1AC – Combustion Society

Combustion Module
 V1
Modern society is built upon a planet of fire. The human impulse to encase the
explosive exothermics of combustion in “manageable” containers has
foundationally altered the methods by which discipline is enacted. American
military identity is thus thermopolitical – ceaselessly accumulating and directing
fire into bullets, pistons, and jets whilst selling the products of our
accumulation along international trade networks to attain geopolitical
dominance.
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page 3-4|KZaidi
Nonetheless these new circumstances have been slow to penetrate into the formulations of some key contemporary geopolitical
cultures, notably the more conservative political forces in the Anglosphere. Gerard Toal suggests that geopolitical culture
“is how states see the world, how they spatialise it and strategize about the fundamental
tasks of the state: security, moderniza- tion, the self–preservation of identity.”16 Suggesting that
there is no objective relationship between a territorial entity and its geopolitical culture he goes on to argue that foundational
myths and ideological frameworks shape how states interpret their resource endowments.
Ideological power networks tend to generate cultural and civilizational discourses. Economic power
networks tend to be the supports for modernization and accu- mulation. Security power
structures organize around perceived threats to the state and can use insecurity and
instability to entrench their power and position within the state. Together these networks
generate civilizational (identity), modernization (accumulation), and state security (defense)
forms of geopolitical thinking. Geopolitical cultures tend to feature competing visions that combine
elements of each. Which one predominates and drives state foreign policy is the subject of
struggles and entrepreneurship in the political arena.17 Coherence between these multiple elements is
frequently lacking. In the case of United States foreign policy relating to energy and climate security
there is often a fundamental divide between those who focus on fuel supply and the
geopolitical flexibility that domestic supplies supposedly provide as key to state security, and
those worried about climate change.18 The latter view the relentless fracking and petroleum extraction across North America as
part of the problem of climate change and a mode of accumulation that needs to be tackled rather than a policy to be supported.
Questions of the possible loss of cultural artefacts that express personal and collective identity also motivate dissent from climate
change initiatives. While no government is ‘coming to take away your SUV’, fears that climate regulations will have such effects are a
significant part of contemporary politics and drive dissent- ing views about the need for climate mitigation actions.19
Combustion is the geophysical process that has facilitated the transforma- tion of much of the
terrestrial surface by humanity and in the process pushed the parameters of the earth system
into a new geological epoch. Combustion is driving climate change and extinction directly ,20 and
indirectly by causing ecosystem disruption and habitat loss. The recent history and very obviously
the future of geopolitics are shaped by these pyrotechnics – a matter of ‘firepower’ quite
literally. The rich and powerful parts of humanity are not only, as classical geopolitics suggests, struggling for
dominance in a partly anarchical arrangement of states, but are simultaneously reshaping the arena of that contest
while arguing over the rules by which the system of rivalry will be governed. That this is in fact
what is happening is rejected by many so-called climate change deniers, and most notably recently by the Trump
administration in the United States, which articulates its vision of the future in terms of a very
simplistic geopolitical framework of competing nation states, domestic virtue and foreign
dangers. This simultaneously implies a stable geographical con- text for state rivalries and an
‘ideology of isolation’ wherein people and states are understood as autonomous separate
actors with little responsibility for the fate of others.21 The intense political opposition to climate change
initiatives in the United States in particular, but also in other parts of the Anglosphere, notably in Canada and Australia, is partly
driven by the short term economic interests of coal and petroleum sectors. But, as will be elucidated further later in this paper,
climate change ‘deniers’ also frequently articulate ‘conservative’ cultural
themes that emphasise competition,
struggles for dominance and status tied to technological artefacts, notably ‘firearms’ and
petroleum powered vehicles. These often encompass colonising tropes, of wilderness and danger
in need of conquest, pacification and where that fails, violent policing to deter threats.22 In the
Canadian case during the years when Stephen Harper was prime minister these themes were explicitly articulated in
terms of Canada as an energy superpower, coupled with the suppression of government
scientific discussion of environmental topics and rhetoric of support for military solu- tions to
external political problems in the Middle East in particular .23 Australian politics has mirrored
many of these themes in the last decade too, and in particular themes of the hostility to refugees
and migrants fleeing violence in Asia and Africa and antipathy to serious climate change action.24 But, climate change makes it clear
that this framework is anachronistic, and in so far as it provides the contextualisation that is used to shape crucial policy decisions, is
likely to aggravate the pace of environmental change rather than ameliorate coming disruptions. Unless, that is, one simply refuses
to accept this contextualisation of rapid change and dismisses scientific formulations of environmental phenomena as a distraction
from the suppo- sedly much more pressing issues of national security focused on geopolitical competition and the threat of violence
ever present in the international arena. Thus, the politics of climate denial connects up with larger matters of geopolitical culture
and with policy actions on international agreements to tackle, or not, climate change. At the heart of this issue is the contested view
of combustion as either a source of national power and cultural accomplishment in the competition for great power status, or as a
fundamental threat to future environmental stabilities necessary for civilised life in a crowded biosphere. Sharply con- trasting
geopolitical assumptions shape these competing views of geography and security. Key to both is the matter quite literally of
‘firepower’. While the early parts of human history are crucial to understanding the bases of what is now understood in terms of
political ecology, theprocesses whereby human economies appropriate resources and remake
landscapes, they need to be extended to more recent history to link the theme of the processes
of combustion to the rivalries of states and empires and the search for dominance in human
affairs. The histories of technologies of warfare and urbanisation are tied into this story with the use
of fire both as an ecological transformation device and a weapon of warfare. The increasing control of
combustion and its reworking in engineering and warfare have driven the processes of
geopolitics, and shaped the rise of the West and the subsequent global spread of these
pyrotechnics, a key part of both the subjugation of conquered peoples and the rivalries of
empires that created the global capitalist economy. All of which is in part the story of the recent parts of the Anthropocene, how in William Ruddiman’s formulation, humans
took control of the climate.25 Fire had been a crucial dimension of natural history long before humanity made its appearance. It shaped plant and animal distributions, and used life’s products as its fuel. Hence it has been a key factor in ecosystem function in many
places.26 Once domesticated by early hominids, this process has been increasingly used by humanity in ever larger and more sophisticated ways. These activities have suggested to some ecologists that the domestication of fire marks the beginning of large-scale
human change and hence an era best termed the early Anthropocene or perhaps the Paleoanthropocene.27 Landscape change, and in some cases the use of fire as an aid in hunting, are key parts of the megafauna destruction that has marked the emergence of
humanity. As our niche has expanded other species have been rendered extinct at an increasingly rapid rate recently, one with a cumulative extinc- tion impact analogous to the consequences of major volcanic or asteroid events of the geologic past. Accounts of the
rise of cities, agriculture and the spread of humanity are frequently told in terms of civilisations and technology.28 Not only weapons and agricultural implements and the practical matters of using fires for heating in cool climates, but also crucially coins are usually
made at least partly of metal components and the processes of smelting require controlling fire to generate heat to melt ores. This process frequently involved using charcoal, a processes of firing too, that changes wood into more useful fuel for intense use. The
Roman innovations with concrete added another important dimension to this, ‘remaking stone’, for more long-lasting exten- sive and robust building construction. Once again controlling fire is a key part of the processes of remaking other substances to shape the
human context directly and much else indirectly. Concrete is now a new part of planetary geology, and as such part of what makes the case for the Anthropocene designation.29 In terms of large scale climate change however it is important to remem- ber the
distinction between fire in terrestrial ecosystems, where plants grow and reabsorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and those in ecosystems that don’t recover as is sometimes the case in deliberate deforestation, and the emissions from fossil fuels where
geological reservoirs of carbon are burnt, literally turning rocks into air in the processes of combustion.30 Obviously human actions are involved in all of these, but the long-term climate change effects of burning biomass, deforestation and fossil fuel combustion are
rather different. Likewise, not all fire is ecologically ‘bad’.31 Fire suppression, in forestry management practices in particular, which prevents the natural combustion of accumulated biomass debris, and the regeneration of landscapes, may actually reduce
biodiversity, and hence make them more vulnerable to climate change. Fire is a crucial part of the earth system, a process that has numerous consequences, but which is dependent on conditions of fuel availability, context and a source of ignition.32 As such it
matters greatly that a single species, humanity, has taken partial control over its use and done so both by rearranging fuel’s geography and supplying new forms of ignition to supple- ment those caused by lightning and volcanoes.33 The expansion of the extractive
processes to supply the global economy with numerous commod- ities, notably in the headlines these days, palm oil from plantations in Indonesia, likewise involves fire to clear landscapes and eradicate forests. Habitat destruction continues apace in many places;
it’s the landscape change wrought by the processes of economic expansion that simultaneously dis- places people and ecosystems and drives the extinction of many species. Wild fire for land clearing is complemented by combustion in chain saws and bulldozers
used to hasten habitat transformation. The extensive use in terms of fire for agricultural land clearing and in the form of fires for domestic heating and smelting metals has been complemen- ted by more ‘intensive’ forms of combustion in the form of gunpowder,
and in the industrial revolution powering boilers in steam engines and later for electricity generation. Other energy sources including timber and peat were also in use during the rise of European capitalism and the related expansion of colonial modes of resource
extraction that have so shaped landscapes around the world in the last few centuries. Canal systems used complicated systems of locks, and moved barges without the use of fossil fuels prior to the introduction of mostly coal- powered steam engines. Sailing ships
were in use throughout the nineteenth century only gradually being replaced by ‘steam- ships’. Windmills and waterwheels provided industrial power in numerous places before being gradually replaced by steam engines; they are once again doing so increasingly as
wind turbines and water wheels in the form of hydroelectric generation spread. But, the nineteenth century and the twen- tieth were most profoundly shaped by the expansion of fossil fuelled based industry and then modes of extensive consumption with all the
consequences this has had for both the global economy and geopolitical rivalries. Promethian Technics The key technical change in the industrial revolution was the expansion of the use of fossil fuels, which when coupled with engineering innovations and the initial
rudimentary steam engines, allowed more flexible use of first pumps and then other industrial processes. Ironically many of the early steam engines were used for pumping water out of mines, coal mines in particular, to allow deeper digging and more extensive
access to fossil energy. This in turn drove the manufacturing innovations in Britain first, and then elsewhere. Most recently fire has been moved inside engineered spaces in the various forms of internal combustion and jet engines that have so accelerated
modernity’s mobility. In the form of chainsaws these devices have greatly speeded global deforestation. Such engines have also facilitated the large-scale changes of marine ecosystems too, both directly in powering fishing boats which can now harvest much of the
oceanic biomass, and indirectly as a result of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels causing sea water acidification, oxygen depletion and ocean warming. Humanity is now mak- ing carbon dioxide at prodigious rates, which the very tentative efforts to
attenuate in the Paris Agreement of 2015 and various smaller scale initiatives, have, at least so far, not substantially constrained. Crucially, Stephen Pyne suggests we need to attend to the human geogra- phy of fire, and the processes of landscape change that are
involved with the ‘pyric transition’, in his terms.34 This is a process of increasingly directed uses of combustion, and a move from extensive use of fire to intensive use, from wildfire to engineered combustion processes, and the precise use of fire to power our
technologies, not least, somewhat ironically, the ‘fire engines’ that we now use to try to control wild fire. People cause fires, and do so for all sorts of practical matters of heating, cooking, land clearing and more recently for industrial and transportation purposes. As
industrialisation has spread worldwide combustion has broadly speaking changed from open biomass burning to contained fossil fuel use; the case of Indonesia just being an extreme case of forest clearing prior to the dominance of internal combustion taking over in
the economy of that country.35 Many combustion processes involve explicitly geographical strategies to enhance human power over both ‘nature’ and other humans. People move fuel so it is burned in particular places that are useful whether in incinerators,
bonfires, or in stoves, boilers and engines. Domestic living arrangements frequently inhabit architectures that focus sociability round a ‘fireplace’. Home is intimately connected to hearth; cooking an essential material pro- cess that is simultaneously key to most
human cultures. Controlled burning is immensely useful for disposing of waste, and bodies too, in processes of cremation. Attempts to stop dangerous fires from burning buildings, fields, forests and infrastructure are mostly exercises in geographical containment
prior to extinguishment. Humanity’s transformation of the contexts of fire, controlling both its ignition and its supplies of fuel is key both to the immediate uses of fire to power various technologies, as well as to the large-scale transformation of the current earth
system.36 Fire thus now follows human activity quite directly in burning landscapes for agricultural and resource extraction activities.37 Indirectly anthropogenic activity in numerous activities, and landscape trans- formation in particular, is also changing the
flammability and the sources of supply of fuel for combustion. Attempts to suppress wildfires as part of park management arrangements and in situations where housing and economic infrastructures are built in natural fire zones have transformed ecosystem
behaviour and, as severe mega-fires in recent years have shown, frequently made combustion more intense when it does occur. Crucially the rise in the use of fossil fuels marks a novel stage in planetary history at the global scale; evolution is being reorganised
dramatically, and industrial forces are indirectly and sometimes directly determining which species thrive and which are threatened with eradication. The use of combus- tion by humanity marks a crucial transition in planetary history: Until that Promethean moment,
fire history had remained a subset of natural history, particularly of climate history. Now, notch by notch, fire gradually ratcheted into a new era in which natural history, including climate, would become subsets of fire history. In a sense, the rhythms of
anthropogenic fire began to replace the Milankovitch climate cycles which had governed the coming and going of ice ages.38 Fire is now changing things at a global scale, mostly by the combustion of fossil fuels, reversing the long-term sequestration of atmospheric
carbon dioxide in the earth, and in the process accelerating climate change and in many places making fires more extreme due to drying and heating processes. The irony of a huge wild fire threatening the petroleum extraction infra- structure of the Tar Sands in

Fire has also long been a weapon

Alberta in May 2016 exemplifies the importance of combustion in linking human and natural transformations in the pro- cesses of climate change. Pyrotechnical Geopolitics

of war, used on battlefields and in sieges in numerous ways . Once rapid combustion in the form of
gunpowder and other explosives were perfected they shaped the conduct of warfare
profoundly, both directly because of their capabilities for destruction and indirectly in setting projectiles in motion. The command to
use these weapons is of course the word ‘fire’. While most of the ever-greater precision of these
combustion technologies, from rockets, to muskets and cannons to rifled artillery to guided
missiles extended the range and accuracy of weapons it is also important to note that
incendiaries to start wild fires have long been part of warfare. Attempts to use aerial bombing
to initiate ‘firestorms’ to burn German and Japanese cities came to their apotheosis in the use
of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.39 The secondary effects of nuclear devices
in causing numerous ignitions are part of their destructive capabilities. Discussion of nuclear war in the 1980s
focused partly on this by thinking through how rapid onset climate change might result from atmospheric pollution caused by burning cities in the after-
math of an American-Soviet conflict.40 Technologies matter in terms of military capabilities , but they don’t
determine events nor require politicians to act in particular ways, even if they do shape the
options. Much of eighteenth and early nineteenth century discussions of resource supplies for the British
military related to access to forests where suitable timber for naval construction was to be had; access to the
Baltic mattered crucially in British Naval strategy, and when access was interrupted in the Napoleonic wars sources in
North America had to be used which dramatically changed patterns of trade across the
Atlantic.41 All this changed again when ‘ironclads’ powered by steam engines gradually replaced
wooden sailing ships in the nineteenth century. Steam engines provided propulsion not
dependent on winds and steel construction meant that timber reserves for naval construction
ceased to be a matter of geostrategy. While replacing sail with steam allowed ships to move regardless of wind
patterns, they became dependent on coal supplies instead. With that went the need for a system of
coaling stations where fleets could be refuelled. Without such access navies were powerless. The saga of the
Russian Baltic fleet trying to secure coal supplies when it was sent to the Pacific in hopes of relieving the besieged Port Arthur, but
ending in catastrophic defeat in the Tsushima strait during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, highlighted the logistical difficul- ties
of supplying coal-powered ships. In the British case in particular technology
and fuel supply had dramatic
geopolitical consequences. In the early years of the twentieth century the Royal Navy decided to change
from coal power to petroleum powered vessels despite the fact that Britain had excellent coal
supplies, especially in the Welsh coalfields, but little petroleum. The supplies to be had in Persia were a great distance
from the home base of the Navy and widespread alarm at the obvious supply vulnerabilities that would result was part of the
discussion. But, as Winston Churchill, a key player in the British admiralty in this period, put the matter subsequently in his inimical
prose: The oil supplies of the world were in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign control. To commit the navy irrevocably to oil
was indeed to take arms against a sea of troubles... . If we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be able to
raise the whole power and efficiency of the navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more
intense forms of war power—in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture.42 The involvement
of the British in
petroleum extraction in Persia, and subsequent involvement across the Gulf set the scene for
twentieth century geopolitics in the region.43 The Royal Navy’s fuel supplies were a key con-
sideration in World War Two’s grand strategy although American sources, not Asian ones, were an important part
of the allied war effort. Likewise after the failure to capture the Caucasus oil fields in 1942, German
petroleum shortages constrained the mobility of their forces especially in the latter stages of
the war, even if much of the Wehrmacht still relied on trains and horses for most of its logistics.
In the Pacific Japanese access to petroleum supplies in the face of American sanctions in 1941 were a key part of the calculus for
going to war in attempts to assure supplies from the Dutch held East Indies in particular. The
destructive power of
petroleum fuelled industrialised war making suggests that perhaps the Thanatocene (after
Thanatos, the personification of death in Greek mythology) might be an appropriate term for the present too .44
War and ecocide are directly related; scorched earth policies and environmental modification ,
epitomised by American attempts to defoliate Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, are part of
landscape change and habitat destruction as war strategy. The extraordinary expansion of American
industrial production during the Second World War set in motion the capabilities to produce
vast quantities of weapons, vehicles, ships and aircraft all powered by petroleum. This
infrastructure subsequently formed the basis of mass consumption societies. Petroleum supplies have
been crucial to modern military operations since the Second World War; contemporary war
machines still run on gasoline and jet fuel. Given their key role in quite literally keeping both the global
economy and military machines mov- ing, petroleum supplies are a matter intimately involved
in state decision- making as well as corporate strategies worldwide. That said, the pattern of
warfare in the Middle East in recent years has never been just about securing access to the supplies
for international markets; the story is much more complicated.45 Nonetheless petroleum supplies to the global economy
that originate there remain a major theme in twenty-first century geopolitics; resource supplies and the threats of
their interruption now involve the Straits of Hormuz more than the Kattegat . The converse was true
two centuries ago. Strategy related to access to resources remains a major theme in geopolitics, but
the relevant geographies shift as the resources needed for military technology change along
with the larger patterns of resource extraction in the global economy. 46 Major American
warships, aircraft carriers and submarines in particular, use nuclear propulsion in part to avoid
the logistical complications of such fuel supplies; but the point about strategy and resources remains important in
considerations of contemporary geopolitics. This is accentuated in contemporary American strategic
thinking that explicitly discusses the need to prepare battlefields, and take actions to preempt
potential threats, to literally attempt to ‘shape the future’, matters that John Morrissey argues have
long been part of imperial practice.47 These discussions of geopolitics, security and climate change extend this
argument into anticipating likely conflicts, as well as identifying facilities threatened in particular by rising sea levels.48 The US
military has added solar powered units to many bases to reduce vulnerabilities to supply
disruptions of diesel and other petroleum fuels . At the global scale the discussion of geoengineering
explicitly ponders the future configuration of the planetary system and in whose interests the
planetary thermostat will be adjusted and with what potential geopolitical consequences.49

Nonetheless, the problem that the military industrial complex now faces is the
problem with modern society: what does one do when confronted with an
excess of fire? The classification of weapons via. Direct Commercial and Foreign
Military Sales ensures that arms transfers remain within a restricted economy
of exchange – one that fears the prospect of scarcity and thus strives to achieve
a stockpile of arms by moderating our output. This presence of excess
thermopolitical power creates the conditions for militarism.
Pawlett 15. William, senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton. “Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society.” (September 9, 2015) ipartman

Life is excessive, explosive. It exceeds limits and boundaries: plants must be cut back, animals tamed, energy
harnessed, but still excess breaks through and life over-shoots the goals or ends imposed on it. For Bataille, solar radiation – the
immense prodigality of the sun – is the ultimate source of an inexhaustible excess. The accursed share is the portion of
energy that cannot be managed, directed or exhausted. The fundamental, general economic question is not
how do we conserve energy, but how is energy to be consumed? How do we prevent its dangerous overaccumulation, the curse of
excess energy? General
economy as theoretical and methodological position seeks to confront the accursed
share, the unutilisable excesses that threaten all systems. General economy takes up a perspective from
beyond or outside the separate disciplines of academic study, a position that has engaged with and gone beyond them. Yet, though
disciplinary limits are trans- gressed by Bataille, they are never annihilated, ignored or eliminated. Indeed, limits enable the general
economy of ‘freedom of thought’, thought which will push further and further in a fearless manner, and which is able to go so far
precisely because it draws upon all available disciplinary knowledge without being confined by it. Bataille immediately notes the
apparent contradiction in the approach he adopts in this study. The Accursed Share is a methodical, even ‘cold’, analysis of society
and politics; his study accumulates historical facts and produces useful knowledge, yet Bataille’s thesis is that production and utility
corrode existence, that accumulation is illusory or ‘only a delay’ before the inevitable moment of squandering. Hence The Accursed
Share is a book ‘the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 11). Yet, perhaps
most ambitiously of all, Bataille concludes his preface by insisting that the unfettered freedom of thought offered by general
economy can generate ‘political proposals’, even a ‘solution’ (Baitalle 1991, p. 431, n. 2) to avert the catastrophe of a World War III
and of nuclear holocaust. The academic discipline of economics is deeply inadequate to the task of averting
catastrophe because in it economy is ‘studied as if it were a matter of an isolatable system of
operations’ (Bataille, 1988a, 19). General economy insists upon interrelations and interdependence which extend from the
microscopic to the cosmological levels. Economics, as restricted economy, studies the exploitation of resources, but it does
not enquire into the nature of these resources in any detail: ‘Shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be
considered in terms of the modifica- tions it receives from its surroundings . . . isn’t there a need to study the system of human
production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 20) For Bataille, material resources – wood, coal,
atoms, machinery, and human beings too – are caught up in the general economy of excess, expenditure and death. Matter
is
not simply energetic; it is ‘cursed’ by an explosive excess. It is not simply that all things, objects and materials
possess an excess or accursed share. Rather, excess cannot be contained by the definition and circumscription of life into objects,
things and materials – these are artificial and ide- alised constructs. The energy of the accursed share precedes the level of things
since the constitution of ‘things’ already presupposes the control, channelling, utilization of energy, and the expulsion of
unmanageable excess. Hence from a general economic perspective, there is no growth, only squandering – as Bataille asserts in the
opening epigraph to this chapter. Production,
development and accumulation are merely ‘ideal’ ends
imposed by restrictive economics upon general economy . If we restrict our perspective of living beings to
separate, particular beings – an individual, a tree, a village – these entities can be understood in terms of necessity and scarcity. Yet
the notions of necessity and scarcity are a function of the restricted perspective which denies the
dynamism and volatility of matter, its boiling up both within and between beings, in their relations of attraction and
repulsion. In the human realm, dynamic relations between beings are generated by non-productive
expenditure, through giving, reciprocating or through violence. Further, human beings are ‘privileged’ in
their ability to experience glorious or sacrificial expenditure, to partake of the movement of excess in festivity, in sacrificial religion
and in eroticism. Human beings then have the ability to choose the modes or forms of sacrificial expenditure ‘that might suit us. . . .
For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot
be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price for the inevitable explosion’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 24). So there
is a fundamental ‘political’ question to be consid-ered: how should we expend the excess energies accumulated by modern
societies? What should become of the wealth, power, riches, technolo-gies they develop? No society, ancient or modern, has
found an adequate means to expend without diverting excess energy and wealth into war.
Today, as Bataille notes, war – that is the external channelling of violence against designated others – has grown in scale
and its destructive capacity threatens to extinguish all human life. For Bataille, then, it is vital to
revolutionise economic, political and ethical thought simultane- ously. War can no longer provide a way for
societies to expend excess wealth and energy. Where can excesses be channelled? The answer for Bataille is that
growth should be immediately ‘subordinated to giving’; commodities should be surrendered without return (Bataille, 1988a, p. 25).
Bataille clearly understood excess American wealth, technology and superpower as a major threat to the
human race and the biosphere, and he gave qualified support to the Marshall Plan , an aid package
designed to assist European economies after World War II. This political, or even ‘ethical’, dimension to Bataille’s notion of the
accursed share has, surprisingly, not been examined in detail by com- mentaries on Bataille’s work. Many gloss over it (Land, 1992),
or assume it is unworkable or contradictory (Bennington in Bailey-Gill, 1995; Noys, 2000; Gasché, 2012). An exception is Stoekl
(1990; 2007) whose application of general economy to contemporary society and ecology is discussed in the concluding chapter.
VOLUME ONE: CONSUMPTION Volume one elaborates Bataille’s laws of general economy, which he understood as linking all of his
major themes, assertions and obsessions. As I noted earlier, the assertion that there are ‘laws’ of general economy has been seen as
a major weakness in Bataille’s thought, yet there is lit- tle doubt that Bataille considered the notion of the accursed share to be
capable of scientific validation, or at least that the exact sciences encoun- tered its effects in a palpable way. In his introduction to
this work, he states: The living organism . . . ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically. (Bataille, 1988a, p. 21) All life exists in excess; it generally has at its command more energy, more ‘life force’, than is
needed for simple subsistence or survival. The accumulation of energy by an organism (biological or social, natural or cultural)
cannot continue indefinitely; there must come a point or limit where energy is expended or consumed. The accursed share (la part
mau- dite) of energy is the excess that cannot be expended usefully, the portion that overflows what is required for survival,
maintenance or growth. The accursed share, Bataille insists, can only be squandered or con- sumed unprofitably. For example, in
human societies vast amounts of wealth and energy are squandered in festivity, in sacrifices, in play, in art, in eroticism and in
drunkenness. Further, at the moment of death the energy that comprised and maintained life is, itself, squandered, lost without
profit. Death, or mortality, then can be regarded as ‘evidence’ of the operation of the accursed share in the general economy of life
and death. In contrast, what Bataille terms restricted economy confines itself to narrowly circumscribed areas or objects, and seeks
to exert control, to exploit, to profit from these objects. Academic disciplines including sociology, biology and economics can be seen
as restricted economies in that they seek to ‘profit’ by accumulating information and knowl- edge. Restricted economies
typically refuse
to acknowledge their limits, their losses and their useless expenditures of energy. Further, restricted
economies achieve some semblance of order and control by expelling unmanageable objects,
zones and experiences – foreign bodies – or by assimilating them through a rubric which is quite
alien to them. For example, sociology has largely expelled sacrifice and the violence of the sacred (once major topics of
concern, see Mauss & Hubert, 1964; Nisbet, 1966) or has assimilated them under the notion of ‘culture’. Culture is an inappropriate
term because it is utilised to contain explosive, conta- gious human practices within what is now a label for ‘safe’, inventoried, even
ossified values – such as might be found in a school textbook or a Wikipedia entry. Bataille’s own examples of such exclusions
include the dangerous notion of infinity banished from philosophy and the expulsion of zero from mathematics. It could be argued
that ‘Bataille’ is a hetero- logical object, tending to be expelled from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, economics and
cultural studies or, at best, partially assimilated through inappropriate and simplistic umbrella concepts or labels such as dissident
surrealist, philosopher of eroticism or pornographic novelist. It has been argued by some of Bataille’s critics that activities involv- ing
the squander of energies are actually socially ‘useful’. This is because such activities provide rest, enjoyment or recreation, so
enabling people to return to work rejuvenated. Even death can be seen as a making way for younger and more vital beings to renew
the species. This is indeed the case, but it misses the point. First, even from the perspective of restricted economies (such as
sociology, economics, religious studies) it must be admitted that social festivities and expenditures include actions and experiences
which surpass or exceed social usefulness. For example, the destruction of resources, the flaring of violence and the consumption of
large and disabling quantities of alcohol do not necessarily ‘rejuvenate’: they may prevent a return to work, or may even cause
fatalities. Nor can such excesses be dismissed as peripheral or accidental; indeed, such excessiveness is very widely understood as
intrinsic or even obligatory to festivity: if people behaved sensibly and responsibly it simply would not be a festival. Second, if we
shift the perspective in the direction of general economy, it appears that work, production and utility are endured only because they
provide the resources destined for expenditure, squan- der or sacrifice. We would not work if work did not enable us to expend, to
squander what we accumulate. Labour, production and growth cannot be unlimited; there must be limits or boundaries which
provide for the experience of release. It is important to note that Bataille does not simply champion excess over utility, or sacrifice
above production, that is, he does not simply invert the values of rationalist, utilitarian thought. For Bataille, the sys- tem of
production could not function without its periodic suspension, nor could wealth be expended sacrificially if it were not first
accumulated. Further, the
demarcation between the two spheres – sacred and profane, sacrificial and
economic, heterogeneous and homogeneous – is vital for society because the marking of limits
enables transgressive experience (such as festivity) to take place, as well as drawing the
boundaries that construct and protect order. Without such limits there is neither order nor disorder. Restricted
economies and the knowledge they generate are absolutely vital and indispensable for society and for thought. Yet, restricted
economies cannot function without erecting limits and boundaries, and there will always be excesses and indeterminacies
permeating these boundar- ies in any particular system. Indeed, the erection of a boundary or limit itself generates an ‘excess’
beyond that limit. Restricted economies ‘work’ only by drawing , selectively and discretely upon their
‘outside’ – the realm of general economy – and by simultaneously denying that they border an irreducible ‘outside’. The
restricted economies of academic disciplines are generally happy to admit that they have limits, of a fuzzy sort, but assume that
beyond ‘their’ limit another academic discipline picks up the baton. For example, sociology may defer to psychology and to biology
where the functioning of the individual psyche or of the body are concerned. In concert, academic disciplines purport to offer a
seam- less and limitless coverage of human experience. Bataille’s contention is that there are inherent and irreducible excesses,
excesses which must be expelled as a precondition for the scientific enterprise to begin. Science is, for Bataille, restricted by its
underlying foundation in utility – ultimately in the profane realm – so that all sciences must accumulate knowledge that is of use to
society. The accursed share, that which cannot be reduced to the utilitarian project of scientific thought, is manifest in paradox,
anomaly and in the failure to erect meaningful rather than simply useful foundations for knowledge. Further, for Bataille, the
subjective or inner experiences of the thinker – his or her experiences of wonder, inspiration, mystery, despair and ecstasy – are
experiences that can never be formalised as scientific knowledge, yet they are the source from which all scientific knowledge is
generated: the pre- or non-foundations of the scientific enterprise. At the level of thought or enquiry, general economic thinking
affirms and confronts the accursed share, where restricted economies deny it or avoid confronting its manifestations. The
implications of the accursed share become increasingly complex and problematic when we consider human groups and societies. In
support of his law of general economy, Bataille outlines a social anthropology of archaic societies which, he argues, made the
expenditure of excess energy and wealth their fundamental dynamic through festivals, feasts and sac-rificial rites (Bataille, 1988a,
pp. 45–77). Bataille’s argument is that by expending excess in collective, ritual practices which suspend everyday, productive
existence, excess energy can bind beings and communities: the accursed share is devoted to glory and sumptuary activities and so
social life is enriched. In contrast, modern societies have, by and large, lost the capacity for glorious, communal expenditures
because wealth is expropriated and ‘owned’ by elites for their individual and private pleasure. Bataille, drawing on Mauss (1990,
originally published 1924–1925), examines the potlatch ceremonies of the American northwest indigenous peoples, such as the
Tlingit and Kwakiutl, through the notion of general economy. These cultures were, traditionally, very rich,
generating large surpluses from hunting, fishing and producing ornate copper workings, such as
plates used in ritual exchange. The tribes possess what Mauss (1990) terms ‘a dual structure’, meaning that they disperse
to hunt and gather food during the warmer months, accumulating the wealth that is ‘lavishly expended’ during the collective
festivities of the winter. Mauss, famously, depicts some potlatch ceremonies as ‘radical’ and violent: Consumption and
destruction of goods really go beyond all bounds. In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has,
keep- ing nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the mostly madly extravagant. Everything is based upon
the principles of antagonism and rivalry . . . [i]n a certain number of cases, it
is not even a question of giving and
returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gifts to be
reciprocated. (Mauss, 1990, p. 37) Within some potlatches at least, there is a violent struggle for hon-our. Giving potlatches is
the only way a chief can preserve his honour or rank within the tribe, and this must be periodically reaffirmed or it is lost forever,
Mauss suggests. Bataille also emphasises the excessive- ness of the squandering of resources, seeing the potlatch as a sacrifice of
wealth. The objects given, circulated or squandered in the potlatch are not mere ‘commodities’, not isolated or separated ‘things’.
The objects circulated in potlatch – gifts, jewels, dances, ornaments – are part of the sacred world. A portion of them is considered a
gift to the ances- tors; another portion grows and develops through the acts of giving and receiving, new tales or myths are added to
it so that the value increases inestimably. As both Mauss and Bataille emphasise, something of this sense of the ‘spirit’ or life of the
gift is retained in modern gift-giving ceremonies such as birthdays and Christmas. This suggests that liberal capitalist notions of
abstract or profane monetary exchange derive from a much richer ‘total’ or general economic system of exchanges. The notion of
barter, of exchanges in terms of approximate use or exchange value, is revealed as nothing more than capitalism’s self-generated
myth of origin: the notion of barter as organising economic principle cannot be found in any traditional society. A second important
point emerges from Bataille’s discussion of potlatch. Those who are able to humiliate or ‘crush’ others by offering gifts so great that
they cannot be reciprocated are conferred rank or prestige. However, this
notion of rank does not correspond to
modern notions of power; rank is sacred rather than profane, as the etymology of the word
hierarchy makes clear. Rank demands heedless, selfless courage and exu- berance; it demands an ‘explosion’ of force, or it
will diminish. The chief must protect his people without the slightest regard for his own safety or survival – and this, Bataille
suggests, sheds light on the fact that vio- lence, particularly skill in combat, is so widely regarded as honourable. This leads us to a
third point on which Bataille has been misunder- stood. It is wrong to accuse Bataille of a ‘romantic’ or sentimental view of the
‘noble savage’. Not only does Bataille emphasise the violence of life in traditional societies, but he is also clear that the sacred is
always compromised and exploited by the powerful. We must not be tempted to return to the past, he argues. Instead, the future
promises a full and universal prodigality and luxury beyond the confines enforced by priest- hoods, monarchies and armies. Indeed:
The true luxury and real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty- stricken . . . the individual who refuses work and makes his life on
the one hand an infinitely ruined splendour, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond
a military
exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can
rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness it heralds, unless it is in the splendour of
rags and the sombre challenge of indifference. (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77) The meaning of wealth and exchange in
capitalist societies is deter- mined by the lies of the rich and powerful, yet their containment and expropriation ‘destines life’s
exuberance to revolt’ (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77). In capitalist modernity, the ‘law’ of general economy is also the principle of
revolutionary overthrow. Bataille examines ancient Aztec society, understanding their culture as devoted to expenditure. Aztec
society, for Bataille, was in fundamen- tal contradiction to Western notions of production, accumulation and profit. The Aztecs
constructed pyramids on the summit of which Aztec priests sacrificed prisoners of war, tearing out their hearts, presenting the still
beating organ to the sun and then decapitating victims whose heads would roll down the sides of the pyramid. Bataille is quite
emphatic: ‘From the standpoint of profit the pyramid is a monumental mistake’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 119). Its construction is
immensely costly in terms of time and materials, and it serves no use from the perspective of restricted economy: the labour that
could have been extracted from the prisoners of war is squandered in a moment of horror and excess. It is sometimes suggested
that the Aztecs suffered food shortages and resorted to human sacrifice and cannibalism to ‘solve’ this shortage, but, though
portions of the bodies of victims were eaten by priests and elite warriors, this was in no way an ‘economical’ way of feeding the
people. Bataille expands on the many expenditures of wealth required for Aztec sacrificial ritual: a carefully chosen victim was
accorded a divine status, given great wealth and property, and then, months later, sacrificed to the sun (pp. 45–61). Such victims,
according to Bataille, actually embodied or temporarily became the accursed share. Their sacrificial religion enabled Aztec society to
ritually expend the wealth generated by their productive activities and military campaigns, and so achieve a degree of internal social
equilibrium. However, equi- librium, for any system or form of life, is only a temporary state. The accursed share cannot be negated,
transcended or resolved: sacrifices must continue. In Aztec society there were up to 20,000 victims per year (Bataille, 1988a, p. 51;
see also Vaillant, 1950). Given this fact, what pos- sible social or political lesson does Bataille draw from the Aztec example? For
Bataille, ‘pure, uncalculated violence’ is morally preferable to ‘The reasoned organisation of war
and conquest’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 54). Violence is, for Bataille, an inevitable and ineradicable dimension
of human existence: the only alternatives are between the forms of the manifestation of violence. On one hand, the sacred
and its unleashing, for Bataille, is the realm of pure and uncalculated violence. Religion, on the other hand, is a ‘subterfuge’,
a staging or dramatisation of extreme violence within social boundaries , in contrast to war which is a
destructive realisation of extreme violence beyond territorial boundaries. Where a society stages sacrificial ritual ,
violence remains within the group’s social boundaries . For Bataille, sacred or sacrificial violence
sunders the degrading order of work and duration; it establishes communication between
chosen members of the community and their divinities and ‘save[s] the rest from the mortal
danger of contagion . . . the community is saved from ruination’ (p. 59). The scope of violence then is limited by giving it a
localised space for its terrifying and spectacular dramatisation. Further, Bataille insists, the sacrificial victim should be
none other than the sovereign, the ruler upon whom is conferred a divine status and immense fortune precisely because
they accept, unreservedly, a sacrificial destiny. Though informed by prestigious ethnographic and folkloric studies, a significant
problem in Bataille’s argument is that such forms of sacrificial kingship seem to have been ‘compromised’ by substitute (or sym-
bolic) sacrificial victims even in archaic social formations. That is to say, the sovereign would be replaced by a substitute sacrificial
victim, and so the sovereign would be sacrificed ‘symbolically’, rather than actually being killed. Further, it might seem that this
internal consumption of violence is meaningful only within relatively small, tribal societies. From this point of view, while Bataille’s
contentions are legitimate as an extrapolation of the meaning of sacrifice from the work of Durkheim (1995, originally pub- lished in
1912), Mauss and Hubert (1964, originally published in 1898) and Georges Dumézil (1988, originally published in 1948), they have
also been criticised as bordering on romanticism (Habermas, 1987; Nehamas, 1989). Yet Bataille’s argument is more sophisticated
and nuanced that his critics allow. If
sacrifice is primarily an internal form of violence (inter- nal to a clan,
community or society) then war and conquest involve the directing of a portion of this violence onto
external enemies. This exter- nal channelling is, for Bataille, morally repugnant because it involves a deferral, accumulation
and rationalisation of the unleashing of violence. Violence breaks free from its ritual limits and accelerates beyond con- tainment,
becoming far more destructive. While violence still breaks the profane routines of society, it does so for
the allegedly ‘rational’ purpose of accumulating wealth or territory – that is for growth. Clearly,
externalised and rationalised violence involves far larger numbers of victims than does sacrifice .
Standing armies are developed. Warfare, throughout modernity, has increasingly affected non-
combatants. No member of society is, in any sense, protected from violence – indeed, all are made vulnerable with the
emergence of ‘total war’ and the threat of nuclear holocaust in the twentieth century. Crucially, the deferral and channel-
ling of violence also opens up the space for the hypocrisies of ideology and propaganda which attempt to
further rationalise the directing of violence onto external enemies by depicting enemies as lower, inferior or inhuman. For Bataille,
the social and epistemological conditions for racial hatred and ethnic violence are set up only through
the externalisations of violent excesses that are characteristic of modernity. We might say that a
religious social system is more honest (or rather less dishonest) about its violence than a ‘rational’, ideologically managed social
system. Finally, the
acquisitive and exploitative drive for continual growth generates new and
unforeseen manifestations of the accursed share, new outlets for the catastrophic squandering
of resources that cannot be contained within ritual or any other limits. The channelling of the
accursed share into military, colonial and ideological violence does not make these societies
more stable; it does not protect or shelter its people at the expense of others, but actually
condemns society to serial conflict, to an endless circulation of violence, a violence ‘set free
on all sides’ (Bataille, 1989a, p. 85). If sacrificing 20,000 people per year is a monstrous aberration, is the ‘sacrifice’ of
thousands of road users and pedestrians killed and injured in accidents across all developed nations any less monstrous? The major
difference seems to be only that the deaths caused by traffic accidents are absolutely meaningless, whereas the deaths in Aztec
sacrificial rites were charged with meaning.Bataille acknowledges that tendencies towards the externalisation of violence were
present, if inchoate, in Aztec society even at the time of the earliest ethnographic accounts. Yet clearly, sacrificial violence was the
central social dynamic. Bataille recounts how prisoners of war, taken by the Aztecs and destined for sacrifice, were made ‘insiders’
by being treated well, adorned and sometimes given concubines, enjoying a life of privilege for up to a year before their immolation.
Of course, Bataille does not contend that such victims were thereby willing, and he frequently notes that the powerful within even
small-scale or archaic ‘collective’ cultures used religion to control and abuse their people (Bataille, 1988, p. 60). Aztec ritual, at the
time of the Spanish invasion, was a degraded, ‘compromised’ form of sacrificial kingship, yet it is still able to illustrate a profound
moral difference from the conditions of modern societies. In stark contrast to Aztec society, the European industrial revolution made
possible an immense growth in wealth and energy during the nine- teenth century, and there was relative peace in Europe between
1815 and 1914. Isn’t this clear evidence of the economic and moral superiority of Western, industrialised cultures? For Bataille, this
growth of wealth and prosperity was, in fact, accompanied by a terrible impoverishment in the conditions of life, especially for the
working classes. Further, the excess energy generated by industrial production was, in time, turned to
catastrophically violent ends: ‘the two world wars organised the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings – that
history has recorded’ (p. 37). The development and accumulation of resources such as armies, machine
guns, tanks and war planes channelled growth into catastrophe as millions of lives were
annihilated on a scale previously unimaginable. In other words, growth as simple profit or unlimited
accumulation can never continue for long – rather growth, left unchecked, will generate new,
uncontrollable and catastrophic expenditures. The horrors of the trenches and the death camps, and of nuclear
devastation, mas- sively exceed and disable any possible sense of the ‘good’, of benefits or ‘profits’ – even figuratively such as
lessons learned by humankind. By contrast, the violence of the potlatch was largely symbolic (scant consolation for the slaves who
were sacrificed) and even Aztec society at the height of its sacrificial fervour never practised ‘sacrifice’ on the scale of
Passchendaele, Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Afghanistan. Indeed, Aztec violence was strictly limited to feast days, military expeditions
and festivals. Applying Bataille’s perspective, such limits allow, activate and contain the expression of the accursed share. We might
sum up this argument by simply saying that if the sacrificial violence of the Aztecs, Tlingit and Kwakiutl was terrifying, the violence
unleashed by modernity is far, far worse. Zizek (1996) suggests that if excess finds a use – in, for example, festivity, gift giving,
eroticism – then there is, in fact, no economy of excess. But this assertion can be reversed. If use, production and growth are only
temporary effects, and are ultimately destined for loss, then there is no restricted economy: there is only excess. However, Bataille’s
thought does not submit to such oppositions. There is no pure restricted econ- omy and no pure general economy; there is only
movement, circulation, alternation, duality, limits and their transgression. Bataille acknowledges that through religious sacrifices and
festivities, priests and rulers hope for some ‘supernatural efficacy’ – but this leads us directly to the dual- ity of the sacred. Sacrifices
are ‘useful on that plane [the supernatural] precisely insofar as they are gratuitous, insofar as they are needless con- sumptions of
resources first and foremost’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 120). For Bataille, the emergence of capitalist economy proper in the seventeenth
century, closely associated with the Protestant asceticism examined by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, actually ‘destroyed the sacred
world, the world of non-productive expenditure, and handed the earth over to the men of production, to the bourgeois’ (p. 127).
Protestantism and capitalism together complete the long process of the separation of the human and the divine, and attempt the
elimination of the sacred. This theme is re-examined in Chapter 7. Bataille concludes volume one with a fascinating discussion of
the Marshall Plan (or European Recovery Program) which, between 1948 and 1951, managed the donation
of around 17 billion US dol- lars to war-shattered European economies. This massive exercise in
state-planned aid enabled European economies to relax austerity and rationing measures, yet it
also provided vast new markets for the sale of American consumer goods. Bataille understands
the Marshall Plan as a form of gift exchange or potlatch, and he broadly approves of it. Fearing that the vast
growth of the American economy, and its mistrust and loathing of the Soviet Union, could only lead to armed conflict between these
superpowers, Bataille proposes that the excess wealth of America be ‘devoted to non-lethal works’ (1988a, p. 172). Bataille supports
the Marshall Plan for several reasons. First, it promised to operate on the general, collective or global level of interdependence, so
breaking with the rampant individualism associated with capitalist economy. Second, the
Marshall Plan relinquished the
profit motive, at least temporarily. Yet, just as important for Bataille, the plan was likely to achieve something
beyond the imagination of those who for- mulated it : to enable a ‘non-lethal’ potlatch-like competition between
the Soviet Union and the West, maintaining them in a ‘dynamic peace’ rather than allowing a situation where one or the other
becomes abso- lutely dominant and so accumulates wealth and power to a degree that threatens the globe. Forty years after
Bataille published The Accursed Share the Soviet Union collapsed, and the former Soviet states adopted market capital- ism. Yet,
even as the Soviet Union and the West seemed most divergent, during the Cold War, they were also converging. It became obvious,
in the West, that free-market economics cannot survive without State assistance and international
aid to prop up its banking system and the wider economy as they lurch from boom to bust. Nor can capitalist societies
survive without rituals of squandering, its managed or administered excesses of consumer spending based on credit
and, also, its thirst for the vicarious enjoyment of excessive violence, horror and death serviced by its entertainment industries. It
would be a mistake to present Bataille’s observations on the Marshall Plan as an entirely prescient or even ‘correct’ analysis of the
politics of the post-war period; he seemed to envisage the Soviet Union becoming more powerful that the United States in a
relatively short space of time, such that it would fall to the Soviet Union to relinquish its excess wealth by helping poorer countries.
But Bataille does not claim predictive power for his notion of general economy; rather, he shifts the level of analysis, suggesting that
America and the Soviet Union are caught up in a potlatch, whether they understand this or not. Indeed the ‘space race’ and Olympic
competition are two examples of prestige wars, potlatch or ‘non-lethal’ competition that did occur during the Cold War. Bataille
also recognises that the Marshall Plan’s ‘renunciation of the growth of productive forces’ is made
in order to achieve a longer term ‘utilization’ of wealth which serves American commercial
interests (1988a, pp. 182–183). However, if the Marshall Plan could prevent a third world war and/or the emergence of a single
totalitarian superpower, either capitalist or communist, the risks were outweighed by the benefits to the globe or ‘biomass’. There is
a significant shift here in what we can label for convenience Bataille’s politics. In The Accursed Share, Bataille seeks peaceful
evolution rather than the bloody street uprisings he envisaged in the mid-1930s. Bataille opposes nuclear disarmament as
unrealistic, and in the dynamic peace he hoped for, the Soviet Union and the United States would converge politically, in that the
latter would adopt some measure of social democratic state planning. The two blocs would provide a degree of tension for each
other which would not reach armed conflict but would prevent either finally dominating the other. The
domination of a
single power, Bataille insists, would be the worst out- come: the dominating force would lose any
critical self-consciousness, it would ‘fall asleep’, producing a slumber which presented ‘more
reason than ever to be afraid’ (p. 188). The collapse of the Soviet Union, and of communism generally, has placed the
world in grave danger: the rulers of Western states have, indeed, lost any critical self-awareness and
pro- nounce free market capitalism to be the only viable system. All limits are denied or
eliminated in the capitalist fantasy of perpetual growth. Indeed, capitalism recognises
neither limits nor excesses, and so must always increase levels of exploitation, of people, resources and the planet, as it
accelerates towards catastrophe.
In this world of timeless utility war becomes an inevitable feature of liberal
politics – a futile but nonetheless bounded attempt to deify state power
through the over-accumulation and stockpiling of arms so as to indoctrinate its
subjects within a purely rationalist understanding of the world sans difference.
The question of this debate, however, is not how we can “solve” war – even
that question takes utility as its nexus. Instead, we must dwell within the
acephalic – an orgiastic festival of unproductive expenditure which is the
condition of possibility for heartfelt communities beyond the bounds of
militarism.
Hamblet’05 |Wendy C. Hamblet is a philosopher, author, philosophical counselor, and consultant. She
has completed a two year term as Executive Director of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace and is an
activist-scholar in the Transcend Network of Conflict Transformation Professionals. “The Manic Ecstasy of
War”, in Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice (2005) Taylor & Francis, Inc. DOI:
10.1080/14631370500292052|KZaidi

Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with the dawn of tyranny and oppression. War,
one of the oldest human institutions, has
proven invaluable to states in establishing their power over
subgroups within the system, as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to
permit their expansion in space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little
mystery to the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing
popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the
dignity of human beings, remains baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered
by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war
composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of
the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the population’s martial
enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of
self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless
splurge of the nation’s human and economic wealth for no better reason than wanton
celebration of state power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille.
His philosophy explains two principles of expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by
utilitarian goals serving current power relations, and that of nonproductive expenditure—that
is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the two dialectical
opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures. The first model aspires to
perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is
monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state becomes self-identified as
a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and customs fixed and imperative.
People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual lives that offer escape from
the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunkenness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures,
self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The monocephalic state, on
the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form
that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos,
madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy provides a valuable framework for analyzing global realities, even in the modern
world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all states
seek timeless stability, secured against time with absolute truth claims, infallible social codes,
and enduring legislation. States are duly secured by the legalized violence of police and military
that appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately suppress all transformation.
Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations—passports, licenses, identity cards, forms
completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration regulations, police interrogations,
surveillance of social and financial transactions among subgroups, security checkpoints,
departments of homeland security—weed out the deviant lifeforms until ultimately all
countervoices have been silenced, all rebellion quite obliterated, all evolutionary movement
logically contradictory. But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state
increasingly closes itself off, it stifles social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the
passion from its citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to
mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly
deified, all labors have become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating
stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most excessive extrapolation— fascism.
Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and move forward into futures. This most solid
state holds firm for a short while only; then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up
and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty
flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles
describe the movement of history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that
ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing
the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually
recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic
structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the
deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals , for Bataille, move between the two contradictory
forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an
imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s
analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests
that war composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a
breakout from mundane servitude. We may not readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms
that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is unquestionably
undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen —Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced
that fascist urges fade with global democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order
and security of the first world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean
between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron
of golden rules. But the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-
order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common
arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one
head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an
embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and
morally superior to acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in
the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid, unyielding—is
preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics.
Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects
as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a theater of cruelty and death
that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the
philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by
lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s
treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the
simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those
very states naming themselves the most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in
the civilized modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within
industrialized, rationalist, rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and
utility. The violence that floods the globe in modernity , that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global
freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires, the projects of
monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern
world: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of
fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons] . . . . [M]an
[lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce
men of modernity—gods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control
to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the products of molten metal torn
from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents
the desperate obstinacy
of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost
somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of
modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good
of their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in
heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the
rigorous projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free
from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them
from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic drives will out
and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern
industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending
character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern wars can be
explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of modern ordered states and from people’s
imprisonment within the merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should provide a
wondrous release from mundane servitude. War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic
omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity
occur with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their suppressed lust for a
sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian reasons of state. This
resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained
wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For
Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped all political bounds
and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an
era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—
but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific
revolution that provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass
production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system)
that have been successfully harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The
goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally
in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of
the primal urges of a community toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based
on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to
make the living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it
must compose orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s
finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves
mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses
its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the
oldest traditions of our species. It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states.
Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of com- munication between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multi-
functional institution. . . . It is extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial
functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is
a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates, ultimately, in fascist
stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is utterly necessary to the
deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the
creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the
citizens and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves
the collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values,
virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems,
tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its
strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in
fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an
inter-national stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even
the most oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly
character—the valor, the selfless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in
the tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the
advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization— today’s wars clearly bring too massive a
booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have increasingly
become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists and accountants
and big busi- nessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern
techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism of
the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars
serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object (the nation)
massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their
corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the
sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective
delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength
and in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collec- tive illusion is
fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed;
the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good war. But for all the benefits served by the
institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse
homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on
parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. Ultimately the
greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its
stark utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the
purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build
heartfelt communities, a need that can only be served by expressing the collective aggressive
energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by
armed force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the
great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force
its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military
prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic urges
that explains a state’s return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution. It
may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its
service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in dispensing its most
fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel needs of the people,
their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts
this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The
sacred values of community—life, freedom,
festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxtaposition to their
opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately,
insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If
Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are utterly
utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.
Plan – the United States federal government should remove all Direct
Commercial and Foreign Military Sales.
Land’92 |Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virtulent Nihilism, 1992|
It is 03.30 in the morning. Let us say one is ‘drunk’—an impoverished cipher for all those
terrible things one does to one’s nervous-system in the depths of the night—and philosophy is
‘impossible’ (although one still thinks, even to the point of terror and disgust). What does it
mean for this episode in the real history of spirit to die without trace ? Where has it strayed to? ‘I
thought of death, which I imagined to be similar to that walk without an object (but the walk, in
death, takes this path without reason— “forever’’ )’ [III 286]. An extraordinary lucidity, frosty and crisp in the
blackness, but paralysed; lodged in some recess of the universe that clutches it like a snare. A wave of nausea is accompanied by a
peculiarly insinuating headache, as if thought itself were copulating unreservedly with suffering. A damp coldness, close to fog,
creeps through the open window. I
laugh, delighted at the fate that has turned me into a reptile. The
metallic hardness of intellect seems like a cutting instrument in my hand; the detached fragment
from a machine tool, or an abattoir, seeking out the terminal sense it was always refused. The
object of philosophy, insofar as the reflective meditation upon thought can be taken to characterize it, is arbitrarily prescribed as
undisturbed reasoning (the cases of psychopathology, psychiatry, abnormal psychology, etc. do not remotely contravene this
rigorous selection, because such studies of disturbed thought are constituted—in principle—without entanglement). It is thus
that successfully adapted, tranquil, moderate, and productive reason monopolizes the
philosophical conception of thought, in the same way that the generalized robotism of regulated
labour squeezes all intense gestures out of social existence. My abnormal devotion to Bataille stems from the
fact that nobody has done more than he to obstruct the passage of violent blanks into a pacified oblivion, and thus to awaken the
monster in the basement of reason. Not that the repressed is locked in a dungeon, it is stranded in a labyrinth,
and connected to the daylit world by a secret continuity. A tangle of confusion comes to seem like a door, a
maze like a barrier, and one says ‘I’, but the inside is not a cell, it is a corridor; a passage cut
from the soft rock of loss. Inner experience traverses a sombre porosity, and  the moans of
the minotaur reverberate through its arteries, hinting at an indefinable proximity. It becomes
difficult to sleep.

