutting ourselves off from it.”39 In the illusion lies the truth, the truth of a life obscured by the sedimented detritus
of instrumental reason that we call civilization. The failure to believe, meanwhile, is symptomatic of the
lifelessness characteristic of our modern cultural condition. Insofar as a preoccupation with disease
manifests itself throughout Artaud’s work, my choice of the term symptom here is not merely metaphorical. Recall his complaint to Rivière
that “I suffer from a horrible sickness of the mind”; to lm director Abel Gance in 1927: “I have the plague in the marrow of my nerves and I
suffer from it”; in his “Fragments of a Diary from Hell,” “[i]t is this contradiction between my inner facility and my exterior dif culty which
creates the torment of which I am dying”; from a 1932 letter to the famous acupuncturist George Soulié de Morant, he complains of “total
exhaustion . . . on all levels and in all senses,” a “monstrous, horrible fatigue,” and a constant struggle with “manifestly pathological . . .
breaks in thought”; in his notebooks and private papers, he alludes to “[t]he wound, the dreadful hollowness
of the paralyzed self.”40 All of this speaks not only to Artaud’s personal struggle with madness, but also to the more general
struggle toward which his theater is aimed. The inability to believe, as a symptom of the
sickening malaise of modern life, is thus a kind of inoculation against the
life with which Artaud found himself to be infected, and with which he wished to infect the
world. He would turn to the sublime destructiveness of the bubonic plague—a disease that single-handedly eradicated one third of Europe’s
population between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries—as a real, historically concrete manifestation of the radical disruption of
which the theater would be capable were it not for the sti ing sanitization of experience imposed by a culture intent upon signi cation,
organization, and subjecti cation. We must insist, along with Artaud, that there is nothing allegorical about this: “[T]he
plague is a
superior disease because it is a total crisis after which nothing remains except death or
an extreme puri cation” (31). So, too, with the theater: [T]he action of the theater, like
that of the plague, is bene cial, for, impelling men to see themselves as they are, it causes
the mask to fall, reveals the lie, the slackness, baseness, and hypocrisy of our world; it
shakes off the asphyxiating inertia of matter which invades even the clearest testimony
of the senses; and in revealing to collectivities of men their dark power, their hidden
force, it invites them to take, in the face of destiny, a superior and heroic attitude they
would never have assumed without it. (31–32) The task of the theater is thus to infect modern culture with the
immeasurable force of social and psychic dissolution, with the realization of its own suicidal
incapacity to contain its irrational excesses: in short, with the contagious
energy of life.41 This, then, is Artaud’s fantasy: “To describe the cry that I dreamed, to describe it in
living words, with the appropriate words, and mouth to mouth and breath to breath, to
make it pass not into the ear but into the chest of the spectator.”42 To give ourselves over, as carriers of
this insurrectionist infection, to the power that only a belief in the illusion of the theater makes possible is to accept our positions not as
sympathetic critics or passive observers, but as the active participant-audience, spreading the revitalizing plague of intensity and excess.
This implies an imperative to undermine the inoculating tendencies of
modern culture, with its entirely digestive concerns, in the name of that
sleeping intensity. Once awakened, life promises to contaminate culture with the profound and cruel insistence of a hunger
without satiation, an af rmation without negation, a body without organs, an experience without representation. If Artaud
imagined that the Theater of Cruelty could cure him of the sickening
demands of signi cation, organization, and subjecti cation, he suggested as
much by insisting that his theater would also cure modern civilization of its
own monstrosity: “Perhaps the theater’s poison, injected into the social body, disintegrates it, as Saint Augustine
says, but at least it does so as a plague, as an avenging scourge, a redeeming epidemic in which credulous
ages have chosen to see the nger of God” (31).
Laughter is a primary form of mimetic affect that the child is

exposed to: it establishes affective channels of communication
that prefigure and predate literal or vocal communication – the
joy transmitted through laughter establishes a collective pre-
subjective permeability to affective communication. This
mimetic interaction brings the subject into a form of permeable,
relational being.
Iss. 2, 2011)//jh
We were wondering which conception of the subject underscores the Bataillean model of sovereign communication. What were the
affective foundations of the ‘‘subjectivite´ contagieuse’’ that informs the interior experience of
communication, and is responsible for the affective transgression of the limits of
individuation? A direct answer, it should be clear by now, can be found in Bataille’s reliance on the nineteenth century Nietzschean
model of the reflex unconscious in general, and on Pierre Janet’s psychology of the socius in particular. In fact, for Bataille, as for
Nietzsche and Janet before him, it is because the subject is from the very beginning open, by reflex, to
the contagious affects of the socii in childhood, that it continues to remain vulnerable to
the transgressive power of mimetic communication in adulthood. Bataille puts it quite
clearly as he pursues his discussion of what he calls a ‘‘fundamental example’’ of communication – namely laughter – and
the affective permeability it generates. Anticipating contemporary developments in child
psychology, Bataille focuses on the newborn’s immediate response to mimetic reflexes as he
writes: ‘‘[a] child, who is a few weeks old, responding to an adult’s laughter, represents
unambiguously the classic example of immediate laughter’’ (Hollier, College 107). And he specifies: Now I
will go back to the child’s laughter as a basic example [exemple fondamental] of permeability to a common movement. It happens when
faced with adult laughter [Il a lieu en face du rire de l’adulte]. It establishes between adult and child a
communication that is already so profound that it later will be able to be enriched and
amplified by multiplying its possibilities without its intimate nature being changed. (Hollier, College 109) For
Bataille, then, in the beginning was laughter. Or, as he will later say, quoting Virgil: ‘‘incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere materm’’ (V:
389).20 Initially triggered by the mimicry of that socius par excellence who is the mother
through an immediate, affective communication based on an involuntary reflex
mechanism, laughter, for Bataille, is the source of a primary, pre-subjective permeability
to the affect of the other/socius, a contagious, mimetic affect which brings the subject
into being as a permeable, relational, being. At the most general level, Bataille makes clear that communication
with the socius does not communicate any linguistic message (‘‘there is no pure and simple communication’’), insofar as for Bataille the
affective medium is the message (‘‘what is communicated is joy’’) (Hollier, College 110). And, as he specifies, the joy
conveyed by the laughter of the socius establishes a communication ‘‘so deep’’ that it paves
the way for future forms of communicative experiences. Moreover, Bataille’s implicit reliance on Janet’s
intersubjective psychology suggests that the ‘‘subject,’’ as it operates in his heterogeneous thought, emerges out of an affective relation of
mimetic communication with another/socius who is experienced as being both interior and exterior to the subject/ipse. Prior
to the
experience of communication there is, strictly speaking, no subject to speak of and thus
no limits to transgress. The subject that emerges from the experience of communication
is, however, from the very beginning, permeable to the other – if only because it is the
laughter of the other that brings it into being. As he will later put it, ‘‘the happiest laughter is the one that gives
birth to a child’’ (Expe´rience 106).
The bataillean subject is not formed by idealism but of

uncontrollable laughter. Self-recognition is precluded by
recognition of the other or the experience of affects received
from the socius
Iss. 2, 2011)//jh
It might be objected that in the context of his discussion of laughter at the Colle`ge, Bataille relies on Alexandre Koje`ve’s
Hegelian language of ‘‘recognition’’ in order to account for the mimetic relation between the subject and the socius. Yet,
already during this Koje`vian period, he makes clear that the child’s visual recognition of its mother is not the condition
for an affective communication to take place. On the contrary, recognition
is but the effect of [construit a`
partir de] a
previous, originary mimetic affectability [sentiment e´prouve´] that overtakes the
subject immediately, as it is exposed to the presence of an ‘‘autre/socius.’’ As Bataille puts it, ‘‘the
phenomenon of recognition will appear to be constructed on the basis of the feeling of
permeability when confronted with an other/socius’’ (Hollier, College 109). For Bataille, the
immediacy of mimetic affects is not only prior to representational distance but is also the
necessary condition for a mediated recognition to take place.21 The Bataillean subject
does not see the other, and then feel her/his affect; it feels the affect of the other first,
and it is on the basis of this mimetic experience that recognition is subsequently based.
Nor does the subject have its origin in a complacent feeling of narcissistic selfsatisfaction at the thought that ‘‘this ideal
form is my ego.’’ On the contrary, laughter, for Bataille, stems from the subject’s affective
openness to the contagious communication of the laughter of the socius which, like an
electric current, transgresses the boundaries of individuation and generates the
experience that ‘‘this mimetic affect is my ego’’! This child does not come into being by
pondering his static mirror-like image, an immobile form represented to itself from a
distance (‘‘I see myself therefore I am’’) but, rather, experiences, with joy, the living pathos of the
laughter of the socius whose ‘‘expressive exclamations’’ tickle the subject into being (‘‘I feel
– I am’’). In short, the Bataillean subject is not born out of the spirit of idealism, but out of an
uncontrolled burst of laughter instead.
The bataillean subject is a product of laughter that is always
capable of becoming-other – the laughter of the socius opens the
subject to future affective channels and prime the subject for
encounters-to-come. This original interaction with the
previously unknown is what opens the subject to interactions
with the socius and establishes a relational model of being that
allows the effectuation of the socuis through the subject in the
form of affective discharge.
- could be used on predictability or whatever
Iss. 2, 2011)//jh
From laughter to inner experience, via tears, trance, eroticism, death, dramatization and sacred festivities, mimesis
seems, indeed, to be at the center of Bataille’s persistent preoccupation with sovereign forms
of communication. As I have tried to show, it is only because of the subject’s prior affectability
to the contagious affects of the other/socius who is both exterior and interior to ipse that the latter
remains permeable to subsequent forms of communicative experience. Or, if you prefer, it is
because the subject is, from the very beginning, chained to another subject that such a
magnetic-electric-hypnotic-mimetic current characteristic of sovereign forms of
communication can actually flow. Which also means that communication is not only concerned
with the dissolution of the boundaries of the subject, nor with a mystical fusion with what
Bataille calls the ‘‘continuity of Being’’ (though it is both these things), but also, and perhaps more
importantly, with a reenactment of that very affective process which brings the subject
into being as a mimetic, relational being. To be sure, Bataille does not offer a single, homogeneous
answer to the open question ‘‘who comes after the subject?’’ Yet his account of the birth of the subject out of
the laughter of the socius affirms the emergence of a modality of being which is always
open to the possibility of becoming other. The laughter of the socius, in fact, opens up the
channels of affective communication that pave the way for the subject’s future
permeability to other forms of mimetic experiences; these passages also prepare the
subject for future encounters with socii yet to come, with whom the experience of
sovereign communication may, with some chance, eventually be reenacted. That Bataille
could not effectively communicate these interior experiences on the page is clear. Yet this impossible,
communicative task did not prevent him from affirming that ‘‘truth is not where humans
consider themselves in isolation: it starts with conversations, shared laughter [rires
partage´s], friendship, eroticism and it only takes place by passing from one to the other ’’ (V:
282; my emphasis). Bataille’s transgressive, mimetic thought makes the subject continuously
slide on the affective passages that emerge in instants of sovereign communication with
the socii. That is, those ‘‘others’’ who are interlocked with the ‘‘subject’’ in such a
fundamental way that they cannot be dissociated from what the subject ‘‘is.’’ These socii
do not communicate with me, but through me, because they are already chained into me
– part of the experience of what Bataille calls, thinking of Nietzsche, ‘‘being multiple singular’’ [eˆtre a` plusieurs
un seul]’’ (Sur Nietzsche VI: 279).
Laughter transgresses beyond racial boundaries to combat
violent hierarchies.
In his essay “An Extravagance of Laughter” (1985), Ralph Ellison reproduces a vernacular joke, known as the “laughing
barrel” joke, that elucidates the contagion of laughter as mobilizing “the most vicious of vicious circles” in the context of
racial inequality in America (192). The joke interrogates the dangers of African American laughter presupposed by the
paranoia and prejudice of the dominant white class. It introduces us to a small town in the American South in which the
rights of African Americans are so suppressed that their right to laugh in public places has been expressly forbidden, the
dominant whites fearing the potentially threatening contagion of black laughter, alleging that blacks lack the fortitude to
master their emotions. On the one hand, this widespread prejudice, espousing the notion that blacks
cannot control their baser impulses, underscores an imperative of racist white society to
prohibit black laughter; however, such a prohibition, apropos of the very content that emerges from
the racist logic of the town’s whites (viz., that blacks cannot control themselves), necessarily destines itself to
failure. In an effort to circumvent this impasse, the town devises the ludicrous idea of placing large wooden barrels
bearing the label “For Colored” on street corners and at all the major thoroughfares. Should a black person fall into
convulsions of laughter, he or she is to place his or her head inside one of these designated barrels. Here
the
peculiar coincidence of prohibition and transgression comes alive: when, for example, a
laughing black man places his head upside- down in the barrel, his laughter may
intensify, propagate, and redouble as he perceives the ridiculousness of his own image,
inverted in a barrel on the street, his feet dancing about where his head should be. The
laughter reverberating from the barrel may also catch passing whites in the contagion of
its convulsion, such that figures of authority, such as politicians and priests, along with
blue collar members of the white working class, such farmhands, and even bootleggers
and criminals may all fall into a kind of volatile “community” with the laughing black
man. The hierarchic class gradations internal to white society as well as those marking
racial boundaries become suspended. And yet, notwithstanding this relaxation of established social
boundaries, the whites shaken in the hilarity echoing from the barrel occupied by the black man’s laughing head may
the black man in the barrel laughs not solely at
come to realize or suspect, amidst peals of laughter, that
himself, but also at them and at their laughter. White paranoia about the alleged unruliness of African
American behavior and psychology is relaxed or suspended in a cross-cultural convulsion yet simultaneously
concentrated, reinforced, magnified. White
anxiety about black laughter and the threat it poses to
the racially-stratified order of things seems to quicken and intensify: whites’ attitudes towards
blacks becomes even more obstinate and petulant even as this quickening of splenetic, racist angst emerges out of a
experiential moment in which the established limits that subordinate African American life (and laughter) to the moral
proprieties of whites bursts, a moment in which racial and class-oriented societal limits fall away in the opening of a
reverberating space inhabited by a syncopated community of laughers. Not
only do the measures taken to
ensure that the laughter of the town’s black denizens does not disrupt the comings and
goings of town-life fail to prevent such a disruption, but the prohibition against blacks’
laughter is precisely what leads to this disruption and to its intensification. The
prohibition itself sets the stage for laughter to ensnare both blacks and whites of all
classes in a convulsive communal unity in which the racial paranoia underpinning the
prohibition both unhinges and (re)asserts itself, abolishing and renewing itself—almost
(if not) simultaneously—amid the repetition of laughter’s bursts. The prohibition’s
intensified (re)affirmation and renewal effectively coincides with the repetition of a
compulsive transgression of the ordered, racial boundary it outlines.
Minimal Literacy Standards
The system has failed us, but we will not let this story continue,
it will have an ending, thus the alt is affirming minimal literacy
standards
Scribner 84 SYLVIA SCRIBNERis professor of psychology at the Graduate School
and University Center of the City University of New York and was formerly associate
director of the National Institute of Education. She has studied the social organization
and cognitive implications of literacy in traditional societies and in work settings in the
United States and has a long-term interest in the continuities and discontinuities
between learning in school and in nonacademic environments. Her recent publications
include ThePsychologyofLiteracy(with Michael Cole), a special issue of the journal
CognitiveStudiesof Work,and chapters on practical thinking and working intelligence.
She is a member of the steering committee of Psychologists for Social Responsibility
(New York) and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
http://courseweb.ischool.illinois.edu/~katewill/fall2014-
502/scribner%201984%20literacy%20in%20three%20metaphors.pdf 11-13
What implications does this analysis have for literacy policy and education? This is a question that calls for the continued,
sustained, and thoughtful attention of educators and others in our society. One implication that I find compelling is the
need to "disaggregate" various levels and kinds of literacy. If
the search for an essence is futile, it
might appropriately be replaced by serious attention to varieties of literacy
and their place in social and educational programs. In this disentangling process, I would
place priority on the need to extricate matters of value and policy from their hidden position in the definitional enterprise
and to address them head on. The International Symposium for Literacy, closing UNESCO's Experimental
World Literacy Program, declared that literacy is a fundamental human
right (Bataille 1976). Literacy campaigns need no other justification. Setting long-range social and
educational goals, however, pushes us farther toward an inquiry into the
standard of literacy that is a desirable (valued) human right in our highly
developed technological society, whose policies have such a powerful impact
on the world's future. What is ideal literacy in our society? If the analysis by metaphor
presented here contributes some approach to that question, it suggests that ideal literacy is
simultaneously adaptive, socially empowering, and self-enhancing. Enabling
youth and adults to progress toward that ideal would be a realization of the spirit of the symposium in Persepolis reflective
of the resources and literacy achievements already available in our society. This suggests that long-term social and
educational policies might be directed at maximal literacy objectives; minimal
literacy standards
would serve a useful function, not as goals but as indicators of our progress
in equipping individuals and communities with the skills they need for
"takeoff" in continuing literacy careers. Recognition of the multiple meanings and varieties of
literacy also argues for a diversity of educational approaches, informal and community-based as well as formal and
school-based. As ethnographc research and practical experience demonstrate, effective
literacy programs
are those that are responsive to perceived needs, whether for functional
skills, social power, or self-improvement. Individual objectives may be highly specific: to qualify
for a promotion at work, to help children with their lessons, to record a family history. Anzalone and McLaughlin (1982)
have coined the term "specific literacies" to designate such special-interest or special-purpose literacy skills. The road to
maximal literacy may begin for some through the feeder routes of a wide variety of specific literacies. These are speculative
and personal views; others will have different conceptions. The notions offered here of ideal and specific literacies do not
simplify the educational issues nor resolve the definitional dilemmasI hope, however, that these concepts and the
metaphoric analysis from which they flowed suggest the usefulness of "dissecting literacy" into its many forms and, in the
process, clarifying the place of fact and value in discussions of the social meaning of literacy.
Monstrosity
The alternative recognizes the violence forces within, the evil
lurking within ourselves, and instead of running affirms
transgression and self-sacrifice that can live in the moment and
find value sans a deferral to future meaning
Hamblet 2007. Wendy, Ph.D. Department of Philosophy, Adelphi University “Guilty of
innocence or nobody remembers the Armenians.” Armenians, Journal of Genocide
Research, 7:1, 129-144, DOI: 10.1080/14623520500045229
To the demonic self That is why we must conclude this contemplation of the
ritual violences concealed in our conceptual and linguistic institutions, and
in our socio-politico-economic systems, by turning to Georges Bataille. Few
would recognize, in the “depraved ravings” of this “bad poet,” with his fascination for the
excesses of De Sade, with Chinese tortures and other “absurd” phenomena, a
philosopher who might have anything to contribute to a discussion that seeks to broaden
responsibility and to expunge violences from the human world. GUILTY OF
INNOCENCE OR NOBODY REMEMBERS THE ARMENIANS 139 Downloaded by
[University of Michigan] at 01:02 29 October 2015 However, Bataille’s “bad
poetics” accomplishes a sleight of hand that could not be accomplished by
the reasoning of a philosophical treatise that must work within the system
of signs and symbols that constitute our “common mental world.” Bataille
frustrates the sorting and distancing mechanism that purifies the home
space of alien contamination by collapsing the logic that underpins the
dominating systems. It is not simply that Bataille has seen all along that the ape’s
anus is as beautiful as it is obscene. It is not simply that his fascination with
transgression has made us wary of the steadfastness of our own moral and existential
borders. It is not simply that Bataille’s own writing enacts a dissolution of logical
reasoning. It is, above all, that Bataille’s “decadent fantasies” expose the extreme
possibility of human being, a possibility that our purifying logic works so desperately to
conceal—the possibility that, at the core of human desire—the desire shared by
all human beings—there lurks the very monster who, in the conscious
moralizing life, we so starkly condemn in others. Bataille reveals the
murderousness that founds all human community when he exposes the darker dreams
that rage in the human breast. In his “Reflections on the executioner and the victim,” a
treatment of David Rousset’s Les Jours de notre mort, Bataille notes, with Rousset, the
common ignobility of the victim and his executioner. These supposed “polar” entities
(victim and executioner) are not “substantial” opposites (not demon and wretched
angel); the two cannot be differentiated in terms of a difference of essence. Rather, they
are mutually bound in a common “decomposition of being.” Distinctions can be made
only in terms of the rhythm by which that decomposition proceeds. Bataille stresses,
with Rousset, that the great human being decomposes more slowly, but,
ultimately, all are subject to the certainty of collapse. However, Bataille wanders
farther from the traditional logic in this essay. It is not simply that each person succumbs
to moral degradation under extremities of suffering and humiliation (Bataille, 1991, p
18). Bataille recognizes, beyond that insight, that abjection takes many forms in a
universe so morally broad. It is the horror that we find, not at the base of the sufferer
(that he will succumb to the ways of his abusers) but at the base of the executioner that is
the greatest of human horrors. Our most deeply concealed terror lies in the
possibility that, in staring into the abyss of the monstrous other, we may
come to see our own most horrific possibilities. In forcing us to gaze into that
abyss, Bataille raises the possibility that each of us shares, with the torturer, the rage that
fires his craft—his love for inflicting pain upon others. This possibility seems “inhuman”
but, rather, asserts Bataille, as “limit” to the “human,” it fully delineates what marks out
the human as such. To define the limiting possibilities is to locate the definitive
parameters of our kind. “Our possibility is not simply pain,” insists Bataille, “but it
extends to the rage of the torturer” (Bataille, 1991, p 18). The possibility of me as the
enraged torturer, exemplifying the full “decomposition of being,” exposes
the essential character of all “human” being. It exposes the ontological fact that
the good victim is simultaneously the “evil” and “monstrous” torturer. At the
extremities of my own possibilities, I find myself as executioner, alongside
all the monsters of human history, at home in a “common mental—if
unconscious—world” of desire that delights in the suffering of others. This
shocking truth communicates the utter banality of evil. The most sacred of
home spaces shares, at least to some degree, with the Third Reich and the kingdom of
Genghis Khan, an allotment of the senseless rage of the torturer, an entirely “human”
rage that dwells on the cusp of the human condition. And it is only in facing that
truth, in accepting the monstrous as an altogether “human” potentiality,
that “reason becomes an insoluble question for itself.” With the
“awakening” of our reasonings to self-question, human beings may stand
capable, at last, of overturning the logic that permits the facile moral
judgments and the clear condemnations that effect “an escapist denial.” This
“awakening” tears us from the logical possibility of the sorting and distancing
mechanism that expiates our violences by projecting them onto a sacrificial
other. Conclusion: from scapegoating to the examined life Burkert has shown that polar
characterizations that rest upon clear and distinct oppositions are the legacy of a violent
human past. That logic lingers in the seriousness with which we carve out our loyalties in
the world, the sacredness we attribute to our home spaces, and the disgust and fear we
experience in the face of the alien. Bataille proposes that flesh is the most
fundamental terrain of violence. His “indecent” fantasies mock the claim
that all home spaces are sacred, clean and pure. He undercuts the scapegoat
mechanism by fashioning us all, on the deepest level, demonic, if only in
potency. Bataille refuses the contaminating principle of an endemic disfigurement
effected from without. For him, the extant order’s dualistic logic is absurd, just as is the
reality of human connection an absurdity—beyond clear and distinct meanings. As
Bataille vomits forth his mutinous writing, contradictory and overexposed,
he acts out a revolution within that very order. Bataille’s literary excesses expose
the only “truth” of the human world—that it is metaphysically rapacious. His wild
musings are so fully embellished, so genuinely utterly absurd, as to supplant any posited
sense of the absurd. With his meaningless festivals of bodily mishap, agony,
perversion and orgy defy the claims of “innocent sanctity” by which existing
socio-moral orders define themselves. He exposes, in his excesses of cruelty,
that violence is always already a predictable element of orders per se. Bataille
unveils the cruelty of the polite human world, a cruelty whose fleshy palpability is only
superficially shrouded by a false politeness, a politeness making even more cruel its
inherent cruelties. In exposing the outrageous disorder fundamental to our ordered
worlds, Bataille raises the possibility that the individual might see beyond his
“sacred” spaces, and break free of the systems in which she figures only as a
link in the chain of species violences. Furthermore, his theater of violences opens
the possibility of alternatively configured relations between human fellows, beyond the
coalitions forged through mechanisms of rejection. His meditations on cruelty illustrate,
if scandalously, that, while suffering bodies are individual, they invite a fraternity on the
basis of collective vulnerability. All bodies potentially suffer. Each individual’s
agony is a potential for everyone else. Exposing the fact that the real world is not
so very different from his theater of the absurd, Bataille exposes that nothing whatsoever
fits neatly into the “two containers”—all is gray zone, that is. The logic of counter-cultural
rejection holds that truth at a comfortable distance, locating the dis-ease in difference,
then marginalizing it and demonizing it. But who is not the different? Are we not all
Armenians? And, then, are we not all Hitlers? Recognizing the violent forces that
are at work in any culture, recognizing our deepest concealments of our own
violational tendencies, recognizing that the more passionately “moral” we
are, the more we are enslaved to the demonizing logic, recognizing that the
more ordered and “legitimate” the system, the more wounding it is likely to
be toward the non-belonging—these re-cognitions (“awakenings” of reasoning)
can help us to overcome our tendency to channel chaos onto the marginal or
expel it upon foreign bodies, and they can help dispel the willed oversights
that claim sacred purity for our own home spaces. Monsters, as unspeakable
objects of dread, function as extremes of human difference that reconfirm all systems,
and reinstate the legitimacy of those who belong, and thus they reconfirm as rightful the
violences visited upon those oppressed by the system. If we take to heart the warnings in
the theories of Burkert and the other anthropologists, we find that the domain of
violence coextends with the over-determined assembly of powers and forces
that configure “human” language, consciousness and culture. There exists
no purified realm cut loose from the orchestrations of power; cultures’
linguistic and social terrain is coextensive with the monstrousness it condemns.
Ordering systems not only suppress and regulate violence; they comprise it. Social
structures, mechanisms of control and order and organization and orientation not only
define the marginal chaotic—they produce it! Prohibitions increase the fear and
sense of powerlessness from which burgeon hysterias for cleanliness. These
hysterias are manifest in the frantic moralizations that flood the public sphere. We see
them in the rage surrounding bids for capital punishment, in the frenzied
denouncements against child molesters, abortionists, terrorists, etc. We see it in over-
serious nationalisms, tribalisms and religious fundamentalisms that flood the globe.
Guilt or innocence of the crime is beside the point in theatricalized condemnations of
anti-social behaviors. It is the condemnations themselves that depend on a
sustained and orchestrated refusal to recognize that violence—evil—is not
external to the social fabric but constitutive of it. Tracking down the sources of
endemic evil in a society, whether by police or intelligence agency, neighborhood “watch”
or lynch mob, involves pinpointing the exact location, spatial but also psychological,
tribal, racial, religious and/or gendered, that designates the precise parameters of guilt
to permit the required catharsis. Ideologies of exposure thus are essentially
ironic, functioning as a cleansing that is simultaneously and equally a
contamination. The “good” citizen as much as the authoritarian powers that maintain
the ambiguous “order” within a system must draw upon the service of the very forces
they are intended to regulate. Order is maintained because, within the system,
chaos is WENDY C. HAMBLETT 142 Downloaded by [University of Michigan] at 01:02
29 October 2015 overwhelmed by a “sacred” and legal violence that explicates
the evil, reconstructs the scene of social crime and assigns guilt. Assignation
of guilt permits closure, in every system as in Kafka’s “Penal colony,” by inscribing upon
the punished body of the criminal the ideological fiction of the ordered stability upon
which the sanctity of the system rests. What is diabolical is not that each of us has
witnessed the corruption of his fellows, but that we believe that the moralizing
gesture of the witnessing grants expiation from the crimes of humanity.
However, the stark fact of the matter is that evil is a rather common and very
“human” phenomenon. It comes to be in famine, flood, aging, sickness and
war. Most of these cannot be separated, let alone purified, from the human
condition. Those few “evils” that can be remedied generally come about as a
result of the inflexible moral distinctions that assign guilt and contamination,
distinctions that are constitutive, not only of our ideological blinders, but of our
social practices, economic systems and political arrangements themselves. It is
not the perversions of others that render our societies dangerous, but that
decadent, yet comfortable, distancing mechanism that clarifies and
illuminates the monstrousness of others with a rigorous and absolute
clarity.
Nonknowledge
Our process of nonknowledge is a squandering of the basic
ideals of the educational systems. We instead affirm the
complete unmeasurability that comes with nonknowledge and
the possibilities or non possibilities that it brings as a form of
thought play
Our explanation of nonknowledge takes place in four major sections, each of which is an “element”
of nonknowledge. They are: unstable communicability (element 1), experientiality (element 2),
threshold position (element 3), and expenditure (element 4). Each of these four elements
(with the exception of element 3) contains a number of “features” that flesh out the element.
The features of element 1 (unstable communicability) collectively point to the larger claims
that there is something in the experience of nonknowledge that does not comfortably or
clearly reduce to language, that language can fail in significant ways, and that
experiences of nonknowledge cannot be propositionalized. The features of element 2
(experientiality) highlight its subjectivity and affectivity, its transgressive nature, and its
seemingly paradoxical property of leading both somewhere and nowhere.
That nonknowledge has no authority other than itself is also emphasized in the features
of element 2. The third element (the threshold position) differs from the others because it does not have a
number of features, and it is not described in Bataille’s texts. The “element” is in fact my claim about the
nature of nonknowledge and its position in relation to the kind of knowledge sought by
the virtue epistemology conversation, made explicit through Bataille. Element 4 is
expenditure. The features of element 4 stress the unmeasurability, partial uselessness,
and destructive facets of nonknowledge. They also stress the non-acquisitive nature of
nonknowledge—that as expenditure, it is not clearly creditable, and thus cannot be
acquired and stored up. Nonknowledge is thus a kind of thought-play.
Today, like other times, I am going to attempt to communicate my experience of nonknowledge to you. Of course, like the
other times, I will fail. But first I would like to show you the extent of my failure. I can say precisely that if I had succeeded,
the tangible contact between you and me would have the nature not of work but of play. I would have known how to make
you perceive what is for me a decisive fact; the only object of my thought is play, and in play my thought, the work of my
thought, is annihilated (USN 120).
Drawing this out will require explaining all four elements of nonknowledge.
We can already see that the features of the four elements of nonknowledge are significantly
different from the presumptions made in the virtue epistemology conversation. Taking
these differences seriously and making them explicit is the chief aim of this document. By
the end of this document, however, I will argue that we can see these elements and features of
nonknowledge at play in the virtue epistemology conversation, and that nonknowledge
can in fact be seen as a feature of knowledge-creation of the kind we see in the virtue
epistemology discussion, as an expression of classical epistemology, and of philosophy.
I will argue additionally (in chapter 3) that nonknowledge
is best understood as “epistemic
expenditure,” and as an open, or general, economy. Building on this, I will return to the virtue
epistemology conversation in order to claim that what at first looks like a closed, or
restricted economy (viz., the virtue epistemology conversation) is in fact an open, or general
economy, with nonknowledge (understood as epistemic expenditure) already occurring
within it. This claim requires some additional claims. I will identify them here before discussing them
fully in the coming chapters. They are: (1) that the virtue epistemology presumptions are an
adaptation to the excess, the waste, that is nonknowledge; (2) that the elements of
nonknowledge occur in virtue epistemology, without being recognized or identified; and thus
(3) that what the classical presumptions suggest is the entire story—or a complete
conversation—is in fact an incomplete story, or conversation.
Nonknowledge is the threshold at which knowledge is exhausted

or recognizes its limits. Understanding it is not a matter of
finding where knowledge becomes nonknowledge, but is the
moment at which we are faced with something that we cannot
think or know. This is not the end of our ability to think, but is
instead a threshold to a new way of thinking or understanding.
Lerman 15, Lindsay, PhD in philosophy from the University of Gough, studies
Bataille and Epistemology, (“Georges Bataille's "Nonknowledge" as Epistemic
Expenditure: An Open Economy of Knowledge,” 8/04/15)//jh
Element 3: Threshold Position “Bataille
envisages the arrival of thought at the gates of nonknowledge
only to the extent that thought would have exhausted its ‘resources’” (Robert Sasso, “Georges
Bataille and the Challenge to Think,” On Bataille 47). “One side of nonknowledge is chaos; the other, system. Knowledge
forms a bridge between the two banks. Knowledge as such is
a space of transformation” (Michel Serres, The
Parasite 73) The position of nonknowledge in relation to knowledge is what I call a
“threshold position.” Important to its threshold position is the “non” in “nonknowledge.”
It is not a “non” in the sense of negation or opposition. Ray Brassier has described what he calls the
“non-philosophy” of François Laruelle in just such a way, akin to the “non” in “non Euclidean” geometry: […] not as a
negation or denial of philosophy, but as suspending a specific structure (the philosophical equivalent of Euclid’s fifth
axiom concerning parallels) which Laruelle sees as constitutive of the traditional practice of philosophy. New possibilities
of thought become available once that structure has been suspended and non-philosophy is an index of those
philosophically un-envisageable possibilities (“Axiomatic Heresy: The non-philosophy of François Laruelle,” Radical
Philosophy 121, p. 25). If nonknowledge were “a-knowledge” it would be the absence of knowledge. If it were “ir
knowledge” or “un-knowledge,” it would be the negation of knowledge. Sticking with the Latin roots, nonknowledge is
closer to “not-knowledge.” But this cannot mean that nonknowledge is strictly not-knowledge. The relationship of
nonknowledge to knowledge can be explained with Bataille’s description of what makes excess possible: “[O]nly the
impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander. Hence the real excess does not begin until the growth of the
individual or group has reached its limits” (Accursed Share 29). At full epistemic capacity, what could have been useful
intellectual activity becomes excessive, wasteful intellectual activity. Nonknowledge
is thus not ignorance or
total absence of knowledge, but a challenging not-knowing that occurs at a limit—at the
continuous and permanent threshold of—knowing. Because in the next chapter we will
see that I am calling nonknowledge epistemic expenditure, I maintain that its most easily
identifiable incarnations occur when a limit in thought, in thinking, in problem-solving—
in 88 “useful” mental activity—is crossed. When thought has “exhausted its resources,” (Sasso ibid) pushed
past a limit of usefulness. Nonknowledge is thus an alternate epistemology. Following the “non” of
Laruelle, nonknowledge makes “new possibilities of thought” available (Brassier ibid). Bataille did not identify
nonknowledge’s position as a threshold position, but he did lay the groundwork for my description. According to Bataille,
nonknowledge occurs as a natural, necessary byproduct of the dissolution of knowledge (AC 74), which itself occurs at the
height of knowledge, only when the “summit” of knowledge is reached (ibid). [K]nowledge leads to the limit, because
knowledge as a willful comportment is motivated by a relation to the limit. Just as the interdit called for transgression,
through an intimate accord hidden within its illusory opposition, knowledge calls to non-savoir as its violent complement,
its hidden condition, its silent end. ‘The nonessence of the will to know arises’: it is not reason that motivates the desire to
know—no more than it was reason that instituted the interdit. The
desire to know is violent—is violence
[…] It is an exigency conditioned by survival and by death. It leads, through its privileged illusion
of objectivity and the possession of truth, inexorablyto its limit. The experience of this limit is non-
savoir” (Joseph Libertson, “Bataille and Communication,” On Bataille 217). Limits can be thresholds. Instead of being
final, they are thresholds—a permanent zone of openness to transformation. What we are
capable of doing is not once and for all determined. We can experience a limit as a final limit—a necessary
stopping-point—or we can see if the limit is not perhaps as final or as real as it seems.
Understanding that limits are thresholds is the key. This is a quasi-Deleuzian point. “Deleuze has an almost
mathematical definition of the limit, as that which one never really reaches.56” (Rosi Braidotti, “The Ethics
of Becoming Imperceptible,” Deleuze and Philosophy 10). Thus understanding the position of nonknowledge in
relation to knowledge is not a matter of determining exactly where knowledge “ends” and
nonknowledge “begins”; it is a moment when we are faced with something unthinkable,
unknowable, un-communicable, or even heretical, and it is a matter of understanding
that moment not as a final marker of a limit, but as a threshold. As somewhere between clear
thought or discourse (that which can be clearly, reliably communicated, translated into knowledge, or seen as a
contribution to the accepted scholarship) and something like a-knowledge or un-knowledge: a wild and entirely
indescribable terrain. When
we have utterly exhausted or clicked off our thinking and knowing
resources, we begin to arrive in the region of nonknowledge. We’ve seen that this is perhaps
uniquely possible in erotic experience, but it is not limited to thinking or knowing during, or about, erotic experience.
Nonknowledge can occur when we are wondering about the structure of the universe. It can happen when a child asks us
what time is. Certain events or experiences can occasion nonknowledge, but they are not the form of nonknowledge. In
keeping with the threshold position of nonknowledge, we will see that it is a part of
knowledge and knowledge-creation, despite the fact that virtue epistemology—and
epistemology in general—seeks to strictly limit what kinds of processes or procedures can result in
knowledge, and thereby excludes processes that might be nonknowledge. (And thus cannot
ever really or fully be excluded.)
Nonknowledge is the wasteful expenditure of thought – it is

thought-play rather than thought-work. This expenditure is un-
recoverable, wasted through self-destruction in opposition to a
general economic approach to life as scarce as opposed to
abundant.
Chapter 3: Nonknowledge is Epistemic Expenditure “The sacred is par excellence the sphere of ‘La Part maudite’ […],
sphere of sacrificial expenditure, of wealth and of death; sphere of a ‘general’ economy which refutes all the axioms of
economy as it is usually understood […] It is also the sphere of non-knowledge” (Jean Baudrillard57). Introduction This
chapter is an argument and an explanation. Firstly, it is my argument that nonknowledge is an essentially
expenditure-related concept, and that it is because nonknowledge is expenditure that
nonknowledge can be a feature of knowledge-creation. That is, this chapter is an argument that
nonknowledge should be understood primarily as an instance or example of expenditure,
and thus, as a positive term with a positive definition. (As an “open” or “general” economy of
knowledge.) Building on this, I will argue in the next chapter than an understanding of nonknowledge as
(epistemic) expenditure makes possible an understanding of nonknowledge as
productive of knowledge. In order to make these arguments, however (and secondly), we need to examine the
most significant element of nonknowledge—expenditure—and we need to do so while continually returning to the virtue
epistemology conversation for points of contrast and clarity. Expenditure will turn out to be the most significant element
of nonknowledge because nonknowledge itself is an act of expenditure. Nonknowledge is
thought-waste or mental energy-expenditure. It is thought-play rather than thought-
work (USN 129). Nonknowledge is pseudo-knowledge partially outside of—and with a complicated relationship to—
utility. And expenditure is waste. It is not total or complete waste, but it is the act of
wasting something and thereby removing or displacing it (at least partially) from economic
utility. The claim that nonknowledge is an act or example of expenditure is a claim I make explicit through Bataille58.
Nonknowledge is thus best conceived of as an “economy.” That is, this epistemic, general
economy is best made visible by seeing the conversation in our virtue epistemology
cluster, by contrast, as a restricted economy driven by accumulation. Element 4: Expenditure,
“General Economy” A note on the relationship between expenditure and “general economy,” a term I (and others) use in
this chapter: General economy is a “principle.” The chief principle of general economy is that
there is always excess (The Accursed Share vol. 1 pp. 21-3). This excess is wasted through destruction
(of itself). In fact, excess is necessarily a byproduct of growth, and excess must be
destroyed and/or “not used.” When limits to growth have been reached, the excess must
be destroyed. This is the basic ontological principle of general economy59. “The general
economy, in the first place, makes apparent that excesses of energy are produced, which by definition cannot be utilized.”
(“Méthode de Méditation, Oeuvres Complètes 5, 215). Bataille is not claiming that there is only excess with regard to the
human population or a particular currency; his use of “economy” refers specifically to the interaction of forces and
energies within a particular realm, and that realm is global60: “On the surface of the globe, for
living matter in
general, energy is always in excess” (AC 23; emphasis Bataille’s). The global nature of the
principle of general economy—that there is always excess—does not allow for general economy to
be pigeonholed as a principle applicable only to human reproduction and population-
growth, for example. The ontological principle of general economy is that there is always excess, for all living
matter61. Arkady Plotnitsky calls general economy a “theoretical framework” as well as a science (Complementarity 19).
As a theoretical framework and a science, general economy is a way of understanding the world. It
contains the notion of expenditure. A restricted, or closed, economy, by contrast, is driven by
a logic of scarcity, by the principle that the basic condition of life is not excess but scarcity. It is
“predicated on the notion of a primal scarcity and the necessity to produce and accumulate in order to safeguard against
this scarcity that perpetually threatens existence. It corresponds to economy viewed from the perspective of fear and
anxiety” (RBN 6462). So we find two sorts of economy in Bataille’s writing: restricted (or closed) and general (or open).
Feature 4.1 (of Expenditure): Non-Productivity General
economy and expenditure are closely linked.
Expenditure operates in the mode of general economy—or according to general
economy. Unproductive expenditure – characterized by unrecoverable loss, as Bataille calls it – is similar
enough to be sometimes inseparable from the notion of “sacrifice.”63 Unproductive
expenditure is non-teleological. Unproductive expenditure is not applicable “the modes of consumption that
serve as a means to the end of production” (ibid). With this, Bataille means to claim that unproductive expenditure is
unproductive, and it is unproductive in many senses. “[L]uxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary
monuments, games, spectacles, arts, [and] perverse sexual activity” are modes of activity that stand in contrast to
productive modes in economy, politics, religion, and interpersonal relations. Bataille is claiming that unproductive
expenditure happens. Bataille is not yet (in 1933) making claims with regard to the value of unproductive expenditure; he
is claiming that unproductive expenditure happens. He calls it “pure loss.” Something escapes productivity
and is a loss to the system—an “accursed” loss: “that extra thing—that accursed share—
that never bows down to the yoke of utility” (Winnubst RBN 7-8). Bataille begins “The Notion of
Expenditure64” (1933) with the following: Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of
production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.
The first, reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the
continuation of individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the
fundamental condition of productive activity. The second part is represented by so-called
unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games,
spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)—all these represent activities which, at
least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve
the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the
modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production (VE 118). Loss that is unrecoverable is loss that
cannot be reinvested in order to produce value or meaning. The peculiar loss involved with expenditure is loss that cannot
“serve as a means to the end of production” (ibid). Loss that is temporary and recoverable is not unproductive
expenditure; it is temporary loss that can be reinvested in production, value, or meaning. We see highly recoverable and
re-investable loss in Las Vegas, for example, where the businessman goes for a wild weekend in order to return to work
refreshed and productive. This is a temporary indulgence in expenditure for soon-to-be-recovered personal gain.
Nonknowledge functions as epistemic expenditure – it allows

for mutual recognition of communicative failure through
experiencing it. It is a form of epistemic play that makes
knowing possible through providing spaces to exercise thought
outside of utility or productivity. It takes as its opposite
thinking, communicating, and totally knowing what is known
Nonknowledge as an “Open” or “General” Economy How is nonknowledge an “open” economy? Nonknowledge is
an “open” economy because it is epistemic expenditure. Nonknowledge occurs at a limit of
thought, as excess, and it is destructive of knowledge. In Bataille’s early writing about expenditure
(roughly 1927 1939), nonknowledge is not mentioned, so the relation nonknowledge has to expenditure is not yet clear in
Bataille’s texts. Denis Hollier, however, links expenditure and nonknowledge in the entirety of Bataille’s oeuvre. In “The
Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,” (Bataille: A Critical Reader) Hollier writes that Bataille’s unification of “thought
(la pensée) and its expenditure (la dépense)” is a fundamental part of Bataille’s desire to challenge the dualism of knowing
and doing, a desire found throughout Bataille’s work (66). “It is a strange relation which ties together these two worlds
[thought and expenditure] with no common ground, whose unthinkable and impossible coexistence cannot be described
in terms of an addition or a totality, never amounting to a total” (ibid). Nonetheless, the “two worlds” united by a “strange
relation” must be understood not as a duality but a pseudo-unity requiring tension and “an ever unresolved
dissatisfaction” (ibid 61). The “unresolved dissatisfaction” must exist because thought and expenditure are “radically
incompatable,” in the face of their pseudo-unity (ibid 67). Hollier’s position brings to mind the unresolved dissatisfaction
which is a necessary part of communicating nonknowledge, and the failure that is part of communication. (“This is also
the profound meaning of nonknowledge. One must cease knowing (speaking) in order to experience” (USN 239);
“Through language we can never grasp what matters to us, for it eludes in the form of interdependent propositions, and no
central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears” (E 274).) Regarding thought and expenditure, my claim
is that nonknowledge is the pseudo-unity of thought and expenditure. Comparing nonknowledge
to Zagzegski and Sosa’s conceptions of knowledge, the expenditure aspect of nonknowledge—the wasteful,
useless, work-annihilating aspect—is arresting: Today, like the other times, I am going to attempt
to communicate my experience of nonknowledge to you. Of course, like the other times, I
will fail. But first I would like to show you the extent of my failure. I can say precisely
that if I had succeeded, the tangible contact between you and me would have had the
nature not of work but of play…in play, my thought, the work of my thought, is
annihilated (USN 129). This is how we can understand nonknowledge as epistemic
expenditure, and thus as an “open” economy of knowledge and a kind of alternate
epistemology. Nonknowledge is thought-play that is partially destructive of thought-work. Recently, I saw this in
action. I was watching my two and half year old daughter Sabine play. She had skinned her knee the day before. She was
fascinated with the scab on her knee, and the band-aid that covered it, and how my parental affection had been different
or new to her as I helped her clean the wound the day before. And this day, she was caretaker to her stuffed animals,
telling me they had all hurt their knees, and they were crying, and she was helping them. As she played, being every
version of a doctor or caretaker she could be, I realized—suddenly, almost stupidly—this form of play is the only way she
can learn, how she can figure out, after the fact, after recuperation from the experience, what an injury is, what care is,
how injuries elicit certain kinds of care, and who knows what else. The childish
play is precisely the thing that
is making knowledge possible, in this case. But the elements of nonknowledge are not a- or anti-epistemic. We
see in the quote above that Bataille believed that nonknowledge as thought-play has something to
offer, that it could show us how to think outside of the “work of thought”; that is, outside
utility, production, and acquisition. Such play, however, “annihilates” work. Thus thinking,
knowing, and communicating what is known in a threshold, “alternate,” “open” position
is destructive of the work-like aspects (production and acquisition) of thinking, knowing,
and communicating what is known.
Nonknowledge is unmeasurable and intoxicatingly meaningless

