Georges Bataille Research Articles

The Revelations of Violence in the Novel Senselessness by Horacio Castellanos Moya

For decades up to the present, Central America has undergone violence in opposition to its self-determination, resulting in the death, disappearance, and displacement of countless people. In the case of Guatemala, what would be described as genocide was carried out against its Mayan population. Through an analysis of the novel Senselessness (2008) – originally published in Spanish in 2004 as Insensatez – by the Salvadoran writer born in Honduras, Horacio Castellanos Moya, I will try to elucidate both the ontological origin of this violence and what it reveals with respect to human nature and the effects (among which geographical and existential displacement stands out) it can have on its victims. To achieve this goal, I will use the ideas of Bolívar Echeverría, Sigmund Freud, and Georges Bataille, among others. [Article copies available for a fee from The Transformative Studies Institute. E-mail address: journal@transformativestudies.org Website: http://www.transformativestudies.org ©2024 by The Transformative Studies Institute. All rights reserved.]

How to Speak of Non-meaning?

Despite all the profound changes that Foucault’s work underwent during the 1960s, there is one point of criticism that Derrida continually repeats: Foucault would remain in a Hegelian framework. According to Derrida, in his anticipation of Georges Bataille’s transgressive thinking, Foucault may have found the right way to escape dialectics, but in his attempt to synthesize transgression with structuralism in The Order of Things, this possibility threatens to be closed off again. Derrida, for his part, turns Bataille’s transgression in a way that allows for a fundamental critique of the concept of knowledge. From the perspective of this critique, not only does a way out of the dialectical identification of the Other open up, but it can also be seen how many philosophical endeavors that imagine themselves to be beyond Hegel continue to stand in his shadow.

The devouring eye

ABSTRACT This essay discusses the positing of the eye in Georges Bataille’s work in an attempt to connect Bataille’s thought with Horst Bredekamp’s notion of the image act. The image act attributes an active nature to images and places them in the sphere of entities capable of acting upon the configuration of our reality. This paper begins by first describing the conceptual framework of critical iconology and then traces its overlap with the work of Georges Bataille. This tracing is achieved through the understanding of Bataille’s subversive use of images, as read by Benjamin Noys. The work proceeds by arguing for a movement away from reading Bataille exclusively under the concept of transgression, and suggests introducing the concept of oscillation. Reading Bataille as such, critical iconology and Bataille’s critical dictionary meet. The paper concludes by engaging with Bataille’s Story of the Eye, as this is read under critical iconology.

‘Negativity without use’: death, desire and recognition in the work of G. Bataille and A. Kojève

ABSTRACT Georges Bataille was a regular attendee in Alexandre Kojève’s seminars on Hegel between 1933 and 1939. Bataille developed a lifelong friendship with the Russian philosopher, with whom he corresponded, and whose numerous unpublished drafts came to his possession after Kojève’s death. Initially, Bataille accepts the Kojèvian starting point of humanity and history, as desire and discourse, action and negativity, a vision which culminates in the apocalyptic end of history. However, progressively, Bataille comes to question the identification of negativity with human history or historical action. Bataille speaks of a ‘negativity without use’; an excess of negativity and death which does not disappear after history has ended. Grappling with Kojève’s suffocating vision of the end of history, Bataille emerges as a profound thinker who attempts to make sense of the post-historical and post-human horizon, and the return to animality, where there is neither desire, nor action and there is ‘nothing else to do’. In this eclipse of sense and historical action, the only endeavours available to humanity seem to be art, death, eroticism and play. Thus, for Bataille, the end of history is an exclusively human condition, in which humanity is brought resolutely to confront its own negative excess.

Solar sacrifice: Bataille and Poplavsky on friendship

ABSTRACT This article reconstructs the forgotten friendship between Georges Bataille and the Russian émigré poet and philosopher Boris Poplavsky. Comparing their solar metaphysics, I focus on conceptions of friendship, sacrifice and depersonalisation. First, I retrace Bataille’s relationship to early Surrealis and Russian circles in interwar Paris, with a focus on his friendship with Irina Odoevtseva. I then offer a novel reading of Poplavsky’s poetry through the lens of Bataille’s philosophy, analysing a recurring motif that I call ‘dark solarity’. Uncovering a hidden intertextual dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I argue for Poplavsky’s lasting impact on Bataille’s anti-Icarian sun cult. Finally, my paper demonstrates how Poplavsky’s writings on solar sacrifice, excess and friendship left marks on Bataille’s vision of a solar community, embodied in the secret society Acéphale. The dialogue between Poplavsky and Bataille, I finally suggest, is a missing piece in the entangled history of Russian and French philosophy, as well as an original contribution to discourses on friendship in twentieth-century continental thought.

