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Ideologies of the Anesthetic:: Acupuncture, Photography, and the Material Image

Eric Hayot

in The Hypothetical Mandarin: Sympathy, modernity, and Chinese Pain

This chapter begins by reading the controversy of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1974 documentary film, China and Pearl S. Buck's China: Past and Present (1972). Moving from Antonioni's filming of a ... More

This chapter begins by reading the controversy of Michelangelo Antonioni's 1974 documentary film, China and Pearl S. Buck's China: Past and Present (1972). Moving from Antonioni's filming of a surgical operation performed under acupuncture anesthesia to Susan Sontag's discussion of just such an operation in On Photography (1977), the chapter argues that part of what was at stake in China's public performance of such operations in the early 1970s was nothing other than the nature of modernity itself. But how, given such a theorization of the photograph, are we to understand the photographs of Chinese torture that circulated in the West in the early twentieth century? Images of Chinese lingchi, the “death of a thousand cuts,” terrified and titillated Western viewers as lingchi became an emblem of the enormous cultural gulf separating the West from China. The chapter closes by reading a photograph famously owned and reproduced by the French philosopher Georges Bataille. Bataille's relation to the photograph, the chapter argues, must be rethought inside the framework of China's relation to modernity, and to the identificatory and sympathetic claims made by the photographic subject's shocking and transformative pain.Less

Introduction: Sacred with a Vengeance

Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall

in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

Jeremy Biles and Kent Brintall provide and introduction to the life and thought of Georges Bataille. In addition to his publications, the introduction examines Bataille’s political affiliations over ... More

Jeremy Biles and Kent Brintall provide and introduction to the life and thought of Georges Bataille. In addition to his publications, the introduction examines Bataille’s political affiliations over the course of his life, his reaction to the onset of World War II, and his engagement with intellectual contemporaries. Rather than promoting the canonization of Bataille’s work, the introduction and following essays seek to reintegrate him into the numerous scholarly debates that his work helped to shape.Less

Eroticism, Violence, and Sacrifice

Carl Olson

in The Allure of Decadent Thinking: Religious Studies and the Challenge of Postmodernism

This chapter critically examines Georges Bataille's theory of religion, and compares it to the Sun Dance of the Sioux on the American plains in order to test its viability and validity.

French Thought between Liberalism and Fascism: Bataille and Blanchot in the 1930s

Adrian May

in From Bataille to Badiou: Lignes, the Preservation of Radical French Thought, 1987-2017

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political ... More

Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot were two foundational influences on both Lignes and many of the review’s contributors. Yet, in the period after Lignes’ creation in 1987, the political engagements of both these figures in the 1930s were coming under increasingly scrutiny as they were suspected of fascist sympathies and anti-Semitic views. This chapter returns to the pre-war period to firstly delineate the review’s trenchant defence of Bataille’s political record, and the influence of Bataille on Lignes’ dual political program of anti-fascism and a critique of economic and political liberalism is subsequently delineated. Secondly, the significance of the review’s historic defence and recent exposé of the right-wing past of Blanchot is discussed in depth. The reception of these two thinkers is thus historicised, especially in the 1980s context of the anti-totalitarian ‘liberal moment’ and the growing anxieties of intellectual complicity with fascism following the Heidegger affair.Less

Georges Bataille: Aleatory Dialectics

Robyn Marasco

in The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory After Hegel

This chapter focuses on Georges Bataille's notion of chance. This notion made its first appearances in Bataille's essays of the 1930s, most notably in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an important document ... More

This chapter focuses on Georges Bataille's notion of chance. This notion made its first appearances in Bataille's essays of the 1930s, most notably in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, an important document from 1937 that deals with questions of politics, the fragmentation of the human being, the limits of action, and the aleatory experience of freedom. The essay suggests that chance is the potentiality for politics, structuring the field of relations between individuals and groups. It also reiterates that with love, and the world created by lovers, “what determines the election of the loved one—so that the possibility of another choice represented logically, inspires horror—is in fact reducible to a series of chances.” Thus, this chance-element in the experience of love gives force to human creativity and will to exist.Less

