The goal of this essay is to refute the remaining critiques of Bataille I have yet to refute (I will probably find more after this, but I digress). I will not waste my time because we have lots to cover. So, if their argument is premised on a strawman, I’ll point that out and disregard it moving on to the next one. So, because we have lots to cover, in such a short amount of time, let’s start with the very subject of time. I will address about half of the critiques I have yet to rebut in this essay, part 1, and the other half in another essay, part 2.
A Response to David Johnson’s Critique of Bataille
Johnson holds that there are certain thinkers who are “pro-transience,” that is, a thinker who is pro-transience “celebrates transience, sees all time from the end of time.”[1] These thinkers see that “[d]eath inevitably lies at the end of the life spans of living beings.”[2] Johnson takes issue not with the view that death is inevitable and the termination of life, but rather with the idea that we must view life from the perspective of death, that is, from the perspective that we are going to die. John sees that there is a paradox in their view: “in assuming that death dominates the flow of time one is trying to describe what time is from the point of view of what happens at the moment of time’s annihilation.”[3] For Johnson, life does not view itself in relation to death as much as the pro-transience thinkers say it does. But this is fundamentally mistaken. For Kojève and Bataille, our consciousness is structured in relation to death, we interpellate ourselves because of death through work. In this sense, Johnson has it all wrong, for on the level of ontics and phenomenology, the subject necessarily views life in relation to death. Johnson also, in a way, strawmans Bataille (Johnson thinks Bataille is one of these thinkers) because Bataille doesn’t think we view time from times end in that it is impossible to view time from time’s end, because death is that outside of consciousness which consciousness constitutes itself upon. This also refutes Johnson’s later Bergsonian point that we cannot know the endpoint of an effect of a cause until we reach it, for we must necessarily know that life will not go on forever to even be, that is, to exist. Now, so far, I have spoken only of our conventional linear understanding of time, but Bataille doesn’t even hold this view of time to be true. Bataille sees that the time of death is “unreal.”[4] Bataille sees that our conventional understanding of time is time “as permanence.”[5] Specifically, Bataille holds, “In common circumstances, time appears as locked — and practically annulled — in each permanent form and in each succession that can be grasped as permanence. [emphasis mine]” He, therefore, hardly views time as transient. It is only in the death of God that time is released from its chains of permanence and, instead of entering into a transient mode of abstract existence (like Johnson holds pro-transience thinkers would have it), enters into the mode of catastrophe. The ecstatic nature of time-as-catastrophe is pure change, not at all transient in that it never is for a moment and therefore never has time to be as it is constantly changing.[6] Even then, Bataille actually sees that subjects view life in regards to future moments of being alive. We infinitely defer the present moment in favor of the future. How could we defer the present moment in favor of a moment which is not? We couldn’t for we would not have anything to defer to. But Johnson extrapolates this to formulate the argument that “Bataille’s demand that we view time from the unproductive end of time represented by death and ruin, is meant to undermine the bourgeoisie-promoted productive ends of time. But one form of teleology cannot cure another, if the desired result is to unleash a mode of time that is not end orientated.”[7] But this is a strawman because if one were to view things from the perspective of general economy, they would not be. It is quite literally impossible to think of time from the positon of time-as-catastrophe for “[t]he existence of time projected arbitrarily into an objective region is only the ecstatic vision of a catastrophe destroying that which founds this region” which is the mind’s understanding.[8] To further, Bataille holds that “[t]ime is the desire that time not exist,” therefore meaning that time doesn’t view itself from the perspective of its destruction because time must view itself as constantly being, this is permanence, to think of dying (and one cannot think of dying for the catastrophe of time would undo that thought).[9] Lastly, this view wouldn’t be a teleology, for teleology implies an end. Death cannot be an end, as we know very well, for it is nowhere. It does not have a virtual presence (see On Expenditure’s Status above) and thus Johnson’s whole conception of Bataille is problematic, though I commend his efforts (he has had the best critique thus far). But Johnson fires back at us, “Bataille’s affirmation of the moment nevertheless represents a definite affirmation of a form of teleology (and a morbid form of teleology at that) in that for him the moment leads physically towards death or ruin rapidly and with teleological inevitability. And since, for Bataille, the moment symbolically draws its authenticity from its affirmation of death, it derives all its meaning from the future.”[10] The issue with this is twofold. Firstly, Bataille does not see that we head towards death. Remember that these moments are not a part of the profane realm we are of, they do not have the same ontological status that we do in that they don’t have an ontological status at all — base matter escapes the ontological machines of man. Thus, we are heading nowhere. Secondly, the moment “is” death, thus it isn’t deriving its meaning from the future, but rather from the now, i.e., itself.
