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

Apparently, there’s aff answers in this file so be careful of picking cards.

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.
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 37-39 KZaidi

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, poli- tics 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 cos- mic abyss can reinvent the
Earth in the direction of the great outdoors. For such an ecology, every moment is an apocalypse which cannot be cul-
minated, 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
eco- logical 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 reconsid- ered 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 rea- son, 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 asymp- totic with the unclimatic depths of the universe and its cosmic contingencies. Ecologically
speak- ing,
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, so- cial, 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 ecol- ogy 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.
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 examples of 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.
 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 immanent
Because our intelligence originates in an interruption of immanence,
continuity oE being by a movement oE transcendence.

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 stronger
There is a difference between the victorious animal and the defeated one. However
chase away the others.

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 that immanence has
A plane of immanence on which no concern for transcendence can have a hold manifests
no risk or no danger.

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 claim- ing 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 ra- diance. 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 vari- eties. 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 bu- reaucratic
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 “hon- ored,” 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” au-
thorities. 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 mem- ber 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 re- produce 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, be- yond formal positions of power, and beyond the written rules, and ex- amine how the
implicit and explicit are interwoven, and how the prac- tices 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 Jacques
Derrida describes as the true victim in Eden, another pedagogical “Garden of the Laws” (79–80). Sade’s purportedly uninhibited 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 prisoner.

Žižek pictures Sade as “an object upon which state agencies lived out their 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

A white man is easily forgiven at least minor infringements of the Law, especially when
blacks.” Žižek continues, “

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 experien- cing 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
Late texts such as Eroticism might suggest a
diminishing the bourgeois, capitalist, Christian individual he considers essentially limited.
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
 They situated dead matter at the
entities, ended up positing an order of things whose hierarchical relations mark it as specifically idealist.
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 master/slave dialectic (remembering that Bataille's own 'version' of the dialectic also
The creation of social authority leads us into the realm of political authority, a further
undoe s dialectical logic).
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 response to events (422), and are able to attack the multiple targets presented by 'democratic or Fascist society.
We might, however, 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
One of the reasons Nazism
Stalingrad long after it is lost (recalling that a sovereign sacrifice is not heroism, b ut pointless destruction or loss).
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
For this reason, he is mor e in the
something new can emerge from violence and sacrifice, but that this cannot be predicted, controlled in advance.
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
Th e general economy subsume s all 'spheres* of moder n
part of a dialectic of economies, politics is not the site of importance.
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), perhapsit 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

gen- eral human condition is itself a religious conundrum. For Bataille, reli- gion 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 reli- gious 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
ultimate- ly 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 com- munication 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.
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 40-43 KZaidi

“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 “impossible difference” and

In Politics, Writing, Mutilation, Allan Stoekl
“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
Hegarty, 2k (Paul Hegarty, author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork, Georges
Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, pg )/RF

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 CTheory regularly (Solar
Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss) KZaidi

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
exorbi- tant 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 prob- lem 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 exor- bitant 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 plural- ity 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 radi- cal change in life and its ventures.

The organism tends to die, or more accu- rately, 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 envel- oped 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 cor- responds to the
fundamental limitations of the exterior source of energy and how these limita- tions 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 heliocen- tric 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), al- ternative 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 interior- ized 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 con- tingency 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, death opens 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 procla-
mation 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 Ranciè re’s work. As Michael Dillon argues
(2005), death is essential for understanding Ranciè re’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 contin- gency 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 accumu- lation. 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, ecsta- sy, 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 ele-
ment 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

everyday projects and strategies of self- preservation are implicated

means everything to this order. Yet I 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 proj- ects, goals, and accumulation “imparts an unreal character to death even though man’s membership in this world is tied to the positing of the body as a thing insofar as it is mortal” (Bataille 2006, 46). According to

Bataille,our general commitment to duration, to repro- ducing 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 recog- nition, 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 vulnera- ble to death and its intimations). Here Bataille’s line of thought con- verges with Baldwin’s point about

social life providing a kind of barrier to “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 com-

munities, 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. he interprets death and
Bataille displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways. First,

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. Therefore, although it destroys what
He argues that death is the putrefaction of life, the stench that is at once the source and the repulsive condition of life.

was to be, 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 whom nothing i s definitively lost in death; indeed, death is seen as holding great signification as a means to truth.

Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of absolute expenditure

Second, (the other characteristic of sovereignty), whereas Hegel tries to keep death within the economy

Life beyond utility, says Bataille, is the domain of sovereignty. This being the case, death is
of absolute knowledge and meaning.

