A2 Bataille

Tech Good
Tech is good and inevitable – you’re biased toward pessimism which disproves their
links, BUT rejecting engagement makes it worse.
Will Rinehart is Director of Technology and Innovation Policy at the American Action Forum, where he
specializes in telecommunication, Internet, and data policy, with a focus on emerging technologies
and innovation. Rinehart previously worked at TechFreedom, where he was a Research Fellow. He
was also previously the Director of Operations at the International Center for Law & Economics, The
Technology Liberation Front, 2018 [“In Defense of Techno-optimism”
https://techliberation.com/2018/10/10/in-defense-of-techno-optimism/ accessed 04-08-2021]
Many are understandably pessimistic about platforms and technology. This year has been a tough one, from Cambridge Analytica and Russian trolls to the
implementation of GDPR and data breaches galore. Those who think about the world, about the problems that we see every day, and about their own place in it, will quickly realize the

immense frailty of humankind. Fear and worry makes sense. We are flawed, each one of us. And technology only seems to exacerbate those problems. But life is getting
better. Poverty continues nose-diving; adult literacy is at an all-time high; people around the world are
living longer, living in democracies, and are better educated than at any other time in history. Meanwhile, the digital
revolution has resulted in a glut of informational abundance, helping to correct the informational asymmetries that have long plagued humankind.
The problem we now face is not how to address informational constraints, but how to provide the means for people to sort through and make sense of this abundant trove of data. These

macro trends don’t make headlines. Psychologists know that people love to read negative articles. Our
brains are wired for pessimism. In the shadow of a year of bad news, it helpful to remember that Facebook and Google and Reddit and
Twitter also support humane conversations. Most people aren’t going online to talk about politics and if you are, then you are rare. These sites are places where families and friends can
connect. They offer a space of solace – like when chronic pain sufferers find others on Facebook, or when

widows vent, rage, laugh and cry without judgement through the Hot Young Widows Club. Let’s also not forget that Reddit, while sometimes a
place of rage and spite, is also where a weight lifter with cerebral palsy can become a hero and where those with

addiction can find healing. And in the hardest to reach places in Canada, in Iqaluit, people say that “Amazon Prime
has done more toward elevating the standard of living of my family than any territorial or federal
program. Full stop. Period” Three-fourths of Americans say major technology companies’ products and services have been more good than bad for them personally. But when it comes
to the whole of society, they are more skeptical about technology bringing benefits. Here is how I read that disparity: Most of us think that we have benefited from technology, but we worry
about where it is taking the human collective. That is an understandable worry, but one that shouldn’t hobble us to inaction. Nor is technology making us stupid. Indeed, quite the opposite is

Technology use in those aged 50 and above seems to have caused them to be cognitively younger
happening.

than their parents to the tune of 4 to 8 years. While the use of Google does seem to reduce our ability to recall information, studies find that it
has boosted other kinds of memory, like retrieving information. Why remember a fact when you can remember where it is located?
Concerned how audiobooks might be affecting people, Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education, compared them to physical reading and was surprised to find “no significant
differences in comprehension between reading, listening, or reading and listening simultaneously.” Cyberbullying and excessive use might make parents worry, but NIH supported work found

that “Heavy use of the Internet and video gaming may be more a symptom of mental health problems than a cause. Moderate use of the Internet, especially
for acquiring information, is most supportive of healthy development.” Don’t worry. The kids are going to be alright. And yes, there
is a lot we still need to fix. There is cruelty, racism, sexism, and poverty of all kinds embedded in our technological

systems. But the best way to handle these issues is through the application of human ingenuity. Human
ingenuity begets technology in all of its varieties. When Scott Alexander over at Star Slate Codex recently looked at 52 startups being groomed
by startup incubator Y Combinator, he rightly pointed out that many of them were working for the betterment of all: Thirteen of them had an altruistic or

international development focus, including Neema, an app to help poor people without access to banks gain financial services; Kangpe, online health services for
people in Africa without access to doctors; Credy, a peer-to-peer lending service in India; Clear Genetics, an automated genetic counseling tool for at-risk parents; and Dost Education, helping
to teach literacy skills in India via a $1/month course. Twelve of them seemed like really exciting cutting-edge technology, including CBAS, which describes itself as “human bionics plug-and-
play”; Solugen, which has a way to manufacture hydrogen peroxide from plant sugars; AON3D, which makes 3D printers for industrial uses; Indee, a new genetic engineering system; Alem
Health, applying AI to radiology, and of course the obligatory drone delivery startup. Eighteen of them seemed like boring meat-and-potatoes companies aimed at businesses that need
enterprise data solution software application package analytics targeting management something something something “the cloud”. As for the other companies, they were the kind of niche
products that Silicon Valley has come to be criticized for supporting. Perhaps the Valley deserves some criticism, but perhaps it deserves more credit than it’s been receiving as-of-late.
Contemporary tech criticism displays a kind of anti-nostalgia. Instead of being reverent for the past, anxiety for the future abounds. In these visions, the future is imagined as a strange, foreign

The future never arrives because we

land, beset with problems. And yet, to quote that old adage, tomorrow is the visitor that is always coming but never arrives.

are assembling it today. We need to work diligently together to piece together a better world. But if we
constantly live in fear of what comes next, that future won’t be built. Optimism needn’t be pollyannaish.
It only needs to be hopeful of a better world.