Johnson then argues that “the moment of expenditure is violent and explosive, and therefore brief, because it must break through another order of time. But the transgressive moment of expenditure is also brief because the order of time that it has shattered comes eventually to re-assert itself. The moment of expenditure is mortal in that the wayward order that it represents can never permanently transcend the order of conservatism.”[11] The first issue with this argument is that Johnson is reinserting these moments within the temporal order they transgress by calling them ‘mortal,’ therefore, this argument is predicated in a pseudo-‘contradiction in terms.’ Secondly, Johnson is viewing things from a position of transcendence. He is stuck within the veil of Māyā. For Bataille, we are all transcendent fictions. We never really are. Thus, it is actually transcendence that is “mortal” on a cosmological level.
Next, Johnson argues that orgasm can have health benefits and thus aren’t ruinous like Bataille argues. Are we being trolled by Johnson? This is a question I continued to ask myself as I read his critique. It is very clear that when we lose ourselves in an orgasm, this all has to do with self-consciousness. The little death is the primary process of energetics reasserting itself as primary, thus negating the secondary process of phenomenology.
Johnson then says, “Bataille is also wrong to equate all pleasure symbolically with death … There is another point worth making, which is that a feeling of security and strength, resonating with pleasure, might generate greater intensity of pleasure than any sense of ruination within pleasure.”[12] The issue with this is that Bataille just wouldn’t consider something that reaffirms the subject as ecstatic per his definition of ecstasy. It is impossible to have an intensity be extremely intense and not disrupt dispositifs, to use the language of the Lyotard of Libidinal Economy.
“By countering Bataille’s view of death, which tries to domesticate death through attempting to engage it in ‘intimate’ dialogue, and which tries to make political gain out of death, we can see death as a real non-negotiable phenomenon.”[13] The issue with this is that Bataille doesn’t have a “view” of death. Either way, this whole point is premised upon that which we have already debunked — it holds no water…
A Response to Rainer Friedrich’s Critique of Bataille
Friedrich, in his essay The Enlightenment Gone Mad (I) The Dismal Discourse of Postmodernism’s Grand Narratives, just repeats implicitly and explicitly the critique of Bataille done by Richard Wolin which I directly responded to here. He repeats the exact same point in this essay that Wolin did, so I am also directly responding to Friedrich in my response to Wolin.
A Response to Apple Igrek’s Critique of Bataille
Igrek repeats a critique I have literally responded to hundreds of times by now (I’m not at all being hyperbolic): the sad critique that Bataille was a capitalist. “Any discussion of Bataillean waste, excess, and profligacy invites the question as to whether this general economy should be distinguished from modern capitalist societies in which blind, ruinous extravagance seems to be the predominant moral imperative. If anything, modern industrial economies are built on extraordinary waste and extreme ecological devastation; thus one could plausibly argue, as Jean-Joseph Goux has, that the risk-taking ethos of transnational capitalism is the quintessential post-bourgeois embodiment of Bataillean expenditure.”[14] The productive consumption of capitalism is not the unproductive consumption that is expenditure for Bataille, it is as simple as that. All commodities have use values. As for the waste of capital? It is recycled or it serves some political use. The climate crisis and all that “waste” such as toxic sludge, the heat that is melting the polar ice caps (Oh no! The polar bears (didn’t Land talk about this? I chuckle)), etc. all serve the use of being the central point of a political eschatology. They are hardly heterogeneous. As for his extension of Goux’s critique, see my response here.
A Response to Rebecca Roberts-Hughes Critique of Bataille
In their essay, Erotic transgression and sexual difference in Georges Bataille, Robert-Hughes repeats the erroneous idea that the female subject is always the object of transgression for Bataille. This is such an incorrect critique and so often repeated by feminists who don’t care to actually read Bataille. To see my direct response to this, see here.
A Response to Andrew Abbott’s Critique of Bataille
Abbott argues that “[Bataille] does not address the question of precisely why waste is necessary, a question that might have been resolved by pursuing more closely his analogy with the laws of thermodynamics. More important, he doesn’t realize that ‘growth’ and ‘extension’ can take forms the undercut the need for waste.”[15] Did he not read the book? The answer is limits. Existence is a series of limits. Being is itself a limit. Space is a limit. And so on, and so on. Once we accumulate and grow so much that we come against this limit, there will be excess, waste, and expenditure.
