Georges Bataille

Ana-Materialism and the Pineal Eye: Becoming Mouth-Breast (or Visual Arts after Descartes, Bataille, Butler, Deleuze, and Synthia with an ‘S’)

by Professor Johnny Golding

Peer-review/Chapter in Pablo Baler (ed): The Next Thing: Art in the 21st century, (Little and Brown: forthcoming 2012).

Originally given as part of the Digital Image and Memory Speakers Series, The Photographers Gallery, London, Sep 05, 2011.  Sections of this paper were presented also at Virtual Futures 2.0, Live philosophy installation/enactment, Warwick University June 2011 and at Queertopia! Northwestern University, Chicago, May 27, 2011. Meditations on Synthia / ‘synthetic unity’/’synthetic life’ were presented at Touched: When Philosophy meets Art. Live philosophy installation/poetics. Liverpool Biennale, Nov 2010. 

In a meta-literal sense, the Pineal Eye is the mythical step-creature of that biological entity found in the brain;... more In a meta-literal sense, the Pineal Eye is the mythical step-creature of that biological entity found in the brain; namely, the pineal gland.By the time Descartes got a hold of the gland, he refashioned it as a ‘synthesis’ of sorts – a double-helix synthesis which named the Pineal Gland as both site (as in terrain) and sight (as in vision-image) where the body and the mind’s ‘eye’ came together, and were enlivened, fashioned, quickened as it were, with a ‘soul’ or even ‘the’ soul. This was a place where memory, knowledge and the senses intermingled and became one; became one, that is to say, in the carnal, sexual-sensuous sense of the word; and, perhaps more to the point, became knowledge in all aspects of the intellectual and inventive, dipped in a wild, bio-degradable substance.  This was not an innocent conceptual move.

This paper explores that claim against the paradoxical backdrop of sexual imagination(s), multi-versal platforms and non-representational materialities otherwise called 'Ana-materialism'.

Amok, Folter, Hooligans. Gewaltsoziologie nach Georges Bataille und Victor Turner

by Werner Binder

Wiith Bernhard Giesen, Werner Binder, Marco Gerster und Kim-Claude Meyer. Published in: Michael Riekenberg (ed.). Zur Gewalttheorie von Georges Bataille. Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2012, pp. 73-102.

Encuentros íntimos

by Natalia Velázquez Luna

Ensayo para estética y filosofía del arte en el que se tratan tres categorías estéticas encontradas en la pornografía:... more Ensayo para estética y filosofía del arte en el que se tratan tres categorías estéticas encontradas en la pornografía: lo obsceno, lo erótico y lo decadente.

Reading Grotesque Material: Bakhtin, Bataille, and Transgression in Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror

by Andrew Kingston

Scheda di lettura: Bataille, La parte maledetta

by Valentina Sperotto

GCSI, Biblioteca filosofica

A Surrealist Meteorology: On General Economy in Hegel's Philosophy of Nature

by Andrew Kingston

Excremental Ecstasy, Divine Defecation and Revolting Reception: Configuring a Scatological Gaze in Trash Filmmaking

by Zoe Gross

Based on paper given at B For Bad Cinema Conference at Monash University, 2009

Le supplice oriental dans la littérature et les arts

by antonio dominguez leiva

De l'orgie à la partouse. L'amour à plusieurs, de la «fin-de-siècle» aux «sixties»

by antonio dominguez leiva

Erotisme et ordre moral

by antonio dominguez leiva

Over het Goddelijke bij Georges Bataille

by Emanuel Rutten

The end of the old flesh: beastly bodily becomings as contemporary parable

by JD Taylor

Presented at "The End of..." Conference, University of Kent, 22 January 2012.

In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's... more In 1981 Gilles Deleuze read in Francis Bacon's paintings a 'zone of the indiscernible' between man and animal. Bacon's figures spasm through their wounded architectures, screams erupting as destabilised bodies attempt to escape their figurations. This paper develops this zone of the indiscernible to explore how human flesh has become a medium for representations of the end. In David Cronenberg's Videodrome [1983], a dark psychological conspiracy places the flesh under suspicion of suggestible media-corruption, as Max Renn transcends to abstracted data by orgiastically abandoning the old flesh.

