08/26/2021
I’m currently reading Anti-Oedipus once more in order to write some more essays (or maybe just one very large essay). I can’t say that any form of synthesis between Deleuze and Guattari and Bataille is possible, but I will try to make it work. And I’m trying at a synthesis because I have already done a critique. It seems that if we just got rid of the concept of production from their work and inserted the concept of expenditure in its place (yes, I know this would leave a lot of gaps because we would be discarding the whole idea of ‘the process’) then this already interesting work of materialist exercise would become even more interesting. Nevertheless, I will continue on.
In relation to what has already been said about Deleuze and Guattari, I want to suggest that the most “Bataillean” work of Deleuzian philosophy is easily Andrew Culp’s great book Dark Deleuze.
I also plan to start writing some form of synthesis between Calvin L. Warren’s black nihilism and some of Bataille’s theories. I may just do a synthesis of what is conventionally considered to fall under the umbrella term ‘afro-pessimism’ and what Bataille put forward.
I have been reading this book Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor by Bruno Gullì, and I finished the part on Bataille just a few minutes ago. It is a critical analysis and I just cannot stop myself from saying that it is horrible. It just doesn’t understand how all of Bataille’s concepts are correlative. His main claim is that Bataille wrongly conflates servility (as opposed to sovereignty) and usefulness (as opposed to uselessness).[1] This ignores the fact that expenditure is sovereignty, as we know. Thus, servility, which is opposed to sovereignty, is opposed to expenditure, which is opposed to utility. Besides the fact that Gullì has just ignored the entirety of the essay The Notion of Expenditure, we can see other inadequacies within his understanding of sovereignty. He writes about it without knowing what sovereignty is (it is NOTHING). And this latter fact that sovereignty is NOTHING, is not taken into account until near the end of the part of the book covering Georges Bataille, in which he makes a conclusion which doesn’t extend to the next paragraph.[2] He continually becomes confused*[3] about sovereignty’s conceptual relation to the subject. And this is why him not understanding the fact that sovereignty is NOTHING complicates his own analysis: he never actually grasps what sovereignty conceptually is for Bataille. He is attacking strawmen while saying “Look at all this critique I’m doing”. We can only remark, in response, “The negativity of critique, what a classic!”. Now, do not get confused. My responses to critiques of Bataille are not counter-critiques because what I am doing is not critique, but defense. I am not working out of reactionary ressentiment, but out of annihilatory and immanent negation (which is the affirmation of affirmation(?)).
Bibliography
Gullì, Bruno. Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010.
References
[1]: Bruno Gullì, Earthly Plenitudes: A Study on Sovereignty and Labor (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2010), 71.
[2]: Ibid., 87.
[3]: *(almost all get confused within Bataille’s texts, but just like Bataille was the only one to “understand” Nietzsche (see Bernard E. Harcourt’s 2/13 | Georges Bataille wherein this latter idea of Batalle claiming to be the only one to understand Nietzsche is suggested), I may be the only one to “understand” Bataille (though there may be others). Then again, just like Bataille did with Nietzsche, I fall into the abyss that are his works.)