A Response to Tom Tyler’s Critique of Bataille
Tyler argues that “[Bataille’s] anthropocentrism, which depends on the animal existing ‘like water in water’, functions as a kind of self-fulfilling prediction (or predication). By asserting that humans are condemned to see the world as only humans can, that the world of the animal, or animality, is utterly closed to us, Bataille identifies himself principally and irretrievably with ‘the human’ (whatever that may be). In doing so, he instantes the very perspective that he discovers. His claim, that humans can see only as humans, his anthropocentrism, is both the starting point and the result of his reflection.”[16] Firstly, Bataille has “accessed” the view of continuity in that he has written, like Nietzsche, with his blood. His work is nothing more than ecstatic communication between the author and the reader. Secondly, Kevin Kennedy, in Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty, correctly argues that “[a]s so often in Bataille’s work poetry features as a privileged moment in the tracing of a path that leads from the known of human cognition to the unknowable, the beyond of consciousness, to ‘the intimacy, which keeps vigil in us, extending its glimmer into the animal darkness’ (TR 23). The poetic use of the traditional metaphors of light and dark here is done in such a way as to counter a strict dichotomy between humans and animals.”[17] Thus, Bataille can access the animality of immanence as his “starting point” in poetry. He, in fact, transgresses and breaks down the whole dichotomy of humanity and animality. In terms of Hegelian phenomenology, only Bataille (and Land) escape anthropocentrism because of their “recognition of inner experience.”
A Response to Mark Graham’s Critique of Bataille
Literally over a hundred times I tell you. Graham does it: the classic critique “Bataille was a capitalist.” Graham says, “Waste and excess are better understood as central to capitalism, which demands endless consumption in the destructive sense of the word to ‘consume’, goods are bought but discarded quickly either thrown away or forgotten and new goods bought to replace them. The restricted economy certainly demands savings, investment and growth but it also needs the profligate waste of the general economy based on the galloping obsolescence of yesterday’s commodities. Living in a capitalist society means taking part in potlatches, even if we might not like to admit it.”[18] No. The restricted economy does not need the waste of the general economy in the sense that it needs it to function, for the restricted economy(’s function) collapses in the face of the expenditure of general economy. As for waste, excess, and consumption I have already above addressed “waste” and “excess,” as for consumption, I will repeat myself. The consumption of capitalism is productive consumption for one is consuming commodities, one is using up use values. This is not the UNPRODUCTIVE consumption that is expenditure which Bataille speaks of.
A Response to Pierre Klossowski’s Critique of Bataille
Pierre Klossowski argues that “God (the head) is necessary for full communication between the members of the body (humanity) … it is necessary that there be reversibility between the head and the body, a balanced expenditure of energy, one taking its form in the Resurrection, the signal of the return of the head, the restoring to balance of the energy flow that was disrupted by the death of God on Good Friday.”[19] The whole issue with this is that God is necessarily a metaphysical stabilizer which upholds the principium individuationis. He is necessarily the denial of communication. The idea that the members still would be in communication for Klossowski, demonstrates his fatal misunderstanding of it. God present in the orgy — an inanity.
A Response to Judith Surkis’ Critique of Bataille
In their essay No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye: Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault, Surkis repeats the same error as Roberts-Hughes, my response is thus the same. And you can find that response here.