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 . Hence the metaphor of luxury and of the luxurious character of death. Third,

establishes a correlation among death, 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 and its deadly attributes reside in the

For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it is

experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events, and fantasized objects.

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 as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political.

. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as that difference that

Politics, in this case, is not the forward dialectical movement of reason

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.
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

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 phi- losophy.
“Solar energy,” writes Bataille, “is the source of life’s exuber- ant 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
anal- ysis 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 ideal- istic. 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 splen- dor 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 ques- tion is always posed
in terms of extravagance.”70 Put more succinctly: “We
receive more energy than we can use.”71 e basic planetary con- dition 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 biolog- ical 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, espe- cially 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 good- ness at work, a ash of solar
exuberance amidst our everyday lives. Consider, also, the ubiquity of queerness across the animal king- dom. 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 mam- mals 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, cultur- al 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, par- ticular 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 our- selves from nature’s over ow. Bataille was
interested in nurturing a sovereign—rather than ser- vile—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 hu- manity’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 ideo- logy 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 objec- tivism" 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 descrip- tion 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 any- thing to do' disappears or
remains in the state of 'unemployed nega- tivity' [...].” (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 dis- position in which unemployed energy reveals itself to itself” (Ia
bar- baric, 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 transforma- tion 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, direct destruction of

Further, two processes of necropolitics are put forward today in the global capitalist world.

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 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

it is possible to state that not one aspect of life, work, education, communication, culture,
market. In both cases

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 in the 3.

present case necrocapitalism, necropolitics and necropower can be (therefore we claim that capitalism has history and biopolitics should be historized)

termed accordingly as necrocapitalist global education. It presents 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 CTheory regularly (Solar
Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss) KZaidi

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 dis- sipation (modes of life) that the Sun
imposes on the planet. Yet these modes of energetic dissipa- tion 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 dis- sipation or circuitous paths of expenditure. To put it differently, capitalism which terrestrially envelops the
restricted economy of the Sun in re- gard 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 op- portunities ensued by thought’s binding of radical exteriority. In line with the vitalistically
pluralist and thanatropically monist regime of solar econo- my, 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 nar- row 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 terres- trial 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 vitalis- tic fashion and thus,
re-enact the Sun’s model of energy expenditure within manifestations of life. Capitalism, in a similar manner,
sniffs out plan- etary waters so as to employ its models of accu- mulation 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 gen- eral) 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 ter- restrial 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 dynam- ics of
contingencies. As previously mentioned, if terrestrial waters are attractors of contingencies or chemistry, then
they do not merely imple- ment 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 contingen- cies
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 produc- tive 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 chemi- cally 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 irrup- tion 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 be- ing superficial, that is to say, it is not the same as considering
Earth as a planetary surface-bio- sphere (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 em- braces
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 perishabil- ity – 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 per- ishable entities. The only true terrestrial ecology, for this reason, is the
one founded on the unilat- eral 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 creativ- ity 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 meta- physics, its sense of the sacred. Bataille's "Copernican
reversal" of political economy is a remark- able 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 un- limited
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 meta- physical 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 pro- fane 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
General economics, unlike
of the surplus, through which the human being experiences the ultimate meaning of existence.
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 secu- larization 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
With the birth of
lamaism and warlike Islamic conquest, the expenditure of excess is always inscribed within a principle of the sacred.
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
If this energy is not
after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been satisfied must be expended.
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
If
to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible.
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 de´cor 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 in a way which
Here

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

more features of modernist capitalist culture are found

asceticism, discipline, and production that were the hallmarks of a modernist state socialism,

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 contradictions of capitalism to a mechanism internal to the structures of capitalist production, we open the way to

: the horror of endless material accumulation and productivism. It is

addressing an issue that Marx’s concern with reorganizing production neglected

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, or intron regions in the genome; and, finally, the challenges of establishing computer database ontology standards in XML. As
a 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
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

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 unpredictable: It leaks,

Our bodies are our opening to life, but also to death. And this
expels, hungers, fails, and ultimately dies.

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

terial riches help us distinguish ourselves not only from

accumulating wealth, according to Bataille, is that ma

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.
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 examples of 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.
 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 pub- lications
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. PauloFreire (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 educational crisis at the start of the

Schools do what they are intended to do—schools underdevelop moral courage,

21st century is not about “failing schools.”

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 scientifically managed enterprise, deeply rooted in the concept of zero-sum capitalism. In this educational model, knowledge is
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 material surplus implies a wealth far more than monetary, and is intended to be indicative of social capital as well. It is

not difficult to 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 human, or to use one another for personal or private gain. What is it to be more human? At our most

altruistic, we give little bits 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 lesser constituted than oneself; this is the

zero-sum game that was introduced into modern educational 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 American

The improvement of U.S. child labor laws and compulsory education

public school system was in a state of a crisis (Rolling, 2013a).

