Effects of the unknowable: Materialism, epistemology, and the general economy of the body in Bataille

Parallax

Volumn 7, Issue 1, 2001, Pages 16-28

  Plotnitsky, Arkady ^a  

^a PURDUE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61249517964     PISSN: 13534645     EISSN: 1460700X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/13534640010015908     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis.: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), p.15.
2. For the French originals of the works here cited see Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1970-1988) 12 vols.
3. Bataille, G., Visions of Excess, Selected Writings, 1927-1939, pp.15-16.
4. I shall not explain quantum theory in detail here and permit myself to refer to my earlier works and references there, in particular, Complementarity: Anti-epistemology After Bohr and Derrida (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994)
5. and 'Techno-Atoms: The Ultimate Constituents of Matter and the Technological Constitution of Phenomena in Quantum Physics', Tekhnema 5 (1999). The literature on Bataille is considerable, and the sparse references to it in this essay, determined by the particular set of contexts it engages, could hardly do justice to it. I find both Maurice Blanchot's and Jacques Derrida's encounters with Bataille the best treatments of Bataille available, and I am indebted to both.
6. Georges Bataille, The Impossible, Robert Hurley (trans.) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1991), p.9.
7. Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, Leslie Anne Boldt (trans.) (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
8. Guilty, Bruce Boone (trans.) (New York: Lapis, 1988);
9. On Nietzsche, Bruce Boone (trans.) (New York: Paragon, 1990).
10. For Bohr's views see his essays in The Philosophical Writings of Niels Bohr, 3 vols (Woodbridge: Ox Bow Press, 1987).
11. Bataille, Guilty, p.46.
12. Georges Bataille, 'Conférences sur le Non-Savoir', Tel Quel 10 ( 1962):5. This sentence is omitted from the text published in 'Conférences 1951-1953'.
13. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, Volume 8, p.219.
14. This confluence may not be coincidental, even beyond the more general reasons indicated earlier. One of the figures involved in the discussion of Bataille's ideas in 'Conferences 1951-1953' was Georges Ambrosino, an atomic physicist, whom Bataille even credits with a partial co-authorship of the contemporary Accursed Share (The Accursed Share: Volume 1, Robert Hurley (trans.) [New York: Zone, 1988], p.191 n. 2).
15. Bataille, Inner Experience, p.103.
16. See especially 'Hegel, la mort, et le sacrifice', Oeuvres complètes, Volume 12, pp.326-345.
17. Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, pp.215-16.
18. Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: Volume 1 and The Accursed Share: Volume 2 and Volume 3, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York: Zone, 1991);
19. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, Robert Hurley (trans.) (New York: Zone, 1989).
20. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1, p.12.
21. Bataille, The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3, p.315.
22. Georges Bataille, The Tears of Eros, Peter Conor (trans.) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), p.205-7.
23. G. S. Kirk, J. E. Raven and M. Schofield (eds) The Presocratic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p.303.
24. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.88.
25. Bataille, Eroticism: Death and Sensuality, Mary Dalwood (trans.) (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986) and The Tears of Eros further elucidate this point.
26. Bataille, Visions of Excess, p.71.
27. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Robert Hurley et al. (trans.) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
28. Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, p.89.
29. Maurice Blanchot, The Death Sentence, Lydia Davis (trans.) (New York: Station Hill, 1978), p.81.
30. Bataille, Eroticism, p.268 n.1; translation modified.