Against the knowing futurism of Videodrome, this paper compares Charles Burns' Black Hole comic-book series [1995-2005], which uses the grotesque contagious corruption of teenage flesh as a dark analogy for growing up and loss of innocence in the haunted spaces of late 20th century  Americana. Overtly Freudian, the rich contrasts of Burns' work introduces the becoming-monstrous and the eruption of contagion which racks modern American anxieties about the ending of the human, most familiar in recent zombie narratives. Taking a parallel track, in both accounts beastly becomings are played out on the flesh to mark internal turmoil whilst offering two directions for a contemporary bestiary of our culture. Whilst Burns offers a pessimistic Quietism and submission to the mysterious disease, Cronenberg's narrative alternatively calls to end the old flesh and embrace the possibilities of cybertechnology. Baudrillardian pessimism is spliced with 'biopunk' subcultures alongside Eugene Thacker's theoretical forays into life as the 'unthinkable' (2010, 2011) to finally ascertain why anxieties over life, technology and the end continue to play on a corrupted flesh. Does power embody itself through a zombified life, or will the skin continue to subvert and revolt against human (and posthuman) machinations?

The Notion of Pantry: A Speculative Defense of Unuse

by Davide Panagia

World Journal 6

My title is less odd than it seems. The concerns expressed herein are born from reactions to recent practices of... more My title is less odd than it seems. The concerns expressed herein are born from reactions to recent practices of departmental “de-activation” amongst university campuses (SUNY-Albany, Penn State, & UNLV); from the downsizing of entire faculties in the name of interdisciplinarity due to supposed lack of student interest in classes (a place-holder term for not pulling one’s own weight with regard to student enrolment); and of decisions on the part of governments (both local and federal) to determine the nature of inquiry and, by implication, the nature of intellectual labour (as recent events in Wisconsin and Iowa have shown). The issue, in other words, regards intellectual survival in an age of austerity—and specifically the idea that speculative inquiry is a wrong that must be defended.

Part of what is at stake here is the polemical category of “wrong” itself, and the ease with which we are accustomed to synchronizing the category of wrong with that of the epistemic mistake. I want to propose something different; namely that wrong is a political category, not an epistemological one.1 And as a political category, it disposes spaces and temporalities that interrupt the conventions of correspondence which enable the circulation of value in contemporary political life. As a political category, wrong regards the rendering remarkable of a site of resistance that stands in excess to the prevailing practices of articulation and deliberation.

In contrast, the political economy of austerity (something that has a much more lucrative cultural politics and history than recent debates suggest) relies on the affect of duress in order to assign tort to excess. In universities, the result is not only the inevitable pressure to produce (both publications and Ph.D. students), but the even odder scenario that production must happen under duress: that education must struggle to produce in order to justify its existence against other unproductive expenditures like the health industry or the service industry. Nothing less than the administration of time, and one’s relationship to one’s own time, is what is at stake in the recent attacks on schooling.

Literature, Life, Death and Thought in Interwar and Occupation-Era France

by Rowan Tepper

Towards a Material Imaginary: Bataille, Non-Logical Difference, and the Language of Base Materialism

by f. scott scribner

Published: Le Pli 13 (2002) 209-220

This paper works to articulate Bataille's notion of base materialism, not merely as a critique of the economy of... more This paper works to articulate Bataille's notion of base materialism, not merely as a critique of the economy of logic, but in order to develop a material imaginary that would give life, direction and meaning to community.

Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia Entries

by Tim Morton

“Bakhtin,” “Bataille,” “Benjamin,” “Deconstruction,” “Saussure,” “Foucault,” “Jakobson,” “Kristeva,” “Postmodernism,” in Benet's Readers' Encyclopedia, 4th edn. (Harper Collins, 1996), 73, 83, 95, 259, 915, 360, 518, 566–7, 823.

Short entries on nine topics. Short entries on nine topics.

Georges Bataille & Inner Experience

by Carl L Bankston

Transgressing Transgression: the Limits of Bataille's Fiction

by Benjamin Noys

in Les Lieux Interdits: Transgression and French Literature, eds. Larry Duffy and Adrian Tudor (Hull UP, 1998), pp.307-323.

Narrative Death and Endless Desire: The Comfort of Strangers

by Hugo Ríos-Cordero

Ashes and madness: The play of negativity and the poetics of organization

by Stephen Linstead