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

When this
of time and money. Laborers who collaborated to create their own ad hoc methods in the field or on the work floor were contributing to lessened productivity.

mandate was replicated in an educational context, 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, 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). When 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

As Taylor’s approach was applied in schools, the

stopwatch became emblematic of Taylor’s system, often likened to “management by measurement.”

completion of 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 the burden of doing only what he or she is told

Management-focused schooling models— their primary mandate being the efficient

to do (Callahan, 1962, p. 27).

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.

when
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 assembly lines,

applied to schools it resulted in a focus upon increasing the production of 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 processes” (Wilson, 1998, p. 29). It is a cultural

But taking a second look, the smallest acts of

behavior that does not appear at first “to contribute to the survival of the species” (Wilson, 1998, p. 29).

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 machinations and

What if we have been overlooking an economy of non-commodity exchanges that are entirely
rhetoric.

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

The natural behavior of this ocean of surplus human social

veil is the one over our own eyes. Yet we see glimpses of its activity everyday.

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: ‘Nietzsche
revealed 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!
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 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
the divine or ‘God’ has
notions of God or the divine get in the way of or prevent a universal community (John Lennon’s position in ‘Imagine’), but that

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 it was in many colonial contexts to make
, ethics, propriety. , ,

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 the law originates in violence and lives by
, Agamben, :

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 for the play of law
, although it does gesture toward some answers: Again,

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 pre- cisely 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 uni- versality 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 lit- tle 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 con- ditions 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 pyra- mids 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 immedi- ately 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 vic- tim, 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 aspi- rations 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’ commu- nism (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, itjust 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 student work, 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
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)

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 following an involution towards the lowest

This theory manifests certain affinities with Malthusian political

point; an entropy of death, pulsional conservatism, equilibrium in the absence of Nirvana.

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 death 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

Instead of establishing death as the regulator of

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 political economy.

tensions and an equilibrium 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 willed by life itself, and that the delirial (economic) phantasm of eliminating it is equivalent to implanting it in

'[t]he idea of a world where human life might be artificially prolonged has a
the heart of life itself this time as an endless mournful nothingness. Biologically,

nightmare quality about it' ), but symbolically above all; and here the
(G. Bataille, Eroticism [2nd edn, tr. M. Dalwood, London: Marion Boyars, 1987], p. 101

nightmare is 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: Not only do we

expenditure and the paroxysm), and so real life is absent from it.

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 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

Death and sexuality, instead of confronting each other as antagonistic principles are
wreak its havoc at our expense. (ibid., p. 60) (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 (the infusorium is itself immortal and asexual)

is sexuality a simple detour on the way to death, as in 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 sexuality and
(eroticism according to Bataille):

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 revolution of life and death where Freud augurs no other issue than the repetitive involution of death. In Bataille, then, there is

Hence the metaphor of luxury and the luxurious character of death. Only
a vision of death as a principle of excess and an anti-economy.

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 amou nt 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

Erotic nakedness is equal to death insofar as it

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)

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. But under what practical conditions is the right to kill, to allow to live, or to expose to death exercised?

? What does the implementation of such a right tell us about the person who is thus put to
Who is the subject of this right