The plan solves – removing DCS and FMS classifications means the US can no
longer regulate munitions to achieve surplus since the input wouldn’t exceed
the output. Rather than treating fire as something to be accumulated, the plan
squanders our amassed resources in a grand bonfire, refusing imaginations of
the subject within the tragic, cowardly, and utterly boring capitalist principle of
utility in favor of an ethic of gift giving – exchanging arms with no expectation
of return.
Pawlett’11 William, Completed his BSc in Sociology at Loughborough University followed by
an MA in Cultural Studies at Lancaster University before returning to Loughborough University
to complete a PhD in Sociology. “Gifts and Reciprocity” in Encyclopedia of Consumer Culture by
Dale Southerton, 2011) ipartman

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were given, circulated, and venerated. The
intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift exchange has long been recognized. In
giving a gift, it seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our emotions, hopes, and fears is
embodied or carried along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of a gift, a remarkably formal
process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or her to reciprocate. Where giver and
receiver are of similar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are received with polite words of thanks, while the giver will
often “downplay” the act of giving with words like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are deeply
unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as in charitable acts, so that the giving does not
humble or obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver is sometimes masked, hooded, or
exceptionally elusive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations . For example, Robin Hood is an
aristocrat who appears poor and so may give to the poor as their equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/ Santa Claus “gives”
without actually giving, or even existing, and allows families to give generously but indirectly
through an enchanted medium. The children who hope to receive presents from Santa Claus
are obligated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be good” in a small reciprocation of
Santa’s goodness. Complexity of Gift Exchange However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to
mythical tales or what might be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as holidays and birthdays. The notion of give
and take and the “special” relationships this can generate are central to the understanding of
power, and of political and military alliances. In the field of new reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or
donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individuals, biotechnology companies, or nation-states concerned seem to be acting
solely in economic terms, their activities are widely condemned and sometimes judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and
entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What
is given often cannot be
measured, certainly not by the abstract system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for you, the
“value” of this act cannot be calculated in terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and
lighting, and cost of labor devoted to the production of the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for
your friend, but you might do any number of other things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them for their perceived role in a
preceding event: persons, objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together in gift exchange.
The complexity and ambivalence of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in the most high-tech forms of virtual social
networking where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions protecting
this expectation are largely eliminated by the distance afforded by the technological medium. To what extent new technologies
might curtail, transform, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further research
in the humanities and social sciences. In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be drawn into a process
that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift is low ,
negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the
giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or even an
obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately. For example, if you
buy a friend a birthday present, you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at your birthday: the person who has not
reciprocated may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth. Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable if
the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled out. The rule seems to be that
if you receive, you must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then, a moral or ethical
dimension to gift exchange that is fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation, even as
economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life. Approaches
The social meanings and consequences of gift exchange have been studied by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques
Derrida; by sociologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu;
by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray. Many of these
thinkers
approach gift giving in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the exchange of presents
but also the gift of being itself: the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth, and the
giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche, gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers have explored the ethics of
gift giving, arguing, in different ways, that the gift exchange process involves, implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness
that is vital for the well-being of individuals and society but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or replaced by patriarchal,
consumerist, and technological culture. Gift
exchange, then, has been presented as a radical alternative to
dominant liberal capitalist modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic exchange is based
on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract system of
money—as general equivalent. The goal is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or invested privately.
Gift exchange, by contrast, tends to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility,
and ethical relatedness. Moreover, these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in terms of
monetary equivalence because their meaning cannot be separated from the acts of exchange
themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to a temporality that is alien to financial
calculation, as we observed in the case of birthday presents. The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn from religion.
The obligatory exchange of gifts, sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or ancestors, was
practiced widely in classical civilization and continued throughout Christian antiquity and into medieval
societies. Gift exchange ceremonies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism
and in ancient Chinese law. Though not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving, the donation of money, food, or
other goods to the poor or needy on request, are important components of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacrifices
were, and still are, given to gods in the hope or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention. Further, gods
give of
themselves: they make sacrifices and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt
worshippers, making demands on them in a reciprocal but radically unequal relationship. While
many gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an act of giving that gives life as a gift to
the receiver and “gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a vital component of many
religions. Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential Essai sur le don
(1924, translated as The Gift, 1990). Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his uncle and the founder of modern sociology),
understood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,” the very energy
that binds society. Indeed, the social circulation of gifts and services has been understood as the foundation of human culture, as
constitutive of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among neighboring
tribes, forging alliances, deterring war, and preventing incest. For the influential French feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of
women, as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she contends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy and the exploitation
of women and nature by men. Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by generating and
maintaining relations of obligatory reciprocity between elements of the social system , both
intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied the so-called
totemic religions of aboriginal Australia, Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing that gift exchange creates and
sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and clans but also
between ideas: between sacred and profane, living and dead, persons and things . For Mauss, gift
exchange consists of three interlocking moments: the obligation to give, the obligation to
receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive
yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek, Latin, and German connotes
not only a present or offering but also poison. Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the potlatch in North America
and the Kula of the Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-
interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are contested.
These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion of
individual freedoms and rights that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Wealth is
circulated such that the participants “did not emerge any richer than before ” (9), and, Mauss claims,
there is no economic advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The gift objects are living wealth; they
generate social meaning and value, and this value actually increases through the act of
exchanging. These festivals, for Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and loan predate the emergence of barter and
money, so the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to understand the development of economy from barter to money to
credit are, for Mauss, quite simply wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed a new social democratic program of welfare
and a general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This was to be fostered by a
reformed education system that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies damaged by war and egotistic individualism. However,
as pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate on the power differences between members of the tribes, or on the
existence of slavery in such societies, and has been much criticized for these omissions. Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch
ceremony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida. Recognizing the
imprecision and colonial history of the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total services
and counter services (prestations et contreprestations totales) to describe systems of social exchange that
include the giving of presents but also loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest sense. The term potlatch
Mauss reserved for “total services of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are
“rare but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he
suggests, goes
“beyond all bounds. . . . One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back . It
is a competition to see who is richest and also the most madly extravagant . Everything is based upon the
principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37). The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving, reciprocal social relations, and the
possibilities for a new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a number of influential thinkers. For
Georges Bataille,
dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive
expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies, Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and
ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and fundamentally excluded bargaining and
calculation in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose,
however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself is not a commodity, and the
value it possesses cannot be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an
impoverished social system where “everything that was generous, orgiastic and excessive has
disappeared” (124). For Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch suggests an alternative
ethical relation might be possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille, violence is an inevitable
and constitutive feature of any society, and he hoped that violence might be dramatized and
expressed in ritual form, rather than “accumulating” or festering into the hatred that promotes
war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than
commercial and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even the separateness of individual
identities—for Bataille, the condition of narrow and calculative behavior— might be swept away in a convulsive
moment. Like Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of gift giving
vital for postwar reconstruction. The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity in
contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard, deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues that consumer
societies
can be understood in terms of a gift , or potlatch, given by society to individual consumers that
cannot be reciprocated and thereby humbles and obligates. In consumer societies, Baudrillard argues, “the
commodity becomes once again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of the gift, and of the
inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33). For Baudrillard, like
Bataille, consumer societies are societies of waste and violence. Examples related by Baudrillard include war and automobile
crashes; even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the whiff of potlatch.” However, the essential difference is that, in
our
current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective
significance it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious
consummation . . . has been “personalised” and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the
economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46) For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be understood as a
violent countergift, an attempt to pay back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of consumer goods, democracy, and sexual
liberation— images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom. Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and gift exchange, focusing on
the temporality of the gift: the interval or term between the moment of giving and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues that
the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the ambivalence of the process:
that giver and receiver are all too aware that a gift is given and that something is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking,
impossible because the notion of exchange undermines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However, this very impossibility suggests,
for Derrida, a form of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar, Derrida
(1995) discusses the Old Testament story of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed the terrible demand that he sacrifice his
eldest son Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all else; he must violate his instincts and social morality by making the
ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting God’s demand is he released from the demand, and for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story,
Derrida finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following the philosophy of
Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond
definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our unique and
fundamental singularity, absolute other to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical
response to the demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida, only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices involved in
giving birth, and the openness to absolute otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics untainted by the calculation of a
return or reward. Final Thoughts Whether
or not we accept that gift exchange embodies or suggests a
radical difference from and alternative to the institutions, assumptions, and goals of capitalist
market society, strong social and interpersonal bonds are forged by gift exchange, bonds that
exceed legalistic notions of contract or of economic interdependence. Yet these bonds are ambivalent and
intensely volatile; they offer no simple solution or panacea for modern, marketized, and technological societies that, for many, lack
sufficiently strong ethical and social bonds.

The plan is a radical imagination outside the plane of utility.

Clark’15 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Fiery Arts:
Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene, GeoHumanities, December
2015. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1100968|KZaidi

Pressing although they might be, such concerns still tether us to an imaginary of need and utility.
It should also be noted that the way most environmental concerns are articulated —both at the planetary scale
of Anthropocene problematics and at more localized levels—tends to make appeals to subjects as if they were
preformed and lying in wait. The politics of the environment and Earth, that is, characteristically assumes the
existence of practical-political agents who already know who and what they are—and thus
should be capable of judging what is in their best interests. Our excursion into the deep, originary aesthetics
of pyrotechnic innovation, however, suggests a more complicated—or implicated—sense of subject formation and collec- tive
action. In generating new materials and processes, pyrotechnic artisans changed the composition
of everyday existence. They produced new things to see or feel or to value, and they helped
transform the makeup of built space in ways that precipitated new patterns of movement,
encounter, and gathering. In ways that could never have been anticipated, such changes affected the
individual and collective sensorium (see Grosz 2008, 77). In this sense, by channeling and elaborating on
the forces of the Earth, pyrotechnicians also helped shape the selves or subjects who shared
the worlds they were helping fabricate. In this way, reflection on the pyrotechnic phylum reminds
us that subjects are constantly in the making, and that they are in the making with and through the
Earth (see Yusoff 2013, 2015). Such a view of the subject has implications for how we conceive of and
engage in politics. Politics, some critical thinkers have lately been insisting, is much more than a matter of
discourse, of conflicting interests and vociferous debates. It is also, to some degree, “aesthetic”—a
process of imagining how the ordering of people, signs, and things might be otherwise and of
actually trying to construct alternative arrangements (Rancière 2004; Dikeç 2015). Our historical probing
of the pyrotechnic phylum—although it inevitably shades into the speculative—adds substance to this sense of the
political as a work of fabulation and crafting— in a way that also stresses the open-ended,
experimental, and pragmatic nature of these processes. This is not to say that the aesthetic is
always already political, although it might well imply that “the political is inherently aesthetic at the conceptual and
substantive level” (Dixon 2009, 412). In other words, experimentation and creativity that is broadly artistic
plays a crucial role in generating the sensibilities, base materials, and platforms that are the
conditions of political action (see Yusoff 2010, 79). By the same token, it must be acknowledged that aesthetic
dispositions are also implicated in the diagramming of things and the distributions of the
sensible against which collective actors mobilize—however much we foist responsibility for the
darker side of these orderings onto the “state” or other powerful interests. Much collective action in
the manner I am suggesting might be described as pyropolitical (Clark 2011, 164–65; Marder 2015). This is not just, in Marder’s
sense, that it concerns struggles over situations and threats involving “the dyad of fire and
atmosphere” or that fire is frequently unleashed during political uprisings. I mean pyropolitical in the
more archeological sense; that fire is implicated—all the way down into the depths of our human being—in processes of
collective self-making and reshaping. Although it might be true that fire as a physicomaterial force and as an element
of political mobilization never fully escapes its “explosive ambiguity” (Marder 2015, xiii), a focus on artisanal fire use
draws attention to the degree to which flame can be corralled, modulated, and ushered into
world-making work. Collaboration and diffusion, as we have seen, have been essential elements in
this marshaling of fire. In their affirmation of the potential of “the common,” Hardt and Negri (2009) looked to
contemporary forms of creative production—especially those deploying digital media—as the site for the
“metamorphosis” of new subjectivities and collaborative dispositions. They noted that the
fashioning of images, codes, and information is not bound by scarcity : “When I share an idea or image with
you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 283). The pyrotechnic arts have rarely been open source in
this sense—their transmission has most often been guarded and selective (here we need to bear in mind not only the magical
element of fire-induced transmutation, but the more prosaic fact that escaping flame could envelop villages, pasture, or forests).
Even so, firemight be regarded as the primordial form of an element undiminished by its
reproduction—and this extends into technical uses. It is not simply that pyrotechnical ideas
and materials have traveled along networks, but that they have often been catalysts or vital
components of the assemblages that made networking possible. Just as metallurgy combined with the
domestication of the horse to enable new kinds of nomadism, so, too, did metals and literacy emerge together and
forge a mutually supportive—and momen- tous—association (Goody 2012; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987,
399). Pyrotechnology, in short has helped compose the very networks it has traversed . Without its
material and ideational traceries, Hardt and Negri’s nascent (2009) informatic commonwealth would be only so much whispering in
the wind. Merged into a vast, decentered, and “polyarchic” platform of know-how and
componentry, the pyrotechnic phylum has been so fundamental to the shaping of sociomaterial
life that it has tended to recede into murmuring anonymity, so much so that its attenuation and
contraction—its progressive partitioning out of the collective sensory field—seems to have
attracted little sustained attention. Just as it is next to impossible to gauge the impact of introducing a new object or
technique into an existing milieu, so, too, is it devilishly difficult to assess the ultimate consequences of the
disappearance of skills or material practices. Pyne (1997) documented some of the damage—social and ecological—
arising from attempts to extirpate broadcast fire from landscapes adapted to its rhythmical
presence. The waning or extinction of so many varieties of chambered artisanal fire, to my
knowledge, however, has attracted no comparative attention. This not a good time to be losing ,
or to have lost, varieties of fire. As Pyne (1994) counseled, this is a planet that “will burn regardless of
what humans do” (907). Combustion got us into the Anthropocene, and we would do well to
consider that in fire’s capacity to shape both built and biotic landscapes lies an immense
potentiality to respond to the current situation. One way or another, it looks likely we will find ourselves fighting
fire with fire (Clark 2012, 259). This is not about trying to rewind our way back to the technical and industrial explosions of the mid-
Holocene, but it
is about seeking to preserve or enhance the diversity of fire on Earth.
Pyrotechnology has been a vital element in the construction of a common global existence as
well as in the diversification and partitioning of human collectivities. When pyrotechnic skills are
extinguished or appropriated, what is lost is not only part of the scaffolding of communal life,
but a form of expression of the Earth itself—an actualization of the planet’s geological
potentiality. If, in its capacity to bring something new into the world, politics—as Dikeç (2015) suggested—has a
sublime aspect, then much of that sublimity ultimately derives from channel- ing and expressing
the forces of the Earth. In quelling fire, we diminish not only the technical resources, but also
the political prospects for crafting prodigiously livable worlds . By keeping our variegated fires stoked, we
hold open our transmutational possibilities—because in doing so we are holding ourselves
open to the exuberance of the Earth itself. In times of accelerating geophysical change, preserving and
proliferating the pyropolitical arts might be a matter of some urgency. It might be almost
impossible to predict or even imagine what “species” of fire will flourish under geoclimatic
conditions the likes of which our species and genus has never yet encountered, although
experience suggests that we should look for signs of experimentation along a broad and mobile
front. Although the pressing sense of necessity conveyed by most Anthropocene theorists seems fully justified, so, too, might we
hold out the hope that a novel fusion of well-modulated fire, earthy materials, and collective
imagination would also be an occasion, in the words of Smith (1981), for “creative participatory joy”
(355).
 Extra Cardss
Poesis
Fernando 10 (Jeremy Fernando, The Suicide Bomber and her gift of death, 2010, pg 213 - ___,
DA: 1/24/12)

The poet, irremediably split between exaltation and vulgarity , between the autonomy that produces the
concept within intuition and the foolish earthly being, functions as a contaminant for philosophy
– a being who since Plato, has been trying to read and master an eviction notice served by philosophy .
The poet as genius continues to threaten and fascinate, menacing the philosopher with the beyond
of knowledge. Philosophy cringes. If we recall the words of Paul Cenan, the words that we turned to earlier, that of
“poetry does not impose itself, it exposes itself ,” one’s instinctive reaction – the thought that comes to mind
without thinking, without knowing – is the question ‘expose itself to what?’ Whilst it is easy, too easy, to dismiss a naïve
question like that, it would be to our detriment if we choose not to attend it, not to attend a possibility that sometimes lies in the
simplest of questions, the silly questions, as it were. After all, if one exposes oneself, it can only be so if there was
something, or someone to expose oneself to . There has to be a witness to the exposure, otherwise there would not
be one at all. Hence, exposure is always a state of establishing a relationality with another . It is not a
relationality that seeks to impose a particular, single, meaning, reading upon another. And this is why poetry continues to
menace the philosopher with the beyond of knowledge ; without an imposition, the borders are not
drawn, the limits are not set. And whilst not forgetting the registers that Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida opened earlier –
yes there are only always rules to seeing, and we are always already in grammar, always bounded
by grammar – the lack of a boundary also always opens more possibilities than we can account
for. One may not even be overstating if one claims that at this point, all accounting systems which are set up to
predict, to control, via graphs, curves, probabilities – fail . Whilst exposing itself, and hence, opening itself to
response, any response, poetry “always risks what it cannot avoid appealing to in reply , namely,
recompense and retribution. It risks the exchange that it might expect but is at the same time
unable to count on. Once the poem is sent off, set off, one can only hope for a response. In fact,
one always gets a response; even a non-response, a complete ignoring of the poem, is a form of
response. It is just that one can never know what kind of response one is going to get. Once the poem is set of, the
poet remains completely blind to its effects . Once the bomb is set off, the suicide bomber s
completely blind to its effects. It is probably of no coincidence that the suicide bomber is usually constituted
as one who is completely irrational, cast as a complete idiot; the most common question heard whenever there is an
instance of a suicide bombing is ‘why would one give up her life when she has so much to live for? All
attempts to provide an answer to the question are banal, as the very person that the answer
attempt to address is dead; hence all answers are unverifiable. One has no choice but to admit that
all reason eludes, escapes, is beyond one, is beyond the limits of one’s cognition , is at the beyond
of knowledge. Perhaps the only thing we can say is that she gives up her life in spite of the fact that she has so much to live for;
after all, it is she who chooses to do so. Whilst this does not provide any answer to the question, provide any comfort that we finally
understand her, this is all we can say. Perhaps it is the fact that she
remains an enigma that is her gift to us . It is
the refusal to be understood, to be subsumed under any existing conception, to be flattened, exchanged,
reproduced, that is her gift. And in that same spirit, it is not a gift that can be understood – this is not a
gift that one can bring to the return -counter at the shop, to be exchanged for something else, something
more palatable, something easier, something more comfortable, more comforting. This is a gift that is unknowable, in
full potential, always possible; perhaps always a gift that is to come. What continues to trouble us is that this
gift – as with all gifts – comes with an obligation to reciprocate , an obligation to respond. So even though
this is an objectless gift – and to compound it a gift that we might not even begin to comprehend,
or even know is present – we are always already within the realm of reciprocation . This is the point where
the eternal question of the serpent, that of what did she mean’, returns to haunt us, along with the other question of responding,
and attempting an appropriate response at that; the question of Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt the question of
Lenin, that of “what is to be done?” If we attempt to answer the question, to provide a prescription, then
we are back to the situation of effacement . Perhaps then the task that we are faced with is that of reconstituting
Lenin in and within a situation. If the question of ‘what is to be done’ is a situational question, there can be no
answer outside of the situation – at the point of uttering both the question and the answer, we are always
immanent to the story, in the making, even when we are the ones telling the story to the other – and
more than that, each answer is at best a provisional answer. However, the fact that one can even attempt an answer suggests that
at least momentarily, one must be able to “step back” as it were, be exterior to the question, to situation. Hence, each answer,
each definition to the question can only be accomplished as a more or less provisory , more or less
violent arresting of a dynamic that is interminable, but never simply interminable or infinite . For a dynamic such as
this can only be conceived as a series of highly conflictual determinations , as a movement of
ambivalence, in which the other is always being seized as a function of the same , all the while eluding
this capture. The other becomes the intimate condition of the possibility of the game , remaining
all the while out of bounds.

Radical Openness
Negarestani’8 |Reza (Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to Collapse and
CTheory regularly), “cyclonopedia: complicity with anonymous materials” p.195-199|KZaidi

In the mid-eighties, before succumbing to his petromantic nympholepsy, Hamid Parsani re-
addresses his book, Defacing the Ancient Persia, as a guide to strategic openness (which, he
insists, is the enduring concern of the Middle East). Following his analysis of the Aryanistic
holocaust and its relationship with the genealogy of monotheism, the book indeed can be read
as a syncretic approach to a broad array of communications and modes of living in the Middle
East, an openness with a polytical edge, as he emphasizes: ‘It [openness] is certainly not made
for social dynamics or lifestyles instrumentalized within liberal societies. Openness is what turns
the very body of the free world upside down throughout human history — if, of course, we
assume that the free world has ever been more than a mere institution of a more tolerable
regime or religion,’ Parsani writes in his later notes on Defacing the Ancient Persia. The book
had already been tagged by hostile critics as ‘a maximalist and verbose treatise about everything
except Persia, informed by every discipline except archeology’ and hailed by a few disciples as
‘the obligatory reference book for traveling to the Middle East’. In any case, it is more than a
misreading to take Parsani’s Defacing the Ancient Persia for a mere collection of phenomenal
discoveries and theories. As Parsani himself confesses, his book pursues an awkward dissection
of the conundrum of openness in the Middle East’.34 If the so-called despotic institutions of the
Middle East have survived liberalism, and have grown stronger instead of being shattered into
miserable pieces long ago, it is because openness can never be extracted from the inside of the
system or through a mere voluntary or subjective desire for being open. Openness can never be
communicated by liberalism (not to mention the free world’). According to his critics, Parsani’s
re-reading of Defacing the Ancient Persia aims to remobilize its already fleshed-out topics on the
current Tellurian Dynamics with the fluid efficiency of petroleum’ (Parsani’s phrase). For Parsani,
however, this process of re-writing (or reinterpretation’, according to critics) had the virtue of
gathering all of his inquiries under the enigma of openness: It seems to me that so-called
middle-eastern life, more than anything else, suggests a communication dynamics, and is an
answer to the enigma of openness rather than being a contemporary orientalist lifestyle with a
political or humanist edge. In the light of Parsani’s references to ‘the enigma of openness’, the
Hyperstition team decided to question and reinvestigate its early notes on openness in relation
to Deleuze and Guattari’s politics of becoming. However, this time the reading was not
conducted on wholly philosophical grounds but rather against a new background, that of the
mess-hysteria of Parsani’s works — a textual sketch resistant to any high-octane philosophical
psychosis. In this way, Parsani’s works could be hammered out new edges and relevancies. In
Defacing the Ancient Persia, human history is an experimental research process in designing and
establishing modes of openness to the outside. Openness is not ultimately, so to speak, the
affair of humans, but rather the affair of the outside — everything minus the human, even the
human’s own body. But openness is not only associated with human history. Parsani argues that
the Earth, as the arch-puppeteer and occult-manipulator of planetary events, has a far more
sophisticated openness of its own. If the human is the subject of openness or the one who
opens himself to his outside, then the Earth is ‘the inside-out subject’ of human openness.
Undoubtedly, human openness is full of twists. This includes social openness, gender
communications, and openness between populations and governments of the contemporary
world, whether cultural or petrological. Parsani shows that human openness has a strategic and
twisted spirit for which every communication is a tactic and every openness is a strategy to be
unfolded. If this is the case, then the Earth must enjoy a womb-dark and an ocean-deep scheme
— if not conspiracy — in its openness and communications with both organisms and its solar
outside. It is difficult to study the politics, culture and economy of the world without questioning
its issues and concerns regarding the ethics of openness. Middle-eastern studies would be
impossible without the question of openness. (Anush Sarchisian in her comments on Defacing
the Ancient Persia, 1994) Openness comes from the Outside, not the other way around.
Nietzschean affirmation was never intended to support liberation or even to be about openness
at all. It was an invocation of the outside, in its exteriority to the human and even to the
human’s openness (which includes desires for being open to the outside). Radical openness has
nothing to do with the cancelation of closure; it is a matter of terminating all traces of
parsimony and grotesque domestication that exist in so-called emancipatory human openness.
The blade of radical openness thirsts to butcher economical openness, or any openness
constructed on the affordability of both the subject and its environment. The target of radical
openness is not closure but economical openness. Radical openness devours all economic and
political grounds based on ‘being open’. Affirmation does not attain openness to the world but
maintains closure progressively through the grotesque domestications of economical openness.
On the first level of its operation, affirmation advocates ‘being open to’ as an anthropomorphic
and regulated mode of openness; it renders everything more affordable, more economically
open and more purposeful. Affirmation is initially involved with the manipulation of the
boundaries (of systems) whose machinery is based on transforming openness into an instance of
affordability, turning economic openness into a survival economy. Economical openness is not
about how much one can be open to the outside, but about how much one can afford the
outside. Therefore, openness, in this sense, is intrinsically tied to survival. The survival economy,
in the same vein, is the realization of all manifestations of communication as the prolonging of
survival; affordability in all its forms guarantees survival. Economical openness is a risk-feigning
maneuver simulating communication with the Outside. Yet for such openness, the outside is
nothing but an environment which has already been afforded as that which does not
fundamentally endanger either the survival of the subject or its environing order. So that ‘being
open’ is but the ultimate tactic of affordance, employed by the interfaces of the boundary with
the outside. For economical openness, the order of the boundary must be invisible; the
boundary is not a filtering sphere or confinement but a ‘force dynamic boundary’ (with an
ambiguous nomadic drive), a fluid horizon seeking to accommodate everything through its
expanding dynamism rather than sedentarization. Affordance presents itself as a pre-
programmed openness, particularly on the inevitably secured plane of being open (as opposed
to being opened). On the plane of ‘being open to’, organic survival can always interfere,
appropriate the flow of xeno-signals, economize participations or if necessary cut the
communication before it is too late. ‘Being open’, ever political and cautious, supports the
survival as an economical and slyly appropriated sphere of capacity (or affordability), an
economy bent on upholding survival at all costs, even through the necrocracy of death.
Economical openness – that is, ‘being open to’ – appropriates the reciprocation between the
subjective and the objective sides of openness. While the subject of the economical openness
manifests itself in the statement ‘I am open to’, the objective of the openness is what ‘being
open to’ aims at. Economical openness is constantly maintained by these two poles which must
afford each other. For an entity, the act of opening to its environment is only possible if the
environment has already afforded the entity within its environing range, and if the entity itself is
able to accommodate part of the environment within its capacity. The capacity of the entity is
directly influenced by the subjective survival of that entity. For this reason, so-called
(economical) openness represents the affordability and the survival capacity of its subjects, not
the act of opening itself. In economical openness, affordance does not refer to either the
restricted or restricting affordability of one or multiple systems, but to the whole reciprocal
horizon in which both the subjective and the objective sides of economical openness must
survive and undergo a dynamic but economical participation. Affordance does not work on a
univocal or an uniderctional line – from the subject of openness to its objective or vice-versa. It
is economically collective. Affordance moulds a horizon of economically-secured openness
which accommodates both sides as bodies dynamically synchronous to each other.
Correspondingly, openness is dynamically determined by the survival of both subjective and
objective sides as a mutual living process, rather than survival as the evasion of peril. If
affordance is basically mesophilic, meaning that it always comes in-between. Participations,
becomings, lines of tactics and communications must all be based on the meso-sphere of
affordance and its survival machineries. ‘I am open to you’ can be recapitulated as ‘I have the
capacity to bear your investment’ or ‘I afford you’. This conservative voice is not associated with
will or intention, but with the inevitability of affordance as a mesophilic bond, and with the
survival economy and the logic of capacity. If you exceed the capacity by which you can be
afforded, I will be cracked, lacerated and laid open. Despite its dedication to repression, its blind
desire for the monopoly of survival and the authoritarian logic of the boundary, the plane of
‘being open to’ has never been openly associated with paranoia and regression. Such is the
irony of liberalism and anthropomorphic desire. However, while affirmation is tactically
nurtured by affordance, it is also a stealth strategy to call and to bring forth an Epidemic
Openness whose eventuation is necessarily equal to the abortion of economical or human
openness. As far as survival is concerned, radical openness always brings with it base-
participation, contamination and pandemic horror, the horror of the outside emerging from
within as an autonomous xeno-chemical Insider and from without as the unmasterable
Outsider. In any case, radical openness is internally connected to unreported plagues. If
affordance is the mesophilic extension between subjective and objective fronts of
communication, the outside is defined by the exteriority of function rather than distance. If
affirmation is ultimately strategic, this is because epidemic openness is inherent to the
repression of the outside and the suspension of its influences. In a political twist, epidemic
openness craves for solid states, manifest closures such as dwelling and accommodating
systems of all kinds which are intrinsically integrated with subsistence and the survival economy:
libban, lifian. Conforming to the secrecy and the conspiracist ethos of affordance, for which
every tactic is another line of expansion (to afford more), radical openness requires strategic
calls or lines of subversion from within affordance. Radical openness, therefore, subverts the
logic of capacity from within. Frequently referred to as sorcerous lines, awakenings,
summonings, xeno-attractions and triggers, strategic approaches unfold radical openness as an
internal cut – gaseous, odorless, with the metallic wisdom of a scalpel. Openness emerges as
radical butchery from within and without. If the anatomist cuts from top to bottom so as to
examine the body hierarchically as a transcendental dissection, then the katatomy of openness
does not cut anatomically or penetrate structurally (performing the logic of strata); it butchers
open in all directions, in correspondence with its strategic plane of activity. Openness is not
suicide, for it lures survival into life itself where ‘to live’ is a systematic redundancy. Since the
Outside in its radical exteriority is everywhere it only needs to be aroused to rush in and erase
the illusion of economical appropriations or closure. Openness is a war, it needs strategies to
work. Openness is not the anthropomorphic desire to be open, it is the being opened
eventuated by the act of opening itself. To be butchered, lacerated, cracked and laid open –
such is the corporeal reaction of subjects to the radical act of opening. Accordingly, affirmation
is a camouflaged strategy, a vehicle for cutting through affordance and creatively reinventing
openness as a radical butchery (a radical xeno-call). To become open or to experience the
chemistry of openness is not possible through ‘opening yourself’ (a desire associated with
boundary, capacity and survival economy which covers both you and your environment); but it
can be affirmed by entrapping yourself within a strategic alignment with the outside, becoming
a lure for its exterior forces. Radical openness can be invoked by becoming more of a target for
the outside. In order to be opened by the outside rather than being economically open to the
system’s environment, one must seduce the exterior forces of the outside: You can erect
yourself as a solid and molar volume, tightening boundaries around yourself, securing you
horizon, sealing yourself off from any vulnerability … immersing yourself deeper into your
human hygiene and becoming vigilant against outsiders. Through this excessive paranoia,
rigorous closure and survivalist vigilance, one becomes an ideal prey for the radical outside and
its forces.
Malpractice Module
 V1
Politics is inherently restrictive – a futile but nonetheless bounded attempt to
confine the radical exoticism of life to a binary formulation on state-centered
decisions. This logic is inherently theological as its existence requires a
deification of the state-form as a God-like force of homogeneity with a global
illusory presence defined against the heterogeneity of racial others. America’s
arms sales are thus a continuation of a much broader anti-black, settler colonial
logic that deifies American military identity to secure economic interests
abroad. What is necessary is to think “in the break” of paradigms so as to
rupture racial capitalisms discursive control over thought. We must force Gods
to bleed.
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991|KZaidi
From what has just been said, it should already be clear that by political theology I mean more than what Carl Schmitt, whose name
is most aligned with this term, meant by it when he said that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts.”27 I mean more than to suggest, again as Schmitt did, a structural similarity between the domains
of law and politics, on the one hand, and theology or the religious, on the other, such that the exceptionalism of the latter (as, for
example, in the force of the “miracle”) is merely transferred to the former (as, for example, with the “state of exception” and the
“force of law”). Rather, by political theology I mean the ways that the
categories of the political and the
theological are mutually affirming. Differ- ing in magnitude, the political and the theological are scalar,
internally braided together in the logic of the state, for which reason they cannot be extracted
one from the other. As I am using it, political theology is that philosophical , indeed, that metaphysical claim
to the rightness, the purity, the would-be gravity of the state as the telos of society, as the
horizon of order, as what securitizes the world if not life itself. If this order, which is to say, if state
order is the ontological horizon of what holds us, if it is a figure of the Being that holds beings
(most especially the human mode of being, which within the terms of state order is nothing less than the citizen mode of being, the
being that is homo politicus), then political
theology is the discourse of Being in its projection of the state
as the ground of legitimate, political (as opposed to “nonpolitical” or antepolitical or anarchic) assembly, on the one
hand, and as the ground of juridical subjecthood, on the other.

I would like to put a finer point on the problem of political theol- ogy by approaching it in terms of the problem of the evisceration of
the sacred, or that which hovers beyond state-sanctioned horizons of life or what is truly real, what
moves as invisibly felt or as a surging, surreal pres- ence that state operations work hard to
overshadow in monumentalizing itself, often through monuments. Like a kind of astrophysical
dark matter with the unknowable force of a dark energy that exceeds racial capitalism’s
gravitational pull by exerting a force from within and that exceeds this (racial) world’s
epistemological and material circumscriptions, this surging, surreal presence moves at the limit
of the state even if on some level within its constraints. Let us call this limit blackness. America is
structured through the horrific regularity, both in spectacular displays and even more so in everyday or mundane
displays, of experiencing unin- corporable limits to itself. That experience is the experience of the
sacred, an experience in which state sovereignty or lordly sovereignty is crossed (out), transgressed. Political
theology is a discourse that seeks to eviscerate such an imagination of the sacred. As such, it is a
statist discourse predicated precisely on the evisceration of the dark arts of the sacred, those
excessive modes of life and knowing. I am interested in that dark knowing that exceeds theopolitical constraint—what Bataille spoke
of as “nonknowledge” and what he also talked about as “poetry,” and what I want to think about here by way of black radical
thought as the astropoetic release of the sacred from categorical capture. This is the black
radical sacred.
As an entry point into this approach to the problem of political theology and to begin to think about the sacred precisely as
malpractice, consider Rei Terada’s essay “Robinson’s Terms,” in which she provides a patient and brilliant reading of Cedric
Robinson’s underexplored first book (his published dissertation, in fact), Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of
Leadership (1980).28 Her reading of Terms of Order offers us a way to understand the trajectory that led Robinson to the thesis he
develops in Black Marxism (1983) that black radicalism is a complexly differentiated tradition rooted in a revolutionary
consciousness that exceeds the terms of political order, which are also the terms of (racial) capitalist order. Order emerges or is
constituted as the counterrevolutionary evisceration of that which exceeds order. Terada tarries with Robinson as he tarries with the
dynamics of this evisceration. What we learn from her reading of Robinson is that if,
in positioning “the state [as] the
telos of society,” the political “depends on and . . . is reflected in [a series of] politico- legalistic
settlements” whose narrative languages and philosophical concepts establish “the terms [of] a [settler] tenancy” (4), then what
makes the political always already theological, even when it prides itself on being secular (which really must be understood as a
mode of the theological), is this: in establishing the state as the telos of society and thus as a world
that houses (human) being, the political follows, indeed, repeats the religious logic of Genesis
or the primordial, cosmogonic activity of the gods. As the gods found the world or establish the real
by what Mircea Eliade describes as “[projecting] a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center
into chaos,” thus allowing an “ontological passage” that in effect establishes the real,29 so too the political is predicated
on a “cosmocizing” (64) or a worlding of territory, a conversion of earth into territorialized
world, by gods/men who imprint terms of order onto what is deemed non- political or
formless (informe). This cosmocizing or would-be worlding of the earth into ownable, bordered territory entails the
production and thus the imposition of spatial order on top of and to the vanquishing of nonpolitical
space or space charged with dark energy or promiscuous intensities figured as aberrantly racial,
sexual, economic, and neurological . These are energies or intensities that are out of this world
and that figure an other- wise totality, perhaps the “collective being, the ontological totality”
that propels the black radical tradition. 30 This, says Terada, is the persistent “existence of what cannot
be conceived from the standpoint of the political” (6). Constantly thwarting politicality’s claim to being all
there is, the nonpolitical represents, Terada further says directly quoting Robinson, an open “set of infinite
alternatives irretrievably forsaken” (10), alternatives that index the impossible as nothing less
than the ongoing possibility of what exceeds the terms of political order. Further still, if with Terada
(with Robinson) we understand that myth “[functions] to process ‘insurmount- able contradiction’ in the societies from which they
arise” (10), then the political, which establishes the terms of settler tenancy as terms of order, is but myth’s
rationalization, with language serving the utilitarian function of securing the order of
signification, the grammar of (political) meaning. Put differently, the political seeks to maintain itself
by instituting a form of knowing in which reason is but the declaration of having won the
mythic struggle against an opposing force. This is the struggle of creation itself, a struggle in which Genesis is an
effect of struggle. Political rationality entails the would-be vanquishing or containing or sacrificial corpsing of
the nonpolitical surround to bring into being what in the Western ontotheological tradition has
been called World. And yet, in this instance formless nonpoliticality bespeaks an abyssal prime matter
that as limitless potential for patterning, as “absolute nothingness,” is both base resource for the violent
production of value and at the same time indexes a volatile danger to existing patterns of politicality.31
I can now address even more directly what is theological about the mythic rationality of the terms of political order. What must be
under- stood is that the previously described dynamic of the political is articulated to what historian of
religions Eliade explains as the production of “sacred space” or the making of “strong, significant
space” out of “spaces . . . without structure or consistency,” spaces that he describes as “amorphous” (20), or that we
might just as well understand with both Bataille and Spill- ers as “monstrous.”32 The bringing forth of strong space out
of disordered void, the overcoming of “the fluid and larval modality of chaos” so as to establish, as an “act of the
gods who . . . organized chaos by giving it a struc- ture, forms, and norms” (31), the ontological or the
“pre-eminently . . . real” (28), and finally, the ritual reactualization of this paradigmatic work of the
gods to secure a proper place in the world rather than hang sus- pended in the void of the not-
real, the absolute nothingness of nonbeing: these mythic operations ground “religion” in the broadest sense. More still, Eliade
describes these operations, to use Terada’s Robinsonian lan- guage, as establishing the terms of a settler
tenancy. Through that tenancy homo religiosus (like and indeed as homo politicus-economicus) quenches his thirst
for real existence in the face of a terrifying nothingness, in the face of that “absolute
nonbeing” “that surrounds his inhabited world,” as Eliade describes it (64). In communication with the gods who
have, as it were, settled the chaos, homo religiosus by feat of ritual repetition repels the abyss and, indeed, in an
ongoing way believes himself to have settled the abyss , lest “by some evil chance, he strays into [that abyss], [and
comes to feel] emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving into [the surrounding] Chaos, and he finally dies” (64).

As a discourse, then, political theology as I mean it proceeds under the logic of a cosmology of
settlement, the supposed containment of the surround by a settler-God or settler-gods and as
reactualized by settler- Man. Here, the sacred has been epistemically annexed and (to invoke a
language from the prior section) right-handedly recruited to settling, their adhesion underwriting
political theology as a discourse that rests on the mythotheological as the mythopolitical
founding of the world. This is “Genesis.” Thus, within the terms of political theology, God, State, and Man are all
god terms that name a vanquishing or a supposed conquering of the abyssal , the infinite, the
alternative, the im/plausibly and im/ possibly im/possible.

But what if we do not assume the political (as seems to be the assump- tion in Rev. Lamar’s comments about the
Charlottesville white nationalist rally, his understanding of the general crisis of politicality today, and his understanding of theology’s
relationship to the political)? What if, to the contrary, we take seriously the political precisely as myth,
trying to reckon with what monstrously appears as its internal limit, of which the counter-
protesters were a monstrous sign? (And here I want to keep in mind that in one etymological derivation monster
derives from the Latin word monere, which means a divine omen or portent of what cannot be foreseen.) This is also to ask, what
if rather than assuming political theology we think with the likes of Colin Kaepernick, whose
taking a knee has incited a crisis of politicality, if not a monstrance of what is irreducibly
antepoliti- cal? What if our study, our writing, takes place within political theology’s
astrophysical contraction, “in the break” of politicality, out of the posse of im/poss/ibility? 33
These questions propel this article’s writing practice, which aims to throw language back on itself, to be
suspended in, even exiled within language itself. I am suspended within and yet beyond the ontology of the
sentence (of politicality), held in an ellipsis, a cloud of antepolitical unknowing. What might it mean to write the
experience of semiotic exile, to not be sentenced to the sentence while suspended within it, to
write the experience of decomposition as the experience of the sacred in its monstrous mode?
What “I,” what “not-I,” what “I” who’s neither “I” nor “other,” can write of parenthetical escape, un/sentenced, un/held within the
sentence, in the break, like
sisters in the wilderness of the sentence , in the void of having been
theopolitically sentenced?34 Can (the) I escape the gravitational forces of civilization? What might it mean to
practice escape or refusal, to be of the void, to be voided, potentiating anything and
everything without determination? What is the feeling of fugitive suspension, outlawed
within the law of the sentence? What of this wandering, this unholding? These are Renee Gladman–
and Sarah Jane Cervenak–inspired questions, and they are Layli Long Soldier– and M. NourbeSe Philip–inspired ones too.35 My claim
in this article is that the
poetics of what is beyond the (theopolitical) sentence is language’s taut
tenseness, the tense of an alternative declension or mood, the domain of the “fourth person
singular” perhaps, where some other experience of lan- guage is felt. 36 Here the myth of
politicality and thus of being individuated, of being “I,” is always already subject to being sacrificed along
with the mode of divinity or the god terms meant to secure the state. This poetics of the
beyond is a poetics of the sacred “‘other’-wise,” Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ashon T. Crawley might say.37
Given this, the black malpractice of which I here speak is a practice of the sacred overboard, an
experience of the sacred detached from or in the absence of its reduction to the stabilizer that
has come to bear the name, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, God or the gods and
as duplicated or mirrored in the divination of the state where the state exists in the image of a
stabilizing God.

