Stronge - Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought

Georges Bataille and
Contemporary Thought

Also available from Bloomsbury

Hegel and Resistance , edited by Rebecca Comay and Bart Zantvoort

The Ethics of Theory , Robert Doran

Castoriadis, Foucault, and Autonomy , Marcela Tovar-Restrepo

Georges Bataille and
Contemporary Thought

Will Stronge

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Eugene Brennan teaches English and Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris and the Universit Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3. In 2016 he completed his PhD on the reception of Batailles work in popular culture. He is the co-editor, with Russell Williams, of Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of Excess (Palgrave, 2015). His research focuses on critical theory, cultural studies and modernist literature.

Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University London. He is author of many articles, books and contributions to multi-authored works, including On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Levinas and the Political (Routledge, 2002).

Edia Connole is a black metal theorist and Bataillean scholar with an orientation in apophatic mysticism. Her books include Floating Tomb: Black Metal Theory (Mimesis, 2015), co-authored with Nicola Masciandaro, Serial Killing: A Philosophical Anthology (Schism, 2015), co-edited with Gary J. Shipley, and Through the Subcultural Lens: Hebdige and Subculture in the 21st Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is, with Scott Wilson, co-founder of MOUTH, mmmouth.wordpress.com, and co-author of The Georges Bataille Cookbook (Schism, forthcoming).

Georges Didi-Huberman is a philosopher and art historian. He teaches at the cole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales. He has published some forty books on the history and theory of images. His books available in English include Images in Spite of All (University of Chicago Press, 2008) and Confronting Images (Penn State University Press, 2005).

Patrick ffrench is Professor of French Language and Literature at Kings College London. He gained his PhD, on French literary and theoretical journal Tel Quel , in 1993, following which he undertook research on the role of Georges Bataille in twentieth-century French intellectual history at University College London. He is author of, amongst other publications, After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community (Routledge, 2007).

Stuart Kendall is a writer, editor, and translator working at the intersections of philosophy, poetics, visual culture, and design. He is the author of a biography of Georges Bataille and translator of six volumes of Batailles work including Inner Experience (SUNY Press, 2014), Guilty (SUNY Press, 2011), and On Nietzsche (SUNY Press, 2015). His other books include Gilgamesh (Contra, 2012) , The Ends of Art and Design (Infra-Thin, 2011), and Phrases: Six Films with Jean-Luc Godard (Contra, 2016). He teaches in the graduate program in design at the California College of the Arts.

Kevin Kennedy holds a PhD in comparative literature from the Free University Berlin. Has taught at Goldsmiths College and the American University of Paris and currently lectures at the University of Paris III: Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is the author of Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Batailles Theory of Art and Literature (Academica Press, 2014).

Michael Lewis teaches Philosophy at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne and is a Research Associate at the Rights and Justice Research Centre at the University of Sussex. His current research addresses the question of the boundary between the human and the animal.

William Pawlett is Senior Lecturer in Art, Philosophy and Social Practice at the University of Wolverhampton in the UK. His main areas of research are social, cultural and media theory, continental philosophy and the application of these to the issues of sexuality and consumerism and to violence, hatred and otherness. He has written on the sociological and philosophical ideas of Jean Baudrillard and the social and religious philosophy of Georges Bataille.

Teresa Pullano is Assistant Professor of European Global Studies at the University of Basel, Switerland. Her research interests include critical theory, political theory, political philosophy, political sociology, European politics, nationalism and state formation, critical social theory and social epistemology.

Will Stronge is Associate Lecturer in Theology at the University of Chichester in the UK and a PhD student at the University of Brighton. He previously studied philosophy and critical theory at Kingston University and the University of the West of England, where he also taught. His research interests include post-Kantian and Marxist critical theory and the writing of Antonio Gramsci on the function of intellectuals in the context of todays political economy.

Oxana Timofeeva is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Philosophy, Department of Political Sciences and Sociology at the European University at St Petersburg, where she teaches courses in Contemporary Problems of Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophical Anthropology and Philosophy of Film. She is the author of History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence, and Freedom (Jan van Eyck, 2012) and Introduction to the Erotic Philosophy of Georges Bataille (in Russian, New Literary Observer, 2009).

Scott Wilson is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at Kingston University London. He is author of The Order of Joy: Beyond the Cultural Politics of Enjoyment (SUNY Press, 2008) and Great Satans Rage: American Negativity and Rap/Metal in the Age of Supercapitalism (Manchester University Press, 2008). He is also co-editor (with Michael Dillon) of the Journal for Cultural Research and (with Fred Botting) of The Bataille Reader (Blackwell, 1997). His research interests include cultural and critical theory, particularly psychoanalysis and the legacy of Georges Bataille.

How are we to understand the corpus of Bataille today? How can we extricate his own perspective from the welter of interpretations of his work that have accumulated over the years? The difficulty of this endeavour is exacerbated by the fact that his writings have had contradictory predicates applied to them: Bataille is apparently premodern, modern and postmodern all at once.

Traversing the twentieth century and outlasting the toxic prefixes, we are perhaps now able to characterize Bataille as an untimely provocation, a voice that will always shuffle the cards of our common sense. It is with this conviction that the current collection gathers knowledge from various domains in an effort to let his voice speak today.

Batailles Accursed Share

The collection finds its centre of gravity in Batailles masterful The Accursed Share ( La Part Maudite ).

The sun is, of course, a recurrent motif in Batailles oeuvre,

First, this solar cosmology posits a non-thoughtful world that is both prior and posterior to the human beings cognitive and conceptual capacity. This constitutes yet another Copernican Revolution, albeit a particularly materialist one, which leads, in Volume III , to an ethicalpolitical position we might call Sovereign Humanism.

Second, the suns excessive generosity its giving without return ultimately grounds the validity of the distinctions, crucial to the later volumes of The Accursed Share , between servility and sovereignty, between subject and object, between use and utilization (and so on). This poses the question of purposes and ends to the modern age and its obsession with instrumental reasoning.