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 exceptio n has been often discussed in relation to Nazism, totalitarianism, and the concentration/exterminati on camps. The death camps in particular have been interpreted
variously as 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
Pawlett 15 (William, Senior Lecturer in the School of Law, Social Sciences and Communication at 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. The No 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.
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, cul- tural 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 appreci- ation 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 inequal- ity 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 “re- volting
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 ces- sation of domination complement each other in vital ways. Bataille is clearer than Trungpa, for example, in linking existential rancor to
spe- ci 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 estab-
lished 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
sys- temic 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
“medita- tion 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
individ- ual 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 teach- ing of meditation in social
movements and in the broader culture. To concretize this point, I put Bataille’s materialist account of earthly rich- ness 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 ex- planations 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 trans- formation.
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 cri- tique
and political theory.”19 Bataille’s work, meanwhile, is teeming with insights, especially ones that bear directly on the relationship be- tween
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 ex- planation of strife that is rooted in
human resistance to the contin- gency 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 prac- tice 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 con- ventions 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 ap- preciate his general encouragement of practices that might better align
cultures with the always- fleeting present and transform existential re- sentment into earthly affirmation. Bataille’s
sometimes-
fumbling search for micropolitical strategies that work on the existential plane (fears, af- fects, 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 inevita- ble 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 per- manent 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 discursive- ly 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 Wedominate 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 strug- gle.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, of- fers 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 en- gagement 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 glori- ous 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 to- tality of life, including death, can produce an
ethos of generosity. Prior to China’s occupation, Tibetan wealth was poured into devel- oping 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 be- stows 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 intellec- tuals—including the current
Dalai Lama—hoped that modern social- ism could disrupt stubborn feudal hierarchies that predated Buddhism’s hold on political power, and
could better materialize the Buddhist em- phasis on universal well-being.35 Even after Communist China’s colo- nization 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 medi- tative 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.”40Despite 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 evinc- es a tragic radicalism; he locates drivers of domination in our existential condition as animals that die, know we die, and easily
feel fear and ser- vility in light of inevitable decay. Since our mortality is hard fact, com- pletely 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 gen- erosity 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) in the 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-Muñ iz, 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—connec- tions 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’stheory corresponds with that of Achille Mbembe (2003) who argues that the
current regime is not biopolitical—as Hardt and Negri claim (2000)— but rather necropo- litical. 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 emanci- patory 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 predi- cated 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, philos- opher, 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 pursuitof 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
Mbembe, 03, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the 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, and fictionalized enemy In other words . It also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, . ,

the question is What is the relationship 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 ( ) .17 That race (

matter racism gures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable more so than
) fi . After all,

class-thinking the ideology that defines history as an economic 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 both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race
, , foreign peoples.

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 .18 Indeed, ,

technology aimed at 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 death.”20
. , he says,

Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower are inscribed (droit de glaive)

in the way all modern states function they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in
;21 indeed,

modernity the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right to kill
. According to Foucault, . This state,

made the management protection and cultivation of life coextensive with the sovereign right to kill By
he claims, , , .

bio- logical 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 moral- ity, economics, and politics. Colonial arbitrariness notoriously sought to
integrate the political with the social and the ethical, while closely sub- ordinating 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 adminis- trations 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 ac- tually 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), comman- dement 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 produc- tion, 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 con- ceived on the basis of an imaginary of the state
making it the organizer of public happiness. As such, the state arrogated the possibility of exer- cising 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 se- curity 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 cer- tain 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 pa- tronage 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 gen- erally poorly
understood by analysts,14 but also the correlative social- ization of arbitrariness—the two movements (privatization of
public pre- rogatives 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 com- mandement 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 simul- taneously 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
Mbembe, 03, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Necropolitics, Pgs. 22-24, 2003)//Cummings

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 mixed marriages

once again, race.38 In fact, in most instances, even the extermination , , forced sterilization,

of vanquished peoples are to and their first 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 . According to her,

conquest 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 the- sis
, — —Nazism and Stalinism did no more than amplify a series of mechanisms that already existed in Western European social and political formations

(subjugation of the body is in the end A fact remains

, health regulations, social Darwinism, eugenics, medico-legal theories on heredity, degeneration, and race) , , irrelevant. , though: in modern

the colony represents the site where sovereignty consists fundamentally in the
philosophical thought and European political practice and imaginary,

exercise of a power outside the law and where “peace” is more likely to take on the face of a “war
(ab legibus solutus)

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
, namely, .

of the colony as 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 state could recognize no authority above it . But conversely,

within its own borders On the other hand the state undertook to “civilize” the ways of killing and to
. , , for its part,

attribute rational objectives to the very act of 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 publicum rapidly assumed the form of a distinction between on the one hand
. In this context, , ,

those parts of the globe available for colonial on the other is appropriation and, , Europe itself (where the Jus publicum was to hold sway).40 This distinction, as we will see,

crucial in 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 centrality , more precisely, .

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 In the same context
, , and a moral sign. ,

colonies are similar to the frontiers . They are inhabited by “savages.” The colonies are not organized in a state form and have not created a human world. Their armies do not form a distinct entity, and their wars are not wars

They do not imply the mobilization of sovereign subjects

between regular armies. (citizens) who respect each other as enemies. They do not establish a distinction between combatants and

colonies are zones in which war and disorder internal and

noncombatants, or again between an “enemy” and a “criminal.” 41 It is thus impossible to conclude peace with them. In sum, ,

external figures of the political the colonies are the location par excellence where the
, stand side by side or alternate with each other. As such,

controls and guarantees of 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 beyond imagination or

what makes the savages different from other human beings is less the color of their skin
comprehension. In fact, according to Arendt,

than the fear that they behave like a part of nature Nature thus remains in all its
, that they treat nature as their undisputed master. ,