Tech =/= Escalation

Emerging tech doesn’t cause war and their determinism is wrong.
Caitlin Talmadge is Associate Professor of Security Studies in the School of Foreign at Georgetown
University, as well as Senior Non-Resident Fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution,
Journal of Strategic Studies, 2019 ["Emerging technology and intra-war escalation risks: Evidence from
the Cold War, implications for today."
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01402390.2019.1631811 accessed 04-08-2021]
Yet thefuture relationship between emerging technologies and escalation may not be as straightforward
as these statements imply. The debate about emerging technologies tends to portray them as a powerful independent variable – an
exogenous factor that is both necessary and sufficient to cause conflict escalation. This paper argues instead that emerging
technologies are more likely to function as intervening variables; they may be necessary for escalation
to happen in some cases, but they alone are not sufficient, and sometimes they will not even be
necessary. The strongest drivers of escalation will actually lie elsewhere, in the realms of politics and
strategy. As a result, concern about new technologies is warranted, but determinism is not. An
overemphasis on the dangers of technology alone ignores the critical role of political and strategic
choices in shaping the impact of technology, and also could lead to a misplaced faith in arms control or
other means of trying to stuff the technological genie back in the bottle.5

Alt Turn
Radical disruption without an endpoint causes extinction and turns the alt.
Andrew Holm, School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Millennium, 2018
[“Silent Order: the Temporal Turn in Critical International Relations”
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0305829818771349 accessed 04-08-2021] mre
Third, and flowing from this, radical openness is not necessarily better, much less good. ‘Possibility’, ‘openness’,
‘alternatives’, and ‘something that is yet to emerge and yet to be known’176 all give off a strong whiff of optimism. Pure
possibilities and open pathways can break many ways, and ‘[t]here are no guarantees’ that engaging disruptive times
‘will produce the result we desire’ or even one we can accept.177 Moreover, novel forms of harm and
radical evil are also alternatives. Or are we to believe that the Holocaust was unsurpassable? That neoliberal economics, national
security, and democratic-peace wars mark the ne plus ultra of subordination and ‘violent response’? Are we to forget that disrupting the
‘inertia of [the] status quo’ so as to ‘open space for a new political reconfiguration’ might cash out as President Trump,
xenophobia, and the fresh possibility of nuclear war?178 All of these possibilities inhere in rupture’s virtual potential. Yet
whether by wilful sublimation or the aforementioned habit of framing ruptures solely against hegemonic
counterparts, they remain absent in critical discourse.

A2 Instrumentalism
Instrumentalization does not necessarily presuppose violence. Influencing situations
does not result in a will to mastery and is an inevitable part of interpersonal relations.
Bush ’12:
Stephen S. Bush, Manning Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Brown University, in Journal of Religious Ethics, in 2012 ["GEORGES BATAILLE'S MYSTICAL CRUELTY", https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1467-
9795.2012.00536.x, 9-2-2018] AR

