Summary
Contents
Subject index
Long recognized in France as a central figure in French cultural thought, the range and significance of Batille's ideas are now being grasped in the English speaking world. His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient. This book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural. And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging a
Sovereignty
Sovereignty
Bataille's notion of sovereignty is what completes his theorization of a general economy. Although never published in his lifetime, The Accursed Share, vol. III: Sovereignty seems always to have been destined to be the conclusion. Of course, the general economy is not supposed to be a project, and cannot, in Bataille's logic, have a conclusion, as that would make it a system of utility, of means and ends – so sovereignty is the end which is not one. Sovereignty represents the status of the subject when caught up in general economy, and thus joins waste, expenditure, death, eroticism and so on as possible ends within such an economy. Even though to talk of ends still implies a project, and therefore accumulation (here, towards a ...
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