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 commit- ted 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 psy- chiatry
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 oui ̈e, 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 transforma- tions 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’s vision 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 invis- ible 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 apos- trophes, hyphens, commas and dashes’).26 As readers, we might be tempted to read Artaud’s
reading of Van Gogh back into his own draw- ings, 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 por- traits 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 sû r 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 nai ̂tre’ (‘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 impos- sible 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 explo- sive 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’ (‘the
human 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 exam- ple in the portraits of Jacques Prevel, Mania Oi ̈fer, 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 Oi ̈fer’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 begin- ning, 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 com- munication: ‘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 sym- bol,
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 sur- face,
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, the

portraits also put into play a series of contradic- tions: 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 con- stant 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 consid- ers 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 commu- nicability, 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.
Addison 11, (Nick, teaches on teaching and learning exchange at the University of the 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).

Addison 11, (Nick, teaches on teaching and learning exchange at the University of the 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

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 it was 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). Theseexcesses: 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

Hegarty, 2k (Paul Hegarty, author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork, Georges
Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, pg )/RF

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 need to extrapolate, what is the role, function or position of representation and figuration in the light of the
The Place of Art for us today, the most obvious place for art is the museum.
general economy?
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
r t 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.
Addison 11, (Nick, teaches on teaching and learning exchange at the University of the 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

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’: “Humanactivity 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
While a complete
regarding his work and its place within the tradition of European and American art history and adjacent disciplines.
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 subsis- tence 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 them- selves 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 sur- plus 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 oth- erwise 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 con- sumption 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 some- thing 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 system- atically
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 special- ists, 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 anthropol- ogy
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, respec- tively, 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 collec- tive 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. WhenGeorges 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. Among the fashioners of this myth were those taken by its most sensational aspect: the
centrality of human 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 cre- ativity 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 imagi- nation throughout his career” (69). Diego Rivera also
believed that Aztec intimacy with the dead might recover a pre- cious 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 fes- tival’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 per- manently 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 aes- thetic 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 con- quest, 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 synthe- sis, however, Rivera ensures
that the calavera also recovers a degree of social and imag- inative fulfillment that had been eclipsed by
Enlightenment reform. While seeming to develop unrelated concerns of the Franco-Mexican myth (sac- rifice 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 prac- tice 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 bur- ial 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 ded- icated 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 resem- ble veritable cemeteries,
the bodies of the
deceased had first to be banished into iso- lated 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 polit- ical 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 biolog- ical 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 peo- ple 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 bore- dom. The curse (which terrifies only those who utter it) leads them to vegetate as
far as pos- sible 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” (Di ́az del Castillo 218) to the eyes of contemporary Spanish onlookers, “was the scene of elab- orate 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 expres- sion in the morphology of shared space. Not only had the Aztecs’ “science of archi-
tecture 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 mod- ern 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 vic- tim” (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 sub- jects 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, sug- gesting 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 eter- nal 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 fash- ion 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 alien- ated 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”.
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 53-55 KZaidi

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: “a language 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.

The alt is to have erotic transgressions

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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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FranceInformation Technology and Services, ARTKeoS Digital Advisor
Previous Masterbrand, Historycraft.fr, Caisse D Allocations Familiale, Erotic Exuberance: Batailles Notion of
Eroticism)/RF

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 wants to overflow, and to
Eroticism is the “fall” of the working and serious self into
breaks out of the restricted seriousness. It is the explosion of selfhood.
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 within a desire for preservation. What
is deemed
impossible is what escape that logic, so in a sense 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. Thisis 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 freedom. On account of this, you’ll need to arm yourself with secret pride
and indomitable willpower. The advantages 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
Minguy, 17 (Thomas Minguy, Head of marketing and communication at ARTKeoS Paris 01, Île-de-France,
FranceInformation Technology and Services, ARTKeoS Digital Advisor Previous Masterbrand, Historycraft.fr, Caisse
D Allocations Familiale, Erotic Exuberance: Batailles Notion of Eroticism)/RF

If the final step in our analysis of eroticism leads into an exploration of the notion of sacredness and holiness, it is
Eroticism is the breakthrough of
because the place where erotic desires and actions take us lies within the same realm of existence.
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 impossibility to make sense of our own existence, since we are all part of this exuberant movement of
energies. Inthe erotic 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 wetoo 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 perspective. This argument amounts to overturning the dominant categories of
modern thought and their prime avatar, rationality. As
opposed 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.
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