The first thing I want to do is to explore the notion of instrumentalization that is so important for Brintnall’s position. Brintnall says that
compassion and sadism are “structurally analogous” to each other, because “both are bound up in a potentially instrumentalizing subject-
object perspective on the world,” a perspective that is the “foundation” of violence. So in achieving an ecstatic relation to others that is not
instrumentalizing, Bataille’s meditation “exerts great pressure to eradicate the dispositions that produce sadistic violence.” This is an important
opinion and it bears not just on the study of Bataille but on the study of mysticism and morality in general, since many philosophers of
mysticism take as paradigmatic a unitive experience that, similarly to Bataille, effaces the subject-object distinction.∂ However, I do not think
that the instrumentalization/non- instrumentalization distinction has the ethical significance that Brintnall attributes to it, and I do not think, as
Brintnall and Bataille do, that subject-object relations involve “inherently alienating violence.” Not
all instrumentalization is
ethically problematic or tends toward violence. We instrumentalize each other all the time and could not
carry on our affairs without doing so. Many goods we rightly regard as valuable require instrumentalizing relations. What matters is that
when we treat others as a means to an end, we simultaneously respect them as an end in themselves. We
cannot treat them as a mere means. It is possible to regard someone as both a means and an end, in other words. This is what the Kantians tell
us, and though I do not count myself among their number, they are on to something here. Whenwe buy a head of lettuce at a
farmer’s market, we treat the farmer as a means to our end, but the important thing is we do not treat her as
merely a means. We must treat her in such a way that regards her as a means to our end (of obtaining salad ingredients) but also as
someone who has her own ambitions, desires, concerns, attachments, and decision-making capacities. To give an
extreme example: if we abducted her and kept her in captivity, forcing her to grow and provide food for us, then we would be treating her
merely as a means. So the ethically relevant distinction is not between instrumentalizing and non-instrumentalizing relations with others, but
rather between different types of instrumentalizing, subject-object relations.∂ This leads me to doubt that compassion and sadism are
structurally analogous. If Brintnall is right that sadism is a teleological project centered on “mastering, controlling, and dominating,” then it is a
teleological project that treats people as mere means. Compassion, however, does not have this feature. And I stress in saying this that not all
actions that the agent (or some other party) deems compassionate actually are. People can and often do mistake their attempts to dominate
others as compassion. The reverse is possible as well: the patient may regard an action that is actually compassionate as an attempt to
dominate and master. But one cannot properly identify an action as compassionate and also regard it as an instance of treating someone as a
mere means. Any plausible account of what a compassionate action is would rule out that such an action merely instrumentalizes the patient.
In speaking of certain actions as being classifiable as compassionate or not, I do not mean to deny that, on the psychological level, motivations
for actions are often complex and contradictory, and I do not mean to deny that one might be motivated to act in a certain way by a complex
mixture of compassionate and domineering motives. But even so—even though compassion can coexist with the will to dominate—the will to
dominate is not itself what compassion is about. Whatever else compassion is, it is a concern for suffering and vulnerable people that regards
their well-being as an end. So I disagree with Brintnall when he says that compassion is often about mastery and domination.∂ Just as I think
that relations that involve instrumentalization and the subject-object distinction come in good and bad varieties, so also I think that ecstatic
relations come in good and bad varieties. I learned this from Bataille, in fact, and this is an important insight that he has to make against
philosophers who unambiguously valorize unitive mystical experiences. Human sacrifice, for Bataille, is a non-instrumentalizing relationship
(Bataille 1991, 45–61). One takes the slave or captive who could otherwise be a productive economic unit and slaughters him. The ecstatic loss
of self can occur just as well in a frenzy of violent destruction— murder, torture, rape, and the like—as it can in solitary meditation or
consensual sex. The wolf does not regard its prey as an object discontinuous with itself (Bataille 1989, 17–25). So too for the human: it is not
necessarily the case that in ecstasy one opens to and encounters others in a symmetric and reciprocal relationship. One can ecstatically
subordinate the other to oneself or be subordinated to the other.∂ To see this, we need to explore the relation between sadism and inner
experience more fully. I am not sure that Brintnall is right that sadism transpires exclusively in the realm of project. Of course, it depends on
what exactly we mean by sadism, and we could turn to various sources to delineate the term: common parlance, a literary analysis of Sade’s
writings, psychoanalytic theory, and S/M practices, for example, would give us different conceptions of the idea. Bataille at one point described
sadism as involving “the desire to hurt and to kill” (Bataille 1986, 183). These desires are not quite the same as the attempt or desire to master
and control (one could conceivably exercise mastery and control without inflicting pain or killing), so it
is not clear to me that the
desire to hurt and kill requires or presupposes a sense of self versus object or of self-aggrandizement. Indeed, the
orgiastic frenzies of which Bataille so often wrote consist simultaneously of violent assault and the ecstatic loss of self, such as when the
maenads devour their children (Bataille 1986, 113). Of course what is most important to me about this is not, at the end of the day, whether
the right label for such actions and passions is sadism, but that we reject any perspective that does not give us sufficient ethical resources to
condemn such actions and counteract such passions.∂ So for me instrumentalization and non-instrumentalization do not fall on different sides
of the moral dividing line. Rather, the line cuts through both categories. I will turn now to the final thing I want to say, and that is that Brintnall’s
response to my essay tends to present things as though there are only two relevant options: actions that strive to master and control, and the
inaction of Bataillean ecstasy. He worries that “intervention in the world on behalf of the other” too readily occurs as “mastery of the world.”
However, attempts to influence a situation are not necessarily attempts to master or control it . For example, I
might try to persuade my child of the choice I think is best for him, but forego means beyond persuasion and set myself to respect his decision
whatever it turns out to be, whereas a desire to master or control him might resort to humiliation or coercion when persuasion fails. Influence
without mastery involves a proper sense of the limits of its efforts, and it more readily acknowledges failure than mastery does. Influence
without mastery involves a respect for the other that refuses both non-intervention and domination.∂ There is then a third way
between apathetic disengagement and mastery, and in fact, some of the theologians who challenge and inspire me the most
are in search of practices that exemplify this third way. Sarah Coakley, for example, advocates a form of vulnerability that she explicitly
contrasts to a desire to control. Coakley is especially relevant to the present conversation because her vision of vulnerability is rooted in
practices of contemplation and meditation, and also because she shares with Brintnall’s Ecce Homo an opposition to domineering masculinism.
The vulnerability Coakley finds in
contemplation is opposed to the will to dominate, but not to the will to
influence one’s society and contest injustice: she sees a virtue in “prophetic resistance” and enjoins her readers to “meet the
ambiguous forms of ‘worldly’ power in a new dimension, neither decrying them in se nor being enslaved to them, but rather facing, embracing,
resisting or deflecting them with discernment” (Coakley 2002, xviii, 38). Coakley’s meditative practices have a connection to the ethical life, but
they do not stand on their own as supreme authorities. They are teleological in nature, and so susceptible to criticism by the various authorities
in the Christian tradition (which are themselves susceptible to criticism). To be sure, Coakley is a minority perspective in the Christian tradition,
which has been and still is domineering and cruel all too often, as Brintnall rightly notes. But she gives an example of an option between
apathetic disengagement and mastery, and she does so with resources to differentiate between cruelty and kindness and to articulate a
preference for one over the other.

