The creation of money by the State Bank of the USSR ∗

This paper justifies the current revival of interest in the Collège by examining the relevance of its ‘sacred sociology’ to post-war anti-utilitarianism. The link between the two periods and set of issues is provided by the review M.A.U.S.S., inspired by Marcel Mauss’s seminal essay on the gift. Mauss was the direct and indirect ethnographic mentor for the Collège’s main figures – Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris. How they effected the ethnographic detour to devise their respective assessments of the place of ‘myth, power and the sacred’ in modern society is the central focus of this presentation.     

Religion and the dualism of the social condition in Durkheim and Bataille

One important legacy of the Collège de sociologie is its development of certain Durkheimian themes, particularly those concerning religion. Both Durkheim and Bataille sought to understand religion and the sacred not as mere cultural phenomena but as defining features of personal, social and economic life. The members of the Collège, and especially Bataille, sought to subject both society and sociology to a radical form of interrogation. Like Durkheim, if in different ways, they sought to situate and address the commitments of social inquiry at the centre of their work rather than at its margins. This article suggests how Bataille can be said to have adopted and radicalized a Durkheimian emphasis on a dualism central to both personhood and society, while rejecting a Durkheimian faith in an evolving sociological enlightenment.     

Utility and excess: the radical sociology of Bataille and baudrillard

This paper consists of three sections. In the first in will attempt it will attempt to establish the theoretical centrality of the contrasting notions of utility and of excess in relation to their treatements within the ‘sociological mainstream’. The second section will introduce antother, radical sociological lineage extending from Nietzsche through Bataille and on to baudrillard. It will be argued that this ineage offers a more adequate approach to the analysis of the linked yet contrasting notions of utility and excess. These concepts will be approached, first, through the notion of general economy, in contrast to the theories and methods of restricted economy, particularly as it operates in the work of Bataille. The theory of Baudrillard will be situated as a treatment of the Problematic of excess in the modern age whereby utility and excess are no longer starkly and simply counterposed. Further, it will argue that Baudrillard's work reveals the importance of a radical theory of contemporary society, one which goes beyond not only restricted explanatory economies but also the notion of general economy itself. it is argued that the dominant strands of modern sociology are ocked within the methodological and theoretical structures of utility and of restricted economy and that this constitutes its fatal weakness. The specific maniestations of excess discussed are social violence, particularly sacrifice and death, transgression, ‘evil’ and the notion of ‘profitless expenditure’. The final section deals, briefly, with the theoretical and material consequences of ture'. The final section deals, briefly, with the theoretical and material consequences of the continue suppression, denial or domestication of this radical or marginal lineage.     

The limits to participatory planning: a reply to Adaman and Devine

This paper considers the relation between Bataille and Mauss in the light of the evidence that whilst the two authors are often linked, the relation between the two was characterized by a lack of reciprocity. It argues that it is not surprising that Mauss never mentions the work of Bataille, as Bataille’s sociology, and his theory of sacrifice, searches for meaning of acts in relation to certain vital needs of human nature – an approach which offends against the implacable rationalism of Mauss, and his belief, in the 1930s, in the triumph of reason and progress.     

The Historico-poetic Materialism of Benjamin and Celan

This article explores the relationship between the historical materialism of Walter Benjamin and the poetics of Paul Celan, and claims that within Celan’s poetics, we find a form for thinking Benjamin’s Marxism beyond Benjamin. The driving force of Benjamin’s critique of historicism is the desire to free Marx’s ideas (class struggle, classless society, progress) from the empty time of progress. By attending to the “breathturns” at the heart of Celan’s, The Meridian, this article uncovers a poetic historiography grounded in Benjamin’s now-time. It is with this conception of history that Marx’s ideas can be reimagined as a historico-poetic materialism and reinvigorated with revolutionary force.     

Morality without Intention

Abstract

An examination of how, in literature, silence and veiling are related to moral significance. The paper emphasizes Walter Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affiniites and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and poses the question of how the literary can possess moral meaning or effect when, as in these two works, silence and veiling appear as a means of refusing or denying intention. Benjamin’s and Hawthorne’s different critiques of the symbol are presented as the central issue around which the possibility of moral meaning is decided as an intentionless act. Benjamin’s preservation of the moral is interpreted as the cause of the paradoxical and contradictory sources of the expressionless and its critical violence as well as the veiling and secrecy he identifies as forming the true work of art. Against this account, Hawthorne’s story is read as the refusal of any preceding secret as the basis of a moral claim and thus as the defining category of the work of art.     