Direct Commercial and Foreign Military Sales are outgrowths of this theological
order precisely because they exist within a Restrictive Economy of Exchange –
one that fears the prospect of scarcity and thus strives to achieve a stockpile of
arms by moderating our output. This stockpiling ensures pre-emptive strikes
and racialized violence against those upon whom we direct the expenditure of
our excess.
Pawlett 15. William, senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton. “Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society.” (September 9, 2015) ipartman

Life is excessive, explosive. It exceeds limits and boundaries: plants must be cut back, animals tamed, energy
harnessed, but still excess breaks through and life over-shoots the goals or ends imposed on it. For Bataille, solar radiation – the
immense prodigality of the sun – is the ultimate source of an inexhaustible excess. The
accursed share is the portion of
energy that cannot be managed, directed or exhausted. The fundamental, general economic question is not
how do we conserve energy, but how is energy to be consumed? How do we prevent its dangerous overaccumulation, the curse of
excess energy? General
economy as theoretical and methodological position seeks to confront the accursed
share, the unutilisable excesses that threaten all systems. General economy takes up a perspective from
beyond or outside the separate disciplines of academic study, a position that has engaged with and gone beyond them. Yet, though
disciplinary limits are trans- gressed by Bataille, they are never annihilated, ignored or eliminated. Indeed, limits enable the general
economy of ‘freedom of thought’, thought which will push further and further in a fearless manner, and which is able to go so far
precisely because it draws upon all available disciplinary knowledge without being confined by it. Bataille immediately notes the
apparent contradiction in the approach he adopts in this study. The Accursed Share is a methodical, even ‘cold’, analysis of society
and politics; his study accumulates historical facts and produces useful knowledge, yet Bataille’s thesis is that production and utility
corrode existence, that accumulation is illusory or ‘only a delay’ before the inevitable moment of squandering. Hence The Accursed
Share is a book ‘the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 11). Yet, perhaps
most ambitiously of all, Bataille concludes his preface by insisting that the unfettered freedom of thought offered by general
economy can generate ‘political proposals’, even a ‘solution’ (Baitalle 1991, p. 431, n. 2) to avert the catastrophe of a World War III
and of nuclear holocaust. The academic discipline of economics is deeply inadequate to the task of averting
catastrophe because in it economy is ‘studied as if it were a matter of an isolatable system of
operations’ (Bataille, 1988a, 19). General economy insists upon interrelations and interdependence which extend from the
microscopic to the cosmological levels. Economics, as restricted economy, studies the exploitation of resources, but it does
not enquire into the nature of these resources in any detail: ‘Shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be
considered in terms of the modifica- tions it receives from its surroundings . . . isn’t there a need to study the system of human
production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 20) For Bataille, material resources – wood, coal,
atoms, machinery, and human beings too – are caught up in the general economy of excess, expenditure and death. Matter
is
not simply energetic; it is ‘cursed’ by an explosive excess. It is not simply that all things, objects and materials
possess an excess or accursed share. Rather, excess cannot be contained by the definition and circumscription of life into objects,
things and materials – these are artificial and ide- alised constructs. The energy of the accursed share precedes the level of things
since the constitution of ‘things’ already presupposes the control, channelling, utilization of energy, and the expulsion of
unmanageable excess. Hence from a general economic perspective, there is no growth, only squandering – as Bataille asserts in the
opening epigraph to this chapter. Production,
development and accumulation are merely ‘ideal’ ends
imposed by restrictive economics upon general economy . If we restrict our perspective of living beings to
separate, particular beings – an individual, a tree, a village – these entities can be understood in terms of necessity and scarcity. Yet
the notions of necessity and scarcity are a function of the restricted perspective which denies the
dynamism and volatility of matter, its boiling up both within and between beings, in their relations of attraction and
repulsion. In the human realm, dynamic relations between beings are generated by non-productive
expenditure, through giving, reciprocating or through violence. Further, human beings are ‘privileged’ in
their ability to experience glorious or sacrificial expenditure, to partake of the movement of excess in festivity, in sacrificial religion
and in eroticism. Human beings then have the ability to choose the modes or forms of sacrificial expenditure ‘that might suit us. . . .
For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot
be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price for the inevitable explosion’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 24). So there
is a fundamental ‘political’ question to be consid-ered: how should we expend the excess energies accumulated by modern
societies? What should become of the wealth, power, riches, technolo-gies they develop? No society, ancient or modern, has
found an adequate means to expend without diverting excess energy and wealth into war.
Today, as Bataille notes, war – that is the external channelling of violence against designated others – has grown in scale
and its destructive capacity threatens to extinguish all human life. For Bataille, then, it is vital to
revolutionise economic, political and ethical thought simultane- ously. War can no longer provide a way for
societies to expend excess wealth and energy. Where can excesses be channelled? The answer for Bataille is that
growth should be immediately ‘subordinated to giving’; commodities should be surrendered without return (Bataille, 1988a, p. 25).
Bataille clearly understood excess American wealth, technology and superpower as a major threat to the
human race and the biosphere, and he gave qualified support to the Marshall Plan , an aid package
designed to assist European economies after World War II. This political, or even ‘ethical’, dimension to Bataille’s notion of the
accursed share has, surprisingly, not been examined in detail by com- mentaries on Bataille’s work. Many gloss over it (Land, 1992),
or assume it is unworkable or contradictory (Bennington in Bailey-Gill, 1995; Noys, 2000; Gasché, 2012). An exception is Stoekl
(1990; 2007) whose application of general economy to contemporary society and ecology is discussed in the concluding chapter.
VOLUME ONE: CONSUMPTION Volume one elaborates Bataille’s laws of general economy, which he understood as linking all of his
major themes, assertions and obsessions. As I noted earlier, the assertion that there are ‘laws’ of general economy has been seen as
a major weakness in Bataille’s thought, yet there is lit- tle doubt that Bataille considered the notion of the accursed share to be
capable of scientific validation, or at least that the exact sciences encoun- tered its effects in a palpable way. In his introduction to
this work, he states: The living organism . . . ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically. (Bataille, 1988a, p. 21) All life exists in excess; it generally has at its command more energy, more ‘life force’, than is
needed for simple subsistence or survival. The accumulation of energy by an organism (biological or social, natural or cultural)
cannot continue indefinitely; there must come a point or limit where energy is expended or consumed. The accursed share (la part
mau- dite) of energy is the excess that cannot be expended usefully, the portion that overflows what is required for survival,
maintenance or growth. The accursed share, Bataille insists, can only be squandered or con- sumed unprofitably. For example, in
human societies vast amounts of wealth and energy are squandered in festivity, in sacrifices, in play, in art, in eroticism and in
drunkenness. Further, at the moment of death the energy that comprised and maintained life is, itself, squandered, lost without
profit. Death, or mortality, then can be regarded as ‘evidence’ of the operation of the accursed share in the general economy of life
and death. In contrast, what Bataille terms restricted economy confines itself to narrowly circumscribed areas or objects, and seeks
to exert control, to exploit, to profit from these objects. Academic disciplines including sociology, biology and economics can be seen
as restricted economies in that they seek to ‘profit’ by accumulating information and knowl- edge. Restricted economies
typically refuse to acknowledge their limits , their losses and their useless expenditures of energy. Further, restricted
economies achieve some semblance of order and control by expelling unmanageable objects,
zones and experiences – foreign bodies – or by assimilating them through a rubric which is quite
alien to them. For example, sociology has largely expelled sacrifice and the violence of the sacred (once major topics of
concern, see Mauss & Hubert, 1964; Nisbet, 1966) or has assimilated them under the notion of ‘culture’. Culture is an inappropriate
term because it is utilised to contain explosive, conta- gious human practices within what is now a label for ‘safe’, inventoried, even
ossified values – such as might be found in a school textbook or a Wikipedia entry. Bataille’s own examples of such exclusions
include the dangerous notion of infinity banished from philosophy and the expulsion of zero from mathematics. It could be argued
that ‘Bataille’ is a hetero- logical object, tending to be expelled from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, economics and
cultural studies or, at best, partially assimilated through inappropriate and simplistic umbrella concepts or labels such as dissident
surrealist, philosopher of eroticism or pornographic novelist. It has been argued by some of Bataille’s critics that activities involv- ing
the squander of energies are actually socially ‘useful’. This is because such activities provide rest, enjoyment or recreation, so
enabling people to return to work rejuvenated. Even death can be seen as a making way for younger and more vital beings to renew
the species. This is indeed the case, but it misses the point. First, even from the perspective of restricted economies (such as
sociology, economics, religious studies) it must be admitted that social festivities and expenditures include actions and experiences
which surpass or exceed social usefulness. For example, the destruction of resources, the flaring of violence and the consumption of
large and disabling quantities of alcohol do not necessarily ‘rejuvenate’: they may prevent a return to work, or may even cause
fatalities. Nor can such excesses be dismissed as peripheral or accidental; indeed, such excessiveness is very widely understood as
intrinsic or even obligatory to festivity: if people behaved sensibly and responsibly it simply would not be a festival. Second, if we
shift the perspective in the direction of general economy, it appears that work, production and utility are endured only because they
provide the resources destined for expenditure, squan- der or sacrifice. We would not work if work did not enable us to expend, to
squander what we accumulate. Labour, production and growth cannot be unlimited; there must be limits or boundaries which
provide for the experience of release. It is important to note that Bataille does not simply champion excess over utility, or sacrifice
above production, that is, he does not simply invert the values of rationalist, utilitarian thought. For Bataille, the sys- tem of
production could not function without its periodic suspension, nor could wealth be expended sacrificially if it were not first
accumulated. Further, the
demarcation between the two spheres – sacred and profane, sacrificial and
economic, heterogeneous and homogeneous – is vital for society because the marking of limits
enables transgressive experience (such as festivity) to take place, as well as drawing the
boundaries that construct and protect order. Without such limits there is neither order nor disorder. Restricted
economies and the knowledge they generate are absolutely vital and indispensable for society and for thought. Yet, restricted
economies cannot function without erecting limits and boundaries, and there will always be excesses and indeterminacies
permeating these boundar- ies in any particular system. Indeed, the erection of a boundary or limit itself generates an ‘excess’
beyond that limit. Restricted economies ‘work’ only by drawing , selectively and discretely upon their
‘outside’ – the realm of general economy – and by simultaneously denying that they border an irreducible ‘outside’. The
restricted economies of academic disciplines are generally happy to admit that they have limits, of a fuzzy sort, but assume that
beyond ‘their’ limit another academic discipline picks up the baton. For example, sociology may defer to psychology and to biology
where the functioning of the individual psyche or of the body are concerned. In concert, academic disciplines purport to offer a
seam- less and limitless coverage of human experience. Bataille’s contention is that there are inherent and irreducible excesses,
excesses which must be expelled as a precondition for the scientific enterprise to begin. Science is, for Bataille, restricted by its
underlying foundation in utility – ultimately in the profane realm – so that all sciences must accumulate knowledge that is of use to
society. The accursed share, that which cannot be reduced to the utilitarian project of scientific thought, is manifest in paradox,
anomaly and in the failure to erect meaningful rather than simply useful foundations for knowledge. Further, for Bataille, the
subjective or inner experiences of the thinker – his or her experiences of wonder, inspiration, mystery, despair and ecstasy – are
experiences that can never be formalised as scientific knowledge, yet they are the source from which all scientific knowledge is
generated: the pre- or non-foundations of the scientific enterprise. At the level of thought or enquiry, general economic thinking
affirms and confronts the accursed share, where restricted economies deny it or avoid confronting its manifestations. The
implications of the accursed share become increasingly complex and problematic when we consider human groups and societies. In
support of his law of general economy, Bataille outlines a social anthropology of archaic societies which, he argues, made the
expenditure of excess energy and wealth their fundamental dynamic through festivals, feasts and sac-rificial rites (Bataille, 1988a,
pp. 45–77). Bataille’s argument is that by expending excess in collective, ritual practices which suspend everyday, productive
existence, excess energy can bind beings and communities: the accursed share is devoted to glory and sumptuary activities and so
social life is enriched. In contrast, modern societies have, by and large, lost the capacity for glorious, communal expenditures
because wealth is expropriated and ‘owned’ by elites for their individual and private pleasure. Bataille, drawing on Mauss (1990,
originally published 1924–1925), examines the potlatch ceremonies of the American northwest indigenous peoples, such as the
Tlingit and Kwakiutl, through the notion of general economy. These cultures were, traditionally, very rich,
generating large surpluses from hunting, fishing and producing ornate copper workings, such as
plates used in ritual exchange. The tribes possess what Mauss (1990) terms ‘a dual structure’, meaning that they disperse
to hunt and gather food during the warmer months, accumulating the wealth that is ‘lavishly expended’ during the collective
festivities of the winter. Mauss, famously, depicts some potlatch ceremonies as ‘radical’ and violent: Consumption
and
destruction of goods really go beyond all bounds. In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has,
keep- ing nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the mostly madly extravagant. Everything is based upon
the principles of antagonism and rivalry . . . [i]n a certain number of cases, it
is not even a question of giving and
returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gifts to be
reciprocated. (Mauss, 1990, p. 37) Within some potlatches at least, there is a violent struggle for hon-our. Giving potlatches is
the only way a chief can preserve his honour or rank within the tribe, and this must be periodically reaffirmed or it is lost forever,
Mauss suggests. Bataille also emphasises the excessive- ness of the squandering of resources, seeing the potlatch as a sacrifice of
wealth. The objects given, circulated or squandered in the potlatch are not mere ‘commodities’, not isolated or separated ‘things’.
The objects circulated in potlatch – gifts, jewels, dances, ornaments – are part of the sacred world. A portion of them is considered a
gift to the ances- tors; another portion grows and develops through the acts of giving and receiving, new tales or myths are added to
it so that the value increases inestimably. As both Mauss and Bataille emphasise, something of this sense of the ‘spirit’ or life of the
gift is retained in modern gift-giving ceremonies such as birthdays and Christmas. This suggests that liberal capitalist notions of
abstract or profane monetary exchange derive from a much richer ‘total’ or general economic system of exchanges. The notion of
barter, of exchanges in terms of approximate use or exchange value, is revealed as nothing more than capitalism’s self-generated
myth of origin: the notion of barter as organising economic principle cannot be found in any traditional society. A second important
point emerges from Bataille’s discussion of potlatch. Those who are able to humiliate or ‘crush’ others by offering gifts so great that
they cannot be reciprocated are conferred rank or prestige. However, this
notion of rank does not correspond to
modern notions of power; rank is sacred rather than profane, as the etymology of the word
hierarchy makes clear. Rank demands heedless, selfless courage and exu- berance; it demands an ‘explosion’ of force, or it
will diminish. The chief must protect his people without the slightest regard for his own safety or survival – and this, Bataille
suggests, sheds light on the fact that vio- lence, particularly skill in combat, is so widely regarded as honourable. This leads us to a
third point on which Bataille has been misunder- stood. It is wrong to accuse Bataille of a ‘romantic’ or sentimental view of the
‘noble savage’. Not only does Bataille emphasise the violence of life in traditional societies, but he is also clear that the sacred is
always compromised and exploited by the powerful. We must not be tempted to return to the past, he argues. Instead, the future
promises a full and universal prodigality and luxury beyond the confines enforced by priest- hoods, monarchies and armies. Indeed:
The true luxury and real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty- stricken . . . the individual who refuses work and makes his life on
the one hand an infinitely ruined splendour, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond
a military
exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can
rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness it heralds, unless it is in the splendour of
rags and the sombre challenge of indifference. (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77) The meaning of wealth and exchange in
capitalist societies is deter- mined by the lies of the rich and powerful, yet their containment and expropriation ‘destines life’s
exuberance to revolt’ (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77). In capitalist modernity, the ‘law’ of general economy is also the principle of
revolutionary overthrow. Bataille examines ancient Aztec society, understanding their culture as devoted to expenditure. Aztec
society, for Bataille, was in fundamen- tal contradiction to Western notions of production, accumulation and profit. The Aztecs
constructed pyramids on the summit of which Aztec priests sacrificed prisoners of war, tearing out their hearts, presenting the still
beating organ to the sun and then decapitating victims whose heads would roll down the sides of the pyramid. Bataille is quite
emphatic: ‘From the standpoint of profit the pyramid is a monumental mistake’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 119). Its construction is
immensely costly in terms of time and materials, and it serves no use from the perspective of restricted economy: the labour that
could have been extracted from the prisoners of war is squandered in a moment of horror and excess. It is sometimes suggested
that the Aztecs suffered food shortages and resorted to human sacrifice and cannibalism to ‘solve’ this shortage, but, though
portions of the bodies of victims were eaten by priests and elite warriors, this was in no way an ‘economical’ way of feeding the
people. Bataille expands on the many expenditures of wealth required for Aztec sacrificial ritual: a carefully chosen victim was
accorded a divine status, given great wealth and property, and then, months later, sacrificed to the sun (pp. 45–61). Such victims,
according to Bataille, actually embodied or temporarily became the accursed share. Their sacrificial religion enabled Aztec society to
ritually expend the wealth generated by their productive activities and military campaigns, and so achieve a degree of internal social
equilibrium. However, equi- librium, for any system or form of life, is only a temporary state. The accursed share cannot be negated,
transcended or resolved: sacrifices must continue. In Aztec society there were up to 20,000 victims per year (Bataille, 1988a, p. 51;
see also Vaillant, 1950). Given this fact, what pos- sible social or political lesson does Bataille draw from the Aztec example? For
Bataille, ‘pure, uncalculated violence’ is morally preferable to ‘The reasoned organisation of war
and conquest’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 54). Violence is, for Bataille, an inevitable and ineradicable dimension
of human existence: the only alternatives are between the forms of the manifestation of violence. On one hand, the sacred
and its unleashing, for Bataille, is the realm of pure and uncalculated violence. Religion, on the other hand, is a ‘subterfuge’,
a staging or dramatisation of extreme violence within social boundaries , in contrast to war which is a
destructive realisation of extreme violence beyond territorial boundaries. Where a society stages sacrificial ritual ,
violence remains within the group’s social boundaries . For Bataille, sacred or sacrificial violence
sunders the degrading order of work and duration; it establishes communication between
chosen members of the community and their divinities and ‘save[s] the rest from the mortal
danger of contagion . . . the community is saved from ruination’ (p. 59). The scope of violence then is limited by giving it a
localised space for its terrifying and spectacular dramatisation. Further, Bataille insists, the sacrificial victim should be
none other than the sovereign, the ruler upon whom is conferred a divine status and immense fortune precisely because
they accept, unreservedly, a sacrificial destiny. Though informed by prestigious ethnographic and folkloric studies, a significant
problem in Bataille’s argument is that such forms of sacrificial kingship seem to have been ‘compromised’ by substitute (or sym-
bolic) sacrificial victims even in archaic social formations. That is to say, the sovereign would be replaced by a substitute sacrificial
victim, and so the sovereign would be sacrificed ‘symbolically’, rather than actually being killed. Further, it might seem that this
internal consumption of violence is meaningful only within relatively small, tribal societies. From this point of view, while Bataille’s
contentions are legitimate as an extrapolation of the meaning of sacrifice from the work of Durkheim (1995, originally pub- lished in
1912), Mauss and Hubert (1964, originally published in 1898) and Georges Dumézil (1988, originally published in 1948), they have
also been criticised as bordering on romanticism (Habermas, 1987; Nehamas, 1989). Yet Bataille’s argument is more sophisticated
and nuanced that his critics allow. If
sacrifice is primarily an internal form of violence (inter- nal to a clan,
community or society) then war and conquest involve the directing of a portion of this violence onto
external enemies. This exter- nal channelling is, for Bataille, morally repugnant because it involves a deferral, accumulation
and rationalisation of the unleashing of violence. Violence breaks free from its ritual limits and accelerates beyond con- tainment,
becoming far more destructive. While violence still breaks the profane routines of society, it does so for
the allegedly ‘rational’ purpose of accumulating wealth or territory – that is for growth. Clearly,
externalised and rationalised violence involves far larger numbers of victims than does sacrifice .
Standing armies are developed. Warfare, throughout modernity, has increasingly affected non-
combatants. No member of society is, in any sense, protected from violence – indeed, all are made vulnerable with the
emergence of ‘total war’ and the threat of nuclear holocaust in the twentieth century. Crucially, the deferral and channel-
ling of violence also opens up the space for the hypocrisies of ideology and propaganda which attempt to
further rationalise the directing of violence onto external enemies by depicting enemies as lower, inferior or inhuman. For Bataille,
the social and epistemological conditions for racial hatred and ethnic violence are set up only through
the externalisations of violent excesses that are characteristic of modernity. We might say that a
religious social system is more honest (or rather less dishonest) about its violence than a ‘rational’, ideologically managed social
system. Finally, the
acquisitive and exploitative drive for continual growth generates new and
unforeseen manifestations of the accursed share, new outlets for the catastrophic squandering
of resources that cannot be contained within ritual or any other limits. The channelling of the
accursed share into military, colonial and ideological violence does not make these societies
more stable; it does not protect or shelter its people at the expense of others, but actually
condemns society to serial conflict, to an endless circulation of violence, a violence ‘set free
on all sides’ (Bataille, 1989a, p. 85). If sacrificing 20,000 people per year is a monstrous aberration, is the ‘sacrifice’ of
thousands of road users and pedestrians killed and injured in accidents across all developed nations any less monstrous? The major
difference seems to be only that the deaths caused by traffic accidents are absolutely meaningless, whereas the deaths in Aztec
sacrificial rites were charged with meaning.Bataille acknowledges that tendencies towards the externalisation of violence were
present, if inchoate, in Aztec society even at the time of the earliest ethnographic accounts. Yet clearly, sacrificial violence was the
central social dynamic. Bataille recounts how prisoners of war, taken by the Aztecs and destined for sacrifice, were made ‘insiders’
by being treated well, adorned and sometimes given concubines, enjoying a life of privilege for up to a year before their immolation.
Of course, Bataille does not contend that such victims were thereby willing, and he frequently notes that the powerful within even
small-scale or archaic ‘collective’ cultures used religion to control and abuse their people (Bataille, 1988, p. 60). Aztec ritual, at the
time of the Spanish invasion, was a degraded, ‘compromised’ form of sacrificial kingship, yet it is still able to illustrate a profound
moral difference from the conditions of modern societies. In stark contrast to Aztec society, the European industrial revolution made
possible an immense growth in wealth and energy during the nine- teenth century, and there was relative peace in Europe between
1815 and 1914. Isn’t this clear evidence of the economic and moral superiority of Western, industrialised cultures? For Bataille, this
growth of wealth and prosperity was, in fact, accompanied by a terrible impoverishment in the conditions of life, especially for the
working classes. Further, the excess energy generated by industrial production was, in time, turned to
catastrophically violent ends: ‘the two world wars organised the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings – that
history has recorded’ (p. 37). The development and accumulation of resources such as armies, machine
guns, tanks and war planes channelled growth into catastrophe as millions of lives were
annihilated on a scale previously unimaginable . In other words, growth as simple profit or unlimited
accumulation can never continue for long – rather growth, left unchecked, will generate new,
uncontrollable and catastrophic expenditures. The horrors of the trenches and the death camps, and of nuclear
devastation, mas- sively exceed and disable any possible sense of the ‘good’, of benefits or ‘profits’ – even figuratively such as
lessons learned by humankind. By contrast, the violence of the potlatch was largely symbolic (scant consolation for the slaves who
were sacrificed) and even Aztec society at the height of its sacrificial fervour never practised ‘sacrifice’ on the scale of
Passchendaele, Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Afghanistan. Indeed, Aztec violence was strictly limited to feast days, military expeditions
and festivals. Applying Bataille’s perspective, such limits allow, activate and contain the expression of the accursed share. We might
sum up this argument by simply saying that if the sacrificial violence of the Aztecs, Tlingit and Kwakiutl was terrifying, the violence
unleashed by modernity is far, far worse. Zizek (1996) suggests that if excess finds a use – in, for example, festivity, gift giving,
eroticism – then there is, in fact, no economy of excess. But this assertion can be reversed. If use, production and growth are only
temporary effects, and are ultimately destined for loss, then there is no restricted economy: there is only excess. However, Bataille’s
thought does not submit to such oppositions. There is no pure restricted econ- omy and no pure general economy; there is only
movement, circulation, alternation, duality, limits and their transgression. Bataille acknowledges that through religious sacrifices and
festivities, priests and rulers hope for some ‘supernatural efficacy’ – but this leads us directly to the dual- ity of the sacred. Sacrifices
are ‘useful on that plane [the supernatural] precisely insofar as they are gratuitous, insofar as they are needless con- sumptions of
resources first and foremost’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 120). For Bataille, the emergence of capitalist economy proper in the seventeenth
century, closely associated with the Protestant asceticism examined by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, actually ‘destroyed the sacred
world, the world of non-productive expenditure, and handed the earth over to the men of production, to the bourgeois’ (p. 127).
Protestantism and capitalism together complete the long process of the separation of the human and the divine, and attempt the
elimination of the sacred. This theme is re-examined in Chapter 7. Bataille concludes volume one with a fascinating discussion of
the Marshall Plan (or European Recovery Program) which, between 1948 and 1951, managed the donation
of around 17 billion US dol- lars to war-shattered European economies. This massive exercise in
state-planned aid enabled European economies to relax austerity and rationing measures, yet it
also provided vast new markets for the sale of American consumer goods. Bataille understands
the Marshall Plan as a form of gift exchange or potlatch , and he broadly approves of it. Fearing that the vast
growth of the American economy, and its mistrust and loathing of the Soviet Union, could only lead to armed conflict between these
superpowers, Bataille proposes that the excess wealth of America be ‘devoted to non-lethal works’ (1988a, p. 172). Bataille supports
the Marshall Plan for several reasons. First, it promised to operate on the general, collective or global level of interdependence, so
breaking with the rampant individualism associated with capitalist economy. Second, the
Marshall Plan relinquished the
profit motive, at least temporarily. Yet, just as important for Bataille, the plan was likely to achieve something
beyond the imagination of those who for- mulated it : to enable a ‘non-lethal’ potlatch-like competition between
the Soviet Union and the West, maintaining them in a ‘dynamic peace’ rather than allowing a situation where one or the other
becomes abso- lutely dominant and so accumulates wealth and power to a degree that threatens the globe. Forty years after
Bataille published The Accursed Share the Soviet Union collapsed, and the former Soviet states adopted market capital- ism. Yet,
even as the Soviet Union and the West seemed most divergent, during the Cold War, they were also converging. It became obvious,
in the West, that free-market economics cannot survive without State assistance and international
aid to prop up its banking system and the wider economy as they lurch from boom to bust. Nor can capitalist societies
survive without rituals of squandering, its managed or administered excesses of consumer spending based on credit
and, also, its thirst for the vicarious enjoyment of excessive violence, horror and death serviced by its entertainment industries. It
would be a mistake to present Bataille’s observations on the Marshall Plan as an entirely prescient or even ‘correct’ analysis of the
politics of the post-war period; he seemed to envisage the Soviet Union becoming more powerful that the United States in a
relatively short space of time, such that it would fall to the Soviet Union to relinquish its excess wealth by helping poorer countries.
But Bataille does not claim predictive power for his notion of general economy; rather, he shifts the level of analysis, suggesting that
America and the Soviet Union are caught up in a potlatch, whether they understand this or not. Indeed the ‘space race’ and Olympic
competition are two examples of prestige wars, potlatch or ‘non-lethal’ competition that did occur during the Cold War. Bataille
also recognises that the Marshall Plan’s ‘renunciation of the growth of productive forces’ is made
in order to achieve a longer term ‘utilization’ of wealth which serves American commercial
interests (1988a, pp. 182–183). However, if the Marshall Plan could prevent a third world war and/or the emergence of a single
totalitarian superpower, either capitalist or communist, the risks were outweighed by the benefits to the globe or ‘biomass’. There is
a significant shift here in what we can label for convenience Bataille’s politics. In The Accursed Share, Bataille seeks peaceful
evolution rather than the bloody street uprisings he envisaged in the mid-1930s. Bataille opposes nuclear disarmament as
unrealistic, and in the dynamic peace he hoped for, the Soviet Union and the United States would converge politically, in that the
latter would adopt some measure of social democratic state planning. The two blocs would provide a degree of tension for each
other which would not reach armed conflict but would prevent either finally dominating the other. The
domination of a
single power, Bataille insists, would be the worst out- come: the dominating force would lose any
critical self-consciousness, it would ‘fall asleep’, producing a slumber which presented ‘more
reason than ever to be afraid’ (p. 188). The collapse of the Soviet Union, and of communism generally, has placed the
world in grave danger: the rulers of Western states have, indeed, lost any critical self-awareness and
pro- nounce free market capitalism to be the only viable system. All limits are denied or
eliminated in the capitalist fantasy of perpetual growth. Indeed, capitalism recognises
neither limits nor excesses, and so must always increase levels of exploitation, of people, resources and the planet, as it
accelerates towards catastrophe.
God’s of War require the repetition of rituals within communities to secure
themselves, thereby forcing communicative spheres such as debate to organize
discourse around the figure of a Godlike Head – what we will call monocephale
– thus ensuring the continuation of arms transfers within our hearts and minds.
This indoctrinates subjects within a purely rationalist understanding of the
world sans difference.
Hamblet’05 |Wendy C. Hamblet is a philosopher, author, philosophical counselor, and consultant. She
has completed a two year term as Executive Director of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace and is an
activist-scholar in the Transcend Network of Conflict Transformation Professionals. “The Manic Ecstasy of
War”, in Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice (2005) Taylor & Francis, Inc. DOI:
10.1080/14631370500292052|KZaidi

Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with the dawn of tyranny and oppression. War,
one of the oldest human institutions, has proven invaluable to states in establishing their power over
subgroups within the system, as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to
permit their expansion in space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little
mystery to the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing
popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the
dignity of human beings, remains baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered
by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war
composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of
the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the population’s martial
enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of
self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless
splurge of the nation’s human and economic wealth for no better reason than wanton
celebration of state power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille.
His philosophy explains two principles of expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by
utilitarian goals serving current power relations, and that of nonproductive expenditure—that
is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the two dialectical
opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures. The first model aspires to
perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is
monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state becomes self-identified as
a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and customs fixed and imperative.
People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual lives that offer escape from
the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunkenness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures,
self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The monocephalic state, on
the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form
that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos,
madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy provides a valuable framework for analyzing global realities, even in the modern
world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all states
seek timeless stability, secured against time with absolute truth claims, infallible social codes,
and enduring legislation. States are duly secured by the legalized violence of police and military
that appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately suppress all transformation.
Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations—passports, licenses, identity cards, forms
completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration regulations, police interrogations,
surveillance of social and financial transactions among subgroups, security checkpoints,
departments of homeland security—weed out the deviant lifeforms until ultimately all
countervoices have been silenced, all rebellion quite obliterated, all evolutionary movement
logically contradictory. But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state
increasingly closes itself off, it stifles social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the
passion from its citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to
mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly
deified, all labors have become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating
stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most excessive extrapolation— fascism.
Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and move forward into futures. This most solid
state holds firm for a short while only; then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up
and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty
flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles
describe the movement of history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that
ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing
the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually
recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic
structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the
deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals , for Bataille, move between the two contradictory
forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an
imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s
analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests
that war composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a
breakout from mundane servitude. We may not readily recognize , in our states, the extreme forms
that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is unquestionably
undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen —Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced
that fascist urges fade with global democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order
and security of the first world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean
between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron
of golden rules. But the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-
order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common
arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one
head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an
embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and
morally superior to acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in
the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid, unyielding—is
preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics.
Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects
as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a theater of cruelty and death
that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the
philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by
lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s
treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the
simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those
very states naming themselves the most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in
the civilized modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within
industrialized, rationalist, rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and
utility. The violence that floods the globe in modernity , that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global
freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires, the projects of
monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern
world: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of
fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons] . . . . [M]an
[lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce
men of modernity—gods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control
to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the products of molten metal torn
from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the desperate obstinacy
of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost
somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of
modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good
of their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in
heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the
rigorous projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free
from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them
from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic drives will out
and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern
industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending
character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern wars can be
explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of modern ordered states and from people’s
imprisonment within the merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should provide a
wondrous release from mundane servitude. War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic
omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity
occur with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their suppressed lust for a
sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian reasons of state. This
resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained
wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For
Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped all political bounds
and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an
era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—
but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes
merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific
revolution that provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass
production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system)
that have been successfully harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The
goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally
in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of
the primal urges of a community toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based
on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to
make the living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it
must compose orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s
finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves
mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses
its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the
oldest traditions of our species. It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states.
Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of com- munication between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multi-
functional institution. . . . It is extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial
functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is
a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates, ultimately, in fascist
stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is utterly necessary to the
deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the
creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the
citizens and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves
the collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values,
virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems,
tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its
strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in
fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an
inter-national stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even
the most oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly
character—the valor, the selfless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in
the tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the
advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization— today’s wars clearly bring too massive a
booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have increasingly
become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists and accountants
and big busi- nessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern
techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism of
the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars
serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object (the nation)
massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their
corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the
sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective
delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength
and in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collec- tive illusion is
fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed;
the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good war. But for all the benefits served by the
institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse
homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on
parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. Ultimately the
greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its
stark utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the
purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build
heartfelt communities, a need that can only be served by expressing the collective aggressive
energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by
armed force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the
great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force
its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military
prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic urges
that explains a state’s return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution. It
may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its
service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in dispensing its most
fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel needs of the people,
their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts
this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The
sacred values of community—life, freedom,
festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxtaposition to their
opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately,
insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If
Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are utterly
utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.

Plan – the United States federal government should remove all arms from the
US Munitions List.
The plan solves – removing arms classifications means the US can no longer
regulate munitions to achieve surplus since the input wouldn’t exceed the
output. The plan squanders our amassed resources in a grand bonfire, refusing
imaginations of the subject within the tragic principle of utility in favor of an
ethic of general rather than restricted exchange – giving arms with no
expectation of return.
This affirmation of a world unencumbered by the hindrances of utility is an act
of black malpractice – a black fugitive logic that ruptures the deification of the
state-form. This activates new modes of being, unplottable gatherings, sacred
forces that “unsay” the contractual terms of legal decisionism which confine
thought to anti-black notions of economic exchange.
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 8 and 26 included in curly braces|KZaidi
After an initial consideration in the next section of this article to unfold what I mean by the sacred in such a way that begins
juxtaposing blackness and the sacred, I then reframe the Charlottesville incident and the general crisis of politicality today as nothing
less than a crisis of the sacred that, rather than disavowing malpractice, in fact calls for it. Together these first two sections serve as
a springboard from which I rethink in the remainder of the article the inherently ambivalent
notion of the sacred,
mobilizing it as a tool for black thought—that is, as a tool for thinking blackness precisely as
opening up an alternate imaginary of the sacred from which also opens up other worlds. Here
blackness indexes sacrality without property and without sovereignty, thus activating other
modes of dwelling on and with the earth, other modes of knowing that we might call “abyssal
nonknowledge,” other socialities or congregationalities that exceed settler politicality. I call this a poetics of the
sacred. Stated differently, if in the immediate sections that follow I consider the myth of politicality or political knowledge in which
certain energies of the sacred are harnessed to state projects and incarnated in charismatic
political leadership (this is, what the Charlottesville white nationalists rallied to defend) to produce a kind of “pure”
or “right-hand sacred” meant to secure homogeneity, then in the rest of this article I consider the sacred in its
base, heterogeneous, or immanent modalities—that is, the sacred not as figure but as impure, “left-hand” flight, indeed, as
that movement or passage or diaspora of spirit that enlivens or animates blackness in its would-be corpsing. I now
turn to the question of the sacred.

The Right- and Left-Hand Sacred

Building from Émile Durkheim and especially Durkheim’s student Rob- ert Hertz, Georges Bataille, and Roger Callois give us an
important initial handle on the sacred in its ambivalent double-sidedness and as a tool for grappling with the modern social text.2 In
“The Psychological Struc- ture of Fascism,” published in 1933, Bataille
mobilized a discourse of the sacred to
examine what was happening at the time and, crucially, to begin thinking toward modes of
social life that exceed the political as we know it. For this, he expanded the basic profane/sacred
duality that Durkheim bequeathed to French social theory into a distinction between the homo- geneous and
the heterogeneous. This became for him an analytic frame- work through which to make sense of fascism.
Identified with produc- tion, the sphere of the profane or what Bataille called the homogeneous is an exclusively
utilitarian realm or a restricted economy of exchange. Conversely, the elements of the sphere of the
heterogeneous or what Bataille called the sacred indicate a general economy of an unrestricted
expenditure of energy that, though to a point employable and thus valu- able because useful
and useable within a social system to help render the system coherent , even if fragilely so, remains
fundamentally excessive, ecstatic, or rapturous.3

To borrow a formulation from Roger Callois, a colleague of Bataille’s in a dissident study group that met in the back of a Paris
bookstore and that they called the “College of Sociology,” we might think of left-hand experiences of the sacred as those in which
the sacred is nothing less than the experience of sociality through and as infraction given in “inter-
affective” excess, given in and as “collective ecstasy.” 4 The sacred here manifests as the experience of
innovation and improvisation, what Callois calls an “improvisation of the sacred,” that connects with a
“mysterious world” (152). For Callois, such improvisational ecstasy bespeaks a fundamental
“metamorphosis of . . . being.” I will revisit this term again when I consider Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis.
Staying for now with Callois, improvisational ecstasy as the metamorphosis of being indicates an
anguished yet joyous dwelling in a kind of blurred communion apart from and in critique of the
presumptions of individuation (282). Akin to Callois’s description of the sacred as a kind of ecstatic and anoriginal
metamorphosis, thinking with Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Italian female mystic, Bataille figures the sacred as
a sort of fecund, negative space, an “abyss of possibilities . . . where the possible is the impos-
sible itself” and in which “ecstatic, breathless, experience . . . destroys the depths . . . of being
by unveiling” a nonpossessable, a nonsubjective zone irreducible to property and thus
irreducible to propertied subjectivity.5 While Bataille eventually devotes an entire book-length study to such “inner
experience,” where “inner” here is not to be understood as the interiority of a supposedly coherent,
individuated self but a kind of collective aliveness, Callois advances his thinking in this vein in an essay called
“Festival.”6 Presented as a talk to the dissident College of Sociology study group, “Festival” considers the sacred in
terms of a collective effervescence and eruption that characterized ancient festivals and feasts
and whose vestiges one finds, Callois argues, in contemporary carnivals and such. Such festive events of “yesteryear and today,” he
says, are “always defined by dancing, singing, excitement, excessive eating and drinking. It is necessary to go all out to
the point of exhaustion, to the point of sick- ness. That is the very law of the festival” (281). Here profane
or chronological temporality or the time of Man and his others is disrupted in the name of
dwelling in some other experience of time beyond the logic of separability. To dwell in the
spacetime of “difference without separability,” and thus in ecstatic temporality, is to dwell in
the experience of carnival time, which is the experience of being out of time, of dwelling in
time-out, in out-time. It indicates a dwelling unhistorically in history, which is to say, in
history’s exhaustion. In short, it is to be off beat. 7 Such is Callois’s description of “inner experience,” where
experience here indicates a condition of ek-stasis—a dwelling in and witnessing to out-ness as
such. This is a condition of being dispossessed of a self, which is a condition of (non)possession
that is anterior to property, anterior to propertied self-possession, indeed anterior to a possessive and
possessing self altogether.8 {I cannot help but hear and want to complicate what Callois is detailing here, and by extension
Bataille as well and arguably French feminist écriture too, under the force of black feminism, particularly under the force of M.
NourbeSe Philip’s poetics and more specifically still under the force of her consideration of inner space (the invasion of the space
between black women’s legs) and outer place (the invasion of the Caribbean and the New World and the establishment of what
Philip calls the plantation machine). The
invasion of the former, so as to tether black women to the
plantation machine in order to sustain that machine through reproduction, links the patriarchal
penetration of the space between the legs to the penetration of the place now called the
Caribbean. Philip writes that violent coming together of inner space and outer place as “s/place.” Philip is also clear that space
and place not only violently come together through the slash in “s/place”; they also diverge
through that same slash. That coming together and/as divergence points to a zone irreducible
to the inner/outer opposition or dialectic. On the page, Philip signifies that zone under the sign “dis place,” which
she extends as “dis placement.” All of this, Philip unfolds in her essay, “Dis Place: The Place Between.” Though I am unable to give a
sustained engagement with this profound essay here, I read this essay as Philip’s own speaking back to Bataille and Callois, back to
French sacred sociology, back to the modernist social text more generally. Philip
is involved in a semiotics of
unsaying and untelling that she places under the rubric of “silence” (295). More specifically, Philip unsays
the notion of “inner experience” through the slash that separates and connects “s/place” (288) and by means of the collectively
agentive “silence” (295) operative within “dis place” and that surges as an insurgency through the rupture of “dis placement” (290).
Unsaying here, in other words, is a mo(ve)ment of passage, a movement of blackness. Rapture and
rupture here comingle with and yet beyond the violence that sustains the opposition between
inner space and outer place. This is a poetics of “between,” of “dis place,” of dispos- session in the name of a
carnivalesque or a bacchanalian spirit possession. Later in this article we will see how Sylvia Wynter, another Caribbean
theorist, effects a similar outcome through her notion of “beyond.” Between and beyond is irreducible to
patriarchal settler colonial and enslaving logics that oppose inner space to be invaded and
territorialized outer place. For Philip, “dis place between” indicates a black feminist ecstatics of the
sacred, an ecstatics of “earth and sound” (296) encountered in that other (dis) place: Caribbean carnival, where “women [mash]
the ground—dancing and wining their all any and everything . . . shaking their booty, doing their thing, their very own thing, jazzin it
up, wining up and down the streets, parading their sexuality . . . taking back the streets, making them their own as they speading
their joying up and down the streets of Port of Spain. . . . Is the only time of the year that women—old women, young women, thin
women, fat women, women women— showing off their sexuality without undue censure or fear under the benign gaze of OUR
ROYAL WILL AND PLEASURE. Oh, for a race of women” (312–13). I take up this black radical, black feminist ecstatics of the sacred in
a continued thinking with Philip and other (black) critical theorists in my book in progress, “Black Rapture.”}

A condition perhaps of spirit possession, this socioecstasy given in the ferment of the festival manifests the
sacred as a sociality of infraction against “taboos” and “rules” meant to ensure propriety and
comportment (282). Such a tabooed sociality in festivaled rapture is nonboundaried and thus
nontabooed in the first place.

We are on the threshold, the limen of the thought of the heterogenous or the otherwise. In raptured ecstasy, the element of the
heterogeneous betokens ontopoliticality’s, indeed, the human’s collapse in the face of what the
violent homogeneity of ontopoliticality cannot hold. The unholdable, the unhavable—
notwithstanding that juridical-economic order seeks to seize and thus reduce the unhavable to ownership or property— is
in fact
uncapturable; it will not fully “get in formation.” Indexing another horizon of existence (where “ex-
istence” is necessarily “ek-static” and as such neither is nor is not but “is-not”), the energies of heterogeneity are for
this reason ultimately, Bataille says, an unemployable, invaluable, or useless surplus9 that indicates a
kind of energy-in-flux, a charged or “base matter”10 that allows the elements of heterogeneity ,
as Michèle H. Rich- man puts in elaborating Bataille on this point, “to break the conventional barriers upon which
homogeneity relies.”11 Bataille associates this break and, importantly, the noncommodifiable
knowledge or the nonknowledge from the break that surges through it with what is irreducible
to production or monetary and identitarian exchange. This is what makes the heterogeneous
powerful and dangerous to systems of politicality or order, why, in other words, it is dangerously sacred.
Decentralized and acephalous, the heterogeneous, which bespeaks the sacred of “the left-hand,” indexes “a force
that disrupts the regular course of things” (143), though those very disruptive energies can be recruited
for “right-hand” purposes, aggregated to an anointed leader, a political “pastor” who uses a kind of “pastoral
power” to seal the breach of heterogeneity and violently return a polity to homogeneity.12 In “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” Bataille interprets the rise of Hitler and 1930s German fascism along with the resulting effects on and uptake
into French politics within this frame- work and as a manifestation of the right-hand sacred—a recruitment of the wild energies of
the sacred to seal the breach of heterogeneity as that political breach of purity at the time came to be figured in the Jews and in
other undesirables. I
read the summer 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the
general rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency in related, right-hand terms.13

But to stay with Bataille, in that same essay he keeps his eye trained on the left side of things where there
is always
heterogeneity or base ener- gies exceeding the terms of order. He finds examples in this regard in the untouchables
of India, on the one hand, and among the destitute in the economically and socially “less ritualistic” or “advanced civilizations” of the
West, as he puts it, on the other. In the latter, “being destitute is all it takes . . . to create between the self
and others—who consider themselves the expression of normal man—a nearly insurmountable
gap” (144). Whether it be the hereditarily untouchables or the destitute in advanced countries, it is the “lowest strata of
society,” Bataille contends, “[that] can . . . be described as heterogeneous . . . those who generally provoke
repulsion and can in no case be assimilated to the whole of mankind” (144). In their
untouchability or destitution, such groups are a heterogeneous element associated with
useless expenditure, with “violence, excess, delirium, madness . . . [that] to varying degrees”
has the capacity because occluded within but not fully subsumed by the juridical-economic
order to unsettle the terms of order (142). Interpreted as mobs, they are outlaw or “[breakers]
of the laws of social homogeneity.” As such, “these impov- erished classes,” Bataille says, “are characterized by
the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things ” (144), particularly those
tabooed things, those things, as Richman explains again elaborating Bataille, placed under “restricted contact”
and whose collective effervescence indicates a “transgression” or a “negation [that] surpasses
itself” in exceeding every closed order “without returning to the original condition or state it had negated.”14 Here we find
the sacred in its excessive, left- hand mode of ceaseless rupture and rapture, as harbinger of a sociality without
limit or completion.
This brings us to an absolutely vital point around which much of what I want to say in this article and, indeed, much of my effort to
mobi- lize a discourse of the sacred for black studies, turns: the ambiguity within the very notion of the sacred itself as both pure and
the impure. Alexander Riley succinctly clarifies the issues here: “The
sacred is not only the holy or consecrated
but can also be the accursed.”15 That is to say, “in addition to being opposed in a binary relationship
to the profane [this is Bataille’s sphere of homogeneity], [the sacred] is itself comprised of two opposing
binary poles: the forces that maintain physical and moral purity and order, life, and health [the
holy that upholds the holy], andthose that contribute to impurity , evil, sacrilege, disease, and death [the
accursed].”16 The former sphere of pure divinity depends on an accursed share, an excremental element, to
constitute and secure itself, within the terms of a restricted economy of sacrificial exchange, as
pure. As Giorgio Agamben understood and as Riley reiterates, this doubled, contradictory or ambiguous sense of the sacred is
connected to the Latin word from which it derives: sacer. Riley goes on to explain how the idea of the sacred can trip us up: hewing
close to the Latin sense of sacer, “the French sacré . . . can mean both, and is frequently used in both senses (la musique sacrée, holy
or sacred music, and un sacré menteur, a damned or accursed liar), whereas the English ‘sacred’ has in practice lost the second
meaning.”17

If Bataille associates this second sense of the sacred, whose relationship to the first is not dialectical but excessive or abyssal, with
the untouchables and the destitute, then here I stretch the generally Durkheimian formulation of the right- and left-hand sacred,
bending along with it even Bataille’s more renegade formulation of sacred excess to that blackened or black
sacral
(non)position that aroused the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in the first place as a violent
secondary, “right- hand” reaction. This opens up a consideration of the sacred’s proximity to
blackness wherein, following Hortense J. Spillers, we might think of blackness as “symptom of the
sacred,” as terrifying monstrance of that beautiful monstrosity , that inner scar voluntarily
claimed in having been called.18 The monstrosity to be claimed here, this “unbounded sociality,” concerns
“blackness as matter [that] signals [infinity], another world . . . that which exists without time
and out of space, in the plenum”19—the sacred otherwise. Here the sacred is obscure and formless, even “oceanic,” to
stay with Spillers’s Freudian-inflected formulation. More akin to that “raw prime matter” of which Denise Ferreira da Silva has
recently spoken as part and parcel of the virtuality of a “black feminist poethics,” the
sacred here is of the wild, of the
wilderness. To continue to think under the force of Spillers’s thought, the sacred, in its adjacency to blackness
or as itself symptomatically black, points to those hermetic energies or those forces of
enchantment, to metamorphosis bound to devotional practices of un/knowing. Black sacrality
indexes a certain liveliness and aliveness occasioned by, moving in relationship to, and yet
irreducible to the “spiritual ordeal” of death that is settler modernity.20 For this reason, black
radical sacrality, which we might just as well think of as the sorcery of (black social) life itself, unsettles, is ever
poised to incite volatility within regimes of politicality. That is to say, the sacred, as I am given to thinking
about it here as figuring a poetics of malpracticed black (reli- gious) study, is neither transcendental, pure, nor
beneficent but, rather, is base, stank, impure, low to the ground, underground, of and with the earth.
All this is to say, I approach the sacred as a kind of pathological and ek-static threshold before which
other, differential and unrepresentable presences, genres or forms of life, unplottable gatherings in
representation’s colonializing ruins, alternative ways of being with the earth, come into view.21

From the vantage point of regimes of politicality, black ek-static

life, which is to say black social life, cannot
help but be understood as indexing deviance, deviation, and aberration. Moving “in the break” of the
terror of politicality, black radical deviance is a practice of the social not reducible to politicality—a
studied “consent,” it has been said, “not to be a single being.”22 This is a malpracticed
spirituality, a non/theological or, better put, an atheological and thus a “godlessmysticism”23
that points to frenzied existence that is so much more than resistance because such indeterminate
non/existence is on the far side of the concept, on the far side of a god-concept, on the far side of a god that stalls out as a static
concept and that thus installs the concept—on the far side, I mean, of “God as a Failed Figuration,” to echo poet Phillip B. Williams,
that which grounds “the American aesthetic.”24 That malpracticed, atheological godlessness bespeaks an interior,
collective alivenessconstantly ready, expectantly poised for the unexpectant, the experience of the ek-static—
to be moved, to be terrified, to love, to hate, to live magically, drunkenly, wanderously,
wonderously, erotically, joyously, childishly, prayerfully, in the radicality of a certain moving
stillness, a certain quarreling, in/sovereign quiet.25 This black (w)holiness that (in)sovereignly
exceeds the concept, we might call black rapture. It is along this path that I want to begin to unfold or
explicate black malpractice as the nonperformance of modernity’s god terms, as
nonperformative breach of the religious contract that subtends the racial contract insofar as
the social contract (of racism) is necessarily a religion contract whose terms are secular.26 {My
notion of a religion contract as animating modernity’s social contract as a race contract emerges in conversation with Sora Han’s
ground-shifting medi- tation on the 1857 legal case known in the legal archive as Betty’s Case. See Han, “Slavery as Contract.” At
issue in the case is the relationship between freedom and slavery for a slave woman, Betty, whom Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the
Massachu- setts Supreme Court declared free by virtue of her arrival from Tennessee with her owners into the northern free state of
Massachusetts. In free territory and by means of a kind of legal alchemy, Betty
moves from being owned property
to free agent who can contract her labor to her former owner . The question of the case was
whether free will could be exercised in any and every way, including the freedom to contract
oneself back into slavery? The reason this legal question arose is because when Betty as slave in the South
traveled with her owners from Tennessee to Massachusetts, she also entered into the legal,
transcendental freedom that spatially obtains by virtue of being in the North, that is, by virtue
of breathing “free air,” as it was often put. And yet, though legally free in the North, Betty nevertheless
exercised that freedom against freedom itself. That is, she opted to return to Tennessee with her
former owners, thus exercising freedom towards unfreedom, towards becoming (again) a slave.
Han astutely walks us through the legal issues arguing that while slavery can be thought about under the rubric of property (which is
typically and most often how it is thought about), what Betty’s Case reveals is that “contract” is the more central
category and problematic. It is, Han says, “the condition of possibility for the slave’s property status” (403). Han further
argues that the kind of freedom Betty enacted was, in fact, an obscenity, an obscene form of
freedom, in that this is a practice of freedom that arrives as the negation of legal freedom, “a
giving away or a giving up on freedom.” This (un)free malpractice of legal, transcendental freedom, this
“nonperformance,” moves “in a subterranean” or outlaw realm, even as it shows up in relationship to the realm of
law and legal thought. Here freedom’s protocols as imagined within liberal (contract) law are
breached, disclosing that in Betty’s case, which is to say in “the case of blackness,” there is a fundamental
indistinction between slavery and (liberal) freedom. But this statement must be quickly sharpened: the
obscenity of Betty’s act of freedom is not merely that it breached the protocols of liberal
freedom. Rather, her freedom act discloses liberal freedom as never not already breached by
“a form of pure performativity” that, referring to Moten, Han calls “improvisation.” Improvisation
here indexes a mode of freedom that “cannot be specifically contracted, nor strictly performed
against a contract, but is nonetheless a legal form contract law might refer to as
nonperformance. We might say that improvisation is the kernel around which contract law’s recognition of
nonperformance circles, and that which it attempts to defend the promise [of the contracting parties]
against” (408). In “Black Rapture,” my book in progress, I extend the idea that I am develop- ing here about blackness as a
(non)performative breach of the modern text, which more specifically I read as a juris-theological contract or a religion contract or a
con- tract of political theology. Within
the terms of this contract the sacred is recruited to subtend or
otherwise sanction modernist concepts of religion and the secular as central to establishing the
anthropocenic world of Man, though that world is even haunted by subterranean earth, black outdoors—
some other, excessive horizon of the sacred altogether. This connects to what earlier in this essay I called an “improvisa-
tion of the sacred.” For another, related take on Han’s notion of “nonperformance,” see Moten, “Erotics of Fugitivity.” On my
invocation earlier in this note of “the case of blackness,” see Moten’s essay of this title.} Stated differently, it is along this path that I
want to engage in sacred poiesis, a poethics of the fugitive sacred. But first, I address the problem of political theology as a species,
we might say, of antiblackness.
Frame the 1AC’s invocation of black malpractice as a form of sovereign poetry
in the face of state-divinity which is irreducible to anti-black programs of
governance.
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnote 50 included in curly braces|KZaidi

What I aim for here, then, is a (mal)practice beyond the myth of theopoliticality. Anatheological
malpractice is the “practice of outside,” outdoors—an out not caught in or that already
ruptures the dialectic of inside-outside or the notion of a border or a property line, notions of
inside-outside that are at the heart of myths of order, state or otherwise. Black out is no
ordinary outness. Out even from itself in critique of the notion of a self, blackness’s practiced
outness or black out is “black rapture.” It is akin to what Nathaniel Mackey has called “Mu” in the serial or unending
poem of his that bears this name. Approaching the sound of the first two letters of the Greek-derived word myth (muthos),
Mackey’s serial mu-poem encodes a poetics not so much of myth but of what he calls ythm. 38
The decomposition of myth into ythm (or is it the imposition, in keeping with my earlier discussion, of myth or
propertied world onto larval Earth, as a hieroglyphics onto flesh, that we are dealing with?) is fascinating to think through
as an expression of black malpractice.

Descending into language itself as some kind of founding or mythic violence, Mackey malpractices myth by
anagrammatically reshuffling it. Ythmic shuffle “advances a sense of alternative, ‘a special
view of his- tory,’” that moves in relationship to an alternative sense of language, a dwelling
in the flesh of words.39 What results is the (rh)ythm of black malpractice, an ythmic
overdubbing of myth. With ythm the first two letters of myth are first inverted (possessive my- becomes dispossessed ym-)
and then splayed open so as to reveal a quantum, cosmic, but also womb space that holds an infinite set of
phonemic, phonetic, “parasemi- otic” possibilities.40 That infinite set is signified in the repositioning of the other
two letters of myth, namely, the dental phoneme th-, between the inverted and now spaced apart other two letters. The inverted
and spaced apart other two letters now hold or, perhaps better put, now care for and become a space of caress for the dental
phoneme th-. Ym- is the womb for a crippled sound (Mackey says that “ythm is crippled rhythm”) created by air vibrating through
flesh, air pushed between tongue and teeth and released through the mouth. In this way, the ym-
of ythm is a conduit, a
frictional (middle?) passage, a fleshly resonance chamber through which even if under duress life’s
breath might pass, a quantum gap of pneumatic respiration , life’s harbor, “held but not had / . . . churchical
girth.”41

Such is Mackey’s ythmic mu-poetics wherein due to the “creaking of the word” language becomes an (rh)ythmic paint
brush of otherworldly, undercommon edifices. Trees paint the sky green, and incarnation or lar- val life sings the
flesh, some “other” experience of the sacred. This is an experience of the sacred in the absence of (state)
divinity, the experience of an uncontainable outside. Black malpractice is an open field poetics
of the black out. The rest of this article explicates, by recursive or serial wandering, that beyond, and that
opening of the field that (rh)ythmically cuts the myth of the political. Black malpractice is a ministerial
poetics, an ythmic poiesis of the beyond.

With this said, I can come back to Rev. Lamar’s Washington Post interview. I want to locate the deeper impulse of what I take Rev.
Lamar to be calling for in relationship to what I have just summarized, that sum- mary pointing to a tradition of the sacred that
shadows Rev. Lamar’s read- ing of the Charlottesville incident. Not
presuming the state as teleological principle of
the social, this is a tradition that moves from the “grounded- ness of an uncontainable
outside.”42 I want to fold Rev. Lamar’s comments into this tradition insofar as they question modernity as a
structure of ontopolitical theology and thus incite a rethinking of the sacred as what is abyssal
to the myth of politicality. Indeed, I would like to (re)turn black studies to the question of the
sacred, a question taken up by black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and M. Jacqui Alex- ander,
among others, and frame it vis-à-vis the im/possibility of black life within the politicotheological
structures of modernity.

I advance here black radicalism as a movement of sacred deviancy, deviation, and aberration. Black
radical deviance is an anatheological practice of the social—a studied “consent not to be a single being,”43 it
has been said—given in and as a practice of the sacred without standpoint, without locus, in and as sacred
malpractice. We must study the sacral- ity of this dissident deviance, the (w)holiness of a blackness
that moves fugitively and ecstatically, like the ancient vagabonds or revolutionary
“gyrovagues,” those monks who, never staying in one place, were mystic wanderers rather than
possessive settlers.44 If the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, were a doubling down on or a
restatement of a certain counter- revolutionary American settlerism that is not new with Trump but that
also must be thought about in relationship to the “postracialism” of the Obama presidency, then they were only
following in the steps of St. Bene- dict, whose counterrevolutionary monastic rule(s) sought to
subject the gyrovagues to his rule(s) of obedience and thus settle (down) the sacred by arresting
the itinerate, revolutionary energies in the movement of sen- tient, gyrating flesh. Blackness is
gyrovague-ish, given to the insovereign itinerancy of enspirited flesh, America’s phantom limb.
Indeed, blackness is enfleshed spirit and so is (a) spiritual, its wandering an itinerant spiri-
tuality. In other words, black wandering upon the earth, like faith itself, moves as a rapturous,
otherworldly excess. Blackness is a lapsarian condition, a “fallenness” within the racially
gendered world of property, an abiding on and with the unpropertizable, ungiven, and
ungivable earth. Though paradoxical, black fallenness thus bespeaks black rapture. We need a
protocol for this fall, for the fallenness of black rapture as a kind of “base faith,” the spirituality of a
“base materialism.”45 We need a protocol for black malpractice as a practice of the monstrous, the fugitive sacred, this
errantry.
Now I confess that I have no pretensions that in the remainder of this article I fully deliver the needed protocol. This is because I am
not sure it can be fully delivered. Or, rather, I wonder if its deliverance can only be aspirational—not aspirational in the sense of
uplift or as an upward striv- ing to become a proper American but aspirational in the sense of a certain movement of spirit that
manifests in the very form and style or mode of writing in this article. Such writing I call spirit-writing or pneumatography. That is to
say, in aspiring toward a protocol of black fallenness, I walk a line of blurred distinction between explication and performance. I aim
on the one hand to further explicate or offer an analysis of what I mean by black malpractice as a kind of black fallenness. In this
sense I want to unpack the idea. On the other hand, I want to enact and be enacted by the idea, to create or, perhaps better, to be
poetically, poethically raptured, caught out, felled by, and in this way all up in the experience of the very malpractice I aim to
explicate—held in its suspension, practiced and channeled by malpractice, its possible ritual conjurer, malpractice’s would-be
instrument, its vibrating reed. This is a matter of method, which is also a matter of the argument itself.