– through the wasteful expenditure of thought, nonknowledge
reveals that meaning has no value. Its goal is not the
accumulation of meaning but instead total expenditure and
sacrifice for its own sake.
Occurring at a limit of knowledge, nonknowledge is destructive of knowledge and some

senses of meaning, particularly measurability: “The ultimate problem of knowledge is the
same as that of consumption. No one can both know and not be destroyed; no one can
both consume wealth and increase it” (The Accursed Share vol. 1 74). The destructive
and unmeasurable aspects of nonknowledge become clear visible we consider
nonknowledge in the context of general economy. General economy “accounts for or
relates to the operation […] of loss and expenditure” (Plotnitsky, Complementarity 21).
That is, loss and expenditure are internal to and part of general economy. Recall that
general economy and expenditure are not the same (despite the former “containing” or
“accounting for” the latter), but that they are also not easily separable. One constitutive
feature of general economy, and thus of expenditure, is that it is not “predicated on the
value of meaning” (C 21). A “restricted” economy, on the other hand, “be it Adam
Smith’s, Hegel’s, or Marx’s, would still be predicated on the value of meaning, and
particularly conscious meaning—meaningful investment, meaningful expenditure of
labor and capital, meaningful production and conservation” (ibid 20-1). Plotnitsky is
here speaking specifically of political and fiscal economies, but he is clear that the
designation “general economy” can apply to any economy, including epistemic ones.
Similarly, Rodolphe Gasché claims that we can understand an “economy” as productive
of meaning within a particular discourse: “We have to understand ‘economy’ here as an
organization of the relation of forces that produce meaning within a discourse” (Georges
Bataille, Phenomenology and Phantasmology 15). Our concern is the difference between
two kinds of economy on offer: a restricted, closed economy and a general, open
economy. If a “restricted” economy is “predicated on the value of meaning,” and a
general economy is not, expenditure becomes a particularly important element of
general economy: it is the action (or “movement”) that embodies useless loss, without
regard for meaning of the loss. Expenditure is the means by which “the value of
meaning” is shown to have little or no bearing on the functioning of general economy. In
this regard, expenditure is the key to general economy and its unique property of not
being “predicated on the value of meaning.” Nonknowledge and expenditure share this
feature. Like expenditure, nonknowledge is a loss of value of meaning. Like expenditure,
nonknowledge is not “predicated on the value of meaning.” Nonknowledge does have
affective meaning, as we saw in chapter two (Feature 2.7 of Experientiality: Meaning in
Affect). The meaning found in nonknowledge is an “intoxicating” nonmeaning,
understood in positive terms as an affective meaning with no clear goal (ON 173).
Nonknowledge thus resists teleology. Supporting this, Plotnitsky claims that “value”
measured in terms of “meaning” is teleological analysis67. Recall Bataille’s assertions
that nonknowledge doesn’t “lead anywhere” (ON 172-3), and that inner experience is a
“struggle against the spell in which useful language holds us” (USN 16). These are two of
the ways in which nonknowledge resists teleological analysis and measurement qua
knowledge or truth-bearing. Nonknowledge cannot be measured, tracked, or accounted
for—assigned a value based on its meaning—in ways we see, for example, our virtue
epistemology conversation measure, track, and account for. Greco offers a clear example:
On the approach I prefer, knowledge is to be understood as true belief grounded in
intellectual virtue, where an intellectual virtue is understood as a reliable cognitive
ability or power. This approach is a version of reliabilism, since it understands
knowledge as true belief produced by a reliable process. But the approach places a
restriction on what sort of reliable process can give rise to knowledge. Namely, only
those processes that are grounded in the abilities or powers of the believer do so (“Virtue,
Luck, and the Pyrrhonian Problematic” 27). The measurability and accountability of a
belief and a believer’s cognitive makeup is key to Greco’s account of knowledge. Meaning
must be clear. Beliefs and a believer’s cognitive makeup must submit to teleological
analysis via clear meaning (in the form of measurability and accountability). Zagzebski
presents us with a similarly measurable account of knowledge: My proposal, then, is this.
An epistemic agent gets credit for getting a true belief when she arrives at a true belief
because of her virtuous intellectual acts motivated by a love of truth. She gets credit for
getting a desirable true belief when she arrives at a desirable true belief because of acts
motivated by love of true beliefs that are components of a good life (“The Search for the
Source of Epistemic Good” 24). The value assigned to both beliefs and believers is
dependent on the discernable— trackable, measurable—motivations of the believer(s).
The unit of measure in virtue epistemology is thus utility, which can only be determined
via the particular accountability required of intellectual virtue. In relation, then, to
Plotnitsky’s assertion that general economy—and with it expenditure— is not “predicated
on the value of meaning,” nonknowledge is an essential example of expenditure. As
expenditure, nonknowledge too has a relationship to the value of meaning that
challenges the assumption that all is “predicated on the value of meaning.” Not only is
nonknowledge not “predicated on the value of meaning”; as a kind of expenditure,
nonknowledge is not predicated on measurability. I am extending Plotnitsky’s
designations of “value” and “meaning” in the case of nonknowledge to include all metrics
other than the utility discussed directly above. That is, the dual utility that (in part)
makes knowledge possible. But because nonknowledge is expenditure, it is not
predicated on measurability. I have to stress once again that nonknowledge is not a total
absence of knowledge, or, in experiential terms, it is not an experience which makes
knowledge-gathering and measuring forever impossible. An important part of
nonknowledge’s threshold position is its relation to meaning: meaning is not
nonknowledge’s primary orientation or goal. Nonknowledge is not wholly goal-less, but
as expenditure, its only observable outcome is expending, wasting, or sacrificing, not for
the purpose of establishing or discovering meaning, but for the purpose of expending.
This is why nonknowledge cannot be continuously accumulated or stored up.
Nonknowledge is an expenditure of individual and collective mental (intellectual)
energy—undirected mental activity. I take “intellectual” here to mean the complex suite
of general activities of the intellect, including thinking, pondering, wondering,
remembering, problem-solving, connecting, orienting, understanding, etc. I do not use
“intellectual” activity as it is scientifically defined or demonstrated: synapses firing and
connecting, areas of the brain lighting up on fMRI scans, etc. Undirected mental activity
could be wondering, or day-dreaming, or absentmindedly remembering, but it matters
less what form it takes and more that it is a state, and an experience, not bound to and by
utility. Nonknowledge is (at least in part) the experience of expending intellectual energy
without return. Expenditure without return is by definition separate from meaning-
driven experience. Lee writes: “from the point of view of general economy, it becomes
clear that some entities must be placed outside the sphere of utility, that is, there has to
be exuberant spending” (RBN 246). Nonknowledge is just such an exuberant spending
that cannot be measured according to a metric such as “value” or “utility” or “meaning.”
Nonknowledge is outside the “sphere of utility”—not entirely outside—but at least
partially outside. This does not make nonknowledge or anything else outside the “sphere
of utility” special; in fact, it is far from “being a special mode of being that belongs to
entities when they are no longer useful”; exuberant spending is rather “the necessary
condition of life, and, consequently, of utility” (ibid). And nonknowledge occurs at a limit
of knowing—as the exuberance of knowing—not before knowledge in some perfect
ignorant state. Nonknowledge thus opens onto an alternate epistemology as an open,
general economy of knowledge.
the expenditure and loss inherent in nonknowledge is

meaningless, but can be channeled towards destructive ends.
The goal is to use a small amount of expenditure and let the rest
be destructive in its creation of further modes of knowing.
Nonknowledge is a prerequisite to any knowledge.
Limits and Destruction “[G]eneral economy must always take into account “the loss in
representation and knowledge” (C 30). However: nonknowledge is not merely a “loss in
representation and knowledge” such that the possibility of knowledge or some amount of
knowledge is suddenly popped out of existence in an experience of nonknowledge;
nonknowledge is the dissolution or destruction of actual knowledge (in the moment of
nonknowledge), and the interruption or dissolution of the dream of un-ending
knowledge in the face of knowledge’s limit (AC 73-4). “Un-ending knowledge,” in this
instance, is knowledge predicated on the value of meaning; utilizable and capable of
being accumulated because of the meaning it offers. Nonknowledge makes visible the
impossibility of perfect utility and expenditure—the loss that cannot be explained in
terms of meaning. But recall that some excess can and ought to be “channeled”—in a
particular way, a particular way that we may not have seen yet. Allan Stoekl writes, ‘Bad
duality,’ as I crudely put it, is the indulgence in expenditure out of personal motives: to
gain something for oneself (glory, social status) or for one’s social group or nation
(booty, territory, security). From the chief who engages in potlatch, all the way to the
modern military planners of nuclear war—all conceive of a brilliant, radical destruction
of things as a useful contribution: to one’s own standing, to the position or long-term
survival of one’s own society (RBN 268). The proper goal, then, is to channel or use some
expenditure, and to allow the rest of the expenditure to be destructive. And of course
some “channeling” might also be destructive. Nonknowledge as expenditure means
nonknowledge as destructive but potentially useful in particular ways: the creation of
knowledge. Exuberant spending being “the necessary condition of life” (Lee, RBN 246)
means that nonknowledge is the primary “necessary” intellectual squandering of
intellectual energy without return. Just as exuberant spending is the necessary condition
of utility, intellectual squandering or exuberance (nonknowledge) is the necessary
condition of utility in the sphere of knowledge. According to this formulation,
nonknowledge is a necessary condition of knowledge. We turn to this final claim—that
nonknowledge is already internal to and primary for knowledge—now in the fourth
chapter.
Pedagogy of Excess
We should prefer a pedagogy of excess as modeled after the
Paris protests in ’68, focusing on student-developed curriculum,
collaborative acts of intellectual enquiry, and connecting
students to radical political history – this allows students to act
as a producer, defying the current consumerist and marketised
model of education.
Neary and Hagyard 11. Mike Neary is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at the
University of Lincoln and he was the Director of the Reinvention Centre, reputed for its
radical pedagogical experimentation. Andy Hagyard is an Academic Development
Consultant at University of Leeds. “The Marketisation of Higher Education and the
Student as Consumer”, Pedagogy of excess: An alternative political economy of student
life | rpadhi
The pedagogy of excess is based on the premise that re-engineering the forms in which
teaching and research are configured in universities has the potential to transform the
nature of higher education in ways that undermine the current consumerist and
marketised model. The mainstream literature on the relationship between teaching and research at the undergraduate level is limited in scope and
ambition, restricted to an orthodox pedagogic agenda involving the training of students as researchers or to enhance their enterprise and employability skills
(Healey and Jenkins 2007). Where the writing on this subject extends beyond these restrictions it is limited to students solving problems to deal with the
In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of

complexities of modern life (Brew 2006; Barnett 2000).
student as consumer, the links between teaching and research need to be radicalised to
include an alternative political economy of the student experience. This radicalisation
can be achieved by connecting academics and students to their own radical political
history, and by pointing out ways in which this radical political history can be brought
back to life by developing progressive relationships between academics and students
inside and outside of the curriculum. A review of the mainstream literature reveals that where writing on this topic does engage with
more radical historical and political issues, for example Elton’s engagement with the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the political implications of
this engagement are not fully developed. The implications are that the laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned Humboldt’s political project to create the
University of Berlin in 1810, if carried through by contemporary universities, will make the appearance of the student as consumer more rather than less likely. Is it
A radical
possible to create a radical pedagogy based on the links between teaching and research to counteract the identity of the student as consumer?
pedagogy can be designed around another version of student life, based on events in
Paris, France in 1968. By making connections between the university and its own political history, and by developing a pedagogy that connects
teaching and research at the undergraduate level, it is possible that a radical new pedagogy might emerge. It is the possibility of this new
radical pedagogy that is described as a pedagogy of excess. The essential aspects of this
pedagogy of excess are that students can be enabled to transcend the constraints of
consumerism by overcoming the limits of what it is to be a student in higher education.
They can do this through collaborative acts of intellectual enquiry, working with
academics and with each other, on subjects that look beyond their own self-interest and
identity as students. This academic activity can include exploring the origins of – as well
as progressive responses to – the general social crisis out of which the attempt to reduce
students to the identity of consumer is derived. This pedagogy of excess can only be
sustained within the moment of a real political history. The pedagogy of excess emerges in a period that has seen
strikes by academics and students around the world against the proposed marketisation of their higher education system (Klimke and Scharloth 2008). The
pedagogy of excess does not look for a repeat of 1968, but seeks to develop a critical
academic project that builds on the radical political history of the university, inside and
outside of the curriculum – in and against the current version of higher education. Literature
review The leading advocate of connecting research and undergraduate teaching was Boyer (1990) who conceptualised the relationship between teaching and
research in terms of what he referred to as the scholarship of teaching and learning. This concept of scholarship has been taken forward by Griffiths (2004) and
Healey and Jenkins (2007), among others, who have designed scholarly-based pedagogic models organised around the teaching-research nexus which they refer to
as research-based learning. Connecting teaching and research at the undergraduate level is now regarded as the essence of student centred-ness (Ramsden 2001),
an important strategy in preparing students for the ‘knowledge society’ (Scott 2002) as well as for developing the qualities of professional expertise among
undergraduates (Weiman 2004; Brew 2006). At the same time, linking teaching and research in the undergraduate curriculum is seen to have the potential to
Where the evidence for the

promote inter-disciplinarity, and to challenge fundamentally the meaning and nature of research (Brew 2006).
effectiveness of linking teaching and research stretches beyond the acquisition of

academic and professional skills, research-based learning is seen as a way of providing
students with problem solving and coping skills for a complex world (Barnett 2000; Brew 2006).
Evidence for the effectiveness of connecting teaching and research at the undergraduate level continues to emerge in an increasing body of work, e.g. Pascarella
and Terenzini (2005), Baxter Magolda et al. (1998), Healey (2005) and Healey and Jenkins (2007). However, the potential for further pedagogical advances,
grounding research-based learning in the political history of higher education, remains undeveloped. This lack of engagement with the political history of the
modern university is surprising given the prominence in the literature to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the political philosopher and educationalist.
Humboldt is widely credited as having established the first modern European university in Berlin in 1810 on the principle of connecting teaching and research. A
notable exception to this lack of political engagement is found in the work of Lewis Elton. Elton’s writings and translations have been important in promoting the
ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt in relation to the historical development of university education in Europe. Elton uses Humboldt’s work as a way of arguing
against the increasing interference in higher education by successive governments. Elton maintains that government interference is likely to endanger the future of
universities in the UK and in Europe (Elton 2008a). For Elton, as for Humboldt, the key to limiting state interference and promoting the interests of universities is
the promotion of scholarship, and key to the promotion of scholarship is the way in which research and teaching can be connected in higher education. Following
Humboldt, Elton argues that research and teaching are to be joined in a process whereby students work together with academics in the service of scholarship
(Elton 2008b). Elton does not fully develop the political implications of the points he is making, limiting the discussion of Humboldt’s notion of scholarship to
recent advances in managerial science, and to integrating research-based learning into professional staff development programmes (Elton 2008a and 2008b).
Humboldt’s political philosophy An understanding of the implications of Humboldt’s political philosophy requires an engagement with his book The Limits of
State Action (1852). In this book Humboldt sets out the basis for his commitment to an extreme laissez-faire philosophy (Humboldt 1993 xlix–lvi). For Humboldt
political philosophy was based on ‘the proclamation of complete self-sovereignty of the individual’ or ‘extreme individualism’ (Knoll and Seibart 1967: 17–19). The
state was to have no positive role in the area of social welfare, but was a necessary evil whose role is to protect its members from external threats: every effort by the
state to interfere in the private affairs of the citizens is to be ‘absolutely condemned’ (Humboldt 1993: 16). Neither was the state to have any influence on education,
which was to be a private rather than a public affair: public education was to lie wholly outside the limits within which the state should exercise its effectiveness
(Humboldt 1993: 52). While working for the Ministry of Education in Prussia Humboldt had to temper his thoughts on public education, but he did not wholly
abandon his reservations about the state and, with regard to his university reform, devised a model with considerable autonomy (Knoll and Seibart 1967).
At the core of
Humboldt’s impeccable liberal credentials make him no figure on which to base a critique on the concept of student as consumer.
liberal theory lie the fundamental principles of consumerism: the concept of the
individual freedom and pursuit of self interest in a context which promotes the self
organising nature of markets and denigrates state intervention. Schemes based on liberal
social theory are, therefore more likely to move higher education further in the direction
of marketisation (Zizek 2009). In order to develop a critical account of the student as consumer it is necessary to look elsewhere into the historical
and political development of the modern university. 1968: the poverty of student life A more progressive basis for the
development of a radical pedagogy that engages critically with the concept of the student
as consumer can to be found in the history and politics of the global student protest
movement of 1968 and, in particular, in Paris, France in May of that year. Although the
student protest in France began in the universities of Nanterre and the Sorbonne, it
quickly spread to include not only students but academics and workers, across the whole
of France. The protest by the students and workers was not in response to an economic
crisis, but was a reaction to the general crisis in French society as a whole, expressed in a
variety of political, economic and cultural forms. These forms included a lack of
democratic accountability in the universities and the national political system, an
alienating technological and bureaucratic form of capitalism, and a culture of anti-war
protest against French colonialism in Algeria and American imperialism in Vietnam (Ross
2002; Gilcher- Holtey 1998; Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998; Seidman 2004; Singer 2002). Within the French universities this was
experienced as an abundance of ennui and ‘the poverty of student life’. The protest
movement culminated in a general strike, which almost destroyed General De Gaulle’s
government and very nearly succeeded in creating a new form of society (Ross 2002; Gilcher-Holtey
1998; Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998; Seidman 2004; Singer 2002). The revolt was eventually suppressed but the protest has left a controversial legacy about its
nature and significance. This legacy has been the subject of much debate among sociologists, historians, anthropologists, biographers and autobiographers
around a series of issues that are pertinent to the pedagogy of excess (Gilcher-Holtey 1998). These issues include the relationships between the student and the
teacher, the relationship between intellectual and manual labour, the relationship between the student movement and other social movements and the relationship
between the university and its external environment. At the centre of these issues lies the question about the representation and production of knowledge, raising
the question about the nature and role of the university, suggesting that a new form of university is possible based on the principles of democracy, self-
. A key issue for the protest was the way in which the students engaged
management and social justice
with the critical social theory within which the events were conceptualised. In France, and throughout
Europe, the protests coincided with the emergence of a radical critique of orthodox Marxism based on previously unpublished versions of Marx’s own work and
other subversive versions of Marx’s social theory that had been suppressed throughout the twentieth century. Key among these critical theorists was the existential
Marxist humanism of Sartre, whose work reinserted human agency (praxis) against the crude materialism of structural Marxism (Fox 2003: 19), promoting a
‘humanist philosophy of action, of effort, of combat, of solidarity’ against ‘the quietism of despair’ (Sartre 1966, cited in Fox 2003: 16). For Sartre human existence
is constituted ‘outwardly by its engagement and actions in the concrete world’ (Fox 2003: 16). The students were inspired by the
work of Walter Benjamin (1934) who expounded a radical theory of action and
engagement based on the radical cultural movements of Dadaism, Surrealism and
Russian Constructivism. Key to these critical cultural activities was involving the
consumer in the process of production: where the reader becomes the author and the
audience becomes the actor, not only as the producers of artistic content, but as
collaborators of their own social world, as subjects rather than objects of history. Henri
Lefebvre, a professor in Nanterre during the protests, argued for the recovery of the concept of ‘everyday life’ as a critical and theoretical category, currently
For Lefebvre the

constituted by the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ and experienced as boredom and banality (Lefebvre 1984).
revolution must transform everyday life as well as the social relations of production. He
argued that the irreducibility of human subjectivity is the key to revolutionary action.
The impulse for progressive political activity was to be found in the human attributes of
creativity and desire, expressed as what he described as ‘poesis’, i.e. resistance to the
alienating consequences of modern consumerism (Hirsch 1982). In The Society of the Spectacle (1970), Debord argued
that the social world had been overwhelmed by capitalist relations of production, and that direct experience and the determination of real events had been reduced
to the passive contemplation of everyday life (Jappe 1999). Debord and his collaborators in the Situationalist International, of which he was a founding member,
argued in favour of direct action through the creation of situations which would reveal the absurdity of everyday life. These spontaneous political protests would be
supported by local worker-student councils which would ‘transform the totality of existing conditions’ so that students and workers could ‘recognise themselves in
a world of their own design’ (Debord 1970: para 179). What all of these writings have in common is the application of Marxist social theory to a committed and
concrete political action, against the condition of consumerism and the commodification of everyday life. What is remarkable about the events of May 1968 is the
ways in which this theory was realised in practice. Action committees: poesis in motion May 1968 was a moment in which everything happened politically (Ross
2002: 15) – an event that was pregnant with a new sense of ‘creative political capacity in France and elsewhere’ (Ross 2002: 18). There was a feeling that ‘politics is
Within the universities self-managing,

– everywhere and everything’ (Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998: 123), especially in education.
democratic, non-hierarchical groups, known as Action Committees, were established

(Posner 1970; Ross 2002; Seale and McConville 1968). These committees comprised of between ten and fifteen
members, academics and students, initially for dialogue and discussion, promoting
‘constant criticism and self discovery’ so that ‘the movement was able to constantly
radicalize itself’ (Posner 1970: 47). The committees went on to occupy campuses across Paris and France. The Action Committees coordinated
demonstrations and demands, and made contact with the workers and other grassroot protest movements, dissolving the separation between workers and
intellectuals through expressions of solidarity and the provision of information through various forms of creative political art, music and drama (agitprop). The aim
of the Action Committees was to abolish the current autocratic, non- democratic, industry-focused structure of universities with a system based on democracy and
social justice (Ross 2002). But, if the movement was defined by its theoretically informed organisational forms, something even more significant was occurring.
Ross (2002) points out that the really transforming aspect of the protest was that the participants did not perform the roles that had been accorded to them by
sociologists, journalists, historians and politicians, i.e., those who defined the events of May 1968 as a ‘student protest’. The significant point, argues Ross, is that
In the so called “student action” students never acted as students

the students refused to act as students: ‘
but as revealers of a general crisis, of bearers of a power of rupture putting into question
the regime, State, society’ (Blanchot 1998, quoted in Ross 2002 p25). This refusal to act as students was
compounded by the students’ refusal to speak about student issues, choosing only to
speak about ‘common affairs’ (Ross 2002: 118), raising the protest to the level of society. As
Badiou describes it, the events of 1968 were ‘something that arrives in excess, beyond all
calculation . . . that proposes an entirely new system of thought’ and which ‘led infinitely
farther than their [the students] education . . . would have allowed them to foresee; an
event in the sense of real participation . . . altering the course of their lives’ (Badiou 1998, quoted in
Ross 2002: 26). Indeed this appears to contrast sharply with the media representation of students by Williams (Chapter 13) that sees students positioned as largely
passive to societal issues. Key to the notion of revelation was the way in which knowledge about the events of May 1968 was to be produced, reported and recorded.
Those involved with the struggle maintained that research should begin from
contestation and revolt. In this way they aimed to break with the tradition of academic
elitism so as to produce knowledge in a populist and highly accessible style (Ross 2002: 117). This
radical way of producing knowledge and presenting information was to be a form of
‘direct communication’ providing ‘a new means of comprehension between different
groups’ (Ross 2002: 114) so as ‘to give a voice to those without voices’ and to contest ‘the domain
of the experts’ (Ross 2002: 116). In this way those engaged in the struggle sought to demystify the process of research. For the students and the workers
‘We are in our way researchers, but this is work that anyone can do’ (Ross 2002: 118). A key means of dissemination of critical
ideas was through graffiti art: Plagiarism is progress, history demands it Boredom is counterrevolutionary Be realistic, demand the
impossible We work, but we produce nothing. A pedagogy of excess The events of 1968 have had a profound effect on the development of higher education in
France and around the world. The post-1968 period saw the emergence of a new form of university: democratic (Scott 1995), postmodern (Lyotard 1979) and
multiverse (Kerr 1963). The key feature of this new type of university was that universities had now become sites of contested space, not only for the control and
management of the higher education, but in relation to the meaning and purpose of knowledge itself (Delanty 2001). A central facet of the
post-1968 period was the development of progressive pedagogies in higher education
based on ‘left wing ideas’, reflecting the radical political agenda that had been
established by the students in Paris. Key to these developments was the engagement of
students in the design of curricula, including deciding on the content of courses as
well as forms of assessment; and, through the proliferation of independent study
programmes, a recognition that undergraduate students were capable of creating
knowledge of real academic content and value (Pratt 1997). In the period since then university
administrators and politicians have struggled to de-politicise the radical substance of
these pedagogical initiatives, while at the same time contain and pacify students and
academics through the imposition of increasingly managerial and bureaucratic strategies
(Zizek 2009). Readings (1996) maintains that the concept of ‘excellence’ is the revenge of the university bureaucrat for 1968. The events of 1968
provide a powerful historical and political framework within which to re-

conceptualise the relationship between teaching and research in higher
education in a way that offers a challenge to the notion of student as
consumer and the politics of marketisation. The problem is how to recover the radicality of the 1968 agenda in
the current contemporary crisis. A progressive way forward is to connect current pedagogies that link
teaching and research with their own radical academic history, and to develop them in a
form that is appropriate for the contemporary situation. Key to this issue of connectivity
is the relationship between action and progressive political theory. It is the relationship
between theory and action, linked to contemporary struggles within higher education,
that provides a framework for the emergence of a pedagogy of excess. Action Key to the development of a
pedagogy of excess is that during the struggles of May 1968 the students exceeded their role as
students – they became the revealers of a general crisis in society, and the
personification of the ways in which that crisis might be interrupted and reconsidered,
calling into question the principles and protocols through which the social was organised
and controlled. In the process the students moved beyond the limits of where they might have expected their experience of university education to have
taken them, exceeding their expectations about the potentials and possibilities of student life. Through the reengineering of research and teaching at the
undergraduate level, considerable advances have been made in developing a progressive agenda for students in ways that take them beyond the mainstream
Through the process of real collaboration with academics the role of student
student experience.
as consumer is challenged, reinventing the student as the producer of knowledge of real

academic content and value (Neary and Winn 2009). The strength of this approach is that the
student becomes the student as producer rather than student as consumer,
but in the mainstream model the student is still confirmed as a student. The extent to which these
collaborations move beyond the mainstream teaching and learning agenda depends on the extent to which the politicised nature of higher education is made
the ways in which the knowledge that is produced is contextualised politically, as
explicit, and
well as theorised critically. Teaching and learning is made political when it is based on an agenda of contestation and struggle rather than the
managed consensus of university bureaucracies, calling into question not just particular aspects of teaching and learning in higher education, but the nature and
purpose of higher education itself. For a pedagogy of excess these contestations and struggles might include course content, assessment strategies and student fees,
but a fully developed pedagogy of excess would look beyond student issues, to matters of
more general social concern, ‘common affairs’, in which the interests of students are not
the main issue. The extent to which these forms of collaboration extend into projects that attempt to reveal the origins for the general capitalist crisis
is a matter of negotia- tion between the students and their teachers, but clearly a framework can be established within which these revelations can occur. This
framework might be extended to become the organising principle for the institutions of
higher education as a whole. Theory: alternative political economy What was learnt from 1968 is that practical action is made dynamic when
it connects to social theory. In this context the theory of excess becomes an antidote to the concept of consumerism and a guide to social action. The concept of
If con-
excess as critical political intervention has its roots in sociology (Bataille), anthropology (Mauss), and Marxist social theory (Debord).
sumerism is based on the economic theory which demands that individuals act rationally
and in their own self-interest (Fine and Milonakis 2009), the category of excess is offered ‘as an
alternative to the rationalist calculation of capitalist exchange’ (Kosalka 1999). The concept of excess was most
developed in the work of Bataille (1991), who offered the notion of excess as an alternative framework to
the capitalist basis of exchange, replacing what he regarded as a ‘restrictive economy’,
with a ‘general economy’. For Bataille this more general economy would provide a
humanistic and non-utilitarian basis for the organisation of modern society. For Bataille
the key to the organisation of any society was the way in which it dealt with the surplus
that had been produced. Anthropology (Mauss 1922) had revealed the ways in which non-capitalistic societies distributed their surplus on the
basis of generosity and abundance, as gifts, promoting a sense of social solidarity through sharing, with an emphasis on collaboration and consensus. Acts of
extravagant generosity afforded status and respect to the person who was doing the
giving; and, as the gifts that were being distributed were often intimately connected to
the person who was doing the giving, generating feelings of personal satisfaction and self
worth. These acts of extravagant giving created a sense of obligation on the part of the recipient, leading to bonding between individuals and groups. This
process of excessive distribution is contrasted with the consumerist exchange process of capitalist society which is characterised by dissatisfaction and alienation.
This promotion of acts of extravagant generosity might seem somewhat utopian in the
context of the modern social world. However, this process of exchange described by the
concept of excess is instantly recognisable as being at the core of the academic enterprise
(Fuller 2002). The practice of academic excess has been given further impetus by online computing through, for example, the free distribution of teaching and
A pedagogy of excess would

learning materials on the World Wide Web, defined as Open Educational Resources (Iiyoshi and Kumar 2008).
seek to promote and develop these activities as a counter to the economistic and market-
driven restrictive practices that increasingly dominate the activity of scientific enquiry.
However, what the politics of student protest has taught us, during and post 1968, is that radical consumption is not enough: the
transformation of capitalist social relations lies not simply in the politics of consumption,
but the politics of production, which, as the revolutionary social theory of the period
demonstrated, can be found in the theory against capitalist work elaborated by Marx in Capital and the Grundrisse (Debord 1970). The essence of
Marx’s revolutionary theory of production lies in his theory of surplus value (excess) which provides the conditions through which the social world can be
progressively transformed. According to Marx’s theory of surplus value, labour is the source and substance of all value in a society dominated, uniquely, by the
production of excess (surplus value). In capitalist society, surplus value (excess) is produced by the quantitative expansion of human energy in the process of
industrial production. While the value of labour (human energy) is the value of all things (commodities), the value which labour produces is not fully recognised in
the financial reward paid to workers (wages). The difference between the value of the reward and the value that is produced by workers constitutes the excess or
surplus value. In the world of capitalist work excess equals exploitation. The physical limitations of human labour, and the continuing resistance of workers to the
imperatives of waged work, mean that human labour is removed by the representatives of capital from the process of production and replaced by technology and
science. For the labour that remains, work is intensified physically and enhanced intellectually – with a clear distinction between mental and manual workers. As
labour is the source and substance of all value, this joint process of the expulsion and enhancement of labour is profound. On one side, the expulsion of labour from
the process of production means that the production of surplus value (excess) breaks down, resulting in dramatic declines in profitability. On the other side, the
release of labour from the production process provides the opportunity for labour – and, therefore, for society as a whole – to develop its full creative capacity, in
ways that are antithetical to the logic of capitalist production. Both scenarios, singularly and together, spell crisis and catastrophe for capitalism (Marx 1993: 706–
8). In practice, capital has sought to restrict the development of discarded labour through the politics of oppression and the imposition of scarcity, poverty and
violence. Yet the creative capacity of labour remains undiminished, as seen in May 1968 and by the continuing movement of protest against the law of surplus value
in all its manifestations. These struggles against capitalist oppression make up the substantive history of modern political protest (Hardt and Negri 2001).
Higher education is directly involved in the development of technology, science and the
production of knowledge. The student-academic is both the producer and personification
of this form of knowledge, and, therefore, has a key role to play in re-engineering the
politics of production. Since 1968, and before, student-academics have played a key role
in the worldwide protest movements against the social relations of capitalist production.
These protests might form the core curriculum for the pedagogy of excess. The curriculum which
informs the pedagogy of excess cannot get ahead of the protests out of which it has been constituted, nor seek to ground a new movement of academic struggle in
The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is connected
the events of the past.
to the contemporary situation by recovering the subversive inspirations around which a

more radical form of progressive pedagogy might be invented. Such a pedagogy would
involve inventing a curriculum that includes grounding the concept of excess in an
alternative political economy, involving a critique not simply of the politics of
consumption but the politics of production. This critical political economy would provide
a theoretical framework within which to conceptualise the ideology of protest, but no
blueprint for action. Direct action should be informed in this curriculum by the lessons learned from the history of struggle inside and outside of
the academy. This connection with the history of academic struggle should include an engagement with other critical pedagogical discourses, including critical
pedagogy and popular education (Freire 2007; McLaren 2000; Amsler and Canaan 2009), as well as ideas that have sought to connect academic struggles with the
worldwide movement of protest: ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy 2005), ‘participative pedagogy’ (Lambert 2009), ‘mass intellectuality’ (Hardt and Negri 2001) and
‘academic activism’ (Castree 2000). Working within this curriculum academics and students can develop networks of alternative research projects. A list for such
projects has already been provided by Dyer-Witheford and includes: the establishment of new indices of well-being beyond monetised measures; the new
capacities for democratic planning afforded by new technology; systems of income allocation outside of wage-labour; the development of peer-to-peer open source
communications networks; research projects that seek to enrich critical political economy with ecological and feminist knowledges, and the formation of aesthetics
). In this way the
and imaginaries adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (2004: 90–1
pedagogy of excess becomes a learning process which promotes the creative capacity of
people in accordance with their needs as social individuals (Kay and Mott 1982). These models of progressive
curriculum restructuring can become frameworks on which to design a progressive model for higher education. In the recent period French academics and their
students have protested against proposed market- based reforms, although with a much more pragmatic agenda than in 1968. There is a growing body of literature
that is recording the worldwide intensification of academic labour as well as struggles to subvert capitalist work (Nelson and Watt 2004; Bousquet 2008; De
Angelis and Harvie 2009), while at the same time provide alternative models to the neo-liberal university (Muhr and Verger 2006; Santos 2003; Emery 2009;
Ainley 2005; Berry et al. 2002; Rogoff 2005). Higher education at the level of society The pedagogy of excess suggests that 1968 offers a much better model around
The pedagogy of
which to organise resistance to consumerism and marketisation than Humboldt’s liberal vision for the University of Berlin.
excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is connected to the contemporary
situation by recovering the subversive inspirations around which new forms of
pedagogies were invented. In 1968 the idea that research was something that students can do was a revolutionary political statement. The
fact that by the beginning of the twenty first century these subversive motivations have
been reduced to the technical imperatives of research-based learning should not conceal
the intellectual power that is generated when academics connect with undergraduate
students through their own research activities, nor the importance for the future of the
academic project that these connections are made, and raised to the level of society.
We should prefer a pedagogy of excess as modeled after the

Paris protests in ’68, focusing on student-developed curriculum,
collaborative acts of intellectual enquiry, and connecting
students to radical political history – this allows students to act
as a producer, defying the current consumerist and marketised
model of education.
Neary and Hagyard 11. Mike Neary is the Dean of Teaching and Learning at the
University of Lincoln and he was the Director of the Reinvention Centre, reputed for its
radical pedagogical experimentation. Andy Hagyard is an Academic Development
Consultant at University of Leeds. “The Marketisation of Higher Education and the
Student as Consumer”, Pedagogy of excess: An alternative political economy of student
life | rpadhi
The pedagogy of excess is based on the premise that re-engineering the forms in which
teaching and research are configured in universities has the potential to transform the
nature of higher education in ways that undermine the current consumerist and
marketised model. The mainstream literature on the relationship between teaching and research at the undergraduate level is limited in scope and
ambition, restricted to an orthodox pedagogic agenda involving the training of students as researchers or to enhance their enterprise and employability skills
(Healey and Jenkins 2007). Where the writing on this subject extends beyond these restrictions it is limited to students solving problems to deal with the
In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of

complexities of modern life (Brew 2006; Barnett 2000).
student as consumer, the links between teaching and research need to be radicalised to
include an alternative political economy of the student experience. This radicalisation
can be achieved by connecting academics and students to their own radical political
history, and by pointing out ways in which this radical political history can be brought
back to life by developing progressive relationships between academics and students
inside and outside of the curriculum. A review of the mainstream literature reveals that where writing on this topic does engage with
more radical historical and political issues, for example Elton’s engagement with the writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the political implications of
this engagement are not fully developed. The implications are that the laissez-faire liberalism that underpinned Humboldt’s political project to create the
University of Berlin in 1810, if carried through by contemporary universities, will make the appearance of the student as consumer more rather than less likely. Is it
A radical
possible to create a radical pedagogy based on the links between teaching and research to counteract the identity of the student as consumer?
pedagogy can be designed around another version of student life, based on events in
Paris, France in 1968. By making connections between the university and its own political history, and by developing a pedagogy that connects
teaching and research at the undergraduate level, it is possible that a radical new pedagogy might emerge. It is the possibility of this new
radical pedagogy that is described as a pedagogy of excess. The essential aspects of this
pedagogy of excess are that students can be enabled to transcend the constraints of
consumerism by overcoming the limits of what it is to be a student in higher education.
They can do this through collaborative acts of intellectual enquiry, working with
academics and with each other, on subjects that look beyond their own self-interest and
identity as students. This academic activity can include exploring the origins of – as well
as progressive responses to – the general social crisis out of which the attempt to reduce
students to the identity of consumer is derived. This pedagogy of excess can only be
sustained within the moment of a real political history. The pedagogy of excess emerges in a period that has seen
strikes by academics and students around the world against the proposed marketisation of their higher education system (Klimke and Scharloth 2008). The
pedagogy of excess does not look for a repeat of 1968, but seeks to develop a critical
academic project that builds on the radical political history of the university, inside and
outside of the curriculum – in and against the current version of higher education. Literature
review The leading advocate of connecting research and undergraduate teaching was Boyer (1990) who conceptualised the relationship between teaching and
research in terms of what he referred to as the scholarship of teaching and learning. This concept of scholarship has been taken forward by Griffiths (2004) and
Healey and Jenkins (2007), among others, who have designed scholarly-based pedagogic models organised around the teaching-research nexus which they refer to
as research-based learning. Connecting teaching and research at the undergraduate level is now regarded as the essence of student centred-ness (Ramsden 2001),
an important strategy in preparing students for the ‘knowledge society’ (Scott 2002) as well as for developing the qualities of professional expertise among
undergraduates (Weiman 2004; Brew 2006). At the same time, linking teaching and research in the undergraduate curriculum is seen to have the potential to
Where the evidence for the

promote inter-disciplinarity, and to challenge fundamentally the meaning and nature of research (Brew 2006).
effectiveness of linking teaching and research stretches beyond the acquisition of

academic and professional skills, research-based learning is seen as a way of providing
students with problem solving and coping skills for a complex world (Barnett 2000; Brew 2006).
Evidence for the effectiveness of connecting teaching and research at the undergraduate level continues to emerge in an increasing body of work, e.g. Pascarella
and Terenzini (2005), Baxter Magolda et al. (1998), Healey (2005) and Healey and Jenkins (2007). However, the potential for further pedagogical advances,
grounding research-based learning in the political history of higher education, remains undeveloped. This lack of engagement with the political history of the
modern university is surprising given the prominence in the literature to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the political philosopher and educationalist.
Humboldt is widely credited as having established the first modern European university in Berlin in 1810 on the principle of connecting teaching and research. A
notable exception to this lack of political engagement is found in the work of Lewis Elton. Elton’s writings and translations have been important in promoting the
ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt in relation to the historical development of university education in Europe. Elton uses Humboldt’s work as a way of arguing
against the increasing interference in higher education by successive governments. Elton maintains that government interference is likely to endanger the future of
universities in the UK and in Europe (Elton 2008a). For Elton, as for Humboldt, the key to limiting state interference and promoting the interests of universities is
the promotion of scholarship, and key to the promotion of scholarship is the way in which research and teaching can be connected in higher education. Following
Humboldt, Elton argues that research and teaching are to be joined in a process whereby students work together with academics in the service of scholarship
(Elton 2008b). Elton does not fully develop the political implications of the points he is making, limiting the discussion of Humboldt’s notion of scholarship to
recent advances in managerial science, and to integrating research-based learning into professional staff development programmes (Elton 2008a and 2008b).
Humboldt’s political philosophy An understanding of the implications of Humboldt’s political philosophy requires an engagement with his book The Limits of
State Action (1852). In this book Humboldt sets out the basis for his commitment to an extreme laissez-faire philosophy (Humboldt 1993 xlix–lvi). For Humboldt
political philosophy was based on ‘the proclamation of complete self-sovereignty of the individual’ or ‘extreme individualism’ (Knoll and Seibart 1967: 17–19). The
state was to have no positive role in the area of social welfare, but was a necessary evil whose role is to protect its members from external threats: every effort by the
state to interfere in the private affairs of the citizens is to be ‘absolutely condemned’ (Humboldt 1993: 16). Neither was the state to have any influence on education,
which was to be a private rather than a public affair: public education was to lie wholly outside the limits within which the state should exercise its effectiveness
(Humboldt 1993: 52). While working for the Ministry of Education in Prussia Humboldt had to temper his thoughts on public education, but he did not wholly
abandon his reservations about the state and, with regard to his university reform, devised a model with considerable autonomy (Knoll and Seibart 1967).
At the core of
Humboldt’s impeccable liberal credentials make him no figure on which to base a critique on the concept of student as consumer.
liberal theory lie the fundamental principles of consumerism: the concept of the
individual freedom and pursuit of self interest in a context which promotes the self
organising nature of markets and denigrates state intervention. Schemes based on liberal
social theory are, therefore more likely to move higher education further in the direction
of marketisation (Zizek 2009). In order to develop a critical account of the student as consumer it is necessary to look elsewhere into the historical
and political development of the modern university. 1968: the poverty of student life A more progressive basis for the
development of a radical pedagogy that engages critically with the concept of the student
as consumer can to be found in the history and politics of the global student protest
movement of 1968 and, in particular, in Paris, France in May of that year. Although the
student protest in France began in the universities of Nanterre and the Sorbonne, it
quickly spread to include not only students but academics and workers, across the whole
of France. The protest by the students and workers was not in response to an economic
crisis, but was a reaction to the general crisis in French society as a whole, expressed in a
variety of political, economic and cultural forms. These forms included a lack of
democratic accountability in the universities and the national political system, an
alienating technological and bureaucratic form of capitalism, and a culture of anti-war
protest against French colonialism in Algeria and American imperialism in Vietnam (Ross
2002; Gilcher- Holtey 1998; Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998; Seidman 2004; Singer 2002). Within the French universities this was
experienced as an abundance of ennui and ‘the poverty of student life’. The protest
movement culminated in a general strike, which almost destroyed General De Gaulle’s
government and very nearly succeeded in creating a new form of society (Ross 2002; Gilcher-Holtey
1998; Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998; Seidman 2004; Singer 2002). The revolt was eventually suppressed but the protest has left a controversial legacy about its
nature and significance. This legacy has been the subject of much debate among sociologists, historians, anthropologists, biographers and autobiographers
around a series of issues that are pertinent to the pedagogy of excess (Gilcher-Holtey 1998). These issues include the relationships between the student and the
teacher, the relationship between intellectual and manual labour, the relationship between the student movement and other social movements and the relationship
between the university and its external environment. At the centre of these issues lies the question about the representation and production of knowledge, raising
the question about the nature and role of the university, suggesting that a new form of university is possible based on the principles of democracy, self-
. A key issue for the protest was the way in which the students engaged
management and social justice
with the critical social theory within which the events were conceptualised. In France, and throughout
Europe, the protests coincided with the emergence of a radical critique of orthodox Marxism based on previously unpublished versions of Marx’s own work and
other subversive versions of Marx’s social theory that had been suppressed throughout the twentieth century. Key among these critical theorists was the existential
Marxist humanism of Sartre, whose work reinserted human agency (praxis) against the crude materialism of structural Marxism (Fox 2003: 19), promoting a
‘humanist philosophy of action, of effort, of combat, of solidarity’ against ‘the quietism of despair’ (Sartre 1966, cited in Fox 2003: 16). For Sartre human existence
The students were inspired by the

is constituted ‘outwardly by its engagement and actions in the concrete world’ (Fox 2003: 16).
work of Walter Benjamin (1934) who expounded a radical theory of action and
engagement based on the radical cultural movements of Dadaism, Surrealism and
Russian Constructivism. Key to these critical cultural activities was involving the
consumer in the process of production: where the reader becomes the author and the
audience becomes the actor, not only as the producers of artistic content, but as
collaborators of their own social world, as subjects rather than objects of history. Henri
Lefebvre, a professor in Nanterre during the protests, argued for the recovery of the concept of ‘everyday life’ as a critical and theoretical category, currently
For Lefebvre the

constituted by the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’ and experienced as boredom and banality (Lefebvre 1984).
revolution must transform everyday life as well as the social relations of production. He
argued that the irreducibility of human subjectivity is the key to revolutionary action.
The impulse for progressive political activity was to be found in the human attributes of
creativity and desire, expressed as what he described as ‘poesis’, i.e. resistance to the
alienating consequences of modern consumerism (Hirsch 1982). In The Society of the Spectacle (1970), Debord argued
that the social world had been overwhelmed by capitalist relations of production, and that direct experience and the determination of real events had been reduced
to the passive contemplation of everyday life (Jappe 1999). Debord and his collaborators in the Situationalist International, of which he was a founding member,
argued in favour of direct action through the creation of situations which would reveal the absurdity of everyday life. These spontaneous political protests would be
supported by local worker-student councils which would ‘transform the totality of existing conditions’ so that students and workers could ‘recognise themselves in
a world of their own design’ (Debord 1970: para 179). What all of these writings have in common is the application of Marxist social theory to a committed and
concrete political action, against the condition of consumerism and the commodification of everyday life. What is remarkable about the events of May 1968 is the
ways in which this theory was realised in practice. Action committees: poesis in motion May 1968 was a moment in which everything happened politically (Ross
2002: 15) – an event that was pregnant with a new sense of ‘creative political capacity in France and elsewhere’ (Ross 2002: 18). There was a feeling that ‘politics is
Within the universities self-managing,

