CFP: CFP : Violence and Conflict in Georges Bataille's works

Violence and Conflict in Georges Bataille’s works

Special Issue Guest-Edited by Nicola Apicella (PhD., co-editor of the Cahiers Bataille) for The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence

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One may argue that the entire work of Georges Bataille is situated under the sign of violence as the antagonist — and sometimes anguished partner — of reason: violence of desire, violence of laughter, violence of prohibitions and their transgression, violence of the exploited social body, sovereign violence, violence of the sacred. The aim of this special issue is to tear away the veil of discursive knowledge and reveal the obscenity of a way of thinking that has always taken place on the margins of reassuring conventions and the irenicism of reason. Bataille never concealed his penchant for altering the order of discourse and for highlighting violence and the conflictuality that is subjacent to it. From his articles in Documents, through the “imperative violence” of the texts for La Critique sociale and the “violence of despair” of the proletariat at the time of Contre-Attaque, to the sacrificial violence of Acéphale, the first period of Bataille’s theoretical writings planted the seeds for the development of the system of Non-Knowledge that occupied him throughout the post-war period, the aim of which was to redefine the limits of rationality. As for his fictional works, eroticism appears as a transgressive and unsettling force that never ceases to reiterate the conflict between desire and the prohibitions that seek to regulate it.

Possible topics may include (but are not restricted to):

- Violence of the obscene, heterology

- Sacrifice and symbolic death

- Political conflict and the violence of the unconscious

- Imperative violence, fascism and heterogeneous forces

- Sacred and atheology

- Eroticism, transgression and the violence of desire

- Bataillian interpretation of the dialectic of recognition and the struggle to the death

- Violence of reason and its prohibitions

- Violence of laughter and tears

- Art and the representation of life and death drives

- Violence of critique

- Bataille’s thoughts on totalitarism

- Bataille’s reflections on the status and evolution of warfare

- Bataille’s interpretation of Sade

- Bataille’s interpretations of serial and sexual homicide (e.g., Gilles de Rais, Elizabeth Báthory, William Hereins, etc.).

- Bataille’s critique of philosophy in respect to violence and the limits of discursive knowledge

- Philosophical critiques of Georges Bataille

- Unproductive expenditure and dilapidation

- History, post-history and the impossible resolution of contradictions

- Unemployed negativity

Important Dates and Submission Guidelines

We invite expressions of interest and ask all prospective authors to send a short 500 word abstract to [email protected] and [email protected] by no later than December 8, 2024. Authors will be informed of acceptance no later than December 20, 2024.

Full papers should be submitted by April 20, 2025 and should be written in the PJCV template available on https://trivent-publishing.eu/32-philosophical-journal-of-conflict-and-violence-pjcv and should not exceed 10,000 words (bibliography and footnotes aside).

The final publication is planned for May 2025.

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Guest edited by Nicola Apicella, PhD., co-editor of the Cahiers Bataille.

For any queries, please contact us at: [email protected] ; [email protected]