Poetics of the Sacred

What is the methodology of black radical sacrality, that poetics of mal- practice that is a poetics of the sacred? In my effort to
explicate this, let us linger for a moment on the word explication itself, for the blurred distinc- tion of which I spoke above between
explication and performance is in fact internal to the very word explication itself. The pli- in explication (from the Latin plico,
meaning “to fold together”) coupled with the prefix ex- (from the Greek ek-, meaning “out from”) suggests an internal communion,
a sociality or a being-with, a folding together. Explication draws out or surfaces, splays and displays, that
form of life that is not one, that is no-body, that is not a singularity but, rather, is a folding-
together. In this respect, explication is akin perhaps to the activity of weaving or looming. Or just as much, with poet-critic Dawn
Lundy Martin as our guide for a moment, explication, given what she says in her meditation on “black poetics,” is “as much
breaking as it is making. The inverse of hermeneutics as it resists interpretation in favor of
something less sure, something more unstable.”46 Immediately following this declaration, Martin pens a curious
series of sentences that may be read as practicing the very breaking and making of which she’d just spoken. Set off in italics and,
moreover, as the
expression and practice of some sort of poetic knowledge, the sentences have the
feel of a poem or of what might be called a micro- or even a minor poem: “I’m jumping on top of a police
car on fire. I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with ecstasy in my sadness.”47

The syntax of the first sentence raises questions for how this micro- poem practices or explicates the breaking-making injunction of
black poetic (non)knowledge as black malpractice. Is the jumping “I” what’s on fire here (which may be why that “I” is jumping)?
That is, is the I-ness of the “I”—where in the wake of Descartes and a broader Western philo- sophical tradition the “I” imagines
itself as a self-determined, coherently singular identity—what is on fire? Is that what is ablaze, under thermo- dynamic immolation
in a socio-relational field to which the “I” (or what we think we mean when we say “I”) is already immanent? Or, might it be that
what is burning in Martin’s micropoem is not so much the “I” as it is the police car that that “I” is jumping on? Could that be what’s
on fire? Or perhaps it is both the subjected “I” and the objective policing car, the sub- ject and the object, that are ablaze. And what
of the relationship between the kinetics of the jumping “I,” the pyrotechnics of the blazing fire that consumes maybe the subjected
“I,” maybe the policing car, maybe both, and that third vector in the poem, the ecstatic heart or spirit aflame with joy while singed
with sadness?

I pose no answers to these questions but instead want to dwell in their poetic interplay, stay with
the splayed ecstatics of a fallen blackness under fire, on fire, in the fire, as fire, the perhaps Pentecostal, perhaps mystical, perhaps
Du Boisian “black flame” fire. Here, blackness might
be thought of as that which burns without being
burnt up, smoky vespers ascending in burning heat. This blue(s) exhaust(ion) puts in mind what the
nonconformist fourteenth-century beguine mystic Marguerite Porete, interestingly judged by her inquisitors as a kind of queered
“pseudo- woman” (quaedam pseudomulier), called as she made her way into the fires of the inquisition, fire’s “relinguishment.”48
For Porete, whose vision approximates Sufi mysticism, fire and air coincide in a kind of “coin- cidence of opposites.”
Alchemically combusting, they interact such that their exhaust(ion) releases a freedom that is
illegible within the terms of politicality. Such freedom pointed for Porete to otherworldly possi-
bilities, vitalities that exceed and that in fact as she saw it could not be contained by the
managerial, priestly class or by inquisitorial governance. The release of which Porete speaks is ecstatic,
which is also to say erotic. Indeed, hers is a social erotics of desire that she saw as the sum and non- substance (insofar as she
identified this as the abyssal nothingness) of the sacred. This is a mode of nonindividuated entanglement, a kind of
quantum sacrality, that moves on the plane of the “pseudo-” and the “para-”—again, her grand inquisitors called her a
pseudomulier, pseudo- woman—on the plane of the ellipses attached to these prefixes that will not allow them to be fixed or come
to a final resting place. This is the plane of the impossibility, the ungraspability and unknowability of
what in Porete’s wake Nicholas of Cusa called posse or possibility itself.

I read Martin’s malpracticing poetics, her micropoetics, as proxi- mate to Porete’s mysticism. A black flame mysticism of the riot is
how I want to read what’s at stake in Martin’s poetics. I’m jumping on top of a police car on fire. I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with
ecstasy in my sadness. With its imagery of jumping into fiery, aerial suspension, that is to say, with its imagery of mystically
Martin’s minor poetics bespeaks spirit possession beyond propertied self-
rapturous (social) movement,
possession. We need a protocol of the spirit, a protocol of this “inner experience” of black ex-
istence, which is also a protocol of the earth in its irreducibility to the world of politicality and
property. This would be as well a protocol of language’s anteriority to itself, a protocol of spirit-language,
pneumatology’s anagrammatical pneumatography. Such a protocol gives itself in rites of passage, in rituals of
apophatic unsaying, in the poetics of an/nihilating fire, in black mystical nothingness, in the mysticism of a heart jumping
and burning in burnt ecstasy without immolation.

Might there be a poetics of celebration here, of riotous ritual praise, wherein black joy fleetingly shows up as
inconsumably ablaze precisely in the scene of and yet exceeding pain? Immolation without full consump- tion? Would not such
ex/tinguishment and an/nihilation entail the need for a
protocol of joy precisely as part of a protocol of spirit
both of which are irreducible to protocol, to rule/s? I raise these questions inasmuch as Martin’s minor-poem
seems to understand black joy and black sadness as bound to each other precisely in the suspension of the spirit, in the suspended
ecstatics of the leap itself, in rapture’s jump (I’m jumping . . . I’m ecstatic . . . ). I’m
interested in the airy, fiery,
atmospheric suspension, in the unlocatable not-ness or the knot, the nothingness of that
blurred “(not) (in) between-ness,” the non- or no-place, nowhere, the black space of a
churchical darkness, the “paracongregationality” (not) between the upbeat and the downbeat of the jump
itself.49 That “blackspace,” Alexis Pauline Gumbs and Pierce Freelon help us understand, is sacred.50 {In the preface to her
poetry collection Spill, Gumbs says, “This space, which is a temporary space, which we must leave, for the
sake of future travelers and for our own necks, is a sacred dedicated space. Libation for the named and
the name- less . . . for black women who made and broke narrative. The quiet, the quarrelling, the queer” (xii). In Durham, NC,
where I currently live, artist-activist and musician Pierce Freelon, who also made a recent run for mayor of the city, has developed a
space for the free expression and Afrofuturist cultivation of young, primarily black and brown people of color, a sacred space called
Blackspace (theblackspace.org). See Tullis, “Space Is the Place.”} I’m interested in the question of celebration that suspension itself
poses.51 “Our music hurts so much that we have to celebrate. . . . That
we have to celebrate is what hurts so
much. Exhaustive celebration in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured,
is” what Fred Moten calls “black study”52 and what I am here thinking about under the rubric of malpractice. Black
malpractice musics the riot as a singed yet celebratory song sung with sadness’s potentiating
force of the alternative. I am interested in how the three sentences making up what I have been calling Martin’s minor,
micropoem explicate or ply or draw out a social move- ment of folding, unfolding, infolding, and refolding celebration.

I own that there is something manic, even deranged —by which I mean something like what Mackey, drawing on
Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, identifies as a duende-like quality— about what I am suggesting here about the
method and sociopoetics of black malpractice, the mysticism of the riot.53 “The word duende means spirit, a kind
of gremlin, a gremlin-like, troubling spirit” (182). The troubling comes through as a particular kind of sound in the voice, Mackey
commenting on Gar- cía Lorca tells us. A
“hurt fractured inside” (161) is how Martin puts it. Announced in “an
almost religious enthusiasm . . . [that] shakes the body” that quakes the dancer’s voice, that
disorients the senses to effect “communication with God by means of the five senses,” as García
Lorca himself puts it, duende’s arrival as “the spirit of the earth” bespeaks “a real and poetic evasion of this world,” some “lyric” and
“constant baptism [yielding] newly created things.”54 By way of Mackey and García Lorca, we
can speak of the duende
or the rapture of the riot, wherein one hears the “black sounds” of a metamorphosis, some
“deep song,” the sonic over- flow of spiritual colors, as the undulating eloquence of a perhaps
squealed, screeching, scorched but no matter how you put it, troubled voice. 55 “Its eloquence becomes
eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing eloquence” (182). As eloquent disorder, duende, we might
say, is the explication as the troubled voicing of a fractured inside. Drawing out the fracture, caressing it and being
caressed by it perhaps, duende is the practice of fractured escape. Robin Blaser, speaking of poet Jack
Spicer, who is another important influence on Mackey and who comes up in Mackey’s reflections on duende, has called this a
“practice of outside.”56 This outside practice, which can show up riotously in writing, in song, in
the visual arts, in the streets, which is to say in and as perfor- mance , might be understood as (black)
spirit’s or life’s “conversation with the dead, intimacy with death and with the dead” (184), an animacy at the rim of the
wound, a “breathing behind the door” (185). That breathing behind the door is a malpracticed breathing, a
“longing without object” or toward another world (185). What Mackey is addressing is wounded
breathing or breathing as experiment, as the experimentalism of possibility itself, the practice of
what moves uncannily and unsettlingly out of place, what kinetically misbehaves by virtue of an
“apparent lack of purpose, efficiency, and function,”57 though what registers as lack (and black) here may in
fact be thought of as the surplus of the subreal, what yet lives at the end of the world , at the rim of the wound.

The stakes of black malpractice preliminarily come into view: my

discourse considers black malpractice as a kind
of explication of a practiced outness where explication as analysis gives way because it is ani-
mated by explication as performance, as atonal, anatheological movement. I want to follow black
malpractice as itself an insovereign, inexplicable movement of what refuses full emplotment and that
thus will not stay in place, an “uncanny . . . movement [that] happens for the sake of move-
ment” itself that is always already internally fractal and multiple.58 This is the movement of a differential
(w)hole, of what I noted earlier that Robinson called “the collective being, the ontological totality,” indeed, incompletion’s totality.
As an out-movement that displays a condition of internally folded togetherness, an inner loom or
serial coilings that bespeak some other kind of gathering , black malpractice is, I guess we could say, complicated.

The trick here then is for my explication to be carried out in such a way that the very malpractice I am concerned with comes
into view as itself an alternative imaginary that releases the sacred (and our imagina- tions of what such a
term might mean) from settler logics of sovereignty and the sovereign. This must be an explication that holds
malpractice open to its own outside and in this way opens out onto a poetics of the sacred, a
movement in which a sociality of deviancy, of deregulated getting together, is itself a transcendently
immanent and an immanently transcendent practice of outside. Internal to the sacredness of such deviant
out(side)ness is a fundamental claim: black radical malpractice imagines and is the practice, indeed, the
ritual conjuring of other modes of being-with, a kind of monastic- or Bedouin-like habit of
otherworldly assembling, of convening what the musician N. in Late Arcade, the latest installment of Mackey’s serial novel
From a Broken Bottle Perfume Still Emanates, calls “Some Other Sunday.”59 Such malpractice is not anti- American,
which is not serious enough; irreducible to the political as we know it, the radicalism of black malpractice
is an ante-American poetics, the critique of political theology and thus of “God” as governor or
world manager.

Tag
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

This all brings me to the question: Is there a breach worth inhabit- ing? I say yes. Indeed, what
has my attention is failure’s internal genera- tivity. This is something that Sarah Jane Cervenak
and I elsewhere have thought about as “inefficiency’s abundance,” which is not unrelated to
failure’s queerness.63 More still, it’s a distinctive kind of breach that I want here to brood upon,
to wit, blackness as the breach of religiosecular administration, the breakdown of political
theology or sovereignty’s onto- theological protocols, protocols that solder sovereignty to the
sacred. A practice of desedimentation, blackness breaks the settler alliance between sovereignty
and sacrality. Given this, we might ask, What opens up when blackness is understood as
breaching political theology, indeed, as breach- ing the theosecular propriety that secures
statecraft? What if, precisely in breaching the settler alliance between sovereignty and sacrality,
the very alliance that produces “civil religion” by subjecting the wild ener- gies or the “total
value” of the sacred to “right-hand” capture, blackness is disclosed as monstrous enthusiasm, as
monstrance of an abundance capturable neither by currency nor politicality, as a kind of
(witch)crafti- ness beyond statecraft?64

I want to stay with these questions. Indeed, the claim I advance here might be framed as
follows: were we to understand blackness precisely as breaching theopoliticality, as that
malpracticed imagination of other- or even no-worldliness in the name of dwelling with the
earth, one that sights and sounds the earth’s regeneration, what would then be given for study
would be a consideration of blackness as that fugitive symptom of what theology cannot
regulate, what exceeds sovereignty’s politicotheological or theopolitical ground and
atmosphere. That is to say, I’m interested in blackness as symptomatic of the always already
ruptured or breached Wor(l)d of Man. Indeed, to understand blackness as breach of theosecu-
lar as theopolitical propriety is to understand blackness with Sora Han and Fred Moten as
“nonperformance,” though nonperformance is now understood as enthusiasm’s insovereign
poetics of the breach—a breach of religious contract in the name of some other freedom.65
From that breach, the sacred, in flight from sovereignty, understood as practices of what
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have recently called “self-owning, earth- owning” accumulation
in and as the history of slavery and settler colonial- ism, comes into view.66 Blackness as rupture
or (de)generative breach is nothing less than a sacred praxis, that Sycoraxian, black feminist
move- ment that eluded Prospero and whose flesh Caliban bore making him a mama’s baby,
bearer of the heritage of the mother dispossessed, carried by the sexual cut to “his own
personhood” by which he is marked by “the ‘female’ within” and in this way denizen of some
day, Some Other Sun- day, earthly inhabitant of no-world.67

Poetics, Beyond

What I am calling here the malpracticed poetics of Some Other Sunday or sacred
nonperformance, Sylvia Wynter takes up in an as yet unpublished, nine-hundred-plus page
manuscript, Black Metamorphosis.68 It is to this work, which I read as anticipating black
malpractice as sacred nonper- formance, that I want to turn to anchor further what I have been
saying.

Written in the decade of the 1970s, the decade that saw the for- mal emergence of black
feminist theoretical discourse, Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is a massive meditation on black
life as on but not of the plantation, on but not of this territorialized world, a dwelling with the
earth. This dynamic of “on but not of,” Wynter compresses into what she calls “beyond” (439)—
beyond this world, indeed, beyond the Western philosophical idea of World because this
beyond concerns baseness itself and, in this way, the thingliness of the earth itself, which I
understand as connected to what Ferreira da Silva has called raw “materia prima”: “akin to
Hortense Spillers’s [notion of] flesh . . . [in] the raw, The Thing, as a referent of undeterminacy
(∞ − ∞) or materia prima, hails blackness’s capacity to release the imagination from the grips of
the subject and its forms, which is but a first gesture in regard to a mode of thinking that
contemplates virtuality and actuality all and at once.”69 As representa- tion’s nullification, this
release from the grips of the subject and its forms is nothing less than a black radical release
from the world’s terms of order in the name of the undeterminancy of matter, in the name of
the earth itself. My use of the notions of “outside” and “beyond” early in this article represents
my attempt to think in the company of Wynter (and Ferreira da Silva), whom here I read as a
thinker both of the theopolitical evis- ceration of the sacred, which evisceration is nothing but
the emergence of the anthropocene as the plantationocene, and of the sacred rethought as the
entanglement of aliveness as such. If entangled liveliness indexes a nonpropertied return to or a
fallenness that is, in fact, a dwelling with the earth, then Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is about
that fallenness, about blackness (to abuse a theological language) as a lapsarian condition. It is
about black fallenness, a dwelling with the earth wherein, as Wynter elab- orates, the African,
transformed by the law of property into something ostensibly ownable by parties to a contract,
nevertheless enfleshes an even deeper transformation. This deeper transformation is what is
meant by metamorphosis—metamorphosis as experimentality, as larval innovation and genres
of the fungible, of an unsettling that exceeds even if coming into view under the occasion of the
colonial violence of enslavement or settlement. For this reason, metamorphosis signals what is
irreducible to representation. It bespeaks that liveliness beyond the plantation placement or
emplotments of what Wynter will later demarcate as “Man (1 and 2).”70 The metamorphic
“trans-iness” if not “tranny-ness,” the “trans*” that arises through “trans*Atlantic” passage, this
fundamental and noniden- titarian queerness or excess of the “asterisked human” is blackness’s
ever receding groundless ground.71

Here I start to get at what is at stake in Wynter’s “beyond,” that asterisked living that exceeds
and nullifies capital’s spatiotemporality. What Wynter means by beyond all unfolds here
between Man’s eviscera- tion of the sacred in and as the plantation bulldozing of the earth, on
the one hand, and those larval architectures of flesh, the flesh of the earth in excess of
plantation landscapes, on the other. More specifically, what Wynter means by beyond turns on
her critical distinction, advanced in another piece of writing also of the decade of the 1970s,
between the plantation and the plot ground. Distilling central ideas of Black Metamor- phosis,
the 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” meditates on that part of the plantation
known as the provision ground or the plot. On, but in some sense not of, the plantation, the plot
is where slaves culti- vated lives of their own replete with practices not at home in the
plantation world. Here, slaves grew yams and other foods for themselves, as well as engaged in
funeral practices for the dead. Not at home or dispossessed of home, they practiced home-in-
dispossession where dispossession itself nurtured if not became a kind of home—home through
lost kinship. Just as in “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (and in Black Metamorpho- sis)
Wynter is interested both in the rise of the novel as a literary form that emerges in relationship
to the plantation system and in what exceeds the plot of the novel as capitalist fiction that
reinforces (plantation) history, we find her also interested in the problem of the plantation itself
as the novel’s geological complement. That is, Wynter is interested in that other exces- sive plot
of the provision ground. Here the plot of the provision ground, on Wynter’s reading, stands in a
geologically excessive relationship to (white) “anthropocenic extraction,” as Kathryn Yusoff has
put it.72 {For a more recent consideration of the plantation and the plot, see Rusert, “Plantation
Ecologies”; Dillon, “Religion and Geopolitics in the New World”; Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations”;
and Paton, “Obeah Acts.” I am particularly taken by Toni Wall Jaudon’s interpretation of Obeah
as Caribbean religious practice in that it aligns with Wynter’s notion of “beyond.” Perhaps the
very word religion, given its emergence within the early modern, imperial-colonial matrix, risks
already overdetermining one’s engagement with the various expressions of religions of the
black diaspora. Perhaps something like Wynter’s “beyond” opens up another vista of
understanding. A practice beyond the terror of territory, Obeah in the Caribbean emerges in
Jaudon’s analysis as a complex “world-making practice” that must be taken seriously. Doing so,
she argues, “shows us that religions do cultural work” of crafting alternative, world imaginations
(“Obeah’s Sensations,” 718). Operating without and beyond a boundary, black diaspora “religion
does not simply ‘spill over and seep through’ national boundaries. . . . Rather, it upends the very
ground on which the nation-state rests” (718). This is all to say that black diaspora religion (and
the black study thereof) refuses the logic of divinized sovereignty as a logic of territory. Its
practice entails the critique of what Stuart Elden has called “territory as political technology”
(The Birth of Territory).}
 Nurturing alternative modes of existence amid plantation devastation, the plot moves in
relationship to and yet exceeds the plantation system of racial capital- ism. If “the plantation
system, a system, owned and dominated by external forces,” and whose law of property as the
will to accumulate is bound up with the seizing or would-be enclosing of the earth, which entails
a colonizing of desire itself and ultimately a sovereigntizing of the sacred, then black popular
culture, animated by a “demonic” or “sociopoetic force,”73 Wynter says emerges from the
beyond of the provision ground or the plot that “the planters gave [and] on which [slaves then
grew] food to feed themselves in order to maximize profits.”74 This provision ground or plot
system, which was on but not of the plantation, was an “indigenous, autochtonous” zone of
semiautonomous cultivation, plots of land on the plantation in which what was grown was not
reducible to utility for the enslavers or planters.75 Rather, these were zones of “useless” beauty,
zones where black life could grow in the earth, where black cultures could take rootless,
rhizomatic root. A locus of socioecological cultivation not based in the law and rights of
property, provision ground was as such a scene, Wynter tells us, of malpractice, of “cultural
guerilla resistance to the plan- tation system.”76 In its otherness and underness, the plot was
the scene of alternative ecologies that from the brutal scene of property itself poten- tiated
unbounded, unpropertized, insovereign relationalities. From the activities of “metamorphosis”
that took place provisionally from the plot and in back woods, Wynter glimpses alternative
sacralities, imaginations of the sacred beyond property and its logics of individuation and bound
up with the baseness of the earth itself. Hence, in Black Metamorphosis Wynter directly engages
with questions of the sacred, its settler colonial evisceration, and also its release from (racial)
modernity’s god terms in the unfinishable metamorphosis that is black popular culture.

Here is one particularly poignant statement in which we see Wynter attending subtly to the
theological architecture of the plantationing of the planet or to a certain plantation-godding of
the world, even as we also glimpse her suggesting a metamorphosis of the sacred, that is, a
hidden, exilic sacrality aligned with pollution and wandering, a subterranean dis- turbance of
“the norm”: “The gods had been transshipped and brought their space with them. But the sky
now had to be underground. They themselves were displaced gods, gods as Bastide says in a
fine phrase, in exile. They were kept hidden now not only because their power was feared as
polluting but because they had to avoid the terrible counter-power of the plantation gods.
Knowing exile, they lost their complacency, the com- placency of the norm, and became
contingent gods” (532). Wynter here claims that, as a regime of property, settlerism had to do
with a total environment or a cosmology. It laid organizational claim on “the sky” and ground,
on mortals and divinities. This is a structure of Heideggerian-like worlding in which the
plantation gods superintend or provide a “sacred canopy” for property relations. The plantation
gods provide the ontotheo- logical structure for the ontopolitical theology of property as basis
of mak- ing a world. Moreover, this ontopolitical theology of property is a political theology of
race(ialization) that takes places under the superintendence of the gods and under whose
superintendence masters are themselves, in fact, worlded, coming into being and into view
precisely as so many sovereigns, as parties to a contract, as legal subjects within the law (of
ownership). What is key for Wynter, and for me following her, is that this operation of worlding
is an operation of religioning and race-ing within the terms of what I call the “religious contract,”
religioning and worlding, or religioning as a kind of worlding, as a kind of terror-filled or
terrifying race-ing or racializing, which is also a settler sovereigntizing of things. It is this nexus of
world and religion, property and contract, ownership and sovereignty that Wynter spies out and
meditates on under the rubric of “the gods.” Furthermore, it is under the canopy of the
plantation gods, or what I am calling the canopy of property-worlding, that ontology and
anthropology, World and Man, in fact, emerge. More precisely, it is within this canopy of the
gods that an ontology and anthropology, that an onto- theology, of the World of Man in his
overdetermination of human being emerges. Property-worlding as conditioned by the
plantation gods is what has come to ground the being of beings, including and most especially
the being of human being, Dasein, as the being of ownership, property, and the proper.

By contrast, the transshipped gods understood now as contingent bespeak, Wynter says, a kind
of poetics of the underworld, an underworld animated by contingency. This contingency I want
to align with Ferreira da Silva’s notion of undeterminancy or the infinity of prime matter. That is
to say, I want to suggest here a convergence between Wynter’s “beyond” as bound up with the
transshipped gods in connection with the enslaved and Ferreira da Silva’s “beyond the equation
of value” in which an uncat- egorical, nonrepresentable blackness breaks form, breaks the
equation; this anoriginal breach of the equation bespeaks a power or a “capacity to disclose
another horizon of existence.”77 Not Heideggerian worlding but a black radical Wynterian (and
a Ferreira da Silvan–poethical) underworld- ing and otherworlding and no-worlding beyond
property and sovereignty and toward an ecopoetics of the social whole: this is black
malpractice’s anatheological concern, where the transshipped gods index a sociality of
entanglement.78 {In speaking of worlding, I have Heidegger in mind albeit routed through
Wynter’s “beyond,” Jaudon’s notion of religion as “world-making” (see n. 72), or, in my
language, aided by Ferreira da Silva, as that “poethical” practice, the malpractice of
otherworlding from the site of nonbeing or the condition paraontological thingli- ness (Nahum
Chandler and Moten) and no-bodiness (Ferreira da Silva). See Chan- dler, “Problem”; Heidegger,
“Thing”; and Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art.” If for Heidegger, worlding is a type of
violent process that, as David L. Eng wonderfully summarizes, “[brings] certain creatures and
things . . . into the time and space of European modernity” and in doing so stage the European
Man’s coming into being, which is to say his genesis or his “worlding,” his “Let there be . . .”
(Gen. 1), then that same process “unworlds” others in the very worlding of the world,
“[consigning those others] to wait, excluded and concealed” (“End(s) of Race,” 1485). This
concealment is the condition of “no-bodies,” as Ferreira da Silva might put it, the condition of
being “earthed,” as Eng puts it, rather than fully of this world. See Jaudon, “Obeah’s
Sensations”; Ferreira da Silva, “No-Bodies”; Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist
Poethics”; and Eng, “End(s) of Race.”} In talking specifically about the transshipped gods meta-
morphosed into what we might think of as “trans*gods” in relation to a trans* or a fantastic or
an “asterisked humanity” from the hold to the plot to black popular culture, Wynter says:

The gods . . . express the social whole, not as its sum, but as its mode of interrelationships. The
gods are the conceptual symbols in which the com- munity as the social whole participates. It is
through this participation that they experience themselves as a social whole. It is for the
experience, by the individual or group, of the social whole, that gods . . . are necessary. No
individual or individual group by itself can experience the whole. (502)

If part of the objective of Wynter’s Metamorphosis is to offer a theory of blackness in its escape
from yet within the constraints of property’s bru- talities, then this entails as well a theory, if not
of religion, then certainly of the sacred reconceived as and in the sociality of flight itself where
the indi- vidual “I” is already broken open, “dividuated” and thus now understood as the
ecstatic, enthusiastic yield of a ceremony of collective plot life not reducible to narrativization or
emplotment. This is the radical rapture, the “critical enthusiasm,” to purloin from Jordana
Rosenberg, of black social life—black rapture as black social life.79 Wynter puts it this way:
“Enthu- siasm and exaltation are the uncolonized law of desire that expresses lib- eration from
societal codings, from its ordering of ego-identities. It is the loss of the public self, this return to
the profound interior self and to the experience of unity of these selves that the truly religious
ritual worship- pers or the Carnival revelers, experience. It is a form of knowledge, the gnosist
[sic] form of knowledge opposed yet complemented to the objec- tive knowledge of the
dominant order” (549). What we discover here is that Wynter’s understanding of sacred flight,
or of the sacred as exilic divinities on the run, is part of the inner logic of a theory and practice of
the social that black studies is given to study. More still, this concern on Wynter’s part with
transshipped divinities, who again stand in for the transshipped, is never not ecological,
geographical, and geological. It is always already concerned with that revolution of the ground
that is a revolution of sociality at the scene of property itself. Resilience in trans- shipment takes
the form now of an underness, of being underground.80 From the underground there is a
revolution, Wynter maintains, of the ground and of the atmosphere and the cosmos insofar as
now “the sky had to be underground,” where above is below; from the plot and through the
cultural activities thereof, “there [arises] knowledge of a higher logi- cal typing, knowledge
which can move outside the codes of knowledge, prescribed and determined by the dominant
modes of social relations, the kosmos [sic] of the status quo” (549).

While there is much more that needs to be said about Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis than I
have space to now say, I offer just a few more remarks about the significance of this text for my
argument about black malpractice as a poetics of the sacred.81 What I find interesting is
Wynter’s understanding that at stake in black life from the plot, and therefore as underground
plot life, is her attention to blackness as revolt that ruptures the forces of the gods of the
plantation, the forces of plantation politicality. She is a theoretician of that rupture, that black
rapture of black malpractice, that underworldly poetics of the sacred and of the social that
compels me. Black revolt is a practice of sacred sociality, a transgressing of the god terms of
racial capitalism. In its anatheological breaking of the law of the individuated subject, black
malpractice cannot help but be more and less than heresy. Indeed, the plot was the seedbed of
black popular culture, the site of an anteheretical underworldliness exceeding capitalism’s
malevo- lent, though presented as a benevolent, mathematics. Anteheretical black- ness is given
in practices of living, experiences of excessive enfleshment that Wynter calls “the underlife.”
Here “mystical reunion with the earth” given in and as marronage—reinhabitations of the earth,
exercises of the sacred as practices of property’s unsettlement—took place.82 In one of her
most powerful descriptions of the mysticism of the underlife and what I am calling black
malpractice, Wynter offers this account of revolt as earth dwelling or life’s regeneration:

Brought to the new world in this figuration/representation of the Earth are the complex of
attitudes that will provide the common ground for the cre- ativity of the black popular masses.
The concept of man as generator, both of his material and of his social life, would remain
dynamically viable in the underlife of the slave’s life, in that underlife where they gave
expression to that unique aspect of the soul, at the same time as they conformed to their role as
piezas in the superordinate system of the plantation.

Dance and song and music, like all art in the culture of origin, were represented as the result of
man’s self-expression, his unique fulfillment of the Earth’s generative powers working through
him, as she, the Earth, fulfilled herself in giving birth to the crop and therefore, to man. For the
earth—like the sea for fishing tribes—was the “material” basis of man’s existence, of his
environment, was represented as the generator of life. And the supreme ethic that arose from
this representation was the commandment to generate life as man’s life was itself generated.
Evil was the absence of life. But the absence of life was not death. Rather, death was the ground
of the regeneration of life. Evil was anything that halted or broke the exchange of life and death.
(528)

We find in Wynter’s description here an account of black life reritual- ized as that flesh that
plantation capitalism eucharistically cannibalized and yet could not fully digest, consumed in the
production of value but that itself is of no value or is prodigal because it is anterior to value.
Such malpracticing flesh—manifest, for example, in funeral rites, the growing of crops, and
especially the rhythmic and sonic traditions, the “flow” of Afro-diasporic musics—moves within
and disturbs the bowels of racial capitalism, its indigestible and excremental remainder. Here
we find an “alternative mode of life . . . alternative desires” not captured by what Wynter calls
the “theologization of the material life” in which there is the “production of the economic as
[the] sole reality principle” (439). That theological production, or the theologization of life, is in
fact an attempted reduction, the “reduction of man to his productive capacity” (439). Wyn- ter
has her keen philosophic eye trained on how theologization—the reduction of the sacred to a
god-term or to “God” as form and figure— functions as the symbolic condition and, indeed, the
semiotic condition, of economization through a mathematics of individuation of life, discrete
units of labor. And yet, she also is looking at what discreetly escapes, indeed, meditating on the
practice, particularly the sonic practice, of escape itself. There is that which exceeds
theoeconomic and theosecular reduction, what is before and after and in the break of political
theology, that immanent transcendence that Wynter carefully charts as a mythic practice—as a
(rh)ymthmic malpractice, if I might offer an anagrammatic annotation that points us back to
Mackey—a poetics that returns us to the earth. This return is precisely what Wynter means by
“beyond”:

The Myth of the Return was a central pillar in that figural representation by which black popular
culture was to establish its own form of the tran- scendent Africa—later translated into Heaven
—became the más alla, the Beyond of the gnostics, the kingdom of Jah, that assails and
delegitimates the present reality.

But the Beyond was, for the New World black popular forces, a Beyond which existed spatially
as an alternative mode of being, rather than tempo- rally in an eternally delayed future, the
conceptualization by which official Christianity supports structures of domination. The future
was, for the New World black, incorporated into the now, heaven was here and now because
experienced. The Symbolic Return to Africa or Heaven, to the true Home, was ceaselessly
carried out through the cults, and their U.S. variants, the ring shouts. (439)
What comes into view here is that the plot—a locus both of constraint and capaciousness where
life was reritualized and “the land remained the Earth” rather than a sovereignly managed,
propertized World—was never not a breach of the American “sacred canopy.” A material
“beyond,” which Wynter gives us to understand as bound up with the baseness of the earth and
experienced in the ex-perience of out-of-this-world-ness itself, from the spirituality of cults and
the ecstasy of ring shouts to New World black popular expressive culture, the plot was a soil in
which things “jes grew.” Locus of “an alternative mode of being” that extends a history below
Middle Passage’s waterline, the plot is an ante-American breach of political theology. This
breach indexes a bursting through from the plot of a peculiar, a strange archive—an archive of a
bent and broken sacrality. Here the sacred manifests in degraded, wounded kinship, as some
sort of mysterious collectivity that works in accordance with a Rastafari-like logic of the “I ’n’ I”
and the “we ’n’ we,” and in accordance, as well, with Mack- ey’s engagement with these
Rastafarianisms in his serial poems in which he coins the notions of the “I-Insofar” and the “we-
Insofar.”83 These coinages are meant to index that “play of dislocated identity” that marks
diaspora (which is to say, black social life) as dwelling in the “quantum gap” of “a subjunctive,
qualified I, an alternate, unmortared I.”84 This is what comes through, as Mackey alerts us, in
one of the lines in the poem, “Night in Jaipur”: “Insofar as there / was an I it wasn’t hers.”85 All
of this suggests that we are dealing here with a strange I-ness, a strange we-ness, an “I ’n’ I”-
ness, a “we ’n’ we”-ness, but just as well, shall we say, a “s/he ’n’ they”-ness, if not a “they ’n’
dem”-ness. This strangeness points to that which is ever incomplete and incompletable. It
points, in short, to incompletion as such—the monstrance of the black radical sacred, of black
malpractice. Such is what brews on the plot that is on but not of the plantation, not of this
World. A frenzied zone of “‘enthusiasm’ . . . in the religious sense” (545), Wynter insists, the plot
was a site of rapturous seizures against having been seized, against the ge(n)ocidal seizing of the
earth. The beyond that is the plot, and that evades full narrative emplot- ment, bespeaks an
underlife, a “non-class culture,” that heralds nothing less than the apocalypse of the (plantation)
(as) World, a zone of festive dwelling where plotters are caught up in an ecstasy of black
fallenness, in “Orphic descent into an Other-world,” into that “amorphous, under- ground
Symbolic Order” (708)—into “a world outside of the rationality of the bourgeois world,” outside
of “the instrumental rationality of the dominant order” and thus into the now of the earth in
which each instant is saturated (545): desire itself decolonized, all libidinal energy—at once
nonproductive and yet generative—released, raptured from as well as rupturing the channels of
capitalist, utilitarian production. Bespeaking some other ecology, the plot is an ante-American
no-place, a nowhere that exceeds property management and plantation administration under
the superintendence of the gods or, in short, the terror of politicality.
2AC – Bataille (BOOM BABY!!)
2ACs:
Case
 Case
True community can only arise in moments of impossibility. Rather than
become duped by a restricted economy that shifts power to the
responsible, we must instead affirm an impossibile community formed
by the powerless people.
Gordienko 12. Andrey, Ph.D., PhD Film & TV @ UCLA “The Politics of Eros: The
Philosophy of Georges Bataille and Japanese New Wave Cinema” UCLA Electronic Theses
and Dissertations) ipartman
Perhaps, then, Suleiman's effort to periodize Bataille's intellectual itinerary does not contradict Besnier's thesis concerning the
centrality of sovereignty to Bataille's thought? This question hinges on whether Suleiman understands the concept of “the
political” as well as that of “power” in the same way as Besnier does. I would contend that whenBataille speaks of
the seizure of power, he has in mind the "powerless power" of the masses as opposed to the
State power. In "Popular Front in the Street," he writes: "What interests us above all ... are the emotions
that give the human masses the surges of power that tear them away from the domination
of those who only know how to lead them on to poverty and to the slaughterhouse.” 65
Power of the masses, of which Bataille speaks, is anarchic power that differs in kind from that form
of power which founds the State. The distinction between the two forms of power in turn
presupposes two radically different conceptions of revolution. Thus, when Bataille appeals to
the power of the masses to revolt, he calls for the destruction of the very form of the State as
opposed to mere substitution of some new version of the State for its existing variant. While
this distinction inevitably invokes Walter Benjamin’s discussion of the difference (originally posited by Georges Sorel)
between a general proletarian strike and a general political strike (with the former entailing the complete
negation of the State and the latter merely demanding that the State reform itself), it is in
Maurice Blanchot's work that one finds the most precise characterization of Bataille's politics
of the impossible that bases itself on the revolutionary potential of the powerless power of
the people: “Contrary to 'traditional revolutions,' it was not a question of simply taking
power to replace it with some other power, nor of taking the Bastille or the Winter Palace, or the
Elysé e or the National Assembly, all objectives of no importance. It was not even a question of
overthrowing an old world; what mattered was to let a possibility manifest itself , the
possibility - beyond any utilitarian gain - of a being-together that gave back to all the
right to equality in fraternity through a freedom of speech that elated everyone .”66 Although
Blanchot has in mind not the activities of Popular Front in the 1930s, but rather the event of May '68,
his work shows a marked affinity with Besnier's decision to discuss Bataille's political logic in terms of ‘possibility’ and
‘impossibility.’ In other words, “the possibility
of a being-together” that Blanchot finds disclosed
in the image of the agitated masses taking over the streets is the possibility of the
impossible – of the community forming spontaneously, without programme, without
demands for political representation, held together only by pure effervescence. The
power of the people is limitless, he insists, precisely because it incorporates absolute
powerlessness - that is to say, powerlessness with respect to the possibilities of founding
another State, securing the right to representation, passing new legislation , etc. Indeed, the idea
of "freedom of speech" invoked by Blanchot has nothing to do with the ideal of freedom
advocated by the proponents of parliamentary democracy inasmuch as the former
presupposes that the people need no politicians to represent them and thus rejects the very
principle of mediation. As Bataille himself puts it, “for us having the debate means having it in
the street, it means having it where emotion can seize men and push them to the
limit, without meeting the eternal obstacles that result from the defense of old
political positions.”67 Thus, when Suleiman invokes Bataille's calls to seize power in order to question Besnier's
thesis concerning the politics of the impossible, she appears to retain the traditional conception of power that presupposes the
existence of the State. Besnier, on the other hand, puts forward an entirely different notion of power at odds with the form of
the State: “the 'powerless power' which, resistant to all power and in that sense 'impossible,'
characterizes the people.”68 As the passage from Blanchot quoted above suggests, an assessment of Bataille's
emancipatory politics must consider the place of community in his philosophical project. Jean-
Luc Nancy insists on this point: the idea of community cannot be separated from the concept of the
political: "the political is the place where community as such is brought into play. It is not, in
any case, just the locus of power relations , to the extent that these relations set and upset
the necessarily unstable and taut equilibrium of collectivity. "69 In this sense, Bataille's work,
before and after 1941, cannot be separated from what I shall call (borrowing an expression from Christopher Fynsk)
a politics of community. Suleiman appears to overlook this fact when she argues that, in relinquishing the hope of
seizing political power for the proletariat by means of a violent revolution, Bataille also terminated his involvement in politics.
His later work on eroticism, however, as much as it privileges the private space of bedroom
over the public space of the street nonetheless concerns community because , as Nancy points out,
"for Bataille, community was first and finally the community of lovers ."70 In this respect, the only
difference separating the early Bataille of “Popular Front in the Street” from the mature Bataille of L’Erotisme consists in the
fact that the
community diminishes from the masses held together by shared passion to the
community of lovers in the grip of erotic ecstasy. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Bataille’s more
explicitly political writings from the late 1930’s attempt to envision a politics of community. For instance, “Popular Front in
the Street” – the very text in which Suleiman discerns Bataille’s affirmation of a revolutionary takeover of power in order to
then question Besnier’s interpretation – certainly exhibits preoccupation with that “fundamental continuity which fuses
individuals together” that, according to Besnier, characterizes Bataille’s political stance in the 1930s. (It may be worth noting,
at this point, that the idea of community put forward in this text has very little to do with Nancy's
conception of it
insofar as the latter refuses to think of community as a fusion or as an immanence of a
communion. As I trace the development of Bataille's thought in my subsequent chapters, I will attempt to account for
those texts in which Bataille's thoughts on community do enter into close proximity with Nancy's propositions.) Thus, in
defining the primary objective of this address, which resembles a manifesto, Bataille writes: “If we are to speak of the Popular
Front, we must first identify what holds us firmly together, what links our origins to the emotions that constitute it, namely,
the existence of the Popular Front in the street.”71 Earlier in this essay, he once again speaks
like an "emotive
intellectual" in Besnier’s sense of the term, the one who is less concerned with developing a careful
strategy for a revolutionary takeover of power than with blindly plunging himself at the
very epicenter of revolutionary developments: “What drives the crowds to the street is the
emotion directly aroused by striking events in the atmosphere of a storm, it is the
contagious emotion that, from house to house, from suburb to suburb, suddenly turns a
hesitating man into a frenzied being.”72
 A2: Falsifiability:
Falsifiability is a bad standard – no unifying, monocephalic truth – that’s
Pawlett.

Thermodynamics proves the aff is true.

Szerszynski 15. Bronislaw Head of Sociology Department at Lancaster University, “Gods of
the Anthropocene: geo-spiritual formations in the Earth’s new epoch,” December 2015,
https://www.academia.edu/19595084/Gods_of_the_Anthropocene_geo-
spiritual_formations_in_the_Earth_s_new_epoch, pg. 2-5) ipartman

Yet for our purposes we need to complement this multinaturalist approach with some more
specific theoretical equipment, ones which cumulatively can be regarded as steps towards or
ingredients of a general theory of planetary spirit. The first ingredient is thermodynamics, the
study of energy, entropy and the arrow of time, which will help us attend to the way that the
Earth as an assemblage has evolved in an ongoing dialectic between the intensive (differences and
gradients) and the extensive (form and structure), through near-equilibrium processes such as sorting
and sedimenting (DeLanda, 1992: 142-3) and far-from-equilibrium processes of self-organisation (Bak,
1996). But key here must be George Bataille’s analysis of a ‘general economy’ of non-productive
expenditure without return, inspired by Marcel Mauss’s anthropology of potlatch and gift. Bataille
argues that in the general economy of nature, governed by the continuing gifting by the sun of
its energy in unproductive expenditure, the key problem is not scarcity but abundance. As Bataille
wrote in The Accursed Share, ‘the living organism… ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for
maintaining life; … if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in … growth, it must necessarily
be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically’ (Bataille,
1988: 21). This general economy of constant gift conditions all living things on the Earth, providing a ‘pressure’ that results in
expansion and space-filling, and where this cannot occur, squander and luxury (Bataille, 1988: 29-32).
 A2: FoD Good:

Life has evolved into a vampiric system of death that now tethers the desires of
its slaves to the production of the socius. This system distorts desire into a
mechanism of production that traps the body within a matrix of consumption
and suffering. The fear of one’s death justifies massive levels of violence and
devalues existence
Winnubst 6 [Shannon Winnubst, Queering Freedom, Indiana University Press]
For Bataille, the servility to utility is displayed particularly in the temporality of such a world —the
temporality of anticipation. Returning again to the role of the tool , he writes, In efficacious activity man
becomes the equivalent of a tool , which produces; he is like the thing the tool is, being itself a product. The implication
of these facts is quite clear: the tool’s meaning is given by the future, in what the tool will produce, in
the future utilization of the product: like the tool, he who serves —who works—has the value of
that which will be later, not of that which is. (1988–91, 2:218) The reduction of our lives to the order
of utility forces us to project ourselves endlessly into the future. Bataille writes of this as our anguished state,
caused by this anticipation “that must be called anticipation of oneself. For he must apprehend himself in the future, through the
anticipated results of his action” (1988–91, 2:218). This is why advanced capitalism and phallicized whiteness
must ground themselves in a denial of death: death precludes the arrival of this future . It cuts us off
from ourselves, severing us from the future self that is always our real and true self. Re sisting the existential turn,
however, Bataille refuses to read this denial of death as an ontological condition of humanity. For
Bataille, this is a historical and economic denial, one in which only a culture grounded in the anticipation of the future must
participate. He frames it primarily as a problem of the intellect. In the reduction of the world to the order of
utility, we have reduced our lives and experiences to the order of instrumental reason. This order
necessarily operates in a sequential temporality, facing forward toward the time when the results will be achieved, the questions
solved, the theorems proved—and also when political domination will be ended and ethical anguish quieted. As Bataille credits
Hegel for seeing, “knowledge is never given to us except by unfolding in time ” (1988–91, 2:202). It never appears to us except,
finally, “as the result of a calculated effort, an operation useful to some end” (1988–91, 2:202)—and its utility, as we have seen, only
drives it forward toward some future utility, endlessly. There
are always new and future objects of thought to
conquer and domesticate. Within this order of reason, death presents the cessation of the very practice
of knowledge itself. Severing us from the future objects of thought and from our future selves ,
“death prevents man from attaining himself” (1988–91, 2:218). As Bataille explains, “the fear of death appears linked from the start
to the projection of oneself into a future time, which [is] an effect of the positing of oneself as a thing” (1988–91, 2:218). The
fear
of death derives from the subordination to the order of utility and its dominant form of the
intellect, instrumental reason. While death is unarguably a part of the human condition , for Bataille
the fear of death is a historically habituated response , one that grounds cultures of advanced
capitalism and phallicized whiteness. In those frames of late modernity, death introduces an ontological
scarcity into the very human condition: it represents finitude, the ultimate limit . We must distance
ourselves from such threats, and we do so most often by projecting them onto sexualized, racialized, and classed bodies. But for
Bataille, servility to the order of knowledge is as unnecessary as servility to the order of utility. To
die humanly, he argues,
is to accept “the subordination of the thing” (198891, 2:219), which places us in the schema that
separates our present self from the future, desired, anticipated self: “to die humanly is to have
of the future being, of the one who matters most in our eyes, the senseless idea that he is not ”
(1988–91, 2:219). But if we are not trapped in the endless anticipation of our future self as the index of meaning in our lives, we may
not be anguished by this cessation: “If we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for
the present is not subject to the demands of the future ” (1988–91, 2:219). To live sovereignly is not to escape
death, which is ontologically impossible. But it is to refuse the fear, and subsequent attempts at disavowal, of death as the
ontological condition that defines humanity. Rather
than trying to transgress this ultimate limit and
prohibition, the sovereign man “cannot die fleeing. He cannot let the threat of death deliver him
over to the horror of a desperate yet impossible flight ” (1988–91, 2:219). Living in a temporal mode in which“
anticipation would dissolve into NOTHING”(1988–91,2: 208), the sovereign man “lives and dies like an animal” (1988–91, 2:219). He
lives and dies without the anxiety invoked by the forever unknown and forever encroaching anticipation of the future. As Bataille
encourages us elsewhere, “Think of the voracity of animals, as against the composure of a cook” (1988–91, 2:83).