Conservative Takeover
The alternative’s anti-humanist cynicism is passionate for the most regressive features
of modern conservatism, locking out any possibility of goodwill care or political
reform.
Preparata ‘8:
Guido Giacomo Preparata, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, in The Catholic Social Science Review, in 2008 ["Un(for)giving: Bataille, Derrida and the Postmodern Denial of the Gift",
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276856447_Unforgiving_Bataille_Derrida_and_the_Postmodern_Denial_of_the_Gift, 3-21-2019] AR

Again, we ask, what could possibly be the benefit in denying a priori that love, in fact, may be the principle that will eventually win the contest
of endurance versus indifference and/or hatred? Shorn of its philosophical pretensions, the argument of Bataille (and Derrida) is not much
more than sullen proverbializing on the immutable mediocrity of our modern soul: a soul incapable of great deeds, and forever bent on the
sycophantic acquisition of cumulative perks. The Liberals would demur, naturally: Self-interest might not be glorious, they’d say, but it remains
nevertheless the sole propellant to riches, and hence, by way of philanthropic trickle-down, to the tempered “happiness” of the collectivity.
Riches, the postmodern Batailleans would rejoin, cannot be a vehicle to satisfaction if their owners are not given the sovereign privilege to blast
them with splendor. To “blast” anything, the Liberals would insist, is, at best, a savvy PR stunt (i.e., a perfectly legitimate business proposition),
or, at worst, something “irrational.” Which reply goes to confirm the thesis of the Batailleans: that the benevolent gift, truly, does not exist, for
neither of its two contemporary expressions— as taxes to the bureaucracy and as the charity of foundations—is driven by a disinterested love
for fellow human beings. As charity, emoluments are granted in keeping with the donors’ wishes, and as taxes, the given funds are involuntary
transfers that fatten an administrative elite on the one hand, and spur wars on the other. In a modern regime, the accursed share thus re-
emerges as the semi-unintended effect of fiscal collection. In any case, the Batailleans would argue, the modern policies of gifting, be they
publicly or privately inspired, make a sonorous mockery of our professed adhesion to the “universal” values of brotherly union, civility,
goodwill, and “human rights.” And to that, the Liberals would respond in the end with a polite, semi-uncooperative (and interested) silence.∂
Which is to say that the Liberals, who
hold the reins of power, have understood that they might benefit by
making room for the Bataillean postmoderns in the proprietary area of academic debate. The benefit consists in co-
opting what presents itself as the adversarial faction—postmodernism fashions itself as the true beacon of the dissenting
Left—by identifying common positions and beliefs. These beliefs must be leveraged to keep at bay alternative ways of thinking. In
this instance, Liberalism and Bataillean anti-humanism appear united by their common hostility to a
jurisprudential reform seeking to enact anonymous, that is, free gifting. The former seems to fear that such a reform would disable the
tenure of business, and the latter sees it as a potential threat to their more or less unavowed espousal of misanthropic nihilism.∂ This
convergence of interests would also contribute to explaining the otherwise bizarre triumph in America of thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida.
Both, and especially the former, were tributaries of Bataille. Their successful launch in the United States is all the more curious as it coincided
with their passing out of vogue in their own country (at the beginning of the eighties) (Macey, 1993, 430). What is captivating, as mentioned in
the introduction, is that most Foucauldians and Derrideans, of whom there are presently legions in American academia, are not fully conversant
with the work of Bataille, and therefore tend to dismiss the essential connection of these latter-day pundits to the baroque and truculent
estheticism of the master. Without bringing to light the Bataillean imprint, we contend that the true pedagogy of these French postmodern
gurus may not be fully discernible. In truth, both Foucault and Derrida had no sympathy for the catch-all label of postmodernism, though in
America both came to be irremediably associated with it. Postmodernism, as known, has become, in the past twenty-five years, a byword for
academia’s protean brew of skepticism, relativism, jocose literary criticism, and anti-colonial invective. Postmodernism’s pièce de résistance is,
or course, Foucault’s Power/Knowledge, which is a peculiar distortion of Bataille’s theory of the “core.” Power/Knowledge provided a clever
discursive structure with which to articulate, without any attempt to solve it, racial difference in American society.4 Power/knowledge came to
freeze such a difference, so to speak. Similar political aims seem to lurk behind Derrida’s re-issue of Bataille’s ontological denial of the gift, or
the related theme of the impossibility of forgiveness, which also appears to be inspired by Bataille’s meditations on the powerful suggestions of
the Christian myth (Bataille, 1970, VIII, 31). The
objective of these philosophical pieces is to intimate and persuade the
reader that “goodness” is an Apollonian illusion. Because the anti-humanists, like the majority of Liberals, are convinced that
humans are at bottom egotists, if not altogether malevolent, they believe it their mission to disabuse us of any wishful
idealism. This kind of intimation indisputably betokens conservative intent: “whatever is is right”—no
need to fix it. Because men give only to get something back, say the Batailleans, gifting, and the kind-hearted
suggestion it carries, is an absurdity. Likewise with forgiveness: if I forgive a tort, says Derrida, it is because the affront suffered
thereby is ultimately tolerable. As such it did not truly require of me any extraordinarily selfless and magnanimous stretch: in fact, I pardoned
nothing. Therefore there can be no forgiving: what is “unforgivable” is by definition beyond our powers of sentimental absorption. In
conclusion, as averred by another Bataillean postmodern such as Jean Baudrillard, we humans are perfect the way we are: dispensers of
merriment and dispensers of sorrow all rolled into one (Baudrillard, 2004, 117). This, the Batailleans sentence, is the “principle of evil,” and it
is the natural state of affairs with which we must always reckon. In this regard, the postmodern outlook is compatible, if not
perfectly identical with the practical cynicism preached by the modern school of Liberal political economy.

