Ansgar Allen

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Base Matter: Bataille and the Expenditure of Texts

A study in the corpus of Georges Bataille.

CONTENTS

  1. Preliminaries
  2. Considerations on method
  3. Excess
  4. New ecologies of excess
  5. Recycled digital excreta, undomesticated ejecta  
  6. Gambits for the expenditure of texts               
  7. Puerile instincts            
  8. Habits of writing, habits of reading, habits of thinking        
  9. Deranging language and signification: Surrealism
  10. Sacred and profane art            
  11. A projection, the artist as a grotesque           
  12. Restrained pleasures, false sovereigns         
  13. A puny kingdom            
  14. Greedy particles           
  15. Generalised profligacy, the organisms of the Earth               
  16. Near-imperishable filth, as a bad thing         
  17. Machinic somnambulance  
  18. The bourgeois outlook              
  19. The introduction of labour, Aztec sacrifice
  20. Ecstatic drunkenness                
  21. Glorious waste, acts without sanction          
  22. Some objections          
  23. On taking up Bataille (again)
  24. Universal meanness, universal reason          
  25. So much carrion           
  26. Realm of lies, the domesticated horse          
  27. Arguments that bleed out      
  28. Filth, sludge itself        
  29. Genealogy of the sacred I. A lost intimacy 
  30. Genealogy of the sacred II. The decline of the gods              
  31. Genealogy of the sacred III. Residual attractions  
  32. Genealogy of the profane       
  33. Heterology and base matter
  34. Eternally, hopelessly soiled: a brief history
  35. Free falseness and the subordination of science
  36. A twofold transgression           
  37. Eroticism and death 
  38. The second transgression and the art of Lascaux 
  39. Effacement before the beast                
  40. Reduced to eating cheese     
  41. Excretion and appropriation
  42. A practically excremental science   
  43. Heterogeneity, fascism, statehood 
  44. Fascist agency and general uprisings             
  45. Industrial society and its alternative                
  46. Looking at the dead   
  47. Communal life and corpses
  48. On the institutions of war, slavery, prostitution and marriage        
  49. On not doing one’s revolutionary duty           
  50. Permanent debauchery           
  51. Useless art      
  52. Towards a dynamic hatred of poetry, of fiction         
  53. Sclerotic knowledges, “a goal to be crossed”           
  54. Less domesticated philosophy           
  55. Teaching the death of thought             
  56. Border crossing and discursive hybridity     
  57. Childhood and cracking the world open      
  58. Interlude: Crucifixion as the most equivocal expression of evil    
  59. Little children and shrunken life        
  60. Writing for no community, evil childhoods 
  61. Death-like mirth, or “the laughable”                
  62. Headlessness and the cephalophore             
  63. Headless community                
  64. Dead tree          
  65. Educated vulgarity and the sacred monster               
  66. Divinity, art and the thing        
  67. The penis hole is laughter      
  68. Execrable, excremental writing           
  69. Pornography and literary eroticism 
  70. Shit-bastard   
  71. Non-excremental, execrable writing                
  72. Pissoir attributions and lesser errors              
  73. Negative philology: Blake and Martin at Bedlam    
  74. Max Weber’s footnotes
  75. Visual detritus (via Peter Gidal)          
  76. The terror inherent in the good            
  77. Conceptual exchange, anguish          
  78. Communication as a sketch of death