Bataille

Libro dedicado al pensamiento de Bataille, incluyendo en primer lugar un importante texto inédito hasta ahora en español (una conferencia sobre el juego y el placer no incluida en las Obras Completas publicadas en Francia).

A través de sus 18 capítulos, el libro recorre el pensamiento de Georges Bataille en todas sus etapas. Pero propone también un diálogo estrecho con muchas de las temáticas tratadas por Bataille (la transgresión, la soberanía, el juego, la muerte, la experiencia interior, la filosofía, la política, el arte), procurando enfrentarlas con los más variados puntos de vista desde dentro y desde fuera de las perspectivas que en su extensa y compleja obra siguió el propio Bataille.

Este libro tuvo su origen en un congreso en torno al pensamiento de la transgresión de Georges Bataille, celebrado en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y coordinado por el grupo LA EUROPA DE LA ESCRITURA. Incluye en primer lugar los trabajos que se presentaron en él. Pero se ha abierto también a trabajos relevantes de autores muy cercanos a Bataille como, entre otros, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-François Lyotard o Georges Didi-Hubeman, que amplían enormemente su alcance.

"What compels me to write, I think, is the fear of going mad". With this statement, Georges Bataille opens his On Nietzsche, a text destined to resonate for a long time in the thought and practice of French philosophy. In the graft between fear, obligation, madness, thought and writing, Bataille inserts the concept of excess, a non-symmetrical half of the Aristotelian right half and therefore a term philosophically afferent to the semantic area of excess, of too much, of the negative. An excess experienced and an excess thought, an excess recognised between Nietzsche's lines and given back to the reader in the form of a mixture between the written and the unwritten world, theory and experiential content. An excess that is not reducible to the morally connoted static nature of the excessive, but taken in the constant movement of the excessive, an escape from one's own identity towards an elsewhere, the source of all questioning of the given. Or, the excess of a real that doubles and surpasses all our attempts to keep up, to note the extremes on a diary page in an effort not to be overwhelmed. In both directions, the concept of excess is doubly linked to that of limit, which is also understood in its dynamics: drawing or line in action, gesture which, by widening or narrowing, crosses the ancient perimeter to reconfigure the boundless.

"Le sacrifice et la création dans l’œuvre d’Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille et Sergueï M. Eisenstein », in Le sacrifice et le don : Représentations dans la littérature et les arts francophones, sous la direction de Irène Chassaing et Juliette Valcke, avec la collaboration de Ziyan Yang, Moncton, Perce-Neige, 2018, pp. 131 - 150.

Abstract
Lévi-Strauss’s scientism positions structuralism midway between information theory and semiotics, a limitation that appears most clearly in his treatment of ritual. At specific junctures Lévi-Strauss could have taken his research more towards semiotics, but opted to hew closely to the information paradigm. Phenomena of ritual repetition, redundancy and the extreme case of sacrificial destruction can only be treated as instances of inefficiency and unrecuperated waste from the perspective of information theory. After exploring the factors that led Lévi-Strauss to dismiss ritual as a legitimate topic of structuralist analysis, this essay retools analytical resources developed from Mauss to Bataille that Lévi-Strauss ignored. As binary oppositions and conceptual exclusions give way to immanent networks of relational structures, the paradigmatically excluded topics of ritual and sacrifice help to bridge the gap between the structuralist approaches that Lévi-Strauss developed and other resources in semiotic theory.

Keywords: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, sacrifice, ritual

In 1929 Bataille introduces, in a magazine, the notion of the informe, he describes it, but he does not define it. This of course fits neatly into Bataille's over all strategy to undermine or sabotage the relation between signifier and sign "from within", he battles against the fixed meaning of words. The notion of the informe had regained attention in the artworld pretty recently, but it's revival seems to involve a certain strict interpretation of the term, an interpetation much stricter than Bataille himself seems to have wielded. (A strictness that perhaps would have outraged Bataille.) This restriction of the scope of the informe consists in an attempt to free the field in which the informe can operate of all form, and also to of the abject-but I will be focusing on the notion of the "formless = resembles nothing" here. First I will give a description of the informe and describe the arguments used to try to render the informe formless. Then, with the help of Deleuze, I will argue that there is a similar strategy to that of Bataille at work in Francis Bacon's paintings. Paintings which seem to resemble (not represent) something. This brings me to my point that the informe can be at work where figure is present. Relations between Bacon and Bataille It is tempting to look for psychological and biographical (physical) similarities between Francis Bacon and Georges Bataille when trying to connect their work. There seems to be a kind of a