Prelude

Kent L. Brintnall

in Ecce Homo: The Male-Body-in-Pain as Redemptive Figure

This book begins by focusing on the concluding paragraphs of the final chapter of Georges Bataille's last book, which reflected on photographs of a Chinese man undergoing lingchi, a form of public ... More

This book begins by focusing on the concluding paragraphs of the final chapter of Georges Bataille's last book, which reflected on photographs of a Chinese man undergoing lingchi, a form of public execution accomplished by severing limbs and ripping flesh from the victim's body. The text records that “this photograph had a decisive role in [Bataille's] life.” According to Bataille, it reveals an intimate connection between religious and erotic experiences, an ecstatic rupture both blissful and horrific. In a recent study of the practice of lingchi in China and representations of lingchi in European scholarship, the authors fault Bataille for imposing a “mask of ecstatic suffering” that burdens the tortured person, consequently concealing him.Less

Admiration and Agreement: Meeting Georges Bataille (1940–1943)

Christophe Bident

in Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

An important chapter on the key relationship between Blanchot and Georges Bataille, which began in the early 1940s. We look at how each describes the influence of the other, and how this is present ... More

An important chapter on the key relationship between Blanchot and Georges Bataille, which began in the early 1940s. We look at how each describes the influence of the other, and how this is present in their work and thinking.Less

Reassessing René Magritte’s Période Vache: From Louis Forton’s Pieds Nickelés to Georges Bataille

Gilda Axelroud

in Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics

In 1948, at the moment his career seemed to be taking off after twenty years of compromise and struggle, René Magritte made the peculiar decision to abandon his flatly painted, hard-edged signature ... More

In 1948, at the moment his career seemed to be taking off after twenty years of compromise and struggle, René Magritte made the peculiar decision to abandon his flatly painted, hard-edged signature style to paint in a more gestural manner reminiscent of expressionist and Fauve painting for a series of works that are now either reviled or celebrated as the ‘Vache’ paintings. A key inspiration for the style and subject matter of the Vache works was the popular French comic strip Les Pieds nickelés (‘Nickel-Plated Feet’). Originally drawn by Louis Forton in 1908 and still in print when Magritte used it for the période Vache (indeed, it is still drawn today), the comic strip had been written on twenty years prior to the exhibition (whilst Magritte was living in Paris) by Georges Bataille in his periodical Documents in a little-known text. This chapter aims to discover what we might learn about Magritte’s Vache paintings through a visual analysis and critical reading of Les Pieds nickelés partly within the framework set by Bataille’s 1929 text on the strip. The chapter then takes on a theoretical slant, examining the Vache paintings in the light of Bataille’s neglected text, in which Aztec religion and humour are brought to bear on a critique of Western civilization and society. The chapter concludes with a broader study of humour in the Surrealist group, bringing forth Magritte’s notion of humour-plaisir, which appears also to have been neglected in the few studies of his période Vache.Less

Does the Acéphale Dream of Headless Sheep?

Jeremy Biles

in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

In light of his polemical relations with André Breton and his critiques of surrealism, Bataille is widely but mistakenly thought to have an aversion to the dream and the unconscious. Revealing ... More

In light of his polemical relations with André Breton and his critiques of surrealism, Bataille is widely but mistakenly thought to have an aversion to the dream and the unconscious. Revealing important connections between psychoanalysis and Bataille, this essay seeks to correct this misreading of Bataille, demonstrating that for Bataille, dream and the powers of the unconscious are in fact intimately related to his conception of the sacred. The essay adumbrates a Bataillean “heterological” approach to the dream and dream interpretation, arguing that for Bataille, the dream is a crucial element of ecstatic “nonknowledge” and “inner experience.”Less

Introduction

Jeremy Biles

in Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form

In the 1930s, French writer Georges Bataille established a secret society known as Acéphale. Bataille sets the mood for this obscure “headless” organization, heralding the ... More

