DOSSIER: Violence and Conflict in Georges Bataille’s Works

Front matter

Foreword

By Nicola Apicella 

Between Rational Animal and Dis-Human Being: Georges Bataille’s Approach to Violence

Rebecca Milaneschi

Abstract

This essay analyzes Georges Bataille’s philosophy of violence as a radical disruption of order, power, and identity systems. Rather than a tool of control or political destabilization, violence in Bataille's work is an ontological and sacred excess that exposes the fragility of reason and sovereignty. Drawing on La part maudite, L'Érotisme, and La souveraineté, the article differentiates between transgressive violence and institutionalized forms of control, exploring Bataille’s theory of violence in contrast to instrumental rationality. The essay engages with the thought of Nietzsche, Hegel, Sade, Girard, and Derrida to situate Bataille within broader philosophical discourses on power and sacrifice. 

On the Violence of Contestation. Corpse, Crime, and Murder in Bataille’s Thought

Gianluca Viola

Abstract

This paper explores Georges Bataille’s notion of contestation through the figures of the corpse, crime, and murder, challenging the Cartesian cogito and its isolation. Contestation is presented not as a mere philosophical abstraction but as a fundamental dynamic of existence, in which each being is continually questioned and destabilized by the presence of others. The corpse is analyzed as a radical rupture in subjective experience, evoking both horror and sacred fascination. Moving to crime and murder, the discussion turns to Sade’s extreme individualism and Gilles de Rais’ tragic excess, demonstrating how the negation of others ultimately leads to self-negation. The serial killer emerges as the modern figure of this paradox, revealing the loss of self in the pursuit of recognition. The paper concludes by reaffirming Bataille’s vision of subjectivity as a tragic and unstable condition, constantly exposed to forces that exceed and contest it. 

Bataille’s Immoralism, Deleuze’s Amoralism Spinozist Desire against Transgressive Violence

Thomas Detcheverry

Abstract

This article reconstructs Gilles Deleuze’s implicit philosophical critique of Georges Bataille. While both thinkers explore forms of limit-experience, Deleuze rejects Bataille’s concept of transgressive violence in favor of a Spinozist conception of desire as innocent, immanent, and affirmative. The article outlines three major divergences: the ontological (continuity vs. individuation), the ethical (guilt vs. joy), and the “erotological” (transgression vs. intensification). Drawing on Deleuze’s readings of Spinoza, Masoch, and D.H. Lawrence, the article analyzes how Bataille’s immoralism, in Deleuze’s view, remains entangled in the moral logic it seeks to subvert, whereas Deleuze proposes an amoralism grounded in vitalist positivity. 

The Dialectics of Enmity in Relation to Sovereignty in the Works of Georges Bataille

Deniz Yenimazman

Abstract

This paper examines the evolution of sovereignty in the European intellectual tradition, from its medieval origins to its redefinition by Georges Bataille. Bataille’s emphasis on transgression, excess, and the interplay between violence and freedom challenges traditional notions of absolute power. The analysis contrasts his ideas with Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s concepts of multiperspectivism, cannibalism, and predation, revealing the productive potential of enmity and the transformative capacity of transgression. It envisions a dynamic world where sovereignty is continuously generated through the interaction of all beings.

The Lion Emperor Against the Caste: Heterogeneity and Violence in Contemporary Argentine Right

Aarón Attias Basso, Tomás Ramos Mejía

Abstract

In this article we will defend the thesis that the Argentine libertarian project expresses an attempt to radicalise the alliance between imperative heterogeneity and social homogeneity. This process shows the solidarity between the purifying destruction and social homogenisation: in order to achieve homogeneity, it is necessary to eliminate any impurity that interrupts utilitarian inertia, as well as those who prevent its full realisation. Our central thesis is that Milei's exercise of power can be accurately characterized as heterogeneous in its imperative and sadistic form.

Premature–Retrograde Ejaculation (Bataille’s Formalist Short-Circuit)

M. Garea Albarrán

Abstract

Framed within the problem of Modern representation, Bataille’s dualistic materialism is examined in its (self-)contradictory nature as the basis for an anti-idealistic critique of social systems of domination. The systematic structuring and behaviour of Bataillean paradoxes is explored internally as a reciprocal Kantian-Hegelian perversion where reason holds a fundamental role. A further analysis detects, however, a fetishistic tendency to formalism determining the procedure whereby the self-annihilating paradox autonomises itself by eliding its historical source through its own restless (self-)contradiction, thereby misfiring his critique unless itself de-autonomised.

VARIA


Exemplary Violence

Paul Dumouchel 

Abstract

This paper presents two distinct but closely interrelated arguments. First, that violence is exemplary in that it tends to justify itself by the simple fact that it happened, directly when the violence of one adversary justifies that of the other, indirectly when third parties validate acts of violence by failing to condemn them. It then argues that this is what happened in the case of the ongoing war of Israel in Gaza and that an important cause of this validation of unacceptable acts of violence against civilians is the importance of jus ad bellum in our thinking about war. 

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