Extinction Outweighs
Extinction still comes first—Bataille’s infinite transgression is only possible through life
—even he concedes this
Lawtoo ‘6:
Nidesh Lawtoo, Department of Comparative Literature University of Washington, LINGUA ROMANA, 2006 ["Bataille and the Suspension of Being", http://linguaromana.byu.edu/2016/06/06/bataille-and-the-suspension-of-being/,
3-10-2019] AWS

Bataille's notion of communication involves a dialectic with two positives (hence a non-dialectic) where two sovereigns confront death not in view of an end but as an end in itself:

"confronting death," in fact, "puts the subjects at stake-"l'être en eux-mêmes [est] mis en jeu" (Sur Nietzsche 61). Further, Bataille affirms that "[p]ersonne n'est-un
instant-souverain qui ne se perde" (OC VIII 429). It is the Nietzschean self-forgetfulness that is here evoked; a self-forgetfulness which implies a transgression

of the limits of both communicating subjects. Again, for Bataille "[l]a 'communication' n'a lieu qu'entre deux êtres mis en jeu-déchirés, suspendus, l'un et l'autre penchés au-
dessus de leur néant" (Sur Nietzsche 62). However, if according to Nietzsche, self-forgetfulness takes place in solitude, for Bataille it necessitates the

presence of an "other."(5) Communication in fact, asks for "deux êtres mis en jeu" who participate in what he defines as "une fête immotivée" (Sur Nietzsche 31). There the
sovereign loses himself (se perde) with the other, through the other, in the other, in a process of "mutual laceration" (Essential 105) which is simultaneously tragic and ludic. The emphasis on
the other is Hegelian, but unlike dialectics, communication does not confront the subject with an object (Gegen-stand, something that stands against the subject). As Bataille puts it (apparently
echoing Baudelaire), communication takes place with "un semblable," "mon frère" (OC VIII 289). And he adds: "Cela suppose la communication de sujet à sujet" (OC VIII 288). Bataille's notion

transgressing the limits of the subject implies

of communication is not based upon a "violent hierarchy" (Derrida's term) but rather upon egalitarianism. Moreover,