Walter Benjamin’s Variations of Imagelessness

Abstract

Strongly positive uses of terms that designate an absence, a cognitive or ontological impossibility or a sensory privation are among the persistent conceptual figures of Benjamin’s thought. This article analyses the moves by which Benjamin gave his concept of ‘the expressionless’ (das Ausdruckslose) its intriguing semantic meaning and moral value. Drawing on the poetics and philosophy of the sublime from Greek antiquity through modern times, the article reveals key historical reference points of Benjamin’s concept and, furthermore, his strategy of advocating a novel theory of the sublime as an antithesis to, or an interruption of, the beautiful by selectively integrating older traditions (such as the topos of god’s “imagelessness”) with theorems previously unrelated to these traditions (such as phenomenological reflections on body perception and colour and the twentieth-century discourse on “decision”).     

Israel’s election

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu appears most likely to form Israel’s next government following its election on 9 April, although it is unclear how stable such a government would be. Further elections within the next two years are quite possible. Whatever the outcome of the election, Israel’s next leader will be forced to address a range of serious and interrelated strategic challenges.     

Ararat and the politics of ‘preserving’ denial

ABSTRACT

Daldal analyses Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) in terms of its ‘truth claims’ and its ostensible critique of the politics of denial of the Turkish authorities. Her essay is not an apologia for Turkish attitudes but claims that, while searching for the ‘truth’ amid denial and deception, the film creates its own ‘official history’, which is presented as the history, mostly based on nostalgia and ‘post-memory’. The Armenian diaspora still relies heavily on the genocide in order to build consciousness and cohesion, and Ararat contributes further to the need for sacred codes, sacred lands and sacred myths. Although the Turkish denial of the genocide is unacceptable, by demonizing the Turks and Turkey, the film contributes to the preservation of that denial, which has been helpful in the creation of diasporic Armenian identity.     

Israel’s new government

In May 2020, the formation of a national unity government brought one political crisis to a close just as another began, with the start of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s criminal corruption trial. Israel will be consumed in the coming months by debate over Netanyahu’s legal problems alongside the critical issue of territorial annexation in the West Bank.     

A Deeper Durkheimian Society for Haidt’s Righteous Minds

Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind is an advance in the empirical study of morality. He argues that liberals lose elections because they only appeal to the moral foundations of Care and Fairness, whereas conservatives can appeal to additional things that most people value - Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity. Haidt’s argument gets a bit muddled when he tries to incorporate the libertarians’ concern with Liberty into his scheme of moral foundations. This muddle can be resolved by seeing that all groups need Loyalty, Authority, and Fairness (re-described). Politics today is a debate about what is truly Sacred for society - the conservatives’ traditional sacred realm of family, religion, and nation-state, the libertarians’ sacred individual liberty, or the liberals’ sacred care for those who are harmed by society.     

The Accursed Share: Bataille as Historical Thinker

Abstract

This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his master-work. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Bataille's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grappling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's oeuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading. The aim of the paper is to offer a sense, on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as important for the irruption of post-structural thought specifically, and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole.     

From Provocation to Challenge: Degrowth,Capitalism and the Prospect of “Socialism without Growth”: A Commentary on Giorgios Kallis

Giorgios Kallis argues that Degrowth, as a pluralistic convergence of both theoretical perspectives and social movements, is part of a renewal of the critique of capitalism based on the ecological contradictions of this social order. In “Socialism without Growth” Kallis engages with other, more classical, approaches that have examined the contradictions of capitalism and the material conditions for a future, ecologically viable postcapitalist social order. After a quick exposition of the lineaments of a general theory of surplus and accumulation based on Bataille, Polanyi and Georgescu-Roegen, Kallis mobilizes Marx’s theory of accumulation to examine the growth drivers of capitalism. I will argue that economic growth in advanced capitalism can best be explained as a relation that articulates capitalist overproduction to overconsumption, and outline some analytical tools that such an explanation can provide to those interested in understanding the specific growth drivers of contemporary capitalism and their social and ecological consequences. This implies moving beyond the model outlined by Marx and mobilizing concepts and categories developed by the over-accumulation approach to capitalism, those developed by some of Degrowth’s most vocal Marxist critics, such as Foster. Through my dialogue with Kallis I will try and bridge these two approaches.     