– everywhere and everything’ (Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998: 123), especially in education.
democratic, non-hierarchical groups, known as Action Committees, were established

(Posner 1970; Ross 2002; Seale and McConville 1968). These committees comprised of between ten and fifteen
members, academics and students, initially for dialogue and discussion, promoting
‘constant criticism and self discovery’ so that ‘the movement was able to constantly
radicalize itself’ (Posner 1970: 47). The committees went on to occupy campuses across Paris and France. The Action Committees coordinated
demonstrations and demands, and made contact with the workers and other grassroot protest movements, dissolving the separation between workers and
intellectuals through expressions of solidarity and the provision of information through various forms of creative political art, music and drama (agitprop). The aim
of the Action Committees was to abolish the current autocratic, non- democratic, industry-focused structure of universities with a system based on democracy and
social justice (Ross 2002). But, if the movement was defined by its theoretically informed organisational forms, something even more significant was occurring.
Ross (2002) points out that the really transforming aspect of the protest was that the participants did not perform the roles that had been accorded to them by
sociologists, journalists, historians and politicians, i.e., those who defined the events of May 1968 as a ‘student protest’. The significant point, argues Ross, is that
In the so called “student action” students never acted as students

the students refused to act as students: ‘
but as revealers of a general crisis, of bearers of a power of rupture putting into question
the regime, State, society’ (Blanchot 1998, quoted in Ross 2002 p25). This refusal to act as students was
compounded by the students’ refusal to speak about student issues, choosing only to
speak about ‘common affairs’ (Ross 2002: 118), raising the protest to the level of society. As
Badiou describes it, the events of 1968 were ‘something that arrives in excess, beyond all
calculation . . . that proposes an entirely new system of thought’ and which ‘led infinitely
farther than their [the students] education . . . would have allowed them to foresee; an
event in the sense of real participation . . . altering the course of their lives’ (Badiou 1998, quoted in
Ross 2002: 26). Indeed this appears to contrast sharply with the media representation of students by Williams (Chapter 13) that sees students positioned as largely
passive to societal issues. Key to the notion of revelation was the way in which knowledge about the events of May 1968 was to be produced, reported and recorded.
Those involved with the struggle maintained that research should begin from
contestation and revolt. In this way they aimed to break with the tradition of academic
elitism so as to produce knowledge in a populist and highly accessible style (Ross 2002: 117). This
radical way of producing knowledge and presenting information was to be a form of
‘direct communication’ providing ‘a new means of comprehension between different
groups’ (Ross 2002: 114) so as ‘to give a voice to those without voices’ and to contest ‘the domain
of the experts’ (Ross 2002: 116). In this way those engaged in the struggle sought to demystify the process of research. For the students and the workers
‘We are in our way researchers, but this is work that anyone can do’ (Ross 2002: 118). A key means of dissemination of critical
ideas was through graffiti art: Plagiarism is progress, history demands it Boredom is counterrevolutionary Be realistic, demand the
impossible We work, but we produce nothing. A pedagogy of excess The events of 1968 have had a profound effect on the development of higher education in
France and around the world. The post-1968 period saw the emergence of a new form of university: democratic (Scott 1995), postmodern (Lyotard 1979) and
multiverse (Kerr 1963). The key feature of this new type of university was that universities had now become sites of contested space, not only for the control and
management of the higher education, but in relation to the meaning and purpose of knowledge itself (Delanty 2001). A central facet of the
post-1968 period was the development of progressive pedagogies in higher education
based on ‘left wing ideas’, reflecting the radical political agenda that had been
established by the students in Paris. Key to these developments was the engagement of
students in the design of curricula, including deciding on the content of courses as
well as forms of assessment; and, through the proliferation of independent study
programmes, a recognition that undergraduate students were capable of creating
knowledge of real academic content and value (Pratt 1997). In the period since then university
administrators and politicians have struggled to de-politicise the radical substance of
these pedagogical initiatives, while at the same time contain and pacify students and
academics through the imposition of increasingly managerial and bureaucratic strategies
(Zizek 2009). Readings (1996) maintains that the concept of ‘excellence’ is the revenge of the university bureaucrat for 1968. The events of 1968
provide a powerful historical and political framework within which to re-

conceptualise the relationship between teaching and research in higher
education in a way that offers a challenge to the notion of student as
consumer and the politics of marketisation. The problem is how to recover the radicality of the 1968 agenda in
the current contemporary crisis. A progressive way forward is to connect current pedagogies that link
teaching and research with their own radical academic history, and to develop them in a
form that is appropriate for the contemporary situation. Key to this issue of connectivity
is the relationship between action and progressive political theory. It is the relationship
between theory and action, linked to contemporary struggles within higher education,
that provides a framework for the emergence of a pedagogy of excess. Action Key to the development of a
pedagogy of excess is that during the struggles of May 1968 the students exceeded their role as
students – they became the revealers of a general crisis in society, and the
personification of the ways in which that crisis might be interrupted and reconsidered,
calling into question the principles and protocols through which the social was organised
and controlled. In the process the students moved beyond the limits of where they might have expected their experience of university education to have
taken them, exceeding their expectations about the potentials and possibilities of student life. Through the reengineering of research and teaching at the
undergraduate level, considerable advances have been made in developing a progressive agenda for students in ways that take them beyond the mainstream
Through the process of real collaboration with academics the role of student
student experience.
as consumer is challenged, reinventing the student as the producer of knowledge of real

academic content and value (Neary and Winn 2009). The strength of this approach is that the
student becomes the student as producer rather than student as consumer,
but in the mainstream model the student is still confirmed as a student. The extent to which these
collaborations move beyond the mainstream teaching and learning agenda depends on the extent to which the politicised nature of higher education is made
explicit, and the ways in which the knowledge that is produced is contextualised politically, as
well as theorised critically. Teaching and learning is made political when it is based on an agenda of contestation and struggle rather than the
managed consensus of university bureaucracies, calling into question not just particular aspects of teaching and learning in higher education, but the nature and
purpose of higher education itself. For a pedagogy of excess these contestations and struggles might include course content, assessment strategies and student fees,
but a fully developed pedagogy of excess would look beyond student issues, to matters of
more general social concern, ‘common affairs’, in which the interests of students are not
the main issue. The extent to which these forms of collaboration extend into projects that attempt to reveal the origins for the general capitalist crisis
is a matter of negotia- tion between the students and their teachers, but clearly a framework can be established within which these revelations can occur. This
framework might be extended to become the organising principle for the institutions of
higher education as a whole. Theory: alternative political economy What was learnt from 1968 is that practical action is made dynamic when
it connects to social theory. In this context the theory of excess becomes an antidote to the concept of consumerism and a guide to social action. The concept of
If con-
excess as critical political intervention has its roots in sociology (Bataille), anthropology (Mauss), and Marxist social theory (Debord).
sumerism is based on the economic theory which demands that individuals act rationally
and in their own self-interest (Fine and Milonakis 2009), the category of excess is offered ‘as an
alternative to the rationalist calculation of capitalist exchange’ (Kosalka 1999). The concept of excess was most
developed in the work of Bataille (1991), who offered the notion of excess as an alternative framework to
the capitalist basis of exchange, replacing what he regarded as a ‘restrictive economy’,

with a ‘general economy’. For Bataille this more general economy would provide a
humanistic and non-utilitarian basis for the organisation of modern society. For Bataille
the key to the organisation of any society was the way in which it dealt with the surplus
that had been produced. Anthropology (Mauss 1922) had revealed the ways in which non-capitalistic societies distributed their surplus on the
basis of generosity and abundance, as gifts, promoting a sense of social solidarity through sharing, with an emphasis on collaboration and consensus. Acts of
extravagant generosity afforded status and respect to the person who was doing the
giving; and, as the gifts that were being distributed were often intimately connected to
the person who was doing the giving, generating feelings of personal satisfaction and self
worth. These acts of extravagant giving created a sense of obligation on the part of the recipient, leading to bonding between individuals and groups. This
process of excessive distribution is contrasted with the consumerist exchange process of capitalist society which is characterised by dissatisfaction and alienation.
This promotion of acts of extravagant generosity might seem somewhat utopian in the
context of the modern social world. However, this process of exchange described by the
concept of excess is instantly recognisable as being at the core of the academic enterprise
(Fuller 2002). The practice of academic excess has been given further impetus by online computing through, for example, the free distribution of teaching and
A pedagogy of excess would

learning materials on the World Wide Web, defined as Open Educational Resources (Iiyoshi and Kumar 2008).
seek to promote and develop these activities as a counter to the economistic and market-
driven restrictive practices that increasingly dominate the activity of scientific enquiry.
However, what the politics of student protest has taught us, during and post 1968, is that radical consumption is not enough: the
transformation of capitalist social relations lies not simply in the politics of consumption,
but the politics of production, which, as the revolutionary social theory of the period
demonstrated, can be found in the theory against capitalist work elaborated by Marx in Capital and the Grundrisse (Debord 1970). The essence of
Marx’s revolutionary theory of production lies in his theory of surplus value (excess) which provides the conditions through which the social world can be
progressively transformed. According to Marx’s theory of surplus value, labour is the source and substance of all value in a society dominated, uniquely, by the
production of excess (surplus value). In capitalist society, surplus value (excess) is produced by the quantitative expansion of human energy in the process of
industrial production. While the value of labour (human energy) is the value of all things (commodities), the value which labour produces is not fully recognised in
the financial reward paid to workers (wages). The difference between the value of the reward and the value that is produced by workers constitutes the excess or
surplus value. In the world of capitalist work excess equals exploitation. The physical limitations of human labour, and the continuing resistance of workers to the
imperatives of waged work, mean that human labour is removed by the representatives of capital from the process of production and replaced by technology and
science. For the labour that remains, work is intensified physically and enhanced intellectually – with a clear distinction between mental and manual workers. As
labour is the source and substance of all value, this joint process of the expulsion and enhancement of labour is profound. On one side, the expulsion of labour from
the process of production means that the production of surplus value (excess) breaks down, resulting in dramatic declines in profitability. On the other side, the
release of labour from the production process provides the opportunity for labour – and, therefore, for society as a whole – to develop its full creative capacity, in
ways that are antithetical to the logic of capitalist production. Both scenarios, singularly and together, spell crisis and catastrophe for capitalism (Marx 1993: 706–
8). In practice, capital has sought to restrict the development of discarded labour through the politics of oppression and the imposition of scarcity, poverty and
violence. Yet the creative capacity of labour remains undiminished, as seen in May 1968 and by the continuing movement of protest against the law of surplus value
in all its manifestations. These struggles against capitalist oppression make up the substantive history of modern political protest (Hardt and Negri 2001).
Higher education is directly involved in the development of technology, science and the
production of knowledge. The student-academic is both the producer and personification
of this form of knowledge, and, therefore, has a key role to play in re-engineering the
politics of production. Since 1968, and before, student-academics have played a key role
in the worldwide protest movements against the social relations of capitalist production.
These protests might form the core curriculum for the pedagogy of excess. The curriculum which
informs the pedagogy of excess cannot get ahead of the protests out of which it has been constituted, nor seek to ground a new movement of academic struggle in
The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is connected
the events of the past.
to the contemporary situation by recovering the subversive inspirations around which a

more radical form of progressive pedagogy might be invented. Such a pedagogy would
involve inventing a curriculum that includes grounding the concept of excess in an
alternative political economy, involving a critique not simply of the politics of
consumption but the politics of production. This critical political economy would provide
a theoretical framework within which to conceptualise the ideology of protest, but no
blueprint for action. Direct action should be informed in this curriculum by the lessons learned from the history of struggle inside and outside of
the academy. This connection with the history of academic struggle should include an engagement with other critical pedagogical discourses, including critical
pedagogy and popular education (Freire 2007; McLaren 2000; Amsler and Canaan 2009), as well as ideas that have sought to connect academic struggles with the
worldwide movement of protest: ‘public sociology’ (Burawoy 2005), ‘participative pedagogy’ (Lambert 2009), ‘mass intellectuality’ (Hardt and Negri 2001) and
‘academic activism’ (Castree 2000). Working within this curriculum academics and students can develop networks of alternative research projects. A list for such
projects has already been provided by Dyer-Witheford and includes: the establishment of new indices of well-being beyond monetised measures; the new
capacities for democratic planning afforded by new technology; systems of income allocation outside of wage-labour; the development of peer-to-peer open source
communications networks; research projects that seek to enrich critical political economy with ecological and feminist knowledges, and the formation of aesthetics
). In this way the

and imaginaries adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (2004: 90–1
pedagogy of excess becomes a learning process which promotes the creative capacity of
people in accordance with their needs as social individuals (Kay and Mott 1982). These models of progressive
curriculum restructuring can become frameworks on which to design a progressive model for higher education. In the recent period French academics and their
students have protested against proposed market- based reforms, although with a much more pragmatic agenda than in 1968. There is a growing body of literature
that is recording the worldwide intensification of academic labour as well as struggles to subvert capitalist work (Nelson and Watt 2004; Bousquet 2008; De
Angelis and Harvie 2009), while at the same time provide alternative models to the neo-liberal university (Muhr and Verger 2006; Santos 2003; Emery 2009;
Ainley 2005; Berry et al. 2002; Rogoff 2005). Higher education at the level of society The pedagogy of excess suggests that 1968 offers a much better model around
The pedagogy of
which to organise resistance to consumerism and marketisation than Humboldt’s liberal vision for the University of Berlin.
excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is connected to the contemporary
situation by recovering the subversive inspirations around which new forms of
pedagogies were invented. In 1968 the idea that research was something that students can do was a revolutionary political statement. The
fact that by the beginning of the twenty first century these subversive motivations have
been reduced to the technical imperatives of research-based learning should not conceal
the intellectual power that is generated when academics connect with undergraduate
students through their own research activities, nor the importance for the future of the
academic project that these connections are made, and raised to the level of society.
To embrace excess and open yourself up to the potentialities of

becoming allows for a subjectivity that moves beyond the axiom
of the human as the basis for ethics
Massumi 17 (Brian, social theorist, writer, philosopher, and professor in the Communications
Department at the University of Montreal, chapter 14 of “General Ecology: The New Ecological
Paradigm”, by Eric Hörl, titled “Virtual Ecology and the Question of Value”. P 364-365. May 4, 2017) //
IES
The point is that the theory of value, to live up to its potential adventurousness, must
approach the ecological systemicity of every value, however seemingly hardwired, as a question of
virtual variety: ecologies of systemic contrast and complementarity. It should grasp these diversities of experience
from the angle of their capacity to enter into the adventure: that of intensifying variation
occurring as part of a process of revaluation.72 It must see diversity as carrying whole
new ecologies, promising the invention of qualities of experience worthy of struggle. The
theory of value as developed here does not stop at human neurodiversity. More far-reachingly, its ecological aim
extends beyond the human brain to nonhuman modes of experience. This is not only meant in the sense
of attending to nonhuman entities as part of the ecological complex and its complexions. It entails an integral
revaluation of values, opening onto new vistas of surplus value of life and new, as yet
indeterminate, fields of struggle. This process hinges on adventures of axiological
invention. It does not content itself with the self-congratulatory pat on the
back of the feeling of being oh-so tolerant and accommodating, or the smug
satisfaction of getting it morally “right” by the prevailing standard. The
process of invention avails itself of excess: the qualitative surplus value of life of the
more-than-human haloing every predominantly human occasion of experience with an
infinity of “other” potentials.73 It should be evident by now that the “actual ecologies” Guattari refers to
in the opening quotation are not limited to the environmental. The overall ecology of values can be parsed
into three reciprocally presupposing systems of complementarity, or virtual mutual inclusion: the environmental,
the social, and the mental (the abstract).74 The theory of value, as suggested by the singular vivacity of
the quality of the experience of color, aims less at these systems per se than at their processual
turnover into each other, and together into new postcapitalist patternings of experience,
each a value in itself, such as it is, as well as carrying other-onward an immeasurably
augmented intensity of virtual complexions, red ripe for experiential adventure
beyond the human compass.
Radical openness
You should prefer a radical openness to the outside through a
laceration of the self which allows for the creation of a
multiplicity of identity. This openness turns the very systems of
western values and identity onto itself through a complete
breakdown
Negarestani’8 Reza (Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to Collapse and CTheory regularly),
“cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials” p.195-199 KZaidi
In the mid-eighties, before succumbing to his petromantic nympholepsy, Hamid Parsani re-addresses his
book, Defacing the Ancient Persia, as a guide to strategic openness (which, he insists, is the
enduring concern of the Middle East). Following his analysis of the Aryanistic holocaust and its relationship with the
genealogy of monotheism, the book indeed can be read as a syncretic approach to a broad array
of communications and modes of living in the Middle East, an openness with a polytical
edge, as he emphasizes: ‘It [openness] is certainly not made for social dynamics or lifestyles
instrumentalized within liberal societies. Openness is what turns the very body of the
free world upside down throughout human history — if, of course, we assume that the free world has
ever been more than a mere institution of a more tolerable regime or religion,’ Parsani writes in his later notes on Defacing
the Ancient Persia. The book had already been tagged by hostile critics as ‘a maximalist and
verbose treatise about everything except Persia, informed by every discipline except
archeology’ and hailed by a few disciples as ‘the obligatory reference book for traveling to
the Middle East’. In any case, it is more than a misreading to take Parsani’s Defacing the Ancient Persia for a mere
collection of phenomenal discoveries and theories. As Parsani himself confesses, his book pursues an awkward
dissection of the conundrum of openness in the Middle East’.34 If the so-called despotic
institutions of the Middle East have survived liberalism, and have grown stronger
instead of being shattered into miserable pieces long ago, it is because openness can
never be extracted from the inside of the system or through a mere voluntary or
subjective desire for being open. Openness can never be communicated by liberalism (not
to mention the free world’). According to his critics, Parsani’s re-reading of Defacing the Ancient Persia
aims to remobilize its already fleshed-out topics on the current Tellurian Dynamics with
the fluid efficiency of petroleum’ (Parsani’s phrase). For Parsani, however, this process of re-writing
(or reinterpretation’, according to critics) had the virtue of gathering all of his inquiries under the
enigma of openness: It seems to me that so-called middle-eastern life, more than
anything else, suggests a communication dynamics, and is an answer to the enigma of
openness rather than being a contemporary orientalist lifestyle with a political or
humanist edge. In the light of Parsani’s references to ‘the enigma of openness’, the Hyperstition team
decided to question and reinvestigate its early notes on openness in relation to Deleuze
and Guattari’s politics of becoming. However, this time the reading was not conducted on
wholly philosophical grounds but rather against a new background, that of the mess-
hysteria of Parsani’s works — a textual sketch resistant to any high-octane philosophical psychosis. In this way,
Parsani’s works could be hammered out new edges and relevancies. In Defacing the Ancient
Persia, human history is an experimental research process in designing and establishing
modes of openness to the outside. Openness is not ultimately, so to speak, the affair of
humans, but rather the affair of the outside — everything minus the human, even the
human’s own body. But openness is not only associated with human history. Parsani argues
that the Earth, as the arch-puppeteer and occult-manipulator of planetary events, has a far more
sophisticated openness of its own. If the human is the subject of openness or the one who
opens himself to his outside, then
the Earth is ‘the inside-out subject’ of human openness.
Undoubtedly, human openness is full of twists. This includes social openness, gender
communications, and openness between populations and governments of the
contemporary world, whether cultural or petrological. Parsani shows that human openness has a
strategic and twisted spirit for which every communication is a tactic and every openness
is a strategy to be unfolded. If this is the case, then the Earth must enjoy a womb-dark and an
ocean-deep scheme — if not conspiracy — in its openness and communications with both
organisms and its solar outside. It is difficult to study the politics, culture and economy of the world without
questioning its issues and concerns regarding the ethics of openness. Middle-eastern studies
would be impossible without the question of openness. (Anush Sarchisian in her comments on Defacing the Ancient
Persia, 1994) Openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around. Nietzschean
affirmation was never intended to support liberation or even to be about openness at all.
It was an invocation of the outside, in its exteriority to the human and even to the
human’s openness (which includes desires for being open to the outside). Radical openness has nothing
to do with the cancelation of closure; it is a matter of terminating all traces of parsimony
and grotesque domestication that exist in so-called emancipatory human openness. The blade of radical
openness thirsts to butcher economical openness, or any openness constructed on the
affordability of both the subject and its environment. The target of radical openness is not
closure but economical openness. Radical openness devours all economic and political
grounds based on ‘being open’. Affirmation does not attain openness to the world but
maintains closure progressively through the grotesque domestications of economical
openness. On the first level of its operation, affirmation advocates ‘being open to’ as an anthropomorphic and
regulated mode of openness; it renders everything more affordable, more economically open and
more purposeful. Affirmation is initially involved with the manipulation of the
boundaries (of systems) whose machinery is based on transforming openness into an
instance of affordability, turning economic openness into a survival economy.
Economical openness is not about how much one can be open to the outside, but about
how much one can afford the outside. Therefore, openness, in this sense, is intrinsically tied to
survival. The survival economy, in the same vein, is the realization of all manifestations of
communication as the prolonging of survival; affordability in all its forms guarantees
survival.
Economical openness is a risk-feigning maneuver simulating communication with the
Outside. Yet for such openness, the outside is nothing but an environment which has already
been afforded as that which does not fundamentally endanger either the survival of the subject or its environing order. So
that ‘being open’ is but the ultimate tactic of affordance, employed by the interfaces of the
boundary with the outside. For economical openness, the order of the boundary must be
invisible; the boundary is not a filtering sphere or confinement but a ‘force dynamic
boundary’ (with an ambiguous nomadic drive), a fluid horizon seeking to accommodate everything
through its expanding dynamism rather than sedentarization. Affordance presents itself
as a pre-programmed openness, particularly on the inevitably secured plane of being open
(as opposed to being opened). On the plane of ‘being open to’, organic survival can always
interfere, appropriate the flow of xeno-signals, economize participations or if necessary
cut the communication before it is too late.
‘Being open’, ever political and cautious, supports the survival as an economical and slyly
appropriated sphere of capacity (or affordability), an economy bent on upholding survival at
all costs, even through the necrocracy of death. Economical openness – that is, ‘being open
to’ – appropriates the reciprocation between the subjective and the objective sides of
openness. While the subject of the economical openness manifests itself in the statement ‘I
am open to’, the objective of the openness is what ‘being open to’ aims at. Economical
openness is constantly maintained by these two poles which must afford each other. For an
entity, the act of opening to its environment is only possible if the environment has already
afforded the entity within its environing range, and if the entity itself is able to accommodate part of the
environment within its capacity. The capacity of the entity is directly influenced by the subjective
survival of that entity. For this reason, so-called (economical) openness represents the
affordability and the survival capacity of its subjects, not the act of opening itself.
In economical openness, affordance does not refer to either the restricted or restricting
affordability of one or multiple systems, but to the whole reciprocal horizon in which
both the subjective and the objective sides of economical openness must survive and
undergo a dynamic but economical participation. Affordance does not work on a
univocal or an uniderctional line – from the subject of openness to its objective or vice-
versa. It is economically collective. Affordance moulds a horizon of economically-secured
openness which accommodates both sides as bodies dynamically synchronous to each
other. Correspondingly, openness is dynamically determined by the survival of both
subjective and objective sides as a mutual living process, rather than survival as the
evasion of peril. If affordance is basically mesophilic, meaning that it always comes in-between.
Participations, becomings, lines of tactics and communications must all be based on the
meso-sphere of affordance and its survival machineries.
‘I am open to you’ can be recapitulated as ‘I have the capacity to bear your investment’ or
‘I afford you’. This conservative voice is not associated with will or intention, but with the
inevitability of affordance as a mesophilic bond, and with the survival economy and the
logic of capacity. If you exceed the capacity by which you can be afforded, I will be cracked, lacerated and
laid open. Despite its dedication to repression, its blind desire for the monopoly of
survival and the authoritarian logic of the boundary, the plane of ‘being open to’ has
never been openly associated with paranoia and regression. Such is the irony of
liberalism and anthropomorphic desire.
However, while affirmation is tactically nurtured by affordance, it is also a stealth strategy to call and to
bring forth an Epidemic Openness whose eventuation is necessarily equal to the abortion
of economical or human openness. As far as survival is concerned, radical openness always brings
with it base-participation, contamination and pandemic horror, the horror of the outside
emerging from within as an autonomous xeno-chemical Insider and from without as the
unmasterable Outsider. In any case, radical openness is internally connected to unreported
plagues. If affordance is the mesophilic extension between subjective and objective fronts of communication, the
outside is defined by the exteriority of function rather than distance. If affirmation is ultimately
strategic, this is because epidemic openness is inherent to the repression of the outside and the
suspension of its influences. In a political twist, epidemic openness craves for solid states,
manifest closures such as dwelling and accommodating systems of all kinds which are intrinsically integrated with
subsistence and the survival economy: libban, lifian. Conforming to the secrecy and the conspiracist
ethos of affordance, for which every tactic is another line of expansion (to afford more), radical
openness requires strategic calls or lines of subversion from within affordance. Radical
openness, therefore, subverts the logic of capacity from within. Frequently referred to as sorcerous lines,
awakenings, summonings, xeno-attractions and triggers, strategic approaches unfold radical openness
as an internal cut – gaseous, odorless, with the metallic wisdom of a scalpel. Openness emerges as radical
butchery from within and without. If the anatomist cuts from top to bottom so as to examine the body
hierarchically as a transcendental dissection, then the
katatomy of openness does not cut anatomically
or penetrate structurally (performing the logic of strata); it butchers open in all directions, in
correspondence with its strategic plane of activity. Openness is not suicide, for it lures
survival into life itself where ‘to live’ is a systematic redundancy. Since the Outside in its
radical exteriority is everywhere it only needs to be aroused to rush in and erase the
illusion of economical appropriations or closure. Openness is a war, it needs strategies to work.
Openness is not the anthropomorphic desire to be open, it is the being opened
eventuated by the act of opening itself. To be butchered, lacerated, cracked and laid open – such is
the corporeal reaction of subjects to the radical act of opening. Accordingly, affirmation is a
camouflaged strategy, a vehicle for cutting through affordance and creatively reinventing
openness as a radical butchery (a radical xeno-call).
To become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible through
‘opening yourself’ (a desire associated with boundary, capacity and survival economy which covers both you and
your environment); but it can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic alignment
with the outside, becoming a lure for its exterior forces. Radical openness can be invoked
by becoming more of a target for the outside. In order to be opened by the outside rather
than being economically open to the system’s environment, one must seduce the exterior
forces of the outside: You can erect yourself as a solid and molar volume, tightening
boundaries around yourself, securing you horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability … immersing
yourself deeper into your human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders.
Through this excessive paranoia, rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance, one becomes
an ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces.
The alternative is to lacerate ourselves in order to allow

for radical openness
Negarestani, 08 (Reza Negarastani, Iranian philosopher and writer, Cyclonopedia:
Complicity with Anonymous Materials)/RF
Openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around. Nietzschean affirmation was never intended to support
liberation or even to be about openness at alt. It was an invocation of the outside, in its exteriority to the human and even to the
human's openness (which includes desires for being open to the outside). Radical openness has nothing to do with the
cancelation of closure; it is a matter of terminating all traces of parsimony and
grotesque domestication that exist in so-called emancipatory human
openness. The blade of radical openness thirsts to butcher economical openness, or any openness constructed on the
affordability of both the subject and its environment. The target of radical openness is not closure
but economical openness. Radical openness devours all economic and political grounds based on 'being open’.
Affirmation does not attain openness to the world but maintains closure progressively
through the grotesque domestications of economical openness. On the first level of its operation,
affirmation advocates 'being open to' as an anthropomorphic and regulated mode of openness; it renders everything more affordable,
more economically open and more purposeful. Affirmation is initially involved with the manipulation of
the boundaries (of systems) whose machinery is based on transforming openness into an
instance of affordability, turning economic openness into a survival economy. Economical openness is not about how
much one can be open to the outside, but about how much one can afford the outside. Therefore, openness, in this sense, is
intrinsically tied to survival. The survival economy, in the same vein, is the realization of all manifestations of
communication as the prolonging of survival; affordability in all its forms guarantees survival. Economical openness is a
risk-feigning maneuver simulating communication with the Outside. Yet for such
openness, the outside is nothing but an environment which has already been afforded as
that which does not fundamentally endanger either the survival of the subject or its
environing order. So that 'being open' is but the ultimate tactic of affordance, employed by the interfaces of the boundary
with the outside. For economical openness, the order of the boundary must be invisible; the
a fluid
boundary is not a filtering sphere or confinement but a 'force dynamic boundary* (with an ambiguous nomadic drive),
horizon seeking to accommodate everything through its expanding dynamism rather
than sedentarization. Affordance presents itself as a preprogrammed openness, particularly on the inevitably secured plane
of being open (as opposed to being opened). On the plane of ‘being open to’, organic survival can always
interfere, appropriate the flow of xeno-signals, economize participations or if necessary
cut the communication before it is too late. 'Being open*, ever political and cautious, supports the survival
economy as an economical and slyly appropriated sphere of capacity (or affordability), an economy bent on
upholding survival at all costs, even through the necrocracy of death. Economical
openness — that is, 'being open to* — appropriates the reciprocation between the subjective and
the objective sides of openness. While the subject of the economical openness manifests itself in the statement 'I am
open to', the objective of the openness is what ‘being open to* aims at. Economical openness is constantly
maintained by these two poles which must afford each other. For an entity, the act of opening to its
environment is only possible if the environment has already afforded the entity within its environing range, and if the entity itself is
able to accommodate part of the environment within its capacity. The
capacity of the entity is directly
influenced by the subjective survival of that entity. For this reason, so-called (economical) openness
represents the affordability and the survival capacity of its subjects, not the act of opening itself. In economical openness, affordance
does not refer to either the restricted or restricting affordability of one or multiple systems, but to the whole reciprocal horizon in
which both the subjective and the objective sides of economical openness must survive and undergo a dynamic but economical
participation. Affordance
does not work on a univocal or an unidirectional line — from the
subject of openness to its objective or vice-versa. It is economically collective.
Affordance moulds a horizon of economically-secured openness which accommodates
both sides as bodies dynamically synchronous to each other. Correspondingly, openness is
dynamically determined by the survival of both subjective and objective
sides as a mutual living process, rather than survival as the evasion of peril. If
affordance cannot be subjectively or objectively dismantled, this is because it is established mutually. In regard to its subjective and
objective poles, affordance is basically mesophilic, meaning that it always comes in-between. Participations,
becomings, lines of tactics and communications must all be based on the
meso-sphere of affordance and its survival machineries. ‘I am open to you’ can be
recapitulated as ’I have the capacity to bear your investment’ or 'I afford you'. This conservative voice is not associated with will or
intention, but with the inevitability of affordance as a mesophilic bond, and with the survival economy and the logic of capacity. If
you exceed the capacity by which you can be afforded, I will be cracked, lacerated and laid open. Despite its dedication to repression,
its blind desire for the monopoly of survival and the authoritarian logic of the boundary, the plane of ‘being open to’ has never been
openly associated with paranoia and regression. Such
is the irony of liberalism and
anthropomorphic desire. However, while affirmation is tactically nurtured by affordance, it is also a stealth
strategy” to call and to bring forth an Epidemic Openness whose eventuation is necessarily equal to the abortion of economical or
human openness. As far as survival is concerned, radical
openness always brings with it base-
participation. contamination and pandemic horror, the horror of the outside emerging
from within as an autonomous xeno-chemical Insider and from without as the unmasterable Outsider. In any
case, radical openness is internally connected to unreported plagues. If affordance is
the mesophilic extension between subjective and objective fronts of communication, the outside is defined by the exteriority of
function rather than distance. If
affirmation is ultimately strategic, this is because epidemic
openness is inherent to the repression of the outside and the suspension of its influences.
In a polytical twist, epidemic openness craves for solid states, manifest closures such as dwelling and accommodating systems of all
kinds which are intrinsically integrated with subsistence and the survival economy: libbun. lijhm. Conforming
to the
secrecy and the conspiracist ethos of affordance, for which every tactic is another line of
expansion (to afford more), radical openness requires strategic calls or lines of
subversion from within affordance. Radical openness, therefore, subverts the
logic of capacity from within. Frequently referred to as sorcerous lines, awakenings, summonings, xeno-
attractions and triggers, strategic approaches unfold radical openness as an internal cut — gaseous, odorless, with the metallic wisdom
of a scalpel. Openness emerges as radical butchery from within and without. If the anatomist
cuts from top to bottom so as to examine the body hierarchically as a transcendental
dissection, then the katatomy of openness does not cut anatomically or penetrate
structurally (performing the logic of strata); it butchers open in all directions, in
correspondence with its strategic plane of activity. Openness is not suicide, for it lures
survival into life itself where 'to live' is a systematic redundancy. Since the Outside in its radical
exteriority is everywhere, it only needs to be aroused to rush in and erase the illusion of economical appropriations or closure.
Openness is a war. it needs strategies to work. Openness is not the anthropomorphic desire to be
open, it is the being opened eventuated by the act of opening itself. To be butchered,
lacerated, cracked and laid open — such is the corporeal reaction of subjects to the radical act of opening.
Accordingly, affirmation is a camouflaged strategy, a vehicle for cutting though
affordance and creatively reinventing openness as a radical butchery (a radical xeno-call). To
become open or to experience the chemistry of openness is not possible through 'opening yourself* (a desire associated with boundary,
capacity and survival economy which covers both you and your environment); but it can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a
strategic alignment with the outside, becoming a lure for its exterior forces.
Radical openness can be invoked by
becoming more of a target for the outside. In order to be opened by the outside
rather than being economically open to the system's environment, one must
seduce the exterior forces of the outside: You can erect yourself as a solid and molar volume,
tightening boundaries around yourself, securing your horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability ... immersing yourself
deeper into your human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders. Through this excessive paranoia , rigorous closure
and survivalist vigilance, one becomes an ideal prey for the radical outside and its forces.
The Middle East's march toward problematic disciplines and the bigotry of monotheistic dogmatism — either through its governing
policies and models or through its social and cultural dynamics — is in fact a systematic progress toward a radical openness. The
plane of being opened lies at the other side of openness, next to strategic closure, opposed to the
free world. It is hard for global politics to understand this. (H. Parsani) For Parsani, such a systematic
march toward the manifestations of closure is equal to summoning and strategically attracting a faceless plague, a xenochemical tide
for subversion and disease against all immunity systems and boundaries, all monolithic and molar structures. Epidemic
openness arrives as a cryptogenic event in the form of butchery (opening and being opened at the
same time). With no prior warning, butchering openness cuts you open (the only question that could be asked is ’where does it start
from?*); it turns you into a fine meal, into a new meat... a new food for a new earth. A-Good-Meai Polytics. The ancient Persian cult
of Druj (the Mother of Abominations) were the first — through exercising their belief systems directly within the body of monotheism
— to discover that ‘when it comes to darkness, we must think strategically.’ To affirm the
Life-Satan (Druj), one must reinvent everything as strategy. Engagement with the Life-Satan must be conducted through a strategic
communication, that is to say, not by affirming positively through faith or credence but by strategically turning ourselves into meals,
acting as a decoy to commence the hunt from the other side. Unlike the revolts of western heterodoxy, the cult of Druj did not take
depravity and irrationality as its heterodox or Satanist blueprint; they summoned the Life-Satan by undertaking a paranoid closure
against the outside and by becoming excessively obsessive with their hygiene and health. By doing so, they deduced terminal insanity
from the very orthodoxy of rationality and logic. In order to surrender yourself to the ecstasy of Life-Satan (the epidemic openness)
you must try to purify yourself from all defects, attend numerous hygiene courses, develop a quotidian and institutionalized life-style,
evade all defilement both physically and mentally ... you must just try to make A Good Meal out of yourself for the life-Satan and its
avatars. As an allure for the outside, you should make a decoy out of yourself. In
this way the Life-Satan is strategically lured to tear you to shreds, giving a new functioning level to openness. Even though openness
is exterior to affordance and capacity, it ravages their corpses and defeated territories. Far
from a necrocratic relief
that presents death as an escape, one becomes an unground to all defilements, fears, and
intensities which the Life-Satan pours into systems and organizations, an unground
where openness can only be outlined as a series of lacerations. If in terms of the radical
outside, closure (of any system or subject) is impossible, then the act of opening is nothing
but the effectuation of this impossibility for the system. For the subject, this
effectuation or imposition of impossibility is always catastrophically unpleasant.
Revolutionary Multiculturalism
A revolutionary multiculturalism pushes the contradictions of
white capitalism to expose the white exploitation of racialized
labor – it links theory and praxis by reconciling student
education with liberation, instead of production, in order to
sever economic thralldom
The theory of expenditure proposed here is a modified Bataillean pedagogy. It represents an alternative
theory to production that nevertheless depends on the transformation of labor to realize its
luxurious goals. A modified theory of expenditure recognizes the value in school experiences
promoting knowledge that serves no master. But it also realizes that a master currently
exists and must be deposed strategically. The double helix of whiteness and
capitalism is the conspiratorial first cause. Pushing the contradictions of
white capitalism to their extreme exposes the weak joints of the economy. Only
then can we approach what Bataille calls “unknowing.” or knowledge divorced from ends, because it
reconciles student interests in work as these evolve in their liberated form and not as
they (re)produce certain outcomes. Bataillean pedagogy, as Jürgen Habermas (1987) suggests, appears like a form of
fantastic anarchism because it lacks a rational basis for valuing one form of student work
over another (since this is beyond linguistic representation). Moreover, Bataille is involved in a
performative contradiction that uses reasoned arguments to reject the metanarrative of
rational knowledge (lay 1993). However, it is also possible to construct Bataille’s suggestions not as anarchistic, but as an
opening up of knowledge to all possibilities. Transforming student labor and transgressing utilitarian experience
represents the double move out of alienated school knowledge. A revolutionary multicultural education entails
teaching students and teachers about the productive basis of schools and social life. It
calls for white teachers to pay attention to how they manifest their whiteness through
their territorial control over production and expenditure. Revolutionary multiculturalism
assists students in constructing a concrete education by exposing the contradictions found in their
encounters with the normative spatial orders of whiteness. Revolutionary
multiculturalism encourages young minds to link their critique of school
knowledge with the white exploitation of racialized labor. However, revolutionary
multiculturalism also recognizes the importance of a theory of expenditure in order to
guard against the uncritical valorization of utilitarian labor coextensive with whiteness.
Squandering knowledge without return or profit is not the opposite of production but rather its completion. Revolutionary multiculturalism
is involved in planning the
counter territorial construction of spaces for forging liberating relationships
between expenditure and production. But we should problematize those
relationships between expenditure and production that serve the interests
of white capitalism. For example, a certain factory in Los Angeles employs mostly Mexicans for the production of audio
speakers. On Cinco de Mayo, the mostly white administration of this factory hires mariachi bands to perform for the workers during their
lunch break. In this scenario, expenditure has been folded into capitalist production. The mariachis are
hired not to promote the resistance of labor, but to make the laborers more productive and loyal to the company. This is not the kind of
relationship between production and expenditure that is counterhegemonic. A
revolutionary multiculturalism calls
for whites to be allies with people of color in authoring spatialities that intervene in the
normative functioning of white privilege in white capitalism. A revolutionary multiculturalism sharpens
on the Whetstone of liberation, Bataille’s vision of excess and Marx’s imperative of class struggle can help us to formulate
such a revolutionary project in order to sever both the economic thralldom through
which the oppressed are imprisoned by the capitalist class as well as the systems of
classification and intelligibility that are used to justify the current social and spatial
division of labor. We need not wait to be given the gift of solidarity from the gods of progress nor expect it to be produced by the
inevitability of revolution. Rather, we must take that first step toward revolutionary praxis. That is
one gift we can bestow on ourselves.
Sacrifice
We sacrificed your aff, come and get it
Bataille 91. Georges, insane librarian, The Accursed Share: An Essay on the General
Economy vol. 1 consumption, translated Robert Hurley p.59-61
The victim is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be
withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed.
Once chosen, he [the victim] is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption. But
the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure,
which now radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings. Nothing is more
striking than the attention that is lavished on him. Being a thing, he cannot be
withdrawn from the real order, which binds him unless destruction rids him [it] of his
"thinghood," eliminating his usefulness once and for all. As soon as he is consecrated and
during the time, between the consecration and death he enters the closeness of the
sacrificers and participates in their consumptions; He is one of their own and in the
festival in which he will perish he sings, dances and enjoys all the pleasures with them.
There is no more servility in him; he [the victim] can even receive arms and fight. He is
lost in the immense confusion of the festival. And that is precisely [its] his undoing. The
victim will be the only one in fact to leave the real order entirely, for he alone is carried
along to the end by the movement of the festival. The sacrificer is divine only with
reservations. The future is heavily reserved in him; the future is the weight that he bears
as a thing. The official theologians whose tradition Sahagiin collected were well aware of
this, for they placed the voluntary sacrifice of Nanauatzin above the others, praised
warriors for being consumed by the gods, and gave divinity the meaning of consumption.
We cannot know to what extent the victims of Mexico accepted their fate. It may be that
in a sense certain ones of them "considered it an honor" to be offered to the gods. But
their immolation was not voluntary. Moreover, it is clear that, from the time of
Sahagun's informants, these death orgies were tolerated because they impressed
foreigners. The Mexicans immolated children that were chosen from among their own.
But severe penalties had to be decreed against those who walked away from their
procession when they went up to the altars. Sacrifice comprises a mixture of anguish and
frenzy. The frenzy is more powerful than the anguish, but only providing its effects are
diverted to the exterior, onto a foreign prisoner. It suffices for the sacrificer to give up the
wealth that the victim could have been for him. This understandable lack of rigor does
not, however, change the meaning of the ritual. The only valid excess was one that went
beyond the bounds, and one whose consumption appeared worthy of the gods. This was
the price men paid to escape their down fall and remove the weight introduced in them
by the avarice, and cold calculation of the real order.
We declare ourselves sovereign, and refuse identification with
their cowardly politics. We offer this debate to ecstatic
communication, sacrificing certainty to social exuberance. We
sacrifice the 1AC, sever its head, flay its corpse, and wear its
skin.
Razinsky 2009 (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no.
2, 2009 ***we don’t endorse gendered or ableist language***)
Thus we see that the stakes are high. What is at stake is the attempt of the subject to grasp itself in totality. This attempt necessitates
bringing death into the account, but death itself hampers this very attempt. One never dies in the first person. Returning to Bataille, why
does he believe sacrifice to be a solution to Hegel’s fundamental paradox? For him, it answers the requirements of the human, for Man
meets death face to face in the sacrifice, he sojourns with it, and yet, at the same time, he preserves his life. In sacrifice, says Bataille, man
destroys the animal within him and establishes his human truth as a “being unto death” (he uses Heidegger’s term). Sacrifice provides a
clear manifestation of man’s fundamental negativity, in the form of death (Bataille, “Hegel” 335-36; 286). The
sacrificer both
destroys and survives. Moreover, in the sacrifice, death is approached voluntarily
by Man. In this way the paradox is overcome, and yet remains open. We can approach
death and yet remain alive, but, one might ask, is it really death that we encountered, or
did we merely fabricate a simulacrum? Bataille insists elsewhere, however, that sacrifice
is not a simulacrum, not a mere subterfuge. In the sacrificial ritual, a real impression of
horror is cast upon the spectators. Sacrifice burns like a sun, spreading radiation our
eyes can hardly bear, and calls for the negation of individuals as such (“The Festival”
313; 215). We did not fool death; we are burned in its fire. Bataille’s idea of the sacrifice
also addresses Freud’s paradox. It might be impossible to imagine our own death
directly, but it is possible to imagine it with the aid of some mediator, to meet death
through an other’s death. Yet on some level this other’s death must be our own as well
for it to be effective, and indeed this is the case, says Bataille. He stresses the element of
identification: “In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is
struck down dead. And so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336; 287). “There is no
sacrifice,” writes Denis Hollier, “unless the one performing it identifies, in the end, with
the victim” (166). Thus it is through identification, through otherness that is partly
sameness, that a solution is achieved. If it were us, we would die in the act. If it were
a complete other, it would not, in any way, be our death. Also noteworthy is Bataille’s
stress on the involvement of sight: “and so he dies in seeing himself die” (“Hegel” 336;
287), which brings him close to Freud’s view of the nature of the problem, for Freud
insists on the visual, recasting the problem as one of spectatorship,
imagining, perceiving. Bataille’s description recapitulates that of Freud, but renders it
positive. Yes, we remain as a spectator, but it is essential that we do so. Without it, we
cannot be said to have met death. Significantly, meeting death is a need, not uncalled-
for. We must meet death, and we must remain as spectators. Thus it is through
identification and through visual participation in the dying that a solution is achieved,
accompanied by the critical revaluation of values, which renders the meeting with
death crucial for “humanness.” Note that both possibilities of meeting death—in the
sacrificial-ritual we have just explored, and in theatre or art, to which we now turn—
are social. [continued] Thus Freud’s text, although it insists on the irrepresentability of
death, actually offers, unintentionally perhaps, a possible way out of the paradox
through turning to the other. Death perhaps cannot be looked at directly, but it can be
grasped sideways, indirectly, vicariously through a mirror, to use Perseus’s ancient trick
against Medusa. The introduction of the other, both similar to and different from
oneself, into the equation of death helps break out of the Cartesian circle with both its
incontestable truth and its solipsism and affirmation of oneself. The safety that theater
provides, of essentially knowing that we will remain alive, emerges as a kind of
requirement for our ability to really identify with the other. In that, it paradoxically
enables us to really get a taste of death. Bataille radicalizes that possibility. Although
Freud deems the estrangement of death from psychic life a problem, as we have seen
and shall see, theater is not a solution for him. With Bataille however, theater emerges
as a much more compelling alternative. Again, it is a matter of a delicate nuance, but a
nuance that makes all the difference. The idea common to both authors—that we
can meet death through the other and yet remain alive—is ambiguous. One can lay
stress on that encounter or on the fact of remaining alive. 11 Freud SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2,
2009 75 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille tends to opt for the second possibility, but his text can also be read as supporting
the first. The benefit in bringing Freud and Bataille together is that it invites us to that second reading. An Encounter with Death Death in
Freud is often the death of the other. Both the fear of death and the death wish are often focused on the other as their object. But almost
always it is as though through the discussion of the other Freud were trying to keep death at bay. But along with Bataille, we can take this
other more seriously. Imagining our own death might be impossible, yet we can still get a glimpse of death when it is an other that dies. In
one passage in his text, the death of the other seems more explicitly a crucial point for Freud as well—one passage where death does
not seem so distant. Freud comments on the attitude of primeval Man to death, as described above—namely that he wishes it in others but
ignores it in himself. “But there was for him one case in which the two opposite attitudes towards death collided,” he continues. It
occurred when primeval man saw someone who belonged to him die—his wife, his child, his friend […]. Then, in his pain, he was forced to
learn that one can die, too, oneself, and his whole being revolted against the admission. (“Thoughts” 293) Freud goes on to explain that
the loved one was at once part of himself, and a stranger whose death pleased primeval man. It is from this point, Freud continues, that
philosophy, psychology and religion sprang. 12 I have described elsewhere (Razinsky, “A Struggle”) how Freud’s reluctance to admit the
importance of death quickly undermines this juncture of the existential encounter with death by focusing on the emotional ambivalence of
primeval man rather than on death itself. However, the description is there and is very telling. Primeval man witnessed death, and “his
whole being revolted against the admission.” ”Man could no longer keep death at a distance, for he had tasted it in his pain about the dead”
(Freud, “Thoughts” 294). Once again, it is through the death of the other that man comes to grasp death. Once again, we have that special
admixture of the other being both an other and oneself that facilitates the encounter with death. Something of myself must be in the other
in order for me to see his death as relevant to myself. Yet his or her otherness, which means my reassurance of my survival, is no less
crucial, for if it were not present, there would be no acknowledgement of death, one’s own death always being, says Freud, one’s blind
spot. 13 Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 76 I mentioned before Heidegger’s grappling with a problem similar
to Bataille’s paradox. It is part of Heidegger’s claim, which he shares with Freud, that one’s death is unimaginable. In a famous section
Heidegger mentions the possibility of coming to grasp death through the death of the other but dismisses it, essentially since the other in
that case would retain its otherness: the other’s death is necessarily the other’s and not mine (47:221-24). Thus we return to the problem
we started with—that of the necessary subject-object duality in the process of the representation of death. Watching the dead object will no
more satisfy me than imagining myself as an object, for the radical difference of both from me as a subject will remain intact. But the
possibility that seems to emerge from the discussion of Freud and Bataille is that in-between position of the person both close and distant,
both self and other, which renders true apprehension of death possible, through real identification. 14 As Bataille says, regarding the
Irish Wake custom where the relatives drink and dance before the body of the deceased: “It is the death of an other, but in such instances,
the death of the other is always the image of one’s own death” (“Hegel” 341; 291). Bataille speaks of the dissolution of the subject-object
boundaries in sacrifice, of the “fusion of beings” in these moments of intensity (“The Festival” 307-11; 210-13; La Littérature 215; 70).
Possibly, that is what happens to primeval man when the loved one dies and why his “whole being” is affected. He himself is no longer sure
of his identity. Before, it was clear—there is the other, the object, whom one wants dead, and there is oneself, a subject. The show and the
spectators. Possibly what man realized before the cadaver of his loved one was that he himself is also an object, taking part in the world of
objects, and not only a subject. When he understood this, it seems to me, he understood death. For in a sense a subject subjectively never
dies. Psychologically nothing limits him, 15 while an object implies limited existence: limited by other objects that interact with it, limited
in space, limited in being the thought-content of someone else. Moreover, primeval man understood that he is the same for other subjects
as other subjects are for him—that is, they can wish him dead or, which is pretty much the same, be indifferent to his existence. The
encounter made primeval man step out of the psychological position of a center, transparent to itself, and understand that he is not only
a spirit but also a thing, an object, not only a spectator; this is what really shakes him. 16 The Highest Stake in the Game of Living Thus
far we have mainly discussed our first two questions: the limitation in imagining death and the possible solution through a form SubStance
#119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 77 Looking Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille of praxis, in either a channeled, ritualized or a spontaneous
encounter with the death of an other, overcoming the paradox of the impossibility of representation by involving oneself through deep
identification. We shall now turn to our third question, of the value of integrating death into our thoughts. We have seen that Bataille’s
perspective continuously brings up the issue of the value of approaching death. The questions of whether we can grasp death and, if we
can, how, are not merely abstract or neutral ones. The encounter with death, that we now see is possible, seems more and more to emerge
as possessing a positive value, indeed as fundamental. What we shall now examine is Freud’s attempt to address that positive aspect
directly, an attempt that betrays, however, a deep ambivalence. As mentioned, Freud’s text is very confused, due to true
hesitation between worldviews (see Razinsky, “A Struggle”). One manifestation of this confusion is Freud’s position regarding this cultural-
conventional attitude: on the one hand he condemns it, yet on the other hand he accepts it as natural and inevitable. For him, it results to
some extent from death’s exclusion from unconscious thought (“Thoughts” 289, 296-97). Death
cannot be represented
and is therefore destined to remain foreign to our life. 17 But then Freud suddenly
recognizes an opposite necessity: not to reject death but to insert it into life. Not to
distance ourselves from it, but to familiarize ourselves with it: But this attitude [the
cultural-conventional one] of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life
is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life
itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American
flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as
contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its
serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief,
make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We
dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact
indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or
experiments with explosive substances. We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to
take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his
children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our
calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the
motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’ (“It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”)
(“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these
words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freud’s Liran Razinsky SubStance #119,
Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 78 thought. One can hardly find any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination
with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage
itself is somewhat unclear. 18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive substances—seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The
meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to
imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that
the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks
of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including death in life, but
insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot accept the situation where death
is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than
Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the flight into normalcy
and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen,
presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to
intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of the true
nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations “necessary for his preservation,” that
he “asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well
as normative. Bataille describes a tendency to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Man’s
need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only fleeing death has less value.
Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is
stressed at the end of the article, where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due”
(“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life “more tolerable for us once again” (299). But since Freud also insists not
only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the
content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the
need to approach death. He
says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result
of abstaining from carrying out “experiments with explosive substances.” In addition,
his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything
in his approach. It is along the lines offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to
interpret them here. Sacrifice, Bataille says, brings together life in its fullness
and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial
ritual. Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary,
exceptionally heightened state of living. “The sacred horror,” he calls the emotion
experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most agonizing experience.” It “opens itself,
like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every limited meaning is
transfigured in it (“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not
humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it
an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly
manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense. Death and other related elements (violence)
bring life closer to a state where individuality melts, the mediation of the intellect
between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest. Bataille calls this state, or
aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and the
world, between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments
of intensity are moments of excess and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They
are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is
problematic for us, but it opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s text
with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life.
Moreover, the repression of death is generalized and extended: “the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its
train many other renunciations and exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The
intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks
out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death.
“Death could no longer be Liran Razinsky SubStance #119, Vol. 38, no. 2, 2009 80 denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really
die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than
the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a
sanguineous imprinting of death directly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths” of others. Life can only become vivid, fresh,
and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both authors speak of a valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery
around it. While the masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death, like the American couple or those who are busy with the
thought of “who is to take our place,” the individualists do not go with the herd, and by allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a
Yet again, Freud’s claims hover in the air, lacking any
fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19
theoretical background. Bataille supplies us with such background. He contests, as we
have seen, the sole focus on survival. Survival, he tells us, has a price. It limits our life.
As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses
the same tension here. Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life
intact, and therefore limit our existence to the bare minimum, or else we are willing to
risk it to some extent in order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our
usual world, according to Bataille, is characterized by the duration of things, by the
“future” function, rather than by the present. Things are constituted as separate objects
in view of future time. This is one reason for the threat of death: it ruins value where
value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that
is continuously hidden from us in the order of things where life runs its normal course.
Man “is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of
things” (“The Festival” 312; 214). Sacrifice is the opposite of production and
accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it is an affirmation of the
intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is therefore
rejected. “The power of death signifies that this real world can only have a
neutral image of life […]. Death reveals life in its plenitude” (309; 212). Bataille’s
“neutral image of life” is the equivalent of Freud’s “shallow and empty” life. What Freud
denounces is a life trapped within the cowardly economical system of considerations. It
is precisely the economy of value and future-oriented calculations that stand
in opposition to the insertion of death into life. “Who is to take the son’s place with his
mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children.” Of course there is an
emotional side to the story, but it is this insistence on replacement that leaves us on the
side of survival and stops us sometimes from living the present. “The need for duration,”
in the words of Bataille, “conceals life from us” (“The Festival” 309; 212). For both
authors, when death is left out, life “as it is” is false and superficial. Another Look at
Speculation Both authors, then, maintain that if elements associated with death invade
our life anyway, we might as well succumb and give them an ordered place in our
thoughts. The necessity to meet death is not due to the fact that we do not have a choice.
Rather, familiarization with death is necessary if life is to have its full value, and is part
of what makes us human. But the tension between the tendencies—to flee death or to embrace it—is not easily resolved,
and the evasive tendency always tries to assert itself. As seen above, Bataille maintains that in sacrifice, we are exposed through death to
other dimensions of life. But the exposure, he adds, is limited, for next comes another phase, performed post-hoc, after the event: the
ensuing horror and the intensity are too high to maintain, and must be countered. Bataille speaks of the justifications of the sacrifice given
by cultures, which inscribe it in the general order of things.
Alt = sacrifice, we like eachother more