Transgression and ekphrasis in Le Corbusier's Journey to the East explores some lesser known aspects of Charles Edouard Jeanneret's early trip to the East focusing on the role of traditional arts and architecture that he encountered in the SouthEast of Europe. The experience, observation and thinking about these arts that subsequently influenced and determined his approach to art and architecture are being explored as a form of transgression and ekphrasis.

Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. In spite of the critical insistence on Vonnegut’s existential or deterministic philosophy, little work has been done to develop either of these ideas, and strictly through critical repetition, Vonnegut’s work has become more closely associated with French existentialism than with the determinism of American literary naturalism.

By overstating the influence of existentialism on Vonnegut’s novels, critics have neglected the influence of determinism on his work, and this neglect disconnects the author from his American literature roots of naturalism. Through an examination of Vonnegut’s treatment of free will and determinism in three of his signature texts, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this study reveals a tension between the two
philosophies in the author’s work. Instead of being predominantly existential, Vonnegut’s works leave unresolved a tension between existentialism, where people create their own meaning through acts of free will, and determinism, where people have no free will and react to the physical environments in which they have been placed.

A critical commentary that presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the author’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement.

At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining  the epistemological regimes such work operates in.

A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.

The author's film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

This paper outlines how Kant's conception of the sublime is radicalized and transformed in the thought of a number of his key successors. The claim is made that the philosophers discussed can all be said to develop an immanent conception of the sublime. These alternatives are critically evaluated.

In most discourse on arts, modernism and avant-garde are regarded as deeply intertwined phenomena or even synonyms. Within film criticism and research, however, they are thoroughly separated. In this paper a selection of Jean-Luc Godard’s films from 1955–1967 will be examined as outstanding examples of non-avant-garde modernism. I attempt to elucidate how the films are used to examine a struggle between word and image. The conceptual framework behind the term image is taken from Henri Bergson’s understanding of all material as image, whereas Vilém Flusser provides the insight into the history of the struggle between the linear logic of the word and the ‘magical’ logic of the image. Gilles Deleuze’ analysis of the appearance of thought in cinema will be employed to cast further light on the methods involved in Godard’s work. The films and their underlying intention are shown as related to Fredric Jamesons’s understanding of the concept modernity. Finally it will be claimed that Alain Badiou’s concepts of Truth, Event and subject are founded on an understanding related to Jameson, but that through dehistoricizing modernity they found modernism as an attitude that may be taken up as a guiding principle. In terms of ethics modernism in this sense lies close to the realm of virtue: the virtue of thought as rebellion. Through a thorough examination of chosen aspects in Godard’s work they are exhibited as examples of the potential outcome of such an attitude. Finally it will be claimed that cinema is not a form of art, whereas modernist cinema of which Godard provides some of the clearest examples, is a medium and venue for thought: that the cinematic apparatus is in his hands research equipment, employed to investigate what it means to be an incorporated subject in a material world. Such research provides friction and slows down philosophical mansplaining. This project, revealed by looking not merely at a single film but Godard’s continuus work as a process of thought, remains and, according to Badiou’s understanding of Truth, will remain unconcluded. The underlying attitude thus remains valid.

