Excess

This paper consider the experience of intoxication as one of immersion in immanence, rather than transcendent escape from reality. It critically traces the attempt to achieve experiential immanence in Deleuze and Guattari, Nick Land, and Beatriz Preciado. My claim is such attempts involve the fantasy of the dissolution of fantasy in immersion in 'real' production.

Samuel Beckett in a vast metaphor of the vision of the world after the holocaust seen through the eyes of the cremated Jews or other victims whose ashes have been thrown over the plains of Poland as sung in The Peat Bog Soldiers by Pete Seeger:
“Far and wide as the eye can wander, / Heath and bog are everywhere, / Not a bird sings out to cheer us, / Oaks are standing, gaunt and bare. / [Chorus:] / We are the peat bog soldiers. / We're marching with our spades, / To the bog.”

That could not be a better description of the world in Corkadoragha, or the setting of Waiting for Godot, or the landscape seen at the beginning of Malloy with only one difference here, the cows. It is the same cosmic order of an obsessive compulsive universe in which we are nothing but prisoners of some fate from which we cannot evade or escape. In a way the very black and dark humor of Flann O’Brien is part of a phenomenal tragic vision shared by many writers, artists or simple human beings in the 20th century, let alone the 21st century. Is that novel still funny when we look at it in this perspective?

In this article I present a reading of the transition from the first to the second books of Hegel's Logic, focusing on the Encyclopedia Logic. In particular I investigate the notion of the excess (das Maßlose), which is the final concept Hegel discusses in the first book of that version of the Logic. I set the stage for this interpretation by briefly introducing the work of two other Hegel scholars: Dieter Henrich and Slavoj Žižek. Each of them presents a reading of the same transition I am focusing on and argue, as I do, that we can find the key to Hegel's Logic in it. Henrich focuses on autonomous negation, Žižek on retroactivity. My aim in the article is to manouvre between the suggestions of Henrich and Žižek and to provide a new approach to understanding Hegel in doing so.

In this paper I argue that a reading of Georges Bataille’s work on economics and excess and his formulation of the critical concept of ‘general economy’ can be instructive with regard to understanding the role of spectacle in contemporary cinema. Thinking about cinema in relation to general economy offers a basis for a critical model of cinema which can reconcile its economic and aesthetic functions rather than holding them apart as conventional theories of film have tended to do. The paper takes as its primary case study James Cameron’s $200m blockbuster Titanic, a film notable for its phenomenal scale and expense. Also notable is the contrast between the film’s massive commercial success, and the critical tendency to dismiss the film as sentimental, nostalgic, simplistic, incoherent, anachronistic and bombastic. I suggest that this striking contrast exposes a failure of film criticism to account for cinematic spectacle as anything other than a reprehensible device for audience manipulation. What is at stake in this omission is, therefore, the exclusion of popular cultural objects from an academic discourse of film criticism (and a simplistic model of the spectatorial relationship with the text). This paper mobilizes Bataille’s model of general economy, in which excess is foregrounded, to offer a different way of understanding the attractions, complexities and meanings of popular cinema and, in turn, the meanings and pleasures of cultural activity more broadly.

Abstract: Thermophysical, thermoacoustical, non-linearity parameter, available volume and intermolecular free length have been computed for four binary, one ternary and one quaternary systems at 298.15 K. Molar compressibility, specific acoustic impedance and molar sound velocity have also been computed from experimentally determined values of ultrasonic velocity and density. Further, excess internal pressure and excess Gibbs free energy of activation of viscous flow values have been employed to predict the interactions for all the six systems to get a better understanding for the intermolecular interactions taking place thereof.

O presente ensaio assume como premissa a idéia de que um Estado Democrático de Direito é sempre também um Estado que se pode designar de “garantista”, no sentido de os direitos fundamentais serem simultaneamente fundamento, finalidade e tarefa do Estado e da própria sociedade. O Direito Penal, que sabidamente opera (ou assim o deveria) acima de tudo como instrumento de tutela de bens jusfundamentais, mas que carrega consigo um conteúdo fortemente limitador de direitos da pessoa, deverá ser objeto de permanente filtragem constitucional, notadamente no que diz com necessária sintonia com os critérios da proporcionalidade. Esta, contudo – pena de distorção do seu sentido e função na ordem constitucional - não se limita a impedir limitações excessivas dos direitos, mas reclama que se avalie, em cada caso e mediante a devida ponderação, eventual insuficiência no que diz com a proteção do mesmo ou de outros bens fundamentais. Em síntese, à luz de alguns exemplos, busca-se demonstrar a correção da concepção de que sem o devido reconhecimento e equacionamento do que se poderia designar de uma dupla dimensão da proporcionalidade, também a concepção do “garantismo penal” – na sua feição marcadamente liberal-iluminista e, portanto, nem sempre aberto à perspectiva sustentada no presente estudo – correrá o risco de pecar, a depender das circunstâncias, por uma unilateralidade nada saudável para o sistema dos direitos fundamentais.