Bataille's conception of the individual, as it appears within 'sovereignty', the general economy, and/or in Inner
experience', is of an individual who undoes their subjectivity. This 'individual could feasibly take one of two
directions with regard to communities. In the first place, such anindividual is even less likely to be part of a
group than an individual subject who would be identified by their self-presence and
agency. Alternatively, the dissolved individual might be a totally social creature, merging with the community as opposed to being
the isolated individual beloved of liberalism. Typically enough, Bataille takes the individual into both of these
possibilities, in what looks like a dialectical synthesis: the sovereign individual is by
definition not isolated. In Eroticism, it is clear that inner experience is most
likely to occur with others, in some form or another (97-100; OCX, 98-101), and as Nancy
noted, 'inner experience is neither inner nor is it experience. This 'experience
of the other can also be sovereign, when it too refuses closure, rejects knowing the other. The endpoint of
Bataille's idea of community is such a coming together - one that threatens what we normally term community (as an expression of
togetherness, unity, self-awareness, shared practices), and the paradigm for this community is sacrifice, and all that surrounds it. But
if community in sacrifice is the endpoint, the starting point for the thought of community
in Bataille is far simpler in its conception, even if sacrifice and loss can, in hindsight, be
seen to be issues at the start. This chapter takes in Bataille's early statements of community, and follows them through
to their conclusion in Eroticism and in the erotic fiction. In Bataille's writings we can trace a progress of the thought of community,
from the 1930s, where it is most clearly apparent in the literal practice of sacrifice, through Somma Atheologica/Inner Experience,
where loss of the self and going beyond the self cause 'communication'. Finally, we can see the thought become
perhaps more obviously communal in Eroticism, where loss of the self is
part of what Bataille terms 'continuity'(this notion develops from 'intimacy in The Accursed Share).
The simplest version of community in Bataille is that of a group of people
operating as a society. In addition, he develops a clear conception of an
'elective community', which operates at several levels (for example in terms of the 'sense of
community one might have with certain writers, or, equally, the development of an 'actually existing communal group). From
here, it is a question of what kind of community he is suggesting, and I think it will
become apparent that this is more than a question of 'who will be let in', as it comes to
encompass exactly how we form a community. In fact, the how is the what, where, who and why of Bataille's
community. The next stage sees a community as that which surpasses the individual, but also surpasses society, as the occurrence of
genuine community is at the moment where the mundane, or even profane, society is undone (on the occasion of sacrifice, for
example). None of these 'stages', as I am calling them here, can be seen in isolation, and we cannot ignore Bataille's actual attempts 'at
a community that would put his ideas into practice. Blanchot notes that this is necessarily impossible, and that Inner Experience is the
playing out of this impossibility (The Unavowable Community, 16-17). Nor
can we ignore the possibility of
communism bringing such a community, or facilitating it. The more 'philosophical end
of the thought of community, which is also the most 'deconstructive', feeds directly back
into the more practical side: the maintenance of an 'other or 'others as the entirety of
community would be potentially of great significance at a political level, as a response to
integrationist liberalism, which seeks to homogenize while 'accepting people
from 'outside of its culture'. Beyond the Individual As with his writings specifically on the general economy,
Bataille is consistently attacking the modern conception of the individual as
being the or even a centre of knowledge and truth. In his attacks on the uses
made of people through the restricted economies of truth assertions (e.g. religions, philosophies
that believe in essential truths) or of the capitalist economy, he is not advocating the dis-alienation
of an otherwise complete human. However, something like an individual can, it seems, be better off in what we
might think of as a dis-alienated community (hence his continued interest in the possibilities of communism). From early texts such as
the two 'Attraction and Repulsion essays, the essays on The Pineal Eye', through the Accursed Share, and still present in the late texts
Eroticism and The Tears of Eros, Bataille is at pains to get the individual beyond 'its self. In the process, he is led to consider societies
that gave more scope to such possibilities than 'ours does. The societies that come out well invariably
feature an element of sacrifice, and certainly require a sacred that we no
longer have - this sacred is not to be confused with the workings of religion,
whose task it is to control the sacred; Bataille is interested in the moments
when the sacred irrupts into being and is beyond the bounds of our attempts
to organize it. An example that he returns to over and over again is that of the Aztecs - the first real consideration being as
early as 1928 ('L'Amerique disparue', ['Vanished America'] OC I, 152-8). The importance of their civilization is
that they had a genuine place for the sacred, a sacred that goes beyond observance of
certain rules, because the moment of the sacred is brought into being as those rules are
broken - i.e. in (human) sacrifice. Christianity is also based on such sacrifice, but in sanitizing the procedure (through
rendering the sacrifice 'symbolic'), the sacred aspect has been lost; hence the contribution of Christianity to a 'profanation of the world,
the results of which can be seen in capitalism and individualism. Societies that are able to suspend
their laws do so in the festival (fete), and Bataille argues that this is the moment when the
society becomes a community.
Speak in death
Vote negative to speak in death – an epistemological move that seeks to
disrupt the smooth functioning of necropolitics through an encounter with the
anti-colonial body erased by sovereign violence. Their theory can never account
for that which exists on the outside.
Stamenkovic, 13, (Marko, PhD Student at Universityof Ghent and member of the International Association of Curators of
Contemporary Art, "On Colonial Blind Spots, Ego-politics of Knowledge and 'Universal Reason'," December 2013, pages 9-
12)//Cummings
In 2003, the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe published an article that starts, in his
own words, from the assumption that “the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large
degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. Hence, to kill
or to allow to live constitute the limits of sovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise
sovereignty is to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and
manifestation of power” the concept of
(Mbembe 2003: 11). While drawing a critical distance from Michael Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, he ascribes this power to what he calls necropolitics, “
biopower, its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and the state of exception” (Mbembe 2003: 12).
What he means by ‘necropolitics’ and the ‘new formations of power’ pertains to populations’
mortality in the hands of the imperialist matrix of power: the limits of sovereignty thus reside in
its potency of exposing human life to death. Such a hypothesis implies the notion of imperium
under conditions of the suspension of law, by which contemporary capitalism and its
powermechanisms of control become directly in charge of populations’ death . This corresponds with the definition of
necrocapitalism or “the contemporary forms of organizational accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death” (Banerjee 2008: 1541). Hence, what is meant by the ‘new formations of power’ is the neoliberal matrix of
His work on the limits of

necropower that has colonized not only the people, their natural resources and their territories, but also their right to live and their right to die unconstrained (Mbembe 2003: 12).
sovereign power, its control over life and death, and its relation to human mortality was
groundbreaking in that regard. According to him, both Western political science and the
Foucauldian critical history of modernity have fallen short of the most significant task that the
philosophy of power still has to perform nowadays . This task conceives of providing an account of sovereignty that is satisfactory for the existential and theoretical position of
the subjects behind the ‘iron curtain’ of neocolonial domination: the subjects of the global anti-imperialist South whose experience of life differs from the conditions in the global imperialist North. This implies the living conditions imposed by the global neoliberal
regime and its ongoing colonial (or necro-colonial) matrix of power. Under such conditions, the life of the governed differs substantially from the lives of their mast ers. By naming them ‘masters’ I broadly imply the subjects of the imperialist North who have
. Our awareness about such different

embraced, rather than opposed, the colonial conditions that, in a historical retrospective, turned to be beneficial for their own comfort of living nowadays
ways of living – and dying – under the necro-colonial matrix of power imposes an urgent need to
approach the notion of colonial and capitalist sovereignty from a critically revised perspective,
which Mbembe justly proposed. Hence, to speak in the name of death – instead of speaking in
the name of life – exposes the need to speak differently from what the hegemonic context has
already prescribed as a ‘universal’ norm for its own sake. To speak in the name of death means
to take one’s own right to speak, to think and to act from a counter-position with regard to the
hegemonic reason and according to the kind of rationality that does not necessarily comply with
what is currently considered as a normative binary along the ‘life versus death’ axis of thought .
Finally, to speak in the name of death does not only mean to oppose the hegemonic reason centered on life and life-oriented discourses – it also means to propose another, counterhegemonic possibility of thinking, that overcomes the gap between two divided
categories as essentially asymmetrical. In this regard, Dussel’s words can be useful when he pleads against “a historical process of asymmetric exchanges […] by so-called ‘Western civilization’ [and] the construction of what is usually called ‘Modernity’, a
phenomenon that denotes the cultural centrality of Europe […] since the European invasion of the Amerindian cultures” (Dussel 2006: 492; my emphasis). Accordingly, the roots of the prevailing Eurocentric simplification and rationalization of “the world of life in all
its economic, political, cultural and religious subsystems” (Dussel 2006: 492) are also the roots of epistemic sovereignty - “the culture of the European vision of the world” - that we need to scrutinize and discuss again. Similarly, what Mbembe proposes is to work out
our own ways towards another vision of the world, perceived from another viewpoint. Such a vision is but a significant example of today’s counter-hegemonic theoretical strategies, produced locally yet with the causality and implications of global necrocolonial
politics in mind. However, this vision is not conceived and shall not be accepted as another particular local knowledge, constructed in defense of a yet another pseudo-universal form of thinking that aspires to become the new epistemic sovereignty. We have to
understand it as an alternative to the existent pseudouniversalism of imperial thinking and, by doing so, to work towards establishing a possible counter-hegemonic theoretical coexistence among various knowledge-worlds in their plurality.
Mbembe’s own arguments have inscribed his theory of necropolitics into contemporary
philosophy as one possible and legitimate variant of global knowledges. That is the main reason
why to understand necropolitics means to approach it as the other of biopolitics: not as its clone
but as its inevitable half in the ‘Siamese twin’ situation. In this regard, I treat the theory of
necropolitics as an intentionally pseudo-universal option characterized by the strategic
propensity to claim its own ‘universality’ on behalf of the global anti-imperialist South, and justly so: because its pseudo-universalism is aware of universalist mythology and its counter-effects: an
obscurity imposed by the regime of singular universe of knowledge in the modern/colonial/capitalist/racial world-system (Grosfoguel and Cervantes-Rodríguez, 2002). Necropolitical theory thus appears as a disguised decolonial option behind which the South enters
. If the biopolitical armature

into a profound dialogue with the obdurate Northern epistemic mytheme. Positioned side by side, they must keep this dialogue open (the dominant structure of
is gradually dismantled through such a dialogue, this will allow for a truly
knowledgecommunication)
emancipatory potential of theoretical propositions, earlier dismissed, to be exposed again (or, in
). In that sense, Mbembe’s ‘return of death’ to philosophy is part of the global and
many cases, for the first time ever
unavoidable process that is not only characterized by one single anti-imperial paradigm (‘necropolitical’,
but rather by numerous possible paradigms unrelated to necropolitics itself. Within

for that matter)
such complexity, a single imperial epistemology is an insufficient option to cope with the
numerous modalities of knowledge, or the pluriverse of local knowledge (s). Hence, to have the epistemological pluralism legitimized –
and to have such legitimacy recognized and globally accepted side by side with the imperialist epistemology – is not only a worthwhile but an urgent task. It is so for the global anti-imperialist South as much as for the rest of the world.
Surrealism
Bataille and Fanon use surrealism to affirm a notion of sovereignty that empties
into infinite freedom – re-creation and dignity come from a violent upheaval of
state
Hirsch 2013 (Alexander, Department of Political Science, University of Alaska. “Sovereignty
surreal: Bataille and Fanon beyond the state of exception.” Contemporary Political Theory. 10
September 2013. Accessed 7/14/17. EHL)
Despite this diametrical opposition, both Bataille and Fanon share a common intellectual and
political debt to surrealism. For both thinkers, surrealism manifests an esthetic of
transgression, one that upends categories of thought deeply embedded in the
occidental imaginary. Surrealism portends an experimental mode of sovereignty, not
hemmed in by rational discourses or legalistic institutionalisms, but rather mapped in a
shifting assemblage of sensations, forces, practices, relations and emergences .
And at the end of the day it is surrealism’s radical ambition that draws both thinkers: surrealism that seeks not merely to invent a
distinct esthetic, but moreover to imagine a new self, an uncanny self proportionate to the
convulsive beauty it valorizes.25 Bataille’s surrealism of ‘sheer negativity’ takes the self‐
possessed and autonomous subject of liberal humanism as its central target. A
poignant example can be found in Bataille’s novel Blue of Noon. Troppmann, the novel’s central protagonist, declares that he has attained a
is self‐annihilating: ‘There was no more authentic reality in

sovereign condition of ‘happiness that defies all reason’. The experience
me’. Bataille describes such reason-defying self-obliteration as a ‘fall into nothingness ... the fall into the
emptiness of the sky ... the empty infinite of freedom’, which is linked to death, beauty and
ultimately to ‘that most essential human possibility: sovereignty itself’.26 In the ‘Fact of Blackness’ chapter of Black Skin,
Fanon strikes a passage that is almost directly in conversation with Blue of

Noon, both in its vertiginous surreal imagery and in its depiction of freedom as
being inexorably linked to nothingness (albeit now in reverse fashion). ‘Yesterday’, writes Fanon, awakening to the
world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disemboweled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed.
This is Fanon’s rejoinder to the dubious

Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. (p. 140)
counsel of a disabled veteran who has advised that he submit to his racial subjection, that he ‘adopt the humility of the cripple’, and
‘resign himself ... [to his] color the way I got used to my stump’. ‘With all my strength’, Fanon insists, ‘I refuse to accept that amputation ... I feel
myself a soul as immense as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest rivers, my chest has the power to expand without limit’ (p. 140). Where
Bataille delights in Troppmann’s self-evisceration, Fanon refuses the empty silence found there. The dizzying, swirling, beckoning sky to which Fanon
turns is indeed ‘convulsively beautiful’. However, it is also the source of a promise that the enslaved in the colony can never realize. This because
Forgetting is, as such, cognate not with

the colonized are cut off from the kind of freedom Bataille describes.
sovereignty, but rather sovereignty’s opposite. Of course, despite these important differences, both
Bataille and Fanon presage a mode of surreal sovereignty totally opposed to
Schmitt. For Schmitt, sovereignty is a Grenzbegriff, a limit or border concept (see Strong, 2012, pp. 238–239). Specifically, sovereignty marks
the distinction between ordinary law and he who reigns above that law, and thus wields the agency to posit its exception. For Bataille,
sovereignty is defined precisely as the absence of any such distinction. Moreover, rather than conceive of sovereignty in
juridical terms, Bataille argues it is instead a condition of existence, one prompted by the
sublime freedom felt in the midst of decreation. Fanon also describes sovereignty
as a condition of existence. However, the condition of existence Fanon associates with
sovereignty is related now to what we might call recreation. Specifically, sovereignty
amounts to the dignity earned by those who contest the colony as state of
exception, and project an alternative claim to decolonized life in the process . Thus,
as with Bataille, one might say that for Fanon sovereignty refers not to he who declares the state of
exception, but rather to he who violently overthrows such a state.
The alt is a new form of museumificaiton of surrealism

that sacrifices the self to craft a new subject
Much is made of Bataille's link to surrealism, on the basis of his personal

engagement with the surrealist movement and his battles with Breton. Like Bataille,
surrealism seeks to escape the confines of thought and art of its time, and Bataille has a
strong sympathy with parts of its programme, but it seems to me that he always regards
surrealism as a failure, and that he is writing 'against surrealism in much the same way
as he writes against architecture. 3 The problem with surrealism is that in trying to get 'above (sur) it elevates the low
(the erotic, the violent, the deadly) and thereby makes it into a value and the resulting adulterations matter little to the surrealists: that
the unconscious is no more than a pitiable treasure-trove; that Sade, emasculated by his cowardly
apologists, takes on the form of a moralising idealist All claims from below have been scurrilously disguised as claims from above:
and the surrealists, having become the laughingstock of those who have seen
close up a sorry and shabby failure, obstinately hold on to their magnificent
Icarian pose. (The "Old Mole" and the Prefix Sur3, 39; OC II, 103) Surrealism, then, becomes little
more than therapy - for society, for the artist. What is interesting is that Bataille does not
regard failure as definitive - at least surrealism has tried. His tone after the war is much more conciliatory to both Breton
and surrealism in general, but all that has altered is that the general economy leads Bataille to view Icarian failure as one of the
possible 'heights of sovereignty. The problem that surrealism never eludes is that of being an
aesthetic movement, despite its conversion to communism and extolling of
psychoanalysis (partially shared by Bataille, at least insofar as he shares surrealism's
aims). If surrealism had tried this a bit more convincingly, it would have met Bataille's criteria for how modernism (Tesprit
moderne') could operate whilst reviving elements from 'pre-modern societies. He complains that instead of blood
rituals, our society has aesthetics ('L'esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions ['Modernism and the Game
of Transpositions'], OC I, 272-3), and, in the main, modernism does not breach the 'separation of
spheres'. The viewer is able to help here, even in the confines of the museum. If the work of art is strong enough, new 'methods
of criticism and appreciation can be brought to bear. Bataille rails against the rational consumption
of art, writing, Ί defy any lover of painting to love a picture as much as a
fetishist loves a shoe' Myth Before the war, Bataille sees hope in the form of 'myth', as myth
is what is present in genuine communities - they embody myth and myth embodies
them. Above all, myth inspires the kind of community that exists only in the
festival, in sacrifice. For the individual, 'myth remains at the disposal of one
who cannot be satisfied by art, science or politics (Th e Sorcerer's Apprentice', 232; OC I, 535),
and in the exceeding of the individual, myth alone returns, to the one who is broken by every ordeal, the image of a plenitude extended
to the community where men gather. Myth
alone enters the bodies of those it binds and it expects
from them the same receptiveness. It is the frenzy of every dance; it takes existence 'to its
boiling point': it communicates to it the tragic emotion that makes its sacred intimacy
possible, (ibid.) Myth is given no content by Bataille, but the implication is that ther e will
be myths, in the form of stories, even if the 'height of existence lies in the moment they
fall away. This falling away is all that separates him from the Fascist vision of uniting 'the
people' through myth and action. ('L'esprit moderne et le jeu des transpositions', 273). The fetishist is
exceeded by the erotic connection with the object; the art lover maintains a
safe distance. In more general terms the consumption of art can be more sacrificial,
refusing to accept the boundaries of taste, criteria of skill on the part of the
painter, art knowledge on t he part of the viewer. In an article on a painting by Dali, Bataille
writes that Dali makes him want 'to squeal like a pig before his canvases (The Lugubrious Game', 28; OC I, 215). Along the way Dali
and Picasso are seen to 'differ from each other as much as a cloud of flies from an elephant (30n.; 213n.). The former was less than
taken with Bataille's article, and refused to let him us e a copy of the picture, but Bataille is, in his own way, praising Dali,
emphasizing that he had shown us the low, dirty side of the unconscious. 4 If
art can still inspire us, 'after the
death of God', then for Bataille, it has to force out of us a reaction that exceeds
rationality. After the war, myth is presented somewhat differently. Now Bataille speaks of the
'absence of myth\ Instead of myth filling, however ironically, the space vacated by God (perhaps, for the artist, in the form of a
'personal symbolism,), myth
now signals its failure - there is no myth left, our last
story is this absence. Awareness of this is no less a belief than that granted any other myth and is the further revelation
that even emptiness is only belief, belief only emptiness: 'the absence of myth is also a myth: the coldest, the purest, the only true
myth* (The Absence of Myth/, 48; OCXI, 236). Surrealism
is one of the movements that has never made
this leap, content to play around with aesthetics, believing that somewhere a truth
lurked. At another level, surrealism is part of the absence of myth in the sense that it is a
myth without foundation, and therefore responds to the mythlessness of capitalist
modernist, restricted society. However, it cannot be an answer, because there is no answer, and although it is not
explicit, maybe the fact of this 'absence of myth being our only myth, and therefore our only truth, is Bataille's equivalent to Adorno's
question about the possibility of poetry 'after Auschwitz'.5 This 'fundamental lack or emptiness should be taken as underpinning
Bataille's longer writings on art that he produced in the 1950s and was working on up to his death. Much of this work is taken up with
questions of 'the origin of art', and origins, for Bataille, are only ever retrospective, even if at first sight his stream of assertions seem
to add up to a belief in a true origin. Only our lack of myth/truth enables us to look back, for
example, at the cave paintings in the way Bataille wishes to, as this is the period before
myth, or perhaps of pure myth, without content. The Origins of Art and Humanity The discovery of the cave
paintings at Lascaux, in south-west France, in 1940, informs much of the standard work on the 'history of art', wherein a teleology is
set up such that all pictures and representations become part of a pseudo-Hegelian schema where the West is the furthest along the
path to complete Spirit. In a way, Bataille does not offer anything strikingly different from this. Like many others, and in particular the
artists of the time, he had already emphasized the link between 'primitive art and modern (ist) art. 6 In Lascaux, Bataille
presents and analyses the array of pictures that had been unearthed, and
brings them into his 'system*. Here was proof of what he had been arguing, and here was not just what had been
present 'at the beginning* but more importantly, what was untainted by the accretions of truths, and could now be looked at through a
modern 'absence of myth*. Lascaux
and the later Tears of Eros try to set out the centrality of art,
along with death, eroticism and so on. They are not always convincing, and Bataille is
often drawn into just marvelling at the violence and raw beauty of the cave paintings.
Whilst this is in some ways an updating of his suggestions about experiencing art intimately, it is annoying in the long run. Lascaux
brings an addition to the 'system* of general economy. Previously, death is the 'differential term, both
bringing humanity, and being what lies beyond humanity. Eroticism fills
exactly the same position, and so, as a result of these two, does
'discontinuous being - our existence as discrete individuals. In addition,
awareness of death brings the possibility or, perhaps, the requirement not
to squander but to accumulate, to preserve . This in turn breeds the 'accursed share wher e
expenditure become s the outside that was 'always already outside. Into this paradoxical beginning of humanity
(always to b e glimpsed in retrospect) comes art. In looking at the 'origin of humanity', we have looked to evidence of the
commemoration of the dead, and also the existence of tools. Bataille adds that the introduction of art
and of play a re also significant (Lascaux, 27; OC EX, 28), and goes on to say that
awareness of death and the world of work and accumulation (which
includes language) is not all that are required to be human. Whilst it would hardly be
new to say that humanity exists due to its capacity to create, what might be of more interest is the fact that, for Bataille, this
capacity is absolutely bound up with death, eroticism and the rejection
(through utility) of what is most creative. He writes that 'art, play and
transgression only come about together, in a unique movement of the
negation of the principles which preside over the regularity of work (Lascaux, 38;
OC Art and Aesthetics 139 IX, 41). This
coming together happens under the auspices of
transgression and taboo which, as in Eroticism, constitutes another version
of 'the origin. As a result, all art should aim to transgress (Lascaux, 39; OC EX, 42). So what we
have here is more (or less) than a dialectic. Negation, or something like differance, is at work/play; death as negation forms awareness
of life; this in turn informs work; art, then, is the next negation. Except that having become this negation, art is transgression of the
limits of work. Death,
too, has become transgression. The taboo, even in the form of work, is
only the going against what was before it, and this is only informed by what comes after.
Once death, art, eroticism or whatever becomes the outside, the other, it is then also at
the beginning: instead of a progress of negations, there is only an endless crossing and
recrossing of lines. In this, art is perfect, as it is both work and the excess of work ('Dossier de
Lascaux', OCEX, 341). Another paradox awaits us, in the largely straightforward description of the violent and erotic scenes of the
cave paintings. This paradox is to do with something like 'the birth of figuration'. According to Bataille, the painters of
Lascaux show us their humanness in figuring animality - or at least what we might
consider, once 'inside humanity', as animal (Lascaux, 115; OC EX, 62). This animality is on its
way out, and what we see in the pictures is both this loss, and that this loss is
what defines humanity (mourning might be too strong a term, however).
The human heads are disfigured, or are replaced by animal heads (see also Tart
primitif, OC I, 251). 'In the sacred moment of figuration, they seem to have turned away from what should, however, have been the
human attitude (Lascaux, 116; OC EX, 63). The reason for this is that the 'human attitude is one of work,
and the painting is part of the excess of work, even if a ritual use value could
be attributed to it. Despite his theory not requiring it, woman, too, is the
outside. Whether Woman filled this role or not is not the issue - the point is Bataille's attribution of timelessness to it, in a
replaying of the worst of psychoanalysis. He writes of the headless sculptures of Woman from
prehistoric times as conveying fear above all else. The multiple breasts
demonstrate, for him, that breasts 'had frightening for a long time* (123; OC IX,
72). I note this comment largely because it is so representative of his throwaway references to women and is not essential to his
thought at all, but is potentially damaging, due to its arbitrariness. The Tears of Eros adds little to the points made in Lascaux. It tries
to establish the lineage between the erotic, death-oriented a rt of the caves and
Western art insofar as it ha s pursued transgression, sex, death. The collection of
images and accompanying text come across as overly thematic, presuming an untroubled link between excess and its representation,
which contradicts most, if not all, of Bataille's theories. Essentially, the book relies on the presumption that a violent enough scene,
conveyed with some violence, can stimulate the Inne r experience of community through sacrifice or violence. This book, for its
author [writes Bataille of The Tears of Eros], ha s only one meaning: it opens up consciousness of the self (The Tears of Eros, 142;
OCX, 620). Now, maybe this is only meant to apply to him, in the process of writing, but it is clearly an attempt to reach at least some
of its readers through an 'absent community'. Perhaps the most interesting part is the revelation of the 'Chinese torture pictures that h e
had been mentioning over the years. Th e pictures show scenes, at the beginning of the century, of a young Chinese man being
dismembered, and wearing a look of ecstasy. Bataille had an ecstatic reaction to the picture, and this had led him on to think of the
merging of religious and erotic ecstasies through violence (206; 627). Th e book closes with wha t could be seen as the completion of
the story opened in Lascaux: Religion in its entirety was founded upon sacrifice. But only
an interminable detour allows us to reach that instant where the contraries
seem visibly conjoined, where the religious horror disclosed in sacrifice
becomes linked to the abyss of eroticism, to the last shuddering tears that eroticism alone can illuminate.
(207; 627) Ther e are various problems here. In his desire to affirm, Bataille has given too much of an answer - we seem to have
finally emerged from the light, blinking into the dark, and the dark is true. Images seem to serve as means to another end, and are
therefore caught within a restricted economy. Further to this point is that Bataille has become overly
obsessed with content, and has neglected to notice that the pictures, however alarming
they might be in their clarity, allow us some control. It would be more interesting at least
to include more firmly the aspect of formal 'horror' or 'ecstasy'. On the more positive side, the book
offers a possible way out of the impasse of having to organize thought to disorganize it, of having to offer discourse where its
destruction was what was wanted. The Tears of Eros stands as a version of Bataille's system put in play, where the strength of the
discourse cannot help. The images allow a silence to speak, one which Bataille thinks sufficient enough to provoke a reaction, through
contagion. The book is highly personalized, which some might regard as a good thing, but even this element is only of worth if taken
in the light of his writings on sovereignty, eroticism and the general economy; otherwise it is a slightly painful (as in poor) avowal of
his own subjectivity. Bataille does not neglect the issue of form in art (he is very reticent to think
about form in literature). His work on Manet is a good example of this concern, and a much more successful merging of his obsessions
and theories than the attempt made in Tears of Eros. In Manet, Bataille makes the now familiar claim that Manet should be seen as the
start of the modern movement, at least within art, both because of his subject matter, and because of his treatment of it. 7 As usual,
Bataille focuses on the content of the works he is discussing, but he breaks through this
self-imposed barrier to think about the question of content, as this is what Manet raises,
bringing in contemporary scenes and characters. Manet goes beyond realism, making art
autonomous, writes Bataille (Manet, 36; OC IX, 126).8 Another of his favourites, Goya, had opened the way, offering
horror to an otherwise complacent public, and also a meditation on death and the process of viewing (or writing) - two ways of
introducing (or inducing) absence (51-2; 132). Manet continues in the same vein, but begins to remove the significance from the
content. Unlike purely abstract art, Manet's takes a subject and empties it. The subject is maintained as an absence that echoes (and
even come s before) the death of God. Indifference is part of this process, and Bataille cites Manet's reworking of
Goya's picture of t he assassination of Emperor Maximilian (52-5; 133-4). This indifference is a
revolt against the vacuous persistence of old forms of art, and he moves toward
sovereignty through 'the silence of art' (58; 135) and the silencing of art. Olympiads prostitute is
all of this, t he bearer of an aggressive indifference, manifesting a low eroticism, and with Manet disdainful in the 'underpainted detail,
he r 'presence ha s the simplicity of an absence (67; 142), bringing sovereignty not to what is figured, but to the process of (de)
figuration. Olympia is about the loss of narrative, a narrative that does get started, only to be lost, as 'what this picture signifies is not
text but [text] being wiped away (67; 142). Above all, Olympia is an attack on all that is solid: 'Olympia, like modern poetry, is the
negation of this world: the negation of Olympus, of the poem, of the mythological monument, of the monumen t and of monumenta l
conventions (71; 145). This reading stands as a potentially crucial moment in the Bataillean oeuvre, indicating how nihilism is there, h
ow NOTHING 'is', when (dis) appearing through a figured image: in other words, 'pure destruction is of no interest, compared to the
slow burning emptiness that signals the impossibility of the nothing lurking inside (when it is supposed to be outside, far away). The
subject of the painting - the person being painted, in their subjectivity - is also subject to attack. Manet's way of painting an individual,
his way of emptying the subjectivity and draining the surroundings, 'is like sacrifice, is sacrifice', one 'which alters, which destroys,
which kills the victim, without neglecting if (103; 157). As a result, Manet's painting is not so much interesting for what is in it as for
what it does (102; 156). Formless To conclude this survey of Bataille's 'aesthetic', we return to an early piece, 'Formless (Visions of
Excess, 31; 'Informe', OC I, 217), as this ha s stimulated one of the essential recent works on modern Art and Aesthetics 143 and
contemporary art: Krauss and Bois's Formless: A User's Guide. Rather than repeat what they have done (which is to formulate a
Bataillean aesthetics of modern art, and apply it), I will draw attention to some points arising from their text, in terms of Bataille's
thought in general. Krauss and Bois take 'formless and make of it a way of theorizing process (amongst other things), arguing on the
basis that, according to Bataille, 'a dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words, but their tasks (Bataille, 'Formless',
31; OC 1,217), and that 'formless is the beginning of this new dictionary.9 'Formless is also what lies outside the dictionary, that
which is covered up in the assigning of forms, and it therefore operates as the differance between Form and Formlessness. Krauss and
Bois do not take the next step, which is to note that 'formless too is a form, a way of encapsulating 'that which escapes form', so is
trapped within the world of form, rather than being a resistance to it, or its inherent unravelling. Insofar as it is an unravelling, it is that
which is within the giving of forms, and cannot be. we look at the last sentence of 'Formless', we can see that Bataille signals formless
as the arbitrariness, the impossibility, the nonevent of form that form hides (like presence to absence, life to death and so on):
'affirming that the universe resembles nothing and is only formless amounts to saying that the universe is something like a spider or a
gob of spit (31; 217 trans, mod.). As with chaos mathematics, it is a mistake to think that
'formless is the site or process of the loss of forms - rather it is a new way of
looking at how form coalesces - a way that entails thinking the continual
movement between something and nothing, form and lack of form. In short, all
form 'contains'formlessness, and the formless cannot be brought out. In terms of Bataille's oeuvre,
the 'formless occupies a space similar to that held by abjection. It is both an 'outside and something
permeating the 'inside (of form, of identity, of solidity). In terms of aesthetic philosophy,
we could liken it to Kant's sublime: totally outside of the categories of beauty, but
somehow informing them, as that which beauty cannot simply be. But Bataille's 'sublime
is one of the movement of crossing, of transgression rather than an observation of
something fearful 'outside'. From the early writings on, Bataille is effectively looking for
some kind of sublime where the process of representation is exceeded. In this excess, the
individual loses their isolated subjectivity and joins with the loss 'presented
by a work of art. Even if Bataille never really moves far from such an idea, excess is written in a way
that is the opposite of the sublime as some kind of regulating device, some
way of letting off ontological steam. Throughout his writings, loss, waste,
death, sacrifice and so on are determining, in the end, and not adjuncts. His
writings on art contain both the best and the worst elements of his
obsessions: on the one hand we get dynamic dispersal of form, content,
subjectivity; on the other, a simplistic liking for a pseudo-gothic aesthetic.
Excessive spaces generate a reconception of sovereignty where democracy is no
longer defined by bitter experience – surrealism ensures that sovereignty
eludes the grasps of the decisionist politics and neoliberalism that are deployed
to exclude – surreal sovereignty regenerates a subject conception for excluded
peoples
Hirsch 2013 (Alexander, Department of Political Science, University of Alaska. “Sovereignty
surreal: Bataille and Fanon beyond the state of exception.” Contemporary Political Theory. 10
September 2013. Accessed 7/14/17. EHL)
Today, sovereignty appears to be on the move. Aihwa Ong has suggested that global capital has patterned the world into
reconditioned zones of production, distribution and consumption entailing ‘adjustments and
compromises in national sovereignty’. The result has been a recalibration of ‘graduated sovereignty’,
which for Ong (2006) refers to ‘the effects of a flexible management of sovereignty, as governments
adjust political space to the dictates of global capital, giving corporations an indirect power over
the political conditions of citizens in zones that are differently articulated to global production
and financial circuits’ (p. 78). In reading contemporary mutations of sovereign life in this fashion, Ong argues for a more expansive view of
Schmittian exceptionalism: ‘I conceptualize the exception more broadly, as an extraordinary departure in policy that can be
deployed to include as well as to exclude’. By this, Ong means that though contemporary critics often turn to Schmitt in order to
theorize Guantánamo Bay and all the exclusions upon which that particular sovereign exception depends, for instance, the market-driven
logic of the exception qua global capital can also be a ‘positive decision to include selected
populations and spaces as targets of calculative choices and value‐orientation associated with
neoliberal reform’. Of course, in a world beset by economic flux, brought on by the global financial crisis of 2008, one wonders just how
totalizing the neoliberal technologies of disciplinary power Ong describes truly are. Sovereignty, in the current conjuncture, appears to
be less obviously a technology of neoliberal governmentality. The temper has changed, generative
openings are surfacing and re-surfacing. New forms of sovereign life, rich and thick with political possibility,
have been proliferating in West Asia and Northern Africa, where the Arab Spring is working to sweep away old decisionist
regimes; in the Iberian and Hellenic worlds, where upheaval is a recurrent potentiality; and in the United States, where the Occupy
movement managed to galvanize popular unrest and dissatisfaction with neoliberal policies, if
only for a moment. I would argue that these are events of what Sheldon Wolin calls fugitive democracy. By democracy
Wolin (1996) does not mean something akin to liberal procedural justice; rather, ‘ democracy needs to be reconceived as
something other than a form of government: as a mode of being conditioned by bitter

experience, doomed to succeed only temporarily, but is a recurrent possibility so long as the
memory of the political survives’ (p. 22). Democracy for Wolin, in other words, is not about legal institutionalism, public
administration or decisionist forms of exceptional power imposed from on high. Rather, democracy appears in flash scenes of
constituent power that percolate up from below. Such moments call for a theory of sovereignty tantamount to the ‘mode of
being conditioned by bitter experience’ they epitomize.27 Bataille and Fanon provide a felicitous point of departure for reconceptualizing
sovereignty in precisely these terms. Sovereignty, for both thinkers, is a species of being. Specifically, sovereignty is a
condition shot through with surreal experiences that render strange the familiar categories of
thought, replacing them with new structures of feeling. For Bataille, these experiences are decreative, while for Fanon
they are recreative. For Bataille, sovereignty ecstatically dislocates the subject, whereas for Fanon sovereignty
regenerates a remembered subjectivity to those from whom it has been taken. To indicate that Bataille
and Fanon speak to our political present is not to sound sanguine about the prospects for wholesale transformation. The question for the
new sovereignty projects emergent on the world stage is how to sustain, in the post-
insurrection phase, contestations over the meaning and modalities of social change. This is a
question that scholars and activists will continue to ponder and debate. What does appear clear, however, is that there is something that exceeds the
regulatory function of neoliberal sovereignty’s spaces and targets of ‘calculative choices and value‐orientations’. Bataille
and Fanon are
stewards of these excessive spaces. And in their surreal visions of sovereignty, something is
born out that eludes the grasp of decisionist politics, something worth dignifying.
Terrorist assemblage
We begin our studies with that of the terrorist assemblage – explode the
binaries between legitimate and illegitimate violence that sustains western
imperialism
Let us return to the example of Palestine where two apparently irreconcilable logics are
confronting each other the logic of martyrdom and the logic of survival
: I would like to . In examining these two logics,
reject on the twin issues of death and terror on the one hand and terror and freedom on the
other In the confrontation between these two logics terror is not on one side and death on the
. ,
other Terror and death are at the heart of each