that the two subjects already possess (in potential) the characteristics of sovereignty. Hence, the status of sovereign is not achieved as a result of a fight
to the death, but requires the subject to be open to an other who is outside the limits of the self. Derrida speaks of the "trembling" to which Bataille submits Hegelian concepts (253). This
trembling, I would argue, has its source in Nietzsche (6): "The figs fall from the trees" says Zarathustra, "they are good and sweet, and when they fall, their red skins are rent. A north wind am I
unto ripe figs" (qtd. in Philosophy 135). If we apply this passage to Bataille's philosophy, we could say that inherent in this "fall" is an explosion of Hegelian concepts, and in particular, as we
have seen, the notion of Herrshaft. Further, communication, for Bataille, involves a similar "fall" which rents (déchire) the skin of the subjects (their limits) exposing the red flesh which lies
beneath the skin. According to the French philosopher, Nietzsche's critique of the subject is more radical than Hegel's, since, as he puts it in "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice," Hegel's philosophy,
and I would add Kojève's interpretation of it, is "une théologie, où l'homme aurait pris la place de Dieu" (OC XII 329). Hegel's "theology" preserves the identity of the subject. Now, Bataille
makes his position to this "theology" clear as he writes: "I don't believe in God-from the inability to believe in self" (Essential 10). By establishing a direct link between the death of the subject
and the death of God, Bataille extends his critique of "beings" into the larger, ontological, critique of "Being." Implicit in this theoretical move is the articulation of the ontology of sovereignty.
Bataille's philosophy is Nietzschean insofar as it is grounded in experience and in the immanence of the body. Communication, for Bataille is first and foremost a bodily affair. Hence the
interrogation of the limits of the subject starts from an interrogation of what we could call the "gates," or openings of the body: the mouth, the vagina, the anus and the eyes are for Bataille
central places for philosophical investigation because at these gates, the integrity of the subject is questioned; its limits can be transgressed. They are spaces of transition where a "glissement
hors de soi" (OC VIII 246) can take place. These bodily openings, which Bataille also defines as "blessures," (Sur Nietzsche 64) found his conception of the sovereign subject. In fact, each
"blessure" can be linked to a specific dimension of communication which obsesses Bataille. His central themes match different bodily openings: the mouth connects to laughter; the vagina to
eroticism; the eyes to tears; the anus to the excrements which he links to death. Through these openings the subject is traversed by different fluxes and its integrity, totality and stability is
challenged. They allow for the possibility of a glissement of the subject's being. The same could be said of Bataille's corpus: it is a unitary entity, which, like a body, escapes the totalizing
temptation of closure. Despite the fact that Bataille defines sovereignty in terms of the Kojèvian/Hegelian "nothingness" (Bataille's Rien), his conception of communication is built upon the
Nietzschean ontological distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In fact, the ontological movement that takes place in communication "exige que l'on glisse" (OC VI 158) from an
"insufficient" and "discontinuous" being to a reality of "continuity" that transcends binary oppositions (Erotism 13-14). To put it more simply, communication introduces a movement from the
"many" to the "One"; from a "discontinuity of being" to a "continuity of being;" from separate "beings" to a common ontological ground ("Being"). The source of Bataille's ontology is clear: it
stems from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy which in turn, is construed upon Schopenhauer's distinction between will and representation. "As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging
sea," writes Schopenhauer," surrounded on all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of torment,

trusting to the principium individuationis" (Birth 21) .(7) Communication, for Bataille, as the Dionysian for Nietzsche, involves the shattering of the principium individuationis, a tearing down of
the veil of Maya which constitutes, what Bataille calls, with a blink of the eye to Schopenhauer, the "illusion of a being which is isolated" (Essential 10; my emphasis). Communication, thus,
involves an opening of the subject to the larger ground of Being. The sovereign's boat is constantly leaking. Yet, in order for communication to take place, the boat needs to keep floating. That

is to say that for transgression to take place, the limits of the subject need to be preserved (Erotism 63; Foucault 34). The being of the
sovereign subject is suspended upon the abîme-what Bataille also calls "une realité plus vaste" (OC II 246)-which means that the subject neither dwells safely within the limits of the "small,

insufficient boat" of individuation, nor within the depth of the undifferentiated "raging sea," but in the space of contact in-between the two spheres. This precision is key in order to delineate

the originality of Bataille's ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's conception of the communicating subject (i.e., of sovereignty) walks a thin line between its self-dissolution and its self-
preservation. Hence the idea that he is above all a thinker of limits or borders. The sovereign's being, in fact, is "suspended" on the "bord de l'abîme" (Coupable V 355) but never actually falls,
except, of course, in death. Hence, for Bataille, "[i]l s'agit d'approcher la mort" [it is approaching death] that is to say, the abîme, or the continuity of being, "d'aussi près qu'on peut l'endurer"

The sovereign subject confronts death while preserving his life. His being is placed at the
[as close as one can endure] (337-338).