Psychological experiments prove the fear of death produces violent racist back-
lash, explaining the rise of Trump and white nationalism – only the aff’s re-
orientation to death, suffering and violence can mobilize political change.
Judis 15. John B. Judis is a staff writer at Vox. “A fascinating psychological experiment could explain Donald Trump’s rise”
http://www.vox.com/2015/12/17/10323956/trump-fear-of-death “///” indicates paragraph breaks NT 17
The key to understanding Trump’s appeal may lie in the works of the late anthropologist/philosopher Ernest
Becker. In his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Denial of Death, Becker contended that a fear of death
shapes in very basic ways our being in the world. He says the fear of death contributes to a literal and
figurative quest for immortality through religion, parenting, and the production of what we
hope are lasting works. /// It can fuel a fascination with heroes who defied death and celebrities whose fame will live
after them. And in certain circumstances, it can also influence our moral and political judgments . It can make
us less tolerant and even fearful of different ethnic groups, religions, and nations, creating a
sharp gap between "us" and "them," and it can strengthen our support for strong and charismatic
leaders who will protect us against them . The San Bernardino massacre may have been one such circumstance, and
the fear of death it awakened may help explain Trump’s sudden rise in the polls. /// Three psychologists — Sheldon Solomon,
Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski, who met as graduate students in psychology at the University of Kansas in the mid-1970s —
were inspired by Becker’s work. Over the past 25 years, they have tried to prove his theory about the fear of death through
practical, real-life experiments. The editor of a professional journal had advised them that if they wanted other psychologists to take
Becker’s ideas seriously, they would have to demonstrate their validity through experiments. /// How the fear of death plays out in
real life /// In 1989, Solomon, Greenberg, and Pyszczynski devised the first of what would be scores of
successful experiments. This one was intended to show that a fear of death could lead to harsh moral
judgments. The psychologists recruited 22 Tucson municipal court judges. They told the judges
they wanted to test the relationship between personality traits and bail decisions, but for some
of them, they inserted in the middle of a personality questionnaire two exercises meant to evoke
an awareness of their own mortality. (One exercise asked them to "briefly describe the emotions that the thought of
your own death arouses in you.") Then they asked the judges to set a bond in the hypothetical case of a
prostitute who a prosecutor warned was a flight risk. The judges who did the mortality exercises
set an average bail of $455; those who did not do the exercises set an average of $50, which was
the prevailing rate in Tucson. /// Over the next decades, the psychologists, and colleagues in the United States
and overseas, devised experiments that showed that these kinds of mortality reminders affected
people’s views of other religions, races, and nations . They recount many of these experiments in arecently
published book, The Worm at the Core: On the Role of Death in Life. When they had students at a Christian college
evaluate essays by what they were told were a Jewish and a Christian author, those who did the
mortality exercises took a far more negative view of the Jewish author than the control group
did. A German psychologist, testing these theories, found a mortality reminder increased
Germans’ hostility toward Turks. Other experiments showed subjects who received the mortality
reminders expressed a far greater veneration for the American flag, took a far more negative
view of an essay critical of the United States, and expressed a harsher view of people who had
different political views from their own. /// How thinking about death makes you more likely to
support George W. Bush /// After 9/11, the researchers devised experiments to gauge the effect of the terrorist attack on
Americans’ awareness of their own mortality. Subjects who had "911" flash subliminally before their eyes between word
associations were more likely to complete word fragments with words associated with death than subjects who had innocuous word
combinations flash before them. (Did "coff" become "coffee" or "coffin?") They concluded that reminders of 9/11 functioned as
mortality reminders. They then did experiments that showed that mortality reminders lent greater appeal to charismatic leaders. ///
They tested the response of two groups — one that experienced mortality reminders and one that didn’t — to three hypothetical
gubernatorial candidates. One was "task-oriented and emphasized the ability to get things done"; another "emphasized the
importance of share responsibility, relationships, and working together"; and a third was "bold self-confident, and emphasized the
group’s greatness" ("you are part of a special state nation"). After a reminder of mortality, there was an eightfold increase in support
for the charismatic candidate. /// In October 2003, the
researchers began testing whether George W. Bush’s
appeal stemmed in part from mortality fears awakened by 9/11. They had two groups of Rutgers
undergraduates read an essay expressing a "highly favorable opinion of the measures taken with
regards to 9/11 and the Iraqi conflict ." Those who did the mortality exercises judged the
statement favorably; those who didn’t did not. In late September 2004, the team gathered together
undergraduates to see whether mortality reminders affected their decision to support Bush over Democratic challenger John Kerry
in the upcoming election. Just as undergraduate opinion had opposed the war, it favored Kerry, and the group that did not do the
mortality exercise chose Kerry by four to one. But the students who did the exercise favored Bush by more than two to one. ///
Trump has awakened our fear of "us" versus "them" /// According to Sheldon Solomon, who teaches at
Skidmore College, the psychologists are in the process of conducting experiments to see whether voters’ reaction to
Trump, in the wake of a mortality reminder, is similar to their reaction in 2003 and 2004 to George W. Bush. They
are not permitted to publish their results until they are vetted by peer review in a scientific journal, but Solomon wrote to me
that he expects "the outcome to be the same as 2004 given the similarity of historical conditions
(9/11-France/California) and candidates (Bush-Trump)." /// I, too, expect the results to be similar.
The San Bernardino and Paris attacks are strong mortality reminders that awaken fear of
"them," and Trump, of all the Republican candidates, combines celebrity and charisma with contempt
and contumely toward those responsible for the attacks. Many voters would see his proposal to bar
Muslims from the country not as an assault upon the Constitution and religious belief, but as a
recognition of a mortal threat to America. And that perception of him would help explain his
sudden rise in the polls. ///
 A2: Liberal Peace:
Their analysis ignores the violence of democracy promotion,
development, and hidden wars and is the production of willful silencing
of the margins – violence is increasing.
Herman 14. Edward S. Herman is professor emeritus at the Wharton School of Business at the University of
Pennsylvania, David Peterson M.A. from University of California San Diego, http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-
apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066, Global Research, June 28th 2014, [AB]
It is amusing to see how eagerly the establishment media have welcomed Steven Pinker ’s
2011 tome, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined,[1] which explains not only that “violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,” but
that “we may be living in the most peaceful era in our species’ existence.”[2] A professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University since 2002 and a two-
time Pulitzer Prize finalist in the general nonfiction category,[3] Pinker’s lovable theme coincides with the Nobel Peace Laureate’s current engagement in wars on at
least four separate continents (Asia, Africa, Europe, and South America); his regretful partial withdrawal from invaded and occupied Iraq; his victorious termination of
the 2011 war in Libya; his buildup and threats to engage in even larger wars with Syria and Iran, both already underway with aggressive sanctions and an array of
covert actions;[4] his semi-secret and ever-widening use of remote-controlled aerial gunships and death squads in global killing operations;[5] and his declaration of the
right to kill any person anywhere for “national security” reasons—officially making the entire world a U.S. free-fire-zone.[6] The Barack Obama regime, and before it the
Bush-Cheney regime, have also supported and protected Israel’s escalated ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the hostile U.S. actions and threats involving Iran and
Syria are closely geared with those of Israel. Whereas in Pinker’s view there has been a “Long Peace” since the end of the Second
World War,[7] in the real world there has been a series of long and devastating U.S. wars : in the

Koreas (1950-1953), Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia (1954-1975), Iraq (1990-), Afghanistan (2001- or, arguably, 1979-), the
Democratic Republic of the Congo (1996-), with the heavy direct involvement of U.S. clients from Rwanda (Paul Kagame) and Uganda (Yoweri

Museveni) in large-scale Congo killings; and Israel’s outbursts in Lebanon (1982 and 2006), to name a few. There were also very

deadly wars in Iran, invaded by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (1980-1988), with Western encouragement and support. And with the stimulus-excuse of 9/11, the U.S.

political and “defense” establishment was able to declare a global “War on Terror,” open-
ended and still ongoing, to assure that the “Long Peace” would not be interrupted by a
conflict that met the Pinkerian standards for a real war. In the same time frame as Pinker’s
“New Peace,” alleged to have begun with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the Warsaw Pact, and of the Soviet Union itself (1989-1991), we have
also witnessed the relentless expansion of the U.S.-led NATO bloc, its 1990s war on and
dismantlement of Yugoslavia,[8] its acceptance of new “out of area” responsibilities for “security,”[9] its steadily enlarging membership from 16
to 28 states, including the Baltic and former Eastern European satellites of the Soviet Union, and a growing U.S. and NATO

encirclement of and threats to China and Russia.[10] And during the first decade of the 21st century, the United
States openly embarked on the systematic use of “enhanced interrogations” (i.e., torture)
and the frequent resort to “extraordinary renditions” that send captives to torture-prone clients for some not-so-angelic
working over.[11] Pinker’s standard for an interruption of the “Long Peace” would be a war between the “great powers,” and it is true that the major Axis and Allied
Pinker carries this line of thought even further: He
powers that fought each other during World War II have not made war among themselves since 1945. But

contends not only that the “democracies avoid disputes with each other,” but that they “tend to stay out of disputes across
the board,” (283) an idea he refers to as the “Democratic Peace.”[12] (278-284) This will surely come as a surprise to the many

victims of U.S. assassinations, sanctions, subversions, bombings and invasions since 1945.[13]
For Pinker, no attack on a lesser power by one or more of the great democracies counts
as a real war or confutes the “Democratic Peace,” no matter how many people die . “Among
respectable countries,” Pinker writes, “conquest is no longer a thinkable option . A politician in a democracy today who

suggested conquering another country would be met not with counterarguments but with puzzlement, embarrassment, or laughter.” (260) This is an

extremely silly assertion. Presumably, when George Bush and Tony Blair sent U.S. and British forces to attack
Iraq in 2003, ousted its government, and replaced it with one operating under laws drafted by the Coalition Provisional Authority,
this did not count as “conquest,” as these leaders never stated that they launched the war to
“conquer” Iraq, but rather “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.”[14] What conqueror has
ever pronounced as his goal something other than self-defense and the protection of life and limb? It is on the basis of devices such as this that Pinker’s “Long Peace,”
“New Peace,” and “Democratic Peace” rest. (See “Massaging the Numbers,” below.) And it is in this kind of context Pinker throws-in his “gentle commerce” theme by
advancing the so-called “Golden Arches Peace” idea—that “no two countries with a McDonald’s have ever fought in a war.” The “only unambiguous” exception that he
can name occurred in 1999, “when NATO briefly bombed Yugoslavia.” (285) In an endnote he mentions that an “earlier marginal exception was the U.S. attack on
Panama in 1989,” but he dismisses this U.S. war as too insignificant to make the grade—“its death count falls short of the minimum required for a war according to the
standard definition,”[15] though according to the UN Charter and customary international law, there was nothing sub-standard about this unambiguous U.S. aggression
against a sovereign country. Here as in many other places, Pinker selects the estimated death toll that
minimizes the U.S.-inflicted casualties and fits his political agenda .[16] Pinker mentions in
passing that the post-World War II peace among the giants was possibly a result of the immense cost of wars that might involve a nuclear exchange —and

it did extend to the Soviet Union during its post-World War II life— but his explanation focuses mainly on the cultural
evolution and biological adaptations of the Civilized, [17] in contrast with the Uncivilized
of the Third World. Why this new peaceableness of the Civilized does not stop their violent interventions abroad he fails to explain. The
exclusion of wars against the Uncivilized from his definition of a “Long Peace” reflects
gross political bias. Pinker attributes the sense of increased violence to multiple
“illusions,” one of which he believes is caused by the development of media and other advanced forms of communication that allow a rushing to the spot of
bloody events, and recording them and transmitting them to the world. As he explained in a guest appearance on CBS TV’s The Early Show in mid-December 2011: “Not
only can we send a helicopter with a film crew to any troubled spot in the world but now anyone with a cell phone is an instant reporter. They can broadcast color
footage of bloodshed wherever it occurs and so we’re very aware of it.”[18] Apparently Pinker believes that the media cover the world on a non-discriminatory basis,
reporting on Guatemalan peasants slaughtered by their army, civilian victims of U.S. drone warfare in Afghanistan, Honduran protesters shot dead by their own military,
and dead and injured U.S. soldiers as aggressively as they report on civilian protesters shot dead on the streets of Tehran, or the victims of the Syrian government or of
The naiveté here is staggering. Pinker’s “Long Peace” and “New Peace” and their
the late Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.[19]

alleged declines of violence not only coincide with the numerous and ongoing attacks
by the giants on the midgets, the huge expansion in arms, and the new “burgeoning” of torture ,[20]
but runs parallel with the increasing structural violence of a global class war that has resulted in
growing inequality within and between countries, systematic dispossession of vast
numbers, a widespread seizure of the commons, major migrations, growing cities of slums, increased ethnic
tensions and anti-Islamic fervor, deliberately stoked in a troubled, receptive environment, mass incarceration of
minority populations, and more vocal oppositional forces both here and abroad.[21] These do not constitute
“violence” in Pinker’s accounting system. Pinker’s “Cold War” Although Pinker covers a great
deal of ground from the earliest humans to the present, with numerous figures and learned
citations, Better Angels is an overwhelmingly ideological work, with biases that reveal
themselves at every level—sourcing, language, framing, historical and political context,
and substance—and on all topics.

Modern peace is a nihilistic will to total utility that attempts to

sublimate violence an contain it within the state. Repression of violence
guarantees explosive releases of aggressive ecstasy. The only response
to such is to embrace the ecstatic excess of violence that can respect the
sovereignty of others.
Hamblet 5. Wendy Hamblet is has a Ph.D. from and is a Professor of Philosophy at Adelphi
University. “The Manic Ecstasy of War.” Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice, Issue 17,
pages 39-35) ipartman
Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with the dawn of tyranny

and oppression. War, one of the oldest human institutions, has proven invaluable to states in establishing
their power over subgroups within the system, as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to permit their expansion
in space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little mystery to

the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The
continuing popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy,
freedom, and the dignity of human beings, remains baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War,
considered by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war

composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of

the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the population’s
martial enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum
exertion of self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless
splurge of the nation’s human and economic wealth for no better reason than wanton
celebration of state power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille. His philosophy explains two
principles of expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by utilitarian goals serving current power relations,

and that of nonproductive expenditure—that is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane
servitude to reason and utility. Political implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the
two dialectical opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures . The first
model aspires to perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous
perfection that is monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state
becomes self-identified as a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and
customs fixed and imperative. At the other end of the structural spectrum resides the
second form of state—the acephalic state—disordered, anarchic, and volatile. This state is
seen by ordered states as a terrifying, heterogeneous primitive lifeform where uncivilized
tribes practice mystical thinking, incommensurable truths, and mad affective experience.
Unreasonable. Useless. Mad. People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual
lives that offer escape from the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunkenness,
dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures, self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark
monster gods. The monocephalic state, on the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state
boasts an enlightened stable form that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the
primitive society is referred to chaos, madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy provides a valuable framework for analyzing
global realities, even in the modern world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all

states seek timeless stability, secured against time with absolute truth claims, infallible
social codes, and enduring legislation. States are duly secured by the legalized violence of
police and military that appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately
suppress all transformation. Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations —passports,
licenses, identity cards, forms completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration regulations, police interrogations, surveillance of social and financial transactions

weed out the deviant lifeforms until ultimately all

among subgroups, security checkpoints, departments of homeland security—

countervoices have been silenced, all rebellion quite obliterated , all evolutionary movement logically contradictory.
But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state increasingly closes itself off, it
stifles social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the passion from its citizen-
devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to mundane utility. When
the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly deified, all labors have
become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in
its most excessive extrapolation—fascism. Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and move forward into futures.

This most solid state holds firm for a short while only; then there begins a condensation of
forces. Life rises up and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole.
Existence and liberty flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these
endless cycles describe the movement of history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode in
hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly
divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic structure moves from
the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals, for Bataille, move between the two
contradictory forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive
rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests that war

We may not readily

composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a breakout from mundane servitude.

recognize, in our states, the extreme forms that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We
believe that, although chaos is unquestionably undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen—
Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced that fascist urges fade with global
democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order and security of the first world. Modern
Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable

But the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for
metron of golden rules.

hyper-order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian
myth, cite a common arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order
(cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is

beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an embarrassment of riches. The foundational
logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and morally superior to acephalic
multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid,
unyielding—is preferable, in the Westernmind,to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics. Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s

a theater of
projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide

cruelty and death that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock
and interrupt the philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined
sophistication thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by lofty ideals,
and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s treatment of the dark, concealed urges in

human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the simultaneous lofty goals of modern
states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those very states naming themselves the
most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in the civilized modern era represents
the release of suppressed subterranean drives within industrialized, rationalist, rigidly
hierarchically ordered populations enslaved [subservient] to reason and utility. The violence
that floods the globe in modernity, that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global
freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires, the projects of
monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern world: “The
economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of
fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons ] .... [M]an
[lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce men of modernity—gods, kings, and their
modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the
products of molten metal torn from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the desperate obstinacy of man opposing the

primitive urges are still at

exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that

work in the projects of modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good of their
communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in heartfelt

communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the rigorous
projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free from the
mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them from
their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic drives will out and fulfill themselves
in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility, and
conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille

modern wars can be explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist
claims it to be? If so, then

orientation of modern ordered states and from people’s imprisonment within the
merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should
provide a wondrous release from mundane [subservience] servitude. War could be said to satisfy
collective fantasies of manic omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values .
Perhaps the wars of modernity occur with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their

suppressed lust for a sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian reasons of
state. This resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial enthusiasm must find release in politically
restrained wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-
annihilation. For Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped all
political bounds and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven by the lofty
goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other
goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific revolution that
provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system) that
have been successfully harnessed to the powerprojects of the mightiest nations. The goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend
Western hegemony globally in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of the primal urges of a community
toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to make the
living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it must compose orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of
the nation’s finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war
serves the purposes of the state, it loses its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and instrumentality.

War is one of the oldest traditions of

But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion.

our species. It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many
functions in states. Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of communication
between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multifunctional institution. ... It is
extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the
most crucial functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystalliz ation of its
[state] monopoly on violence. War is a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that
culminates, ultimately, in fascist stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is
utterly necessary to the deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the
creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the citizens and

place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves the
collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values, virtues, and meanings of one’s own
cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems, tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its strong and
courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an
international stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even the most oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual

display of the soldiers’ manly character—the valor, the selflessness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in the
tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the
advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization—today’s wars clearly
bring too massive a booty to be named selfless expenditures . In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have
increasingly become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists
and accountants and big businessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an
arsenal of modern techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism
of the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians . Above all, modern
wars serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object
(the nation) massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders,
and their corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the
fantasy that the sacred love-object [the nation] is the savior and benefactor of the globe;
war serves the paranoid collective delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible,
unlimited as the god in its strength and in its moral substance . Killing the enemies,
propagandized as evil, the collective illusion is fed that evil is overthrown : thus the sanctity
of the love-object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed; the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good
war. But for all the benefits served by the institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic;

they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse homeless
families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on parched lands where even
the earth mother is barren. Ultimately the greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its stark utility to the few at

the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the purposes of war by
frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build heartfelt
communities, a need that can only be served by expressing the collective aggressive
energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by armed
force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the great
human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility ...it must force its half-seduced lovers to

enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release

of ecstatic urges that explains a state’s return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution
[war]. It may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the
cephalus and in its service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in
dispensing its most fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel
needs of the people, their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes
possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of
modern war. The sacred values of community—life, freedom, festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxtaposition to their
opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately, insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated

beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are
utterly utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.
 A2: Reform/Liberalism Good:
Their retreat into liberal co-habitation is wedded to a legacy of divine
imperialism: shifting the operational processing of warfare to the
Schmittean ontology of friends/enemies, citizen/soldiers in order to
justify humanitrain intervention as a means of recuperating US
globalization under the guise of pursuing peace..
Evans 16 Brad Evans, senior lecturer in international relations at the School of Sociology,
Politics & International Studies at the University of Bristol, founder and director of the
histories of violence project, 2016, “Liberal Violence: From the Benjaminian Divine to the
Angels of History,” Theory & Event Volume 19 Issue 1) ipartman
Despite universal claims to peaceful co-habitation, liberal regimes have been compelled
to make war on whatever threatens it. This is why the liberal account of freedom has depended
upon a lethal principle, which discursively wrapped in the language of rights, security and justice,
inaugurated planetary state of warfare and siege. It has promoted an account of freedom that, in the process of
taking hold of the problem of the planetary life of political subjects, linked human potentiality to the possibility of its ruination.
Ifliberal violence has then produced a necessary lethal corollary in its mission to foster the
peace and prosperity of the species in order to alleviate unnecessary suffering; so it has also
needed to foster a belief in the necessity of violence in the name of that suffering and
vulnerability to which it continually stakes a claim. The Liberal wars of the past two
decades in particular have revealed a number of defining principles . Aside from relying upon technological
supremacy and universal claims to truth, they have been overwhelmingly driven by a bio-
political imperative, which has displaced concerns with Sovereign integrities with
forms of violence carried out in the name of an endangered humanity. In this regard, they have
destroyed the Westphalia pretence, seeing the catastrophes of our global age in fact as a condition of possibility
to further the liberal will to rule. Since incorporation in this setting has proceed on the basis that all life
should necessarily be included within its strategic orbit, the veritable evisceration of any sense of
“the outside” (as conceived in terms of its political imaginary) has led to the blurring of all conventional demarcations
between friends/enemies, citizens/soldiers, times of war/times of peace . What is more, as life itself became increasingly
central to questions of security, issues of development as broadly conceived would no longer be regarded as peripheral to the
war effort. It would in fact become a central motif as most notably articulated in the strategic mantras “War
by Other
means” and “War for Hearts and Minds”. Not only would this point to new forms of
depoliticisation which, less about Schmittean exceptionalism, were more explicable in
terms of the fundamental political and social transformation of societies. It would also lead to the
production of violent subjects, as the recourse to violence became sure testament to a conception of humanity realised
Liberal violence, in other words, proved to be unbounded, unlimited and
through the wars fought in its name.
without conventional Sovereign warrant – namely revealing of the fundamental principles of what Benjamin once elected
to term “the divine”. Diagnosing the liberal wars of the past two decades as a form of divine violence offers a more
disturbing reading of the violence of the liberal encounter. If the violence of political realism, at least in theory, appreciated the
what seems to define the lethality of liberal freedom has been a
value of limits and boundaries,
commitment to war without boundaries, hence limitless. As Dillon and Julian Reid acutely
observed:
[L]iberal peacemaking is lethal. Its violence a necessary corollary of the aporetic character of its mission to
foster the peace and prosperity of the species ... There is, then, a martial face to liberal peace. The liberal way of rule is
contoured by the liberal way of war ... Liberalism is therefore obliged to exercise a strategic
 calculus of necessary killing, in the course of which calculus ought to be able to say how much killing is
enough... [However] it has no better way of saying how much killing is enough, once it starts
killing to make life live, than does the geopolitical strategic calculus of necessary killing’42.

This brings us to Steven Pinker’s Better Angels of Our Nature43. Reworking the well-rehearsed liberal peace thesis,
for Pinker, the reason we have become less warlike today can be account for in terms of our liberal maturity. Leaving aside the
evident theological undertones to Pinker’s work, along with the numerous empirical flaws in his thesis, his not so original
thesis at least accredits its all too Euro-centric sources of inspiration on matters of civility :
‘The reason so many violent institutions succumbed within so short a span of time was that the arguments that slew them
belong to a coherent philosophy that emerged during the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment. The ideas of thinkers like
Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes, Locke, David Hume, Mary Astell, Kant, Beccaria, Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, Madison, Jefferson,
Hamilton and John Stuart Mill coalesced into a worldview that we can call Enlightenment humanism’. John Gray has been
rightly suspicious of the entire project and claims being made here: The
idea that a new world can be
constructed through the rational application of force is peculiarly modern, animating ideas of
revolutionary war and pedagogic terror that feature in an influential tradition of radical Enlightenment thinking. Downplaying
this tradition is extremely important for Pinker. Along with liberal humanists everywhere, he regards the core of the
Enlightenment as a commitment to rationality. The fact that prominent Enlightenment figures have favoured violence as an
instrument of social transformation is—to put it mildly—inconvenient... No doubt we have become less violent in some ways.
But it is easy for liberal humanists to pass over the respects in which civilisation has retreated. Pinker is no exception. Just as
he writes off mass killing in developing countries as evidence of backwardness without enquiring whether it might be linked
in some way to peace in the developed world, he celebrates “re-civilisation”... without much concern for those who pay the
price of the re-civilising process44.Gray showed his evident concerns here with the promissory nature of
liberal violence. Indeed, what he elsewhere terms the violence of the liberal missionary, reposes Nietzsche’s further
instance that ‘god is dead and man has killed him’ with a devastating humanistic critique 45. Such violence, in the end,
however has proved to be politically, ethically and economically narcissistic. Just as liberal advocates in the
zones of crises now increasingly find themselves operating within fortified protectorates as
part of a great separation from the world, this has been matched, albeit it ways that initially appear
disconnected, by new forms of violence which also takes place almost exclusively  at a distance.
Indeed, as liberal actors increasingly give up on the idea that the world may be transformed for the better, new modalities of
violence are emerging which seem to be more logically in fitting with the new politics of catastrophe that increasingly defines
our terrifyingly normal times. As the promise of violence and catastrophe now appears inescapable,
insecurity is becoming normalised, dystopian realism becoming the prevailing imaginaries for political
rule, and once cited claims to emancipation, unending progress and lasting security for peoples all but
abandoned47.The politics of catastrophe and its relationship to “end of times” narratives adds another layer to our
theological enquiry. As Jacob Taubes once noted48, there is perhaps something theologically different at work here between the
pre-modern apocalyptic movements and the catastrophic reasoning now defining the contemporary moment. For all their
nihilism and monotheistic servitude, at least the apocalyptic movements of yesteryear could
imagine a better world than already existed. There is therefore a vast difference between the subjects which
names its disaster ‘apocalypse’ to that which reads disaster in terms of ‘catastrophe.’ 49 Unlike apocalypse, there is
no beyond the catastrophic. Its mediation on the “end of times” is already fated.
Catastrophe denies political transformation. It demands instead a forced partaking in a world that is
deemed to be insecure unto the end. The upshot being, as all things become the source of endangerment, the
human becomes the source of our veritable undoing. Angels of History Every war produces
its casualties. Some of these stand out in terms of the sheer body count. The horror of mass
warfare reduced to the most banal forms of inhuman quantification. Others, no less important, are its political and
philosophical losses. What is increasingly clear is that the past two decades of liberal warfare ,
punctured but not initially determined by the tragedy of the events of September 11 th 2001, ultimately put the very
concept of war into question. The reluctance to officially declare war, even when our involvement
in the politically motivated violence appears to be all too evident , now demands a move beyond
the dominant frames which have shaped discussions for the past two decades. There is an important caveat to address here.
What happened during last decade of the Global Wars on Terror cannot simply be inserted into a post 9/11 frames for
analysis. Much of what passed for post 9/11 justice or military excessiveness was slowly maturing in the global borderlands
for some considerable time. If there is a departure it needs to be accounted for against this broader post-Cold War
humanitarian sensibility through which liberalism absorbed local crises into its political fabric to further condition its violent
to put the blame for the violence and
interventions.It has been all too easy for political and social theorists
atrocities of the Global Wars on Terror onto the shoulders of George Bush and Dick Cheney.
This has allowed liberals to appropriate Schmitt as one of their own, hence reducing the entire war
effort to the reductionist measures of “US hegemony/exceptionalism”. Such retreats back
into state centric models have not only proved unhelpful in terms of questioning the normalization of violence, they
have failed to grasp the complexity of war – especially how questions of universality, economy,
power and the formation of political subjectivities can be rethought through violent
encounters. What is more, the limits of these analyses have been further evidenced by the complete lack of engagement
with political theology, failing to recognize the violence of universal ambitions, along with the need to put the contemporary
legacy of Kant on trial. Let us not forget Tony Blair and Barack Obama have embodied the liberal Kantian idea of political
leadership better than any others throughout the history of liberalism. Any change in liberal fortunes must be understood in
this context.We
have witnessed in recent times profound changes in the violent
cartography of what is a post-Iraq liberal influence. Instead of actively and one-sidedly
engaging the world, humanely, violently or otherwise, what we are now encountering are new political
arrangements shaped by forms of distancing and technological realignment. Just as liberal
agents in the dangerous borderland areas increasingly find themselves operating within fortified protectorates as part of a
great separation from the world, this is matched, albeit it ways that initially appear disconnected, by new forms of violence
that also take place at a distance. The political and philosophical significance of this should not be underestimated. The
technological and strategic confluence between the remote management of populations
(notably surveillance) and new forms of violence are indicative of the narcissism of a liberal
project that reeks of the worst excesses of technological determinism. Instead of looking
with confidence towards a post-liberal commitment to transforming the living conditions of the world of peoples, what has
taken its place is an intellectually barren landscape offering no alternative other than to live out our catastrophically fated
existence. This is instructive regarding how
we might envisage “the end of liberal times” as marked
out and defined by this incommensurable sense of planetary siege. It also demands new
thinking about the relationship between violence, technology and theology in these
uncertain times.The liberal wars of the past decade have been premised on two notable claims to superiority. The first
was premised on the logic of technology where it was assumed that high-tech sophistry could
replace the need to suffer casualties. The second was premised upon a more humanitarian ethos,
which demanded local knowledge and engagement with dangerous populations . The
narcissistic violence of the Global War on Terror has put this secondary vision into lasting crises as the violence of liberal
encounter has fatefully exposed any universal commitment to rights and justice. Not only did we appear to be the principle
authors of violence, thereby challenging the notion that underdevelopment was the true cause of planetary endangerment,
Metaphysical hubris displaced by a
populations within liberal societies have lost faith in worldly responsibilities.
catastrophic reasoning that quite literally places us at the point of extinction. Violence as
such has assumed non-locatable forms as liberalism is coming to terms with the limits
to its territorial will to rule. Physically separated from a world it no longer understands, it is now left to the
digital and technological recoupment of distance to shape worldly relations with little concern for human relations. Drone
violence is particularly revealing of this shift in the liberal worldview . While the first
recorded drone strike was authorised by President George Bush in Pakistan on 18 th June 2004, it has been during the
Presidency of Obama that the use of the technology has become the more favoured method for dealing with recalcitrant
elements in the global borderlands. Indeed, it seems, whilst the Bush administration favoured extraordinary rendition,
detention and torture, the Obama policy for preventing the growth of inmates in camps such as Guantanamo has been their
execution. Hence inhumane torture and barbarity replaced by the more dignified and considerate method of targeted
debates on drone violence tend to centre on questions its legality, especially
assassination! While
little attention is given to the wider political moment and
whether it fits within established rules of war,
how the violence points to the changing nature of liberal power and its veritable
retreat from the world of people.Whereas Bush and Blair launched a one-sided territorial assault on Iraq and
Afghanistan in order to promote ‘civilisation’, Obama has waged his war in the deregulated atmospheric shadows where
technological supremacy allows for the continuation of uninhibited forms of violence, while addressing the fact that the
previous interventions failed by any given measure. Hence, this time, out of respect for public sensibilities a ‘precise’ or
We should not forget however that
‘surgical’ form of violence is delivered remotely to its distant adversaries.
the technologies, infrastructures and aesthetics essential for remote warfare are essentially
the same as those that support the economy and consumer society. Targeted drone-strikes
and the advertising that maintains the consumer hothouse essentially rely on the same
computer-based technologies and algorithmic sense-making tools. Put another way, how
Amazon mechanically predicts your next book purchase is not fundamentally
different from how adversarial behavioural patterns are isolated in authoring a
signature-kill.Drone technologies are not simply a new tool of warfare that allow for legal or strategic
reassessment. They are paradigmatic to the contemporary stages of liberal rule. As technological
advance compensates for the “soldiers on the ground” militaristic retreat, they further radicalise the very idea of the territorial
front line such that any Schmittean notion of inside/outside appears like some arcane remnant of an out-dated past . What
takes its place is an atmospheric gaze that further eviscerates the human. From the perspective of
violence, displacing the primacy of human agency from the act of killing represents more than the realisation of the military’s
It reveals more fully the dominance of dystopian realism as the defining
dream of zero casualties.
rationality shaping the political landscape in the here and now, and beyond 50. Demanding then of
a new conceptual vocabulary that allows us to critique what happens when violence is neither orderly nor progressive, but is
simply tasked to mitigate the demise liberal power and ambition in an uncertain world seems more pressing than ever .

The AFF ‘s gestures towards a disarticulation of ethics is the only in the

age of Trump that seeks to usher in a new apocalypse.
Paul 17 (Ian Alan, American transdisciplinary artist, theorist, and curator whose projects
and writing engage in contemporary debates concerning politics, aesthetics, technology,
and ethics, “10 Preliminary Theses on Trump,” January,
https://alineisaterritory.wordpress.com/2017/01/25/10-preliminary-theses-on-trump/)
1. Trump’s power is fundamentally virtual in form. Propose this, suggest that, lie about
yesterday, declare the inevitability of that which is yet to come, retreat from one position while advancing on two more,
contradict oneself, tweet about the greatest possible number of arbitrary things , attack,
provoke, feign movement, never apologize or restrain oneself, hint at gesture, sound the dog whistle, appear still,
expand interpretations, proliferate noise, introduce turbulence, obscure predictability in dense fogs of possibility.
Trump’s power arises not from any individual act but from the multiplication of
possible acts. 2. Defending truths against Trump is to mistake the present battlefield
entirely. Journalists and politicians alike are unable to meaningfully respond to, resist, or
rebuke Trump because they approach him as something singular and consistent , whereas
he acts multiply and chaotically. They aim to pull down something which already is, whereas Trump has
already departed from the here and now towards any number of things that could possibly be instead. While everyone
keeps busy defending fragile shelters of truth, Trump has moved into his golden
palace built on a foundation of a glistening “what if?” 3. As Trump proceeds, what is imaginable,
permissible, and ultimately doable for the Right will multiply in every direction and across every axis. In the back of a bus, like
a little schoolboy, Trump can barely contain his excitement as he describes how he can “grab them by the pussy.” Words that
used to only be whispered slowly reappear in everyday conversations with a dangerous allure. Young men on college
campuses complain about white genocide. Swastikas are sprayed on barn doors. A family sits down for breakfast at a diner
with camouflage assault rifles strung over their shoulders. The Right, feeling liberated at last from liberal political correctness,
feminist shaming, white guilt, academic criticism, media reporting, and any kind of scrutiny in general, go on to dream of the
birth of new worlds that resemble imaginary old ones. 4. The
Left, sensing fascism on the horizon,
retreats to defend the walls of a liberal democracy hallucinated in the fever of the
present. Don’t normalize this! Investigate Russia! Organize for the midterms! Start the
impeachment process! Release the taxes! The constitution must be defended at all
costs! These will be the rallying cries of the liberal Left that finds solace in the fantasy
of an uncompromised past, the inverse mirror of the Right’s “traditional America.”
This is an America without Guantanamo Bay. An America where drones have never
seen flight. An America without police executions. It is an American democracy that
irresistibly arcs towards justice. It’s an America that doesn’t exist. In the terrifying
shadow of Trump’s virtuality, the Left seeks out security in the same institutions that
enabled his appearance. 5. Trump’s virtuality is the virtuality of capital. Trump is the avatar of a
neoliberal insurrection against the liberal forces that have historically attempted to
soften, slow, humanize, and manage capitalism. He is the bleeding edge, the frothing
crest of a wave of deterritorialization, the spray-tanned frontier of global capital. He
is the combed-over contagion that will finally bring the capitalist crisis that has so far
largely been contained in the Global South to the Global North. For both Trump and capital,
limits are only there to be overcome, success means success at any cost, and everything that exists only exists for the taking by
those with the courage and ingenuity to dare to. It is never a question of whether something is possible, but rather of what
new transgression needs to be performed to make it so. 6. Only those parts of the state that are
absolutely necessary to defend wealth will remain . The police and army will become
increasingly indistinguishable and will find support while the extraneous is slashed,
cut, and left to decompose in the heat of rapidly rising global temperatures . As more
and more is secured for capital, everything will become less so . When everything becomes
property, simply being alive constitutes trespassing , and as the rich accumulate impossibly large sums of
wealth they will find that they have no safe place to keep it. The distinction between politics and war, if
there ever were a meaningful one, will become impossible to see in the clouds of tear
gas that will persistently hang in the air of financial centers. 7. The reterritorializing forces of
capital no longer keep up with the accompanying forces of deterritorialization, unavoidably leading us into new intensities of
capitalist crisis. The disciplinary power of jails, hospitals, schools, checkpoints, and border fences now do little to ward off
riots and waves of migrants and refugees. Closed bank branches in Athens burn while the bottom of the Mediterranean and the
deserts of Arizona become ever more populous graveyards. Markets flash-crash as algorithms detect
something that humans cannot. Energy corporations that endlessly lobby against environmental restrictions
now simultaneously make pleas for responses to climate change. The flows unleashed by the global
economy are spilling over the dams meant to profit from them, and even those at the
top find themselves in the floodplains below. The possibilities of the new threaten to
wholly extinguish life in the now. 8. As lived reality becomes ever more precarious and
ultimately unsustainable, life will require more and more mediation to be managed .
Images will accelerate and proliferate at rates unimagined as possible before . Pepe
the Frog will be remixed, reinterpreted, recaptioned, and reuploaded by every
political tendency and faction, while videos of Richard Spencer being punched by the
black bloc will be synchronized with every song to ever appear on Billboard Top 100
charts and uploaded to a playlist on youtube. Presidential press conferences will be accompanied by
applause tracks, while social network executives will prepare to become politicians. Everyone will retweet
Trump and Trump will retweet everyone. Writers in Eastern Europe will make up news stories for
websites in Mexico to undermine trade deals with China. Everything will become more recognizable
and less distinguishable as the deepening poverty of reality is compensated by ever
more sophisticated forms of media. 9. When the present has fully entered into its own
formal disintegration, Trump’s virtuality will necessarily become our own. As a life
becomes less possible, it will increasingly have to resort to what it can become
instead. Sometimes this will only become manifest as pure fantasy: in the American dream, in shiny skyscrapers that
effortlessly and gracefully float above the chaos below, on a rural commune, in outer space, on The Apprentice, in the wild
wildernesses beyond civilization that fill survivalists’ minds. At other times, this will become manifest in radical
experimentation in the streets that find themselves in direct confrontation with Trump’s
storm troopers. Either way, the present will overflow with many different versions of what must become possible
instead. 10. The present crisis being virtually ushered in by Trump must be met with a
crisis of our own making. As things increasingly disintegrate, it will not be possible to
remake what has become undone. Awash in a world without limits or meaning, a
place where the possibility of life itself has become threatened by the possibilities
unleashed under capitalism, the only way out may be to introduce a crisis of a
different kind, one that posits a fundamentally different register of possibility . In the
playful invention of new repertoires, in the forging of new collectivities, in the experimentation with new practices of living,
perhaps something else, something otherwise can begin. In
the coming years, it will be our task to make
possible that which cannot be under capitalism.
 FW
Taboo is a pre-requisite to their politics – the drive for total productivity
and peace culminates in capitalist instrumentalization and war.
Pawlett 13. William Pawlett, senior lecturer in media, communications, and cultural
studies at the University of Wolverhampton, UK “Violence, Society And Radical Theory:
Bataille, Baudrillard And Contemporary Society,” p. 23-25) ipartman
For Bataille religions are based on a fundamental and vital subterfuge: taboos, prohibitions or
laws are erected, held solemn and enforced precisely to enable their momentous violation at the
prescribed time - on feast days, in carnival, in sacrifice and in ritual orgy. This is the meaning of
Bataille's important notion, transgression. Transgressive is not necessarily literally violent or bloody,
even sacrificial rites usually involve a symbolic substitute for a human victim. Religion, for
Bataille as for Durkheim, is a vital, indestructible and foundational component of human life (Durkheim
1995: 1). Religion provides a solemn, regulated and communal means of experiencing the limits
of discontinuous existence, of suspending such existence before the sacred. Religion,
particularly before the structural transformations effected on the experience of the sacred by Christianity (Bataille 1989: 69-77),
leads its worshippers to a precipice where order, sanity, and reason are threatened.
Religions demand the temporary suspension of profane and productive activities - and the
subjectivities that work requires - in order to celebrate the ritual violation of ordinarily binding
prohibitions; laws which are the very foundations of social life. Religion requires the
orgiastic giving of bodies, of gifts or sacrificial offerings through licensed transgression.
Transgression, then, involves far more than the infraction of a law or the breaking of a rule. Acts of
transgression are resolutely part of the taboo; they partake of the taboo's energy and indeed heighten
experience of it by dramatising the crossing of its limits. This sense of transgression reveals
truths ordinarily hidden: that order and disorder require each other, that law and
crime are inter-dependent, that good and evil must periodically embrace. Society is built
on the separation of these terms (that is, their separation as terms) yet it can function only if it
allows them to meet again in transgression. Law, order and reason are not 'natural',
inevitable or autonomous, they are held in place by their opposite and equal partners. Not
only do law, order and reason have an outside, they must allow a place for what is
beyond their limits. Taking the example of war, a declaration of war temporarily suspends the
prohibition on killing so that a society can defend or enlarge itself . In this sense all societies
require the possibility of an organised transgression of what is, supposedly, their most
cherished core value. The cessation of hostilities brings the prohibition back into effect ; this is
often accompanied by great jubilation not only because the threat of being killed is lifted, but also because the demand that you, as
citizen, must become killer is also lifted: the
'taboo' returns with renewed force. Yet, in capitalist
modernity the profane, productive condition has become dominant and continues to
expand, for example in endless drives for efficiency and cost-cutting which are treated, by
politicians and business managers, as the unquestionable truths of social and economic existence .
Off Case:
---Generic A2: K---
 Speed Elitism
Speed Elitism DA – As the academy serves more and more military ends, the
affirmation of its techo-transparency can only serve to create more and more
death, re-founding the humanist mythos of Enlightenment reason to know
oneself and the world around you, to purge the world from mystery. We need
an ethics of intellectual inquiry that engenders death in this infrastructure.
Hoofd 10. Ingrid M. Hoofd, Assistant Professor in the Communications and New Media
Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The accelerated university: Activist
academic alliances and the simulation of thought, ephemera, Feb 2010, 2010 ephemera 10(1):
7-24)

But far from an ‘a-disciplinary self-constitution’ that supposedly overcomes any fictitious distinction, Investigacció for one
relies heavily on the common fictitious distinction between activism and academia to validate
their praxis. By contrasting their initiative to the false objectivity of academicism, they validate
their own knowledge production by claiming to be in the margins as opposed to the ‘ivory
tower’, as if the latter is a stable area from which one can detach oneself from the outside world
and hence objectively analyse. Also, one could wonder to what extent one is actually speaking
from the margins when one has the time, technologies, spaces and connections to organise an
event like Investigacció. The desire to generate knowledge from ‘one’s own subjectivity, without
limitations’ (2005: 3) is analogous to the mythical humanist narrative of breaking with and
improving upon previous knowledge – a form of knowledge-innovation that the academic
institution is also infused with. The university of excellence as well as its doublings into projects like Investigacció are
therefore an effect of its repetitions (with a difference) into the neo-liberal mythical space of progress and acceleration. The
creation of more and more ‘spaces and mechanisms of production, exchange and collective
reflection’ (2005: 3) is indeed precisely what late-capitalism seeks to forge, as long as such reflection
generates an intensification of production. The idea that subjectivities from social movements
are in any way less produced by neo-liberal globalisation is highly problematic . In fact, such an
idea suggests a rather positivist notion of the subject – similar to that supposedly objective academic individual
Investigacció seeks to dethrone. Investigacció then somewhat nostalgically narrates a subject untainted by power structures and
technologies. In fact, the Investigaccióinitiative displays how the subject of activist research empowers her- or himself
throughrecreating the fictitious distinction between activism and academia. S/he does so by reproducing this opposition, which in
turn co-creates and accelerates these ‘new spaces’ – spaces that were created with the goal of facilitating global capitalism and its
speed-elite, and that allow for the perfection of military power through technologies of surveillance. The call for
participants to become active and productive in co-organising the international event – of course, without any
monetary remuneration – is also much present in Investigacció’s rhetoric. They suggest that participants should
engage with one another not only at the meeting, but especially through the online spaces
Investigacció has created for the purpose of generating activist research. ‘Take action!’ says their flyer, ‘[...]
make it so the conference is yours!’ This seductive appeal to the subject-individual as the centre
of creative production is very common to neo-liberal consumerism and its emphasis on
cybernetic interactivity. But it is also false in that it gives the participants a sense of control over Investigacció that they
actually do not have – eventually, the main organisers (have already) set the agenda and handed out the stakes. In short, the
organisers fail to situate themselves by pretending everyone is on the same level of privilege – for example, not requiring monetary
compensation – in this project, and this failure is strangely an effect of their attempt at reviving a more democratic academic
structure. Information Initially, one could think that Baudrillard’s
assessment confirms my analytical suspicion
regarding activist-research projects. In ‘The Implosion’, Baudrillard starts from the premise that the increase of
information in our media-saturated society results in a loss of meaning because it ‘exhausts
itself in the act of staging communication’. New media technologies exacerbate the subject’s
fantasy of transparent communication, while increasingly what are communicated are mere
copies of the same, a ‘recycling in the negative of the traditional institution’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 80).
New technologies are simply the materialisation of that fantasy of communication , and the ‘lure’
(1994: 81) of such a technocratic system resides in the requirement of active political engagement
to uphold that fantasy. This translates in a call to subjectivise oneself – to be vocal, participate,
and to ‘play the [...] liberating claim of subjecthood’ (1994: 85). The result of the intensifying circular logic of
this system, he says, is that meaning not only implodes in the media, but also that the social implodes
in the masses – the construction of a ‘hyperreal’ (1994: 81). Contra the claim of Glocal Research Space that such
praxes of alliance are ‘without an object’ (Glocal Research Space, 2003: 19), this does not mean that objectification does not take
place at all. Instead, and in line with Baudrillard’s argument, the
urge to subjectivise oneself and the
objectification of the individual go hand in hand under speed-elitism – a double bind that locks
the individual firmly into her or his technocratic conditions . Indeed, the argument in ‘Activist Research’ that
‘research [should be] like an effective procedure [which is] in itself already a result’ (2003: 19) describes the conditions of Readings’
‘university of excellence’ where any
research activity, thanks to technological instantaneity, translates
immediately into the capitalist result of increased information flow (Readings, 1996: 22). Active
subjects and their others become the cybernetic objects of such a system of information flow .
The insistence in ‘Activist Research’ on free, travelling and nomadic research simply makes sure that this logic
of increased flow is repeated. Because of this desire for increased flow and connection, activist-research
projects are paradoxically highly exclusivist in advocating the discourses and tools of the
speed-elite. The problem with projects like Edu-Factory or the productive cross-over of activism and
academia is therefore not only that their political counter-information means just more
information (and loss of meaning) as well as more capitalist production, but that it puts its faith in
precisely those technologies and fantasies of control, communication and of ‘being political’
that underlie the current logic of overproduction. It is at this point that John Armitage and Joanne Roberts in
‘Chronotopia’ contend that such a ‘cyclical repetition’ (Armitage and Roberts, 2002: 52) is particularly dangerous
because the fantasy of control remains exactly that, a fantasy. At the same time, this increasingly
forceful repetition can only eventually give way to ‘the accident’ because chronotopian speed-
spaces are fundamentally and exponentially unstable. Armitage and Roberts’ idea of ‘cyclical repetition’
through chronotopianism does thus not mean an exact repetition of the speed-elite’s quest for
mastery – instead, I would argue that it is this immanent quality of difference in repetition , of the
‘essential drifting due to [a technology’s] iterative structure cut off from […] consciousness as
the authority of the last analysis’ as Derrida calls it in ‘Signature Event Context’ (Derrida, 1982: 316) that allows for
the accident or true event to appear. The difference through technologically sped-up repetition appears then perhaps
as a potential, but only precisely as a growing potential that cannot be willed – in this sense, it will be an unanticipated event indeed.
One could then speak of an intensification of politics in what is perhaps too hastily called the
neo-liberal university, opening up unexpected spaces for critique in the face of its neo-
liberalisation, which in turn points to the fundamental instability of its enterprise. Activist-
research projects add to this intensification by virtue of their techno-acceleration. This
intensification of politics is no ground for univocal celebration, since it remains also the
hallmark of the neo-liberal mode of production of knowledge through the new tele-technologies
as excellent, regardless of its critical content . The current university’s instability mirrors and
aggravates the volatility of a capitalism marked by non-sustainability, a growing feminisation of
poverty, the rise of a new global upper class, and highly mediated illusions of cybernetic
mastery. This nonetheless also opens up new forms of thought, if only appearing as
‘accidents’. Derrida hints at this, but also at the university’s elusiveness, in ‘Mochlos, or: the Conflict of the Faculties’, when he
claims that he ‘would almost call [the university] the child of an inseparable couple, metaphysics
and technology’ (Derrida, 1993: 5, emphasis mine). Almost, but never quite – here then emerges the possibility
of truly subversive change. But this change will not be brought about by the mere content of
the critique, but by the way it pushes acceleration to the point of systemic disintegration or
implosion. In Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard calls this the ‘fatal strategy’ that contemporary theory
must adopt: a sort of conceptual suicide attack which aims at pulling the rug out from under
the speed-elitist mobilisation of semiotic oppositions , and which shows the paradox behind
any attempt at structural predictions. In ‘The Final Solution’, Baudrillard relates this intensification of
the humanist obsession with dialectics, mastery, and transparency – the quest for immortality
that is at the basis of techno-scientific research – to destruction and the death drive through
the metaphor of and actual research around cloning , which strangely resonates well with Derrida’s investigation
of the tele-technological archive in Archive Fever. I read Baudrillard’s ‘Final Solution’ here as a metaphor for
the duplication (cloning) of thought into virtual spaces outside the university walls proper . If
contemporary research seeks to make human cloning possible , argues Baudrillard, then this
endeavour is equivalent to cancer: after all, cancer is simply automatic cloning, a deadly form of
multiplication. It is of interest here to note that the possibility of creating an army of clones has likewise
garnered much military interest, just as academia today more and more serves military ends. As
the logic of cloning as automatic multiplication is typical of all current technological and
humanist advancements, the exacerbation of this logic can only mean more promise and
death. At this point my argument mirrors the apocalyptic tone of the activist-research projects .
In the final analysis, the problem with Edu-Factory, Facoltà di Fuga, Investigacció, Universidad Nómada, Ricercatori Precari, and
Glocal Research Space is that these
projects entail a very specific form of subjugation with dire
consequences for the slower and less techno-genic classes . Techno-scientific progress entails a regress into
immortality, epitomised by a nostalgia typical of the current socio-technical situation, for when we were ‘undivided’ (Baudrillard,
2000: 6). I contend that Baudrillard refers not only to the lifeless stage before humans became sexed life forms, but also makes an
allusion to psycho-analytic readings of the ‘subject divided in language’ and its nostalgia for wholeness and transparent
communication. The desire for immortality, like archive fever, is therefore the same as the
Freudian death drive, and we ourselves ultimately become the object of our technologies of
scrutiny and nostalgia. The humanist quest of totally transparency of oneself and of the world
to oneself that grounds the idea of the modern techno-scientific university, is ultimately an
attempt at (self-)destruction, or in any case an attempted destruction of (one’s) radical
difference [alterity]. The urgent political question, which Stiegler problematically avoided in Disorientation,
then becomes: which selves are and will become caught up in the delusion of total self-
transparency and self-justification, and which selves will be destroyed? And how may we
conceive of an ‘ethic of intellectual inquiry or aesthetic contemplation’ that ‘resists the
imperatives of speed’, as Jon Cook likewise wonders in ‘The Techno-University and the Future of Knowledge’ (Cook, 1999:
323)? It is of particular importance to note here that the very inception of this question and its possible
analysis, like the conception of the speed-elite, is itself again a performative repetition of the
grounding myth of the university of independent truth, justice and reason . Therefore, in carrying
forward the humanist promise, this analysis is itself bound up in the intensification of the logic
of acceleration and destruction, and that is then also equally tenuous. This complicity of thought
in the violence of acceleration itself in turn quickens the machine of the humanist promise , and
can only manifest itself in the prediction of a coming apocalypse – whether it concerns a
narrative of the death of thought and the university, or of a technological acceleration
engendering the Freudian death drive. We are then simply the next target in the technological
realisation of complete γνωθι σαυτον (know thyself) – or so it seems. Because after all, a clone
is never an exact copy, as Baudrillard very well knows; and therefore, the extent to which
activist-research projects hopefully invite alterity can thankfully not yet be thought.
Capitalism
 Top Level
Their empirical, scientific cataloguing of the system naturalizes use value which
backdoors in the values of capitalism – production is not limited to
commodities, but a metaphysical system premised on utility and sign value.
Pawlett 07. William Pawlett, senior lecturer in media, communications, and cultural studies at
the University of Wolverhampton, UK, Jean Baudrillard: Against Banality, Routledge, 2007, pg.
30

Mirror and Symbolic Exchange involve the development and application of a new methodology in Baudrillard’s work. Baudrillard
develops what he terms an ‘ethnological reduction’ aiming ‘to strip our culture, including its
materialist critique, of the absolute privilege that it gives itself by the imposition of a universal
code’ (1975: 115). A code of signs, signs of truth, signs of reality – the entire representational
apparatus of Western culture and rationality is attacked . Mirror is the last text in which Baudrillard seems
willing to anticipate likely criticisms of his positions. The following is particularly important: The objection that our society
is still largely dominated by the logic of commodities is irrelevant. When Marx set out to analyse
capital, capitalist industrial production was still largely a minority phenomenon . When he
designated political economy as the determining sphere, religion was still largely dominant. The
theoretical decision is never made at the quantitative level, but at the level of structural critique.
(Baudrillard, 1975: 121) In other words, theory must not limit itself to description, to an empirical or
‘realist’ cataloguing, nor to taking a critical ‘standpoint’ in relation to an aspect of the system. In
order to be analytical theory must depart from the existing state of affairs and the ideas it
circulates. What is clear is that the scope of Baudrillard’s early work expands constantly, circling
outwards from objects to the entire system of consumption, from the production of signs to the
metaphysical system of production. At each stage Baudrillard seeks a mode of resistance to, or
better defiance of, these systems, through a radical difference that cannot be assimilated . The
difficulties involved in articulating a convincing mode of resistance show just how deep and pervasive the systems of power, control
and regulation actually are. LE MIROIR DE LA PRODUCTION THE MIRROR OF PRODUCTION The early 1970s was a time of major
political upheaval and contestation in the Western democracies. In Paris the students’ revolt and workers’ strikes of May 1968
temporarily and locally suspended the cap- italist system, but faded during the long summer months with students and workers split
by government manoeuvres. The Conservative gov- ernment in the UK was destroyed by strike action in 1974 and the USA suffered
the Watergate scandal while the Vietnam war still raged, as did protests against it. At the same time there was a widespread
escalation in ‘terrorist’ activities. Baudrillard’s contentions in Mirror (1975), that Marxism was not capable of challenging the system,
were untimely, awkward and provocative, and a number of Marxist-oriented critics have never forgiven Baudrillard for writing it.
Baudrillard’s major contention in this work is that production is far more than a mode of creating goods for
distribution and sale: production is, in Western culture, a metaphysical system. A ‘metaphysics’
is a system of thought that bases its arguments on an abstracted or ‘meta’ principle that cannot
be shown to be valid and has to be taken on trust . The implication is that metaphysical principles are
spurious and fanciful, and Baudrillard uses the term ‘metaphysical’ in the most derogatory sense
to mean something like empty, abstract nonsense.2 To produce goods to satisfy basic survival
needs is very widely understood as the fundamental law of the human species . According to Baudrillard
productionism, as metaphysical principle, functions as an abstract principle that codes all
human practices, desires, aspirations and forms of exchange as production. Yet, following Durkheim
(1961) and Bataille (1986), Baudrillard insists that very little human action can actually be understood in
terms of production. Instead, profound meaning, joy and intensity are experienced in taking risks,
in wastefulness and even in destruction. The metaphysics of production locks us within a
system of the production of value – whether as goods, services or signs. Further, we are expected
to produce and reproduce ourselves as value, we must maximize ourselves, exploit our
potential, and this, for Baudrillard, is the most fundamental, insidious and developed form of social
control. According to Baudrillard, Marxism, though a powerful critical force in some respects, is confined within the
metaphysics of productionism. Marxism departs sharply from liberal economic theory in that it emphasises the
importance of the social relations of production , not merely the abstract forces or conditions of production (such
as available tech- nology, raw materials, markets for the sale of goods). Marx focuses on the social relations involved in any practice
or process of production and asks awkward questions such as who benefits the most from such a system. Baudrillard still has
a reputation as an anti-Marxist, forged largely by Marxist critics of his work, particularly Kellner
(1989: 33–59) and Callinicos (1989: 144–54). However, there is no question that Baudrillard was inspired and
deeply influenced by Marx even in the formulation of his notion of symbolic exchange and of
sign-value, which, ultimately, Baudrillard deploys as a critique of Marx . Symbolic exchange and
the logic of sign-value are developed to critique the integrating power of capitalism . It is therefore
simplistic and misleading to suggest that these are anti-Marxist concepts and that by developing
them Baudrillard entirely rejects Marxism (Kellner, 1989: 58; Callinicos, 1989: 147). However, Baudrillard
attacks Marxism explicitly on several related fronts . First, Baudrillard argues, Marx failed to see the
interconnections between the system of political economy (of labour, the production of
goods, the market) and the system of representation (language, the sign, meaning). For Baudrillard
these two orders are parallel and ‘inseparable’ such that ‘it becomes impossible to think
outside the form production and the form representation’ (1981: 43–63, 1975: 29). Other, more substantive
criticisms flow from this principle. Because it does not question the abstract or metaphysical principle of
production as a means of satisfying needs, Marxism tends to naturalise and universalise use-
value. For the sake of clarity this point is explored in some detail. In a section of Critique entitled ‘The Myth of Primary Needs’
(1981: 80–2) Baudrillard contests what he terms the ‘bio-anthropological postulate’ of primary
needs. The notion of need is ideological in the sense that it is based on an insupportable
abstraction: the separation of ‘man as essence’ from the social environment. One implication
of this way of thinking is that the social system could be said to obscure the ‘true essence of
humanity’, but Baudrillard denies that ‘true’, ‘objective’ survival needs can be identified , since ‘it
is always the production of the surplus that regulates the whole. The survival threshold is
never determined from below, but from above’ (1981: 81). That is, ‘needs’ and their satisfactions
are always ideological, always implicated in power relations, never ‘natural ’. For Baudrillard needs
are defined as: a function induced (in the individual) by the internal logic of the system: more
precisely not as a consummative force liberated by the affluent society, but as a productive
force required by the functioning of the system . . . there are only needs because the system
needs them. (Baudrillard, 1981: 82–3, original emphasis) Baudrillard attacks the very principle of needs,
uses and wants. To speak of needs, uses or wants is already an abstraction because it covertly
assumes a great deal. It assumes an already existing, taken-for- granted individual separated
from other individuals and separated from the world. It assumes that this ‘individual’, itself an
abstraction, will naturally abstract or break down the world into useful things (and less useful
things) and make use of the useful things to survive and reproduce . This assumes a natural state
of scarcity and of competition for these scarce resources. It assumes that all of these
components – ‘objects’, ‘individuals’, ‘scarcity’, ‘usefulness’ and ‘competition’ – exist in nature
or reality, independently of social or cultural meanings and representational practices. It suggests
that these facts of reality or nature are the cause of cultural meanings and practices, which are
merely a ‘reflection’ of them. Baudrillard’s contention, and it is by no means an original one, is that these
components are effects, not causes, of cultural practices. It follows that each of these contentions
can be contested and, for Baudrillard, must be if the capitalist system is to be challenged . Crucially, the
idea that the individual pre-exists society, culture or community is patently absurd – although it is
widely held. Every ‘individual’ is born into a community with values, norms and a language, or
rather the notion of the ‘individual’ is only constituted through relations with the community’s
values, norms and language. That an individual can be recognised, and function, as ‘an
individual’ is a mea- sure of the community’s success in producing individuals . Moreover, what we
refer to as an ‘individual’ is an idea generated by our cultural practices and meanings, which
are capitalist, and which are built upon the ‘barring’ of symbolic exchange relations between
people.