. the survivor is the one who having . As Elias Canetti reminds us, ,
stood in the path of death knowing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen
, , is still alive. Or,
the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of enemies and managed not only
more precisely,
to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers the lowest form of survival is killing . This is why, to a large extent, .
Canetti points out that in the logic of survival “each man is the enemy of every other.” Even ,
more radically in the logic of survival one’s horror at the sight of death turns into satisfaction
,
that it is someone else who is dead It is the death of the other that makes the . , his or her physical presence as a corpse,
survivor feel unique And each enemy killed makes the survivor feel more secure 74 The logic of
. .
martyrdom proceeds along different lines It is epitomized by the figure of the “suicide bomber,” .
which itself raises a number of questions What intrinsic difference is there between killing with a .
missile helicopter or a tank and killing with one’s own body? Does the distinction between the
arms used to indict death prevent the establishment of a system of general exchange between
the manner of killing and the manner of dying? The “suicide bomber” wears no ordinary
soldier’s uniform and displays no weapon The candidate for martyrdom chases his or her targets . ;
the enemy is a prey for whom a trap is set Significant in this respect is the location of the .
ambush laid the bus stop the café the discotheque the marketplace the checkpoint the road
: , , , , , —in sum,
the spaces of everyday life The trapping of the body is added to the ambush location The
. .
candidate for martyrdom transforms his or her body into a mask that hides the soon-to-be-
detonated weapon Unlike the tank or the missile that is clearly visible the weapon carried in the
. ,
shape of the body is invisible it forms part of the body It is so intimately part of the body
. Thus concealed, .
that at the time of detonation it annihilates the body of its bearer who carries with it the bodies ,
of others when it does not reduce them to pieces The body does not simply conceal a weapon . .
The body is transformed into a weapon not in a metaphorical sense but in the truly ballistic ,
sense my death goes hand in hand with the death of the Other Homicide and suicide are
. In this instance, .
accomplished in the same act And to a large extent resistance and self-destruction are . ,
synonymous To deal out death is therefore to reduce the other and oneself to the status of
.
pieces of interties and assembled with difficulty before the burial

, scattered every- Public Culture where,war is the . In this case,
war of body on body one has to come as close as possible to the body of the enemy
(guerre au corps-à-corps). To kill, .
To detonate the bomb necessitates resolving the question of distance through the work of ,
proximity and concealment How are we to interpret this manner of spilling blood in which death
.
is not simply that which is my own but always goes hand in hand with the death of the other?75 ,
How does it differ from death indicted by a tank or a missile in a context in which the cost of my ,
survival is calculated in terms of my capacity and readiness to kill someone else? In the logic of
“martyrdom,” the will to die is fused with the willingness to take the enemy with you that is with , ,
closing the door on the possibility of life for everyone . This logic seems contrary to another one, which consists in wishing to impose death on others while preserving one’s
Canetti describes this moment of survival as a moment of power

own life. triumph develops . In such a case,
precisely from the possibility of being there when the others in this case the enemy Such ( ) are no longer there.
is the logic of heroism as classically understood In the logic of martyrdom : to execute others while holding one’s own death at a distance. ,
a new semiosis of killing emerges It is not necessarily based on a relationship between form and .
matter the body here becomes the very uniform of the martyr But the body as such is
. As I have already indicated, .
not only an object to protect against danger and death The body in itself has neither power nor .
value The power and value of the body result from a process of abstraction based on the desire
.
for eternity In that sense the martyr having established a moment of supremacy in which the
. , ,
subject overcomes his own mortality can be seen as laboring under the sign of the future , . In other words,
in death the future is collapsed into the present the besieged body passes through two . In its desire for eternity,
stages. First, it is transformed into a mere thing, malleable matter. Second, the manner in which
it is put to death—suicide—affords it its ultimate signification. The matter of the body or again ,
the matter which is the body is invested with properties that cannot be deduced from its
,
character as a thing The besieged body becomes a piece of metal whose

, but from a transcendental nomos outside it.
function is The body duplicates itself and literally and metaphorically

, through sacrifice, to bring eternal life into being. , in death,
escapes the state of siege and occupation the relation between terror and . Let me explore, in conclusion, , freedom,
sacrifice Martin Heidegger argues that the human’s “being toward death” is the decisive
.
condition of all true human freedom Whereas Heidegger .76 In other words, one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die one’s own death.
grants an existential status to being-toward-death and considers it an event of freedom Bataille ,
suggests that “sacrifice in reality reveals nothing.” It is not simply the absolute manifestation of
negativity death reveals the human subject’s animal side which he refers to
. It is also a comedy. For Bataille, ,
moreover as the subject’s “natural being.” “For man to reveal himself in the end , he has to die, but he will have to do so
the human subject has to be fully alive at the very moment of dying
while alive—by looking at himself ceasing to exist,” he adds. In other words, ,
to be aware of his or her death to live with the impression of actually dying Death itself must
, .
become awareness of the self at the very time that it does away with the conscious being . “In a sense, this is
what at least is on the point of taking place or what takes place in an elusive
what happens ( by , , fugitive manner),
means of a subterfuge in the sacrifice In the sacrifice the sacrificed identifies himself with the . ,
animal on the point of death and even at one with the weapon of
. Thus he dies seeing himself die, , in some sense, through his own will,
sacrifice But this is play!” And for Bataille play is more or less the means by which the human
. ,
subject “voluntarily tricks himself.”77 How does the notion of play and trickery relate to the
“suicide bomber”? There is no doubt that in the case of the suicide bomber the sacrifice consists
of the spectacular putting to death of the self of becoming his or her own victim self-sacrifice). , (
The self-sacrificed proceeds to take power over his or her death and to approach it head-on This .
power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one’s own body does not affect
the continuity of the being The idea is that the being exists outside us The self-sacrifice consists
. . ,
in the removal of a twofold prohibition that of self-immolation

here, and that of murder : (suicide) . Unlike primitive
Death here achieves the character of a transgression

sacrifices, however, there is no animal to serve as a substitute victim. . But unlike crucifixion, it has no expiatory
It is not related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition

dimension. . Indeed, a dead person cannot recognize his or her killer, who is
Does this imply that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness excess and
also dead. ,
scandal? Whether read from the perspective of slavery or of colonial occupation death and ,
freedom are irrevocably interwoven As we have seen terror is a defining feature of both slave . ,
and late-modern colonial regimes Both regimes are also specific instances and experiences of .
unfreedom and roadblocks everywhere buildings
. To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”: fortified structures, military posts, ;
that bring back painful memories of humiliation and beatings curfews that imprison , interrogations, ;
hundreds of thousands in their cramped homes every night from dusk to day- break soldiers ;
patrolling the unlit streets parents shamed and beaten in front of their
, frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets;
families shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun

; soldiers urinating on fences, pounding on , chanting loud offensive slogans,
fragile tin doors to frighten the children consecrating papers or dumping garbage in the middle , ,
of a residential neighborhood shootings and fatalities a certain

; border guards kicking over a vegetable stand or closing borders at whim; bones broken; —
kind of madness the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship

.78 In such circumstances, (trial by death) are marked by excess. What
and freedom is an ecstatic notion of temporality and politics The future

connects terror, death, . , here, can be authentically anticipated,
but not in the present The present itself is but a moment of vision vision of the freedom not yet
. —
come Death in the present is the mediator of redemption Far from being an encounter with a
. .
limit this preference for death over continued servitude is a

, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.”79 As Gilroy notes,
commentary on the nature of freedom itself or the lack thereof). If this lack is the very nature of (
what it means for the slave or the colonized to exist the same lack is also precisely the way in ,
which he or she takes account of his or her mortality Referring to the practice of individual or .
mass suicide by slaves cornered by the slave catchers Gilroy suggests that death , , in this case, can be represented as agency.
For death is precisely that from and over which I have power But it is also that space where .
freedom and negation operate .

The Story of the Ear
We affirm the severed ear as a disjunction between the
normative modes of thought which habituate the status quo.
This proposal is a visceral reaction to the labyrinthine structure
of politics and instead resides within the razor and the severed
ear as a complete upheaval of the stability of the subject and the
world. Bataille says that this affirmation is one that changes the
being of the human subject from that of Jupiter to Prometheus,
a painting of the world order through violent dismemberment as
a form of “radiance, explosion, and flames… a flood of molten
rock surging from beneath”
Rönnbäck’15 – Fredrik Ronnbaack holds a Ph.D. in French Lit from NYU. He published on Michel Leiris and
Bataille and is the translator of several works by Georges Perec into Swedish – 2015 – “The Other Sun: Non-Sacrificial
Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Georges Bataille” -- KZaidi
Story of the Ear
Mutilations abound in Bataille’s work. In two articles written in the 1930s, he addresses the famous episode that took place on December
23, 1888, in Arles,
when Vincent van Gogh took to his left ear with a razor. In “Sacrificial
Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” published in 1930 in Documents, he examines the
event in conjunction with two other cases of self-mutilation. The first concerns a less illustrious artist, Gaston F., who, as he was walking
along Boulevard de Ménilmontant in the vicinity of Père-Lachaise, “suddenly
started staring at the sun and
receiving from its rays the imperative order to rip off a finger, without hesitation, with-
out feeling any pain, bit down on his left index finger, . . . and ripped it off com-
pletely.”12 The young artist himself claimed that, in addition to the Sun’s orders, the
deed was inspired by a biography of Van Gogh, but this literary explanation is rejected entirely by Bataille,
who sees no other possible connection between the two painters than their shared
dependence on the Sun, making the mutilation the equivalent of a ritual sacrifice.13
The second case of self-mutilation referenced by Bataille is perhaps even gorier. A woman,
having been committed to an asylum after a delirium of religious hallucinations, is found in her room one morning trying
to
gouge out her eyes with her bare hands. When asked about her motives, she “claimed to
have heard the voice of God and to have seen a few moments later a man of fire: ‘Give me your
ears, crack open your head,’ said the ghost.”14 Having failed to deliver her ears, she decides to appease the
solar deity’s emissary with her eyes instead. Bataille finds this example crucial in that it
illustrates the possibility of passing from a less essential form of ablation—the ear—to
“the most horrifying form of sacrifice”—Oedipal enucleation.15 His inclination to emphasize this
substitution is easy to understand. The symbolic importance of the eye as an object of
self-mutilation is incontestable, and its prominent role in Bataille’s own writings needs no further elucidation. But
what if one were to challenge his quick affirmation that a mutilated ear would have been
any less essential? After all, in two of the three cases mentioned in the article, the ear is the intended object of
sacrificial dismemberment. It appears strange, then, to conclude that it would be of lesser importance than the eye.
In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” Bataille
cites Salomon Reinach’s
interpretation of the Prometheus myth, a self-referential system where the titan, the eagle feeding on
his liver, and the Sun all form one creature who mutilates himself, first by ripping the
Sun from its heavenly position and then again by swallowing his own liver only to spew it
out through his open bowels, once again forcing himself to eat it. “There is, in fact,” Bataille writes, “no
reason to separate the ear of Arles or the index finger of Père-Lachaise from
Prometheus’s famous liver.”16 When he returns to the case of Van Gogh’s self- mutilation in 1937, in the article “Van Gogh
as Prometheus,” published in Verve, the point of reference is, once again, as the title suggests, the
Prometheus myth, but his comparative reading has shifted in a significant way. While his
earlier interpretation focused on the corporeal reflexivity of self-mutilation, he now
develops a theme that was only present in potentia in the earlier essay. Despite being at the heart of
the argument of the previous essay, the importance of the Sun to the Prometheus myth was hardly
explored at all. By the time he pens “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” however, Bataille seems
to have discovered the full potential of this myth as it relates to Van Gogh’s self-mutilation: “For it was
not only a bloody ear that Van Gogh removed from his own head . . . much more than an
ear, Van Gogh who, since 1882, had thought it better to be Prometheus than to be Jupiter,
tore from himself nothing less than a SUN.”17 The severed ear no longer represents the
autophagy of the Aetos Prometheus but rather the theft of the heavenly fire that precedes
it, transposing it from the obscure margins of ritual punishment to the central position of
the transgression itself.
Contrary to Bataille’s claims, the severed ear is central to the aesthetics of his interwar
articles. The immediate implications of the metaphor equating the ear and the Sun are artistic.
The Sun transforms Van Gogh’s art; there is a before and an after to the incident in Arles. The Sun becomes a
mystical force, dictating the rhythm and orientation of his art, a “sorcerer whose dance
slowly stirs the crowd and carries it away in his movements.”18 A seemingly banal question might serve as a next
step: What is the function of the ear? The outer ear, the cartilage appendage also known as the pinna, which is to
say the feather, collects sounds and channels them into the ear canal. But symbolically, as the
ear’s only immediately visible part, it also represents the ear as a whole. Van Gogh’s assault
on the outer ear then ripples inward and becomes an aggression directed at the
unassailable inner ear as well. These are the regions that house the vestibular system that is
the center of our sense of spatial positioning. The ear is the locus of balance and
orientation, and Van Gogh’s solar-induced self-mutilation, as well as the failed attempt by
the woman in the asylum, can be read in light of this fact. The destabilization of Van
Gogh’s art, when the entire visual field is drawn into the wild disorienting dance of the Sun, is symbolically prefigured
by his attack on the center of balance. From that moment on, Van Gogh’s painting is “radiance,
explosion, flames.”19
This mutilation is in fact not, and could never be replaced by, an Oedipal enucleation, and the eye
is conspicuously absent from “Van Gogh as Prometheus.” The chain of associations that is
established instead runs between “the ear, the asylum, the sun, the most spectacular of
feasts and death.”20 Whereas the eye represents the Sun as a symbol of vision and
knowledge—reason as opposed to unreason—what makes it possible for the ear to take its
place is that, like the Sun, it is a means of orientation. Slicing the ear results in a complete
upheaval of the stability and permanence of this world. It is a fragile balance that Van Gogh’s
symbolic self- mutilation disrupts, a stability that is guaranteed only by the great
distance that separates Earth from the perpetual cataclysms of the Sun, and by the thin layer of the
Earth’s crust, “for the incandescence of lava is found in the depths of the earth.”21 When Bataille writes about Van
Gogh’s mutilated art that “the earth undulated like a rapid sea,” the image he summons is
not that of land turning into water, but of a flood of molten rock surging up from
beneath.22
Because of its mazelike structure, the
vestibular system of the inner ear is also frequently referred to
as the labyrinth. It is therefore, as Hollier remarks, the center not only of orientation but also of
disorientation. The ambiguity is reflected in Bataille’s reversal of the labyrinth’s
metaphorical value, denouncing the Icarian aspirations of philosophy to escape on the wings of rational thought.23 Indeed,
it is after the incident in Arles that the Sun assumes its dominant position in Van Gogh’s
paintings, orienting the visual field through its rays, dictating every move in the wild dance it incites. Rosalind
Krauss speaks of two mythic cycles that dominate Bataille’s aesthetics: on the one hand
the “chthonic obscurity of the cave,” the labyrinth where terror and blindness reign, and
on the other the Sun, “that embodiment of the zenith and of light,” which symbolizes the
ideal of elevation but also the madness that ensues if one stares at it fixedly.24 The labyrinth and the Sun
embody opposite aspects of the sacred: the repulsive horrors of the sacred left and the
elevated attraction of the sacred right. Yet the cycles of the Sun and the labyrinth are one
and the same, Krauss writes, and artistic creation occurs “at the limit: where light turns to darkness, where life
surrenders an image of death, where sight is extinguished in a revelatory moment which is the
same as blindness.”25
The limit where sight equals blindness—this is the goal of Icarus’s flight. But the impossibility
of an Icarian flight contained in the story of Van Gogh’s severed ear differs from the
myth. The assault on the labyrinth of the ear is not simply an attempt to escape its prison
by laying it in ruins, nor is it a rejection of the orienta- tional system of the Sun-labyrinth
in favor of limitless chaos. One is not possible without the other, since the immediate
target of the sacrificial gesture is never the labyrinth itself, which remains out of reach,
but the pinna, the feather that lifts Icarus toward the sky. The labyrinth and the feather come together to
form the ear, creating an inextricable unit of errance and escape, and any violence is by necessity directed at both. The
severed ear is Bataille’s answer to the call of the labyrinthine underworld, but the double
bind of the ear’s labyrinth-feather structure turns the descent into an ascent and vice versa.26 Not only is
Icarus’s flight followed by the inevitable fall, but “the height of elevation in fact
coincides with a sudden fall of unheard violence.”27 This is what constitutes the artistic
condition. The flight is also the fall that splits the Sun in two—the one that lures Icarus to fly ever closer
and the one that throws him back down to the ground.
The Sun of the ear is the Sun of balance and imbalance, the Sun that must not be seen, lest
the observer be struck to the ground, for “staring at the sun relates to mental ejaculation, foaming at the mouth and
epileptic fits.”28 It is the Sun of sudden and brutal falls. There is one other mention of epilepsy,
the falling sickness, in Bataille’s early work. It occurs in Story of the Eye, when Simone
abruptly collapses, “her clothes all messed up, her ass in the air, as if she suffered from epilepsy.”29 Simone, of course,
is situated squarely within the main thematic order of this story, which is that of the eye,
so it is hardly surprising that her fall should appear to be nothing more than an act. She
falls to the ground in spasms in order to create a moment of disruption. Her fall reads like a parody of
another fall that occurs earlier in the story, when the pious and naive Marcelle makes her appearance and
surprises Simone and the narrator in a compromising situation. Marcelle’s fall, unlike Simone’s imitation, is authentic and
unprovoked. It is a genuine loss of balance, a failure of the ear.
Metaphorical Taxonomy
Roland Barthes speaks of two metaphorical chains that make up Bataille’s Story of the Eye. On the one hand, there
are the
globular objects: the eye, the testi- cle, and the Sun; on the other, intertwined with these,
there are the liquids: tears, urine, and sunlight.30 If these individual metaphors are grouped together in what
could be classified as the globular and the liquid families, the taxonomy can also be extended to two different
metaphorical orders, both of which include their own versions of the Sun. There is the
order of the eye, to which both of Barthes’s metaphorical chains belong, and there is the order of
the ear. Each
order is defined by a different set of characteristics: The order of the eye
relates to knowledge and reason, and the order of the ear to balance and orientation.
The metaphorical order that unites the Sun and the ear is most explicit in the essays on
Van Gogh, but the Sun as a metaphor for a general principle of orientation can also be
found elsewhere. In the 1938 article “The Obelisk,” published in Mesures, Bataille reproduces almost
verbatim Nietzsche’s parable from The Gay Science about the madman in the town
square. He abruptly cuts the parable short, however, erasing what is arguably the most compelling part of Nietzsche’s argument. For
what is truly noteworthy is not the madman’s announcement that God is dead, but his sudden realization that he has
spoken too soon and that the townspeople surrounding him cannot yet perceive the absence of the Sun,
but instead continue to go about their business in its warm morning glow.
All of this is left out. In fact, Bataille makes a claim that amounts to the opposite. The
disorientation that the madman speaks of already appears to be established truth.
Human beings, he writes, exist in a state of individuality that reduces them to specks of dust, and
what they fail to see is not the absence of a sacred center but, on the contrary, its invisible presence, the gravitational pull of
an ordering principle that has not yet disappeared and that controls the orbital
movements of each individual particle. It is as if the townspeople in Nietzsche’s parable
already believed that they were hurtling through space, away from all Suns, plunging continuously in every
direction. They are all in a sense madmen. Instead it is the town square, where the announcement is made, that
inherently contradicts their beliefs. “The Place de la Concorde is where the death of God must be announced and
shouted out, precisely because the obelisk is its calmest negation. A turbulent and empty human dust
gravitates around it as far as the eye can see.”31 Just like Proust’s steeples, the vertical directionality
of the obelisk pulls the human imagination upwards “in [its] soaring elevation.” The
false sense of order becomes a false sense of disorder.
The madman’s announcement is negated by the sacred topography of the town square, and
Van Gogh’s self-mutilation does not eliminate the pull of the sacred Sun. If anything, the Sun
asserts its attraction with even more force, string- ing out the artist’s works along its rays. But the severed ear
is also the incident that reveals the inaccessibility of the Sun. The intensified attraction is
matched by an equally strong repulsion. The result of the assault on the labyrinth-feather
of the ear is an interruption of the artist’s ascendant trajectory, preventing him from ever reaching the
gravitational core, including its outer limits, where the light of the Sun meets the darkness of the labyrinth. The artist still
desires the sacred, but is forced to abandon the path that leads to it. It is reminiscent of Giorgio
Agamben’s description of acedia, an “anguished sadness and desperation” that results from the sense of awe that the intense contemplation
of God inspires.32 This in turn brings about a withdrawal from the divine; “ it
is the perversion of a will that wants
the object, but not the way that leads to it, and which simultaneously desires and bars
the path to his or her own desire.”33 Not only is there no weakening or extinction of desire, but, just like van
Gogh’s sacred Sun, its intensity appears only to increase. The attitude of the melancholic
is a way to seize an unobtainable object of desire by feigning a loss when in fact nothing
has been lost at all, either because the object was never in the possession of the
melancholic to begin with or simply because the object never existed.
Van Gogh’s self-mutilation symbolically and corporeally illustrates the withdrawal from
the object of desire that is the cause of melancholia. Through the violent destruction of the
ear that is the locus of both disorientation and orientation, of errance and escape, all
forms of movement toward the sacred are rendered impossible. If the mutilation of the eye is a rejection
of the primacy of sight, belonging to a paradigm of vision and blindness, where the true space of artistic creation is the
limit where one turns into the other, the mutilation of the ear abol- ishes this limit
altogether. The story of the ear thus reveals a different aspect of Bataille’s thought, a metaphorical
order based on refusal rather than experience. It is an attempt to grasp the ungraspable by
embracing it in its absence, akin to the belief found in apophatic theology that the ineffable can only be approached through
silence.
Agamben juxtaposes his elaborations on melancholia with a reading of Freud’s 1927 article on fetishism, observing that
what unites the fetishist and the melancholic is that they both succeed in surreptitiously appropriating the absent or
unobtainable object by blocking the path that would force them to accept the impossibility of their desire, which is instead
transferred to another object. The threat of castration that weighs heavily on the fetishist is also, according to C. F. B.
Miller, atthe heart of Bataille’s account of van Gogh’s self-mutilation. It represents a double
bind, a desire to perfectly resemble the solar father who both demands this resemblance
and forbids it.34 But this is where the order of the ear comes into play. It becomes, as it were, an Alexandrian cut that
promptly does away with the Gordian double bind of castration. Subordination is no longer the only
alternative. Instead the desire can be projected onto a different object, creating a new trajectory that is no longer
aimed at the Sun. The same function can be discerned in religious fetishes. William Pietz distinguishes a number of “basic
themes that recur throughout the history of fetish discourse,” one of which is “a fixed power to repeat an original event.”35
Part of the attractive power specific to the fetish object is that it provides a material manifestation of an event that is
unrepeatable and no longer present. The fetish becomes a space of infinite repeatability, a space of presence through
absence.
What emerges, then, is an undercurrent in Bataille’s work, a silent mourning whose

symbolic manifestation is the ear as opposed to the eye. The current has its origin in “Notre-Dame de
Rheims,” a text that was conceived under the sign of the mother, as Hollier notes, contrasting it against a later recollection of the same
events of August 1914—when Bataille
left Reims together with his mother, leaving his father and
brother behind—this time recounted under the sign of the father in The Little One, from
1943.36 The intimate connection between the enucleated eye and the memory of the blind father is addressed by the author himself in
“Coincidences” at the end of Story of the Eye.37 Analogously, it could be said that the
silence of the severed ear recalls
the silence enveloping “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” the motherly cathedral for whom
soldiers marched toward their deaths. The labyrinthine cathedral, with its nave and its aisles, with its
ambulatory and its apse, towers over the city of Reims like the deaf ear of a giant.
AT: BATAILLE
Bataille 
at bataille: theory of expenditure bad
Bataille’s theory of expenditure doesn’t apply to postmodern
consumer capitalism, which is based on massive amounts of
consumption and waste – exactly what Bataille advocates.
Yang 2000 (Mayfair Mei-hui, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California
Santa Barbara, has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of
Michigan, the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for
Advanced Study, Princeton, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity,
Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure,” Current Anthropology, University of Chicago
Journals)
Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s
views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer
capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the
thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of
expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply
creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire
(Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by
consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the
principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer
capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt
similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are
basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would
have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive
accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home décor
merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive
expenditure.
Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the
furthering of military‐industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer
culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self‐depleting archaic sacrificial
economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving
the whole community or social order.
Valorizing expenditure recreates instrumental reason Bataille

hopes to escape
Wolin, PhD, 04
The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual
(Richard, Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in
Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )

At times, Bataille's
celebration of transgression for its own sake seems woefully simplistic. In lieu
of a conceptual framework that would permit one to distinguish between constructive and
retrograde instances of transgression, we are left with an ethos of shock, rupture, and
disruption simpliciter. Bataille seeks to ground postmodern ethics in the attitudes of a
cultural avant-garde (Acephale and the College of Sociology) oriented toward precapitalist life forms that
modernity has scorned. Yet the very idea of achieving a conceptual reckoning with Bataille-
generated ideals such as "transgression," "heterogeneity," and "expenditure" would seem
inimical to their very spirit. In his idiom, to rely on procedures of principled legitimation or a
rational accountability would be to succumb to the logic and rhetoric of "productive
consumption"—the values of a society predicated on instrumental reason and commodity
exchange. (165)
Expenditure is not transgressive- limitless consumption is

useless theory
Paul Mann, 1999, “The Exquisite Corpse of Georges Bataille” in Masocriticism, p. 67-9
the most desperate alibi of all. For “sacrificial
I would like at one and the same time to affirm this model and to dismiss it as
consumption” can never become an explicit critical motive.13 At the moment it presents itself as a proper element
of some critical method, it degenerates into another useful trope, another bit of intellectual
currency, another paper-thin abyss, another proxy transgression; and the force of
transgression moves elsewhere, beneath a blinder spot in the critical eye.14 Questions of
motive or understanding, the fact that one might be self-critical or at least aware of recuperation, are immaterial: what is
at stake here is not self-consciousness but economics, material relations of appropriation and exclusion,
assimilation and positive loss. Whatever transgression occurs in writing on Bataille does so only through the stupid recuperation and
hence evacuation of the whole rhetoric and dream of transgression, only insofar as the false profundity of philosophy or theory evacuates the false profundities it
To justify this as the sublime loss of loss is merely to indulge a paradoxical figure.
apes.
Excess is not a project but a by-product of any discourse; the interest of Bataillean
discourse lies chiefly in the compulsive and symptomatic way it plays with its feces. The
spectacle of critics making fools of themselves does not reveal the sovereign truth of
death: it is only masocritical humiliation, a pathological attempt to disavow the specter of
death. As for the present essay, it makes no claims to any redeeming sacrifice. Far from presenting you with a truer Bataille, far from speaking in his voice
more clearly than his other readers, this essay pleads guilty to the indictment against every appropriation. Until philosophy and theory squeal like a pig before
Bataille’s work, as he claims to have done before Dali’s canvases, there will be no knowledge of Bataille. In the end, one might have to
take and even stricter view: there is no discourse of transgression, either on or by Bataille.
None at all. It would be necessary to write a “Postscript to Transgression” were it not for the fact that Foucault already wrote it in his “Preface,” were it not
for the fact that Bataille himself wrote it the moment before he first picked up his pen. It makes no difference whether one
betrays Bataille, because one lip syncs Bataille’s rhetoric or drones on in the most tedious
exposition. All of these satellite texts are not heliotropic in relation to the solar anus of Bataille’s writing, of the executioners he hoped (really?) would meet
him in the Bois de Boulogne, or depensives in spite of themselves. It would be sentimental to assign them such privileges. They merely fail to fail.
They are symptoms of a discourse in which everyone is happily transgressing everyone else and nothing ever happens, traces of a certain
narcissistic pathos that never achieves the magnificent loss Bataille’s text conveniently
claims to desire, and under whose cover it can continue to account for itself, hoarding its precious debits in a masocriticism that is anything but
sovereign and gloriously indifferent. What is given to us, what is ruinously and profitably exchanged, is a
lie. Heterology gives the lie to meaning and discourse gives the lie to transgression, in a potlatch that reveals both in their most essential and constitutive
relation. Nothing is gained by this communication except profit-taking from lies. We must
indict Bataille as the alibi that allows all of this writing to go on and on, pretending it is
nothing it is not, and then turn away from Bataille as from a sun long since gone nova, in
order to witness the slow freezing to death of every satellite text. The sacrificial
consumption of Bataille has played itself out; the rotten carcass has been consumed: no
more alibis. What is at stake is no longer ecstatic sexuality or violent upheavals or bloody sacrifices
under the unblinking eye of the sun; nor was it ever, from the very beginning of Bataille’s
career. These are merely figures in the melodramatic theater of what is after all a “soft
expenditure” (Hollier 1989, xv), a much more modest death, a death much closer to home. It has never been
more than a question of the death of the theory and of theory itself as death . Of theory-death. A
double fatality.
The aff's absurd extreme expenditure recreates the SQ

Plontisky, 95 (Arkady, Professor of English and Theory and Cultural Studies, Purdue University, “On Bataille: Critical Essays,” State University of
New York Press, pg. 111, Tashma)
Indeed, as Bataille's discourse shows with extraordinary power, it is the economic insistence on consumption at the multiple and often
interacting levels of theoretical economies—economic, political, conceptual—that is most problematic. The theoretical problem is a
metaphoric loss of the economy of loss and thus of the general economy. It is not that consumption and the pleasure
of consumption are not important or theoretically and otherwise pleasurable. To reverse the configuration absolutely and to privilege expenditure
unconditionally would be just as untenable . As I indicated earlier, Bataille's heavy insistence on waste and
expenditure must be seen as problematic in this respect and is "saved" only by the enormous labyrinthine complexity of Bataille's inscription of
these concepts.
Their sacrifice is insignificant- can't change relationship to

death
C. Michael Minkoff, 2007,
“Existence is Sacrificeable, But It Is Not Sacrifice,” April 25,
http://smartech.gatech.edu/dspace/bitstream/1853/14446/8/Michael%20Minkoff--LCC%204100--Animal_Sacrifice.pdf
What Nancy admits is that “strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice” and that “the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close…it is
closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself” (Nancy, 35). These confessions are significant because it indicates the fear that Nancy has of
What Bataille wanted from sacrifice was

appropriating a symbol which has a remainder and a vector he cannot predict or control.
one thing, but Nancy fears that sacrifice carries its own valence. It is like the art that accedes to
extinction, but suspends above it indefinitely. The force to accede to extinction is not guaranteed to
suspend. The force that Bataille borrows from sacrifice is not guaranteed to behave in the
way atheism dictates. Nancy reasserts that Western sacrifice always knew it sacrificed to nothing, but this latent knowledge makes the institution
of sacrifice absurd, and Nancy is not willing to deny that sacrifice “sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences” (Nancy, 35) What
Nancy fears is this ignorance. He knows he does not understand the significance of the old sacrifice. If sacrifice was to no one and everyone knew it; why was and is
if one assumes that there is no one to

it so universal and why have so many been tempted into believing its significance? But
whom one sacrifices, Bataille may not use sacrifice as the centerpiece of his philosophy
because if sacrifice is not to anyone, it is not truly significant. If it is not significant or meaningful, it has no
power. It becomes comedic. And it becomes massacre. That is why Nancy spends much of his time
talking about the sacrifice of the Jews at Auschwitz. Without over-determining the
significance, the sacrifice becomes a genocide or a holocaust. Bataille is trapped between two
uncomfortable positions—let the blood continue to spill to make sacrifice real and significant and concrete, or
deny the death the status of sacrifice, which in Bataille’s mind, would be to deny it realization.
Nancy asks if Bataille’s “dialectical negativity expunges blood or whether, on the
contrary, blood must ineluctably continue to spurt” (Nancy, 27). If Bataille spiritualizes
sacrifice, it no longer has the power of real death, the concreteness of finiteness and the
ability to rupture finitude. But if Bataille insists on the real death, he necessitates the
constant spilling of blood in mimetic repetition until history is completed in the Sage
at bataille: no link to modern capitalism
Bataille doesn’t apply to modern capitalism, which is already
based on excessive consumption and desire.
Goux et al 90 (Jean-Joseph, the Lawrence Favrot professor of French and chair of
French studies at Rice University, Kathryn Ascheim, PhD and editor of Nature Biotech,
Rhonda Garelick, taught at Yale, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Columbia, critic
of literature and politics, PhD in comparative literature, “General Economics and
Postmodern Capitalism,” Yale French Studies No. 78 On Bataille, pp. 206-224)
Where do we situate Bataille’s claim? What happens to the demand of the sacred in capitalist society? How
do we reconcile the affirmation that capitalism represents an unprecedented break with
all archaic [precapitalist] forms of expenditure and the postulate of the necessary universality of spending as
pure loss? This is the difficulty Bataille wants to maintain as a general anthropological principle the
necessity of unproductive expenditure while simultaneously upholding the historic singularity of capitalism with regard to
this expenditure. Bourgeois society corresponds to a “general atrophy of former sumptuary processes” (41). An anomaly
whereby loss is not absent (which would contradict the general principle) but virtually unreadable: “Today, the great and
free social forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. Nevertheless, we should not conclude from this that the
very principle of expenditure is no longer situated at the end of economic activity” (37). So what happens to ostentatious
expenditure in capitalism? And can we really believe, furthermore, that the even more radical
desacralization effected by communism could become a libertarian affirmation of
sovereignty – the feast of self-consciousness, without divinities and myths? Everything suggests that Bataille was
unable to articulate the mystical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness “without form
and mode,” “pure expenditure” (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed
capitalist society the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in production. Now it is quite clear that
today’s capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its
beginning. The values of thrift, sobriety, and asceticism no longer have the place that
they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois mentality with the characters of pére Grandet or the
usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical
purity in Benjamin Franklin’s principles [“he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced:
entire stacks of sterling pounds”] [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be considered the spirit of the times. Undoubtedly,
the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated
has quickened. but hasn’t contemporary society undergone a transformation of the ethic
of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical [Weberian] analyses of the spirit
of capitalism [to which Bataille subscribes] inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no
longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expenditure has been replaced by private expenditure, it
is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy and utility that presided at its
beginning. No society has “wasted” as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess?
at bataille: no alt solvency
Bataille believes human sacrifice is the ultimate form

transgression- this proves his alt is awful.
Pavlovski 2005 (Linda, editor for the database Enotes and of multiple academic
collections, “Bataille, Georges: Introduction,” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,
http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/bataille-georges)
Bataille sought “sovereignty” through loss of self, which is achieved through

transgression and excess, notably through laughter, religious ecstasy, sacrifice, eroticism,
death, and poetry. Considering human sacrifice the ultimate transgression, Bataille was
fascinated by religious feast days that included rites of sacrifice. This fascination led
Bataille to the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and to a particular interest in the
cultures of the Aztecs and North American Indians. In their use of human sacrifice and
potlatch, respectively, Bataille saw an excessive, generous spirit which he admired. As a
direct result of this, Bataille wrote an unconventional theory of economics that promoted
waste and excess, rather than acquisition. Believing that transgression existed beyond
mere words, Bataille constantly battled with the problem of writing the inexpressible.
Bataille’s reasoning justifies atrocities and death.

Boldt-Irons, 2000 (Leslie Anne, Associate Professor of French at Brock University,
“Military discipline and revolutionary exaltation: the dismantling of
“l’illusion lyrique” in Malraux’s L’Espoir and Bataille’s Le Bleu du Ciel,”
Romantic Review, vol. 91 issue 4, p. 481)
In 1933, Bataille contributed a review of André Malraux’s novel La Condition humaine to
the ultra left-wing journal La Critique sociale.1 In this article, Bataille questions the place
that revolution occupies in the larger and more general context of “human agitation.” He
asks, for example, whether the convulsive movements of revolt, social upheaval, and
revolution should be situated outside of, or above, what is normally experienced as life in
its quotidian expressions of tenderness, enthusiasm or even hate. In the name of what
authority, for example, might one be justified in placing the fascination with pleasure,
torture and possible death outside the limits of acceptable social practice – extreme
states often linked to revolutionary upheaval outside the limits of acceptable social
practice? Another way of situating the convulsion of revolutionary movements – an
approach clearly endorsed by Bataille – is to place it squarely within the framework of
any activity marked by agitation. From this perspective, the acts of torture and murder
would arise from an excitability or arousal similar in nature to that intensifying the fury
of the revolutionary impulse. This impulse, writes Bataille, is a means by which the
proletariat – who had for a long time been deprived of the possibility of attributing any
value to suffering and to life – is able to gain access to value itself, a value linked to states
of excitation unsubordinated to any simple political means or end. This value, and the
state of agitation to which it is linked, gives the proletariat both life and hope, for which
even death in all its atrocity might be the payment required.
at bataille: apolitical / alt fails
cant solve politics
Fortuna, PhD candidate in political philosophy and IR – UC Santa Barbara, ‘9
(John, “Loss and Sacrifice in the Thought of Georges Bataille (And their Political
Implications),” http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p317285_index.html)
While it is certainly the case that Bataille’s position does require some sort of reworking of our practices (or perhaps
more importantly, the way in which we understand those we currently have) in order to accommodate the experience of sacrificial loss, this
does not necessarily entail a complete upheaval of society and politics. As disruptive as sacrifice may be to
the stable and logical forms which tend to comprise profane existence, it does not seem to be the case that
Bataille is recommending that we simply overturn all things profane. In fact, Bataille
specifically argues against such action where, in Guilty, he says, Life is a result of
disequilibrium and instability. Stable forms are needed to make it possible however….To shrink
from fundamental stability isn’t less cowardly than to hesitate about shattering it. Perpetual instability is more boring
than adhering strictly to a rule, and only what’s in existence can be made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to be
sacrificed. The more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or sacrifice that can result
(Bataille 1988b, 28-29). Perhaps the most important insight to take from this quote is that sacrifice (here emphasized as that
which disrupts what is) depends upon the logical and stable forms that are marks of the
profane world of work and utility. Because sacrifice might be said to represent a transgression of the norms of the profane world, it
follows that these norms must exist in order for such a transgression to occur in the first place. While I have been emphasizing the
importance for Bataille of sacrificial loss (and to the extent that it follows from it—disruption), in this passage he seems to be affording
some sort of recognition to the importance of values like stability, that are associated not with the sacred but rather the profane.
The alt fails –

Arnould, lecturer – Johns Hopkins U, ‘96
(Elisabeth, The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of
Sacrifice,” Diacritics 26.2)
Sacrifice is unquestionably the most prominent model in Bataille's thinking of finitude. But it is also, if one accepts Nancy's allegations, the
most problematic. While
hoping to find in the exemplarity of sacrifice a new paradigm for the
thinking of finitude, Nancy explains in "The Unsacrificeable," Bataille does nothing but
resubmit this finitude to the most traditional determinations of ontotheology. Sacrifice
remains, in Bataille's thought, a deficient model for finitude insofar as it continues to be conceptually dependent on traditional
philosophical and Christian interpretations of sacrifice. Thus, Nancy asserts that the
characteristic valorization
Bataille grants to the finite and cruel moment of immolation in his rethinking of sacrifice does
nothing but repeat, by simply inverting its valence, the classical interpretation of an occidental
sacrifice that conceives itself as the ideal sublation of this same moment. The philosophical and
Christian version of sacrifice is understood as the spiritual transformation of a sacrificial moment the finite nature of which it denounces
even as it appropriates its power. The Bataillian version, on the contrary, insists upon this finite moment in order to escape the dialectical
comedy that transforms sacrifice into an ideal process. Performed
in the name of spiritual rebirth,
the sacrifices of Plato and Christ, for instance, reappropriate death by transfiguring it
as resurrection. Grotesque and replete with horrors, death in Bataille appears alone on a
stage whose cruelty is neither explained nor redeemed through transfiguration. Thus, Bataille
withholds nothing from the scene of sacrifice but lets it emerge in the fullness of its amorphous violence. He valorizes its sanguinary horror
in order to denounce the dialectic idealization of a death nothing should domesticate. He
exhibits it "as it is":
opaque, silent, and without meaning. According to Nancy, however, the valorization
itself remains caught in the sacrificial logic of the idealist tradition . For, he argues,
only in light of its ontotheological conceptualization can sacrifice become at once the infinite process of dialectical sublation and the blood-
spattered moment this process both negates and sublates, simultaneously [End Page 87] avers and contests. The Bataillian thesis, granting
efficacy and truth (reality) to sacrificial cruelty, is irremediably linked to the processes of dialecticization and spiritualization through which
the philosophical and Christian West appropriates the power of sacrifice. It is the cruel counterpart of its idealization. And if this conception
gives to sacrificial death an importance proportionally opposite to that which it receives from the Christian and philosophical
transfiguration--since the finite truth of death plays at present the role of the infinite truth of resurrection--it still does nothing but repeat
its ontotheological scheme. For it also pretends to find, on the cruel stage of sacrifice, a
singular and more "real" truth of death. The stage of the torment is, for Bataille, that place where death appears
with the full strength of a nonmeaning that can be exposed only through the immolation of the sacrificial victim. If this is so, then should we
not suppose that this immolation pretending to give us the "inappropriable" truth of death's rapture appropriates in its turn the excess of
the "excessive" meaning of this rapture? Does
it not transform its excess into an "excessive
truth," to be sure a negative one, though no less absolute than the philosophical and
spiritual truths to which it opposes itself? At the heart of modern theories of sacrifice is thus, as Nancy
puts it, a "transappropriation of sacrifice" by itself, even when, as is the case for Bataille, this theory tries to overcome sacrifice's spiritual
operation through an excessive and volatile negativity. As soon as sacrifice thinks itself as revelation,
be it that of a spiritual beyond or its negative counterpart, it remains a sacrifice in the name of its own
transcendence, a loophole to a finitude powerless to think itself in terms other than those of a revelation: the revelation of a
clear or obscure god, symbol of resurrection or of death's blind horror. If one wants to think finitude according to a model different from
that of its sacrificial appropriation, one should think "apart from" sacrifice. If finitude is, as Bataille has himself wanted to think, an "access
without access to a moment of disappropriation," then we must also call it "unsacrificeable" [Nancy 30].
This is too complicated for them to answer.