In March 2011, the Society of Economic Anthropology held its Annual Meeting Conference, hosted at the University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, Indiana, to discuss the topic: Social Economies of Greed and Excess: Lessons from Recessions Past and Present. Specifically time during the social, economic, and political aftermath of the Great Recession (2007–2009), the articles were chosen to understand “greed” and “excess” as behaviors, ideas, and accusations that have shaped and in turn, been shaped by social processes, across different societies and at different periods in human history. This article (a) contextualizes the conference and the subsequent discussion of greed and excess within the broader narratives of causation and accusation between various actors and groups involved in and affected by the outcomes of differential accumulation and consumption of resources, (b) introduces the various articles raging from archaeology to ethnography and commentaries by noted anthropologists tha...

In this article, the author revisits an interview with Ava Montalvo—a mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico—which initially confounded her interpretive resources. This reflexive, performative article examines the role of excess as an analytical lens through which to understand maternal subjectivity and elaborates the methodological implications of this lens for interviewing methods and qualitative fieldwork. The author employs performative writing to exemplify that which exceeds accepted boundaries and normative scholarly representation.

In this article, I explore how to make space in the neoliberal academy for inquiry that welcomes what is yet to be thought, imagined, anticipated while also remaining responsible to institutional demands that privilege a certain type of academic subject. I draw upon Manning and Massumi’s notion of uselessness to position philosophy as a generative tool.
Specifically, I explain how useless reading of philosophy positions becoming an academic subject as a continuous process of experimentation and learning instead of a reproduction of available descriptions enabled by neoliberalism. Philosophical reading exceeds the boundaries of what is already recognizable, and I dwell in that excess, shifting the focus away from complicity or resistance as the only possible responses to neoliberal mandates (either/or) and move instead toward
rethinking ways of being, knowing, living, and responding to others in the world (both/and).

Any investigation into the topics of greed and excess is necessarily hampered by the inability to frame and define these concepts for general application to human behaviors. These terms carry significant moral, social, political, and cultural weight, primarily used either as accusations of sin, vice, and social destruction or justified for their virtues, rewards, and social good. In trying to understand the social and economic underpinnings of the behaviors we may term as greedy and excessive, we recognize the need for also exploring why these topics have almost universally been addressed in religions, philosophies, and social rules across the world, whether in sanction and condemnation, or in tolerance or even encouragement. This article investigates the ways in which major philosophical traditions across the world have viewed greed and excess, their impacts on society, and how the meanings and connotations of these terms have changed through time, since the Bronze Age to the prese...

The 21st century Muslim world faces the crises of reciprocal extremism and radicalisation entertained by minorities in our midst and rooted in the Middle Eastern mindset of Zionism and Arab nationalism. Its outward manifestations are: (a) continuous bloodshed in the Muslim lands, and (b) deepening Muslim disunity. This article examines the QurāĀnic concept of wasać as an inward alternative of the mindset of extremism and a means of deradicalisation. Al-wasaćiyyah is discussed within the framework of the Islamic epistemology of gradual sustenance as a method of its implementation. The article critically examines the term "al-wasaćiyyah," traces the QurāĀnic injunctions that make up its framework and applies its values to the 21st century "crises."

For full article please visit
http://tafhim.ikim.gov.my/index.php/tafhim/article/view/13

This article examines what has been called 'the Great Outdoors' as something that both has an impact on experience and limits it. After a brief review of some of the features of the negative definition often given to it, three features for a positive definitions of the Great Outdoors are proposed. These features are based on the ideas of supplement in Derrida, excess in Bataille and horizon in Severino.

Excluded from the philosophical logos, excess can even be seen to be the “subject” of literature. From the epic poem and the platonic divine furor to the baroque esthetic, and from romanticism to Freudian sublimation, a line can be drawn together with a theory of artistic genesis as arising out of limit experiences: excess is the mark of an encounter with a real which overpowers the signifier. The birth of the esthetic in of itself, conceived of in Baumgarten's terms, arises out of the consideration of literature and art as testifying to a truth of the confused and of the singular, inaccessible to logical reasoning in so far as it exceeds the capacity of the concept.