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 good- ness. 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 em- blematic 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 over- whelming than it used to be. It has actually come to feel
good—an op- portunity to ride life’s e usion, life’s goodness. Marcus Boon hypoth- esizes 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 sovereign- ty.”84 Bataille’s theoretical work was partly inspired by
Buddhist praxis, but can be looped back to help conceptualize the experience of medita- tion. 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 re- sentment 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 fini- tude—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. We
might 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
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

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
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

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.
Wright 17. Drew, English Professor at Georgia State University. “The Impossible Thought off Georges
Bataille: A Consciousness that Laughs and Cries” | rpadhi

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.
Wright 17. Drew, English Professor at Georgia State University. “The Impossible Thought off Georges
Bataille: A Consciousness that Laughs and Cries” | rpadhi
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). Things could 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). Thisirrepressible “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). Icontend 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 with- out 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 “abso- lute 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 repre- sentation
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 disrup- tive 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 con- tained 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 indi-
vidual’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 experi- ence 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 metaphys- ics 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 situ- ations, 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 out- lined 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 the- ater 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 ena bles 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 com- plete 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 the- ater 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 through- out 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 cen- turies—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 clear- est
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 real- ization 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. Thisimplies 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
nega- tion, 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.
Lawtoo 11, (Nidesh Lawtoo, “Bataille and the Birth of the Subject,” Angelaki, Vol. 16, 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
Lawtoo 11, (Nidesh Lawtoo, “Bataille and the Birth of the Subject,” Angelaki, Vol. 16, 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

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 thebirth 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.

Wright 17. Drew, English Professor at Georgia State University. “The Impossible Thought off Georges
Bataille: A Consciousness that Laughs and Cries” | rpadhi
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 come to realize or suspect, amidst peals of laughter, that the black man
in the barrel laughs not solely at 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 pub- lications
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 com- munity-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
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 30-32 KZaidi

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, inexorably to 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. Whenwe 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.
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

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
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
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.
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

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.
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

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

In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of student as

the complexities of modern life (Brew 2006; Barnett 2000).

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 possible to create a radical pedagogy based on the links between

teaching and research to counteract the identity of the student as consumer? A radical 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 devel- oping the qualities of professional expertise among undergraduates (Weiman 2004; Brew 2006). At the same time, linking teaching and research in the undergraduate curriculum is

Where the evidence for the

seen to have the potential to 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

At the core of
autonomy (Knoll and Seibart 1967). 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 pro- test has left a controversial legacy about its nature and significance. This legacy has been the subject of
much debate among sociologists, historians, anthropolo- gists, 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-management and

. A key issue for the protest was the way in which the students engaged with the critical social
social justice

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

The students were inspired by the work of

existence is constituted ‘out- wardly by its engagement and actions in the concrete world’ (Fox 2003: 16).

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 constituted by the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’

For Lefebvre the revolution must transform everyday life as well as the
and experienced as boredom and banality (Lefebvre 1984).

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 – everywhere and everything’ (Quattrocchi and Nairn

Within the universities self-managing, democratic, non-hierarchical groups, known

1998: 123), especially in education.

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 the

In the so called “student action” students never acted as students but as revealers
students refused to act as students: ‘

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 under- graduate 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 student experience.

Through the process of real collaboration with academics the role of student 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 excess as critical political intervention has its roots in sociology (Bataille), anthropology (Mauss), and Marxist social theory (Debord).

If con- 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 learning materials on the World Wide Web, defined as Open Educational Resources (Iiyoshi and Kumar 2008). A

pedagogy of excess would 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

Higher education is directly involved in the development of technology, science and

protest (Hardt and Negri 2001).

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 events of the past. The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is

connected 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 and imaginaries

). In this way the pedagogy of excess becomes a

adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (2004: 90–1

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 which to organise resistance to consumerism and marketisation than

The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is

Humboldt’s liberal vision for the University of Berlin.

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

In order to fundamentally challenge the concept of student as

the complexities of modern life (Brew 2006; Barnett 2000).

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 possible to create a radical pedagogy based on the links between

teaching and research to counteract the identity of the student as consumer? A radical 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 devel- oping the qualities of professional expertise among undergraduates (Weiman 2004; Brew 2006). At the same time, linking teaching and research in the undergraduate curriculum is

Where the evidence for the

seen to have the potential to 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

At the core of
autonomy (Knoll and Seibart 1967). 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 pro- test has left a controversial legacy about its nature and significance. This legacy has been the subject of
much debate among sociologists, historians, anthropolo- gists, 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-management and

. A key issue for the protest was the way in which the students engaged with the critical social
social justice

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

The students were inspired by the work of

existence is constituted ‘out- wardly by its engagement and actions in the concrete world’ (Fox 2003: 16).