Arnould, lecturer – Johns Hopkins U, ‘96
(Elisabeth, The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of
Sacrifice,” Diacritics 26.2)
But if finitude thus appropriates itself in a self-sacrifice that reveals its truth,
if it becomes "its own subject," how can we, once again, make a difference between the
philosophical, Christian version of sacrifice and the modern Bataillian
interpretation? Do they not entertain the same goal: mastery of the unthinkable
excess of finitude? And do they not both pretend to manifest a truth of the
experience of nonknowledge: a truth that is, on the one hand, that of an ideal or divine
resurrection and, on the other, a purely immanent but nonetheless presentable reality of
death? The figure of a self-immolating Rimbaud and the inner experience it embodies
are, intentionally or not, analogous in design and purpose to the ontotheological figures
of the idealist and dialectical tradition. And this particular sacrificial figure is all
the more suspect in that it recasts and replays the much-talked-about "sacrifice
of poetry" constitutive of the Western philosophical tradition. It is scarcely
necessary to remind the reader that the emblematic scene of the birth of philosophy in
the West has traditionally been represented both by the sacrifice of the poet in the public
square and the legendary tale of self-sacrifice depicting young Plato burning his poems.
Now, Bataille, it would seem, is merely reproducing these scenes. His version
resituates the immolation of poetry in the context of a nonknowledge, but this new
context does not alter the fundamental identity of the meaning and purpose of these
sacrifices. Plato's sacrifices sought to demonstrate that truth, though hidden, is
accessible through the sacrificial machination of a philosophical dialectic. Similarly,
Bataille reasserts that finitude, though absent, is accessible through the negativity
and self-immolation of the experience. Just as Plato and Socrates informed us that, in
order to obtain the idea in its purity, it must first be abstracted from the verbiage of
representational falsification by way of sacrificing the falsifier, the mimetician, so
Bataille informs us that only a sacrifice of poetry will allow the experience to achieve the
inner void of its nonknowledge. Hence, the experience separates its "inner" truth from a
poetic exteriority that could only "simulate," as Bataille himself often writes, "its
absence." And it is as this inner "presence-to-itself of absence" ("présence-à-soi de
l'absence") that Bataille seems to be conceptualizing finitude. Finitude is the
"impossible presence" that one must preserve and purify through a renewed
sacrifice of meaning. How can we thus avoid thinking that such an
experience, intent upon wresting its finitude from the bad repetition of a mimesis, not
only misjudges the nature of finitude but also the nature of a poetry whose
"mimetic imposture" could actually, as Nancy says, teach us a few things about the
"impossible"--or "inappropriable"--nature of finitude itself.
at bataille: fascist
Bataille celebrates and glorifies war for war’s sake—his ideas are
the foundation of fascism.
Wolin, 2006 (Richard, Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New
York Graduate Center, “Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German
Ideology”Constellations vol. 2 issue 3, pp. 397-428)
In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young conservatives, war plays an
essential, positive role. It serves as a means of dissolving the principium individuationis:
the principle of a bourgeois subjectivity, on which the homogenous order of society - a
world of loneliness and fragmentation – depends. For, according to Bataille, “the general
movement of life is... accomplished beyond the demands of individuals.”32 It is in
precisely this spirit that he celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of “combat” or “war” as a
type of aestheticist end in itself: “Glory...expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of
measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat it
glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment.”33 For the same reasons,
Bataille eulogizes those premodern “warrier societies in which pure, uncalculated
violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway.”34 For under such conditions, war
was not made subservient to the vulgar ends of enterprise and accumulation, as is the
case for modern-day imperialism, but served as a glorious end in itself. Yet in the early
1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration of “violence for violence’s sake,” or
“war for war’s sake,” that Benjamin viewed as the essence of modern fascism. As he
remarks in a well known passage: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism, and, as
Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense pereption that
has been changed by technology...Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of
contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has
reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure
of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.35
In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harbinger of a cultural transfiguration in which
the primacy of self-subsistent subjectivity would be replaced by the values of an
“unavowable” or “ecstatic community”: that is, a community that would no longer be
governed by the goals of a “visual culture” – transparency, self-identity, etc. – but
instead, those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. In fact this Bataille-inspired
program of an ecstatic community has been quite explicitly carried forth and explored in
the political writings of Maurice Blanchot (La Communaute inavouable; 1983) and
Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communaute desoeuvree; 1985).
Bataille’s philosophy emphasizes the destruction of war and

conflict
Moreover, the cultural attitudes of both Spe\ngler and Bataille are linked by an
aesthetics of violence that is highly characteristic of the “front generation.” In a key
passage in The Decline of the West, Spemgler, depicting the “life-world” of blood and
instinct that had been repressed by the Faustian spirit of modernity, observes: “War is
the primary politics of everything that lives and so much so that in the depths battle and
life are one, and being will-to-battle expire together.”28 Similarly, for Junger, “War is an
intoxication beyond all bonds. It is a frenzy without cautions and limits comparable only
to the forces of nature.”29 Bataille (the meaning of his name in French should be
recalled), too, is convinced that “conflict is life. Man’s value depends on his aggressive
strength. A living man regards death as the fulfillment of life; he does not see it as
misfortune. ...I MYSELF AM WAR.”30 As Jay observes in this connection: “on a deeper
level, the war [World War I] seems to have exercised a certain positive fascination [on
Bataille]. For it is striking that many of Bataille’s obsessive themes would betray an
affinity for the experiences of degradation, pollution, violence, and communal bonding
that were characteristic of life in the trenches.”
at bataille: fascist
Bataille was an admirer of fascism and believed it was the
noblest form of political rule.
Here, the analysis must begin with an examination of Bataille’s essay, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” often rightly hailed as a theoretical breakthrough
in our understanding of the mass psychological appeal of modern authoritarian rule. Yet, the essay also contains a barely veiled admiration for the vitality and
energy of the existing fascist states, especially when contrasted with the decadence and inertia of the contemporary European democracies. Bataille purveys a
critique of parliamentarianism that is as zealous as anything one finds in the work of Carl Schmitt. Parliamentary decision-making, he claims, partakes wholly of
the order of the homogenous. It aims solely at co-optation, the elimination of difference. As such, it is purely instrumental and serves primarily to suppress the
breakthrough of heterogeneous elements that threaten to explode the normative bases of the given economic and political order. As Bataille observes, in a striking
anticipation of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s association of “consensus” and “terror”: “The reduction of differences in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible
Bataille can perceive no fundamental

complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity.60
differences between the conduct of political and economic life in modern democratic
societies, insofar as both are examples par excellence of homogeneity – this despite the
fact that discussion aims at mutual understanding, whereas economic activity is goal-
oriented and utilitarian. Given this curt dismissal of the institutional bases of democracy,
it comes as little surprise that Bataille glorifies the role played by fascism in modern
political life as a type of breakthrough of the heterogeneous. For Bataille, “the fascist
leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. Opposed to democratic
politicians, who represent in different countries the platitude inherent to homogeneous
society, Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.”62 What he
admires about these men and the movement they represent is that they embody “a force
that situates them above other men,” which accounts for their “sovereignty.” Yet, he also
esteems greatly their thoroughgoing antagonism to law: “the fact that laws are broken is
only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action.”63
Here, the parallels with Schmitt’s critique of bourgeois legal positivism are of course profound. Both Schmitt and Bataille view the institution of law as the
consummate embodiment of the spirit of bourgeois rationalism. It symbolizes everything they detest about the reigning social order: its prosaic longing for
security, its unrevolutionary nature, its abhorrence of “transcendence,” its anathematization of the vitality and intensity one finds in the “exception” (Schmitt) or
“transgression” (Bataille). Moreover, for Bataille the system of law merits especially harsh treatment insofar as it signifies a type consecration of the profane order
Bataille concludes his endorsement

of things, as such, it stands as an impediment to contact with the heterogeneous or the sacred.
of fascist politics with the following encomium: “Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to
the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as
exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle
situated above any utilitarian judgment.” As opposed to the bourgeois order of life, which, with its utilitarianism and its legalism,
merely sanctifies “the prose of the world,” fascism offers a new political aesthetic, the return, as it were, of an aesthetic politics: a type of politics that reintroduces
the long lost elements of charismatic leadership (in Bataille’s terms, “sovereignty”), violence, and martial glory. It is, moreover, a politics that facilitates a great
emotional cathexis between leaders and masses, a point which Bataille emphasizes repeatedly. For one of fascism’s great attributes is that it “clearly demonstrates
what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces” – forces capable of guaranteeing a measure of collective solidarity, which have been
banished from a society in which the division of labor and rationalization reign supreme. In sum, fascism serves to reintroduce a type of ecstatic politics into the
forlorn and disenchanted landscape of political modernity, a politics that aims at the creation of a quasi-Nietzschean ecstatic community.
The sacrificial practices Bataille celebrates sustain existing

power relations.
Yet, in his celebratory discussions of sacrifice, potlach, and so forth, Bataille
fundamentally misconstrues the historical and contextual parameters of such ritual
practices. One could even go so far as to say that, in a certain measure, Bataille’s
understanding of these phenomena succumbs to a type of “primitivism”: he
decontextualizes the cultural practices he analyzes in order the better to incorporate
them within his own theoretical agenda of his own critique of modernity. Here, Bataille
seeks nothing less than “an anthropology that will itself provide a living – and orgiastic –
myth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, ‘modern’ sterile bourgeois
society.”51 Bataille chooses to view sacrifice and gift-giving in the first instance as
gratuitous, non-utilitarian, or, as he puts it, “having no ends beyond themselves” – but
this is far from the case. While he is correct in characterizing such practices as related to
the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of
existing relations of power. The act of human sacrifice as practiced among the Aztecs
redounds to the credit of the sacrificer(s): it reinforces existing relations of authority,
viz., the authority of those who are empowered to commission a sacrifice (in this case,
the priests and aristocracy). It provides those in authority with a quasi-divine power to
preside over life and death. In this sense, it is misleading to claim that sacrifice has no
end beyond itself.
at bataille: energy is finite
Bataille is wrong - the world’s supply of energy and resources is
finite and is being consumed rapidly now, risking extinction.
Tverberg, 07 (Gail E., fellow of the Casualty Actuarial Society and a Member of the
American Academy of Actuaries, writes for Contingency magazine and TheOilDrum.com,
“Our world is finite: Is this a problem?” Energy Bulletin/Our Finite World,
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/29117)
We all know the world is finite. The number of atoms is finite, and these atoms combine
to form a finite number of molecules. The mix of molecules may change over time, but in
total, the number of molecules is also finite.
We also know that growth is central to our way of life. Businesses are expected to grow.
Every day new businesses are formed and new products are developed. The world
population is also growing, so all this adds up to a huge utilization of resources. At some
point, growth in resource utilization must collide with the fact that the world is finite. We
have grown up thinking that the world is so large that limits will never be an issue. But
now, we are starting to bump up against limits. Where are we reaching earth’s
limits? 1. Oil Oil is a finite resource, since it is no longer being formed. Oil production in
a given area tends to increase for a time, then begins to decline, as the available oil is
pumped out. Oil production in the United States has followed this pattern (Figure 1), as
has oil production in the North Sea (Figure 2). This decline has taken place in spite of
technology improvements. There is now serious concern that world oil production will
begin to decline (”peak”), just as it has in the United States and the North Sea. I discussed this earlier in Oil Quiz - Test Your Knowledge . A
congressional committee was also concerned about this issue, and asked the US Government Accountability Office to study it. The GAO’s report, titled CRUDE
OIL: Uncertainty about Future Supply Makes It Important to Develop a Strategy for Addressing a Peak and Decline in Oil Production confirmed that this is an
important issue. Exactly how soon this decline will begin is not certain, but many predict that the decline may begin within the next few years. 2. Natural Gas
Natural gas in North America is also reaching its limits. United States natural gas production reached its peak in 1973. Each year, more and more wells are drilled,
but the average amount of gas produced per well declines. This occurs because the best sites were developed first, and the later sites are more marginal. The United
States has been importing more and more natural gas from Canada, but this is also reaching its limits. Because of these issues, the total amount of natural gas
. Fresh Water Fresh water is

available to the United States is likely to decline in the next few years - quite possibly leading to shortages. 3
needed for drinking and irrigation, but here too we are reaching limits. Water from
melting ice caps is declining in quantity because of global warming. Water is being pumped from aquifers
much faster than it is being replaced, and water tables are dropping by one to three meters a year in many areas. Some rivers, especially in China and Australia, are
close to dry because of diversion for agriculture and a warming climate. In the United States, water limitations are especially important in the Southwest and in the
The topsoil we depend on for agriculture is created very slowly

more arid part of the Plains States. 4. Top soil
- about one inch in 300 to 500 years, depending on the location. The extensive tilling of
the earth’s soil that is now being done results in many stresses on this topsoil, including
erosion, loss of organic matter, and chemical degradation. Frequent irrigation often
results in salination, as well. As society tries to feed more and more people, and produce
biofuel as well, there is pressure to push soil to its limits–use land in areas subject to
erosion; use more and more fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides; and remove the organic
material needed to build up the soil. Are there indirect impacts as well? Besides
depleting oil, natural gas, fresh water, and top soil, the intensive use of the earth’s
resources is resulting in pollution of air and water, and appears to be contributing
to global warming as well. Can technology overcome these finite world issues?
While we have been trying to develop solutions, success has been limited to date. When
we have tried to find substitutes, we have mostly managed to trade one problem for
another:
at bataille: expenditurn without reserve  extinction
Excessive consumption will cause extinction – it’s already at an

unsustainable level.
Trainer, 07 (Ted Trainer, Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Work at the University
of New South Wales. “Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society” p. 128-29)
It is of the utmost importance to recognize that whether or not renewable energy can
sustain consumer-capitalist society is not a matter of whether it can meet present energy
demand. The essential question is whether it can enable constant increase int he volume
of goods and services being consumed and the associated increase in energy demand.
Energy demand is rising significantly, although estimates of future demand vary. ABARE’s Energy Outlook 2000shows that the
average annual rate of growth in energy use in Australia over the decade of the 1990s was around 2.5% p. a. The Australian Yearbook shows that between 1982
and 1998 Australian energy use increased 50%, an arithmetical average growth rate of 3.13% p.a., and the rate has been faster in more recent years. (Graph 5.12.)
However ABARE estimates that Australian energy demand will slow, reaching about 1.9% p.a. by 2040, meaning more than a doubling in annual use by then. In
July 2003 Australian electricity authorities warned that blackouts are likely in coming years due to the rapid rate of increase in demand, estimated at almost 3% pa
for the next five years. (ABC News, 31 July.) Robbins (2003) reports NEMMCO predicting electricity growth over the next 10 years in NSW, Queensland and
Victoria as 3.1%, 3.5% and 2.6% p.a. respectively. Poldy (2005) shows that over the past 100 years Australian energy consumption has followed GDP growth
closely, and he estimates that in recent years it has approximated a growth rate of 3.6% p.a. In 2004 world energy use jumped, growing at 4.3% p.a. (Catan, 2005.)
Thus the commitment to growth greatly exacerbates the problem, and in turn all of the
other resource supply problems, because all involve an energy component. For instance
if the cost of fuel increases significantly, then so will the cost of food and minerals, and
even university courses, because fuel is needed to produce them. It has been argued
above that renewables are not likely to be capable of meeting present electricity and
liquid fuel demand, but given the inertia built into growth trends, the demand to be met
will probably be three or four times as big as it is now by mid century...and doubling
every approximately 35 years thereafter. To summarise regarding Fault 1, consumer-
capitalist society is obviously grossly unsustainable. We have far overshot levels of
production, consumption, resource use and affluence that are sustainable for ourselves
over a long period of time, let alone extended to all the world’s people. Yet our top
priority is to increase them continuously, without limit. This is the basic cause of the
many alarming sustainability problems now threatening our survival.
at bataille: Ivory tower
The critique is ivory tower elitism – only the rich and powerful
can afford to expend without reserve.
Wolin, PhD, 04

One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille's treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well [end page 170] as gift-giving. In
truth, only
those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to
engage in potlatch does not exist for society's lower classes. 56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is
implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige
of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to
the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect
humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.(170-1)
at bataille: sacrifice bad
Voting AFF does nothing to solve their impact
Paul Mann 99, Literature prof @ Pomona, 1999, Masocriticism, p. 67-69
I would like at one and the same time to affirm this model and to dismiss it as the most desperate alibi of all. For
“sacrificial consumption” can never become an explicit critical motive.13 At the
moment it presents itself as a proper element of some critical method, it degenerates into
another useful trope, another bit of intellectual currency , another paper-thin abyss,
another proxy transgression; and the force of transgression moves elsewhere,
beneath a blinder spot in the critical eye.’4 Questions of motive or understanding, the fact
that one might be self-critical or at least aware of recuperation, are immaterial: what is at stake
here is not self-consciousness but economics, material relations of appropriation and exclusion, assimilation and
positive loss. Whatever transgression occurs in writing on Bataille does so only through the
stupid recuperation and hence evacuation of the whole rhetoric and dream of transgression, only
insofar as the false profundity of philosophy or theory evacuates the false profundities it apes. To justify this as the
sublime loss of loss is merely to indulge a paradoxical figure. Excess is not a project but a
by-product of any discourse ; the interest of Bataillean discourse lies chiefly in the
compulsive and symptomatic way it plays with its feces. The spectacle of critics
making fools of themselves does not reveal the sovereign truth of death: it is only
masocritical humiliation, a pathological attempt to disavow the specter of death . As for the
present essay, it makes no claims to any redeeming sacrifice. Far from presenting you with a truer Bataille, far from
speaking in his voice more clearly than his other readers, this essay pleads guilty to the indictment against every
appropriation. Until philosophy and theory squeal like a pig before Bataille’s work, as he claims
to have done before Dali’s canvases, there will be no knowledge of Bataille. In the end, one might have to
take an even stricter view: there is no discourse of transgression, either on or by Bataille. None at
all. It would be necessary to write a ‘Postscript to Transgression” were it not for the fact that Foucault already wrote it in
his ‘Preface,” were it not for the fact that Bataille himself wrote it the moment before he first picked up his pen. It
makes no difference whether one betrays Bataille, because one is hip to heterology or does it by accident,
whether one lip syncs Bataille’s rhetoric or drones on in the most tedious exposition. All of
these satellite texts are not heliotropic in relation to the solar anus of Bataille’s writing, or the executioners he hoped
(really?) would meet him in the Bois de Boulogne, or dépensives in spite of themselves. It would be sentimental to assign
them such privileges. They merely fail to fail. They are symptoms of a discourse in which
everyone is happily transgressing everyone else and nothing ever happens,
traces of a certain narcissistic pathos that never achieves the magnificent loss Bataille’s
text conveniently claims to desire, and under whose cover it can continue to
account for itself, hoarding its precious debits in a masocriticism that is anything
but sovereign and gloriously indifferent. What is given to us, what is ruinously and
profitably exchanged, is a lie. Heterology gives the lie to meaning and discourse gives the lie to transgression, in a
potlatch that reveals both in their most essential and constitutive relation. Nothing is gained by this communication
except profit-taking from lies. We must indict Bataille as the alibi that allows all of this writing to
go on and on, pretending it is the nothing it is not, and then turn away from Bataille as
from a sun long since gone nova, in order to witness the slow freezing to death of every
satellite text. The sacrificial consumption of Bataille has played itself out; the rotten carcass has
been consumed: no more alibis. What is at stake is no longer ecstatic sexuality or violent upheavals or bloody
sacrifices under the unblinking eye of the sun; nor was it ever, from the very beginning of Bataille’s career. These are
merely figures in the melodramatic theater of what is after all a “soft expenditure” (Hollier 1989, xv), a much more modest
death, a death much closer to home. It has never been more than a question of the death of theory
and of theory itself as death. Of theory-death. A double fatality.
at bataille: becoming wrong
Openness to flux and constant becoming destroys the
foundations for political institutions necessary to sustain radical
democratic life---some universal, “fixed” guarantees of equality
are crucial to politics
Joseph Schwartz 8, Professor of Political Science at Temple University, The Future
of Democratic Equality, 56-61
Butler, Brown, and Connolly reject the essentialism of “narrow” identity politics as an inverted “ressentiment” of the Enlightenment desire
for a universal, homogenized identity. They judge identity politics to be a politics of “wounding, resentment, and victimization” that only
can yield bad-faith moralization Wendy Brown takes to task identity politics for “essentializing” conceptions of group identity. For example,
she critiques the work of Catherine MacKinnon as epitomizing “identity” political theory, accusing MacKinnon of denying women agency by
depicting them purely as victims.38 Brown also remains wary of the patriarchal, conformist nature of traditional left conceptions of
solidarity and citizenship. Brown’s implicit concept of radical democratic citizenship rests upon the recognition that political identity is
continually in flux and is socially constituted through “agonal” political struggle. Brown celebrates an Arendtian conception of a polity in
which both shared and particular identities are continually open to reconstruction. In this “left Nietzschean” view of an “everyperson’s” will
to power, there can be no cultural certainties or political givens, as such “givens” would repress difference and fluidity.39 But, if
the
human condition is a world of permanent flux, then we must postulate a human capability of
living with constant insecurity, for in this world there can be no stable political
institutions or political identities.40 An ability to calculate the probabilities of political
actions or public policies would disappear in this world of infinite liminality. By
assuming that the pre-eminent democratic value is that of leaving all issues as
permanently open to question, post-structuralist “democratic theory” eschews the
theoretical and political struggle over what established institutions and consensual
values are needed to underpin a democratic society .¶ Post-structuralist analysis has contributed to a
healthy suspicion of narrow and “essentializing” identity politics. But a self-identified feminist, African- American, or lesbian activist is
likely to value the shared historical narratives that partly constitute such group identities. Of
course, if one is a democrat
and a pluralist, one would reject the oppressive homogenization and potentially authoritarian
aspects of ethnic or racial chauvinism and of “essentializing” types of identity politics. The democratic political home
should be open, fluid, and self-reflective; but if participation is to be open to all, then such a
society also needs to reproduce a shared democratic culture and the institutional guarantee of
democratic rights. That is, contrary to post-structuralist analysis, not all issues can be open to “agonal
struggle” in a democratic society. The traditional radical democratic critique of democratic capitalism remains valid; the equal
worth of the individual is devalued by rampant social inequality within and between
groups. Thus, a radical democrat, whether post-structuralist or not, must not only be
committed to institutional protections of political and civil rights, but also to social
rights—the equal access to the basic goods of citizenship (education, health care,
housing, child care). Of course, the precise nature and extent of these rights will be politically contested
and constructed. But a democratic society cannot leave as totally “open” the minimal
institutional basis of democracy— a democratic society cannot be agnostic as to the value of freedom of speech,
association, and universal suffrage.¶ Social movements fighting for an expansion of civil, political, and social rights, rarely, if ever, rest their
arguments on appeals to epistemological truths— whether “foundational” or “anti-foundational.” To remain democratic, their policy goals
cannot be so specific that they preclude political argument about both their worth and how best to institutionalize them. If social
movements in a 58 democratic society deemed that every policy defeat meant a betrayal of basic democratic principles, there would be no
give-and-take or winners and losers within democratic politics. But if a government were to abolish freedom of speech and competitive
elections, or deny a social group basic rights, it would be reasonable for an observer to judge that democratic principles had been violated.
Democratic political movements and coalitions struggle to construct shared meanings
about those political, civil, and social rights that should be guaranteed to all citizens—and they often
work to expand the types of persons to be recognized as citizens (such as excluded immigrants). Such arguments are
inevitably grounded in normative arguments that go beyond merely
asserting the import of “flux,” “difference,” and “anti-essentialism.” The civil rights movement did not
demand equal rights for all solely as an “agonal” assertion of the will of the excluded; they desired to gain for persons of color an established
set of civil and political rights that had been granted to some citizens and denied to others. The movement correctly assumed that the
postmodern
exclusion of citizens from full political and civil rights violated the basic norms of a democratic society. Thus,
epistemological commitments to “flux” and “openness” cannot in-and-of-themselves sustain the
“fixed” moral positions needed to sustain a radical democracy.¶ Post-structuralist theorists openly
proclaim their hostility to all philosophical “meta-narratives.” They reject comprehensive conceptions of how society operates and the type
of society that would best instantiate human freedom. But post-structuralists go beyond rejecting “meta-narratives”; they insist
that only an “anti-foundational” epistemology can ground a politics of emancipation. For Butler, Brown, and Connolly, not only do “meta-
discourses” invariably fail in their efforts to ground moral positions in a theory of human nature or human reason. They also assert that an
agonal politics of democratic “we” formation can alone sustain democratic society. This agonal politics,they claim, can only
be sustained by a recognition of the inconstant signification of discourse and the ineluctable flux of personal
and group identity.41 Rejecting the authoritarian, celebration of the “ubermensch” by Nietzsche, they offer a post-Nietzschean,
“amoral” conception of democracy as an open-ended project of defining a self and community that is constantly open to the desires of
“others.” These theorists constantly reiterate the definitiveness (dare we say “foundational truth”) of this grounding of democracy,
despite the historical reality that social movements often contest dominant
narratives in the name of a stable alternative narrative of a democratic and
pluralist community.¶ One might well contend that the post-structuralist political stance is guilty
of a new meta-narrative of “bad faith,” that of “anti-foundationalism.” According to this anti-
foundational politics, a true democrat must reject any and all a priori truths allegedly grounded upon the nature of human reason or human
nature. A committed democrat may well be skeptical of such neo-Kantian or neo-Hegelian conceptions of freedom; but, many committed
democrats justify their moral commitments using these philosophical methods. A democrat might also reject (or accept) the arguments of a
Jurgen Habermas or Hans Georg Gadamer that the structure of human linguistic communication contains within it the potential for a
society based on reasoned argument rather than manipulation and domination. But there are numerous other philosophically “pragmatic”
ways to justify democracy, even utilitarian ones. Political democrats may well disagree about the best philosophical defense of democracy.
But, invariably, “practicing democrats” will defend the belief (however philosophically “proved” or “justified”) that democratic regimes best
fulfill the moral commitment to the equal worth of persons and to the equal potential of human beings to freely develop and pursue their
life plans.¶ To contend that only an anti-foundationalist, anti-realist epistemology can sustain democracy is to argue precisely for a
foundational metaphysical grounding for the democratic project. It is to contend that one’s epistemology determines one’s politics. Hence,
Brown and Butler both spoke at a spring 1998 academic conference at the University of California at Santa Cruz where some
attributed “reactionary” and “left cultural conservatism” to belief in “reactionary” “foundationalist humanism.”42
Post-structuralism cannot escape its own essentialist conception of identity.
For example, Butler contends in Feminist Contentions that democratic feminists must embrace the post-
structuralist “nondefinability of woman” as best suited to open democratic constitution of what it is to be a
“woman.”43 But this is itself a “closed” position and runs counter to the practices of many
democratic feminist activists who have tried to develop a pluralist, yet collective identity
around the shared experiences of being a woman in a patriarchal society (of course, realizing that
working-class women and women of color experience patriarchy in some ways that are distinct from the patriarchy experienced by middle-
class white women).¶ One
query that post-structuralist theorists might ask themselves: has
there ever existed a mass social movement that defined its primary “ethical”
values as being those of “instability and flux”? Certainly many sexual politics activists are cognizant of
the fluid nature of sexuality and sexual and gender identity. But only a small (disproportionately university educated) segment of the
women’s and gay and lesbian movement would subscribe to (or even be aware of) the core principles of post-structuralist “anti-essentialist
Post-
epistemology.” Nor would they be agnostic as to whether the state should protect their rights to express their sexuality.
structuralist theorists cannot avoid justificatory arguments for why some identities
should be considered open and democratic and others exclusionary and anti-democratic.
That is, how could post-structuralist political theorists argue that Nazi or Klan “ethics” are antithetical to a democratic society—and that a
democratic society can rightfully ban certain forms of “agonal” (e.g. harassing forms of behavior against minorities) struggle on the part of
such anti-democratic groups.
The alt fails---deriding all attempts at action as “freezing

becoming” no way to deal with difficult political choices---we
also control terminal uniqueness because they can’t convince
others to abandon liberal subjectivity
A politics of radical democratic pluralism cannot be securely grounded by a whole-hearted
epistemological critique of “enlightenment rationality.” For implicit to any radical
democratic project is a belief in the equal moral worth of persons; to embrace such a
position renders one at least a “critical defender” of enlightenment values of equality and
justice, even if one rejects “enlightenment metaphysics” and believes that such values are often embraced by
non-Western cultures. Of course, democratic norms are developed by political practice and
60 struggle rather than by abstract philosophical argument. But this is a sociological and
historical reality rather than a trumping philosophical proof. Liberal democratic publics rarely ground their
politics in coherent ontologies and epistemologies; and even among trained philosophers
there is no necessary connection between one’s metaphysics and one’s politics. There have,
are, and will be Kantian conservatives (Nozick), liberals (Rawls), and radicals (Joshua Cohen; Susan Okin); teleologists, left, center, and
right (Michael Sandel, Alasdair McIntyre, or Leo Strauss); anti-universalist feminists (Judith Butler, Wendy Brown) and quasi-universalist,
Habermasian feminists (Seyla Benhabib, Nancy Fraser). ¶ Post-structuralists try to read off from an epistemology or ontology a politics; such
attempts simply replace enlightenment meta-narratives with postmodern (allegedly anti) meta-narratives. Such efforts represent an idealist
version of the materialist effort—which post-structuralists explicitly condemn—to read social consciousness off of the structural position of
“the agent.” A democratic political theory must offer both a theory of social structure and of the
social agents capable of building such a society. In exchanging the gods of Weber and Marx for Nietzsche and
Heidegger (or their epigones Foucault and Derrida), poststructuralist theory has abandoned the
institutional analysis of social theory for the idealism of abstract philosophy. ¶ Connolly, Brown, and
Butler reject explicit moral deliberation as a bad faith Nietzschean attempt at “ressentiment.” Instead, they celebrate the amoral, yet ethical
strivings of a Machiavellian or Gramscian realist “war of position.”44 Sheldon Wolin, however, has written convincingly of how Machiavelli
can be read as an ethical realist, a theorist of moral utilitarianism.45 Even a Machiavellian or Gramscian political “realist” must depend
upon moral argument to justify the social utility of hard political choices. That is, if one reads both as ethical utilitarians who believe that, at
times, one must “dirty” one’s hands in order to act ethically in politics, then they embrace a utilitarian, “just war” theory of ethical choice.
According to this consequentialist moral logic, “bad means” are only justifiable if they are the only, unavoidable way to achieve a greater
ethical good—and if the use of such “bad means” are absolutely minimized. Such “hard” political choices yield
social policies and political outcomes that fix identities as well as transform
them .¶ Not only in regard to epistemological questions has post-structuralist theory created a new political “metaphysics” which
misconstrues the nature of democratic political practice; the post-structuralist analysis of “the death of man” and “the
death of the subject” also radically preclude meaningful political agency. As with Michel
Foucault, Butler conceives of “subjects” as “produced” by powerknowledge discourses. In Butler’s view, the modernist concept of an
autonomous subject is a “fictive construct”; and the
very act of adhering to a belief in autonomous human
choice is to engage in “exclusion and differentiations, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently
concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy.”46 That is, the power of discourse, of language and the unconscious, “produces
If those “subjects” conceive of themselves as having the capacity for conscious
subjects.”
choice, they are guilty of “repressing” the manner in which their own “subjectivity” is
itself produced by discursive 61 exclusion: “if we agree that politics and a power exist already at the level at which the
subject and its agency are articulated and made possible, then agency can be presumed only at the cost of refusing to inquire into its
construction.”47 Susan Bickford pithily summarizes the post-structuralist rejection of the modernist subject: “power is not wielded by
autonomous subjects; rather through power, subjectivity is crafted.”48 Bickford grants that post-structuralism provides some insight into
how group and individual identity is “culturally constructed.” But Bickford goes on to contend that after
post-structuralism
exposes the “lie of the natural” (that there are no natural human identities), “socially
constructed” modern individuals still wish to act in consort with others and to
use human communication to influence others: “people generally
understand themselves as culturally constituted and capable of agency.”49¶
For if there is no “doer behind the deed,” but only “performative” acts that constitute the subject, how can the
theorist (or activist) assign agency or moral responsibility to actors who are “constituted by
discursive practices.” (“Discursive practices” engaged in by whom, the observer may ask?) Butler insists that not only is the
subject “socially constituted” by power/knowledge discourses, but so too is the “ontologically reflexive self” of the enlightenment. Now if
this claim is simply that all social critics are socially-situated, then this view of agency is no more radical a claim than that made by Michael
Walzer in his conception of the social critic (or agent). Walzer argues that even the most radical dissident must rely upon the critical
resources embedded within his own culture (often in the almost-hidden interstices of that culture). Effective critical agency cannot depend
on some abstract universal, external logic.50 Asserting
that critical capacities are themselves socially
constructed provides the reader with no means by which to judge whether forms of
“resistance” are democratic and which are not. That is, no matter how hard one tries to
substitute an aesthetic, “ironic,” “amoral ethical sensibility” for morality, the social critic and political
activist cannot escape engaging in moral argument and justification with
fellow citizens.¶ Butler astutely notes that “resistance” often mirrors the very powerknowledge discourses it rejects—resisting
hegemonic norms without offering alternative conceptions of a common political life. But Butler seems to affirm the possibility (by whom?)
of effective rejection of such “norming” by “performative resignification.” But the
“resignification” of “performative”
discursive constructions provides no criteria by which to judge whether a given
“resignification” is emancipatory or repressive.51 And just who (if not a relatively coherent, choosing human
subject) is “performing” the resignification. Furthermore, if all forms of identity and social meaning are
predicated upon “exclusion,” then the democratic theorist needs to distinguish among
those identities which “exclude” in a democratic way and those which exclude in an anti-
humanist, racist, and sexist manner. Some social “identities” are democratic and
pluralist, such as those created by voluntary affiliations. But other “identities,” such as
structural, involuntary class differences and racial and sexual hierarchies, must be
transformed, even eliminated, if democracy is to be furthered. And how we behave—or “perform”—can
subvert (or reinforce) such undemocratic social structures. But if these social structures are immutably inscribed by62 “performative
practices,” then there can be no democratic resistance. In her call for an ironic politics of “performative resistance,” Butler seems to imply
that human beings have the capacity to choose which “performative practices” to engage in—and from which to abstain. If this is the case,
then a modernist conception of agency and moral responsibility has covertly snuck its way back into Butler’s political strategy.52
Institutional distributions of power like weed prohibition result

in obliterations of difference---accepting some commonality for
the sake of contingent political claims is not a violent imposition
of being---it’s necessary for political movement building
As I argued in the prior chapter, post-structuralists fail to offer any coherent political
strategy for emancipation beyond individuals “performatively” “resisting” dominant
norms. Post-structuralists are correct to worry that social movements can define
“authentic” norms and behavior in ways that become overly restrictive and conformist;
such non-pluralist movements can end up “norming” and “disciplining” their members.
Feminists, queer theorists, and critical race theorists have critiqued the anti-political,
homogenizing constraints of essentialist forms of identity politics.1 But while democratic
pluralists should warn against homogenizing group pressures, they should not ignore the
reality that the building of social movements involves the construction of shared
narratives and common identities.2
While theorists of a “politics of difference” are more attentive to the social constitution
and activities of social groups, as with post-structuralists, they sometimes fail to
recognize that “difference” is frequently institutionalized upon a terrain of unequal
power and resources. This oversight mirrors the failure of earlier liberal pluralist
conceptions of politics to illuminate how the structural nature of power in capitalist
democracies leads some groups to have much greater power than their numbers (or lack
thereof) would democratically justify. Foucault’s concern with “micro-power”—and his
conscious downplaying of the import of macro-structural social forces—renders most
post-structuralist influenced theory silent in regard to the reconfiguration and
accentuation of structural inequality integral to late capitalism (not only in regard to
class, but also in regard to the material and cultural inequalities of race, gender,
nationality, and sexual orientation). One can see how the complex interaction of
inequalities of race, class, and gender influences United States politics. The insidious
“raced and gendered” nature of economic inequality in the United States has been
ideologically mobilized by the right to create sharp political divisions between the “old”
industrial (and deindustrialized), predominantly white, male working class and the
expanding (predominantly female, immigrant, and persons of color) “precariot” of the
underemployed and unemployed.
Thus, a “politics of difference” has not created a political majority capable of
transforming the material and social conditions of poor communities of color or of
working class and poor women (and men) of all races. The popular (and corporate)
celebration of “diversity” has consciously failed to interrogate the relationship between
inequality and “diversity.” Group assertion of “difference” can be empowering; but it can
also be oppressive to those who are “othered” by dominant groups. Inner-city African-
Americans have been “othered” by mainstream American society; and the vicious
materiality of that “othering” has led most middle- and upper-working-class
suburbanites (and not just whites) to fail to recognize inner-city residents as fellow
citizens who merit a radical transformation of public policy aimed at achieving
substantive equal opportunity for all citizens.
at bataille: war thesis avoidable
Studying war analytically helps avoid it.
Edelstein 10 – (2010, David, PhD in Political Science, Associate Professor in the Edmund A.
Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of Government at Georgetown
University, “Why realists don’t go for bombs and bullets,”
http://foreignpolicy.com/2010/07/21/why-realists-dont-go-for-bombs-and-bullets/)
Thanks to Steve Walt for inviting me to contribute to his blog while he is away on vacation. I have been a regular reader of Steve’s blog since it launched, and for my first post, I wanted to pick up on a
motif that I have seen running through Steve’s posts: Will realists ever again support the use of military force by the United States?
Followers of this blog will by now have little doubt about how Walt felt about the Iraq War or how he views the prospects for U.S. success in Afghanistan. In fact, throughout the history of his blog, I can
only recall one case in which Walt advocated the use of U.S. military force (and I think the realist credentials in that case are rather dubious).
There is a common perception in the field of political science that realists are war-mongering
Neanderthals anxious to use military force at the drop of a hat. Attend any meeting (if you must) of the American Political Science Association or the International Studies Association,
and one will find realists derided as the "bombs and bullets guys" as if we were all direct descendants of Curtis LeMay.
What is notable about this — and what has been notable about Steve’s blog — is just how infrequently realists have
supported the use of American military force. Take the U.S. interventions of the post-Cold War period: Panama, the
Gulf War, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Of those interventions,
Afghanistan was the only one that received anything close to strong support from most
realists. Others, most notably the Iraq War, received vehement opposition from the vast
majority of realists. Even in the case of Afghanistan, realists expressed trepidation about
the prospects for ultimate success despite early victories.
Go back to the Cold War, and realists like Kenneth Waltz and Hans Morgenthau were famously
opposed to the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. Lest one think this is an academic phenomenon,
realist policymakers like Brent Scowcroft were equally critical of the Bush administration’s actions in Iraq, and George F.
Kennan was skeptical of the U.S. interventions in both Korea and Vietnam. Today, should anyone dare to
suggest the use of military force in new contexts such as Iran, they are summarily dismissed
by prominent realists. Not a single (self-proclaimed or attributed) realist I know of has advocated the use of
military force against Iran in response to its apparent development of nuclear weapons, and most are adamantly opposed to it.
From one perspective, this opposition is surprising. It is realists, after all, who so value material power, in particular military capabilities. It is not difficult to understand why so many would assume that
realists are anxious to use military force because realists are anxious to focus on military capabilities as a primary explanatory variable for international politics.
it is precisely because realists have spent so much time studying military force that
But
they are also so reluctant to use military force. Though realists themselves are divided on the question, many have
concluded that the use of military force is often counterproductive, inviting balancing coalitions that simply make life more difficult. Moreover, as I have
argued elsewhere, using military force to reorder societies is very difficult and unlikely to succeed except in uncommon circumstances.
Treating death as asthetics causes mass death

Minkoff, 4/25/’7 (C. Michael, GA Tech,
http://smartech.gatech.edu/dspace/bitstream/1853/14446/8/Michael%20Minkoff--
LCC%204100--Animal_Sacrifice.pdf)
What Nancy admits is that “strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice” and that “the Western
economy of sacrifice has come to a close…it is closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself” (Nancy, 35).
These confessions are significant because it indicates the fear that Nancy has of appropriating a symbol which has a
remainder and a vector he cannot predict or control. What Bataille wanted from sacrifice was
one thing, but Nancy fears that sacrifice carries its own valence. It is like the art
that accedes to extinction, but suspends above it indefinitely. The force to accede to extinction
is not guaranteed to suspend. The force that Bataille borrows from sacrifice is
not guaranteed to behave in the way atheism dictates. Nancy reasserts that Western
sacrifice always knew it sacrificed to nothing, but this latent knowledge makes the institution of sacrifice absurd, and
Nancy is not willing to deny that sacrifice “sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences”
(Nancy, 35) What Nancy fears is this ignorance. He knows he does not understand the significance of the old sacrifice. If
sacrifice was to no one and everyone knew it; why was and is it so universal and why have so many been tempted into
believing its significance? But if
one assumes that there is no one to whom one
sacrifices, Bataille may not use sacrifice as the centerpiece of his philosophy
because if sacrifice is not to anyone, it is not truly significant. If it is not significant or meaningful,
it has no power. It becomes comedic. And it becomes massacre. That is why Nancy spends
much of his time talking about the sacrifice of the Jews at Auschwitz. Without
over-determining the significance, the sacrifice becomes a genocide or a holocaust. Bataille is trapped between
two uncomfortable positions—let the blood continue to spill to make sacrifice real and
significant and concrete, or deny the death the status of sacrifice, which in Bataille’s mind,
would be to deny it realization. Nancy asks if Bataille’s “dialectical negativity expunges blood or
whether, on the contrary, blood must ineluctably continue to spurt” (Nancy, 27). If Bataille spiritualizes sacrifice, it no
longer has the power of real death, the concreteness of finiteness and the ability to rupture finitude. But if Bataille insists
on the real death, he necessitates the constant spilling of blood in mimetic repetition until history is completed in the Sage
Death means they can’t love war.