"In his phenomenological study of imaginative acts in The Imaginary, Jean-Paul Sartre declares that memory and imagination are two different functions, and consequently severs the two from one another. Imagination, he argues, is the epitome of human freedom, since it allows consciousness to detach itself from experience or to negate reality; recollection, on the other hand, entirely depends on perception and is portrayed in The Imaginary as reproduction of perceptual experience. I show in this paper that although he explicitly treats memory and imagination as dichotomous, Sartre’s description of the two indicates strong affinities between them. First, Sartre uses recollections as examples of imaginative acts. Second, his phenomenological description of imagination is wholly applicable to recollection. The paper re-examines the relationship between memory and imagination in The Imaginary and uses Sartre’s theory of imagination as well as his autobiographical writing to conceptualize autobiographical memory as an active and productive aspect of the human mind "

Ce livre développe, à partir de Merleau-Ponty, Henry et Sartre, une phénoménologie décrivant la vie perceptive du point de vue du désir d'éprouver qui s'y déploie. L'auteur interroge, selon différents chemins tout à la fois opposés et noués les uns aux autres, le rapport de la vie perceptive à l'imaginaire et à la théâtralité originaire du corps. Il montre comment chaque expérience perceptive est la mise en jeu d'un désir de vivre, comment elle est susceptible d'accroître ou d'affaiblir la capacité des individus à se laisser affecter en profondeur par leur situation, à l'endurer, à y ouvrir du possible.

Contenu : Maurice Merleau-Ponty : La perception comme toucher à distance - La texture imaginaire du réel - Violence et événementialité de la vision - La théâtralité originaire du corps - Michel Henry : La vulnérabilité intrinsèque du pâtir - Affectivité, sensibilité, temporalité - Vie et possibilité - Impression et réalité - La texture imaginaire des impressions - Jean-Paul Sartre : Immanence, affectivité et intentionnalité - L'imaginaire et le retard originaire de la conscience - Émotion et imagination - Liberté et théâtralité.

ABSTRACT: This article examines the eye metaphor in Bataille’s 1928 The Story of the Eye. It combines Barthes’ 1963 treatment with Lacan’s similarly formal approach to analysis to flesh out the metaphor and metonymy disclosed within. Then it delves deeper into the contents side of the Story to clarify the desire at play through further engagement with Lacan's psychoanalysis and Bataille’s philosophical works on the erotic. Finally it turns to the treatment of Sade in Bataille’s 1957 Eroticism, suggesting the violence of the Eye argues for as it metaphorises a crossing of the bar of resistance towards the sexed gaze––in response to the specially ossified taboos of Christianity on the real.

This essay analyzes Karl Jaspers’s view of melancholia and schizophrenia developed in General Psychopathology, further explored in the comparative psychiatric study Strindberg and van Gogh—Swedenborg-Holderlin (1922) and expanded in the Groningen Lectures on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche collected in Reason and Existence (1935). The analysis, undergone in order to define the role and significance of the condition of human existence within Jaspers’s philosophical thought expounded in his magnum opus Philosophy (1932), involves a discussion of his pluralistic clinical approach to the psychopathology of melancholy and schizophrenia as well as his own existential interpretation of the morbid psyche.

Despite Georges Bataille’s acknowledged influence on major poststructuralist thinkers—including Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, Baudrillard, and Barthes—and his prominence in literary, cultural, and social theory, rarely has he been taken up by scholars of religion, even as issues of the sacred were central to his thinking. Bringing together established scholars and emerging voices, Negative Ecstasies engages Bataille from the perspective of religious studies and theology, forging links with feminist and queer theory, economics, secularism, psychoanalysis, fat studies, and ethics. As these essays demonstrate, Bataille’s work bears significance to contemporary questions in the academy and vital issues in the world. We continue to ignore him at our peril.

In Georges Bataille’s view, the Hegelian interpretation of kenotic sacrifice as passage from Spirit to the Speculative Idea effaces the necessarily representational character of sacrifice and the irreducible non-presence of death. But Hegel identifies these aspects of death in the fragments of the 1800 System. In sacrificial acts, subjectivity represents its disappearance via the sacrificed other, and hence is negated and conserved. Sacrifice thus provides the representational model of sublation pursued in the Phenomenology as a propaedeutic to Science. Bataille’s critique clarifies the fragments of the 1800 System, contextualizing Hegel’s rehabilitation of kenotic sacrifice in the Phenomenology. Bataille’s poetics parodies Hegelian kenosis via repetition of material difference, enacting an ecstatic temporality which Hegel perhaps suppresses as the condition of his system. Finally—if Bataille is correct in his assessment—the system would be subjected to a reversal, with radical implications for the philosophy of religion.