The movement of the whole and the stationary earth: ecological and planetary thinking in Georges Bataille

ABSTRACT We have become estranged from the cosmic movements, according to Bataille. We are confined by the error linked to the representation of ‘the stationary earth’. We have negated the immersive immanence of the whole and made nature into a fixed world of tools and things. How then do we recognise ourselves as part of the ‘rapture of the heavens’? Bataille urges us to consider life as a solar phenomenon, the free play of solar energy on the earth. This paper argues how Bataille’s cosmic vision anticipates both planetary and ecological thinking. This entails a base materialism of difference based on a radical Nietzschean and Heraclitean theory of becoming and flux. This thought is developed along Bataillean concepts such as the movement of the whole, the labyrinthine, and compound beings, ipseity, as well as the concept of a communifying movement. This materialism paired with Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere lays the foundation for the laws of the general economy, which also constitutes an economy inclusive of a general ecology: a tragic vision of Gaia and Dionysos. Finally, poetry is considered, as a way we might reconnect with the universe and stimulate ecological imagination.

Bataille and Wittgenstein: on mysticism, silence, and inner experience

ABSTRACT Despite differences, Georges Bataille, theorist of non-knowledge and atheology, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian logician, share specific parallels regarding their understandings of language and mystical experience. For both, mystical experience pushes beyond conventional discourse. Using analogous elements of critical and mystical discourse, each express rather antiphilosophical, spiritual visions. Still, Wittgenstein’s deeply private and agnostic Christianity sharply contrasts Bataille’s own atheological experience of the death of God. Where Bataille’s mysticism challenges rationality, Wittgenstein’s instead expresses the numinous world as such, shedding light on the dark night of Bataille and the specific character of ‘inner experience’. Where Wittgenstein advocates either clarity of expression or silence, however, the transgressive and poetic syntax of Bataille, alongside his evocative and erotic usage of imagery and metaphor, instead presses precisely against the impossibility for words that Wittgenstein’s thinking forecloses. Silence, like evil and poetry for Bataille, is active and imperative to communication, opening itself against the closure of reason. Relative to Wittgenstein and Christianity’s ascent to knowledge and awareness then, Bataille instead dives down deep into the body and night of nonknowledge. In this way, paradoxically, Bataille’s atheological writings approach a new summit of communication only attainable in the absence of God.

Traces of Georges Bataille in Gilles Deleuze: non-productive expenditure or production of consumption?

ABSTRACT Georges Bataille is remarkably absent from Gilles Deleuze’s oeuvre, even though early commentators like Michel Foucault, in his ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, recognised an obvious affinity between the two thinkers. Direct references to Bataille in Deleuze’s published works are few and far between, and most of them are barely more than offhand remarks. In these few comments, Deleuze’s treatment of Bataille seems to oscillate between contempt and admiration. In an astonishing footnote within the Anti-Oedipus, Bataille’s concept of ‘sumptuary, non-productive expenditure’ is equated with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s concept of the ‘production of consumption’. Taking this passing remark seriously would mean finding Bataille at the very heart of Deleuze’s thought. This paper, therefore, seeks to investigate the traces of Bataille in Deleuze’s work, in order to evaluate the footnote in question. I will show that the equivocation of ‘sumptuary, non-productive expenditure’ and ‘production of consumption’ is indeed warranted and that Deleuze’s thought is far closer to Bataille’s than Deleuze ever cared to admit. Bataille emerges as a great precursor to the thought of immanence, difference, and the event.

Experience in common: Bataille’s Nietzsche and Shestov’s

ABSTRACT Georges Bataille made no secret of the importance Friedrich Nietzsche’s life and work held for him. But Bataille’s encounter with Nietzsche remained paradoxical: he rejected or ignored most of Nietzsche’s major concepts while nevertheless insisting on the value of Nietzsche’s thought and experience as a necessary counterpoint to the political, religious, and social currents of modernity. This paper demonstrates the extent to which Bataille owes the content and to some degree also the form of his idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche to the influence and example of the Russian emigré philosopher Lev Shestov (1866–1938). In 1925, Georges Bataille published a translation of Shestov’s The Idea of the Good in Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching, co-signed with Shestov’s daughter Tatiana Beresovski-Chestov. The translation was the product of a period during which Bataille also spent time with the older man and benefited from his tutelage. It was Shestov’s interpretation of the meaning of the death of God in Nietzsche’s life and thought that would have the most decisive influence on Bataille’s own life and work and make him, in his turn, a philosopher of tragedy.