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 constituted by the ‘bureaucratic society of controlled consumption’

For Lefebvre the revolution must transform everyday life as well as the
and experienced as boredom and banality (Lefebvre 1984).

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 – everywhere and everything’ (Quattrocchi and Nairn

Within the universities self-managing, democratic, non-hierarchical groups, known

1998: 123), especially in education.

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 the

In the so called “student action” students never acted as students but as revealers
students refused to act as students: ‘

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 under- graduate 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 student experience.

Through the process of real collaboration with academics the role of student 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 excess as critical political intervention has its roots in sociology (Bataille), anthropology (Mauss), and Marxist social theory (Debord).

If con- 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 learning materials on the World Wide Web, defined as Open Educational Resources (Iiyoshi and Kumar 2008). A

pedagogy of excess would 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

Higher education is directly involved in the development of technology, science and

protest (Hardt and Negri 2001).

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 events of the past. The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is

connected 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 and imaginaries

). In this way the pedagogy of excess becomes a

adequate to the scope of what a progressive and sustainable humanity might become (2004: 90–1

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 which to organise resistance to consumerism and marketisation than

The pedagogy of excess requires that the radical history of 1968 is

Humboldt’s liberal vision for the University of Berlin.

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 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 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
Such is the irony of
the boundary, the plane of ‘being open to’ has never been openly associated with paranoia and regression.
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
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)

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
Yet again, Freud’s claims
the herd, and by allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty. 19

hover in the air, lacking any 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

Hegarty, 2k (Paul Hegarty, author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork, Georges
Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, pg )/RF

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 an individual 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” (Mbembe 2003: 11). While drawing a critical distance from Michael Foucault and

the concept of biopower, its relation to notions of sovereignty (imperium) and

Giorgio Agamben, he ascribes this power to what he calls necropolitics, “

the state of exception” What he means by ‘necropolitics’ and the ‘new formations of power’
(Mbembe 2003: 12).

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 necropower that has colonized not only the people,

His work on the limits of sovereign power, its control over

their natural resources and their territories, but also their right to live and their right to die unconstrained (Mbembe 2003: 12).

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 masters. By naming them ‘masters’ I broadly imply the subjects of the imperialist North who have

. Our awareness about such different ways of

embraced, rather than opposed, the colonial conditions that, in a historical retrospective, turned to be beneficial for their own comfort of living nowadays

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

Mbembe’s own arguments have inscribed his

thinking and, by doing so, to work towards establishing a possible counter-hegemonic theoretical coexistence among various knowledge-worlds in their plurality.

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 into a profound dialogue with the obdurate

. If the biopolitical armature is gradually dismantled

Northern epistemic mytheme. Positioned side by side, they must keep this dialogue open (the dominant structure of knowledgecommunication)

through such a dialogue, this will allow for a truly emancipatory potential of theoretical propositions, earlier
dismissed, to be exposed again ). In that sense, Mbembe’s ‘return of death’ to philosophy is
(or, in many cases, for the first time ever

part of the global and unavoidable process that is not only characterized by one single anti-imperial
paradigm but rather by numerous possible paradigms unrelated to necropolitics itself. Within
(‘necropolitical’, 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 sover- eignty, 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 sovereign condition of ‘happiness that defies all reason’. The experience is

self‐annihilating: ‘There was no more authentic reality in 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. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep. (p. 140) This

is Fanon’s rejoinder to the dubious 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 the colonized are cut off from the kind of freedom

Bataille describes. Forgetting is, as such, cognate not with sovereignty, but rather sover- eignty’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
Hegarty, 2k (Paul Hegarty, author and lecturer in aesthetics at University College Cork, Georges
Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist, pg )/RF

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 'humanattitude 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
Mbembe, 03, (Achill senior researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand,
Necropolitics, Pgs. 35-39, 2003)//Cummings

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 reject on the twin issues . In examining these two logics,

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 stood in the path of death knowing of many deaths and
. As Elias Canetti reminds us, , ,

standing in the midst of the fallen the survivor is the one who has taken on a whole pack of , is still alive. Or, more precisely,

enemies and managed not only to escape alive, but to kill his or her attackers the lowest form . This is why, to a large extent,

of survival is killing 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 survivor feel
. , his or her physical presence as a corpse,

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 the spaces of everyday life The trapping of the body is added to the ambush location The
—in sum, . .

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 that at the time of detonation it
. Thus concealed, .

