Georges Bataille Rodolphe Gasché / Roland Végső
2012, 2012-10-24, Volume:
440
eBook
This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and ...philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs "low materialism." Phenomenology, Gasché argues, thus paves the way for a new "science" of phantasms.
Definition of Heterology Bataille, Georges
Theory, culture & society,
09/2018, Volume:
35, Issue:
4-5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
In this text, Bataille clarifies his idea of the ‘excluded part’, i.e. that which is left behind by science. Bataille seeks to create an approach that would challenge the abstracted method of ...science, which presents the world as idealized and homogeneous. The aim of Bataille’s ‘science of the heterogeneous’ is to shed light on the unproductive expenditure of life, which moves between the sacred and the unclean. In pursuing this, he debunks the common idea that what is profane is already impure and vice versa. This text is notable for the new vocabulary that Bataille introduces in order to define heterology. Terms like heterodoxy, agiology and scatology rehabilitate the ideas of the unclean and the profane by structuring them in a new discourse, in which the excluded part is taken as the foundation for the new science of the impossible. Finally, the text shows how Bataille articulates this new science through providing examples largely from the study of religion and psychoanalysis.
Like all discourses on the ‘other’, Bataille’s heterology is faced with the problem of conceptualizing the heterogeneous (the other of thought, reason and language), while preserving its alterity, ...its fundamental resistance to conceptual thought. This paper interrogates the potential parallels between this aspect of Bataille’s notion and some of the prevalent concerns of contemporary and traditional aesthetics. The argument is based on the idea that theories of the aesthetic, akin to Bataille’s heterology, are always inevitably confronted with the paradoxical task of conceptually framing an experience that, per definition, resists philosophical or political appropriation. In relation to this my paper traces a development in Bataille’s thinking from an initial rejection of art and the aesthetic to their later reconfiguration as manifestations of sovereignty. Here I show how Bataille’s notion of sovereign art presents an implicit attempt to overcome some of the aporias to have surfaced in his earlier account of heterology. This development in Bataille’s thought is analysed in the context of his changing relationship with Surrealism.
This paper argues that the dominant modes of academic address, the conference paper, the journal article, and the monograph, reinforce problematic and exclusionary assumptions concerning what counts ...as legitimate research, whilst also restricting academic enquiry and impoverishing intellectual life. It makes its case by exploring in some detail the intellectual commitments of one the West’s more wayward 20th century thinkers, Georges Bataille. It suggests that Bataille presents not simply a conceptual armoury (and one among many) for critiquing Western logocentrism from within, but offers an example of what a less domesticated, less stylistically narrowed mode of thinking might look like.
The text introduces the special issue on Georges Bataille and his idea of heterology. The editors, Marina Galletti and Roy Boyne, immediately point out the novelty of Bataille’s heterology, both in ...the academic and political contexts of the 1920s and the present day. It is suggested that Bataille’s heterology is neither a technical-philosophical notion nor a definitive concept. Rather, heterology represents the challenge of the illicit parts of our human existence to any constituted power that proclaims itself as hierarchical, authoritarian, absolute order. Heterology is the revolt of the excluded part – which Bataille sees mainly in the hidden parts of our human body – against a world made up by idealised abstractions. The different sections of the introduction illustrate how Bataille makes heterology operate as a critical and disruptive dispositive in all fields of our knowledge: art, politics, philosophy, economy. This emphasis is also to be found in the various contributions to the special issue, which are briefly discussed in the introduction. Finally, the reader is introduced to the dimension of the ‘completely other’ that Bataille’s heterology opens up and leaves incomplete, as if it were an excluded part that constantly escapes from all human efforts to grasp it firmly.
This article examines the issues surrounding transcendence, the Other and base materialism in relation to Georges Bataille’s heterology and Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the face of the Other as ...infinity and transcendence. The article concludes that there is no facet of human existence – including work and the economy – which is not touched by transcendence, and that the idea that there are societies based in subsistence and in nothing but a ‘struggle for existence’ is a prejudice of modernity.
In the works of Djuna Barnes, and particularly the enigmatic final paragraphs of Nightwood , animals and animalistic qualities represent the terminal incapacity of language to encompass reality. ...Georges Bataille's concept of "animality," considered as a comparative heuristic, allows for a more coherent articulation of the theoretical underpinnings and implications of this presentation of the animal as a limit to the logical, sequential ordering of coherent meaning through language, or what Bataille refers to in shorthand as "discourse." Ultimately, Bataille theorizes and Barnes embodies an animal poetics that gives expression to that which is not strictly amenable to human sense, and both mark the literary as the site where it becomes possible to gesture beyond the human toward a mode of bestial expression that emerges from the breakdown of human signification.