“人民自由”何以可能--从消极自由理论说起

贡斯当的“古代人的自由与现代人的自由”是近现代西方消极自由理论的重要基础;伯林的“消极自由与积极自由”以个人自由为出发点,落脚到制约国家权力的宪法制度设计上;德沃金和罗尔斯的自由理论返回法的形而下,试图寻找国家权力在个人自由实现中发挥积极作用的可行路径;中国传统自由观强调权力与自由的关系,以严复为代表的近现代自由话语开始触及自由的主体性、平等性等法治要素。中国共产党从人民立场出发的自由理论及其实践表明,“人民自由”吸收借鉴经验自由主义和理性自由主义合理因素,吸取中国传统自由观优秀基因,整合自由与平等、自由与公正、自由与法治的关系,形成了个人自由与国家权力同生共在、相互促进、共同发展的有序格局。     

Migrant protest in times of crisis: politics,ethics and the sacred from below

This paper focuses on the 300 Migrant Hunger Strikers event in Greece to explore the material conditions of possibility for migrant politics in times of crisis. It identifies three elements that played determinant roles in the articulation of the event: the politics of equality enacted by migrants, the ethics of hospitality and witnessing enacted by the Greek activists and host populations and the sacredness of the event. Critically engaging with the theories of Rancière, Derrida, Agamben and Durkheim, this paper demonstrates how these elements encountered and how their encounter helped migrants to achieve rights, albeit limited and temporary. Moving beyond the particularity of the event, this paper also highlights the event’s importance for migrant politics in times of austerity, and increased surveillance and racism against migrants. Despite its limited and temporary success, the event demonstrates how a politics of equality, ethical openness and respect for human life can form the basis of true cosmopolitan universality. The event also demonstrates how cosmopolitan universality is constructed from below by the migrants, who despite their undocumented status, engaged in an act of citizenship to demand equality.     

Why We Love to Hate the Wolf (of Wall Street): Using Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche to Critique the Function of Moral Ideology Under Late Capitalism

The release of Martin Scorsese’s film The Wolf of Wall Street in late 2013 helped to reignite a public conversation about corporate greed and the moral excesses and violations of Wall Street firms and executives. A barrage of articles, reviews, and criticisms of the film emerged throughout popular media that sought, for the most part, to single out and condemn the immoral actions and behaviors of individuals (for example, Jordan Belfort, whose actions constitute the primary subject matter of the film) within a pre-given and non-negotiable context of capitalist economic and social relations. This article uses the writings of Georges Bataille and Friedrich Nietzsche to critique this popular discourse. It reads the discourse as structured by a false identity of opposites, whereby the normal, moral, legal, and “peaceful” state of things is depicted as constitutive of a separate world from that of Belfort and the “criminal” excesses and expenditures of Wall Street. As a result of this conceptual maneuver, a mode of moralizing is enabled. In a fit of ressentiment, critics unleash their moralizing sentiments, single out and constitute guilty subjects, and hold these subjects responsible in order to repair the “secondary malfunctions” of capitalism. They do this so that capitalism can continue to survive and so they can have a good conscience while it does.     

“The River Told Me”: Rethinking Intersectionality from the World of Berta Cáceres

ABSTRACT

Inspired by the spiritual and political journey of Berta Cáceres (1973-2016), a fierce Lenca woman leader from Honduras who died in defense of sacred indigenous rivers, the essay aims to rethink the frame of intersectionality that is axiomatic in feminist theorizing and activism. Against the backdrop of the January 2017 Women’s March in the USA, I interrogate inclusionary accounts that equate intersectionality with a pre-existing unity among women that leaves power differentials intact. I recover the intersection as an index of invisibility and violence by drawing on the intimate connections that Berta foregrounded between multiple structures of domination. However, I argue that attending to the relational histories and geographies of patriarchy, colonialism and capitalism, is insufficient for imagining more just futures that are hospitable to subaltern horizons. Feminist praxis must also interrogate the Western liberal conceptions of agency and human-nature relations that undergird its intersectional analysis. Through an exploration of the indigenous cosmovisions and transnational grassroots solidarity that coalesce under Berta’s name, I point to the importance of cultivating a disposition to listening to incommensurable worlds where rivers tell stories and call upon us. This is an ecofeminist vision capable of rooting intersectional analysis within decolonizing relations and alternatives.     

The Rise of the Genotocracy

This article examines whether meritocracy is an effective device for legitimising socioeconomic inequality. It looks at two ways in which it could be said to do that—by allocating wealth and prestige according to merit, and by creating opportunities for those born in low income families—and concludes that the first only creates the appearance of fairness (an argument made persuasively by John Rawls) and the second is a largely unfulfilled promise. The author asks whether the low levels of social mobility in Britain and America are because they have not yet become fully-fledged meritocracies, or because they have, and considers Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s argument in The Bell Curve that meritocratic societies have a tendency to degenerate into genetically-based caste systems. It examines the research by Dalton Conley, Jason Fletcher and Benjamin Domingue on this point, which shows that genetic assortative mating declined over the course of the twentieth century, and tentatively concludes that Herrnstein and Murray were wrong—that flatlining social mobility is a bug, not a feature, of meritocratic societies.