Si la plupart des ouvrages traitant la Grande Guerre évoque les dures conditions de vie des combattants comme la boue, le froid, la pluie, la chaleur étouffante, peu accordent aux conditions météorologiques une importance particulière. Or, à la lecture des lettres et carnets de Poilus, on prend mesure de l’importance des conditions météorologiques, tant pour le moral des combattants, leur santé et leur corps, que pour l’ajournement d’offensives.

Paru dans Mémoire des Vosges, n°31, 2015|2, pp. 39-43.

La Biblioteca di RebStein (LXXVII) - Tra il mese di novembre 2018 e il mese di giugno 2019 si è tenuto a Genova, presso il Centro Former, un seminario sull’opera di Bataille. Vengono qui proposti i materiali realizzati in quell’ambito. Ai vari incontri hanno partecipato: Viana Conti, Dario De Bello, Gianfranco Di Pasquale, Marco Ercolani, Giuliano Galletta, Tommaso Gazzolo, Rossella Landrini, Sandro Ricaldone, Luigi Sasso, Enrico Sciaccaluga, Giuseppe Zuccarino.

This article offers alternate readings of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) and Winter Light (1963) to those proposed in a preceding article by Esma Kartal. It argues against the contention that the two films express optimism about one’s ability to resolve spiritual-existential angst and the possibility of ultimately reaffirming one’s faith. Through close analysis of pivotal scenes, including that of Death in the Castle in The Seventh Seal and the Frostnäs church service in Winter Light, the article exposes the unremitting pessimism that pervades the films’ atmospheres. In essence, the article asserts that the two films, Winter Light in particular, are among the most pessimistic in Bergman’s cinema.

En Relato soñado de Arthur Schnitzler existe un tratamiento de la experiencia erótica vinculada con la vacilación entre realidad/irrealidad, vida/muerte y sueño/ vigilia. Esto ubica al erotismo en el terreno de lo siniestro, según las conceptualizaciones sobre la vacilación, lo ominoso y lo espeluznante que proponen Todorov, Freud y Fisher, respectivamente.

Para abordar el terreno del erotismo en específico, se tendrán en cuenta las propuestas conceptuales de Georges Bataille. En primer lugar, la afirmación de que el erotismo no es sino "la aprobación de la vida hasta en la muerte" (Bataille 1997: 15). En segundo lugar, las relaciones entre: erotismo y prohibición/transgresión, erotismo y violencia, erotismo y sacrificio, matrimonio y prostitución.

La metodología se centrará en el análisis de distintas escenas de la novela en las que pueden verse reflejadas estas afirmaciones para concluir, finalmente, con la propuesta conceptual llamada "erotismo siniestro".

This is a chapter in the book: Boro: l’île d’amour: The Films of Walerian Borowczyk. Edited by Kamila Kuc, Kuba Mikurda and Michal Oleszczyk (Berghahn Books, 2015).
It offers a discussion of the concept of 'excess' according to Georges Bataille through the analysis of excess in the film adaptation by Walerian Borowczyk of a Polish novel, The Story of Sin.

This essay proposes a reading of Curzio Malaparte's La pelle (1949) grounded in a comparison with Georges Bataille's conception of a "limitexperience" as a source of literary intensity, the pathetic force able to undo the author's ideological dominance on the work. Taking into consideration the traumatic reality of war and degradation from which the novel originates, my essay examines the contradictions between Malaparte's self-absolutory strategy throughout the book, and the disruptions to the mimetic ow of his prose, where the anxiety generated by the author's personal situation within that historical condition produces what I call a "rhetoric of interruption." Key to my interpretation of Malaparte's text is the use he makes of the medieval iconography of the Triumph of Death and of the literary topos of the plague, both of which play an important role in the construction of La pelle.