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 . In this instance,

Other Homicide and suicide are 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 war is the war of
, scattered every- Public Culture where, . In this case,

body on body one has to come as close as possible to the body of the enemy To detonate the
(guerre au corps-à-corps). To kill, .

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,

Canetti describes this moment of survival as a moment of power

which consists in wishing to impose death on others while preserving one’s own life. . In such a case,

triumph develops precisely from the possibility of being there when the others in this case the enemy ( ) are no

Such is the logic of heroism as classically understood

longer there. In the logic of : to execute others while holding one’s own death at a distance.
martyrdom 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 not
. As I have already indicated, .

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 death the future is collapsed into . In other words,

the present the besieged body passes through two stages. First, it is transformed into a mere
. In its desire for eternity,

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 , ,

can- not be deduced from its character as a thing The besieged body becomes a piece of , but from a transcendental nomos out- side it.

metal whose 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 sacrifice Martin . Let me explore, in conclusion, , freedom, .

Heidegger argues that the human’s “being toward death” is the decisive condition of all true human
freedom Whereas Heidegger grants an existential status to being-
.76 In other words, one is free to live one’s own life only because one is free to die one’s own death.

toward-death and considers it an event of freedom Bataille suggests that “sacrifice in reality reveals ,

nothing.” It is not sim- ply the absolute manifestation of negativity death reveals the human . It is also a comedy. For Bataille,

subject’s animal side which he refers to moreover as the subject’s “natural being.” “For man to reveal
,

himself in the end the human subject has to be fully alive at the
, he has to die, but he will have to do so while alive—by looking at himself ceasing to exist,” he adds. In other words,

very moment of dying 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,

what at least is on the point of taking place or what takes place in an elusive
this is what happens ( by means of a , , fugitive manner),

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 sacrifice But this is play!” And for
. Thus he dies seeing himself die, , in some sense, through his own will, .

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 sacrifices,

Death here achieves the character of a transgression

however, there is no animal to serve as a substitute victim. It is not . But unlike crucifix- ion, it has no expiatory dimension.

related to the Hegelian paradigms of prestige or recognition Does this imply . Indeed, a dead person cannot recognize his or her killer, who is also dead.

that death occurs here as pure annihilation and nothingness excess and 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 . To live under late modern occupation is to experience a permanent condition of “being in pain”: fortified structures, military posts,

roadblocks everywhere buildings that bring back painful memories of humiliation

; and beatings , interrogations, ;

curfews that imprison 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 , frightened by their own shadows; children blinded by rubber bullets;

their families shooting at the rooftop water tanks just for fun
; soldiers urinating on fences, pounding on fragile , chanting loud offensive slogans,

tin doors to frighten the children consecrating papers or dumping garbage in the middle of a residential , ,

neighborhood shootings and fatalities a certain kind of madness

; border guards kicking over a vegetable stand or closing borders at whim; bones broken; — .78 In such circumstances,

the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship and freedom is an ecstatic (trial by death) are marked by excess. What connects terror, death,

notion of temporality and politics The future but not in the present The present itself is but
. , here, can be authentically anticipated, .
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
, boundary, or barrier, it is experienced as “a release from terror and bondage.”79 As Gilroy notes,

for death over continued servitude is a 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

For death is precisely that from and over which I have power But it is also that space where freedom
agency. .

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 Mé nilmontant in the vicinity of Pè re-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 reli- gious 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-mutila- tion 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 dismem- berment. It appears strange, then, to conclude that it would be of lesser impor- tance 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 Pè re-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 inter- pretation 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 asy- lum, the sun, the most spectacular of feasts and death.”20 Whereas
the eye repre- sents the Sun as a symbol of vision and knowledge—reason as opposed to unrea- son—
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 cen- ter 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 domi- nate 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 blind- ness.”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 struc- ture turns the descent into an ascent and vice versa.26 Not only is Icarus’s flight fol- lowed 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 appear- ance and surprises Simone and the narrator in a compromising
situation. Marcelle’s fall, unlike Simone’s imitation, is authentic and unprovoked. It is a gen- uine 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, thereare 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

knowl- edge 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 ori- entation 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 argu- ment. 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 towns- people 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 oppo- site. The disorientation that the
madman speaks of already appears to be estab- lished 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 cen- ter 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 con- tinuously 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 imagi- nation 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 extinc- tion 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 with- drawal from the object of
desire that is the cause of melancholia. Through the vio- lent 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, at
the 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 alterna- tive. Instead
the desire can be projected onto a different object, creating a new tra- jectory 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
 Bataille left Reims
the sign of the mother, as Hollier notes, contrasting it against a later recollection of the same events of August 1914—when

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.