A Response to Marc de Kessel’s Critique of Bataille
Kessel argues, “God is dead, indeed, and the infinite universe is not closed anymore in (and by) the infinity of God. So, with God’s death, the infinite has become simply the infinite ‘place,’ the limitless ‘space.’ But for Bataille this space nevertheless ‘closes’ in its own limitlessness itself. For him, the whole of being remains within the very limits of this infinity. After God’s death, being remains closed within (and by) the infinity of death itself. So we see how, in its infinity, ‘death’ itself has — so to speak — survived even God. Within this infinite space, but precisely because it somewhere does still have a limit where it resists the vital power of being that is ‘pressing’ at it, death will be able to play its excessive games, and maintain life, of which it is the basic principle. Bataille thus accomplishes a regressive movement with regard to the Christian creationist vision of being. Christianity had broken up the finite world of antiquity with the idea that being as such had a ‘sovereign’ origin outside of what was held to be ‘being.’ From a classical Greek philosophical point of view, Christianity was doing something quite absurd: it founded ‘being’ in a place where until then one could only (unreasonably) speak of non-being, in a ‘space’ where there was only pure, nonexistent nothing. Strangely enough, this vision survived, among other reasons because this ‘nothing’ was mitigated in its severe and incongruous negativity by being seen as something ‘more than being,’ and by attributing this ‘hyperbolic’ ontological character to God. Christianity taught that the all-embracing cosmos turned out not to be ‘everything’; outside of it there was an infinite ‘nothing,’ in which the Infinite One dwelled. The feeling of infinity did not depart from internal closeness of being itself any longer, but from an exterior infinity within which there was ‘being.’ If, in the past, the cosmos was based only on itself, henceforth it was to be based on the Infinite One who had created (ex nihilo) the cosmos while, in essence, not being part of it.”[20] All of this can be solved by pointing out that Bataille’s cosmology is so incredibly complex (I’m still having trouble making sense of it (I think only Land has, and if you’ve read The Thirst for Annihilation, then you know it is a fucking trip)). Necessarily, there is no closure. There is no being. All of this is fiction. For Bataille, the realm of transcendence and all those discontinuous entities which inhabit it (all discontinuous entities) are fictitious. Think of Schopenhauer and the will as “real” and representation as “fictional.” Comparatively, the veil of Māyā that is the world as representation for Schopenhauer is what transcendence essentially is for Bataille. Thus, being is not imposing itself against death. Death is not what survives after the death of God, for God has always been dead. He, like us (human subjects), too is of transcendence. Immanence is the death of God. Therefore, death does not outlive God nor us, for neither God nor us never lived. Thus, he does not regress into the errors of Christian cosmology either.
A Response to Carl Olson’s Critique of Bataille
The issue with Olson’s entire critique is a misidentification of what sacrifice is, and thus not at all a critique but rather a strawman. For his whole argument (the call for a need of historical testing, the Sun Dance, etc.) is predicated on it. Firstly, we do not need “historical proof” for Bataille’s theory of how the subject arises.[21] We know a priori that for the subject to come into conscious living, it must have had something to limit its consciousness. This could only be death. Bataille does not view sacrifice as only a practice of bloody ritual. Rather, all expenditure is sacrifice. Bataille’s “proof” for his idea of sacrifice can be so easily found: just look up at the Sun.
A Response to Gad Horowitz’s Critique of Bataille
In their essay Bringing Bataille to Justice, Gad Horowitz speaks of justifying our existence…[22] Justifying fictions? What a joke… Ultimately, operating off Bataille’s compositional ontology of the fictional, Levinas crumbles. Ethics before ontology? You mean “ethics before nothing?” Being is not, never has been, never will be… time will deal with being… Thus, when he speaks of the “the ethical dimension of « height »,” we laugh.[23] The “I as being?”[24] What is that? Why do you keep speaking of specters brother, of ghosts, fictions, abstractions? The other as “never [having] been?”[25] You got that right! But the other as “beyond being?”[26] The ghosts have gotten to your head again (Stirner laughs with us!)… Because being is nowhere, because transcendence is (the) fictional, Bataille’s “lowering” is not at all “caught up with being.”[27]
So, when Horowitz says,
Bataille’s « communication » as the sharing of anguish, the loss of the self of all of us on the same plane, our dying together, misses the irreplaceable singularity of the subject. It does not go below, that is above, the community of those who have nothing in common to the null place where I alone … bear the burden of all others. The Bataillean space is not curved. That’s why Bataille can only beat his head against the walls of this double dilemma : first, he explains « that which I desired to be for others was excluded [by my] being for me […]. Therefore the use to which I wanted to be put by others required that I cease to be […] that I die […]. [Thus] I was condemned to live as an unreality, as a fetus tainted at birth », and second : « I see the good of another as a kind of decoy, for if I wish the good of another it is in order to find my own ». Therefore, I’m left with only an « empty yearning, the unhappy desire to be consumed for no reason other than desire itself — to burn ».[28]
We laugh! HA HA! “Misses the irreplaceable singularity of the subject?” You mean the irreplaceable singularity of a fiction, and thus, of nothing? Bataille misses nothing. Community is nothingness, it is hardly of anything (for lovers never are, they are incessantly dying in each other which are undifferentiable: death-in-itself? If death is nothing in immanence, like Bataille says in Theory of Religion, is this not another example of death-in-itself?). You do not bear the burden of others, you may wish to, sure! You may want to be everything! Does that mean you do in community? Not at all, for in community you are annihilated. Bataillean space is not curved! This is right! But the reason this is correct is not because it is rigid and straight. ON THE CONTRARY! Bataillean space is nothing like our conventional conception of space… It is bottomless… It is without limits, without walls. Bataille bumps his head into nothing, for there are no limits in Bataillean space and because HE HAS NO HEAD! Now, Horowitz is wrong here. It isn’t “the desire to be consumed for no other reason than desire itself.” Remember that Bataille uses the word ‘use’ in the first quote Horowitz puts forward. It is for another reason, and that is of the other, but you would say, “There is not other, and thus he doesn’t do it for anything.” Hardly, there is only no other if there is no self, which there isn’t (both are fictions). If there is no other, there is no self. The self necessitates a “limiter,” a “demarcator.” Think Bataille’s critique of the circle of absolute knowledge as Kojève articulates it.