Hagglund 8
(Martin, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life, pg. 203-4)
The first consequence of a radically atheist thinking of politics, then, is that it gives access to a hyperpolitical logic that spells
out that nothing is unscathed or unquestionable. The second consequence is that the logic of radical atheism transforms the
most fundamental assumptions about what is desirable. Political philosophy has traditionally determined corruption as an evil
that supervenes on something that precedes it or as a lamentable fact of life that ought to be overcome in an ideal future. In
contrast Derrida maintains that the essential corruptability of autoimmunity is not a privation but the condition for even the
highest good or the most ideal justice. In his formulation, “the possibility of evil, or of perjury, must be intrinsic to the good or
to justice for either to be possible.t’” As I have argued, this logic follows from a radically atheist conception of desire, where
justice and the good are essentially matters of mortal survival. Mortal survival opens the
chance for everything that is desired and the threat of everything that is feared, since without
mortal survival there can be nothing at all. Mortal survival is thus a necessary but
not sufficient requirement for justice and goodness. The affirmation of
survival is the condition for any ability to respond to suffering, but this does not mean that
the affirmation of survival is simply in the service of life. It is rather the source of all passion
for life and the source of all resentrnent for life. Without the affirmation of survival
there would be no compassion and love (since one would not be committed to anything), but
there would also be no suffering and hate (since one would not be threatened by anything).
Instead, change the concrete conditions that cause us to “love”

war.
Stuhr, professor of philosophy – Emory, ‘8
(John J, “A Terrible Love of Hope,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22(4), pg. 278-
289)
If Hillman is right, he is only partly right. We may have a terrible love of war. But
we can and do have other loves as well. It is not my only love, but I confess to an unshakable, terrible love of
hope, and peace too. Because I do not share Hillman's [End Page 283] Jungian psychological commitments, I am not sure
that this love is archetypal or universal. Maybe Paul Simon is right that " everybody loves the sound of a train in the
distance," that "the thought that life could be better is woven indelibly into our hearts and our brains."10 Or maybe only
some people love this sound, and maybe this thought is woven only precariously into some hearts and bones sometimes.
But I am sure that this love
of hope and peace has a history and expression equal in duration
and depth to those of love of war. I am sure that for every General Patton, quoted by Hillman, who proclaims
love of war beyond love of life, there is a General MacArthur, who proclaimed just as strongly, "I have seen war. . . . I hate
war." Or there is a General (and President) Eisenhower, who observed in 1953 that war "is not a way of life at all in any
true sense" but only "humanity hanging on a cross of iron." Or there is a General Sherman, who said that "war is hell." Or
there is a Senator John McCain, who said: "War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could
sentimentalize its cruel reality." And then what, now
what? What should a meliorist do? Terrible lovers of hope and
peace often have answered this question in one or both of two ways. The
first is the way of individual self-
transformation. I think of this strategy as an "Inward Bound" program. "War and peace start in the
hearts of individuals," Pema Chodron writes.11 The way to peace is the way of turning hearts of war into
hearts of peace and nonviolence; hearts open to what Gandhi called the "infinite possibilities of universal love," universal
truth, and the God within us all; and hearts in community and communion with one another.12 All we need is love—
though, of course, that is a lot, and this way is difficult. It requires that we reject as our ideal the strategic warrior: War will
exist, John F. Kennedy said, "until that distant day when the conscientious objector enjoys the same reputation and
prestige as the warrior does today." Whatever its merits—and I think there are real merits—thisapproach has
not proven very effective. It has proven difficult for individuals to embody and enact
it. And it has proven difficult for individuals who do embody it to transform those who do
not. Perhaps most people need to try a lot harder, or perhaps this approach just demands too much of most people. In
either case, this approach is too individualistic and voluntaristic. It is not very useful to demand that people act
virtuously—peacefully, lovingly, cooperatively—without attending to the cultural conditions that would enable them
significantly to do so. If one takes the self less as archetypal and more as cultural—as, for example, the irreducibly social
self explained by George Herbert Mead—then so too one must see the self's vices and virtues, including loves and hopes, as
social. It is some version of this insight that underlies a second approach to peace by those with a terrible love of
hope: the way of societal transformation. I think of this strategy as an "Outward Bound" program. On this
view, war and peace start in cultural conditions. The way to peace is the way of social action: the amelioration of
oppression, domination, abuse, threats, humiliation, poverty, hunger, illness, [End Page 284] ignorance, and
miscommunication. All we need is social change—though, of course, that is a lot, and this way is difficult, piecemeal, and
never complete. Whatever its merits—and, again, I think there are real and great merits—this
approach has not
proven very effective. It has been difficult to greatly reduce, much less eliminate, social
conditions that nurture and sustain war. And it has proven difficult to spread or export even partial, local,
temporary success. This is not surprising; those conditions are in part nurtured by our love of war. Perhaps more work is
needed, or perhaps the problems are just too great in light of this love of war. If concrete cases of love of hope
and peace point toward, and result from, both self and societal transformation, so too do
concrete cases of love of war. We may discipline ourselves to become more loving or more hateful. We may
engage in social action to foster harmony or conflict. Recognizing this fact, we should not only strive to
eliminate love of war through inward-bound self-transformation or outward-bound
societal reconstruction. Hillman argues that this is impossible, and whether it is necessarily
impossible, as he says, or just contingently impossible, neither of these strategies has worked so far. Instead, we
should focus on changing the conditions that call forth action on behalf of love of war—
and thereby change the consequences of love of war. In other words, if a healthy dose
of realism suggests that we cannot eliminate love of war, then a healthy dose of
meliorism suggests that we need to work to (1) reduce—not eliminate, but reduce—its
manifestations or outbreaks and (2) redirect its energy. Let me expand on these two points. In the
first place, then, we need to focus on the signs in our experience that love of war is moving us toward acts of war. What are
these signs? They include at least the following six features of experience: * mdash a morality of fundamentalist dualisms
and absolutes: experiences of sharply separate and complete goods and complete evils, of self and radical other, of us and
them, of good guys in a shining city on the hill and white hats and evil empires, of our benevolence and their arrogance
and humiliation of us, of the outwardly same actions by us as justified and by them as unjust * mdash a unique
temporality: experiences that things are different or unique or special now, that a final moment has been entered and that
we are tested by it, that we must respond right now fully and finally, that their actions must not be allowed to pass, that we
have come to a turning point, that there is no going back, that it is now or never and that the past has come to an end *
mdash an exceptional metaphysics: experiences that God and history are with us; that we are chosen or exceptional or
highest; that we are more than just another group striving to respond to our problems and advance our interests; that our
interests, above all others, are Real or True or Holy * mdash a projected transformation: experiences of anticipation and
expectation that everything that really matters will be different—depending on what we do [End Page 285] now; that we
stand at a threshold of possible irreversible triumph, glory, and salvation; that a qualitatively different future is about to
dawn * mdash a single-mindedness: experiences of narrowed focus and realization, finally, of what alone matters; of
everything else as secondary and unimportant; of this alone as one's calling and meaning of life; of what one was born for,
made for, prepared for; of one's destiny * mdash the impossibility of communication: experiences that we cannot talk with
them, that our truths permanently cut us off from their lies, that we can understand them but that they cannot understand
us, that without our direct experience and our identity outsiders can never understand us, that deliberation and
understanding are impossible and pointless and even demeaning13 These and related experiences,
rooted in a
love of war, are not merely "natural." Instead, they can be, and are, manufactured and
manipulated and deployed. Today we have learned that Hermann Göring was right that it is easy for leaders to
drag the people to war: "All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of
patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Accordingly, those who hope for peace
must invent democratic practices and institutions that mediate, intervene, and educate for different, fundamentally
opposite experiences and policies. The politics of any effective love and hope for peace must be, in the broadest sense of
the term, educational. The love of war, William James notes, is a love of meaningful and strenuous service to, and pride in,
a collectivity. Noting that "no collectivity is like an army for nourishing such pride," James nonetheless melioristically
maintains that "the martial type of character can be bred without war."14 How? James says in response that "a
permanently successful peace-economy cannot be a simple pleasure-economy" and that, instead, "new
energies and
hardihoods must transform "the manliness to which the military mind so faithfully
clings." He continues: "The war-function has graspt us so far; but constructive interests may
some day seem no less imperative and impose on the individual a hardly lighter burden."15
What constructive interests? James focuses on lives of little or nothing else but suffering imposed by accidents of birth,
position, and opportunity—a general stance that dovetails nicely with many contemporary concerns about class and
economic colonialism, nation and hemisphere, race and ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation, disability and disease,
human rights and environmental justice. The
advance of these interests is not primarily a
matter of individual will. Even James, often incorrectly supposed to be focused exclusively on individuality
and personal energies, realizes that this task is social and educational. He proposes, instead of military conscription, "a
conscription of the whole youthful population" to battle the injustices of birth, to even them out, and to provide other
benefits to the commonwealth.16 There may be no reason, then or today, to limit this conscription to the "youthful
population," though there is good reason to think that its educational [End Page 286] impact there would be greatest.
There is every reason, by contrast, to think that love of peace, when
not joined by imaginative action to
create new social institutions and practices of this type, fails to be genuine hope for
peace—and becomes merely an idle wish for peace. Moreover, I confess that it is difficult for me to see
how any philosophy that is not linked to this sort of cultural reconstruction is anything like real love of wisdom—
philosophy as a personal way of life—as distinct from love of some texts, authors, or what James, in sexist language of the
day, calls "unmanly ease"—philosophy as a professional way of earning a living. James says that genuine hope for peace
and creation of its alternative, constructive interests may some day seem imperative. A century later, that day has not
come. Yet. Hopefulopposition to war requires the ongoing creation and reconstruction of
positive alternatives to the perceptions that turn love of war into acts of war. It requires
creation of different enemies, weapons, and campaigns to supply the satisfactions of that
love. Effective opposition to war can be nothing less.
psych doesn’t explain war

Hoffman, Center for European Studies at Harvard, 1986 [Stanley, “On the Political Psychology of Peace and War:
A Critique and an Agenda,” Political Psychology 7.1, jstor, p. 7-11]
One group, looking at the show, concludes that it is
This is why I talked about a different reading of reality.
utopian to wish it away, or to suggest cures whose adoption cannot be imagined unless
it were already fundamentally different from what it is now and has been for ages. The
other group, looking at the new weapons on the stage, and remembering the show's past breakdowns, argues
that the only way of preventing the fire next time is to move to a totally new stage, and to
change the play and the actors.
As I said already, not all the traditionalists promise world peace, nor do all the radicals believe in
the mathematical certainty of nuclear war and winter. But they are convinced that the very impossibility of a mutation
before disaster limits the scope and indeed the types of measures that can realistically be taken to avoid it. Radical impatience with what is
(wrongly) often interpreted as a professional commitment of traditional analysts to the perpetuation of the current state of their field - as a
failure on their part, as well as on the part of statesmen, to be shaken, like lonesco's characters, by the sudden irruption of rhinoceroses in our midst - is
matched by traditionalist annoyance at what is often perceived as mere rhetoric of

indignation, denunciation, and exorcism, fist shaking at unwelcome facts, and unfair
name calling addressed to actors who, caught in a game they did not invent, do, at best, what
they can to keep it from blowing up and, more usually, at least what they have been selected for.
This brings us to a second difference. The radicals, who tend (often correctly) to perceive the policy scientists' stance as a trahison des clercs, write and behave as if
they were above the fray, seeing through the ra- tionalizations statesmen endlessly provide, and the stereotypes in which citizens cloak their fears, frustrations, and
aggressions. At the same time, they can't help but belong to different communities: While calling for a global identity, they remain, say, Americans or British, or
Indian, or Israeli. Their recommendatations are usually addressed to, or hurled at, their own governments or (in the case of many intellectuals from less powerful
countries who deal with the global cold war) at the superpowers. The underlying assumption, once again, is that the seriousness of the peril should push their own
national government, or, in the latter case, the great powers' leaders, into adopting the drastic measures needed for salvation.
traditionalists, even when, in their own work, they try scrupulous-ly to transcend national
The
prejudices and to seek scientific truth, believe that it is unrealistic to expect

statesmen to stand above the fray: By definition, the statesmen are there to worry not only about planetary survival, but —
first of all—about national survival and safety. To be sure, they ought to be able to see how certain policies, aimed at enhancing security, actually increase in-
security all around. But there are sharp limits to how far they can go in their mutual empathy or in their acts (unlike intellectuals in their advice), as long as the
states' antagonisms persist, as long as uncertainty about each other's intentions prevails, and as long as there is reason to fear that one side's wise restraint, or
unilateral moves toward "sanity," will be met, not by the rival's similar restraint or moves, but either by swift or skillful political or military exploitation of the
opportunity created for unilateral gain, or by a for-midable domestic backlash if national self-restraint appears to result in ex-ternal losses, humiliations or
perceptions of weakness.
the radicals'
There is little point in saying that the state of affairs which imposes such limits is "anachronistic" or "unrational." To traditionalists,
stance — condemnation from the top of Mount Olympus — can only impede
understanding of the limits and possibilities of reform. To be sure, the fragmentation of mankind is a formidable
obstacle to the solution of many problems that cannot be handled well in a national framework, and a deadly peril insofar as the use of force, the very distinctive
feature of world politics, now entails the risk of nuclear war.
But one can hardly call anachronistic a phenomenon—the assertion of national identity
— that, to the bulk of [HU]mankind, appears not only as a necessity but also as a positive
good, since humanity's fragmentation results from the very aspiration to self-determination. Many people have only recently emerged from foreign mastery,
and have reason to fear that the alternative to national self-mastery is not a world government of assured fairness and efficiency, but alien domination.
As for "unrationality," the drama lies in the contrast between the ra-tionality of the whole, which scholars are concerned about—the greatest good of the greatest
number, in utilitarian terms — and the rationality or greatest good of the part, which is what statesmen worry about and are responsible for. What the radicals
What keeps
denounce as irrational and irresponsible from the viewpoint of mankind is what Weber called the statesman's ethic of responsibility.
ordinary "competitive conflict processes" (Deutsch, 1983)— the very stuff of society — from becoming
"unrational" or destructive, is precisely what the nature of world politics excludes: the
restraint of the partners either because of the ties of affection or responsibility that
mitigate the conflict, or because of the existence of an outsider — marriage counselor, arbitrator, judge,
policeman or legislator— capable of inducing or imposing restraints.
Here we come to a third point of difference. The very absence of such safeguards of rationality , the obvious discrepancy
between what each part intends, and what it (and the whole world) ends with, the crudeness of some of the psychological mechanisms at work in international
have led many radicals, especially among

affairs—as one can see from the statements of leaders, or from the media, or from inflamed publics—
to treat the age-old contests of states in terms,

those whose training or profession is in psychoanalysis or mental health,
not of the psychology of politics, but of individual psychology and pathology.

There are two manifestations of this. One is the tendency to look at nations or states as individuals writ large, stuck at an early stage of development (similarly,
John Mack (1985) in a recent paper talks of political ideologies as carrying "forward the dichotomized structures of childhood"). One of my predecessors writes
about "the correspondence between development of the individual self and that of the group or nation," and concludes "that intergroup or international conflict
contains the basic elements of the conflict each individual experiences psychologically" (Volkan, 1985). Robert Holt, from the viewpoint of cognitive psychology,
finds "the largest part of the American public" immature, in a "phase of development below the Conscientious" (Holt, 1984). The second related aspect is the
tendency to look at the notions statesmen or publics have of "the enemy," not only as residues of childhood or adolescent phases of development, but as images that
express "disavowed aspects of the self" (Stein, 1985), reveal truths about our own fears and hatreds, and amount to masks we put on the "enemy," because of our
own psychological needs.
Here is where the clash between traditionalists and radicals is strongest. Traditionalists do not accept a view of group life derived from the study of individual
development or family relations, or a view of modern society derived from the simplistic Freudian model of regressed followers identifying with a leader. They
don't see in ideologies just irra-tional constructs, but often rationally selected maps allowing individuals to cope with reality. They don't see national identification
as pathological, as an appeal to the people's baser instincts, more aggressive impulses or un-sophisticated mental defenses; it is, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau so well
understood, the competition of sovereign states that frequently pushes people from "sane" patriotism to "insane" nationalism (Rousseau's way of preventing the
former from veering into the latter was, to say the least, im-practical: to remain poor in isolation). Nor do they see anything "primitive" in the nation's concern for
survival: It is a moral and structural requirement.
the "intra-psychic" approach distorts reality. Enemies are not mere

Traditionalists also believe that
projections of negative identities; they are often quite real. To be sure, the Nazis' view of the
Jews fits the metaphor of the mask put on the enemy for one's own needs. But were, in return, those Jews who understood what
enemies they had in the Nazis, doing the same? Is the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, is the Soviet regime's treatment
of dissidents, was the Gulag merely a convenient projection of our intrapsychic battles? Clichés such as the one about how
our enemy "understands only force" may tell us a great deal about ourselves; but sometimes they contain half-truths about him, and not just revelations about us.
Our fears flow not only from our private fantasies but also from concrete realities and
from the fantasies which the international state of nature generates.
the psychology of politics which traditionalists deem adequate is not derived
In other words,
from theories of psychic development and health; it is derived from the logic of the
international milieu, which breeds the kind of vocabulary found in the historians and theorists of the state of nature: fear and power, pride and
honor, survival and security, self-interest and reputation, distrust and misunderstanding, commitment and credibility. It is also derived from the social psychology
of small or large groups, which resorts to the standard psychological vocabulary that describes mental mechanisms or maneuvers and cognitive processes: denial,
But using this vocabulary does not imply that a group whose
projection, guilt, repression, closure, rigidity, etc....
style of politics is paranoid is therefore composed of people who, as private individuals,

are paranoid. Nor does it relieve us of the duty to look at the objective reasons and
functions of these mental moves, and of the duty to make explicit our assumptions about what constitutes a "healthy," wise, or proper
social process.
traditionalists find the mental health approach to world affairs unhelpful.

Altogether,
Decisions about war and peace are usually taken by small groups of people; the
temptation of analyzing their behavior either, literal-ly, in terms of their personalities, or, metaphysically, in terms
borrowed from the study of human development, rather than in those of group dynamics or principles
of international politics is understandable. But it is misleading. What is pathological in
couples, or in a well-ordered community, is, alas, frequent, indeed normal, among states, or in a
troubled state. What is malignant or crazy is usually not the actors or the social process
in which they are engaged: it is the possible results.
this
The grammar of motives which the mental health approach brands as primitive or immature is actually rational for the actors. Traditionalists fear that
particular approach leads to the substitution of labels for explanations, to bad analysis
and fanciful prescriptions. Bad analysis: the tendency to see in group coherence a regressive response to a threat, whereas it often
is a rational response to the "existential" threats entailed by the very nature of the international milieu. Or the tendency to see in the
effacement or minimization of individual differences in a group a release of unconscious instincts, rather than a
phenomenon that can be perfectly adaptive—in response to stress or threats—or result from
governmental manipulation or originate in the code of conduct inculcated by the educational system, etc.. . The habit of comparing the state, or modern society,
with the Church or the army, and to analyze human relations in these institutions in ways that stress the
libidinal more than the cognitive and superego factors, or equate libidinal bonds and the desire for a leader. The view that enemies
are above all products of mental drives, rather than inevitable concomitants of social
strife at every level. Or the view that the contest with the rival fulfills inter-nal needs, which may be true, but requires careful examination of the
nature of these needs (psychological? bureaucratic? economic?), obscures the objective reasons of the contest, and
risks confusing cause and function.

Indeed, such analysis is particularly misleading in dealing with the pre-sent scene . The radicals are so
(justifiably) concerned with the nuclear peril that the traditional ways in which statesmen and publics behave seem to vindicate the pathological approach. But this,
in turn, incites radicals to overlook the fundamental ambiguity of contemporary world politics. On the one hand, there is a nuclear revolution—the capacity for
total destruction. On the other hand, many states, without nuclear weapons, find that the use of force remains rational (in terms of a rationality of means) and
beneficial at home or abroad—ask the Vietnamese, or the Egyptians after October 1973, or Mrs. Thatcher after the Falklands, or Ronald Reagan after Grenada.
The superpowers themselves, whose contest has not been abolished by the nuclear revolution (it is the stakes, the costs of failure that have, of course, been
transformed), find that much of their rivalry can be conducted in traditional ways — including limited uses of force —below the level of nuclear alarm. They also
find that nuclear weapons, while—perhapsunusable rationally, can usefully strengthen the very process that has been so faulty in the prenuclear ages: deterrence
deterrence as expressing the deterrer's belief that his country is

(this is one of the reasons for nuclear proliferation). The pathological approach interprets
good, the enemy's is bad. This is often the case, but it need not be; it can also reflect the conviction that one's country
has interests that are not mere figments of the imagination, and need to be protected
both because of the material costs of losing them, and because of the values embedded in
them. As for war planning, it is not a case of "psychological denial of unwelcome reality"
(Montville, 1985). but a — perhaps futile, perhaps dangerous—necessity in a world where
deterrence may once more fail.

Even if one accepts the
The prescriptions that result from the radicals' psychological approach also run into traditionalist objections.
metaphors of collective disease or pathology, one must understand that the "cure" can
only be provided by politics. All too often, the radicals' cures consist of perfectly sensible
recommendations for lowering tensions, but fail to tell us how to get them carried
out —they only tell us how much better the world would be, if only "such rules could be established" (Deutsch, 1983).
Framework
Bataille Flows Neg
Bataille admits rules outweigh
Fortuna, PhD candidate, 09
(John , The Political Implications of Sacrifice and Loss in the Thought of Georges Bataille http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p317285_index.html)
Bataille’s position does require some sort of reworking of our practices (or perhaps more importantly, the
While it is certainly the case that
way in which we understand those we currently have) in order to accommodate the experience of sacrificial loss, this does not necessarily entail a
complete upheaval of society and politics. As disruptive as sacrifice may be to the stable and logical forms which tend to comprise profane
existence, it does not seem to be the case that Bataille is recommending that we simply overturn all
things profane. In fact, Bataille specifically argues against such action where, in Guilty, he says, Life is a
result of disequilibrium and instability. Stable forms are needed to make it possible however….To
shrink from fundamental stability isn’t less cowardly than to hesitate about shattering it.
Perpetual instability is more boring than adhering strictly to a rule, and only what’s in existence can be
made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to be sacrificed. The more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or
Perhaps the most important insight to take from this quote

sacrifice that can result (Bataille 1988b, 28-29).
is that sacrifice (here emphasized as that which disrupts what is) depends upon the logical and stable
forms that are marks of the profane world of work and utility. Because sacrifice might be said to
represent a transgression of the norms of the profane world, it follows that these norms
must exist in order for such a transgression to occur in the first place. While I have
been emphasizing the importance for Bataille of sacrificial loss (and to the extent that it follows from it—disruption), in this passage he seems to be affording
some sort of recognition to the importance of values like stability, that are associated not with the sacred but rather the profane.
Debate Solves
Debating this shit is good
Miller et.al ’11 – Profs @ Rowan University and Rutgers
D. Miller,]. Rivera and C. Gonzalez, Societies Without borders 6:2 (2011) 68-91 The
Deliberative School Emphasis of Human Rights and Community-Based Research:
Recognizing our Common Humanity, Empowerment and Uplift, DeMond Miller, Jason
Rivera and Christopher Gonzalez, Rowan University
http://societieswithoutborders.files.wordpress.com/2011/09/miller-rivera-gonzales-
6_2-2011-draft.pdf
The ways in which community-based research can be integrated into society vary. From a governmental point of view,
community-based research can be integrated into a community's decision-making process by promoting reflexive
inclusion, which includes transparency, sustainable equity, and a results-based culture that involves community members
in the process of needs assessment, policy development and oversight (Miller and Rivera 2006). The idea of reflexive
inclusion places the responsibility of the development of culturally acceptable human rights concepts and frameworks in
the hands of the community and the government in charge of making sure that policies are implemented effectively.
Alternatively, when governments are not open to changes in decision-making procedures, community-based research can
be integrated into the higher education curriculum (Rivera and Miller 2009). It is hoped that when
college
students are incrementally exposed to human rights issues early in their
careers, they will influence the professional organizations and civic institutions they
later enter. This diffusion of respect for human rights throughout society results in
the incremental integration into private and public spheres. The incremental
integration of human rights issues accentuates the broader social acceptance of human rights emphasized in the
Deliberative School. Furthermore, only
through acceptance by the broader society, and subsequent
institutionalization in the global community, will the promotion and enforcement of
human rights become possible. Community-based research brings us closer to that end, closer to an
understanding of others, and closer to a larger understanding of humanity—a society without borders.
Law Good
The aff’s rejection of any attempt at productive reform is

congruent with the most regressive features of political
conservatism – vote neg to embrace the possibility for continual
tinkering and incremental improvement
Guido Giacomo Preparata 8, Associate Professor of Political Economy at the
University of Washington, The Catholic Social Science Review 13, “Un(for)giving:
Bataille, Derrida, and the Postmodern Denial of the Gift”, p. 191-193
Again, we ask, what could possibly be the benefit in denying a priori that love, in fact, may be the principle that will
eventually win the contest of endurance versus indifference and/or hatred? Shorn
of its philosophical
pretensions, the argument of Bataille (and Derrida) is not much more than sullen
proverbializing on the immutable mediocrity of our modern soul: a soul incapable of
great deeds, and forever bent on the sycophantic acquisition of cumulative perks . The
Liberals would demur, naturally: Self-interest might not be glorious, they’d say, but it remains nevertheless the sole
propellant to riches, and hence, by way of philanthropic trickle-down, to the tempered “happiness” of the collectivity.
Riches, the postmodern Batailleans would rejoin, cannot be a vehicle to satisfaction if their owners are not given the
sovereign privilege to blast them with splendor. To “blast” anything, the Liberals would insist, is, at best, a savvy PR stunt
(i.e., a perfectly legitimate business proposition), or, at worst, something “irrational.” Which reply goes to confirm the
thesis of the Batailleans: that the benevolent gift, truly, does not exist, for neither of its two contemporary expressions— as
taxes to the bureaucracy and as the charity of foundations—is driven by a disinterested love for fellow human beings. As
charity, emoluments are granted in keeping with the donors’ wishes, and as taxes, the given funds are involuntary
transfers that fatten an administrative elite on the one hand, and spur wars on the other. In a modern regime, the accursed
share thus re-emerges as the semi-unintended effect of fiscal collection. In any case, the Batailleans would argue, the
modern policies of gifting, be they publicly or privately inspired, make a sonorous mockery of our professed adhesion to
the “universal” values of brotherly union, civility, goodwill, and “human rights.” And to that, the Liberals would respond in
the end with a polite, semi-uncooperative (and interested) silence.∂ Which is to say that the Liberals,
who hold
the reins of power, have understood that they might benefit by making room for the
Bataillean postmoderns in the proprietary area of academic debate. The benefit consists in co-opting
what presents itself as the adversarial faction—postmodernism fashions itself as the true beacon of the
dissenting Left—by identifying common positions and beliefs. These beliefs must be leveraged
to keep at bay alternative ways of thinking. In this instance, Liberalism and Bataillean anti-
humanism appear united by their common hostility to a jurisprudential reform seeking to
enact anonymous, that is, free gifting. The former seems to fear that such a reform would disable the tenure of business,
and the latter sees it as a potential threat to their more or less unavowed espousal of misanthropic nihilism.∂ This
convergence of interests would also contribute to explaining the otherwise bizarre triumph in America of thinkers such as
Foucault and Derrida. Both, and especially the former, were tributaries of Bataille. Their successful launch in the United
States is all the more curious as it coincided with their passing out of vogue in their own country (at the beginning of the
eighties) (Macey, 1993, 430). What is captivating, as mentioned in the introduction, is that most Foucauldians and
Derrideans, of whom there are presently legions in American academia, are not fully conversant with the work of Bataille,
and therefore tend to dismiss the essential connection of these latter-day pundits to the baroque and truculent estheticism
of the master. Without bringing to light the Bataillean imprint, we contend that the true pedagogy of these French
postmodern gurus may not be fully discernible. In truth, both Foucault and Derrida had no sympathy for the catch-all
label of postmodernism, though in America both came to be irremediably associated with it. Postmodernism, as known,
has become, in the past twenty-five years, a byword for academia’s protean brew of skepticism, relativism, jocose literary
criticism, and anti-colonial invective. Postmodernism’s pièce de résistance is, or course, Foucault’s Power/Knowledge,
which is a peculiar distortion of Bataille’s theory of the “core.” Power/Knowledge provided a clever discursive structure
with which to articulate, without any attempt to solve it, racial difference in American society.4 Power/knowledge came to
freeze such a difference, so to speak. Similar political aims seem to lurk behind Derrida’s re-issue of Bataille’s ontological
denial of the gift, or the related theme of the impossibility of forgiveness, which also appears to be inspired by Bataille’s
meditations on the powerful suggestions of the Christian myth (Bataille, 1970, VIII, 31). The
objective of these
philosophical pieces is to intimate and persuade the reader that “goodness” is an
Apollonian illusion. Because the anti-humanists, like the majority of Liberals, are
convinced that humans are at bottom egotists, if not altogether malevolent, they believe
it their mission to disabuse us of any wishful idealism. This kind of intimation
indisputably betokens conservative intent: “whatever is is right”—no need to fix it.
Because men give only to get something back, say the Batailleans, gifting, and the kind-hearted suggestion it carries, is an
absurdity. Likewise with forgiveness: if I forgive a tort, says Derrida, it is because the affront suffered thereby is ultimately
tolerable. As such it did not truly require of me any extraordinarily selfless and magnanimous stretch: in fact, I pardoned
nothing. Therefore there can be no forgiving: what is “unforgivable” is by definition beyond our powers of sentimental
absorption. In conclusion, as averred by another Bataillean postmodern such as Jean Baudrillard, we humans are perfect
the way we are: dispensers of merriment and dispensers of sorrow all rolled into one (Baudrillard, 2004, 117). This, the
Batailleans sentence, is the “principle of evil,” and it is the natural state of affairs with which we must always reckon. In
this regard, the postmodern outlook is compatible, if not perfectly identical with the
practical cynicism preached by the modern school of Liberal political economy.
The aff’s just a guise for tea-party conservatism – reject their

presupposition that the world can’t get any better
Guido Giacomo Preparata 8, Associate Professor of Political Economy at the
University of Washington, The Catholic Social Science Review 13, “Un(for)giving:
Bataille, Derrida, and the Postmodern Denial of the Gift”, p. 174-175
To repeat, no systematic appraisal of the Bataillean matrix behind conventional postmodern works will be attempted here.
This article will merely focus on a very specific segment of this important connection, namely Bataille’s treatment of
gifting, and its virtual replication in Derrida, fifty years after its original formulation. This circumscribed analysis is here
presented as an introductory side step into the intriguing realm of Bataille, and into the semi-unacknowledged legacy
bequeathed by this dark genius on contemporary political economy. In this sweeping fresco of existential hermeneutics,
Bataille’s nested treatise on the gift is nonetheless a significant contribution. The seminal idea of this particular invective
against charity—that it is unworthy of heroic beings, who need not be shackled by gratitude—was indeed planted by de
Sade in his celebrated Justine. And Bataille was a careful reader and admirer of the Marquis. Bataille
did
something novel in revisiting this theme. And that was to highlight the strident antagonism of his
pioneering anti-humanism to the idealistic hope that generosity and a system of
benevolent emulation supported by a generalized policy of gifting among free city-states may act as a shield
against man’s murderous and oligarchic propensities. The thesis of this article is, then, that Bataille’s
(and Derrida’s) attack on the gift is, more than by skepticism, prompted by fear. In other words, it is my suspicion that
behind the obsessive and renewed effort to deny the beneficial virtues of gifting there lies
the determination to kill in the reader any hope that this world is perfectible, that peace and justice
may triumph in some form or other. It is as if thinkers of Bataille’s ilk had already made up their
minds as to what may be humanly effected in this world—and this would hitherto amount
to little more that a series of truces in one endless sequence of painful tumults. And,
therefore, to disabuse the rest of us of the notion that good can be done, the Batailleans have conducted a comprehensive
critique of our modes of thought and social organization by laying special emphasis on the systematic failure of mankind’s
professed commitment to lofty, humane goals throughout history. The
postmodern invective against the
gift is merely an economic appendix of this vast project of anti-humanist
catechesis. Ultimately, such anti-humanist speculation, despite, or rather owing to, Bataille’s malevolent
brilliance, has endured a steady, and refreshed season of success in academia (see for instance,
Martyn, 1999) and public discourse for the past thirty years, because its inherent misanthropism
and lack of compassion has proven to be highly compatible with the uncaring and
unforgiving ethos of standard Liberal, laissez-faire economics (Polanyi, 2001, 116-35). And, as
such, it does stand as one important and fascinating exemplar of conservative discourse.
Reform Solves
Voting for us affirms the transformational power of
oppositional networks to accelerate the fragmenting power of
anti-hegemonic networks – larger trajectory of reform can be
understood as a strategy for political action
Hardt 2 – Prof. of Literature @ Duke & The European Graduate School
New Left Review, New Left Review 14, March-April 2002,
http://newleftreview.org/II/14/michael-hardt-porto-alegre-today-s-bandung
Anti-capitalism and national sovereignty The Porto Alegre Forum was in this sense perhaps to happy, to celebratory and
not conflictual enough. The most important political difference cutting across the entire Forum concerned the role of
national sovereignty. There are indeed two primary positons in the response to today’s dominant forces of globalization:
either one can work to reinforce the sovereignty of nation-states as a defensive barrier against the control of foreign and
global capital, or onecan strive towards a non-national alternative to the present form of
globalization that is equally global. The first poses neoliberalism as the primary analytical category, viewing
the enemy as unrestricted global capitalist activity with weak state controls; the second is more clearly posed
against capital itself, whether state-regulated or not. The first might rightly be called an
antiglobalization posit on, in so far as national sovereignties, even if linked by international solidarity, serve to limit and
regulate the forces of capitalist globalization. National liberation thus remains for this posit on the ultimate goal, as it was
for the old anticolonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The second, in contrast, opposes any national solutions and seeks
instead a democratic globalization. The first position occupied the most visible and dominant spaces of the Porto Alegre
Forum; it was represented in the large plenary sessions, repeated by the official spokespeople, and reported in the press. A
key proponent of this position was the leadership of the Brazilian PT (Workers' Party)—in effect the host of the Forum,
since it runs the city and regional government. It was obvious and inevitable that the PT would occupy a central space in
the Forum and use the international prestige of the event as part of its campaign strategy for the upcoming elections. The
second dominant voice of national sovereignty was the French leadership of ATTAC, which laid the groundwork for the
Forum in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique. The leadership of ATTAC is, in this regard, very close to many of the
French politicians— most notably Jean-Pierre Chevenement—who advocate strengthening national sovereignty as a
solution to the ills of contemporary globalization. These, in any case, are the figures who dominated the representation of
the Forum both internally and in the press. The non-sovereign, alternative globalization position, in contrast, was
minoritarian at the Forum—not in quantitative terms but in terms of representation; in fact, the majority of the
participants in the Forum may well have occupied this minoritarian position. First, the various movements that have
conducted the protests from Seattle to Genoa are generally oriented towards non-national solutions. Indeed, the
centralized structure of state sovereignty itself runs counter to the horizontal network-form that the movements have
developed. Second, the Argentinian movements that have sprung up in response to the present financial crisis, organized
in neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are similarly antagonistic to proposals of national sovereignty. Their
slogans call for getting rid, not just of one politician, but all of them—que se vayan todos: the entire political class. And
finally, at the base of the various parties and organizations present at the Forum the sentiment is much more hostile to
proposals of national sovereignty than at the top. This may be particularly true of ATTAC, a hybrid organization whose
head, especially in France, mingles with traditional politicians, whereas its feet are firmly grounded in the movements.
The division between the sovereignty, anti-globalization position and the non-sovereign,
alternative globalization position is therefore not best understood in geographical terms.
It does not map the divisions between North and South or First World and Third. The
conflict corresponds rather to two different forms of political organization. The traditional
parties and centralized campaigns generally occupy the national sovereignty pole, whereas the new
movements organized in horizontal networks tend to cluster at the non-sovereign pole. And furthermore,
within traditional, centralized organizations, the top tends toward sovereignty and the base away. It is no surprise,
perhaps, that those in positions of power would be most interested in state sovereignty and those excluded least. This may
help to explain, in any case, how the national sovereignty, antiglobalization position could dominate the representations of
the Forum even though the majority of the participants tend rather toward the perspective of a non-national alternative
globalization. As a concrete illustration of this political and ideological difference, one can imagine the responses to the
current economic crisis in Argentina that logically follow from each of these positions. Indeed that crisis loomed over the
entire Forum, like a threatening premonition of a chain of economic disasters to come. The first position would point to
the fact that the Argentinian debacle was caused by the forces of global capital and the policies of the IMF, along with the
other supranational institutions that undermine national sovereignty. The logical oppositional response should thus be to
reinforce the national sovereignty of Argentina (and other nation-states) against these destabilizing external forces. The
second position would identify the same causes of the crisis, but insist that a national solution is neither possible nor
desirable. The alternative to the rule of global capital and its institutions will only be found at an equally global level, by a
global democratic movement. The practical experiments in democracy taking place today at neighbourhood and city levels
in Argentina, for example, pose a necessary continuity between the democratization of Argentina and the democratization
of the global system. Of course, neither of these perspectives provides an adequate recipe for an
immediate solution to the crisis that would circumvent IMF prescriptions—and I am not convinced that such a
solution exists. They rather present different political strategies for action today which seek,
in the course of time, to develop real alternatives to the current form of global rule.
Parties vs networks In a previous period we could have staged an old-style ideological confrontation
between the two positions. The first could accuse the second of playing into the hands of neoliberalism,
undermining state sovereignty and paving the way for further globalization. Politics, the one could continue,
can only be effectively conducted on the national terrain and within the nation-state. And
the second could reply that national regimes and other forms of sovereignty, corrupt and oppressive as they
are, are merely obstacles to the global democracy that we seek. This kind of confrontation, however, could not take place at
Porto Alegre—in part because of the dispersive nature of the event, which tended to displace conflicts, and in part because
the sovereignty position so successfully occupied the central representations that no contest was possible. But the more
important reason for a lack of confrontation may have had to do with the organizational forms that correspond to the two
positions. The traditional parties and centralized organizations have spokespeople who represent them and conduct their
battles, but no one speaks for a network. How do you argue with a network? The
movements organized within them do exert their power, but they do not proceed through
oppositions. One of the basic characteristics of the network form is that no two nodes
face each other in contradiction; rather, they are always triangulated by a third, and then
a fourth, and then by an indefinite number of others in the web. This is one of the
characteristics of the Seattle events that we have had the most trouble understanding:
groups which we thought in objective contradiction to one another—environmentalists
and trade unions, church groups and anarchists—were suddenly able to work together, in the
context of the network of the multitude. The movements, to take a slightly different perspective,
function something like a public sphere, in the sense that they can allow full expression
of differences within the common context of open exchange. But that does not
mean that networks are passive. They displace contradictions and operate instead a
kind of alchemy, or rather a sea change, the flow of the movements transforming the
traditional fixed positions; networks imposing their force through a kind of
irresistible undertow. Like the Forum itself, the multitude in the movements is always overflowing, excessive
and unknowable. It is certainly important then, on the one hand, to recognize the differences that divide the activists and
politicians gathered at Porto Alegre. It
would be a mistake, on the other hand, to try to read the division
according to the traditional model of ideological conflict between opposing sides.
Political struggle in the age of network movements no longer works that way. Despite the
apparent strength of those who occupied centre stage and dominated the representations of the Forum, they may
ultimately prove to have lost the struggle. Perhaps the representatives of the traditional parties and centralized
organizations at Porto Alegre are too much like the old national leaders gathered at Bandung—imagine Lula of the PT in
the position of Ahmed Sukarno as host, and Bernard Cassen of ATTAC France as Jawaharlal Nehru, the most honoured
guest. The leaders can certainly craft resolutions affirming national sovereignty around a conference table, but they can
never grasp the democratic power of the movements. Eventually they too will
be swept up in the
multitude, which is capable of transforming all fixed and centralized elements into so
many more nodes in its indefinitely expansive network.
Cap
Links / Turns
Expenditure as a strategy can't cope with the changing face of
capitalism- it sanitizes neoliberalism
GOUX , PhD, 90
(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)
Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the mystical tension toward
sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a
utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist
society the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in production. Now it is quite
clear that today's capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that
presided at its beginning. The values of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have
the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois mentality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is
doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's
principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of sterling pounds") [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be
considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. But
hasn't contemporary society undergone a transformation of the ethic of consumption,

desire, and pleasure that renders the classical (Weberian) analyses of the spirit of capitalism
(to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the
sacred and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and
glorious expenditure has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true
that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy
and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has "wasted" as much as
contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These questions strike directly at the
historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's thought. Is it not clear that
his passion for the "notion of expenditure,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his economic reflections to come-
emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism, in the 1920s and 1930s, which also
saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and
restricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an internal conflict
that undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradiction with itself ? (209-210)
Failing to grasp this crucial shift in capitalist strategy makes

their politics useless
GOUX , PhD, 90
Let me make it clear that, if there is no question of my subscribing without

discrimination to Gilder's apologetic discourse, on the other hand I take it quite seriously
as a pointed ideological legitimation strategy of eighties-capitalism. Gilder's theory is
exemplary as an attempt to formulate a morality of capitalism at odds with the heritage
of the Enlightenment. If his theory is weak as political economy, it is highly significant
(although at times disquieting)4 as economic politics. Any social critic (to go back to a phrase that Bataille would not disavow)
who overlooks this type of contemporary justification risks missing the true target and
overlooking once more capitalism's resources and metamorphoses. Furthermore, perhaps Mauss would
not have disavowed Gilder's attempt in principle. The anthropologist does not hesitate to see in the skillful operations of potlatch on the part of the Iroquois (in
whose simple disinterestedness he is careful not to believe) a pre- figuration of the operations of capitalism. And it is also his aim, at the end of The Gift to search
for something in the contemporary world that could prolong the process of gift and countergift of primitive societies. It is not, however, in "the cold reason of the
merchant, of the banker and of the capitalist" (The Gift, Chapter 4, Conclusion, vol. 2) that he detects that prolongation, but rather in the liberality of the
industrialist who creates family insurance funds or, better still, in national health insurance, where the community gives to the workers something other than a
simple salary. We are far from the insane squandering fantasized by Bataille, as well as from the innovator's generous risk invoked by Gilder. There still remains
the question of why neither Mauss nor Bataille have pointed out, in some decisive mechanism of capital, a contemporary continuation of potlatch, while Gilder, in
a transformation
1980, does not hesitate to resort to that ethnological reference, and to make it the guarantee of a moral basis. The reason is that
has become manifest. In the capitalism of abundance the