The only way to avoid neoliberal backlash in the form of “sustainable

capitalism” is to critique order itself. Nothing in history is inevitable – education
away from capitalism can unshackle desires and reappropriate them toward
expenditure. This means we access building for the future better.
White and Williams 12. Richard J. White, professor of development and society at Sheffield
Hallam University (UK), and Colin C. Williams, professor of management at the University of
Sheffield (UK), “The Pervasive Nature of Heterodox Economic Spaces at a Time of Neoliberal
Crisis: Towards a Postneoliberal Anarchist Future,” Antipode Vol. 44 No. 5 2012 pg. 1638

From William Godwin’s (1986 [1793]) polemic about the evils of national education to the present day, anarchistsand other
dissident thinkers, notably Friere (1972) and Illich (1971), have invested a great deal of attention toward
the role of (state- controlled) schools and education. As Ward (1982:79) argues: “Ultimately the social
function of education is to perpetuate society: it is the social function. Society guarantees its
future by rearing its children in its own image.” At a fundamental level, encouraging the recognition
and development of crypt-economic spaces depends on the ability of contemporary society to
unshackle itself from the current straitjacket of neoliberal economic thought and discourse,
and instead be inspired to envisage multiple possibilities of a “post-neoliberal” future.
Education thus—as it always has— becomes a critical key, not only in inspiring greater critical thought
and engagement through engaging with heterodox economics, but also with re-inserting this in
broader political frameworks. Undoubtedly education—both compulsory and at higher levels—must give
serious consideration as to how best to incorporate these broader economic and political
frameworks of reference and understanding . We would argue strongly that a core element of geography
must (at all levels) turn towards its anarchist roots once more, dedicate resources not only to
de-mystifying the anarchist tradition, but where relevant and possible, engaging directly with
the (new) challenges and critiques that anarchism extols as a political and social ideology.
Anarchist studies must strive to be, in the words of Shukaitis (2009:169), “more than the study of
anarchism and anarchists by anarchists, weaving a strange web of self-referentiality and endless
rehashing of the deeds and ideas of bearded nineteenth-century European males”. Pepper
(1988:339–340) suggests two ways to introduce the subject of anarchism into the geography classroom: First pupils could be
informed of some of the principles underlying various forms of anarchism (e.g., decentralism, self-
reliance, anti-specialism, anti-urban/ pro-rural, egalitarianism), and asked to speculate on what changes would
occur in Britain’s geography if these principles were applied. Indeed the crisis of both neoliberal
economics and the state demands that the need to radicalise and re-think approaches to these
domains is taken up, and the current vogue for the “business as usual” model, or the
oxymoronic call for “sustainable capitalism” is firmly critiqued, exposed and rejected. As Pepper
(1988:350) argues, getting children to critically consider the contemporary (economic, social,
political) landscapes should: Wean pupils away from a-historicism: that is, the distressing
tendency to see the future as inevitable—i.e., over-conditioned by the present—and only
imaginable in terms of extrapolation from present assumptions (of gigantism, capitalism,
technological determinism, etc.). Importantly, with respect to the economic the evidence base
presented here— which constructively builds upon the critical interventions and interpretations arising from other
dissident/heterodox economists— acts as another excellent point of discussion and departure from
conventional neoliberal economic dogma.

The revolution itself is bourgeois—capitalism will reform itself around

further regimes of accumulation, and a materialist analytic is
insufficient to develop a post-capitalist society.
Wendling 06. (Amy Wendling, Assistant Professor of Philosophy @ Creighton College.
Reading Bataille Now. Ed. Winnubst. P 64-51)
- Sovereignty and the Revolutionary Subject Bataille's discussion of "sovereignty" occupies the entire third volume of The
Accursed Share. This volume explains the final two chapters of volume 1, in which Bataille sketches the forms of consumption
characteristic of Soviet industrialization as a modality of the forms of consumption characteristic of the bourgeois world, as a
cruel accumulation. In sovereign consumption, consumption is not subjected to an end
outside of itself. In the terms of classical Marxism, to act sovereignly is to privilege use over exchange value, or
individual over productive consumption. In a temporal schema, to act sovereignly is to privilege
the present over the past or future. We might recognize sovereign consumption as
noncoercive pleasure or play, consumption that exceeds a productive, work-driven
economy. A sovereign world would have the vision-and the language-to accommodate such a recognition and to
accommodate it in a mode other than dubbing it irresponsible, irrational, childlike, or mad. Let me offer an example of
sovereign consumption from the realm of sexuality, a realm that Bataille also highlights in both his fiction and his philosophy.
The compulsory productive heterosexuality characteristic of bourgeois cultures is also part of the coercion to production.
Bataille's por [p. 47] nography, all of which describes nonreproductive if mostly heterosexual sex, fits into his project for this
reason. Nonreproducrive sex-sex for sex's sake, queer sex, or sex for pleasure-are all modes of nonproductive, or sovereign
consumption: consumption that does no work, produces no new workers, and uses energy without recompense. All bourgeois
cultural taboos about sexuality are rooted in the coercion to production. For Bataille, the sovereign individual, a version of the
Nietzschean noble or Hegelian master (1991b, 219; 1973, 267), "consumes and doesn't labor" (199lb, 198; 1973, 248). Like
Nietzsche, Bataille argues that bourgeois societies-we readily recognize them as our own-have made this sort of consumption
impossible for us by inverting the values attached to it. Accumulation eclipses
the character of the
sovereign: we stockpile, hoard, and hold in reserve rather than use or enjoy. Our
deepest pleasures derive from the hoarding itself: from the security of knowing it is
there, should we want it. Because of this out pleasures remain vicarious, theoretical,
indefinitely deferred and abstract. In an inversion of economic values, the pressure to accumulate eclipses
Bataille's sovereign consumption. Similarly, in Nietzsche, the priest's inversion of moral values eclipses the goodness of
nobility. For Bataille, the bourgeois class is the first-and ultimately only- r revolutionary class: an ascetic class that revolts
specifically against the sovereign nobility in favor of accumulation. The bourgeois revolution over against sovereignty
conditions and inescapably schematizes all subsequent revolution and appeals to revolution. The
very idea and
practice of revolution is itself bourgeois. Revolution is a bourgeois concept, and the
world in which Bataille finds himself continues to be the world of a feudal order that
is breaking down. Bataille writes: 1 cannot help but insist on these aspects: I wish to stress, against both
classical and present-day Marxism, the connection of all the great modern revolutions, from the English and
the French onward, with a feudal order that is breaking down. There have never been any great
revolutions that have struck down an established bourgeois domination. All those
that overthrew a regime started with a revolt motivated by the sovereignty that is
implied in feudal society, (1991b, 279; 1973, 321) Conceptually, revolution demarcates the
transition from sovereignty to accumulation. Revolution will always be connected with the dissolution of
a feudal order and the privileges emblematized by such an order: access to nonproductive consumption, enjoyment, or
use-value itself, by right of birth. [p. 48] But why not, rather, a conception of plenitude and entitlement for all, also by right of
birth, instead of competition and struggle for survival? Such
a view is impossible when Nietzschean
ressentiment is the impetus for liberation, because postrevolutionary subjects have
learned to demonize the very things that they most desire. This point goes some
distance toward explaining why revolutionary class hatred is insufficiently analytic
and confuses the aristocracy with the bourgeoisie. It also explains why the revolution attempted in
1848 was a disaster. Bataille writes: The days ofJuue, the Commune, and Spartakus are the only violent convulsions of the
working masses struggling against the bourgeoisie, but these movements occurred with the help of a misunderstanding. The
workers were misled by the lack of obstacles encountered a little earlier when the bourgeoisie, in concert with them, rose up
against men born of that feudality which irritated everybody. (1991b, 289) Under
this historical error, born of
the precipitous mixing of classes, the particularity of the bourgeoisie is
misunderstood. The bourgeois is no lord or lady waited upon, but a money-grubbing, guilt-ridden, obsessive worker,
too cheap to hire help, self-righteously confirmed in his or her work ethic and ascetic way of life. I am not suggesting that the
bourgeois does not have privileges. He or she does, but not in the same way as the feudal lord or lady. The bourgeois
goal is always further accumulation, never consumption, and therefore never
sovereignty. Bataille writes, "The masses have never united except in a radical hostility to the principle of sovereignty"
(l99lb, 288; 1973, 329). The masses do not unite against accumulation, except when that
accumulation is expressed as sovereignty, and therefore not as accumulation at all,
but as consumption. The proletarian worker perceives an excessive consumption as
the necessary result of the bourgeois accumulation of property. But this is a
misperception, for the bourgeois does not enjoy but accumulates. When the
proletarian worker comes to power, a bourgeois revolution recurs because this mass
worker, the slave ascendant, forever operates in an economy of scarcity: hoarding
resources from the memory of being deprived . The problem of accumulation begins
again. The structure is of actual scarcity, followed by perceived scarcity and hoarding
that holds on as a historical remainder. Never fully overcome, this remainder
becomes part of the historically sedimented fear through which bourgeois cultures
function. The problem is that a resentful revolutionary subject is unfit and unable to
enjoy wealth and, by extension, political sovereignty. In The German Ideal [p. 49] ogy, Marx answers
this criticism by claiming that through the process of revolutionary action, the proletariat is able to overcome accumulated
habit and conditioning, learn to consume well, and thus become fit for rule (1978, 193). Only an upsurge of violent
revolutionary action will be a sufficient lesson in consumption, a trial by violence that returns the bondsman back to the scene
of the struggle to the death. For Marx, the emergent subject, baptized by fire, is transformed into a being capable of
sovereignty-or dead-at the end of the process .
But we have seen that the process of revolutionary
action instills not liberation but a fearful repetition of servitude, now internal. In
short, transformation is never so neat as Marx would have it. The problem of how
subjects who have lived through oppression wield power has been notoriously sticky,
reappearing in all thoughtful considerations of postrevolutionary subjects. In volume 3 of
The Accursed Share, the problem appears in Bataille's characterization of Stalin as a serfs son come to power, who deliberately carries out a
revolutionary program that he knows will not extend beyond the reformations of the bourgeois democracies to the West. In his own list of the
tasks of the Provisional Revolutionary Government, Stalin wrote that "none of them would go beyond the limits of bourgeois democracy"
(Bataille 1991b, 266-67). The problem appears in Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth (1968) when he considers the Algerian Revolution
and the subsequent fitness to rule of those whose political and psychological sensibilities have been shaped by oppression. The problem also
appears in the strains of contemporary feminism that deal with transgendered persons, persons who live out a socially deterknined gender
identity other than the one into which they were born. In Judith Halberstam's Female Masculinity, she describes the female to male
transgendered person who has seized a prized and structurally privileged position. Halberstam writes, "Gender transition from female to male
allows biological women access to male privilege within their reassigned genders" (1998, 143).b0 Such "postrevolutionary" subjects struggle
against inhabiting a masculinity that reinscribes the dominant model by which they themselves were oppressed. They must also struggle against
being perceived as "class traitors" to women and feminism (Califia 2000; Halberstam 1998, 144). Having gone through this transition, Patrick
Califia considers what he calls "the transformation of manhood and masculinity" (2002, 394). Fully aware of the ambivalence of his
postrevolutionary subjectivity, he writes: My gender dysphoria [came from the) feeling that there is something wrong when other people
perceived or treated me as if I were a girl. Not wanting to he female, but not having much enthusiasm for the only other option our [p. 50] society
offers .... Still, I keep thinking there must be something unique about being a man, something fit to be celebrated in ritual and mythology, the stuff
of a spiritual mystery teaching. Or is this desire the toot of the oppression of women-the need to cordon off certain activities or experiences and
say, only we can do this and women may not, because we mast have a source of pride and uniqueness in order to have meaningful lives? ... I
wonder if I can talk about what I like about being a man and disliked about being a woman without being attacked for being sexist? ...
Being a fag or thirdgender person is a way for me to salvage the good that I saw in my father, the virtues that I see in ordinary
men, without being damaged by the ugliness, the unbridled rage, the hatred of homosexuals, the racism, the arrogance that
made me wary of my dad. (2002, 394-400) Conclusion T remain hopeful about postrevolurionary subjects and the abilities of
such subjects to occupy positions of power in critical and self-aware ways. I also remain hopeful about a
notion of sovereignty partially liberated from the context of oppression in which it
was forged and about consumption as enjoyment that somehow exceeds a context of
production, or work. In seeking to keep sovereignty alive, Baraille too does not envision a return to the oppreslive
sovereignty characteristic of a feudal system . Sovereignty operates for Bataille more as a
conceptual, methodological, and practical postulate rather than as a historical
nostalgia. But it is precisely because of this that sovereignty can stage its insurgency anywhere. Baraille suggests that
enjoyaunt itself is the upsurge of sovereignty: "The enjoyment of production is in opposition to accumulation (that is, [in
opposition) to the production of the means of production) . . . [Sovereignty is] neither anachronistic nor insignificant [because
it is the general) condition of each human being" (1991b, 281; 1973, 322, my emphasis). Sovereignty is the
overcoming of the urge to hoard; the overcoming of bourgeois subjectivity ; the
refusal of the historical sedimentation of cruelty, accumulation, and the bad
conscience, Acting sovereignly, I leave behind fear, and I stop living in expectation of
death. I fear the loss of enjoyment more than death. Bataille's sovereignty anticipates the
existentialist refrain of freedom at any cost. But unlike in existentialism, Bataille's sovereignty preserves corporeality: I live
sovereignly, not despite my feats of death, but because of my enjoyment of life. For
according to Baraille, "if we live sovereignly, the representation of death is impossible, for
the present is not subject to the demands of the future. That is why, in a fundamental sense, living
sovereignly is to escape, if not death, at least the anguish of [p. 51] death. Not that dying is hateful-but living servilely is
hateful" (1991b, 219). Nor has Bataille given up on communism: "Sovereignty is no longer alive except in the perspectives of
communism" (1991b, 261; 1973, 305). For communism is the only kind of thinking and practice that tries to restore individual
consumption, to restore use-value and with it enjoyment as the general condition of life. Bataille knows that the jury is out on
communism: its historical moment is too near to rake a clear view of its implications as a whole. Because of its historical
proximity, communism has fallen between the cracks of dogmatic and politicized positions. Bataille writes that "the lack of
interest in understanding communism evinced by practically all noncommunists and the involvement of militants in a cohort
acting almost without debate-according to directives in which the whole game is not known-have made communism a reality
that is foreign, as it were, to the world of reflection" (1991b, 264). Bataille's comments on communism in volume 3 of The
AccnrsedShare seek to redress this gap, forcing the owl of Minerva to rake her customary flight earlier than usual. Cleansed of
teleology, communist revolution becomes the theoretical and practical pursuit of such enjoyment, of a different kind of
liberation. And in contemporary thinkers as diverse as Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, and Antonio Negri, we find
sketches of non-teleological liberations, which are no longer revolutions that
reinstate repressive subjectivities. Derrida speaks of ongoing, underground practices
of resistance (1994, 99). Haraway insists on the non-innocence and impurity of all
positions of resistance that appear alongside hegemonic cultural ideals (1991, 1997).
Addressing the temporal deferral of communism itself, Negri writes, "Communism does not come in a 'subsequent period,' it
springs up contemporaneously as a process constituting an enormous power of antagonism and of real supersession" (1991,
181). Anticipating these thinkers, Bataille situates the real interest of communism in its vision of a human being whose general
condition is to play without labor in an economy of plenty. No price must be exacted for enjoyment, and there is no question of
entitlement. The
eclipse of this assertion, in favor of the accumulating and stockpiling of
the means of production for future use, is communism missing its own best point.
 #Accelerate 2AC Cards:
Perm – Deploy the ecstatic affect of the 1AC as a locus for new accelerationist
politics
Williams & Srnicek 13 (Alex, PhD student at the University of East London, presently at work
on a thesis entitled 'Hegemony and Complexity', Nick, PhD candidate in International Relations
at the London School of Economics, Co-authors of the forthcoming Folk Politics, 14 May 2013,
http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-
politics/

15.We do not present any particular organisation as the ideal means to embody these vectors.
What is needed — what has always been needed — is an ecology of organisations, a pluralism of forces, resonating
and feeding back on their comparative strengths. Sectarianism is the death knell of the left as much as
centralization is, and in this regard we continue to welcome experimentation with different tactics (even those we

disagree with). 16. We have three medium term concrete goals. First, we need to build an intellectual infrastructure. Mimicking the Mont
Pelerin Society of the neoliberal revolution, this is to be tasked with cre ating a new ideology, economic and social mod -

els, and a vision of the good to replace and surpass the emaciated ideals that rule our world
today. This is an infrastructure in the sense of requiring the construction not just of ideas, but
institutions and material paths to inculcate, embody and spread them.

There’s no forced choice

Wark ’13 (Mackenzie, Prof. of Culture and Media Studies @ The New School, “#Celerity: A
Critique of the Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”)

3.1 Thetask is one of coordinating the latent energies of a people bored with what the
commodity has to offer with the awareness of what shaping powers remain to us to open cracks
towards new futures. It’s not either or. ‘Folk politics’ and technical politics need to talk to each
other. To do otherwise is to lapse, on the one hand, into local and specific grievances, or purely
negative energies, or a refusal to confront the larger picture of metabolic rift. On the other hand, to
ignore folk politics is also a danger, the danger of the technocratic fix. It’s to base decisions on a refusal to
acknowledge folk struggle and demand, but also insight and information from the popular
struggles in and against commodity economy. What we need is neither abstraction nor
occupying, but the occupying of abstraction.

Vanguardism DA – The alt leads to revolutionary violence and failed politics –

we need to couple subjectival shift with broader politics.
Deterritorial Investigations Unit ’13 (“New Accelerationism and Imperial Protocol”
http://deterritorialinvestigations.wordpress.com/2013/05/19/new-accelerationism-and-
imperial-protocol/)

I think that [there] are some immediate problems of this approach. While agreeing with the
inability of localism to triumph over a transnational complex , it seems to me that Williams and Srnicek have
a tendency to look at the ongoing crisis from the vantage point of the macro-sphere. But , to use the
model developed in part by Brian Holmes, capitalism and power formations are presently effecting us across five scales :

the global, the continental, national, territorial, and intimate. Thus, a macropolitical resistance must be

coupled with a Guattarian micropolitical revolution in order for any successes to be made;
otherwise the regulated subjectivity emerged from the intersections of our “everyday
infrastructure” (which is something that we encounter on a local level, no?) Micropolitical revolution does not necessary mean
local or folk politics, though it can take on this form – it means the profound transformation of
the local, be it the localized community, activist group, or individual. We learned with a series of neutered revolutions – running from the
Bolshevik revolution through to Chavez’s Venezuela – that forsaking emphasis on the micro for the macro leads
to both a re-emphasis on the continental and national scales (the Soviet’s “Internationalism” bracketed by nationalism, Chavez’s own
continental capitalism and national management existing outside the greater world market), and an outright rejection of really-existing autonomy. Under Lenin, the Bolshevik form of

this overcoding came at the forced collectivization of the peasantry , the glorification of Fordist and Taylorist industrial paradigms,
and the destruction of communal power. Furthermore, the Bolshevik supremacy came at the expense of various other radical movements, many inclined towards anarchism; these other forms of dissent were

captured and utilized to produce the panopticonic state of the USSR. In the West, the ways in which the Leninist current organized itself – secret
cells, vanguardism – was picked up by a group of neo-classical economists (including F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and Milton Friedman) and utilized

to implement a truly international revolution, this time in the service of capitalism. This, of course, was the neoliberal revolution, and the group I’m referring to is the Mont Pelerin Society. This

society made itself into a strict intellectual vanguard , spanning hundreds of think-tanks, forums, university and government appointments around the
globe to convince both the public and the private that free-market capitalism was not only right, but that is was natural. This promise of a frictionless and open world of trade, much like the dream of the

when we read in the Accelerationist

proletariat’s utopia in Russia, led instead to the proliferation of bureaucracy, of tedium, and of boundless exploitation. Thus,

manifesto that there needs to be a “mimicking of the Mont Pelerin Society,” there might be
cause to be wary.
 Settler Colonialism and Pessimism
Perm do both – the AFF’s pyrotechnic aesthetic is an apocatastasis of fleshy
assemblages, which brings the past of the oppressed fully into the present to attend to
the worlds and alternate forms of life that exceed and persist despite the Western
Imperial Man’s project of overrepresentation. “It’s after the end of the world, don’t
you know that yet?”
Weheliye 14 Alexander G., Professor of African American Studies and English at Northwestern
University, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of
the Human, p. 131-135
Agamben's theorization of bare life leaves no room for alternate forms of life that elude the law's violent embrace. What seems to
have vanished from this description is the life in the bare life compound; hence the homo sacer remains a thing, whose happening
slumbers in bare life without journeying through the rivulets of liberations elsewhere. The potential of bare life as a concept falls
victim to a legal dogmatism that equates humanity and personhood with a status bequeathed or revoked by juridical sovereignty in
much the same way as human rights discourse and habeas corpus do. Because alternatives do not exist in Agamben's generalized
sphere of exception that constitutes bare life, the law denotes the only constituent power in the definition and adjudication of what
it means to be human or dehumanized in the contemporary world. If
alternate forms of life, what Wynter dubs
genres of the human beyond the world of Man, can flourish only after the complete obliteration
of the law, then it would follow that our existence, whether it is bare or not, stands and falls
with the extant laws in the current codification of Man. This can blind us to the sorrow songs,
smooth glitches, miniscule movements, shards of hope, scraps of food, and interrupted
dreams of freedom that already swarm the ether of Man's legal apparatus , which does not
mean that these formations annul the brutal validity of bare life , biopolitics, necropolitics, social
death, or racializing assemblages but that Man's juridical machine can never exhaust the
plentitude of our world. The future orientation of political messianism has made the existing realities of oppressed groups
more bearable and has inspired some of modernity's greatest thinkers (Karl Marx, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Walter Benjamin, to name
only a few), functioning as a politicopoetic imaginary of the flesh—an instantiation of the reveries that lay groundwork for
assemblages of liberation in the future anterior tense—with recourse to a worldly and/or a metaphysical restorative force that
transpires in the name of affecting redemptive transformations in the hic et nunc.20 This dimension evaporates in bare life and
biopolitics discourse; in its stead Agamben offers us a defanged legal messianism far removed from the traditions of the oppressed
while Foucault fails to consider alternative imaginaries. When
June Tyson repeatedly intones, “It's after the end
of the world…. Don't you know that yet?” at the beginning of the Sun Ra Arkestra's 1974 film Space Is the
Place, she directs our attention to the very real likelihood that another world might not only be
possible but that this universe may already be here in the NOW.21 The only question that
remains: do we have the tools required to apprehend other worlds such as the one prophesied
by June Tyson and Sun Ra, or will we remain infinitely detained by the magical powers of
Man's juridical assemblage as a result of having consumed too much of his treacly Kool-Aid ?
The idea of the flesh, as theorized by Spillers, while by no means drinking from the bountiful
fountain of messianism, constitutes a liminal zone comprising legal and extralegal subjection,
violence, and torture as well as lines of flight from the world of Man in the form of practices,
existences, thoughts, desires, dreams, and sounds contemporaneously persisting in the law's
spectral shadows. The enfleshed modalities of humanity, however, are not uncritical reiterations
of the humanist episteme or insistences on the exceptional particularity of racialized humanity,
and, as a consequence, they do not represent mere legal or moral bids for inclusion into or critiques of the
shortcomings of western liberal humanism. For habeas viscus does not obey the logic of legal possession and
remains even after the body's demise; it refuses to pass on but is, nonetheless, passed down as the remainder of the hieroglyphics
of the flesh. In
the absence of and in contradistinction to habeas corpus, how might the flesh
incarnate alternate forms of liberty and humanity that dwell among us in the NOW , which, “as a
model of messianic time, comprises the entire history of humanity in an enormous abbreviation, coincides exactly with the place the
history of humanity occupies in the universe”?22 If
it's after the end of the world and we just don't know that
yet, surviving in the space of the flesh might just be tantamount to inhabiting a future anterior
elsewhere in which “contemporary events throw a penetrating light into the past and thereby
illuminate the future.”23 Agamben repeatedly quotes Walter Benjamin's famous proclamation from “On the Concept of
History”: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that ‘the state of exception’ (Ausnahmezustand) in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is commensurate with this insight. Then we will clearly see that it
is our task to bring about a real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism”; yet he rarely
comments on Benjamin's references to the tradition of the oppressed or the fight against fascism (“On the Concept of History,”
392).24 Far more interested in the law as the locus for the universalization of the state of exception than he is in the pedagogy of the
oppressed, Agamben's omission amplifies his almost exclusive focus on bare life from the horizon of jurisprudence and hegemony,
thus leaving intact the homo sacer qua homo sacer by repeating the very procedure by which modern racializing assemblages invent
and maintain this category. In his numerous discussions of Benjamin, Agamben also does not consider the question of historical
materialism: “The historical materialist approaches a historical object only where it confronts him as a monad. In this structure he
recognizes the sign of a messianic arrest of happening [Stillstellung], or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for
the oppressed past” (“On the Concept of History,” 396). For Benjamin, the dialectical struggle of historical materialism seeks not to
universalize the particular oppressed past to but to generate the revolutionary restitution of temporality in which the messianic
arrest of happening functions as an assemblage of freedom. In his most extended consideration of the concept of messianic
redemption as it appears in the Benjaminian oeuvre, Agamben dismisses exegeses of “On the Concept of History” that insist on
replacing the history of the ruling classes with historical narratives about the tradition of the oppressed, because this presumes “that
the tradition of the oppressed classes is, in its goals and in its structures, altogether analogous to the tradition of the ruling classes
(whose heir it would be); the oppressed class, according to this theory, would differ from the ruling classes only with respect to its
content” (Potentialities, 153). The radical nonfungibility of the ruling and oppressed classes vis-àvis history vanishes after this point
so that Agamben can appeal to an abstract sphere of historical cessation qua messianic salvation. In Agamben's narration,
Benjamin's aim is not to emancipate the past and “restore its true dignity, to transmit it anew as an inheritance for future
generations.” Instead, what is at stake “is an interruption of tradition in which the past is fulfilled and thereby brought to its end
once and for all. For humanity as for the individual human, to redeem the past is to put an end to it, to cast upon it a gaze that fulfills
it” (Potentialities, 153). The opposition between a reconstructive and destructive relationship to the past that Agamben postulates,
while in the spirit of Benjamin, misses its mark because it does not consider the question of historical materialism so fundamental to
the way Benjamin imagines the oppressed's world historical role in bringing about a real state of exception. Excavating
the
subjugated past constitutes a revolutionary endeavor since the tradition of the oppressed
cannot differ from ruling-class history purely in its epiphenomenal content.25 Not only does the
oppressed past call into question the hubris of empty homogenous time but it also , and more
significantly, requires a distinctive ontologico-formal assemblage in order to appear in the clearing
of history. Which is to say that the oppressed qua flesh must be summoned as an assemblage of
revolutionary freedom so as not to fall prey to the limits of traditional dialectical materialism .
Consequently, as opposed to the constraints of the traditional dialectical form in which “every
negation has its value solely as background for the delineation of the lively, the positive,”
Benjamin's versioning of the dialectic emphasizes that “a new partition be applied to this initially
excluded, negative component so that, by a displacement of the angle of vision (but not of the
criteria!), a positive element emerges anew in it too—something different from that previously
signified. And so on, ad infinitum, until the entire past is brought into the present in a historical
apocatastasis.”26 Benjamin is after the transubstantiation of the originally discounted, negative
factor (the oppressed/revolutionary classes or the flesh), for it is in this prehensive shift that the
echoing omen of revolutionary redemption can be found . As Benjamin writes, the oppressed class (the
flesh/Man's others) appears in this dialectical drama as “the avenger that completes the task of liberation in the name of
generations of the downtrodden” (“On the Concept of History,” 394). In accordance with his usage of other religious and
cosmological concepts, Benjamin secularizes but does not dispense completely with the metaphysical and otherworldly resonances
of “the restitution of all things of which God has spoken” (Acts 3:21), although he does further specify the temporal cum liberationist
dimensions of apocatastasis, which
addresses “the resolve to gather again, in revolutionary action and
in revolutionary thinking, precisely the elements of the ‘too early’ and the ‘too late’ of the first
beginning and the final decay.”27 Much too tardy for salvation while anticipating the epoch of
revolution, the ether of the flesh is situated at the crossing of the first creation of what was
and the ultimate arrest of what is. As such the flesh provides the ground, the loophole of
retreat, the liminal space, and the archipelago for those revolutions that will have occurred but
remain largely imperceptible within Man's political and critical idioms : “It's after the end of
the world…. Don't you know that yet?”
 (Potential) Perm for A/B

It solves the alt – an aesthetics of fire unleashes anagramatical blackness

Warren 16 (Calvin Warren, assistant professor of American Studies at George Washington
University, PhD from Yale, 2016. “Black Care”. Liquid Blackness: Volume 3, Issue 6. pgs. 43-47 )
ipartman
For black existence in an antiblack world, the problem is one of attending to a laceration, which appears across time, space,
individual, and community. Furthermore, the laceration is meaningless as a sign for institutions using transparency and translation as
“Black care” is a particular type of attentiveness or operation, since what needs caring
a strategy of domination and assault.
anagrammatical: “a spirit, a soul, a psyche.” Black care is a network of strategies
for is something
and practices entailing the circulation, communication, and sharing of the non-sense
hieroglyphic. The objective is not to render the sign decipherable, since its meaning resides outside of a metaphysical world,
but to share this undecipherable sign as a lateral practice. Circulation and sharing, then, are the operations of black care. I emphasize
these two practices because much of the viciousness of the metaphysical violence is worked through alone. Shame enshrouds many
experiences: having one’s competence questioned at work, encountering routinized micro-aggressions, facing insecurity and
depression, experiencing strip-searches, and succumbing to self-destructive behavior and resignation are often internalized, or more
accurately, confined to the internal. This is an aspect of metaphysical violence; one fears discourse about it and its circulation can
often put one at risk if shared with an uncaring individual. By “sharing” and “circulation” I mean providing expressive form for an
indecipherable affect and sending it forth—to a collective, to a public, to a friend, a spouse, etc. Affect is difficult because one often
experiences the torment as interior struggle— communication turned inward. The care I have in mind, here, would turn that
communication outward, even if what one is feeling cannot be completely deciphered, one can still give it form—much like the
hieroglyphic, for example, provides typographic form for an unknown message. The
typographic form provides space,
an openness, within which one can share its mystery— without a vicious “will to power” or
desire to decode and dominate (as is the procedure of institutional care). I have read Spillers, Bataille,
and Sharpe together to offer an operation that envisions communication of the non-sense sign as an operation of black care. Much
work is done in sharing and communicating. Since the laceration transfers and constitutes a flow of misery, it is only in and through
communication that attentiveness can occur. I hesitate to use the word “healing,” since this is often the “sign” of metaphysical
overcoming and domination, and anti-black violence continues without end and can never be overcome. Bu t we might
embrace the term ‘endurance’ as the objective of black care . To communicate the laceration, to share the
generational and individual components of it, enables endurance. Not the endurance that yields resolution, but an
endurance that is a lateral affirmation of injury—a recognition and embrace of the laceration. We might turn
briefly to the cinematic example of Beloved (Jonathan Demme, 1998).11 Captivity is precisely the experience in which “a
spirit, a soul, a psyche” is violated without end, and captives found a way to endure the
incessant violation. Corporeal violence does not exhaust the field of misery and brutality;
“something” else is violated . Baby Suggs, the spiritualist and exhorter, understands this and
assembles captives in a circle. She instructs the women to cry “for the living and the dead just
cry” (i.e. do not attempt to narrate the feelings with traditional language, “just cry”). She then instructs the men to dance and the
children to laugh. Why would she do this? I suggest Baby Suggs has a deep understanding of black care .
Laughing, crying, and dancing provide form for an indecipherable violation —one that language
cannot adequately address (this is why she does not instruct them to speak). The captives, then, must rely on
the “non-sense” sign (laughing, crying, and dancing), as institutional care would describe it, to give form to an affective
dimension. Participants in the circle do not try to decipher each woman’s cry, or decode each
child’s laugh, or translate the dancing into an apodictic narrative. Instead, the participants share
the indecipherable sign—they circulate it between themselves—and they remain open to
receiving the affect, even though a concrete meaning is impossible. The scene is instructive; it
teaches us how to address injury laterally, when vertical redress is foreclosed. The circle is an
allegorical space of openness (the geometry of flow and circulation); we must find ways to
circulate the laceration in its myriad expressive forms . Black care is an essential practice of
attentiveness. Whether it is the chromatic melisma of a gospel jazz artist (such as Kim Burrell), the
dynamic choreography of inspired dancers, the warm embrace of a friend, a cleansing cry, etc., the aim is to
provide form and send it forth. These forms of expression enable us to endure the burdensome and bear what seems
unbearable. This non-sense communication does not have to manifest itself in language, since the hieroglyph fractures the word
itself. But it must be communicated, even in “grunts, moans, [and] shrieks,” or in what Fred Moten would call “sociality.”12 The
operation relies on whatever forms of expression enable a “sending forth” of the hieroglyph. This sharing, sending forth, is
a
strategy of endurance; and enduring anti-blackness requires , above all, the operations of black
care.

(Potential) Perm for Settler Colonialism

Perm do both – the AFF’s fiery expenditure is not just a sacrificial project of
incommunserability but works to excavate the colonial reality of violence to turn our
attention to the worlds of abundance which presage and lay within the possibility of
decolonial transformation rooted in pluriversal wildness and a recognition of the
autonomy of the Other.
Collard 15. Rosemary-Claire Collard, Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, Planning
and Environment (Concordia University, Montreal), Jessica Dempsey, Assistant Professor in the
School of Environmental Studies at the University of Victoria, & Juanita Sundberg, Associate
Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, “A Manifesto for Abundant
Futures,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Volume 105, Issue 2, 2015, p. 322-
330) ipartman

Another Path Is Possible! Abundant Futures Manifesto If anything, the

Anthropocene is a spark that will light a
fire in our imaginaries. This is a time to think big, to dream. We dream about abundant futures.
In what follows, we offer this dream in the form of a manifesto, a declaration of strategies to create the conditions for supporting
diverse forms of life and ways of living. Decolonizing frameworks, politics, and ethics guide our thinking about
the conditions needed to generate abundance. Although “the desired outcomes of
decolonization are diverse and located at multiple sites in multiple forms” (Sium, Desai, and Ritskes
2012, 2), our decolonizing sensibility builds from scholarship and movements in settler societies
that are premised on Indigenous self-determination. In this context, we draw particular attention to the ways
Nature is steeped in colonial patterns of power and knowledge. Nature, we argue, must be confronted as an artifact
of empire, although not “as dead matter or remnants of a defunct regime” that can be ignored (Stoler 2008, 196). Rather, as
Stoler (2008, 195) notes, imperial ruins have a political life; they “impinge on the allocation of space,
resources, and on the contours of material life” in the present . Discerning how the residues of Nature are
reactivated in contemporary conservation politics in ways that continue to dispossess is crucial to the practice of decolonizing. The
violence of settler colonialism is ongoing (Wolfe 2006) as “land is remade into property and human
relationships to land are restricted to the relationship of the owner to his property” (Tuck and Yang
2012, 5). Anishinaabeg scholar and activist Leanne Simpson beautifully articulates this transformation of land and bodies (cited in
Klein 2013): Extraction
and assimilation go together. Colonialism and capitalism are based on
extracting and assimilating. My land is seen as a resource . My relatives in the plant and animal
worlds are seen as resources. My culture and knowledge is a resource. My body is a resource
and my children are a resource because they are the potential to grow, maintain, and uphold
the extraction–assimilation system. The act of extraction removes all of the relationships that give whatever is being
extracted meaning. Extracting is taking. Actually, extracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without
thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in
that environment. That's always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the
indigenous. As Simpson suggests, colonial extraction also implies attempts to erase distinct ways of
bringing worlds into being. Transforming these conditions requires political struggle grounded
in decolonizing. Inspired by Simpson and others, we now turn to three concrete political strategies
necessary to create conditions for generating abundance rather than postnatural conservation. These
strategies are informed by transformative efforts already occurring around the globe. Strategy 1:
Reckoning with Colonial-Capitalist Ruination Like postnatural conservationists, we do not support a conservation
oriented around the colonial myth of a pristine past. Yet the tendency to relentlessly focus on the future is not
the answer. When considering how to intervene responsibly and ethically, an ongoing and active reckoning with the past is crucial.
We can look to the past not to provide an Edenic benchmark but to understand the discursive material infrastructure we have
inherited: How did we arrive where we are today, to a world of social asymmetries and ecological impoverishment? Galeano (1973)
and Davis (2002) contend that we arrived at contemporary “underdevelopment” through colonialism and imperial capitalist
development. Violence was central to these processes. “Millions died,” Davis (2002, 11) writes, “not outside the ‘modern world
system,’ but in the very process of being forcibly incorporated into its economic and political structures.” The
Capitalocene,
Haraway's (2014) counterconcept to the Anthropocene, specifically
foregrounds capitalist modes of political
economy (and their attachment to fossil fuels) as drivers of impoverished ecologies. To recall this violence
is neither nostalgic nor anachronistic but central to understanding that any intervention today
is unavoidably linked to processes of imperial ruination. Equally, we need to pay attention to
histories of nonhuman abundance and the violences that led to their diminishment. MacKinnon
(2013) sees the past as a measure of possibility for what “may be again.” For MacKinnon, this is not a call for “some romantic return
to a pre-human Eden.” Rather, he posits, “A story of loss is not always and only a lament; it can also be a measure of possibility.
What once was may be again.” For MacKinnon, this means taking past abundance as a marker for what might be; looking back
shows us what rich socioecological worlds looked like (as in Denevan 2001; Raffles 2002; Mann 2005). “Our systems are designed to
promote more life,” says Leanne Simpson about her Anishinaabeg community (cited in Klein 2013). Working
with the
Anishinaabeg concept of mino bimaadiziwin, variously translated as “the good life” and “continuous rebirth,”
Simpson identifies an alternative to worlds that are enacted through utilitarianism and
extraction. “The purpose of life,” she says, “is this continuous rebirth, it's to promote more life. In
Anishinaabeg society, our economic systems, our education systems, our systems of governance, and our political systems were
designed with that basic tenet at their core.” The concept of promoting life differs considerably from a core aspect of sustainability
and earth systems science, which focuses on figuring out the limits to development or the extent to which ecosystems may be
degraded before ecological function is impaired or beyond repair. As Simpson says, her community considers “how much you can
give up to promote more life” (cited in Klein 2013; also Simpson 2011). We ally ourselves with such strategies to
produce abundance. For Tewolde Egziabher (2002), the tireless Ethiopian advocate for farmers’
rights and agricultural diversity, supporting conditions to create and sustain biological diversity
involves refusing capitalist processes of enclosure over land , waters, and living things, including patents on life.
We ally with Via Campesina (2008) and its more than 200,000 members throughout the globe in
defending the “collective rights of peasant farmers to access land” from those who appropriate land
“for profit.” Peasant farmers affiliated with Via Campesina fight relentlessly against the status quo, against the World
Trade Organization and other trade agreements that privilege corporate actors, against the governments who facilitate land
grabs, and against corporate enclosures. In so doing, they are creating institutions and alliances that
go far beyond national borders, including the World Social Forum, farmer–farmer exchanges, and seed-saving
networks. Strategy 2: Acting Pluriversally Recognizing entanglement is not enough to undo colonial
formations such as Nature. Hence, we ally with others fostering the capacity to act in pluriversal
instead of universal ways (Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar 2014). The universe is enacted through the ontological
assumption of reality or nature as singular, with different cultures offering distinct conceptions of this reality (Blaser 2013). This
approach equates ontology with mental maps or culture and leaves intact the assumption that differing perspectives on the world
can be understood through and reduced to Eurocentric categories. Building on Indigenous thought as well as some
science studies scholarship, Blaser (2009, 2013) frames ontology in terms of practices and performances of worlding—of
being, doing, and knowing; reality “is done and enacted rather than observed” (Mol 1999, 77). Worlding practices bring
worlds into being; different stories enact different worlds that may be coemergent, partially
connected, or in conflict. Blaser (2013, 552) proposes the pluriverse as a “heuristic proposition,” a commitment to
enacting ontological multiplicity, to shift us away from continuously performing the universe. If different stories perform different
yet interconnected worlds, then worlding practices can be evaluated in terms of their effects; some worldings might be wrong in the
sense that “they enact worlds (edifices) in which or with which we do not want to live, or that do not let us live—or lets some live
and not others” (Blaser, de la Cadena, and Escobar 2014). Creating abundant futures, we believe, means
supporting already existing worlding practices that enact worlds different from those
produced by European imperialism and settler colonialism. We ally ourselves with Idle No
More, a Canada-wide Indigenous movement sparked by federal efforts in 2012 to enact legislative
changes that weaken Indigenous sovereignty and environmental regulations . Started by four women,
the movement spread like wildfire, drawing national attention to ongoing Indigenous struggles, sparking,
revitalizing, and supporting decolonizing efforts in a multitude of communities. Activists and authors
Simpson (cited in Klein 2013) and Glen Coulthard (2013) articulate the movement's role in supporting a “resurgence of Indigenous
political thought” in relation to governance models and “Indigenous political-economic alternatives.” We respond to Idle No More's
invitation “to join in a peaceful revolution, to honour Indigenous sovereignty, and to protect the land and water” (Idle No More n.d.).
Enacting abundance means different ways of building relationships across vast differences, best described as solidarity or collective
movement in support of conditions that enable differently situated people and other-than-humans to realize abundance, to build a
world of many worlds. In thinking about how to move collectively, we
take inspiration from the concept of
walking with put forth in the Zapatista movement's Sixth Declaration of the Selva
Lacandona (Zapatista Army of National Liberation 2005). In this framing of solidarity, walking with implies
engaging in activism wherever one lives in support of a common struggle against neoliberalism
and for democracy, liberty, and justice. As such, solidarity supports autonomous forms of
worlding. Strategy 3: Recognizing Animal Autonomy Recognizing multispecies entanglement is not a license
to intensify human control over other-than-human life. Abundant futures include nonhuman animals , not
as resources or banks of natural capital that service humans but as beings with their own familial, social, and
ecological networks, their own lookouts, agendas, and needs . An abundant future is one in which other-
than-humans have wild lives and live as “uncolonized others ” (Plumwood 1993). We follow Cronon, likely the
most widely cited troubler of wilderness, who actually argues for retaining the idea of wildness. As Cronon (1995, 89) writes,
“Honoring the wild” is a matter of “learning to remember and acknowledge the autonomy of the other.” Whereas wilderness
refers to an impossible pure Nature, wildness refers to the autonomy, otherness, and sentience
of animals (Plumwood 1993; Collard 2014). By autonomy we mean the fullest expression of animal life, including capacity for
movement, for social and familial association, and for work and play. These capacities have been profoundly
diminished with the confinement, control, and managerialism that have come to characterize
humans’ relationships with the wider world in humanist colonial and capitalist regimes . In
particular, animals’ spatial and bodily enclosure (in public zoos and aquariums, laboratories, and factory farms) impedes their
autonomy and abundance. Of course, an autonomous life is never a discrete life. Whether enclosed or not,
animals are always inescapably part of socionatural networks (as are we). So what is the difference between these networks? The
wild one offers—within limits—openness, possibility, a degree of choice, and self-determination. The enclosed
one is controlled, cramped, contained, and enclosed. But neither do wildness or animal autonomy
mean no human intervention; in a world that has always been far too entangled to permit
“stepping outside,” wildness and autonomy are relational. We are not advocating a return to
conservation's old misanthropy but an orientation in which wildness is understood relationally,
not as the absence of humans but as interrelations within which animals have autonomy. The degree to which an animal is wild thus
has little to do with its proximities to humans and everything to do with the conditions of living, such as spatial (can the animal come
and go), subjective (can the animal express itself), energetic (can the animal work for itself), and social (can the animal form social
networks). These are conditions of possibility, of potential, not forced states of being. We ally ourselves with the few
conservationists who make the well-being of individual animals a priority (Paquet and Darimont 2010) and with efforts such as the
recent campaign by Zoocheck and other Toronto and international organizations that led to the transfer of three elephants from the
Toronto Zoo to a wildlife sanctuary in California. Part of a wider movement to end elephant captivity, the release of these three
elephants is a sign of growing recognition of the effects of captivity on such social creatures. Orienting
toward
abundant futures requires walking with multiple forms of resistance to colonial and
capitalist logics and practices of extraction and assimilation . Decolonization is our guide
in this process. A profoundly unsettling process, decolonization “sets out to change the order of the
world,” as Fanon (1963, 36) suggested fifty years ago. As the organizations, movements, and people discussed here show,
unsettlings are already taking place, pluriversally. Although never perfect, they are our best
chance for abundant socioecological futures.
 White Inferno / Black Fire
Good Thesis on relation between the Anthropocene and colonial
disposession/black fungibility. The Global-World-Space is subtended by the
geologic event of colonization that rips black subjects from land in a violent
process of thingification but out of thus emerges alternative modes of
(in)humanity.
Yusoff 18. Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queer Mary University of
London. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. P. 29-33)
ipartman
The earliest suggested date in the history of material exchanges is the 1610 thesis, dating the Anthropocene’s start to the European
invasion of the Americas, or “New World,” and the so-called exchange in flora and fauna.1 Authors Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin call
this the “Collision of the Old and New Worlds.” Tying the Anthropocene to conquest makes explicit the
colonial relation, but how does this rupture of bodies, flesh, and worlds become buried in the notion of exchange and
contact? On his second voyage in 1493 to the New World (modern Dominica), Columbus initiates the
first transatlantic slave voyage, a shipment of several hundred Taino people sent from Hispaniola
to Spain. In 1496, he returns from his second voyage, carrying around thirty Native American slaves. By 1510, there is the
start of the systematic transportation of African slaves to the New World. By the time Shakespeare’s
play The Tempest is first performed in 1611 (a year after the proposed start date), the enslaved figures of Caliban and Ariel are
familiar subjects in the Old World. The “collision of the Old and New” covers over the friction of a less
smooth, more corporeal set of racialized violences. In the language of exchange, it might be assumed that something was
given rather than just taken. In that slippage of grammar, I want to shake the innocence of a language of description that assails this
dehumanizing logic and masks its operations. The “nonevent” of this geologic corporeality is the very
contact zone of geosocial relations that the Anthropocene attempts to speak to , yet it continues to do
so in the progressive narrative arc, which is also a narrative of the asymmetries of colonial possession (of
subjects, land, resources) and indigenous and black dispossession. This “exchange” is the directed
colonial violence of forced eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines, and
the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape . Invasion instigates the disruption of
ecological belonging and viable food economies and the introduction of famine and permanent malnutrition. It is the
mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity. “No human contact, but relations of
domination and submission.”2 It was a process of alienation from geography, self, and the possibility of relation. Yet, “these heads of
men, these collections of ears [collected by the barrelful by Count d’Hérisson], these burned houses, these Gothic invasions, this
streaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of.”3 Césaire
argues that
the deliberate destruction and pride in dehumanization that characterized colonial conquest was
not just a butchery that was inflicted on the colonized but one that also brutalized the colonizer: “the West has
never been further from being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the
measure of the world.”4 The superimposition of colonialism was a shearing of subjects from
geography and the reinstantiation of those subjects into a category of geology that recoded
them as property, whereby extraordinary possibilities in relation to the earth were wiped out. The arrival of
Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 and the subsequent colonialism of the Americas “led to the
largest human population replacement in the past 13,000 years ” and to the mixing of previous
separate biotas, such as corn, maize, potatoes, sugarcane, wheat, and domesticated animals such as cows, rats, goats, and pigs
in new ecological formations and plantation ecologies of the Americas.5 As Europeans invaded the Caribbean, deforming and
decimating the indigenous “Caribs,” they began to use the islands as an experimental archipelago in terms of both the social
organization of categories of human and the ecological arrangements of flora and fauna. The
invasion of Europeans in
the Americas resulted in a massive genocide of the indigenous population, leading to a decline
from 54 million people in the Americas in 1492 to approximately 6 million in 1650, a result of
murder, enslavement, famine, and disease . This led to a massive reduction in farming and the regeneration of
forests and carbon uptake or sequestration by forests, leading to an observed decline in Antarctic ice cores of CO2
in the atmosphere. This “Orbis spike” of systematic murder marks the instigation of Global-
World-Space (an understanding of the world as a global entity that is open to the conquest of the entirety of its spatialized and
subjective relations). Here the enslaved are coded in parallel with material extraction under the
guise of exchange. “Colonization = thingification,” where subjectivity becomes fungible as a
geographical as well as psychic and property entity .6 As a descriptive project in the grammar of geology, this
spike naturalizes European colonial relations and their epistemological and ecological
transformations. The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the inventory of which it was
made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the slave children sold by weight of flesh, the
sharp blades of sugar, all the lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic
generations. The shift of grammar cannot keep the rawness out.The 1610 natal moment
does, however, tie the origin of the Anthropocene to the death of 50 million indigenous people (80
to 95 percent of the population), systematic violence, and chattel slavery. This spike of brutality, sadism,
and death, coupled with the subsequent dispossession of indigenous peoples from their land
and the beginnings of industrial global slavery, enacts a foundational spatial inscription of
colonialism (and race) into a monument of global environmental change . Inscribed in this origin of the
Anthropocene is what Michael Taussig calls a “space of death.”7 The Anthropocene began with the
annihilation of the Colonial Other and an epochal redescription of geography as Global-World-Space.8 That is, the
fungibility of Blackness and geologic resources (as land, minerals, and ores) is coeval, predicated on the
ability of the colonizer to both describe and operationalize world-space as a global entity .9In this
spike, the colonial Other is displaced , along with existing ecological relations and connections of
the colonized to earth. As Global-World-Space is established by the colonizers , the Human and
its Others are bifurcated in the production of racial difference to create two worlds of
colonizer and colonized—or two different species, as Fanon would have. Coloniality cuts across both
flesh and earth in the economies of valuation it established, exacting an “incorporative exclusion from
space”10 for the colonized as subjective agents and agents of geography . Indigenous genocide and
removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity, a way in which
subjects get (what Wynter names) “selected” or “dysselected” from geography and coded into
colonial possession through dispossession.The color line of the colonized was not merely a consequence
of these structures of colonial power or a marginal effect of those structures; it was/ is a means to operationalize
extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures
and of global space). Richard Eden, in the popular 1555 publication Decades of the New World, compares the people of the “New
World” to a blank piece of “white paper” on which you can “paynte and wryte” whatever you wish. “The Preface to the Reader”
describes the people of these lands as inanimate objects, blank slates waiting to be civilized by the Europeans: "these simple gentiles
lyvinge only after the lawe of nature, may well bee likened to a smoothe and bare table unpainted, or a white paper unwritten upon,
upon the which yow may at the first paynte and wryte what yow lyste."11 As land
is made into tabula rasa for
European inscription of its militant maps, so too do Indigenes and Africans become rendered as
a writ or ledger of flesh scribed in colonial grammars.