Horowitz then does something that I can’t believe I actually read. I’ve gone through almost every critique of Bataille, and this just caught me off guard. We are at a very high level of philosophical abstraction, and thus this surprised me:
For Levinas, only the subject is formless, beyond being. An arrow shot at Hegel here will also hit Bataille : Levinas notes that for Hegel, unique or singular beings are « bits of dust » or « drops of sweat » collected by the movement of « universal selfconsciousness forgettable moments » of what counts, which is « only their identities due ». Since that’s what they are for Hegel, that’s what they are for Bataille : dust, sweat, spit, with their value reversed or inverted scatologically as the value reversed or inverted scatologically as the value of no value. It’s a singularity attributed to base matter.[29]
“Since that’s what they are for Hegel, that’s what they are for Bataille”… The amount of nuance that has been just refused in this one sentence is astounding… genuinely… I have never read such a thing… I can’t describe how… I don’t even know. Either way, to respond: The subject for Levinas cannot be formless… If it is, that is, if it in any way is ontological, i.e., Being, then it is not formless. As for Hegel and Bataille, the connections between Bataille and Hegel when it comes to the subject is twofold: 1. Nominally, i.e., in name only 2. In terms of action and teleology, in the way Kojève speaks of it. As we already know, and Dibben has articulated very well, Bataille’s whole appropriation of the “master-slave dialectic” is wholly nominal except in relation to two things: 1. Positions of the master and slave and 2. The momentary sovereignty of the master. There is no phenomenology at the basis of Bataille, but rather an energetics. In no way does Bataille see the subject as base matter, nor does he view the subject as Hegel does… In terms of action, he believes that the subject continues to assert its being through action. Other than that, there is no connection to my knowledge… As for base matter as a singularity in the Hegelian sense… that is just absurd… Base matter is not an entity but a charge, a shock…
Then the main critique of Bataille is to be made: the subject is called to responsibility at the limit of the possible.[30] There is no other to be responsible for in the leap…
A Response to Guido Giacomo Preparata’s Critique of Bataille
Outside of the humanism of this essay, Giacomo actually presents an interesting critique. Essentially, Giacomo sees that Bataille denies the possibility of the gift because, for Bataille, you cannot give and acquire. If you cannot give and acquire, then you cannot give “the genuine, enlightened free gift,” for if you did then you would be acquiring a wholesome feeling, some gratification, etc. in return, therefore meaning it isn’t a gift.[31] Even speaking about giving a gift could lead to the acquirement of social capital. Thus, Bataille “[has supposedly] proven the ontological impossibility of the gift.”[32] Before we address this claim, let’s continue in his argument. Because Bataille has denied the possibility of the gift, he has, for Giacomo, done nothing less than perpetuate a neo-liberal prayer which denies that “economic efficiency is best achieved through cooperation, justice, and brotherhood.”[33] Giacomo then puts forward that a gift could be anonymous and therefore not accrue any social capital. This is an answer to one of the reasons the gift cannot be a “gift.” But, this does not answer the question of “Why would one want to give?” If one gives out of a desire to, then they are fulfilling a desire, and in this way, they receive satisfaction. No one could ever give something. And this is exactly the point! One can only give through loss. What Bataille is putting forward is a form of giving without the gift, for the gift is not a thing. The gift is loss. It is expenditure. Therefore, Bataille is in no way falling into the folly of neo-liberal propaganda. Quite the opposite actually. Giacomo, on the other hand, seems to be denying annihilatory expenditure… Is this not the liberal humanist’s only impulse? Do they not only have the single impulse to deny expenditure?
