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The Limit of the Useful: Bataille, War, and Fascism
🕑 Added 2023-03-10 18:00:07 +0000 UTCIn the decade prior to the publication of Inner Experience (L'expérience intérieure), the twentieth-century French philosopher Georges Bataille produced a nascent masterwork containing some of his most original and extensive reflections on a range of subjects. With thoughts on ritual sacrifice and military conquest, the nature of laughter, and the mechanisms of capitalism, The Limit of the Useful, as Bataille had planned to title the work, illuminates the philosopher's later corpus, yet it remained unfinished and unpublished in his lifetime, and untranslated until now.
This is the first English-language translation of what Cory Austin Knudson and Tomas Elliott argue is one of Bataille's most structurally consistent works. Paired with draft essays and plans for The Accursed Share, along with over a hundred pages of appendixes and notes, the volume distinctively elaborates Bataille's thought. The Limit of the Useful spans a decade of rich intellectual ferment in Bataille's life as he first formulated his challenge to capitalism, engaging with concepts and ideas in ways not seen in his other published works. The volume bridges the gap between Bataille's surrealist literary writings and later scientific pretensions, drawing attention to, and filling in, an overlooked lacuna in his oeuvre.
The book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047333/the-limit-of-the-useful/
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Comments
Rich K
This was awesome! I have to re-listen because I had some ideas about Batille and Benjamin's outburst and the need to speak spiritually to left movements (it's always interesting that no one mentions Caillois's proto-Peterson, proto-fascist angle). Can't wait to dive in!