Aberrant Shakespeare: Ron Athey’s Excesses, Bataille’s Solar Anus, Becomings-Macbeth

l In this article we argue that Ron Athey’s performance Solar Anus is an aberrant adaptation of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in which the parodic world of abundant excess that the witches catalyze is redemptively captured and transformed through the playful, androgynous, and excessive performance of Athey, who fulfills the witches’ prophecy and continues to live on sovereignly as both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Athey is a Los Angeles-based performance artist who practices what is sometimes called “extreme performance,” exploring the limits of aesthetics and the capabilities of the human body to express both beauty and pain. His work Solar Anus draws on the works of Georges Bataille, especially his short essay-poem, Solar Anus, as well as Paul Molinier, a queer French painter and visual artist who worked on the fringes of the surrealist movement. We work through the combined sociopolitical theory, performance aesthetics, and research methodology of transversal poetics and engage especially with the theories and explorations of aesthetics and sovereignty by Georges Bataille and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in order to explore the ways in which Athey is capable of realizing the witches’ prophecy of sovereignty without being destroyed by the parodic world that they create and inhabit. Alongside the concepts of sovereignty, we examine how Bataille’s ideas of parody, sacrifice, and excess offer new ways of understanding the world of Macbeth and how excess and sovereignty both function within its porous borders.

Mudfog: Crabbe and Dickens, and the View from the Marshes

Abstract: This paper asks about the relationship of Crabbe's poetry (and his life) to Dickens, and pursues an interest in the marshy and muddy landscapes of David Copperfield, Bleak House , and Great Expectations , with attention also to Little Dorrit . I am interested in Dickens's neologism "mudfog," and how this extends through his fiction; in this specific case looking at Orlick in Great Expectations . I read him as deriving from Crabbe's Peter Grimes, and as an incarnation of the oozy stagnancy of the marshes in the novel. Here I draw on Julia Kristeva and Georges Bataille on the abject and the formless as a way of conceptualizing what Orlick, one of Dickens's more surprising characters, might represent. The whole paper is a continuation of interests discussed in an earlier paper on "Mudfog" ( Dickens Quarterly , June 2024).

Bataille and Eisenstein: In Defense of Michelson's View

Abstract In October 188's “Visceral Economies, Queer Dialectics: Eisenstein Meets Bataille,” Elena Vogman argues that there is an “affinity” between Sergei Eisenstein's and Georges Bataille's views, thereby contesting Annette Michelson's verdict that any similarities between them are “superficial.” This article contends that Michelson is right, and that Vogman provides no evidence of an affinity between Eisenstein's and Bataille's thinking. In doing so, I defend the important methodological principle, exemplified by Michelson's work, that theory should not be applied, top down and a priori, to art as if it were mere grist for the theory mill. Eisenstein was a deeply original thinker and filmmaker, and while he might have shared some of Bataille's interests, he did so for reasons antithetical to Bataille's. His work should not, therefore, be appropriated by what Michelson called the “veritable Bataille industry … [that] has proliferated to the point of generating a grille through which the reading of the Eisensteinian text is now proposed.”

Bleeding Forms

This essay considers the war in Gaza from the perspective of resistance as an anticoncept. It draws inspiration from the notion of the informe (formless) as described by Georges Bataille to understand how resistance acts as a formless operation that deforms the colonial structure. It argues that resistance overflows the condition it seeks to dismantle and bring down in the world. The essay explores the difference between Bataille's account of the operation of the formless and Frantz Fanon's understanding of the tabula rasa, highlighting how resistance can break down, deform, and distort following this capacity to deform historically. However, the Palestinian resistance did not achieve the radical break, or what Frantz Fanon describes as the minimum demand of the colonized, the clean slate from which a genuine decolonization can ensue. The essay explores how the Palestinian resistance initiated on October 7 a meticulously orchestrated offensive maneuver that surpassed the spontaneous uprisings of previous intifadas. It was a calculated decision to deform the existing order. The essay points to the novel development in Palestinian resistance where the decision to instigate this process of decomposition has become wedded to a decider and a locus, while highlighting some of the pitfalls of this development. It argues that the current moment is marked by a decomposition of the colonial order without decolonization.