Giacomo also goes on to argue that the pessimism that is associated with anti-humanism falls in line with the cynicism of the liberal. But this is not true, for pessimism is nothing but anguished turned into a propellant. A propellant which propels us beyond ourselves. The virulency of our libidinal pessimism, of our atheology, does not in any way cause us to fall in line with capitalism, God, etc. Rather it causes us to desire for God’s death.
References
[1–3]: David Johnson, “Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?,” Time & Society 12, no. 2–3 (2003): pp. 209–224, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x030122003, 210.
[4]: Georges Batialle, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl. trans. by Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Carl R. Lovitt, and Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 132.
[5]: Ibid., 134.
[6]: Ibid., 135.
[7]: David Johnson, “Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?,” Time & Society 12, no. 2–3 (2003): pp. 209–224, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x030122003, 213.
[8]: Georges Batialle, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, ed. by Allan Stoekl. trans. by Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Carl R. Lovitt, and Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 135.
[9]: Georges Bataille, On Nietzsche, trans. Stuart Kendall (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015), 124.
[10–11]: David Johnson, “Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?,” Time & Society 12, no. 2–3 (2003): pp. 209–224, https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x030122003, 215.
[12]: Ibid., 216.
[13]: Ibid., 222.
[14]: Apple Zefelius Igrek, “Modes of Luxurious Walking,” Modes of Luxurious Walking | POSTMODERN CULTURE (Postmodern Culture, September 3, 2013), http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/modes-of-luxurious-walking/.
[15]: Andrew Abbott, “The Problem of Excess,” Sociological Theory 32, no. 1 (2014): pp. 1–26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275114523419, 7.
[16]: Tom Tyler, “Like Water in Water,” Journal for Cultural Research 9, no. 3 (July 2005): pp. 265–279, https://doi.org/10.1080/14797580500179865, 278.
[17]: Kevin Kennedy, Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature (Palo Alto: Academica Press, LLC., 2014), 43–44.
[18]: Mark Graham, Anthropological Explorations in Queer Theory (Cherry Street: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2014), 49.
[19]: Eleanor Kaufman, The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2001), 123.
[20]: “Georges Bataille,” enotes.com (enotes.com), accessed October 3, 2021, https://www.enotes.com/topics/georges-bataille/critical-essays/bataille-georges-79767.
[21]: Carl Olson, “Eroticism, violence, and sacrifice: A postmodern theory of religion and ritual,” Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 6 no. 3 (1994): pp. 231–250, 237.
[22]: Gad Horowitz, “Bringing Bataille to Justice,” Religiologiques 30 (autumn 2004): pp. 127–140, 131.
[23–26]: Ibid., 132.
[27–28]: Ibid., 133.
[29–30]: Ibid., 135.
[31]: Guido Giacomo Preparata, “Un(for)giving: Bataille, Derrida and the Postmodern Denial of the Gift,” Catholic Social Science Review 13 (2008): pp. 169–200, 183.
[32–33]: Ibid., 184.
Bibliography
Abbott, Andrew. “The Problem of Excess.” Sociological Theory 32, no. 1 (2014): 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1177/0735275114523419.
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— — — . Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Edited by Allan Stoekl. Translated by Donald M. Leslie, Jr., Carl R. Lovitt, and Allan Stoekl. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.
“Georges Bataille.” enotes.com. enotes.com. Accessed October 3, 2021. https://www.enotes.com/topics/georges-bataille/critical-essays/bataille-georges-79767.
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Igrek, Apple Zefelius. “Modes of Luxurious Walking.” Modes of Luxurious Walking | POSTMODERN CULTURE. Postmodern Culture, September 3, 2013. http://www.pomoculture.org/2013/09/03/modes-of-luxurious-walking/.
Johnson, David. “Why View All Time from the Perspective of Time’s End?” Time & Society 12, no. 2–3 (2003): 209–24. https://doi.org/10.1177/0961463x030122003.
Kennedy, Kevin. Towards an Aesthetic Sovereignty: Georges Bataille’s Theory of Art and Literature. Palo Alto: Academica Press, LLC, 2014.
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Preparata, Guido Giacomo.”Un(for)giving: Bataille, Derrida and the Postmodern Denial of the Gift.” The Catholic Social Science Review 13 (2008): 169–200. https://doi.org/10.5840/cssr20081312
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