(already at work but still concealed)
distinction between luxury and non- luxury has become indeterminable. Clearly, it is only in
a regime of luxury, where everything is superfluous, that demand cannot be assigned
and becomes open to possibilities that are less and less predictable. It is only in a regime
of surplus consumption that the subject (the client who chooses) does not know his own desire, and
that supply (founded on still unknown, still unimagined technological and aesthetic possibilities) must necessarily precede
demand. The distinction is no longer between the necessary and the superfluous, but
between several as yet unimagined possibilities. This is why seduction, the aesthetization
of merchandise, plays a primordial role. It is vital for this supply economy to deny the
naturalness of needs- including the very notion of need and utility (in the trivial sense).
In this sense we are witnessing the aesthetization of political economy. (213-5)
This isn't a random missed prediction- Bataille's failure to

anticipate hedonistic capitalism invalidates his entire sociology
GOUX , PhD, 90
Along with this "postbourgeois" capitalism that at once contradicts Bataille's
sociological interpretation and confirms his ontological vision, explode the
sociocultural contradictions of capitalism. Daniel Bell has convincingly shown that with the
development of mass consumption and mass credit (which he situates in the 1930s) the puritan
ideology of early capitalism entered into contradiction with an increasingly hedonist
mode of consumption favored by capitalism. The entrepreneur's need to revive seduction, to respond to
competition with promises of evermore complex pleasures, inscribes him in a consumerist ideology directly at odds
with the "bourgeois" virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work that had assured the development of production. In this
way, the strict moral confines necessary for production enter into contradiction with the
ethical liberation (even moral license) necessary to consumption.8 Bataille does not seem to
have foreseen this conflict born of abundance and the extraordinary
sophistication of production. The Weberian image of capitalism that he maintains, the
slightly obsolete conviction that Franklin's precepts of economy and sobriety represent capitalism's morals in its pure state, seem to indicate that
Bataille did not imagine the paradoxical situation of postindustrial capitalism where only
the appeal to compete infinitely in unproductive consumption (through comfort, luxury, technical refinement,
the superfluous) allows for the development of production. (218-9)
Util
At: death
There’s no impact to servility and your authors don’t say that
DEATH is good, just that FEAR OF DEATH is bad – death itself
destroys the potential for radical negativity, which turns the
case
Gemerchak 12 Christopher M. Gemerchak is Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Institute
of Philosophy at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Sunday of the Negative, The:
Reading Bataille Reading Hegel, 2-1-12, 43-45, msm
The situation establishing the potions described above is in fact not an abstract one, but, rather, occurs in a fight to the
death between the two players—a fight that Bataille obliquely, yet significantly refers to as “The game” (Lg/ea)" Conflict
is the first step on the path to intersubjectivity, the sphere of recognition, for without this conflict, “the conscious subject
would remain in its routine of self-certainty and subjective knowledge.” And this “fight” occurs precisely because each
subject involved views itself as the essential reality, independent from all otherness, a view which is then challenged by
the other who holds the same attitude toward himself. What is then essential to realize is that the positions of this
intersubjective relation are established by the combatant’s respective attitudes towards life and death, for it is above all the
disregard for life that confirms an end to otherness and dependence."0 More specifically: the one who becomes the slave,
when confronted with the possibility of death and propelled into anxiety at this prospect, chooses not to take the risk of
dying and opts for a life of servitude and dependence. The horror of death and subsequent flight from it is the origin of
slavery in particular, and is the precondition of conscious individualization in general. The slave's shying away from death
shows that he prefers to remain tied to the given world, which amounts to a choice for servility over freedom, dependence
over self-sufliciency. This is negatively established through Hegel’s principle—one that is essential for Bataille—that “it is
only through staking one's life that freedom is won.”'" The
slave does retain a certain freedom in the
ability to negate and transform the given world, even if this is accomplished under
compulsion of fear, but in truth the freedom of negativity is hollow if it loses the strength to risk life itself.
Indeed, the fundamental condition of possibility for genuine self-consciousness is the willingness to freely risk one’s life.
And the refusal to squander one’s vital resources represents for Bataillc nothing less than an abdication from the
possibility of realizing one’s ultimate truth. It therefore seems that we should look to the other side of the equation, to the
one who accepts the possibility of death for a nonvital, essentially useless end—for pure prestige—to find the
representation of freedom that Bataillc is seeking. It is the master who represents for Bataille the sovereign attribute in
Hegel's dialectic, which is “the fact of a [hu]man's having staked his[their] whole being" through the “reckless expenditure
of vital resources.”” And it is this expenditure—which we will later encounter in one of Bataille’s privileged paradigms, the
potlatch—that carries the connotation of sovereign freedom, whereby one shows that one is “not attached to any specific
existence . . . is not tied up with life.”3 Or as Bataillc repeatedly states; the master, the sovereign existence,
escapes the anguish of death, treating death “as if it were not."4 We will examine this in greater
detail below. U What we must note here, however, is that Bataille could not be more clear about the
derivation of his notions of “sovereignty” and “servility’” from Hegel. He states: “In the Hegelian
dialectic, the sovereign share of man has indifl'er- ence to death, the risk of death confronted, for its foundation, the
servile part proceeds from the fear, or moreover the horror of death.”5 At first glance, Bataille’s “sovereignty” indeed
seems identical to Hegel’s mastery (Hmcbafl). for both are established through risking or putting into play (mettre enjeu)
the entirety of one’s existence. And even though Bataille again states that “the Master’s attitude implies sovereignty“ in the
risk of death without biological reasons, it is essential for us to realize how and why these notions differ rather than simply
illustrating their common origin. The first difference to note is established by two interrelated conditions of mastery:
firstly, the master must stay alive despite having accepted the risk of death ; and
secondly, the prestige gained through his lack of concern for life is put to use by exerting power over the slave, by
commanding the vanquished to work. The master thereby profits from his risk. Both of these conditions pertaining to
Hegel’s mastery thereby fall into the paradigm of Bataille's servility: the projection of the self into the future, which again
implies the fear of death. Sovereignty, as we will see, must lie elsewhere. With respect to mastery, however, the former
condition—limiting the risk in accordance with Hegel's economy of life—is
necessary if the possibility of reaching the truth of self-consciousness is not
to be lost, for which this consciousness must be maintained. We will soon see the
extensive ramifications of this imperative, but for now, we may simply posit that if one of the combatants
physically dies, the dialectic that constitutes the history of meaning stops,
never attaining its desired result, never profiting from the risk. Should the fight end
in total loss, death would be present as nonproductive or “abstract negation” rather than the negation characteristic of
consciousness, “which supersedes in such a way as to preserve and maintain what is superseded, and consequently
survives its own supersession.” That is, biological death would not reveal the concrete,
eficacious negativity that yields self-consciousness of one’s own negativity,
and which thereby give: a meaning to death." Therefore, while the master does in fact seem to
rise above the concern for life, sovereignly putting that life at stake, the meaning of this risk is only
confirmed if the stakes are ultimately limited. Should one drive headlong
into death one undergoes the risk of losing that for which one has staked
one's life—the meaning of that risk. Therefore, “in this experience [facing death in the fight], self—
consciousness learns that life is as essential to it as pure self- consciousness
[the realization of absolute negativity].""‘ The moment of risk is therefore only meaningful
to the extent that it respects life and is in a position to profit from this risk in
the future."0 This is the comedy transcribed by reason, a comedy of compromise, which Derrida posits should elicit
a “burst of laughter from Bataillc. Through a ruse of life, that is, of reason, life has stayed alive. . . . Such is the truth of life.
Through this recourse to the AW- brmg, which conserves the stakes, remains in control of the play, limiting and
elaborating it by giving it form and meaning, this economy of life restricts itself to conservation . . . henceforth, everything
covered by the name lordship collapses into comedy.”1 Yet again, we will have reason to question whether the reasons
Bataille would laugh are those that Derrida attributes to him. Whether, that is, Bataille will resort to his own ruses in order
to afiirm life in complicity with death.
"Playing with mass death" isn't just violent to life – it will play-
out with disparate race and class violence – turns their root
cause claims
Wolfe '13 (Cary, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame,
University of Chicago Press, 2013, p. 59-60)
Be that as it may, Esposito’s position, pragmatically speaking, fares no better. First, it replays all the quandaries around
biocentrism brought to light during the 1970s and 1980s in North America during the heyday of the deep ecology
movement—debates that Esposito (or for that matter his fellow Italian political philosophers) would have little reason,
perhaps, to know about. As Tim Luke notes, if
all forms of life are given equal value, then we face
questions such as the following: “Will we allow anthrax or cholera microbes to attain
self-realization in wiping out sheep herds or human kindergartens? Will we continue to
deny salmonella or botulism micro-organisms their equal rights when we process the
dead carcasses of animals and plants that we eat?”30 In the face of such challenges, all that Esposito
can offer is to retrofit Spinoza’s concept of natural right to make “the norm the principle of unlimited equivalence for every
single form of life.” 31 The general idea here—and I will return to it in more detail in a moment—seems to be that this new
norm will operate as a sort of homeostatic mechanism balancing the creative flourishing of various life forms. As Esposito
characterizes it, “ the juridical order as a whole is the product of this plurality of norms and the provisional result of their
mutual equilibrium,” and for this reason no “normative criterion upon which exclusionary measures” could be based is
possible.32 But such a position—and its key markers in the foregoing quotation are “ plurality” and “ equilibrium”—is in
essence no different from deep ecology’s guiding principles of biocentrism (or, in a slightly more refined version that
Esposito would be forced to reject, biodiversity). There are perhaps those who would respond to
Luke’s foregoing questions in the affirmative—who would argue that, yes, all forms of life should be
equally allowed to take their course, even if it means a massive die-off of the species Homo sapiens. But biopolitically
speaking, that hardly solves the problem, of course, because when we ask what the
demographic distribution of such an event would likely be, we realize that the brunt
would surely be absorbed by largely black and brown poor populations of the south,
while those in the “ rich North Atlantic democracies” (to use Richard Rorty’s no-nonsense phrase)
who could afford to protect themselves would surely do so.33 And even privileging
biodiversity, which would seem in tune with the “qualitative and quantitative expansion”
of life that Esposito values, is equally question-begging because, as Luke notes, that
means that rare species and endangered individuals are by definition more valuable than
those that are more common (and this is only thinking for the moment on the level of the creature, not of the
microorganism), so that, for example, given a choice between saving a California condor and a
human child, one would be obliged to choose the former.34 Thus biocentrism, as Patrick Curry
observes, “is both intellectually and metaphysically implausible,” and it is also “hopelessly
impractical as a guide to action; you cannot ask anyone (let alone everyone) to live as if
literally every life-form—a lethal virus, say—has equal value to all the others.”35
Their willingness to “play with death” is bad – it locks-in

privilege and violently elides the differing experiences of queer
subjects. We can win on this alone.
Gray ’15 Mary L. Gray - Associate Professor and Faculty Department of Communication and Culture @
Indiana Univ - The author holds a Ph.D. from The University of California, San Diego, 2004 “A Question
from Bruno Latour” This article is part of the series Queer Futures. Fieldsights - Theorizing the
Contemporary, Cultural Anthropology Online, July 21, 2015 - https://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/703-a-
question-from-bruno-latour
For me,reflecting on “no futures”—a plurality that signals the multitudes at stake in a conversation about futurity—is a meditation. It
pushes me to think about the possibilities but, more importantly, the imagined impossibilities for human
existence. Lee Edelman (2004) posed a provocative challenge to LGBT-identifying people’s rush to reproduce normative kinship structures through
marriage and child rearing. At the same time, the argument lacked any textured
understanding of what happens to those formations when they take root in

specific cultural contexts and social situations. There is nothing clearly normative about, say, lesbian couples,
with toddlers in tow, returning to rural towns to care for their aging parents. Edelman’s argument, embracing the
mortality by radically resisting the shackles of blood kin and anything but a queer celebration of
we all face
antiestablishment, could not make room for either the deeply queer pleasures of cultural constraints (fitting
in) nor could it avoid reductively assuming that there is some autonomous individual in the center
of things choosing to reject all forms of support and obligation to others. Who does that?
Who has the privilege of such imagined mobility? The rural queer and
questioning youth I worked with did not. In the face of their social realities and
conflicted desires for them, they lived a different queer future. Neither a lesser nor a more morally righteous version of the
future than the one theorized by Edelman: just different.
At: suffering k
Even if death and suffering is an individual decision – YOU
MAKE IT FOR EVERYONE. Even though this card’s about
Nietzsche, it contextualizes to their biz.
Koontz ‘8 (Brian, Commentator for Dissent Voice and Social Worker. Brian holds a BA in Social Work and has
served as a counselor in fields such as Drug Abuse Counseling and criminal Justice – fields which see their share of “life
denying” behavior. He also holds an MA in Criminal Justice. September 12th –
http://briankoontz.wordpress.com/2008/09/12/nietzsche-is-dead/,)
Nietzsche’s constant belief in “tests” ensures a violent world. The 20th century fulfilled Nietzsche’s
hope. Plenty of tests, ridiculous amounts of violence, and the world has emerged an
absolute wreck, continuing in that way into the 21st century. Take global warming. A Nietzschean argument places
global warming as just another test – just another “well, if it doesn’t kill me it will surely make
me stronger”. What utterly irresponsible narcissism. Nietzsche’s tunnel vision ultimately
placed all value in his own strength – he both embraced his own status as an invalid and sought to “overcome” it. His own
fate of insanity should have tipped people off as to the common result, but instead his supporters laud his “genius” as
being such *because* of his physical weakness.¶ Nietzsche was endlessly optimistic, but optimism is not reality and global
warming, totalitarianism, and nuclear weapons are not “tests” of humanity, they are THREATS to humanity.
Humanity needs maturity, not Nietzsche. Orwell takes us through Nietzsche’s political “test” –
an absolute hellhole. Far from making humanity stronger, the test is actually torture – it
degrades and permanently damages the humans who undergo it.¶ “What does not kill me only
makes me stronger” is not wisdom, and is ONLY wisdom when applied highly selectively, in a
controlled environment. Nietzsche treated this wisdom as universal instead of identifying the contexts in
which it is true, which opened the door for the embrace of human disaster.
Perm do the plan and learn how to die.
Making suffering be liberation excuses bad people that

needlessly make the world worse
Cross ’14 (Katherine Cross is a PhD Candidate in the CUNY Graduate Centre’s Sociology programme.
Among other things, she is a writer, an editor at The Border House – a blog for those who are feminist,
queer, disabled, people of color, transgender, poor, gay, lesbian, and others who belong to marginalized
groups, as well as allies.Her work has been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly, The Occupied Times of
London, and Bitch Magazine. She wrote this piece under the name “Quinnae Moongazer” – Nuclear Unicorn
– “Words, Words, Words: On Toxicity and Abuse in Online Activism” – January 3, 2014 –
http://quinnae.com/2014/01/03/words-words-words-on-toxicity-and-abuse-in-online-activism/)
There was a time in my life

It is an extreme example but one that is nevertheless entirely too common, and one that I came perilously close to taking as a model.
where I took pride in being a “social justice warrior” on Reddit, ticking the boxes of others’ mistakes, missteps, and
misspoken words, cruelly scolding people, looking for those who were “doing it wrong” as a means of validating my own
sense of integrity as an activist, as if each person I roasted would be a talisman against the same thing happening to me ever again. It was only when I discovered that I had made someone cry for
hours that I took a long step back and asked myself if I was really making the world a better place by doing this. I had at last allowed myself to acknowledge that this was not
what I wanted to do as an activist. At its best, activism is not merely opposition to what is, it is also
constructive of what will be. Ours is not a utopia of negatives– a world without this,
without that, and so forth– but also a world of affirmatives and possibilities. This swirling gyre of rage and ressentiment is a terrible
artefact of oppression, and one we ought not consign ourselves to. It is not a wormhole to liberation,
however much we may wish it to be. What aroused my concern was the fact that there are too many people, in the trans community alone, who feel like
they are unable to call it their community and find shelter there because the tenor of discourse is so corrosive as to be just as stressful and antagonistic as the outside world. I hear this from a
number of people who are close to me and have contributed mightily to activist communities with labour, art, and struggle– and I hear it from neophytes and outsiders who wish to join but find
themselves put off by the rancour they hear from within. One example of the latter was a trans woman named Deb who commented on an article I wrote criticising the culture that led to the vicious
online firestorm surrounding Carolyn Petit and her review of GTA V. Deb worried that that same “poisonous attitude” was creeping into “otherwise nice places,” going on to cite examples of speech
in queer communities that troubled her. My reply was at pains to draw a clear distinction between oppressive speech and counter-oppressive speech, and to assert that the difference in power
between the two was not trivial. Nevertheless, her core points could not be denied and so I addressed those at greater length. What I said there is, I think, a good way to close: “It is not reasonable
to compare the angry speech of a powerless minority to the “hate speech” (in the legal and sociological sense of that term) of a privileged group, but there is an ethical argument to be made. We
may not materially disadvantage cis people when we speak in such overtly aggressive ways, but we do something equally bad– and you exemplify this– we isolate our community members and
corrode the very community that is meant to be a shelter for us against an often uncaring world. I do not wish to be in a community where spite and anger are the prevailing emotions, however
justified they may be in some cosmic sense. More than cis people, we owe it to each other to make our community more productive. The simple and ineluctable truth about our corrosive call-out
culture is that it’s part of this larger problem I addressed, where we use the unique nature of the internet to do harm. People saying that others should commit suicide, die in a fire, or making death
threats are not acceptable– whoever says them. And as feminists and social justice activists, we must make that clearer without indulging in the overused and disingenuous argument that
oppression makes that sort of expression valid.” We must remember that considering the impact of our words and the register in which they are spoken is not genuflection to the oppressor, but
we must also challenge

love and respect for our peers. I would now take this one step further to say that while sheltering our community members must always take priority,
ourselves to be merciful to those who make themselves our enemies, and keep their
humanity in sight even as they denude themselves of it with petty hatred. We can do more than simply meet their
cruelty with ineffectual rage, and we can do more than simply shelter in place from their privilege. It is time that we took our convictions to their
logical conclusion and set our sights higher than the call outs of particular points of failure evinced by some hapless individual; it is time we took the next step so many in our communities are
already taking, to a social justice activism recommitted to changing social structures and not just creating echo chambers to declaim against what we have. In Mattie Brice’s words we “need to keep
in mind that we’re fighting the system that uses people to marginalise others, not the people themselves.” Throughout this piece I have, likely to the consternation of some, been less careful with
my uses of the terms “anger” and “rage” than some of the other critics and activists I have cited. I did this in part because I think it can be healthy to be critical about what we admit as “anger” and
thus acceptable under the dominant paradigms of activist discourse. One can take the excellent tack that Aevee Bee took in her article and say that “anger isn’t abuse and abuse isn’t anger,”
recognising that abuse is not something we should excuse with the ennoblement of anger that we indulge, but we can also think about the efficacy of even “acceptable” forms of anger. Why?
Because I believe that lack of circumspection is at the heart of the problem. We allow important activist insights to metamorphose into inflexible rules, rather than useful information to help us
make sense of an ever-undulating landscape. Yes, anger is useful and sometimes vitally necessary. But we can hold onto that while judging activist tactics on a case by case basis. Rather than
applying blanket rules (“all questioning of anger is tone policing”) we can be nimbly thoughtful in our assessments and recognise that not every problem we face is the nail to anger’s hammer.
Justice does not take the shape of punishment eagerly dispensed. Let us recommit
to the just creed that has summoned us to this work: a clarion call that resonates with our shared humanity and compels us towards a more compassionate and
merciful understanding of justice– surely we owe it to ourselves.
( ) don’t generalize human experience based-on depressed

dudes from the 1800’s.
Foot ‘1 (Philippa, Professor of philosophy at UCLA and Fellow of Somerville College- Oxford, “Nietzche: the
Revaluation of Values,” in NIETZCHE, Eds: John Richardson and Brian Leiter, p.220)
Now on some points in his psychological observation Nietzsche undoubtedly was right; he was right for instance to teach us to be
wary of one who finds other men most satisfactory when they are in need of his help, and to be wary also of the one who hates
himself. At certain points his observation, and his anticipation of depth psychology, shows him as
brilliant psychologist. But one could not see Nietzsche as one who had a great
knowledge of life and of the human heart. He describes convincingly what he knew
thoroughly, as he knew the life of the lonely genius, the creative artists of thinker. It is,
however, noticeable that his picture of the strong noble man fails to carry conviction when it
deviates from his model; what he says about the conditions for his man’s health seems to stem largely from his
belief that the overriding and underlying principle of human behavior was the will to power. Now it
is notorious that
general theories about the springs of action are traps for philosophers, and Nietzsche,
who tried to work on a world historical scale, is an obvious victim of the
delusion of having seen whole. This world have to be shown, but prima facie, one has no
reason to trust Nietzsche’s views of human nature beyond a very limited
perspective, and one quite inadequate for this case. There is no reason to suppose that we really
are in the dilemma that he insists on- that, we either sacrifice the weak or else deform
strong. And in a way events have caught up with Nietzsche. How could
one see the present dangers that the world is in as showing that there is too much pity
and too little egoism around? One wonders what Nietzsche himself, in some ways a most
humane man, would have said if he were living now, and could see inhumanity on its
present scale and its present blatant forms.
At: Bataille VTL
Bataille too obsessed with momentary “ecstasy in life” – ignores
value of living.
Johnson ‘3
DAVID JOHNSON has a DPhil. in English and Related Literature (York University), an MA (Distinction) in Continental
Philosophy (Warwick University) and a BA (Hons) in Literature and Philosophy (Middlesex Polytechnic). Time & Society
copyright © 2003 available via SAGE database
Life is a serious business of highly charged temporal stakes, involving a being’s struggle to secure for itself the
experience of pleasure time/free time rather than pain time/slave time. Since lived time is a living stake,
death is not the profound phenomenon that Bataille thinks it is. For one who is racked by
drawn-out pain, the pain of death situated at the end of time is an irrelevance. And for one who
is caught up in the throes of extended pleasure, the dubious pleasure of death is likewise
irrelevant. Death, far from being profound, may simply provide a pragmatic escape from
a life of pain and toil, or a simple halt to a life of pleasure and freedom. We can see death as
important to time in that it is the end of the great game of time, the great flow. But death is relative in
importance to time for the same reason; it is simply the end of the great game of time, a
game without which it would be pure abstraction. However, we are not suggesting that death has
absolutely no importance for living beings. On the contrary. By countering Bataille’s view
of death, which tries to domesticate death through attempting to engage it in ‘intimate’ dialogue, and which tries
to make political gain out of death, we can see death as a real, non-negotiable
phenomenon. Death can no longer be thought of as an ambiguous but essentially accessible deity, but must instead
be seen as that which wipes out real substantial time with no hope of appeal. Death can now be viewed as a certain
element in the game of time, as something to be dreaded or desired as the end of time, but which has no fixed moral or
political meaning in itself. By affirming the reality of time we are in fact affirming the reality of death, and so we are
proposing a more tragic philosophy than the one Bataille proposes – which is ironic, given that Bataille is considered by
most postmodernist/ post-structuralist philosophers to be perhaps the cruellest thinker.
General Indicts of Bataille / Prodicts of Util
Self Preservation is a pre-req to expenditure
Itzkowitz, Prof. philosophy Marietta, 99
(Kenneth, To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille, College Literature Vol. 26, No. 1, Cultural Violence (Winter, 1999), pp. 19-33 )
Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataille would applaud Manson for
the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too
far. "Continuity is what we are after," Bataille confirms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not
the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds
our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually

that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words,
approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sensuality, Bataille continues, Short of a
paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Juliette should not be wholeheartedly
abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would
end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are
building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataille 1962, 179-80)
This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that
remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample
motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is also a
fundamental value for Bataille; there is also ample motive to resist the violence
that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we
must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too
far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of . . . [ourselves] and to
know clearly what . . . [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly
disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we
are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively.
Acting to help others generates meaning

May 5 – Todd May 5, philo prof at Clemson, “To change the world, to celebrate life”,
Philosophy & Social Criticism, vol 31, nos 5–6, 517–531
What are we to make of these references? We can, to be sure, see the hand of Heidegger in them. But we may also, and for
present purposes more relevantly, see an intersection with Foucault’s work on freedom. There is an ontology of
freedom at work here, one that situates freedom not in the private reserve of an individual but in the unfinished
character of any historical situation. There is more to our historical juncture, as there is to a painting,
than appears to us on the surface of its visibility. The trick is to recognize this, and to take
advantage of it, not only with our thoughts but with our lives. And that is why, in the end,
there can be no such thing as a sad revolutionary. To seek to change the world is to
offer a new form of life-celebration. It is to articulate a fresh way of being, which is at once a
way of seeing, thinking, acting, and being acted upon. It is to fold Being once again upon itself, this time at a new point, to
see what that might yield. There is, as Foucault often reminds us, no guarantee that this fold will not itself
turn out to contain the intolerable. In a complex world with which we are inescapably entwined, a world we
cannot view from above or outside, there is no certainty about the results of our experiments. Our
politics are constructed from the same vulnerability that is the stuff of our art and our daily practices. But
to refuse to experiment is to resign oneself to the intolerable; it is to abandon both
the struggle to change the world and the opportunity to celebrate living within it.
And to seek one aspect without the other – life-celebration without world-changing, world-changing
without life-celebration – is to refuse to acknowledge the chiasm of body and world that is the wellspring
of both. If we are to celebrate our lives, if we are to change our world, then perhaps the best
place to begin to think is our bodies, which are the openings to celebration and to change, and perhaps the
point at which the war within us that I spoke of earlier can be both waged and resolved. That is the fragile beauty that, in
their different ways, both MerleauPonty and Foucault have placed before us. The
question before us is
whether, in our lives and in our politics, we can be worthy of it.
Anti-util leads to war

Wolin, PhD, 04

In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young conservatives, war plays an
essential, positive role. It serves as a means of dissolving the principium individuationis: the principle of a bourgeois subjectivity, on which the
homogenous order of society - a world of loneliness and fragmentation – depends. For, according to Bataille, “the general
movement of life is... accomplished beyond the demands of individuals.”32 It is in

precisely this spirit that he celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of “combat” or “war” as a
type of aestheticist end in itself: “Glory...expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of
measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat it glorious in
that it is always beyond calculation at some moment.” 33 For the same reasons, Bataillsssse eulogizes those premodern “warrier societies in which pure,
For under such conditions, war was not made subservient to the
uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway.” 34
served as a glorious end in itself. Yet in

vulgar ends of enterprise and accumulation, as is the case for modern-day imperialism, but
the early 1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration of “violence for violence’s
sake,” or “war for war’s sake,” that Benjamin viewed as the essence of modern fascism. As
he remarks in a well known passage: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense
pereption that has been changed by technology... Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for
itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an
aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic. In Bataille’s 35
thought war serves as the harbinger of a cultural transfiguration in which the prismacy of
self-subsistent subjectivity would be replaced by the values of an “unavowable” or “ecstatic
community”: that is, a community that would no longer be governed by the goals of a “visual culture” – transparency, self-identity, etc. – but instead,
those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. In fact this Bataille-inspired program of an ecstatic
community has been quite explicitly carried forth and explored in the political writings of Maurice Blanchot
(La Communaute inavouable; 1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communaute desoeuvree; 1985).
Immanence is awful
Nancy, PhD, 91
(Jean-Luc, The Unsacrificeable* Yale French Studies, No. 79, Literature and the Ethical Question (1991), pp. 20-38 )
if existence arranges itself

But if sovereignty is nothing, if the “obscure God” is only the obscurity of desire ecstatic in the face of itself,
only towards its own finitude, then we must think apart from sacrifice. On the one hand, what is at stake since the beginning of the
Western sublation of sacrifice should definitively be acknowledged: strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice. We need to
admit that what we consider as a mercenary exchange (“Here is the butter…”) sustained and gave
meaning to billions of individual and collective existences, and we do not know how to
think about what founds this gesture. (We can only guess, confusedly, that this barter in itself goes beyond barter.) On the
contrary, we know that, for us, it is absolutely impossible to declare: “here are the lives,
where are the others?” (all the others: our other lives, the life of a great Other, the other of life and the other life in general). Consequently, on the
other hand, it should be definitively acknowledged that the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close, and that it is closed by the decomposition of the
that bloody transgression by which the “moment of the finite” would be

sacrificial apparatus itself,
transcended and appropriated infinitely. But finitude is not a “moment” in a process or an economy. A
finite existence does not have to let its meaning spring forth through a destructive
explosion of its finitude. Not only does it not have to do so; in a sense it cannot even do
so: thought rigorously, thought according to its Ereignis, “finitude” signifies that existence cannot be sacrificed. It
cannot be sacrificed because, in itself, it is already, not sacrificed, but offered to the
world. There is a resemblance, and the two can be mistaken for one another; and yet,
there is nothing more dissimilar. One could say: existence is in essence sacrificed. To say this would be to reproduce, in one of its forms,
the fundamental utterance of Western sacrifice. And we would have to add this major form, which necessarily follows: that existence is, in its essence, sacrifice. To
say that existence is offered is no doubt to use a word from the sacrificial vocabulary (and if we were in the German language, it would be the same word: Opfer,
Aufopfertmg). But it is an attempt to mark that, if we have to say that existence is sacrificed, it is not in any case sacrificed by anyone, nor is it sacrificed to
anything. "Existence is offered" means the finitude of existence. Finitude is not negativity cut out of being and granting access, through this cutting, to the restored
integrity of being or to sovereignty. Finitude utters what Bataille utters in saying that sovereignty is nothing. Finitude simply corresponds to the generative formula
of the thought of existence, which is the thought of the finitude of being, or the thought of the meaning of being as the finitude of meaning. This formula states: "the
"essence" of Dasein lies in its existence.22 If its essence (in quotation marks) is in its existence, it is that the existent has no essence. It cannot be returned to the
trans-appropriation of an essence. But it is offered, that is to say, it is presented to the existence that it is. The existence exposes being in its essence
disappropriated of all essence, and thus of all "being:" the being that is not. Such negativity, however, does not come dialectically to say that it shall be, that it shall
finally be a trans-appropriated Self. On the contrary, this negation affirms the inappropriate as its most appropriate form of appropriation, and in truth as the
unique mode of all appropriation. Also, the negative mode of this utterance: "being is not" does not imply a negation but an ontological affirmation. This is what is
meant by Ereignis. The existent arrives, takes place, and this is nothing but a being-thrown into
the world. In this being-thrown, it is offered. But it is offered by no one, to no one. Nor is it
self-sacrificed, if nothing—no being, no subject—precedes its being-thrown. In truth, it is not even offered or sacrificed to
a Nothing, to a Nothingness or an Other in whose abyss it would come to enjoy its own impossibility of being impossibly. It is exactly at this
point that both Bataille and Heidegger must be relentlessly corrected. Corrected, that is: withdrawn from
the slightest tendency towards sacrifice. For this tendency towards sacrifice, or through
sacrifice, is always linked to a fascination with an ecstasy turned towards an Other or
towards an absolute Outside, into which the subject is diverted/spilled the better to be
restored. Western sacrifice is haunted by an Outside of finitude, as obscure and bottomless as this "outside" may be. But there is no "outside." The
event of existence, the "there is," means that there is nothing else. There is no "obscure God." There is no
obscurity that would be God. In this sense, and since there is no longer any clear divine epiphany, I might say that what technique presents us with could simply be:
clarity without God. The clarity, however, of an open space in which an open eye can no longer be fascinated. Fascination is already proof that something has been
accorded to obscurity and its bloody heart. But there is nothing to accord, nothing but "nothing." "Nothing" is not an abyss open to the outside. "Nothing" affirms
finitude, and this "nothing" at once returns existence to itself and to nothing else. It desubjectivizes it, removing all possibility of trans-appropriating itself through
Thus there is room to give meaning

anything but its own event, advent. Existence, in this sense, its proper sense, is unsacrificeable.
to the infinite absence of appropriable meaning. Once again, "technique" could well constitute such an horizon. That
is once more to say, there must be no retreat: the closure of an immanence. But this immanence
would not have lost or be lacking transcendence. In other words, it would not be sacrifice in any sense of the word. What we used to call "transcendence" would
immanence" is not some indistinct coagulation: it is made

signify rather that appropriation is immanent, but that "
only from its horizon. The horizon holds existence at a distance from itself, in the gap or
the "between" that constitutes it: between birth and death, between one and the others. One
does not enter the between, which is also the space of the play of mimesis and of methexis. Not because it would be an abyss, an altar, or an impenetrable heart, but
because it would be nothing other than the limit of finitude; and lest we confuse it with, say, Hegelian "finiteness," this limit is a limit that does not soar above
nothingness. Existence alone breaks away from even itself. Does this mean rejoicing in a mediocre and limited life?
Surely such a suspicion could itself come only from a mediocre and limited life. And it is
this same life that could suddenly be exalted, fascinated, by sacrifice. Neither pain nor
death are to be denied. Still less, if possible, are these to be sought after in view of some
transappropriation. At issue, rather, is a pain that no longer sacrifices, and which one no longer sacrifices. True pain, doubtless, and perhaps even
the truest of all. It does not efface joy (nor enjoyment), and yet, it is not the latter's dialectical or sublimating threshhold either. There is no
threshhold, no sublime and bloody gesture, that will cross it. After all, Western sacrifice has almost always
known, and almost always been ready to say, that it sacrificed to nothing. That is why it has always tended to say that true sacrifice was no longer sacrifice. Yet
henceforth it is incumbent upon us to say—after Bataille, with him and beyond him—that there
is no "true" sacrifice, that veritable existence is unsacrificeable, and that finally the truth of existence is that it cannot be
sacrificed.
The aff’s disaster means that we can’t enage in expenditure
Shaviro, 90 (Steven, PhD from Yale, professor at Wayne State University, former professor at University of Washington, “Passion and Excess,” The
Florida State University Press, pg. 37-39)
Yet if the intensity of Bataille’s involvement is clear, the details of its expression are not. Does the
passage which I have just quoted function as description or as exhortation? On what sort of threshold are we standing, and what is the nature of the "void” which
lies beyond it? At such a point, what kind of "alternative” is at stake? What further disaster could be entailed by a “retreat”? And is it
even possible to retreat? Since the foundations have already crumbled, is not a fall inevitable? But what sort of courage is available in such a situation? What kind
of "conquest" is it which is no longer played out according to the dialectic of master and slave, with the risk of heroic death as ultimate stake? What experience of
time is realized by this leap into die void? The only way to answer such questions may be to alter the way in which they are posed. For the peculiar effect of
Bataille’s work is that it offers no satisfying conclusions , no points of repose. Not even the
satisfaction of absolute destruction. His obsessive meditations concern—a.nd participate in—a catastrophe all the more obscure and
unsettling in that it refuses apocalyptic closure. "Ce qui seul demeure est l’agitation circulaire—qui ne s’épuise pas dans lèxtase et recommence ai partir d’elle
[What alone remains is circular agitation—which does not exhaust itself in ecstasy and begins again from it]" (OC, 5:130; IE, lll). The "yertiginous fall’” takes place
in a “bottomless void,” and consequently never hits bottom. The privileged act of sacrifice serves no end, leads to no appeasement. And
despite Bataille’s frequent sexual stereotyping and invocations of virility, his " interior experience" does not culminate in any
display of phallic mastery. Pure loss, expenditure without recompense, it issues only in an
absurd compulsion to repeat, to approach the threshold of disaster again and
again . The “summit" of ecstasy cannot be extricated from a concomitant "decline": "De méme que le S0mKIlCt n’est a la fin que l’inacecssible, le déclin des
l’abord est Pinévitable [Iust as the summit is finally only the inaccessible, so the decline, from the very first, is inevitable]” (OC, 6:57). The exuberant
violence of Bataille’s texts is matched only by the pointless dissipation of the energies they
invoke.
Life is a pre-req to death

Nidesh Lawtoo 5, Dept of Comparative Lit, U Washington, Bataille and the Suspension of Being, linguaromana.byu.edu/Lawtoo4.html
Bataille's notion of communication involves a dialectic with two positives (hence a non-dialectic) where two sovereigns confront death not in view of an end but as
confronting death," in fact, "puts the subjects at stake-"l'être en eux-mêmes [est] mis en jeu" (Sur Nietzsche
an end in itself: "
61). Further, Bataille affirms that "[p]ersonne n'est-un instant-souverain qui ne se perde" (OC VIII 429). It is the Nietzschean self-forgetfulness that is
here evoked; a self-forgetfulness which implies a transgression of the limits of both
communicating subjects. Again, for Bataille "[l]a 'communication' n'a lieu qu'entre deux êtres mis en jeu-déchirés, suspendus, l'un et l'autre
penchés au-dessus de leur néant" (Sur Nietzsche 62). However, if according to Nietzsche, self-forgetfulness takes
place in solitude, for Bataille it necessitates the presence of an "other."(5) Communication in

fact, asks for "deux êtres mis en jeu" who participate in what he defines as "une fête immotivée" (Sur Nietzsche 31). There the sovereign loses
himself (se perde) with the other, through the other, in the other, in a process of "mutual
laceration" (Essential 105) which is simultaneously tragic and ludic. The emphasis on the other is Hegelian, but unlike dialectics, communication does not
confront the subject with an object (Gegen-stand, something that stands against the subject). As Bataille puts it (apparently echoing Baudelaire), communication
Bataille's
takes place with "un semblable," "mon frère" (OC VIII 289). And he adds: "Cela suppose la communication de sujet à sujet" (OC VIII 288).
notion of communication is not based upon a "violent hierarchy" (Derrida's term) but rather
upon egalitarianism. Moreover, transgressing the limits of the subject implies that the two
subjects already possess (in potential) the characteristics of sovereignty. Hence, the status of
sovereign is not achieved as a result of a fight to the death, but requires the
subject to be open to an other who is outside the limits of the self . Derrida speaks of the
"trembling" to which Bataille submits Hegelian concepts (253). This trembling, I would argue, has its source in Nietzsche (6): "The figs fall from the trees" says
Zarathustra, "they are good and sweet, and when they fall, their red skins are rent. A north wind am I unto ripe figs" (qtd. in Philosophy 135). If we apply this
passage to Bataille's philosophy, we could say that inherent in this "fall" is an explosion of Hegelian concepts, and in particular, as we have seen, the notion of
Herrshaft. Further, communication, for Bataille, involves a similar "fall" which rents (déchire) the skin of the subjects (their limits) exposing the red flesh which
lies beneath the skin. According to the French philosopher, Nietzsche's critique of the subject is more radical than Hegel's, since, as he puts it in "Hegel, la mort et
le sacrifice," Hegel's philosophy, and I would add Kojève's interpretation of it, is "une théologie, où l'homme aurait pris la place de Dieu" (OC XII 329). Hegel's
"theology" preserves the identity of the subject. Now, Bataille makes his position to this "theology" clear as he writes: "I don't believe in God-from the inability to
believe in self" (Essential 10). By establishing a direct link between the death of the subject and the death of God, Bataille extends his critique of "beings" into the
larger, ontological, critique of "Being." Implicit in this theoretical move is the articulation of the ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's philosophy is Nietzschean
insofar as it is grounded in experience and in the immanence of the body. Communication, for Bataille is first and foremost a bodily affair. Hence the interrogation
of the limits of the subject starts from an interrogation of what we could call the "gates," or openings of the body: the mouth, the vagina, the anus and the eyes are
for Bataille central places for philosophical investigation because at these gates, the integrity of the subject is questioned; its limits can be transgressed. They are
spaces of transition where a "glissement hors de soi" (OC VIII 246) can take place. These bodily openings, which Bataille also defines as "blessures," (Sur Nietzsche
64) found his conception of the sovereign subject. In fact, each "blessure" can be linked to a specific dimension of communication which obsesses Bataille. His
central themes match different bodily openings: the mouth connects to laughter; the vagina to eroticism; the eyes to tears; the anus to the excrements which he
links to death. Through these openings the subject is traversed by different fluxes and its integrity, totality and stability is challenged. They allow for the possibility
of a glissement of the subject's being. The same could be said of Bataille's corpus: it is a unitary entity, which, like a body, escapes the totalizing temptation of
closure. Despite the fact that Bataille defines sovereignty in terms of the Kojèvian/Hegelian "nothingness" (Bataille's Rien), his conception of communication is
built upon the Nietzschean ontological distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In fact, the ontological movement that takes place in communication
"exige que l'on glisse" (OC VI 158) from an "insufficient" and "discontinuous" being to a reality of "continuity" that transcends binary oppositions (Erotism 13-14).
To put it more simply, communication introduces a movement from the "many" to the "One"; from a "discontinuity of being" to a "continuity of being;" from
separate "beings" to a common ontological ground ("Being"). The source of Bataille's ontology is clear: it stems from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy which in
turn, is construed upon Schopenhauer's distinction between will and representation. "As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging sea," writes
Schopenhauer," surrounded on all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of
Communication, for Bataille, as the Dionysian for Nietzsche, involves the

torment, trusting to the principium individuationis" (Birth 21) .(7)
tearing down of the veil of Maya which constitutes, what Bataille calls, with a blink
shattering of the principium individuationis, a
of the eye to Schopenhauer, the "illusion of a being which is isolated" (Essential 10; my emphasis). Communication,
thus, involves an opening of the subject to the larger ground of Being. The sovereign's
boat is constantly leaking. Yet, in order for communication to take place, the boat needs
to keep floating. That is to say that for transgression to take place, the limits of the
subject need to be preserved (Erotism 63; Foucault 34). The being of the sovereign subject is
suspended upon the abîme-what Bataille also calls "une realité plus vaste" (OC II 246)-which means that the subject neither dwells
safely within the limits of the "small, insufficient boat" of individuation, nor within the
depth of the undifferentiated "raging sea," but in the space of contact in-between the two
spheres. This precision is key in order to delineate the originality of Bataille's ontology of
sovereignty. Bataille's conception of the communicating subject (i.e., of sovereignty)
walks a thin line between its self-dissolution and its self-preservation. Hence the idea
that he is above all a thinker of limits or borders. The sovereign's being, in fact, is
"suspended" on the "bord de l'abîme" (Coupable V 355) but never actually falls, except, of course, in death. Hence, for Bataille,
"[i]l s'agit d'approcher la mort" [it is approaching death] that is to say, the abîme, or the continuity of being, "d'aussi près qu'on peut l'endurer" [ as
close as one can endure] (337-338). The sovereign subject confronts death while
preserving his life. His being is placed at the border between life and death. Hence, if
Bataille defines philosophy as "existence striving to reach its limits" (Essential 146), it should be
specified that the being of the subject is not found beyond its limits, as his use of "existence"
seems to suggest (Ek-sistenz) since that would imply a total dissolution of the subject . Bataille's philosophy of
transgression implies the preservation of the limits of the subject so that the
sovereign can experience and endure death in life. The tension between self-
expenditure (Nietzsche's Verschwendung) and self-preservation (linked to Hegel's Anerkennung) is analogous to the
movement of a moth that is first attracted by the fire of a candle and subsequently
distances itself from the fire in order to preserve its life.(8) This repeated back and forth
movement recapitulates the movement of communication and is responsible for the
underlying tension which traverses Bataille's philosophy. It is an inner (bodily) drive that
attracts the moth to death and not, as it is the case for Hegel's master, a reasoned project in view of an end (recognition). The moth's self-
sacrifice, in fact, is perfectly useless (it serves no purpose) and hence is truly sovereign. Bataille would call it "une négativité sans emploi." Or, as he says with
This
respect to eroticism in his first and last interview before he died, "it is purely squandering, an expenditure of energy for itself" (in Essential 220).
movement forwards, towards the flame of self-dissolution (which takes place in death, eroticism, laughter…)
and its retreat backwards, towards life and the limits it involves, epitomizes Bataille's
notion of communication. A practice which for Bataille seems to have the characteristic of a fort-da game in which the subject is not in control
of the movement. This movement, Bataille writes in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, happens "malgré nous" (III 11). Thus conceived the sovereign accepts the
place of a toy in the hands of a child playing-a definition similar to Heraclitus' vision of life, which he defines as "a child at play, moving pieces in a game (Fragment
52, in GM 149). This view of communication is both tragic and joyful; violent and useless. A joyful tragedy, which challenges the limits of the subject; that puts the
subject's being en jeu. If Bataille is deeply fascinated by death, decay and the dissolution of the
subject in a continuity of being, he escapes the temptation to embrace death at
the expense of life. His definition of eroticism sums up this fundamental tension:
"Eroticism," he writes, "is assenting to life up to the point of death" (Erotism11). This applies not
only to eroticism but also to all communicating activities such as laughter, play, tears, and ultimately to the ethos that sustains the
totality of Bataille's philosophy. If Kojève defines dialectics as a "negating-negativity" (5), Bataille's communication
can be read as an affirmative negativity. In fact, death is confronted and even invoked, but
what is found in death is the ultimate affirmation of life. Negation of the
integrity (the limits) of the subject leads to a radical affirmation of life. And if in the Preface to
Madame Edwarda, Bataille can affirme "l'identité de l'être et de la mort" (OC III 10), let us also note that the identity of being and
death is realized in life. Faithful to Nietzsche, Bataille does not become a negator of the will; a
negator of life; a pessimist, a Buddhist or worse, a nihilist (some of the derogatory terms used by Nietzsche to retrospectively
define his first and last master). Bataille remains truthful to life . While the ontological premises grounding sovereignty are
taken from Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche), Bataille's conclusions are diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's first master. In fact, Bataille's
philosophy can be seen as an affirmation of the will (he operates an inversion of values) through
Dionysian practices (included sexuality which Schopenhauer condemned) that put the subject in touch with the
ultimate ground of being, without dissolving him/her in it.

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NOTES

“Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its

Debate’s information habit is a synonym for death. Death cab for

Modern day education is haunted by the spectral figure of the

Our only real pleasure is to squander our resources to no

With extreme asceticism the old but sinuous link

We will focus on a conversation in virtue epistemology because virtue

Part 1: Virtue Epistemology, Subset of Epistemology

1. That knowledge is communicable, especially in the form of clear

We can move further outward in scope to see Bataille’s

Productivity colludes with the necropolitical order of

Contention 8 is words from our Credible Death Sponsor Joseph

too much joy

1 Bataille, 1999, 151

We must collapse and force the structures of language to failure

“Socratic College” also contains multiple claims

This failure is part and parcel of the impossibility of Bataille’s notion of

claims that Bataille advocates embracing

Rather than a process of revealing knowledge or meaning, we

Fiat is an advertising product that seduces debaters into

This debate was never really between us or them—we have come

6 In my theorizing about this essay, I contemplated including a reference to Ernest Callenbach’s

Earlier we saw Bataille

Bataille begins to separate “intelligence” and “experience” using his notion of

Bataille draws a helpful distinction

“There is always some limit which the individual accepts. He

Their desire for limits and a “fair space” inevitably creates a

Nonknowledge is an experience that occurs at the limit of knowledge.

Feature 2.2 (of Experientiality): Struggle Against “Useful Language”

“Experience” is also a “struggle against the spell” in which “useful language”

Bataille claims that the endlessness or goal-lessness of experience leads to

The argument is roughly that knowledge is more valuable if acquired virtuously

This attempt to be able to inscribe value to truth and knowledge

1.3: Elements of Classical Epistemology

, I will examine the banality of power in the ‘‘postcolony.’’ By ‘‘banality of power ’’ I

postcolony is characterized by a distinctive art of

improvisation, by a tendency to excess and disproportion as well as by distinctive ways in

I am concerned with the ways in which state power: 1) creates,

institutionalize its world of meanings as a ‘‘socio-historical world,’ and to make that ’4

). These oppositions are not helpful rather, they

cloud our understanding of postcolonial relations.7 In the postcolony, the

So as to insure that such transgression does not in fact

; the manner in which these institutions, knowledges, norms, and

of extraction and exploitation as it operates in a framework of polarity that exacerbates

an expression of power The Kantian mode of analysis is set out in Revolutionary

surplus also involves the expenditure of energy

competition and fear .

A. Veblen’s theory of the leisure class

B. Bataille: A visionary of excess

economic utility is conflated within a system of conspicuous waste, consumption and

i. “The notion of expenditure”

such activities do not conform to the standard idea of economic

utility no matter how contrary

expenditure as is production To him the hypocrisy of capitalists and the bourgeoisie .

“representatives of the bourgeoisie” underlying such attitudes as “trickery [that] has

– …a category of degradation and abjection that leads to slavery…the modern world

to a hideous degradation…” Bataille “Notion”, 125-126). The whole idea of accumulation

every sense of the word It is a process that promotes a master-slave

particular aspect of terrestrial activity regarded as a cosmic phenomenon A movement is .

as a specificity without the appropriate context to interpret it in Bataille’s emphases): (

systems organisms or enterprises). Economic activity

particular operations with limited ends…Economic science merely generalizes the

in general the question is always posed in terms of extravagance The choice is