Crip sovereignty

Crip theory traces a line of flight away from liberal disability studies in the direction of an ethics of degradation which revels in and exploits disability’s destabilising and disruptive potential. The danger of such an ethics, however, is that it risks romanticising disability and, in so doing, unintentionally underwriting ableist prejudices by continuing to index human worth to the capacity for self-determination, here in the form of a subversive “indeterminacy” and “heterogeneity”. Georges Bataille’s work can supplement crip theory insofar as it likewise joyfully affirms the scandalousness of degradation (uselessness, waste, etc.) while grounding this affirmation in an ontology of productive life überhaupt that shifts the responsibility for transgression from the individual onto society. For Bataille, more specifically, the point is that there is a categorical imperative to celebrate degradation as the a priori condition of a collective commitment to prevent global catastrophic suffering.

General Ecology: Bataille in the Biosphere

Abstract I present Georges Bataille’s general economy and trace to what extent it draws on Vladimir Vernadsky’s work The Biosphere and Friedrich Nietzsche’s power ‘ontology.’ I also situate Bataille’s thoughts within contemporary planetary thinking, such as Gaia theory, and highlight some of the potential in thinking global ecology in the light of a Dionysian understanding of the biosphere.

The Sound of Capitalism: Thomas Pynchon’s Critique of Future Economic Realities through Don Giovanni in Bleeding Edge

ABSTRACT The topic of fraud in Bleeding Edge extends beyond financial deceit to alternative realities, which are fabricated by alleged time travelers. One such traveler aligns with Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Captive to ominous forces, he liberates himself in death but returns posthumously in a digital future, joining, this article argues, a sacred conspiracy, and the laughter of the Acéphale, which echoes Georges Bataille’s concept inspired by Mozart’s Don Juan. Thomas Pynchon discusses the themes of sin, deception, and fraudulent channels as he intertwines a TV production of Don Giovanni with allusions to Dante’s “Circles of Hell.” Pynchon’s portrayal of sound engages in a theological critique of future economic realities that draws from Bataille’s vision of expenditure value in a future economy while also observing Kierkegaard’s praise for Mozart’s Don Giovanni. The sinner’s odyssey unfolds in a technological future unfettered by repentance for excess and pleasure, but enchained in sound, which offers an eschatological discourse on digital transitions and economic futures. Pynchon’s narrative proposes a cultural exchange that aims to trade over-accumulation and compromised communication for an inner experience of sensuality, which prompts reflections on the impact of data centers, virtual gamescapes, money as medium, and information that shapes and accelerates our trajectory into the future.

From Base Materialism to Base Culture: Georges Bataille and the Politics of Heterogeneity

From Base Materialism to Base Culture: Georges Bataille and the Politics of Heterogeneity

The chaff and the wheat: Emily Dickinson and Maurice Blanchot

ABSTRACT In this article, I examine how Emily Dickinson consigned her work to loss and powerlessness instead of profit and power in the light of Maurice Blanchot’s understanding of ‘the unworking’, a concept he developed in dialogue with French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Bataille. The aspects of Dickinson’s writing practice that I relate to ‘the unworking’ are its materiality, strategies of address used in poems, spider poems, and the way she writes about dying. These aspects are marked by powerlessness, unemployed negativity and loss. Thinking about these elements in dialogue with Blanchot also provides a better comprehension of the relationship he established between ‘the unworking’ and literature.

Laure and Bataille as educators: On the useless value of sacred experiences

Whereas there are potentially many ways to have sacred experiences as part of one’s higher education, we show how exam writing as a specific study activity can serve as an occasion for such experiences to occur. Experiences through writing that involve the destruction and creation of worlds, of losing and regaining oneself and of learning profound things along the way. Illustrated through the case of Sofie, an undergraduate philosophy student, we show how experiencing the sacred involves the temporary entrapment of the self by the self, in a demonic fashion. The process of emergence and dissolution of this entrapment ultimately makes up a sacred experience that nourishes a learning-development process that can best be described as an oscillating process of becoming. Our article draws its main philosophical inspiration from Laure and Georges Bataille.

Extermination and excess: Martial economies of poison

Engaging the thinking of Georges Bataille, this article examines the international politics of poison as a category of death-dealing that defies distinctions between war/not war and weapon/not weapon. Refraining from splitting poison into pesticides and chemical weapons, the article analyses political ecologies and affective economies of poison both historically and today, to illuminate which desires and strategies poison, as a technology of death, lends itself to. Taking its departure in Bataille’s writing on fascism and ending with his main theory of a general economy, the article weaves through nerve agent assassinations, fumigation, and ideas about gardening, to arrive at the conclusion that poison is not so much an excessive response as it is a response to excess. Following Bataille in viewing ecology as economies of consumption and competition, the article develops a rubric of martial economies of poison to encapsulate how poison, as mode of martial expenditure, makes spaces vacant by death, and room for organisms deemed worthy.