Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought

Will Stronge is Associate Lecturer in theology at University of Chichester and PhD student in politics and philosophy at University of Brighton.

Georges Bataille has been celebrated more as a prophet of excess than taken seriously as a thinker. This collection corrects this absence by exploring Bataille as a thinker of all that overturns the limits of the restricted economies in which we live. From Neanderthal man to Black Metal, Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought presents us with a Bataille that by remaining untimely is still vital to understanding our present.

• Introduction by Will Stronge (University of Brighton/University of Chichester, UK)1 ‘Frenzy, Feeder, Falcon: Eroticism in the 21st century’ – Scott Wilson (Kingston University, UK)2 ‘Bataille’s Nature: On (Not) Having One’s Feet on the Ground’ – Patrick ffrench (King’s College London, UK)3 ‘Bataille and the Left Pole of the Sacred’ – William Pawlett (University of Wolverhampton, UK)4 ‘Making More (of waste)’ – Stuart Kendall (California College of the Arts, USA)5 ‘Georges Bataille as a thinker of Statehood: a Relational and Materialist Approach’ – Teresa Pullano (Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium)6 ‘Guilty, Capable, Extravagant, Dialectic’ – Georges Didi-Huberman (École des hautes études en sciences sociales, France) translated by Stuart Kendall7 ‘Useless Practices in Sacred Spaces’ – Kevin Kennedy (American University of Paris, France)8 ‘”The only real outlaws”: Animal Freedom in Bataille’ – Oxana Timofeeva (European University at St. Petersburg, Russia)9 ‘Speculating with Bataille’s Unfinished System: “Mystical Vomit” from Neoplatonism to Neroplatonism’ – Edia Connole10 ‘The Politics of Excess and Restraint: Reading Bataille alongside and against Accelerationism’ – Eugene Brennan (American University of Paris, France)11 ‘Bataille and the Neanderthal Extinction’ – Howard Caygill (Kingston University, UK)12 ‘On Thinking at the End of the World: Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille’ – Michael Lewis (Newcastle University, UK)Index