Another good thesis arg – wynter’s theory of “Man” gleaned in relation to the
Black is imposed through a language of Inhumanism + agential significance of
the land for Slaves
Yusoff 18. Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queer Mary University of
London. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. P. 29-33)
ipartman

Wynter suggests that we

should in fact consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African
slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira , initiating the
“sugar–slave” complex—a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people (existing ecologies were not immune to
the ravages of the new invaders, from plants and domestic animals to microbiomes and new geomorphic regimes). Wynter
argues that the importance of the New World is in its dual processes of the “reduction of Man to
Labour and of Nature to Land under the impulsion of the market economy .” Wynter forcefully
demonstrates how “Man” appears as the ontological signification of Whiteness and how this rational
man is established as the biologically selected being , established first through Cartesian man and
then through biologism as an advanced evolutionary subject within concepts of geologic time .
Weheliye calls this “dis-dentification, wherein whiteness connotes the full humanity only gleaned in
relation to the lack of humanity in blackness. ”12 The effect of this doubling of Man/Whiteness in the natal moment
of “his” heuristic formation disabuses the idea of humanity as an ontological category that has a nonracialized primacy. Weheliye
argues, “In black culture this category becomes a designation that shows its finitudes and exclusions very
clearly, thereby denaturalizing the ‘human’ as a universal formation while at the same time laying claim
to it.”13 In reclaiming humanity as a heuristic operation rather than an ontological formation, Wynter plots the historic
formation of Man as a racialized subject that is exclusionary at the point of origin , and precisely
because of the history of those murderous origins . Wynter adds to her revolutionary formation of Man (and his
overrepresentation) in “Black Metamorphosis,” where she considers the relations between land and territory in the organization of
Colonial Man’s “humanity” and the geographies of erasure that underpin it in this conquest of space.14Wynter argues that the
invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese travel to the Americas instigates at the same time
“a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race.15 This refiguring of slaves trafficked to gold mines is borne
into the language of the inhuman, whereupon Blackness becomes characterized through its
ledger of matter, which in turn populates the idea of race. Extending Wynter’s argument, 1492 marks also the
structural inclusion of Man’s Others into the geological lexicon of the inhuman (as matter and energy) and the exclusion from its
material wealth, whereby humanness becomes differentiated by the inhuman objectification of
indigenous and black subjects. While Wynter argues that this devaluation of Blackness served the
specific material purpose of labor and the colonization of Indian land , there is also a prior step in
the identification of inhuman objects that generated the context of “needs” for such labor and dispossession. Voiding subjects
was also about voiding a relation to earth that was embodied , organized, and intensified by those relations to
place; taking place is also taking ways in which people realize themselves through the specific geologies of a land. Colonialism
enacted multiple forms of geologic disruption as well as the more obvious forms of extractive
dispossessions.Wynter contends that the revaluation of black life and the resistance to
dehumanization could only be made through the “creation of a counter-culture through the
transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its reinvention in new and alien
conditions. It was in this transplantation, this metamorphosis of an old culture into a new, that the blacks made themselves
indigenous to their new land.”16 This also involved the transplantation of a traditional relationship to nature, a relationship under
the inspiration of which the slave, now in exile, both adapted himself to Nature and transformed it. In this type of relationship
the land (i.e. part of Nature) could not be regarded as a mere commodity in the land-labor-capital-relationship. New world land, like
the land in Africa was still seen as the Earth—the communal means of production. This attitude, transferred and perpetuated, was
the central grid for many old beliefs which could be retranslated into a new reality.17Descriptions
of the lives of slaves
in Jamaica in the seventeenth century by English clergyman the Rev. John Taylor stress the “great veneration”
which the slaves had for “the Earth.” It may be precisely because land and labor were regarded as private property
that the earth became a source of possibility to release the literal stranglehold of that incarceration in a propertied relation. In the
struggle against forms of propertied relation with the inhuman, different intimacies developed with the earth. Wynter discusses the
importance of the plot accorded to slaves to grow their own food in slave replantation. She says, The
plot was the slave’s
area of escape from the plantation, it was an area of experience which reinvented and
therefore perpetuated an alternative world view, alternative consciousness to that of the
plantation This world view was marginalized by the plantation but never destroyed. In relation to the plot, the slave lived in a
society partly created as an adjunct to the market, partly as an end in itself.18While growing food was a basic requirement for the
reproduction of labor power for the plantation, it also became part of the reproduction of cultural powers in a new land, to establish
a less alienated relation to the earth: “Let me be contained between latitude and longitude.”19The
relation of slave to
provision ground was a relation to a contingent earth, a material relation forged in resistance
to the dehumanizing of colonialism that opened a carceral geography.
Perm
Yusoff 18. Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queer Mary University of
London. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. P. 29-33)
ipartman

The earth in its symbolic and nonabstracted forms (as a knowledge about survival in maroonage, the quotidian
practices of harvesting useful plants and animals, and navigation) was a crucial aspect of slave revolts . Wynter argues,
“Black slavery in the Caribbean was synonymous with black revolt against slavery. And these
revolts would be crucial to the indigenization process .”20 Maroonage becomes the practice of
cultural resistance to slavery. Wild mountain and interior living was also a successful part, Wynter argues, of
replantation to the new land and the confrontation with its unfamiliar geographical conditions. She discusses at length the oaths
to earth that were sworn before rebellions and how these were oaths to ancestors replanted in a
new land—and that such oaths could not be broken despite the horrendous torture of those
captured, in a context where “property that had rebelled, thereby affirming its status as human, must be burnt
(i.e. tortured) as a ‘terror’ to other ‘property’ who might want to assert their human
status.”21 Kissing the earth before rebellions was an oath-act that maintained a social contract
with the earth often to the point of death .22 Wynter argues that this “indigenization”23 was a way of
thinking and apprehending the material reality of slavery through a dynamic replanting of roots
(or “transplanting” as Wynter calls it) in an alien context: “this is the process of black cultural resistance and response to the Middle
Passage and to what lay on the farther side—the alienated reality of a New World, new not only in its geography, but also in its
radically different experience.”24 Disrupting
the grammar of the inhuman articulated through thirteenth-
to nineteenth-century genealogies of race, planting roots through maroonage and cultivation
established kinship with the earth, made in the context of natal alienation. In the path of the totality of
alienation, the achievement in Haiti was to put down roots in a “stranger” soil, which “made the soil their own” in ways that were
not predicated on the notion of territory under colonialism.25 As Price-Mars said, the planet rather than humanism became the
sphere of recognition for the Haiti Revolution;26 “our presence on a spot of that American archipelago which we ‘humanized,’ the
breach which we made in the process of historical events to snatch our place among men,” was worthy of study, a particular
achievement that could be placed “within the common life of man on the planet.”27 Such a rupture in the fabric of colonialism’s
codification of personhood and space was an extraordinary reclamation of both freedom and its geographical expression. Wynter
argues that since “needs produce powers just as powers produce needs,” the response to the dehumanizing alienation was “ to
create the new vocabulary of the new existence .”28 Wynter argues that alienation is an inherently
dynamic concept that implies change, “a consciousness of being alienated.” For Price-Mars, the study of
the folklore of Haiti was a study of transplantation, where indigeneity becomes fused with the site of the struggle, essentially a
geographical, soil-based process of rerooting and of learning new forms of planting oneself in the earth. “Haiti where negritude rose
to its feet for the first time and said it believed in its own humanity.”29 Wynter
calls this process “cultural
metamorphosis,” but it is also a geological metamorphosis tethered to the place, site, and soil of struggle.30While slave
owners tried to void their subjects as inhuman objects, Wynter argues that black culture was creative
because it had to overcome its property status to find other means of revaluation .31 As slaves were
traded as both property and standard equivalence (for a certain amount of gold ounces), as “Native trade goods—gold, slaves,
pepper, ivory, native cloths, hides, cattle and millet—were used as standards. Some European stables such as iron bars, coppers and
cloth were used,” the
slave became interned in “metamorphosis from human entity to a market
one.”32 Revaluation, then, required a destabilization of the relations of production in the realm of
aesthetics and sense:in other words, the oath-taking ceremonies and subsequent revolts were at one
and the same time a form of praxis and an abstract theoretical activity . Neither could be
separated from the other. The theory only existed in praxis; praxis was inseparable from theory.33The
embodied experience of power located in the earth was the basis of knowledge and the affirmation of
a more exorbitant world or planetarity. The articulation of resistance is not a romantic appeal but a
structural reorientation to the rifts of colonialism and its geosocial formations , made through
the interarticulation of the inhuman in the breaks of propertied forms .34 This revaluation or
reconstruction of value deuniversalizes the effect of the language of the inhuman. In the savage New World, the exchange was of
terror, slavery, and subjugation, of barbarous executions, disfigurement, and sadistic pleasures. That
is, there was no exchange;
there was replantation and resistance in the praxis of the human through a relation with the
earth.

Just flow this with a fire emoji

Yusoff 18. Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queer Mary University of
London. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018. P. 29-33)
ipartman

Wynter suggests that we

should in fact consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African
slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira , initiating the
“sugar–slave” complex—a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people (existing ecologies were not immune to
the ravages of the new invaders, from plants and domestic animals to microbiomes and new geomorphic regimes). Wynter
argues that the importance of the New World is in its dual processes of the “reduction of Man to
Labour and of Nature to Land under the impulsion of the market economy .” Wynter forcefully
demonstrates how “Man” appears as the ontological signification of Whiteness and how this rational
man is established as the biologically selected being , established first through Cartesian man and
then through biologism as an advanced evolutionary subject within concepts of geologic time .
Weheliye calls this “dis-dentification, wherein whiteness connotes the full humanity only gleaned in
relation to the lack of humanity in blackness. ”12 The effect of this doubling of Man/Whiteness in the natal moment
of “his” heuristic formation disabuses the idea of humanity as an ontological category that has a nonracialized primacy. Weheliye
argues, “In black culture this category becomes a designation that shows its finitudes and exclusions very
clearly, thereby denaturalizing the ‘human’ as a universal formation while at the same time laying claim
to it.”13 In reclaiming humanity as a heuristic operation rather than an ontological formation, Wynter plots the historic
formation of Man as a racialized subject that is exclusionary at the point of origin , and precisely
because of the history of those murderous origins . Wynter adds to her revolutionary formation of Man (and his
overrepresentation) in “Black Metamorphosis,” where she considers the relations between land and territory in the organization of
Colonial Man’s “humanity” and the geographies of erasure that underpin it in this conquest of space.14Wynter argues that the
invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese travel to the Americas instigates at the same time
“a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race.15 This refiguring of slaves trafficked to gold mines is borne
into the language of the inhuman, whereupon Blackness becomes characterized through its
ledger of matter, which in turn populates the idea of race. Extending Wynter’s argument, 1492 marks also the
structural inclusion of Man’s Others into the geological lexicon of the inhuman (as matter and energy) and the exclusion from its
material wealth, whereby humanness becomes differentiated by the inhuman objectification of
indigenous and black subjects. While Wynter argues that this devaluation of Blackness served the
specific material purpose of labor and the colonization of Indian land , there is also a prior step in
the identification of inhuman objects that generated the context of “needs” for such labor and dispossession. Voiding subjects
was also about voiding a relation to earth that was embodied , organized, and intensified by those relations to
place; taking place is also taking ways in which people realize themselves through the specific geologies of a land. Colonialism
enacted multiple forms of geologic disruption as well as the more obvious forms of extractive
dispossessions.Wynter contends that the revaluation of black life and the resistance to
dehumanization could only be made through the “creation of a counter-culture through the
transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its reinvention in new and alien
conditions. It was in this transplantation, this metamorphosis of an old culture into a new, that the blacks made themselves
indigenous to their new land.”16 This also involved the transplantation of a traditional relationship to nature, a relationship under
the inspiration of which the slave, now in exile, both adapted himself to Nature and transformed it. In this type of relationship
the land (i.e. part of Nature) could not be regarded as a mere commodity in the land-labor-capital-relationship. New world land, like
the land in Africa was still seen as the Earth—the communal means of production. This attitude, transferred and perpetuated, was
the central grid for many old beliefs which could be retranslated into a new reality.17Descriptions
of the lives of slaves
in Jamaica in the seventeenth century by English clergyman the Rev. John Taylor stress the “great veneration”
which the slaves had for “the Earth.” It may be precisely because land and labor were regarded as private property
that the earth became a source of possibility to release the literal stranglehold of that incarceration in a propertied relation. In the
struggle against forms of propertied relation with the inhuman, different intimacies developed with the earth. Wynter discusses the
importance of the plot accorded to slaves to grow their own food in slave replantation. She says, The
plot was the slave’s
area of escape from the plantation, it was an area of experience which reinvented and
therefore perpetuated an alternative world view, alternative consciousness to that of the
plantation This world view was marginalized by the plantation but never destroyed. In relation to the plot, the slave lived in a
society partly created as an adjunct to the market, partly as an end in itself.18While growing food was a basic requirement for the
reproduction of labor power for the plantation, it also became part of the reproduction of cultural powers in a new land, to establish
a less alienated relation to the earth: “Let me be contained between latitude and longitude.”19The relation of slave to
provision ground was a relation to a contingent earth, a material relation forged in resistance
to the dehumanizing of colonialism that opened a carceral geography. The earth in its symbolic
and nonabstracted forms (as a knowledge about survival in maroonage, the quotidian practices of harvesting useful plants
and animals, and navigation) was a crucial aspect of slave revolts . Wynter argues, “Black slavery in the
Caribbean was synonymous with black revolt against slavery. And these revolts would be
crucial to the indigenization process.”20 Maroonage becomes the practice of cultural resistance
to slavery. Wild mountain and interior living was also a successful part, Wynter argues, of replantation to the new land and the
confrontation with its unfamiliar geographical conditions. She discusses at length the oaths to earth that were sworn
before rebellions and how these were oaths to ancestors replanted in a new land —and that such
oaths could not be broken despite the horrendous torture of those captured , in a context where
“property that had rebelled, thereby affirming its status as human, must be burnt (i.e. tortured) as a ‘terror’ to
other ‘property’ who might want to assert their human status .”21 Kissing the earth before
rebellions was an oath-act that maintained a social contract with the earth often to the point
of death.22 Wynter argues that this “indigenization”23 was a way of thinking and apprehending the
material reality of slavery through a dynamic replanting of roots (or “transplanting” as Wynter calls it) in an
alien context: “this is the process of black cultural resistance and response to the Middle Passage and to what lay on the farther side
—the alienated reality of a New World, new not only in its geography, but also in its radically different experience.”24 Disrupting
the grammar of the inhuman articulated through thirteenth-to nineteenth-century genealogies
of race, planting roots through maroonage and cultivation established kinship with the earth,
made in the context of natal alienation. In the path of the totality of alienation, the achievement in Haiti was to put
down roots in a “stranger” soil, which “made the soil their own” in ways that were not predicated on the notion of territory under
colonialism.25 As Price-Mars said, the planet rather than humanism became the sphere of recognition for the Haiti
Revolution;26 “our presence on a spot of that American archipelago which we ‘humanized,’ the breach which we made in the
process of historical events to snatch our place among men,” was worthy of study, a particular achievement that could be placed
“within the common life of man on the planet.”27 Such a rupture in the fabric of colonialism’s codification of personhood and space
was an extraordinary reclamation of both freedom and its geographical expression. Wynter argues that since “needs produce
powers just as powers produce needs,” the response to the dehumanizing alienation was “ to create
the new vocabulary
of the new existence.”28 Wynter argues that alienation is an inherently dynamic concept that implies
change, “a consciousness of being alienated.” For Price-Mars, the study of the folklore of Haiti was a study of
transplantation, where indigeneity becomes fused with the site of the struggle, essentially a geographical, soil-based process of
rerooting and of learning new forms of planting oneself in the earth. “Haiti where negritude rose to its feet for the first time and said
it believed in its own humanity.”29 Wynter calls this process “cultural metamorphosis ,” but it is also a geological
metamorphosis tethered to the place, site, and soil of struggle.30While slave owners tried to void their subjects as
inhuman objects, Wynter argues that black culture was creative because it had to overcome its
property status to find other means of revaluation .31 As slaves were traded as both property and standard
equivalence (for a certain amount of gold ounces), as “Native trade goods—gold, slaves, pepper, ivory, native cloths, hides, cattle
and millet—were used as standards. Some European stables such as iron bars, coppers and cloth were used,” the
slave
became interned in “metamorphosis from human entity to a market one.” 32 Revaluation, then,
required a destabilization of the relations of production in the realm of aesthetic s and sense:in other
words, the oath-taking ceremonies and subsequent revolts were at one and the same time a form
of praxis and an abstract theoretical activity . Neither could be separated from the other. The
theory only existed in praxis; praxis was inseparable from theory.33The embodied experience of power
located in the earth was the basis of knowledge and the affirmation of a more exorbitant world or
planetarity. The articulation of resistance is not a romantic appeal but a structural reorientation to
the rifts of colonialism and its geosocial formations , made through the interarticulation of the
inhuman in the breaks of propertied forms.34 This revaluation or reconstruction of value deuniversalizes the effect
of the language of the inhuman. In the savage New World, the exchange was of terror, slavery, and subjugation, of barbarous
executions, disfigurement, and sadistic pleasures. That
is, there was no exchange; there was replantation and
resistance in the praxis of the human through a relation with the earth.
 Offense
Ressentiment DA – the reactive definition of blackness to a merely opposable
term destroys the possibility of freedom and the active creation of value. They
collapse the signifier of the slave onto the black body and therefore destroy
black value to life.
Marriot ‘7. David, associate professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California, Santa Cruz, Haunted Life: Visual culture and Black modernity, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, Pg. 233-237
Fanon borrows this formulation from Nietzsche, in particular The Genealogy of Morals and The Will to Power. Nietzsche defines
"ressentiment" as developing in those "natures who are denied true reactions, those of deeds."!' Ressentiment psychology
– and this point is crucial both for Nietzsche and for Fanon's appropriation – is distinguished by a
consciousness of loss, by a failure to integrate experiences of powerlessness, leaving this
experience to remain in the memory as a traumatic kernel, leading to an obsession with past
racial injuries that poison the ability of the self to function in the present or project an active
future. In The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche defines "Slave ethics are what] begins by saying no 110 to an
"outsider," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its creative act . This reversal of direction of the evaluating
look, this invariable looking outward instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics requires for its
inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. Physiologically speaking, it requires an outside
stimulus in order to act at all; all action is reaction " (Nietzsche, The Birth, 170-171). The slave blames the
other, or outsider, for his suffering, makes him or her the symbol of evil and a phobic object . This
response remains reactive. The slave does not act on the basis of his or her sovereignty, but in
opposition to the other's domination. Nietzsche argues that ressentiment indicates a failure, not so much
to accept responsibility for one's existence (Sartrean "bad faith"), but a failure to affirm life as a spirit of becoming .
Fanon terms it a slavish, reactive attitude toward the future and the past. In this "pessimism of
indignation" one assumes that one can do nothing because one is wretched, and one blames
someone else for one's wretchedness. This is why, in Wretched of tlte Earth, Fanon argues that the first
stages of spontaneous anticolonial violence are always reactive: "racism, hatred, resentment,"
"the legitimate desire for vengeance," cannot sustain a war of liberation. 14 Such reactive moments are
linked to questions of time but in a negative sense, as examples of a reactive affirmation of history. It is precisely because he
recognizes racist historicity in these attitudes that Fanon's work is taken up with the problem of time and death. If
the limit set
to black life is the significance conferred on presence by racism which voids all black life of value
as life, with the result that one cannot live it, racism also robs the black of his or her ability to
live and so to die as a free subject. Spurned by history, the attempts by blacks to reimmerse
themselves in time have resulted in a turn toward allegory and myth. These attempts are condemned
because they restrict the life as lived to one held in abeyance, in suspension, a life ossified either by
its slavish reverence for the precolonial past or by its abject sacrificing of itself to the future to
come, the freedom always to come in eternity. Both attitudes are positings of finite being that refuse to
tarry with death as the true scandal of black historical experience and so become even less
capable of resolving it. This is not to say that Fanon has lost faith in a redemptive future, or that he wants to routinize and
categorize such temporal ecstasies by representing death as life's categorical commandment. Rather that, as in the letter to Tayeb,
what matters is the life earned when it plunges into the inexplicable and emerges from it; what
matters is how we, like Orpheus, take up the cunning and creativity of ressentiment as a culture on the
edge of nothingness. Only by negotiating power and violence can we engage and reconfigure
virtue for the modem polity (the "new humanism" that emerges from the "tabula rasa" opened up by the colonized
on the path toward revolution-a possibility which is neither an end nor a beginning but an endless
"tension of opening" between the twO).IS That is, death as lawless violence is the predicament and
possibility of who we are and might become, here, now, the tenses through which we belong irreducibly to this
time. This is also why Fanon rejects Sartrean, Hegelian, and other forms of determinate historicism, the logic according to which
everything that happens had to happen. Against dialectical logic – and its view that out of experience, no matter how negative.
something emerges – Fanon posits a black existential time in which what happened happens and keeps on happening in ways that
remain unforeseeable and unknowable but which nonetheless forces us to be responsible at the level of ethics, politics, and will.
Throughout Fanon's oeuvre. antihistoricism turns on the difficulty of naming and situating a black
orphism beyond identity and alterity, beyond loss and the annihilation of being. True
anticolonial violence, if it is to go beyond such Manichacism, must arrive at a teleological
suspension of the ethical and so go beyond the spurious opposition between murder and illegitimate right, or murder
dressed up as political vengeance. Manichean violence is ressentiment, for liberation is not a higher
ethical law than murder and can only be justified in the pursuit of freedom, which is
incommensurable with domination but nevertheless implicated in its violence. Hence Fanon is not
trying to ethically justify the violence of anticolonial war (as he is often accused of doing). but trying to account for the use of
violence in the revolutionary pursuit of freedom." Liberatory violence. in brief. as one possible memory of the future; as one possible
pathway through the unjust violences of the political world. Both the conclusions to Black Skill, While Masks and Wretched of t/-ie
Earlh define that memory as thc horizon of revolutionary hope and politics. as a rupture of time without end but within time's
workings. POl' this reason, I cannot accept Patrick Taylor's dircrnpuvc opposition between Black Skill, While Masks as a work that
ends with ethics over history. and Wretched of the Earth as a work that moves from ethics to revolutionary history (Taylor.
Narratives, 74-76). Such opposition misreads the conclusion to Black Skill, White Mllsks. where Fanon
writes, "I am not the
slave of the Slavery that dehumanized my ancestors " (230). Antillean culture is a slave culture for
Fanon, following Nietzsche, because its ressentiment represents a cultural-historico paralysis
which has not yet become creative and so achieve that active forgetfulness of the past that
accompanies successful repression and defines a noble memory of the will. This peculiar anamnesis,
which is the result of historically distinct configurations of power, dominarion. and race war, reveals how, for Fanon, the traumas of
cultural assimilation for the colonial subject is already marked by historical forces and decisive events whose trauma cannot simply
be dispelled by the time of analysis or the methods of genealogy. 17 Slave
ethics, insofar as it is reactive and denies
responsibility and its ability to act, cannot achieve this cultural-historico transmutation. Through
decolonization and violence the colonized can break through the impasse of ressentiment and
enter into history. The task for the colonized, Fanon implies, is to risk the orphic "leap" into the
"black hole" while also moving Out to the universal (199). One must move beyond the "absurd drama" of
colonialism dialectically. One must move to ethics from history because ethics is the affirmation of the
radical transformation of time, a decision to change both the meaning of the deathliness of
black life and its sign of ressentiment. In the essay "West Indians and Africans," Fanon writes, 'The task consists of
removing the problem, puuing the contingent in its place, and leaving the Martinican the choice of supreme values. One sees
everything that could be said by envisaging this situation in accordance with the Kierkegaardian stages. "18 These stages arc the
a move from ethics
aesthetic, the ethical and the religious, Fanon's turn to Kierkegaard is not, as Patrick Taylor presents it,
to history or, more accurately, inner morality to objective or ethical freedom . but a recognition of how
violence and law pervade each other, and of how ethics is an encounter with the violence of power and its
legitimation. The task is to move, not from values based on race to human values understood
as transcending the old humanisms of Europe, which formed the foundations of colonial
racism, but to address the phantasmatic and racist underpinnings of value as such. Fanon explicitly
mentions Kierkegaard when discussing how law and violence remain implicated in the movement from ethics to freedom in history.
The slave's struggle for freedom cannot only be defined in ethical terms. On the other hand, it is naive to assume that the decolonial
world will exist beyond law and coercion. In Black Skin, W!tiLe Masks Fanon writes, "The former slave, who can find in his memory
no trace of the struggle for liberty or of that anguish of liberty of which Kierkegaard speaks, sits unmoved before the young white
man singing and dancing on the tightrope of existence" (22t). Because the slave has no memory of that "anguish of liberty," the
ethical and the historical condition of freedom remains unavowable. The slave remains a dumb wimess to his own violated
singularity which he can neither comprehend, renounce nor test. Fanon says that "the
real leap consists in introducing
invention into existence" (229). One shows how the ethical is mediated by the promise and
actuality of such "invention" by becoming actively creative at the level of history . Acceptance of
this coexistence does not "eliminate ... the ethical in oneself," but forces one to return to the
ethical as the always potential encounter with the violence of the world as a test of one's faith
(Taylor, Narmtives, 76).
Malpractice Module
 AFF V1
Nonetheless, the problem that the military industrial complex now faces is the
problem with modern society: what does one do when confronted with an
excess of fire? The classification of weapons via. Direct Commercial and Foreign
Military Sales ensures that arms transfers remain within a restricted economy
of exchange – one that fears the prospect of scarcity and thus strives to achieve
a stockpile of arms by moderating our output. This presence of excess
thermopolitical power creates the conditions for militarism.
Pawlett 15. William, senior lecturer in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of
Wolverhampton. “Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society.” (September 9, 2015) ipartman

Life is excessive, explosive. It exceeds limits and boundaries: plants must be cut back, animals tamed, energy
harnessed, but still excess breaks through and life over-shoots the goals or ends imposed on it. For Bataille, solar radiation – the
immense prodigality of the sun – is the ultimate source of an inexhaustible excess. The accursed share is the portion of
energy that cannot be managed, directed or exhausted. The fundamental, general economic question is not
how do we conserve energy, but how is energy to be consumed? How do we prevent its dangerous overaccumulation, the curse of
excess energy? General
economy as theoretical and methodological position seeks to confront the accursed
share, the unutilisable excesses that threaten all systems. General economy takes up a perspective from
beyond or outside the separate disciplines of academic study, a position that has engaged with and gone beyond them. Yet, though
disciplinary limits are trans- gressed by Bataille, they are never annihilated, ignored or eliminated. Indeed, limits enable the general
economy of ‘freedom of thought’, thought which will push further and further in a fearless manner, and which is able to go so far
precisely because it draws upon all available disciplinary knowledge without being confined by it. Bataille immediately notes the
apparent contradiction in the approach he adopts in this study. The Accursed Share is a methodical, even ‘cold’, analysis of society
and politics; his study accumulates historical facts and produces useful knowledge, yet Bataille’s thesis is that production and utility
corrode existence, that accumulation is illusory or ‘only a delay’ before the inevitable moment of squandering. Hence The Accursed
Share is a book ‘the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 11). Yet, perhaps
most ambitiously of all, Bataille concludes his preface by insisting that the unfettered freedom of thought offered by general
economy can generate ‘political proposals’, even a ‘solution’ (Baitalle 1991, p. 431, n. 2) to avert the catastrophe of a World War III
and of nuclear holocaust. The academic discipline of economics is deeply inadequate to the task of averting
catastrophe because in it economy is ‘studied as if it were a matter of an isolatable system of
operations’ (Bataille, 1988a, 19). General economy insists upon interrelations and interdependence which extend from the
microscopic to the cosmological levels. Economics, as restricted economy, studies the exploitation of resources, but it does
not enquire into the nature of these resources in any detail: ‘Shouldn’t productive activity as a whole be
considered in terms of the modifica- tions it receives from its surroundings . . . isn’t there a need to study the system of human
production and consumption within a much larger framework?’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 20) For Bataille, material resources – wood, coal,
atoms, machinery, and human beings too – are caught up in the general economy of excess, expenditure and death. Matter is
not simply energetic; it is ‘cursed’ by an explosive excess. It is not simply that all things, objects and materials
possess an excess or accursed share. Rather, excess cannot be contained by the definition and circumscription of life into objects,
things and materials – these are artificial and ide- alised constructs. The energy of the accursed share precedes the level of things
since the constitution of ‘things’ already presupposes the control, channelling, utilization of energy, and the expulsion of
unmanageable excess. Hence from a general economic perspective, there is no growth, only squandering – as Bataille asserts in the
opening epigraph to this chapter. Production,
development and accumulation are merely ‘ideal’ ends
imposed by restrictive economics upon general economy . If we restrict our perspective of living beings to
separate, particular beings – an individual, a tree, a village – these entities can be understood in terms of necessity and scarcity. Yet
the notions of necessity and scarcity are a function of the restricted perspective which denies the
dynamism and volatility of matter, its boiling up both within and between beings, in their relations of attraction and
repulsion. In the human realm, dynamic relations between beings are generated by non-productive
expenditure, through giving, reciprocating or through violence. Further, human beings are ‘privileged’ in
their ability to experience glorious or sacrificial expenditure, to partake of the movement of excess in festivity, in sacrificial religion
and in eroticism. Human beings then have the ability to choose the modes or forms of sacrificial expenditure ‘that might suit us. . . .
For if we do not have the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used, and, like an unbroken animal that cannot
be trained, it is this energy that destroys us; it is we who pay the price for the inevitable explosion’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 24). So there
is a fundamental ‘political’ question to be consid-ered: how should we expend the excess energies accumulated by modern
societies? What should become of the wealth, power, riches, technolo-gies they develop? No society, ancient or modern, has
found an adequate means to expend without diverting excess energy and wealth into war.
Today, as Bataille notes, war – that is the external channelling of violence against designated others – has grown in scale
and its destructive capacity threatens to extinguish all human life. For Bataille, then, it is vital to
revolutionise economic, political and ethical thought simultane- ously. War can no longer provide a way for
societies to expend excess wealth and energy. Where can excesses be channelled? The answer for Bataille is that
growth should be immediately ‘subordinated to giving’; commodities should be surrendered without return (Bataille, 1988a, p. 25).
Bataille clearly understood excess American wealth, technology and superpower as a major threat to the
human race and the biosphere, and he gave qualified support to the Marshall Plan , an aid package
designed to assist European economies after World War II. This political, or even ‘ethical’, dimension to Bataille’s notion of the
accursed share has, surprisingly, not been examined in detail by com- mentaries on Bataille’s work. Many gloss over it (Land, 1992),
or assume it is unworkable or contradictory (Bennington in Bailey-Gill, 1995; Noys, 2000; Gasché, 2012). An exception is Stoekl
(1990; 2007) whose application of general economy to contemporary society and ecology is discussed in the concluding chapter.
VOLUME ONE: CONSUMPTION Volume one elaborates Bataille’s laws of general economy, which he understood as linking all of his
major themes, assertions and obsessions. As I noted earlier, the assertion that there are ‘laws’ of general economy has been seen as
a major weakness in Bataille’s thought, yet there is lit- tle doubt that Bataille considered the notion of the accursed share to be
capable of scientific validation, or at least that the exact sciences encoun- tered its effects in a palpable way. In his introduction to
this work, he states: The living organism . . . ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g. an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically. (Bataille, 1988a, p. 21) All life exists in excess; it generally has at its command more energy, more ‘life force’, than is
needed for simple subsistence or survival. The accumulation of energy by an organism (biological or social, natural or cultural)
cannot continue indefinitely; there must come a point or limit where energy is expended or consumed. The accursed share (la part
mau- dite) of energy is the excess that cannot be expended usefully, the portion that overflows what is required for survival,
maintenance or growth. The accursed share, Bataille insists, can only be squandered or con- sumed unprofitably. For example, in
human societies vast amounts of wealth and energy are squandered in festivity, in sacrifices, in play, in art, in eroticism and in
drunkenness. Further, at the moment of death the energy that comprised and maintained life is, itself, squandered, lost without
profit. Death, or mortality, then can be regarded as ‘evidence’ of the operation of the accursed share in the general economy of life
and death. In contrast, what Bataille terms restricted economy confines itself to narrowly circumscribed areas or objects, and seeks
to exert control, to exploit, to profit from these objects. Academic disciplines including sociology, biology and economics can be seen
as restricted economies in that they seek to ‘profit’ by accumulating information and knowl- edge. Restricted economies
typically refuse to acknowledge their limits, their losses and their useless expenditures of energy. Further, restricted
economies achieve some semblance of order and control by expelling unmanageable objects,
zones and experiences – foreign bodies – or by assimilating them through a rubric which is quite
alien to them. For example, sociology has largely expelled sacrifice and the violence of the sacred (once major topics of
concern, see Mauss & Hubert, 1964; Nisbet, 1966) or has assimilated them under the notion of ‘culture’. Culture is an inappropriate
term because it is utilised to contain explosive, conta- gious human practices within what is now a label for ‘safe’, inventoried, even
ossified values – such as might be found in a school textbook or a Wikipedia entry. Bataille’s own examples of such exclusions
include the dangerous notion of infinity banished from philosophy and the expulsion of zero from mathematics. It could be argued
that ‘Bataille’ is a hetero- logical object, tending to be expelled from disciplines such as sociology, philosophy, economics and
cultural studies or, at best, partially assimilated through inappropriate and simplistic umbrella concepts or labels such as dissident
surrealist, philosopher of eroticism or pornographic novelist. It has been argued by some of Bataille’s critics that activities involv- ing
the squander of energies are actually socially ‘useful’. This is because such activities provide rest, enjoyment or recreation, so
enabling people to return to work rejuvenated. Even death can be seen as a making way for younger and more vital beings to renew
the species. This is indeed the case, but it misses the point. First, even from the perspective of restricted economies (such as
sociology, economics, religious studies) it must be admitted that social festivities and expenditures include actions and experiences
which surpass or exceed social usefulness. For example, the destruction of resources, the flaring of violence and the consumption of
large and disabling quantities of alcohol do not necessarily ‘rejuvenate’: they may prevent a return to work, or may even cause
fatalities. Nor can such excesses be dismissed as peripheral or accidental; indeed, such excessiveness is very widely understood as
intrinsic or even obligatory to festivity: if people behaved sensibly and responsibly it simply would not be a festival. Second, if we
shift the perspective in the direction of general economy, it appears that work, production and utility are endured only because they
provide the resources destined for expenditure, squan- der or sacrifice. We would not work if work did not enable us to expend, to
squander what we accumulate. Labour, production and growth cannot be unlimited; there must be limits or boundaries which
provide for the experience of release. It is important to note that Bataille does not simply champion excess over utility, or sacrifice
above production, that is, he does not simply invert the values of rationalist, utilitarian thought. For Bataille, the sys- tem of
production could not function without its periodic suspension, nor could wealth be expended sacrificially if it were not first
accumulated. Further, the
demarcation between the two spheres – sacred and profane, sacrificial and
economic, heterogeneous and homogeneous – is vital for society because the marking of limits
enables transgressive experience (such as festivity) to take place, as well as drawing the
boundaries that construct and protect order. Without such limits there is neither order nor disorder. Restricted
economies and the knowledge they generate are absolutely vital and indispensable for society and for thought. Yet, restricted
economies cannot function without erecting limits and boundaries, and there will always be excesses and indeterminacies
permeating these boundar- ies in any particular system. Indeed, the erection of a boundary or limit itself generates an ‘excess’
beyond that limit. Restricted economies ‘work’ only by drawing , selectively and discretely upon their
‘outside’ – the realm of general economy – and by simultaneously denying that they border an irreducible ‘outside’. The
restricted economies of academic disciplines are generally happy to admit that they have limits, of a fuzzy sort, but assume that
beyond ‘their’ limit another academic discipline picks up the baton. For example, sociology may defer to psychology and to biology
where the functioning of the individual psyche or of the body are concerned. In concert, academic disciplines purport to offer a
seam- less and limitless coverage of human experience. Bataille’s contention is that there are inherent and irreducible excesses,
excesses which must be expelled as a precondition for the scientific enterprise to begin. Science is, for Bataille, restricted by its
underlying foundation in utility – ultimately in the profane realm – so that all sciences must accumulate knowledge that is of use to
society. The accursed share, that which cannot be reduced to the utilitarian project of scientific thought, is manifest in paradox,
anomaly and in the failure to erect meaningful rather than simply useful foundations for knowledge. Further, for Bataille, the
subjective or inner experiences of the thinker – his or her experiences of wonder, inspiration, mystery, despair and ecstasy – are
experiences that can never be formalised as scientific knowledge, yet they are the source from which all scientific knowledge is
generated: the pre- or non-foundations of the scientific enterprise. At the level of thought or enquiry, general economic thinking
affirms and confronts the accursed share, where restricted economies deny it or avoid confronting its manifestations. The
implications of the accursed share become increasingly complex and problematic when we consider human groups and societies. In
support of his law of general economy, Bataille outlines a social anthropology of archaic societies which, he argues, made the
expenditure of excess energy and wealth their fundamental dynamic through festivals, feasts and sac-rificial rites (Bataille, 1988a,
pp. 45–77). Bataille’s argument is that by expending excess in collective, ritual practices which suspend everyday, productive
existence, excess energy can bind beings and communities: the accursed share is devoted to glory and sumptuary activities and so
social life is enriched. In contrast, modern societies have, by and large, lost the capacity for glorious, communal expenditures
because wealth is expropriated and ‘owned’ by elites for their individual and private pleasure. Bataille, drawing on Mauss (1990,
originally published 1924–1925), examines the potlatch ceremonies of the American northwest indigenous peoples, such as the
Tlingit and Kwakiutl, through the notion of general economy. These cultures were, traditionally, very rich,
generating large surpluses from hunting, fishing and producing ornate copper workings, such as
plates used in ritual exchange. The tribes possess what Mauss (1990) terms ‘a dual structure’, meaning that they disperse
to hunt and gather food during the warmer months, accumulating the wealth that is ‘lavishly expended’ during the collective
festivities of the winter. Mauss, famously, depicts some potlatch ceremonies as ‘radical’ and violent: Consumption and
destruction of goods really go beyond all bounds. In certain kinds of potlatch one must expend all that one has,
keep- ing nothing back. It is a competition to see who is the richest and also the mostly madly extravagant. Everything is based upon
the principles of antagonism and rivalry . . . [i]n a certain number of cases, it
is not even a question of giving and
returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gifts to be
reciprocated. (Mauss, 1990, p. 37) Within some potlatches at least, there is a violent struggle for hon-our. Giving potlatches is
the only way a chief can preserve his honour or rank within the tribe, and this must be periodically reaffirmed or it is lost forever,
Mauss suggests. Bataille also emphasises the excessive- ness of the squandering of resources, seeing the potlatch as a sacrifice of
wealth. The objects given, circulated or squandered in the potlatch are not mere ‘commodities’, not isolated or separated ‘things’.
The objects circulated in potlatch – gifts, jewels, dances, ornaments – are part of the sacred world. A portion of them is considered a
gift to the ances- tors; another portion grows and develops through the acts of giving and receiving, new tales or myths are added to
it so that the value increases inestimably. As both Mauss and Bataille emphasise, something of this sense of the ‘spirit’ or life of the
gift is retained in modern gift-giving ceremonies such as birthdays and Christmas. This suggests that liberal capitalist notions of
abstract or profane monetary exchange derive from a much richer ‘total’ or general economic system of exchanges. The notion of
barter, of exchanges in terms of approximate use or exchange value, is revealed as nothing more than capitalism’s self-generated
myth of origin: the notion of barter as organising economic principle cannot be found in any traditional society. A second important
point emerges from Bataille’s discussion of potlatch. Those who are able to humiliate or ‘crush’ others by offering gifts so great that
they cannot be reciprocated are conferred rank or prestige. However, this
notion of rank does not correspond to
modern notions of power; rank is sacred rather than profane, as the etymology of the word
hierarchy makes clear. Rank demands heedless, selfless courage and exu- berance; it demands an ‘explosion’ of force, or it
will diminish. The chief must protect his people without the slightest regard for his own safety or survival – and this, Bataille
suggests, sheds light on the fact that vio- lence, particularly skill in combat, is so widely regarded as honourable. This leads us to a
third point on which Bataille has been misunder- stood. It is wrong to accuse Bataille of a ‘romantic’ or sentimental view of the
‘noble savage’. Not only does Bataille emphasise the violence of life in traditional societies, but he is also clear that the sacred is
always compromised and exploited by the powerful. We must not be tempted to return to the past, he argues. Instead, the future
promises a full and universal prodigality and luxury beyond the confines enforced by priest- hoods, monarchies and armies. Indeed:
The true luxury and real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty- stricken . . . the individual who refuses work and makes his life on
the one hand an infinitely ruined splendour, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond
a military
exploitation, a religious mystification and a capitalist misappropriation, henceforth no one can
rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness it heralds, unless it is in the splendour of
rags and the sombre challenge of indifference. (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77) The meaning of wealth and exchange in
capitalist societies is deter- mined by the lies of the rich and powerful, yet their containment and expropriation ‘destines life’s
exuberance to revolt’ (Bataille, 1988a, pp. 76–77). In capitalist modernity, the ‘law’ of general economy is also the principle of
revolutionary overthrow. Bataille examines ancient Aztec society, understanding their culture as devoted to expenditure. Aztec
society, for Bataille, was in fundamen- tal contradiction to Western notions of production, accumulation and profit. The Aztecs
constructed pyramids on the summit of which Aztec priests sacrificed prisoners of war, tearing out their hearts, presenting the still
beating organ to the sun and then decapitating victims whose heads would roll down the sides of the pyramid. Bataille is quite
emphatic: ‘From the standpoint of profit the pyramid is a monumental mistake’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 119). Its construction is
immensely costly in terms of time and materials, and it serves no use from the perspective of restricted economy: the labour that
could have been extracted from the prisoners of war is squandered in a moment of horror and excess. It is sometimes suggested
that the Aztecs suffered food shortages and resorted to human sacrifice and cannibalism to ‘solve’ this shortage, but, though
portions of the bodies of victims were eaten by priests and elite warriors, this was in no way an ‘economical’ way of feeding the
people. Bataille expands on the many expenditures of wealth required for Aztec sacrificial ritual: a carefully chosen victim was
accorded a divine status, given great wealth and property, and then, months later, sacrificed to the sun (pp. 45–61). Such victims,
according to Bataille, actually embodied or temporarily became the accursed share. Their sacrificial religion enabled Aztec society to
ritually expend the wealth generated by their productive activities and military campaigns, and so achieve a degree of internal social
equilibrium. However, equi- librium, for any system or form of life, is only a temporary state. The accursed share cannot be negated,
transcended or resolved: sacrifices must continue. In Aztec society there were up to 20,000 victims per year (Bataille, 1988a, p. 51;
see also Vaillant, 1950). Given this fact, what pos- sible social or political lesson does Bataille draw from the Aztec example? For
Bataille, ‘pure, uncalculated violence’ is morally preferable to ‘The reasoned organisation of war
and conquest’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 54). Violence is, for Bataille, an inevitable and ineradicable dimension
of human existence: the only alternatives are between the forms of the manifestation of violence. On one hand, the sacred
and its unleashing, for Bataille, is the realm of pure and uncalculated violence. Religion, on the other hand, is a ‘subterfuge’,
a staging or dramatisation of extreme violence within social boundaries , in contrast to war which is a
destructive realisation of extreme violence beyond territorial boundaries. Where a society stages sacrificial ritual ,
violence remains within the group’s social boundaries . For Bataille, sacred or sacrificial violence
sunders the degrading order of work and duration; it establishes communication between
chosen members of the community and their divinities and ‘save[s] the rest from the mortal
danger of contagion . . . the community is saved from ruination’ (p. 59). The scope of violence then is limited by giving it a
localised space for its terrifying and spectacular dramatisation. Further, Bataille insists, the sacrificial victim should be
none other than the sovereign, the ruler upon whom is conferred a divine status and immense fortune precisely because
they accept, unreservedly, a sacrificial destiny. Though informed by prestigious ethnographic and folkloric studies, a significant
problem in Bataille’s argument is that such forms of sacrificial kingship seem to have been ‘compromised’ by substitute (or sym-
bolic) sacrificial victims even in archaic social formations. That is to say, the sovereign would be replaced by a substitute sacrificial
victim, and so the sovereign would be sacrificed ‘symbolically’, rather than actually being killed. Further, it might seem that this
internal consumption of violence is meaningful only within relatively small, tribal societies. From this point of view, while Bataille’s
contentions are legitimate as an extrapolation of the meaning of sacrifice from the work of Durkheim (1995, originally pub- lished in
1912), Mauss and Hubert (1964, originally published in 1898) and Georges Dumézil (1988, originally published in 1948), they have
also been criticised as bordering on romanticism (Habermas, 1987; Nehamas, 1989). Yet Bataille’s argument is more sophisticated
and nuanced that his critics allow. If sacrifice is primarily an internal form of violence (inter- nal to a clan,
community or society) then war and conquest involve the directing of a portion of this violence onto
external enemies. This exter- nal channelling is, for Bataille, morally repugnant because it involves a deferral, accumulation
and rationalisation of the unleashing of violence. Violence breaks free from its ritual limits and accelerates beyond con- tainment,
becoming far more destructive. While violence still breaks the profane routines of society, it does so for
the allegedly ‘rational’ purpose of accumulating wealth or territory – that is for growth. Clearly,
externalised and rationalised violence involves far larger numbers of victims than does sacrifice .
Standing armies are developed. Warfare, throughout modernity, has increasingly affected non-
combatants. No member of society is, in any sense, protected from violence – indeed, all are made vulnerable with the
emergence of ‘total war’ and the threat of nuclear holocaust in the twentieth century. Crucially, the deferral and channel-
ling of violence also opens up the space for the hypocrisies of ideology and propaganda which attempt to
further rationalise the directing of violence onto external enemies by depicting enemies as lower, inferior or inhuman. For Bataille,
the social and epistemological conditions for racial hatred and ethnic violence are set up only through
the externalisations of violent excesses that are characteristic of modernity. We might say that a
religious social system is more honest (or rather less dishonest) about its violence than a ‘rational’, ideologically managed social
system. Finally, the
acquisitive and exploitative drive for continual growth generates new and
unforeseen manifestations of the accursed share, new outlets for the catastrophic squandering
of resources that cannot be contained within ritual or any other limits. The channelling of the
accursed share into military, colonial and ideological violence does not make these societies
more stable; it does not protect or shelter its people at the expense of others, but actually
condemns society to serial conflict, to an endless circulation of violence, a violence ‘set free
on all sides’ (Bataille, 1989a, p. 85). If sacrificing 20,000 people per year is a monstrous aberration, is the ‘sacrifice’ of
thousands of road users and pedestrians killed and injured in accidents across all developed nations any less monstrous? The major
difference seems to be only that the deaths caused by traffic accidents are absolutely meaningless, whereas the deaths in Aztec
sacrificial rites were charged with meaning.Bataille acknowledges that tendencies towards the externalisation of violence were
present, if inchoate, in Aztec society even at the time of the earliest ethnographic accounts. Yet clearly, sacrificial violence was the
central social dynamic. Bataille recounts how prisoners of war, taken by the Aztecs and destined for sacrifice, were made ‘insiders’
by being treated well, adorned and sometimes given concubines, enjoying a life of privilege for up to a year before their immolation.
Of course, Bataille does not contend that such victims were thereby willing, and he frequently notes that the powerful within even
small-scale or archaic ‘collective’ cultures used religion to control and abuse their people (Bataille, 1988, p. 60). Aztec ritual, at the
time of the Spanish invasion, was a degraded, ‘compromised’ form of sacrificial kingship, yet it is still able to illustrate a profound
moral difference from the conditions of modern societies. In stark contrast to Aztec society, the European industrial revolution made
possible an immense growth in wealth and energy during the nine- teenth century, and there was relative peace in Europe between
1815 and 1914. Isn’t this clear evidence of the economic and moral superiority of Western, industrialised cultures? For Bataille, this
growth of wealth and prosperity was, in fact, accompanied by a terrible impoverishment in the conditions of life, especially for the
working classes. Further, the excess energy generated by industrial production was, in time, turned to
catastrophically violent ends: ‘the two world wars organised the greatest orgies of wealth – and of human beings – that
history has recorded’ (p. 37). The development and accumulation of resources such as armies, machine
guns, tanks and war planes channelled growth into catastrophe as millions of lives were
annihilated on a scale previously unimaginable. In other words, growth as simple profit or unlimited
accumulation can never continue for long – rather growth, left unchecked, will generate new,
uncontrollable and catastrophic expenditures. The horrors of the trenches and the death camps, and of nuclear
devastation, mas- sively exceed and disable any possible sense of the ‘good’, of benefits or ‘profits’ – even figuratively such as
lessons learned by humankind. By contrast, the violence of the potlatch was largely symbolic (scant consolation for the slaves who
were sacrificed) and even Aztec society at the height of its sacrificial fervour never practised ‘sacrifice’ on the scale of
Passchendaele, Auschwitz, Hiroshima or Afghanistan. Indeed, Aztec violence was strictly limited to feast days, military expeditions
and festivals. Applying Bataille’s perspective, such limits allow, activate and contain the expression of the accursed share. We might
sum up this argument by simply saying that if the sacrificial violence of the Aztecs, Tlingit and Kwakiutl was terrifying, the violence
unleashed by modernity is far, far worse. Zizek (1996) suggests that if excess finds a use – in, for example, festivity, gift giving,
eroticism – then there is, in fact, no economy of excess. But this assertion can be reversed. If use, production and growth are only
temporary effects, and are ultimately destined for loss, then there is no restricted economy: there is only excess. However, Bataille’s
thought does not submit to such oppositions. There is no pure restricted econ- omy and no pure general economy; there is only
movement, circulation, alternation, duality, limits and their transgression. Bataille acknowledges that through religious sacrifices and
festivities, priests and rulers hope for some ‘supernatural efficacy’ – but this leads us directly to the dual- ity of the sacred. Sacrifices
are ‘useful on that plane [the supernatural] precisely insofar as they are gratuitous, insofar as they are needless con- sumptions of
resources first and foremost’ (Bataille, 1988a, p. 120). For Bataille, the emergence of capitalist economy proper in the seventeenth
century, closely associated with the Protestant asceticism examined by Max Weber and R. H. Tawney, actually ‘destroyed the sacred
world, the world of non-productive expenditure, and handed the earth over to the men of production, to the bourgeois’ (p. 127).
Protestantism and capitalism together complete the long process of the separation of the human and the divine, and attempt the
elimination of the sacred. This theme is re-examined in Chapter 7. Bataille concludes volume one with a fascinating discussion of
the Marshall Plan (or European Recovery Program) which, between 1948 and 1951, managed the donation
of around 17 billion US dol- lars to war-shattered European economies. This massive exercise in
state-planned aid enabled European economies to relax austerity and rationing measures, yet it
also provided vast new markets for the sale of American consumer goods. Bataille understands
the Marshall Plan as a form of gift exchange or potlatch, and he broadly approves of it. Fearing that the vast
growth of the American economy, and its mistrust and loathing of the Soviet Union, could only lead to armed conflict between these
superpowers, Bataille proposes that the excess wealth of America be ‘devoted to non-lethal works’ (1988a, p. 172). Bataille supports
the Marshall Plan for several reasons. First, it promised to operate on the general, collective or global level of interdependence, so
breaking with the rampant individualism associated with capitalist economy. Second, the
Marshall Plan relinquished the
profit motive, at least temporarily. Yet, just as important for Bataille, the plan was likely to achieve something
beyond the imagination of those who for- mulated it : to enable a ‘non-lethal’ potlatch-like competition between
the Soviet Union and the West, maintaining them in a ‘dynamic peace’ rather than allowing a situation where one or the other
becomes abso- lutely dominant and so accumulates wealth and power to a degree that threatens the globe. Forty years after
Bataille published The Accursed Share the Soviet Union collapsed, and the former Soviet states adopted market capital- ism. Yet,
even as the Soviet Union and the West seemed most divergent, during the Cold War, they were also converging. It became obvious,
in the West, that free-market economics cannot survive without State assistance and international
aid to prop up its banking system and the wider economy as they lurch from boom to bust. Nor can capitalist societies
survive without rituals of squandering, its managed or administered excesses of consumer spending based on credit
and, also, its thirst for the vicarious enjoyment of excessive violence, horror and death serviced by its entertainment industries. It
would be a mistake to present Bataille’s observations on the Marshall Plan as an entirely prescient or even ‘correct’ analysis of the
politics of the post-war period; he seemed to envisage the Soviet Union becoming more powerful that the United States in a
relatively short space of time, such that it would fall to the Soviet Union to relinquish its excess wealth by helping poorer countries.
But Bataille does not claim predictive power for his notion of general economy; rather, he shifts the level of analysis, suggesting that
America and the Soviet Union are caught up in a potlatch, whether they understand this or not. Indeed the ‘space race’ and Olympic
competition are two examples of prestige wars, potlatch or ‘non-lethal’ competition that did occur during the Cold War. Bataille
also recognises that the Marshall Plan’s ‘renunciation of the growth of productive forces’ is made
in order to achieve a longer term ‘utilization’ of wealth which serves American commercial
interests (1988a, pp. 182–183). However, if the Marshall Plan could prevent a third world war and/or the emergence of a single
totalitarian superpower, either capitalist or communist, the risks were outweighed by the benefits to the globe or ‘biomass’. There is
a significant shift here in what we can label for convenience Bataille’s politics. In The Accursed Share, Bataille seeks peaceful
evolution rather than the bloody street uprisings he envisaged in the mid-1930s. Bataille opposes nuclear disarmament as
unrealistic, and in the dynamic peace he hoped for, the Soviet Union and the United States would converge politically, in that the
latter would adopt some measure of social democratic state planning. The two blocs would provide a degree of tension for each
other which would not reach armed conflict but would prevent either finally dominating the other. The
domination of a
single power, Bataille insists, would be the worst out- come: the dominating force would lose any
critical self-consciousness, it would ‘fall asleep’, producing a slumber which presented ‘more
reason than ever to be afraid’ (p. 188). The collapse of the Soviet Union, and of communism generally, has placed the
world in grave danger: the rulers of Western states have, indeed, lost any critical self-awareness and
pro- nounce free market capitalism to be the only viable system. All limits are denied or
eliminated in the capitalist fantasy of perpetual growth. Indeed, capitalism recognises
neither limits nor excesses, and so must always increase levels of exploitation, of people, resources and the planet, as it
accelerates towards catastrophe.
Anti-black settler colonialism
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi
From what has just been said, it should already be clear that by political theology I mean more than what Carl Schmitt, whose name
is most aligned with this term, meant by it when he said that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts.”27 I mean more than to suggest, again as Schmitt did, a structural similarity between the domains
of law and politics, on the one hand, and theology or the religious, on the other, such that the exceptionalism of the latter (as, for
example, in the force of the “miracle”) is merely transferred to the former (as, for example, with the “state of exception” and the
“force of law”). Rather, by political theology I mean the ways that the
categories of the political and the
theological are mutually affirming. Differ- ing in magnitude, the political and the theological are scalar,
internally braided together in the logic of the state, for which reason they cannot be extracted
one from the other. As I am using it, political theology is that philosophical , indeed, that metaphysical claim
to the rightness, the purity, the would-be gravity of the state as the telos of society, as the
horizon of order, as what securitizes the world if not life itself. If this order, which is to say, if state
order is the ontological horizon of what holds us, if it is a figure of the Being that holds beings
(most especially the human mode of being, which within the terms of state order is nothing less than the citizen mode of being, the
being that is homo politicus), then political
theology is the discourse of Being in its projection of the state
as the ground of legitimate, political (as opposed to “nonpolitical” or antepolitical or anarchic) assembly, on the one
hand, and as the ground of juridical subjecthood, on the other.