border between life and death. Hence, if Bataille defines philosophy as "existence striving to reach its limits" (Essential 146), it should be specified that the being of
the subject is not found beyond its limits, as his use of "existence" seems to suggest (Ek-sistenz) since that would imply a total

dissolution of the subject. Bataille's philosophy of transgression implies the preservation of the limits of the subject so
that the sovereign can experience and endure death in life. The tension between self-expenditure (Nietzsche's Verschwendung) and self-preservation
(linked to Hegel's Anerkennung) is analogous to the movement of a moth that is first attracted by the fire of a candle and subsequently distances itself from the fire in order to preserve its life.
(8) This repeated back and forth movement recapitulates the movement of communication and is responsible for the underlying tension which traverses Bataille's philosophy. It is an inner
(bodily) drive that attracts the moth to death and not, as it is the case for Hegel's master, a reasoned project in view of an end (recognition). The moth's self-sacrifice, in fact, is perfectly useless
(it serves no purpose) and hence is truly sovereign. Bataille would call it "une négativité sans emploi." Or, as he says with respect to eroticism in his first and last interview before he died, "it is
purely squandering, an expenditure of energy for itself" (in Essential 220). This movement forwards, towards the flame of self-dissolution (which takes place in death, eroticism, laughter…) and
its retreat backwards, towards life and the limits it involves, epitomizes Bataille's notion of communication. A practice which for Bataille seems to have the characteristic of a fort-da game in
which the subject is not in control of the movement. This movement, Bataille writes in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, happens "malgré nous" (III 11). Thus conceived the sovereign accepts
the place of a toy in the hands of a child playing-a definition similar to Heraclitus' vision of life, which he defines as "a child at play, moving pieces in a game (Fragment 52, in GM 149). This view
of communication is both tragic and joyful; violent and useless. A joyful tragedy, which challenges the limits of the subject; that puts the subject's being en jeu. If Bataille is deeply fascinated by
death, decay and the dissolution of the subject in a continuity of being, he escapes the temptation to embrace death at the expense of life. His definition of eroticism sums up this fundamental

tension: "Eroticism," he writes, "is assenting to life up to the point of death" (Erotism11). This applies not only to eroticism but also to all communicating activities such as laughter, play, tears,
and ultimately to the ethos that sustains the totality of Bataille's philosophy. If Kojève defines dialectics as a "negating-negativity" (5), Bataille's communication can be read as an affirmative

negativity. In fact, death is confronted and even invoked, but what is found in death is the ultimate affirmation of life.
Negation of
the integrity (the limits) of the subject leads to a radical affirmation of life. And if in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, Bataille can affirme "l'identité de l'être et de la mort" (OC III 10), let us

also note that the identity of being and death is realized in life. Faithful to Nietzsche, Bataille does not become a negator of the will; a negator of life; a
pessimist, a Buddhist or worse, a nihilist (some of the derogatory terms used by Nietzsche to retrospectively define his first and last master). Bataille remains truthful to life. While the
ontological premises grounding sovereignty are taken from Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche), Bataille's conclusions are diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's first master. In fact, Bataille's
philosophy can be seen as an affirmation of the will (he operates an inversion of values) through Dionysian practices (included sexuality which Schopenhauer condemned) that put the subject
in touch with the ultimate ground of being, without dissolving him/her in it.

Future Okay
Engaging affirmative action with an (eye) toward the future is essential to authentic
existence. The flip side of Bataille’s philosophy is flagrant irresponsibility that shirks all
engagement with the world.
Biles ‘7:
Jeremy Biles, Professor of religion, philosophy, and art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in Fordham University Press, in 2007 ["Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form " pg 63-64,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt13x01g9, 3-20-2019] AR

Following the publication in 1943 of Bataille's book Inner experience, Bataille and Jean-Paul Sartre engage in a brief but mordant polemical volley in which Sartre
accuses Bataille of being "a new mystic." As a term of derision, "mystic' here connotes for Sartre a person who has disengaged himself from life, retreating from the
crucial choices that ensure an authentic human existence. Bataille's
pursuit of a "rapturous escape from the self" amounts to
cowardice, flagrant irresponsibility - a failure to exercise the free involvement with the world that
defines authenticity. 141 He accuses Bataille of escaping engagement, evading meaningful action. 142 Though Sartre does not explicitly
rely on Nietzsche in formulating his philosophical response to Bataille's mystical raptures, Sartre does pressuppose a certain reading of Nietzsche, his "Great
predecessor" 143 - for Nietzsche emblematizes what Sartre refers to as authenticity, the antithesis of "bad faith." Drawing from the German philosopher's emphasis
on free will and overcoming, Sartre formulates his brand of existentialist philosophy around a humanistic vision in which choice (the
free act of the
will) allows a person to live authentically - that is, with an eye to future possibilities. Nietzsche's philosophy becomes a
"call for man to choose his own life, to take responsibility for it." 144 According to Sartre, existence is absurd unless humans engage in
projects through which they project themselves into the future. It is this telically oriented life that Bataille seeks to
challenge. 145