In the 1930s, French writer Georges Bataille established a secret society known as Acéphale. Bataille sets the mood for this obscure “headless” organization, heralding the acéphale deity that embodies this fierce religious sensibility. Bataille insists on the contradictory nature of this headless being. The acéphale is thus neither merely man nor solely god, because he is both man and god. This conjunction of opposites is what endows the headless being with its aura of fascination, and what makes of it a sacred “monster” Bataille's insistent conjunction of the monstrous and the sacred is the subject of this book. It specifies some of the ways in which Bataille evokes monstrosity to elicit in himself and his audience an experience of simultaneous anguish and joy—an experience that he calls sacred. In particular, Bataille is fascinated with the “left-hand” sacred. It is in beholding the monster that one might experience the combination of ecstasy and horror that characterizes Bataille's notion of the sacred.Less

Speech, Sacrifice and Shit: Three Orders of Giving in the Thought of Jacques Lacan

Gerald Moore

in Politics of the Gift: Exchanges in Poststructuralism

Chapter 1 opens through a discussion of Mauss's more explicit héritiers, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Bataille, as two principal, albeit highly different proponents of new forms of knowledge ... More

Chapter 1 opens through a discussion of Mauss's more explicit héritiers, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Georges Bataille, as two principal, albeit highly different proponents of new forms of knowledge deemed irreducible to the broader concerns and remit of institutional philosophy. The main focus of the chapter is on Jacques Lacan. Drawing extensively on the historical background Lévi-Strauss, Hegel-Kojève, Freud and Bataille, the chapter is structured around the idea that the gift features extensively in the formation of each of the three registers of Lacan's pre-ontology: the symbolic ‘gift of speech’ of the earlier, more structuralist Lacan; the sacrificial gift of love in the imaginary; and, in the later, more Bataillean, Lacan, the traumatic ‘gift of shit’, the eternal return of a real that ungrounds the subject. Through sustained readings of many of Lacan's most important works, including the “Rome Discourse” and Seminars VII and XI, plus a range of responses from Boothby and Miller, Borch-Jakobsen, Žižek and Zupančič, we see that the work of Lacan is exemplary of the shift from more empirical understandings of gifts and exchange toward an increasingly abstract, theoretical conception of giving as an event that cannot be incorporated within the economic sphere of the traditionally-conceived subject.Less

Maximal Objects in Drone Music, Dub Techno, and Noise

Joanna Demers

in Listening through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music

Chapter 3 looked at microsound, a form of electronica often characterized as minimalist. Chapter 4 looks at music that can be described as “maximal” because it tests the physical limitations of ... More

Chapter 3 looked at microsound, a form of electronica often characterized as minimalist. Chapter 4 looks at music that can be described as “maximal” because it tests the physical limitations of listeners through excessive durations and volumes. These various manifestations of excess all purport to transcend meaning, to push sound beyond semiosis to a state in which it communicates directly to listeners’ bodies. The chapter focuses on maximal genres such as drone music, dub techno, and noise music, enlisting theories on excess and the sublime by Georges Bataille and Immanuel Kant. It also situates noise as a reaction to but also a confirmation of traditional notions of beauty in music.Less

Georges Bataille

Nadine Hartmann

in Agamben's Philosophical Lineage

Throughout his oeuvre, Giorgio Agamben makes numerous references to Georges Bataille. Already in the 1977 Stanzas, Bataille’s general economy is afforded one of the scholia of the chapter ‘The ... More

Throughout his oeuvre, Giorgio Agamben makes numerous references to Georges Bataille. Already in the 1977 Stanzas, Bataille’s general economy is afforded one of the scholia of the chapter ‘The Appropriation of Unreality’ and scolded for its alleged simplification of Marcel Mauss’s account of the gift. A brief discussion of the letters that Bataille and Alexandre Kojève exchanged in 1937 is contained in Agamben’s 1982 Language and Death and picked up again in 2002’s The Open: Man and Animal. The only text that exclusively deals with Bataille, however, is Agamben’s 1987 essay ‘Bataille e il paradosso della sovranità’. By the time Agamben begins the Homo Sacer project (1995), and in particular in Means Without End (1996), Bataille has been banished into unambiguously dismissive footnotes or ‘thresholds’ in which Agamben distances himself from Bataille’s definitions of the sacred, sacrifice and sovereignty. Thus, unlike Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin or Michel Foucault, Bataille not only cannot be considered one of Agamben’s main informants, but receives all but marginal attention from him – and this despite the fact that Bataille is generally held to be one of the crucial thinkers of the sacred and of sovereignty.Less

