Document Type
Article
Department or Administrative Unit
Philosophy and Religious Studies
Publication Date
6-2008
Abstract
Georges Bataille is known for being complex and multifaceted: influenced by Christian mystics as well as Hegelians and Marxists, his work is also linked with that of the surrealists and existentialists of his own mid-20th century France as well as the post-structuralists - in particular the Tel Quel collaboraters - who followed in his wake. It would be astonishing, then, if Bataille's thinking were not conflated with precisely those movements and those ideas with which he has so much in common, despite the fact that we should refuse to expect this. Much of Bataille's work was devoted to the ambivalent overlapping of transgression and its reified containment, and this in part explains why such a large number of his interpreters fall prey to reducing the former category to the latter. This article is therefore an attempt to disentangle, to whatever extent possible, the transgressive from the contained. I will do this on four accounts: postmodern economics, mystical union, sexual degradation, and historical dialectics.
Recommended Citation
Igrek, A. (2008). Concrete Containment in Late Capitalism, Mysticism, the Marquis de Sade, and Phenomenological Anthropology. Colloquy, 15, 95-114.
Journal
Colloquy
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Rights
© Monash University
Included in
Christianity Commons, Comparative Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons
Comments
This article was originally published Open Access in Colloquy. The full-text article from the publisher can be found here.