Perm
Perm do both: transgressive intellectualism abandons compassionate responsibility –
only wordly engagement can read Bataille without falling into a trap of sadism.
Tauchert ‘8:
Ashley Tauchert, Senior Lecturer in the School of English @ Exeter University, in Critical Quarterly, in 2008 ["Preface Against Transgression: Bataillean ‘Transgression’ and its colonization of contemporary critical thought",
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1467-8705.2008.00020.x, 3-22-2019] AR
The intellectual engagement with questions of the final truth of human consciousness initiated by Bataille has been subsequently
reified into a commodified critical desire to identify with the anguished and transgressive itself; a desire that
has come to operate an unconscious fascination for academic thought, all the more compulsive as it is unconscious. By
making the conditions of this thought conscious we can face it and decide what is to be done with it.
Unconsciously motivated thought cannot be socially responsible thought, and we would do well to
remember our responsibilities to each other and to the younger generation of thinkers. So this is also a book about power, the power of
thought, and the power to generate and direct thought. The final concern of this work is to begin a process of understanding how it is that academic theorists can
be so excited by transgressive thoughts, but dismayed by the effects of transgression in the social world.33 It
is all very well and good to celebrate
Bataille’s condensed image of the exorbitated eye: quite another thing to have one’s own eyes
exorbitated. If this sounds naîve I am happy for it to be so, since to turn away from the fascinated, morbid play of critical
transgression is finally to turn towards a conscious innocence that might just be more powerful in the end.

Transgression Oppressive
Transgression through limitless expediture is built on oppressive gender dynamics.
The subject of limitless expediture is inescapably masculine—in order to give up on
rational subjectivity one must possess it first.
Judith Surkis, History @ Harvard, Diacritics, 1996 [“No Fun and Games Until Someone Loses an Eye:
Transgression and Masculinity in Bataille and Foucault” 26 (2) p. 19-20,
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1566294?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents accessed 04-09-2021] mre
In his attempt to lose himself (rupture his own philosophical and discursive limits) in Bataille, Foucault both appropriates and repositions Bataille's theory of
transgression, effacing the gendered dynamic that I think structures Bataille's concept, an exclusion upon which, I will argue, Foucault's own project of self-loss
relies. Moreover, an
examination of the gendering of transgression might throw its very viability into question.
In order to sketch this complex play of positions, I will begin with Bataille's own model of eroticism. The
vision of erotic transgression set forth in
Erotism concentrates on the experience of the "discontinuous subject" in his attempt to transgress the
limits of individual existence by leaping or falling into the realm of continuity or limitless being in order
to access the zone of death.' For Bataille this experience of continuity should not be confused with absolute and final death; he stresses that
"continuity is what we are after, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run"
[18-19]. The experience of death in eroticism is, by definition, always only proximate- simultaneously rupturing
and maintaining the limits of individual existence. Bataille insists: "At all costs we need to transcend [limits], but we should like to
transcend them and maintain them simultaneously" [141]. The transgressive experience is thus organized and produced by
the imposition of a limit always existing in relation to it, even and especially at the moment of its rupture. The
sensation of transgression is conditioned by a cognizance of the taboo and is, as a result, fundamentally
"duplicitous," performing "a reconciliation of what seems impossible to reconcile, respect for the law
and violation of the law . [36]. Transgression thus heightens or creates an awareness of the law. As Bataille
writes: "If we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it. But in the act of violating it we feel the anguish of mind without which the
taboo could not exist. That experience leads to the completed transgression which, in maintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit by it [pour
enjouir]" [38; OC 42]. Since the pleasures or jouissance of eroticism are intimately related to the injunctions that prohibit them, the subject must always be aware of
the existence of the law in order to experience limitless being in the moment of transgression; he must be sensitive "to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less
great than the desire which leads him to infringe it" [38-39]. This is the fundamental structure of Bataille's transgression, and, as
Carolyn Dean has argued, this paradoxical dynamic is integral to his understanding of the subject. Because his self-
loss actually makes him aware of the law, it is "lived as the constituent moment of self- hood" [242; see also Hollier]. However, Dean
questions the universal applicability of a subjectivity founded by its own dissolution. She argues that it presumes a "masculine" subject who
initially possesses a position or self to transgress or lose. Dean suggests that, for Bataille, the reconciliation of
"manhood" and castration are constitutive of his notion of the "virile" rather than incompatible with it.
In effect, the "wholeness" of Bataille's virile man is, as she writes, "paradoxically linked to an experience of
transgressing limits rather than of containment within boundaries that would demarcate his being." If this
virility is repeatedly produced in and by self-dissolution of a masculine subject, Dean wonders where "women figure in this scheme of
things" [244-45]. Upon reading Erotism, we find that images of women's self-loss are prominent in Bataille's theory of
erotic transgression; they are instrumental to the enactment of masculine self-loss .