Excess, Time, and the Pure Gift

Carl Olson

in The Allure of Decadent Thinking: Religious Studies and the Challenge of Postmodernism

Georges Bataille's notion of the gift and Jacques Derrida's inquiry into the possibility of a pure gift are examined within the context of Marcel Mauss's classic theory of the gift. These three ... More

Georges Bataille's notion of the gift and Jacques Derrida's inquiry into the possibility of a pure gift are examined within the context of Marcel Mauss's classic theory of the gift. These three theories are compared with theoretical work on the Hindu notion of the gift.Less

Economies of Subjectivity: Bataille After Freud

Nick Mansfield

in The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Sovereignty and Subjectivity Between Freud, Bataille, and Derrida

This chapter examines the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille's thinking on the issue of subjectivity as either an economy of energy or as located in one. It suggests that the ... More

This chapter examines the relationship between Sigmund Freud and Georges Bataille's thinking on the issue of subjectivity as either an economy of energy or as located in one. It suggests that the model of sovereignty that can be traced to Jacques Derrida first arises in Bataille's consideration of the politics of subjectivity. The Freudian model of the subject may have shifted to an economic model in order to supplement and subsume the inadequacies and incompleteness of the previous models, particularly with respect to the dynamic interrelation of one psychic system with another.Less

Sovereignty and Cruelty: Self-Affirmation, Self-Dissolution, and the Bataillean Subject

Stephen S. Bush

in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

Two problems confront the attempt to develop an ethical perspective from Georges Bataille’s writings. First, he employs representations of cruelty frequently, and he seems to think there is some ... More

Two problems confront the attempt to develop an ethical perspective from Georges Bataille’s writings. First, he employs representations of cruelty frequently, and he seems to think there is some benefit to attending to spectacles of cruelty. Second, he has a focus on self-dissolution, which seemingly comes at the expense of appropriate self-assertion. This chapter argues that Bataille enjoins self-assertion, not just self-dissolution. Further, his use of cruel imagery is part of his strategy of fostering self-assertiveness. In apprehending representations of cruelty, Bataille’s idea is that subjects can endorse the drive in themselves to be free of external constraints while recognizing that this drive can lead to victimization. Paradoxically, self-assertion ultimately leads to self-dissolution, however.Less

Bataille and Kristeva on Religion

Zeynep Direk

in Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion

This essay inquires into the intellectual relation between Bataille and Kristeva by focusing on their conceptions of the religious experience as an experience of desire, law, and death. It lays out ... More

This essay inquires into the intellectual relation between Bataille and Kristeva by focusing on their conceptions of the religious experience as an experience of desire, law, and death. It lays out how their reflections on religious signification have evolved throughout the different phases of their thinking. Even though both have interpreted religion in terms of abjection, Kristeva’s psychoanalytic approach to religion differs from Bataille’s anthropological reflections. The essay shows that Kristeva’s reading of Bataille changed from an appreciation of him as a thinker of poetic revolution in 1970s to a figure of revolt in 1980s, a period in which Bataille still continues to be a source of inspiration for Kristeva’s theorization of the sacred, religion, erotic, abjection, language, and revolt, though now she disavows his legacy and seeks to distance herself from his thought. In the 1990s, Kristeva comes to the point of dismissing him as a historical, even nostalgic figure of transgression.Less

Sharing in What Death Reveals: Breaking the Waves

Stephen S. Bush

in Politics, Theory, and Film: Critical Encounters with Lars von Trier

This chapter discusses two interpretations of von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) in its treatment of violence. One interpretation concerns Bess McNeill’s sacrificial love for her husband, Jan, in ... More

This chapter discusses two interpretations of von Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996) in its treatment of violence. One interpretation concerns Bess McNeill’s sacrificial love for her husband, Jan, in which Bess’s violent death becomes the supreme expression of that love. According to an alternative interpretation, informed by Georges Bataille, the role of violence in the film is to bring the viewer to an experience of commonality with Bess. It is also an acknowledgment of the viewer’s own cruel fascination with the spectacle of violence. The chapter argues that the two interpretations are in tension, revealing shortcomings not only in von Trier’s treatment of violence, but also in Bataille’s.Less