I would like to put a finer point on the problem of political theol- ogy by approaching it in terms of the problem of the evisceration of
the sacred, or that which hovers beyond state-sanctioned horizons of life or what is truly real, what
moves as invisibly felt or as a surging, surreal pres- ence that state operations work hard to
overshadow in monumentalizing itself, often through monuments. Like a kind of astrophysical
dark matter with the unknowable force of a dark energy that exceeds racial capitalism’s
gravitational pull by exerting a force from within and that exceeds this (racial) world’s
epistemological and material circumscriptions, this surging, surreal presence moves at the limit
of the state even if on some level within its constraints. Let us call this limit blackness. America is
structured through the horrific regularity, both in spectacular displays and even more so in everyday or mundane
displays, of experiencing unin- corporable limits to itself. That experience is the experience of the
sacred, an experience in which state sovereignty or lordly sovereignty is crossed (out), transgressed. Political
theology is a discourse that seeks to eviscerate such an imagination of the sacred. As such, it is a
statist discourse predicated precisely on the evisceration of the dark arts of the sacred, those
excessive modes of life and knowing. I am interested in that dark knowing that exceeds theopolitical constraint—what Bataille spoke
of as “nonknowledge” and what he also talked about as “poetry,” and what I want to think about here by way of black radical
thought as the astropoetic release of the sacred from categorical capture. This is the black
radical sacred.
As an entry point into this approach to the problem of political theology and to begin to think about the sacred precisely as
malpractice, consider Rei Terada’s essay “Robinson’s Terms,” in which she provides a patient and brilliant reading of Cedric
Robinson’s underexplored first book (his published dissertation, in fact), Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of
Leadership (1980).28 Her reading of Terms of Order offers us a way to understand the trajectory that led Robinson to the thesis he
develops in Black Marxism (1983) that black radicalism is a complexly differentiated tradition rooted in a revolutionary
consciousness that exceeds the terms of political order, which are also the terms of (racial) capitalist order. Order emerges or is
constituted as the counterrevolutionary evisceration of that which exceeds order. Terada tarries with Robinson as he tarries with the
dynamics of this evisceration. What we learn from her reading of Robinson is that if,
in positioning “the state [as] the
telos of society,” the political “depends on and . . . is reflected in [a series of] politico- legalistic
settlements” whose narrative languages and philosophical concepts establish “the terms [of] a [settler] tenancy” (4), then what
makes the political always already theological, even when it prides itself on being secular (which really must be understood as a
mode of the theological), is this: in establishing the state as the telos of society and thus as a world
that houses (human) being, the political follows, indeed, repeats the religious logic of Genesis
or the primordial, cosmogonic activity of the gods. As the gods found the world or establish the real
by what Mircea Eliade describes as “[projecting] a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center
into chaos,” thus allowing an “ontological passage” that in effect establishes the real,29 so too the political is predicated
on a “cosmocizing” (64) or a worlding of territory, a conversion of earth into territorialized
world, by gods/men who imprint terms of order onto what is deemed non- political or
formless (informe). This cosmocizing or would-be worlding of the earth into ownable, bordered territory entails the
production and thus the imposition of spatial order on top of and to the vanquishing of nonpolitical
space or space charged with dark energy or promiscuous intensities figured as aberrantly racial,
sexual, economic, and neurological . These are energies or intensities that are out of this world
and that figure an other- wise totality, perhaps the “collective being, the ontological totality”
that propels the black radical tradition. 30 This, says Terada, is the persistent “existence of what cannot
be conceived from the standpoint of the political” (6). Constantly thwarting politicality’s claim to being all
there is, the nonpolitical represents, Terada further says directly quoting Robinson, an open “set of infinite
alternatives irretrievably forsaken” (10), alternatives that index the impossible as nothing less
than the ongoing possibility of what exceeds the terms of political order. Further still, if with Terada
(with Robinson) we understand that myth “[functions] to process ‘insurmount- able contradiction’ in the societies from which they
arise” (10), then the political, which establishes the terms of settler tenancy as terms of order, is but myth’s
rationalization, with language serving the utilitarian function of securing the order of
signification, the grammar of (political) meaning. Put differently, the political seeks to maintain itself
by instituting a form of knowing in which reason is but the declaration of having won the
mythic struggle against an opposing force. This is the struggle of creation itself, a struggle in which Genesis is an
effect of struggle. Political rationality entails the would-be vanquishing or containing or sacrificial corpsing of
the nonpolitical surround to bring into being what in the Western ontotheological tradition has
been called World. And yet, in this instance formless nonpoliticality bespeaks an abyssal prime matter
that as limitless potential for patterning, as “absolute nothingness,” is both base resource for the violent
production of value and at the same time indexes a volatile danger to existing patterns of politicality.31
I can now address even more directly what is theological about the mythic rationality of the terms of political order. What must be
under- stood is that the previously described dynamic of the political is articulated to what historian of
religions Eliade explains as the production of “sacred space” or the making of “strong, significant
space” out of “spaces . . . without structure or consistency,” spaces that he describes as “amorphous” (20), or that we
might just as well understand with both Bataille and Spill- ers as “monstrous.”32 The bringing forth of strong space out
of disordered void, the overcoming of “the fluid and larval modality of chaos” so as to establish, as an “act of the
gods who . . . organized chaos by giving it a struc- ture, forms, and norms” (31), the ontological or the
“pre-eminently . . . real” (28), and finally, the ritual reactualization of this paradigmatic work of the
gods to secure a proper place in the world rather than hang sus- pended in the void of the not-
real, the absolute nothingness of nonbeing: these mythic operations ground “religion” in the broadest sense. More still, Eliade
describes these operations, to use Terada’s Robinsonian lan- guage, as establishing the terms of a settler
tenancy. Through that tenancy homo religiosus (like and indeed as homo politicus-economicus) quenches his thirst
for real existence in the face of a terrifying nothingness, in the face of that “absolute
nonbeing” “that surrounds his inhabited world,” as Eliade describes it (64). In communication with the gods who
have, as it were, settled the chaos, homo religiosus by feat of ritual repetition repels the abyss and, indeed, in an
ongoing way believes himself to have settled the abyss , lest “by some evil chance, he strays into [that abyss], [and
comes to feel] emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving into [the surrounding] Chaos, and he finally dies” (64).

As a discourse, then, political theology as I mean it proceeds under the logic of a cosmology of
settlement, the supposed containment of the surround by a settler-God or settler-gods and as
reactualized by settler- Man. Here, the sacred has been epistemically annexed and (to invoke a
language from the prior section) right-handedly recruited to settling, their adhesion underwriting
political theology as a discourse that rests on the mythotheological as the mythopolitical
founding of the world. This is “Genesis.” Thus, within the terms of political theology, God, State, and Man are all
god terms that name a vanquishing or a supposed conquering of the abyssal , the infinite, the
alternative, the im/plausibly and im/ possibly im/possible.

But what if we do not assume the political (as seems to be the assump- tion in Rev. Lamar’s comments about the
Charlottesville white nationalist rally, his understanding of the general crisis of politicality today, and his understanding of theology’s
relationship to the political)? What if, to the contrary, we take seriously the political precisely as myth,
trying to reckon with what monstrously appears as its internal limit, of which the counter-
protesters were a monstrous sign? (And here I want to keep in mind that in one etymological derivation monster
derives from the Latin word monere, which means a divine omen or portent of what cannot be foreseen.) This is also to ask, what
if rather than assuming political theology we think with the likes of Colin Kaepernick, whose
taking a knee has incited a crisis of politicality, if not a monstrance of what is irreducibly
antepoliti- cal? What if our study, our writing, takes place within political theology’s
astrophysical contraction, “in the break” of politicality, out of the posse of im/poss/ibility? 33
These questions propel this article’s writing practice, which aims to throw language back on itself, to be
suspended in, even exiled within language itself. I am suspended within and yet beyond the ontology of the
sentence (of politicality), held in an ellipsis, a cloud of antepolitical unknowing. What might it mean to write the
experience of semiotic exile, to not be sentenced to the sentence while suspended within it, to
write the experience of decomposition as the experience of the sacred in its monstrous mode?
What “I,” what “not-I,” what “I” who’s neither “I” nor “other,” can write of parenthetical escape, un/sentenced, un/held within the
sentence, in the break, like
sisters in the wilderness of the sentence , in the void of having been
theopolitically sentenced?34 Can (the) I escape the gravitational forces of civilization? What might it mean to
practice escape or refusal, to be of the void, to be voided, potentiating anything and
everything without determination? What is the feeling of fugitive suspension, outlawed
within the law of the sentence? What of this wandering, this unholding? These are Renee Gladman–
and Sarah Jane Cervenak–inspired questions, and they are Layli Long Soldier– and M. NourbeSe Philip–inspired ones too.35 My claim
in this article is that the
poetics of what is beyond the (theopolitical) sentence is language’s taut
tenseness, the tense of an alternative declension or mood, the domain of the “fourth person
singular” perhaps, where some other experience of lan- guage is felt. 36 Here the myth of
politicality and thus of being individuated, of being “I,” is always already subject to being sacrificed along
with the mode of divinity or the god terms meant to secure the state. This poetics of the
beyond is a poetics of the sacred “‘other’-wise,” Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ashon T. Crawley might say.37
Given this, the black malpractice of which I here speak is a practice of the sacred overboard, an
experience of the sacred detached from or in the absence of its reduction to the stabilizer that
has come to bear the name, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, God or the gods and
as duplicated or mirrored in the divination of the state where the state exists in the image of a
stabilizing God.
In this world of timeless utility war becomes an inevitable feature of liberal
politics – a futile but nonetheless bounded attempt to deify state power
through the over-accumulation and stockpiling of arms so as to indoctrinate its
subjects within a purely rationalist understanding of the world sans difference.
The question of this debate, however, is not how we can “solve” war – even
that question takes utility as its nexus. Instead, we must dwell within the
acephalic – an orgiastic festival of unproductive expenditure which is the
condition of possibility for heartfelt communities beyond the bounds of
militarism.
Hamblet’05 |Wendy C. Hamblet is a philosopher, author, philosophical counselor, and consultant. She
has completed a two year term as Executive Director of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace and is an
activist-scholar in the Transcend Network of Conflict Transformation Professionals. “The Manic Ecstasy of
War”, in Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice (2005) Taylor & Francis, Inc. DOI:
10.1080/14631370500292052|KZaidi

Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with the dawn of tyranny and oppression. War,
one of the oldest human institutions, has proven invaluable to states in establishing their power over
subgroups within the system, as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to
permit their expansion in space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little
mystery to the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing
popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the
dignity of human beings, remains baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered
by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war
composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of
the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the population’s martial
enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of
self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless
splurge of the nation’s human and economic wealth for no better reason than wanton
celebration of state power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille.
His philosophy explains two principles of expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by
utilitarian goals serving current power relations, and that of nonproductive expenditure—that
is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the two dialectical
opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures. The first model aspires to
perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is
monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state becomes self-identified as
a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and customs fixed and imperative.
People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual lives that offer escape from
the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunkenness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures,
self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The monocephalic state, on
the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form
that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos,
madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy provides a valuable framework for analyzing global realities, even in the modern
world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all
states
seek timeless stability, secured against time with absolute truth claims, infallible social codes,
and enduring legislation. States are duly secured by the legalized violence of police and military
that appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately suppress all transformation.
Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations—passports, licenses, identity cards, forms
completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration regulations, police interrogations,
surveillance of social and financial transactions among subgroups, security checkpoints,
departments of homeland security—weed out the deviant lifeforms until ultimately all
countervoices have been silenced, all rebellion quite obliterated, all evolutionary movement
logically contradictory. But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state
increasingly closes itself off, it stifles social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the
passion from its citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to
mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly
deified, all labors have become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating
stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most excessive extrapolation— fascism.
Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and move forward into futures. This most solid
state holds firm for a short while only; then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up
and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty
flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles
describe the movement of history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that
ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing
the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually
recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic
structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the
deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals , for Bataille, move between the two contradictory
forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an
imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s
analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests
that war composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a
breakout from mundane servitude. We may not readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms
that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is unquestionably
undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen —Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced
that fascist urges fade with global democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order
and security of the first world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean
between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron
of golden rules. But the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-
order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common
arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one
head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an
embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and
morally superior to acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in
the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid, unyielding—is
preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics.
Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects
as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a theater of cruelty and death
that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the
philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by
lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s
treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the
simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those
very states naming themselves the most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in
the civilized modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within
industrialized, rationalist, rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and
utility. The violence that floods the globe in modernity , that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global
freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires, the projects of
monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern
world: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of
fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons] . . . . [M]an
[lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce
men of modernity—gods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control
to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the products of molten metal torn
from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the desperate obstinacy
of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost
somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of
modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good
of their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in
heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the
rigorous projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free
from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them
from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic drives will out
and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern
industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending
character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern wars can be
explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of modern ordered states and from people’s
imprisonment within the merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should provide a
wondrous release from mundane servitude. War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic
omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity
occur with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their suppressed lust for a
sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian reasons of state. This
resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained
wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For
Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped all political bounds
and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an
era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—
but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes
merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific
revolution that provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass
production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system)
that have been successfully harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The
goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally
in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of
the primal urges of a community toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based
on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to
make the living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it
must compose orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s
finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves
mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses
its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the
oldest traditions of our species. It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states.
Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of com- munication between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multi-
functional institution. . . . It is extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial
functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is
a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates, ultimately, in fascist
stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is utterly necessary to the
deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the
creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the
citizens and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves
the collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values,
virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems,
tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its
strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in
fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an
inter-national stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even
the most oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly
character—the valor, the selfless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in
the tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the
advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization— today’s wars clearly bring too massive a
booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have increasingly
become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists and accountants
and big busi- nessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern
techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism of
the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars
serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object (the nation)
massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their
corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the
sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective
delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength
and in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collec- tive illusion is
fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed;
the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good war. But for all the benefits served by the
institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse
homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on
parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. Ultimately the
greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its
stark utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the
purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build
heartfelt communities, a need that can only be served by expressing the collective aggressive
energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by
armed force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the
great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force
its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military
prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic urges
that explains a state’s return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution. It
may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its
service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in dispensing its most
fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel needs of the people,
their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts
this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The
sacred values of community—life, freedom,
festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxtaposition to their
opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately,
insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If
Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are utterly
utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.

Solvency Card
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi
After an initial consideration in the next section of this article to unfold what I mean by the sacred in such a way that begins
juxtaposing blackness and the sacred, I then reframe the Charlottesville incident and the general crisis of politicality today as nothing
less than a crisis of the sacred that, rather than disavowing malpractice, in fact calls for it. Together these first two sections serve as
a springboard from which I rethink in the remainder of the article the inherently ambivalent
notion of the sacred,
mobilizing it as a tool for black thought—that is, as a tool for thinking blackness precisely as
opening up an alternate imaginary of the sacred from which also opens up other worlds. Here
blackness indexes sacrality without property and without sovereignty, thus activating other
modes of dwelling on and with the earth, other modes of knowing that we might call “abyssal
nonknowledge,” other socialities or congregationalities that exceed settler politicality. I call this a poetics of the
sacred. Stated differently, if in the immediate sections that follow I consider the myth of politicality or political knowledge in which
certain energies of the sacred are harnessed to state projects and incarnated in charismatic
political leadership (this is, what the Charlottesville white nationalists rallied to defend) to produce a kind of “pure”
or “right-hand sacred” meant to secure homogeneity, then in the rest of this article I consider the sacred in its
base, heterogeneous, or immanent modalities—that is, the sacred not as figure but as impure, “left-hand” flight, indeed, as
that movement or passage or diaspora of spirit that enlivens or animates blackness in its would-be corpsing. I now
turn to the question of the sacred.

The Right- and Left-Hand Sacred

Building from Émile Durkheim and especially Durkheim’s student Rob- ert Hertz, Georges Bataille, and Roger Callois give us an
important initial handle on the sacred in its ambivalent double-sidedness and as a tool for grappling with the modern social text.2 In
“The Psychological Struc- ture of Fascism,” published in 1933, Bataille
mobilized a discourse of the sacred to
examine what was happening at the time and, crucially, to begin thinking toward modes of
social life that exceed the political as we know it. For this, he expanded the basic profane/sacred
duality that Durkheim bequeathed to French social theory into a distinction between the homo- geneous and
the heterogeneous. This became for him an analytic frame- work through which to make sense of fascism.
Identified with produc- tion, the sphere of the profane or what Bataille called the homogeneous is an exclusively
utilitarian realm or a restricted economy of exchange. Conversely, the elements of the sphere of the
heterogeneous or what Bataille called the sacred indicate a general economy of an unrestricted
expenditure of energy that, though to a point employable and thus valu- able because useful
and useable within a social system to help render the system coherent , even if fragilely so, remains
fundamentally excessive, ecstatic, or rapturous.3 {Lindon Barrett is similarly concerned with the problematic of capitalism as a
restricted economy of value, though, in
centering the idea of blackness as general excess and thus as
unrestricted general economy, Barrett goes beyond Bataille and much of the tradition of French
thought that emerged in his wake. See Barrett, Black- ness and Value.}
To borrow a formulation from Roger Callois, a colleague of Bataille’s in a dissident study group that met in the back of a Paris
bookstore and that they called the “College of Sociology,” we might think of left-hand experiences of the sacred as those in which
the sacred is nothing less than the experience of sociality through and as infraction given in “inter-
affective” excess, given in and as “collective ecstasy.” 4 The sacred here manifests as the experience of
innovation and improvisation, what Callois calls an “improvisation of the sacred,” that connects with a
“mysterious world” (152). For Callois, such improvisational ecstasy bespeaks a fundamental
“metamorphosis of . . . being.” I will revisit this term again when I consider Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis.
Staying for now with Callois, improvisational ecstasy as the metamorphosis of being indicates an
anguished yet joyous dwelling in a kind of blurred communion apart from and in critique of the
presumptions of individuation (282). Akin to Callois’s description of the sacred as a kind of ecstatic and anoriginal
metamorphosis, thinking with Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Italian female mystic, Bataille figures the sacred as
a sort of fecund, negative space, an “abyss of possibilities . . . where the possible is the impos-
sible itself” and in which “ecstatic, breathless, experience . . . destroys the depths . . . of being
by unveiling” a nonpossessable, a nonsubjective zone irreducible to property and thus
irreducible to propertied subjectivity.5 While Bataille eventually devotes an entire book-length study to such “inner
experience,” where “inner” here is not to be understood as the interiority of a supposedly coherent,
individuated self but a kind of collective aliveness, Callois advances his thinking in this vein in an essay called
“Festival.”6 Presented as a talk to the dissident College of Sociology study group, “Festival” considers the sacred in
terms of a collective effervescence and eruption that characterized ancient festivals and feasts
and whose vestiges one finds, Callois argues, in contemporary carnivals and such. Such festive events of “yesteryear and today,” he
says, are “always defined by dancing, singing, excitement, excessive eating and drinking. It
is necessary to go all out to
the point of exhaustion, to the point of sick- ness. That is the very law of the festival” (281). Here profane
or chronological temporality or the time of Man and his others is disrupted in the name of
dwelling in some other experience of time beyond the logic of separability. To dwell in the
spacetime of “difference without separability,” and thus in ecstatic temporality, is to dwell in
the experience of carnival time, which is the experience of being out of time, of dwelling in
time-out, in out-time. It indicates a dwelling unhistorically in history, which is to say, in
history’s exhaustion. In short, it is to be off beat. 7 Such is Callois’s description of “inner experience,” where
experience here indicates a condition of ek-stasis—a dwelling in and witnessing to out-ness as
such. This is a condition of being dispossessed of a self, which is a condition of (non)possession
that is anterior to property, anterior to propertied self-possession, indeed anterior to a possessive and
possessing self altogether.8 {I cannot help but hear and want to complicate what Callois is detailing here, and by extension
Bataille as well and arguably French feminist écriture too, under the force of black feminism, particularly under the force of M.
NourbeSe Philip’s poetics and more specifically still under the force of her consideration of inner space (the invasion of the space
between black women’s legs) and outer place (the invasion of the Caribbean and the New World and the establishment of what
Philip calls the plantation machine). The
invasion of the former, so as to tether black women to the
plantation machine in order to sustain that machine through reproduction, links the patriarchal
penetration of the space between the legs to the penetration of the place now called the
Caribbean. Philip writes that violent coming together of inner space and outer place as “s/place.” Philip is also clear that space
and place not only violently come together through the slash in “s/place”; they also diverge
through that same slash. That coming together and/as divergence points to a zone irreducible
to the inner/outer opposition or dialectic. On the page, Philip signifies that zone under the sign “dis place,” which
she extends as “dis placement.” All of this, Philip unfolds in her essay, “Dis Place: The Place Between.” Though I am unable to give a
sustained engagement with this profound essay here, I read this essay as Philip’s own speaking back to Bataille and Callois, back to
French sacred sociology, back to the modernist social text more generally. Philip
is involved in a semiotics of
unsaying and untelling that she places under the rubric of “silence” (295). More specifically, Philip unsays
the notion of “inner experience” through the slash that separates and connects “s/place” (288) and by means of the collectively
agentive “silence” (295) operative within “dis place” and that surges as an insurgency through the rupture of “dis placement” (290).
Unsaying here, in other words, is a mo(ve)ment of passage, a movement of blackness. Rapture and
rupture here comingle with and yet beyond the violence that sustains the opposition between
inner space and outer place. This is a poetics of “between,” of “dis place,” of dispos- session in the name of a
carnivalesque or a bacchanalian spirit possession. Later in this article we will see how Sylvia Wynter, another Caribbean
theorist, effects a similar outcome through her notion of “beyond.” Between and beyond is irreducible to
patriarchal settler colonial and enslaving logics that oppose inner space to be invaded and
territorialized outer place. For Philip, “dis place between” indicates a black feminist ecstatics of the
sacred, an ecstatics of “earth and sound” (296) encountered in that other (dis) place: Caribbean carnival, where “women [mash]
the ground—dancing and wining their all any and everything . . . shaking their booty, doing their thing, their very own thing, jazzin it
up, wining up and down the streets, parading their sexuality . . . taking back the streets, making them their own as they speading
their joying up and down the streets of Port of Spain. . . . Is the only time of the year that women—old women, young women, thin
women, fat women, women women— showing off their sexuality without undue censure or fear under the benign gaze of OUR
ROYAL WILL AND PLEASURE. Oh, for a race of women” (312–13). I take up this black radical, black feminist ecstatics of the sacred in
a continued thinking with Philip and other (black) critical theorists in my book in progress, “Black Rapture.”}

A condition perhaps of spirit possession, this socioecstasy given in the ferment of the festival manifests the
sacred as a sociality of infraction against “taboos” and “rules” meant to ensure propriety and
comportment (282). Such a tabooed sociality in festivaled rapture is nonboundaried and thus
nontabooed in the first place.

We are on the threshold, the limen of the thought of the heterogenous or the otherwise. In raptured ecstasy, the element of the
heterogeneous betokens ontopoliticality’s, indeed, the human’s collapse in the face of what the
violent homogeneity of ontopoliticality cannot hold. The unholdable, the unhavable—
notwithstanding that juridical-economic order seeks to seize and thus reduce the unhavable to ownership or property— is in fact
uncapturable; it will not fully “get in formation.” Indexing another horizon of existence (where “ex-
istence” is necessarily “ek-static” and as such neither is nor is not but “is-not”), the energies of heterogeneity are for
this reason ultimately, Bataille says, an unemployable, invaluable, or useless surplus9 that indicates a
kind of energy-in-flux, a charged or “base matter”10 that allows the elements of heterogeneity ,
as Michèle H. Rich- man puts in elaborating Bataille on this point, “to break the conventional barriers upon which
homogeneity relies.”11 Bataille associates this break and, importantly, the noncommodifiable
knowledge or the nonknowledge from the break that surges through it with what is irreducible
to production or monetary and identitarian exchange. This is what makes the heterogeneous
powerful and dangerous to systems of politicality or order, why, in other words, it is dangerously sacred.
Decentralized and acephalous, the heterogeneous, which bespeaks the sacred of “the left-hand,” indexes “a force
that disrupts the regular course of things” (143), though those very disruptive energies can be recruited
for “right-hand” purposes, aggregated to an anointed leader, a political “pastor” who uses a kind of “pastoral
power” to seal the breach of heterogeneity and violently return a polity to homogeneity.12 In “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” Bataille interprets the rise of Hitler and 1930s German fascism along with the resulting effects on and uptake
into French politics within this frame- work and as a manifestation of the right-hand sacred—a recruitment of the wild energies of
the sacred to seal the breach of heterogeneity as that political breach of purity at the time came to be figured in the Jews and in
other undesirables. I
read the summer 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the
general rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency in related, right-hand terms.13

But to stay with Bataille, in that same essay he keeps his eye trained on the left side of things where there
is always
heterogeneity or base ener- gies exceeding the terms of order. He finds examples in this regard in the untouchables
of India, on the one hand, and among the destitute in the economically and socially “less ritualistic” or “advanced civilizations” of the
West, as he puts it, on the other. In the latter, “being destitute is all it takes . . . to create between the self
and others—who consider themselves the expression of normal man—a nearly insurmountable
gap” (144). Whether it be the hereditarily untouchables or the destitute in advanced countries, it is the “lowest strata of
society,” Bataille contends, “[that] can . . . be described as heterogeneous . . . those who generally provoke
repulsion and can in no case be assimilated to the whole of mankind” (144). In their
untouchability or destitution, such groups are a heterogeneous element associated with
useless expenditure, with “violence, excess, delirium, madness . . . [that] to varying degrees”
has the capacity because occluded within but not fully subsumed by the juridical-economic
order to unsettle the terms of order (142). Interpreted as mobs, they are outlaw or “[breakers]
of the laws of social homogeneity.” As such, “these impov- erished classes,” Bataille says, “are characterized by
the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things ” (144), particularly those
tabooed things, those things, as Richman explains again elaborating Bataille, placed under “restricted contact”
and whose collective effervescence indicates a “transgression” or a “negation [that] surpasses
itself” in exceeding every closed order “without returning to the original condition or state it had negated.”14 Here we find
the sacred in its excessive, left- hand mode of ceaseless rupture and rapture, as harbinger of a sociality without
limit or completion.
This brings us to an absolutely vital point around which much of what I want to say in this article and, indeed, much of my effort to
mobi- lize a discourse of the sacred for black studies, turns: the ambiguity within the very notion of the sacred itself as both pure and
the impure. Alexander Riley succinctly clarifies the issues here: “The
sacred is not only the holy or consecrated
but can also be the accursed.”15 That is to say, “in addition to being opposed in a binary relationship
to the profane [this is Bataille’s sphere of homogeneity], [the sacred] is itself comprised of two opposing
binary poles: the forces that maintain physical and moral purity and order, life, and health [the
holy that upholds the holy], and those that contribute to impurity , evil, sacrilege, disease, and death [the
accursed].”16 The former sphere of pure divinity depends on an accursed share, an excremental element, to
constitute and secure itself, within the terms of a restricted economy of sacrificial exchange, as
pure. As Giorgio Agamben understood and as Riley reiterates, this doubled, contradictory or ambiguous sense of the sacred is
connected to the Latin word from which it derives: sacer. Riley goes on to explain how the idea of the sacred can trip us up: hewing
close to the Latin sense of sacer, “the French sacré . . . can mean both, and is frequently used in both senses (la musique sacrée, holy
or sacred music, and un sacré menteur, a damned or accursed liar), whereas the English ‘sacred’ has in practice lost the second
meaning.”17

If Bataille associates this second sense of the sacred, whose relationship to the first is not dialectical but excessive or abyssal, with
the untouchables and the destitute, then here I stretch the generally Durkheimian formulation of the right- and left-hand sacred,
bending along with it even Bataille’s more renegade formulation of sacred excess to that blackened or black
sacral
(non)position that aroused the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in the first place as a violent
secondary, “right- hand” reaction. This opens up a consideration of the sacred’s proximity to
blackness wherein, following Hortense J. Spillers, we might think of blackness as “symptom of the
sacred,” as terrifying monstrance of that beautiful monstrosity , that inner scar voluntarily
claimed in having been called.18 The monstrosity to be claimed here, this “unbounded sociality,” concerns
“blackness as matter [that] signals [infinity], another world . . . that which exists without time
and out of space, in the plenum”19—the sacred otherwise. Here the sacred is obscure and formless, even “oceanic,” to
stay with Spillers’s Freudian-inflected formulation. More akin to that “raw prime matter” of which Denise Ferreira da Silva has
recently spoken as part and parcel of the virtuality of a “black feminist poethics,” the
sacred here is of the wild, of the
wilderness. To continue to think under the force of Spillers’s thought, the sacred, in its adjacency to blackness
or as itself symptomatically black, points to those hermetic energies or those forces of
enchantment, to metamorphosis bound to devotional practices of un/knowing. Black sacrality
indexes a certain liveliness and aliveness occasioned by, moving in relationship to, and yet
irreducible to the “spiritual ordeal” of death that is settler modernity.20 For this reason, black
radical sacrality, which we might just as well think of as the sorcery of (black social) life itself, unsettles, is ever
poised to incite volatility within regimes of politicality. That is to say, the sacred, as I am given to thinking
about it here as figuring a poetics of malpracticed black (reli- gious) study, is neither transcendental, pure, nor
beneficent but, rather, is base, stank, impure, low to the ground, underground, of and with the earth.
All this is to say, I approach the sacred as a kind of pathological and ek-static threshold before which
other, differential and unrepresentable presences, genres or forms of life, unplottable gatherings in
representation’s colonializing ruins, alternative ways of being with the earth, come into view.21

From the vantage point of regimes of politicality, black ek-static

life, which is to say black social life, cannot
help but be understood as indexing deviance, deviation, and aberration. Moving “in the break” of the
terror of politicality, black radical deviance is a practice of the social not reducible to politicality—a
studied “consent,” it has been said, “not to be a single being.”22 This is a malpracticed
spirituality, a non/theological or, better put, an atheological and thus a “godlessmysticism”23
that points to frenzied existence that is so much more than resistance because such indeterminate
non/existence is on the far side of the concept, on the far side of a god-concept, on the far side of a god that stalls out as a static
concept and that thus installs the concept—on the far side, I mean, of “God as a Failed Figuration,” to echo poet Phillip B. Williams,
that which grounds “the American aesthetic.”24 That malpracticed, atheological godlessness bespeaks an interior,
collective alivenessconstantly ready, expectantly poised for the unexpectant, the experience of the ek-static—
to be moved, to be terrified, to love, to hate, to live magically, drunkenly, wanderously,
wonderously, erotically, joyously, childishly, prayerfully, in the radicality of a certain moving
stillness, a certain quarreling, in/sovereign quiet.25 This black (w)holiness that (in)sovereignly
exceeds the concept, we might call black rapture. It is along this path that I want to begin to unfold or
explicate black malpractice as the nonperformance of modernity’s god terms, as
nonperformative breach of the religious contract that subtends the racial contract insofar as
the social contract (of racism) is necessarily a religion contract whose terms are secular.26 {My
notion of a religion contract as animating modernity’s social contract as a race contract emerges in conversation with Sora Han’s
ground-shifting medi- tation on the 1857 legal case known in the legal archive as Betty’s Case. See Han, “Slavery as Contract.” At
issue in the case is the relationship between freedom and slavery for a slave woman, Betty, whom Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the
Massachu- setts Supreme Court declared free by virtue of her arrival from Tennessee with her owners into the northern free state of
Massachusetts. In free territory and by means of a kind of legal alchemy, Betty
moves from being owned property
to free agent who can contract her labor to her former owner . The question of the case was
whether free will could be exercised in any and every way, including the freedom to contract
oneself back into slavery? The reason this legal question arose is because when Betty as slave in the South
traveled with her owners from Tennessee to Massachusetts, she also entered into the legal,
transcendental freedom that spatially obtains by virtue of being in the North, that is, by virtue
of breathing “free air,” as it was often put. And yet, though legally free in the North, Betty nevertheless
exercised that freedom against freedom itself. That is, she opted to return to Tennessee with her
former owners, thus exercising freedom towards unfreedom, towards becoming (again) a slave.
Han astutely walks us through the legal issues arguing that while slavery can be thought about under the rubric of property (which is
typically and most often how it is thought about), what Betty’s Case reveals is that “contract” is the more central
category and problematic. It is, Han says, “the condition of possibility for the slave’s property status” (403). Han further
argues that the kind of freedom Betty enacted was, in fact, an obscenity, an obscene form of
freedom, in that this is a practice of freedom that arrives as the negation of legal freedom, “a
giving away or a giving up on freedom.” This (un)free malpractice of legal, transcendental freedom, this
“nonperformance,” moves “in a subterranean” or outlaw realm, even as it shows up in relationship to the realm of
law and legal thought. Here freedom’s protocols as imagined within liberal (contract) law are
breached, disclosing that in Betty’s case, which is to say in “the case of blackness,” there is a fundamental
indistinction between slavery and (liberal) freedom. But this statement must be quickly sharpened: the
obscenity of Betty’s act of freedom is not merely that it breached the protocols of liberal
freedom. Rather, her freedom act discloses liberal freedom as never not already breached by
“a form of pure performativity” that, referring to Moten, Han calls “improvisation.” Improvisation
here indexes a mode of freedom that “cannot be specifically contracted, nor strictly performed
against a contract, but is nonetheless a legal form contract law might refer to as
nonperformance. We might say that improvisation is the kernel around which contract law’s recognition of
nonperformance circles, and that which it attempts to defend the promise [of the contracting parties]
against” (408). In “Black Rapture,” my book in progress, I extend the idea that I am develop- ing here about blackness as a
(non)performative breach of the modern text, which more specifically I read as a juris-theological contract or a religion contract or a
con- tract of political theology. Within
the terms of this contract the sacred is recruited to subtend or
otherwise sanction modernist concepts of religion and the secular as central to establishing the
anthropocenic world of Man, though that world is even haunted by subterranean earth, black outdoors—
some other, excessive horizon of the sacred altogether. This connects to what earlier in this essay I called an “improvisa-
tion of the sacred.” For another, related take on Han’s notion of “nonperformance,” see Moten, “Erotics of Fugitivity.” On my
invocation earlier in this note of “the case of blackness,” see Moten’s essay of this title.} Stated differently, it is along this path that I
want to engage in sacred poiesis, a poethics of the fugitive sacred. But first, I address the problem of political theology as a species,
we might say, of antiblackness.

Solvency pt 2
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

What I aim for here, then, is a (mal)practice beyond the myth of theopoliticality. Anatheological
malpractice is the “practice of outside,” outdoors—an out not caught in or that already
ruptures the dialectic of inside-outside or the notion of a border or a property line, notions of
inside-outside that are at the heart of myths of order, state or otherwise. Black out is no
ordinary outness. Out even from itself in critique of the notion of a self, blackness’s practiced
outness or black out is “black rapture.” It is akin to what Nathaniel Mackey has called “Mu” in the serial or unending
poem of his that bears this name. Approaching the sound of the first two letters of the Greek-derived word myth (muthos),
Mackey’s serial mu-poem encodes a poetics not so much of myth but of what he calls ythm. 38
The decomposition of myth into ythm (or is it the imposition, in keeping with my earlier discussion, of myth or
propertied world onto larval Earth, as a hieroglyphics onto flesh, that we are dealing with?) is fascinating to think through
as an expression of black malpractice.
Descending into language itself as some kind of founding or mythic violence, Mackey malpractices myth by
anagrammatically reshuffling it. Ythmic shuffle “advances a sense of alternative, ‘a special
view of his- tory,’” that moves in relationship to an alternative sense of language, a dwelling
in the flesh of words.39 What results is the (rh)ythm of black malpractice, an ythmic
overdubbing of myth. With ythm the first two letters of myth are first inverted (possessive my- becomes dispossessed ym-)
and then splayed open so as to reveal a quantum, cosmic, but also womb space that holds an infinite set of
phonemic, phonetic, “parasemi- otic” possibilities.40 That infinite set is signified in the repositioning of the other
two letters of myth, namely, the dental phoneme th-, between the inverted and now spaced apart other two letters. The inverted
and spaced apart other two letters now hold or, perhaps better put, now care for and become a space of caress for the dental
phoneme th-. Ym- is the womb for a crippled sound (Mackey says that “ythm is crippled rhythm”) created by air vibrating through
flesh, air pushed between tongue and teeth and released through the mouth. In this way, the ym-
of ythm is a conduit, a
frictional (middle?) passage, a fleshly resonance chamber through which even if under duress life’s
breath might pass, a quantum gap of pneumatic respiration , life’s harbor, “held but not had / . . . churchical
girth.”41

Such is Mackey’s ythmic mu-poetics wherein due to the “creaking of the word” language
becomes an (rh)ythmic paint
brush of otherworldly, undercommon edifices. Trees paint the sky green, and incarnation or lar- val life sings the
flesh, some “other” experience of the sacred. This is an experience of the sacred in the absence of (state)
divinity, the experience of an uncontainable outside. Black malpractice is an open field poetics
of the black out. The rest of this article explicates, by recursive or serial wandering, that beyond, and that
opening of the field that (rh)ythmically cuts the myth of the political. Black malpractice is a ministerial
poetics, an ythmic poiesis of the beyond.

With this said, I can come back to Rev. Lamar’s Washington Post interview. I want to locate the deeper impulse of what I take Rev.
Lamar to be calling for in relationship to what I have just summarized, that sum- mary pointing to a tradition of the sacred that
shadows Rev. Lamar’s read- ing of the Charlottesville incident. Not
presuming the state as teleological principle of
the social, this is a tradition that moves from the “grounded- ness of an uncontainable
outside.”42 I want to fold Rev. Lamar’s comments into this tradition insofar as they question modernity as a
structure of ontopolitical theology and thus incite a rethinking of the sacred as what is abyssal
to the myth of politicality. Indeed, I would like to (re)turn black studies to the question of the
sacred, a question taken up by black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and M. Jacqui Alex- ander,
among others, and frame it vis-à-vis the im/possibility of black life within the politicotheological
structures of modernity.

I advance here black radicalism as a movement of sacred deviancy, deviation, and aberration. Black
radical deviance is an anatheological practice of the social—a studied “consent not to be a single being,”43 it
has been said—given in and as a practice of the sacred without standpoint, without locus, in and as sacred
malpractice. We must study the sacral- ity of this dissident deviance, the (w)holiness of a blackness
that moves fugitively and ecstatically, like the ancient vagabonds or revolutionary
“gyrovagues,” those monks who, never staying in one place, were mystic wanderers rather than
possessive settlers.44 If the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, were a doubling down on or a
restatement of a certain counter- revolutionary American settlerism that is not new with Trump but that
also must be thought about in relationship to the “postracialism” of the Obama presidency, then they were only
following in the steps of St. Bene- dict, whose counterrevolutionary monastic rule(s) sought to
subject the gyrovagues to his rule(s) of obedience and thus settle (down) the sacred by arresting
the itinerate, revolutionary energies in the movement of sen- tient, gyrating flesh. Blackness is
gyrovague-ish, given to the insovereign itinerancy of enspirited flesh, America’s phantom limb.
Indeed, blackness is enfleshed spirit and so is (a) spiritual, its wandering an itinerant spiri-
tuality. In other words, black wandering upon the earth, like faith itself, moves as a rapturous,
otherworldly excess. Blackness is a lapsarian condition, a “fallenness” within the racially
gendered world of property, an abiding on and with the unpropertizable, ungiven, and
ungivable earth. Though paradoxical, black fallenness thus bespeaks black rapture. We need a
protocol for this fall, for the fallenness of black rapture as a kind of “base faith,” the spirituality of a
“base materialism.”45 We need a protocol for black malpractice as a practice of the monstrous, the fugitive sacred, this
errantry.
Now I confess that I have no pretensions that in the remainder of this article I fully deliver the needed protocol. This is because I am
not sure it can be fully delivered. Or, rather, I wonder if its deliverance can only be aspirational—not aspirational in the sense of
uplift or as an upward striv- ing to become a proper American but aspirational in the sense of a certain movement of spirit that
manifests in the very form and style or mode of writing in this article. Such writing I call spirit-writing or pneumatogra- phy. That is to
say, in aspiring toward a protocol of black fallenness, I walk a line of blurred distinction between explication and performance. I aim
on the one hand to further explicate or offer an analysis of what I mean by black malpractice as a kind of black fallenness. In this
sense I want to unpack the idea. On the other hand, I want to enact and be enacted by the idea, to create or, perhaps better, to be
poetically, poethically rap- tured, caught out, felled by, and in this way all up in the experience of the very malpractice I aim to
explicate—held in its suspension, practiced and channeled by malpractice, its possible ritual conjurer, malpractice’s would-be
instrument, its vibrating reed. This is a matter of method, which is also a matter of the argument itself.

Poetics of the Sacred

What is the methodology of black radical sacrality, that poetics of mal- practice that is a poetics of the sacred? In my effort to
explicate this, let us linger for a moment on the word explication itself, for the blurred distinc- tion of which I spoke above between
explication and performance is in fact internal to the very word explication itself. The pli- in explication (from the Latin plico,
meaning “to fold together”) coupled with the prefix ex- (from the Greek ek-, meaning “out from”) suggests an internal communion,
a sociality or a being-with, a folding together. Explication draws out or sur- faces, splays and displays, that form of life that is not one,
that is no-body, that is not a singularity but, rather, is a folding-together. In this respect, explication is akin perhaps to the activity of
weaving or looming. Or just as much, with poet-critic Dawn Lundy Martin as our guide for a moment, explication, given what she
says in her meditation on “black poetics,” is “as much breaking as it is making. The inverse of hermeneutics as it resists
interpretation in favor of something less sure, something more unstable.”46 Immediately following this declaration, Martin pens a
curious series of sentences that may be read as practicing the very breaking and making of which she’d just spoken. Set off in italics
and, moreover, as the expression and practice of some sort of poetic knowledge, the sentences have the feel of a poem or of what
might be called a micro- or even a minor poem: “I’m jumping on top of a police car on fire. I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with ecstasy
in my sadness.”47

The syntax of the first sentence raises questions for how this micro- poem practices or explicates the breaking-making injunction of
black poetic (non)knowledge as black malpractice. Is the jumping “I” what’s on fire here (which may be why that “I” is jumping)?
That is, is the I-ness of the “I”—where in the wake of Descartes and a broader Western philo- sophical tradition the “I” imagines
itself as a self-determined, coherently singular identity—what is on fire? Is that what is ablaze, under thermo- dynamic immolation
in a socio-relational field to which the “I” (or what we think we mean when we say “I”) is already immanent? Or, might it be that
what is burning in Martin’s micropoem is not so much the “I” as it is the police car that that “I” is jumping on? Could that be what’s
on fire? Or perhaps it is both the subjected “I” and the objective policing car, the sub- ject and the object, that are ablaze. And what
of the relationship between the kinetics of the jumping “I,” the pyrotechnics of the blazing fire that consumes maybe the subjected
“I,” maybe the policing car, maybe both, and that third vector in the poem, the ecstatic heart or spirit aflame with joy while singed
with sadness?

I pose no answers to these questions but instead want to dwell in their poetic interplay, stay with
the splayed ecstatics of a fallen blackness under fire, on fire, in the fire, as fire, the perhaps Pentecostal, perhaps mystical, perhaps
Du Boisian “black flame” fire. Here, blackness might
be thought of as that which burns without being
burnt up, smoky vespers ascending in burning heat. This blue(s) exhaust(ion) puts in mind what the
nonconformist fourteenth-century beguine mystic Marguerite Porete, interestingly judged by her inquisitors as a kind of queered
“pseudo- woman” (quaedam pseudomulier), called as she made her way into the fires of the inquisition, fire’s “relinguishment.”48
For Porete, whose vision approximates Sufi mysticism, fire and air coincide in a kind of “coin- cidence of opposites.”
Alchemically combusting, they interact such that their exhaust(ion) releases a freedom that is
illegible within the terms of politicality. Such freedom pointed for Porete to otherworldly possi-
bilities, vitalities that exceed and that in fact as she saw it could not be contained by the
managerial, priestly class or by inquisitorial governance. The release of which Porete speaks is ecstatic,
which is also to say erotic. Indeed, hers is a social erotics of desire that she saw as the sum and non- substance (insofar as she
identified this as the abyssal nothingness) of the sacred. This is a mode of nonindividuated entanglement, a kind of
quantum sacrality, that moves on the plane of the “pseudo-” and the “para-”—again, her grand inquisitors called her a
pseudomulier, pseudo- woman—on the plane of the ellipses attached to these prefixes that will not allow them to be fixed or come
to a final resting place. This is the plane of the impossibility, the ungraspability and unknowability of
what in Porete’s wake Nicholas of Cusa called posse or possibility itself.

I read Martin’s malpracticing poetics, her micropoetics, as proxi- mate to Porete’s mysticism. A
black flame mysticism of the riot is how I want to read what’s at stake in Martin’s poetics. I’m
jumping on top of a police car on fire. I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with ecstasy in my sadness.
With its imagery of jumping into fiery, aerial suspension, that is to say, with its imagery of
mystically rapturous (social) movement, Martin’s minor poetics bespeaks spirit possession
beyond propertied self-possession. We need a protocol of the spirit, a protocol of this “inner
experience” of black ex-istence, which is also a protocol of the earth in its irreducibility to the
world of politicality and property. This would be as well a protocol of language’s anteriority to
itself, a protocol of spirit-language, pneumatology’s anagrammatical pneumatography. Such a
protocol gives itself in rites of passage, in rituals of apophatic unsaying, in the poetics of
an/nihilating fire, in black mystical nothingness, in the mysticism of a heart jumping and burning
in burnt ecstasy without immolation.

Might there be a poetics of celebration here, of riotous ritual praise, wherein black joy fleetingly
shows up as inconsumably ablaze precisely in the scene of and yet exceeding pain? Immolation
without full consump- tion? Would not such ex/tinguishment and an/nihilation entail the need
for a protocol of joy precisely as part of a protocol of spirit both of which are irreducible to
protocol, to rule/s? I raise these questions inasmuch as Martin’s minor-poem seems to
understand black joy and black sadness as bound to each other precisely in the suspension of
the spirit, in the suspended ecstatics of the leap itself, in rapture’s jump (I’m jumping . . . I’m
ecstatic . . . ). I’m interested in the airy, fiery, atmospheric suspension, in the unlocatable not-
ness or the knot, the nothingness of that blurred “(not) (in) between-ness,” the non- or no-
place, nowhere, the black space of a churchical darkness, the “paracongregationality” (not)
between the upbeat and the downbeat of the jump itself.49 That “blackspace,” Alexis Pauline
Gumbs and Pierce Freelon help us understand, is sacred.50 {In the preface to her poetry
collection Spill, Gumbs says, “This space, which is a temporary space, which we must leave, for
the sake of future travelers and for our own necks, is a sacred dedicated space. Libation for the
named and the name- less . . . for black women who made and broke narrative. The quiet, the
quarrelling, the queer” (xii). In Durham, NC, where I currently live, artist-activist and musician
Pierce Freelon, who also made a recent run for mayor of the city, has developed a space for the
free expression and Afrofuturist cultivation of young, primarily black and brown people of color,
a sacred space called Blackspace (theblackspace.org). See Tullis, “Space Is the Place.”} I’m
interested in the question of celebration that suspension itself poses.51 “Our music hurts so
much that we have to celebrate. . . . That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much.
Exhaustive celebration in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is”
what Fred Moten calls “black study”52 and what I am here thinking about under the rubric of
malpractice. Black malpractice musics the riot as a singed yet celebra- tory song sung with
sadness’s potentiating force of the alternative. I am interested in how the three sentences
making up what I have been calling Martin’s minor, micropoem explicate or ply or draw out a
social move- ment of folding, unfolding, infolding, and refolding celebration.

I own that there is something manic, even deranged—by which I mean something like what
Mackey, drawing on Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, identifies as a duende-like quality—
about what I am sug- gesting here about the method and sociopoetics of black malpractice, the
mysticism of the riot.53 “The word duende means spirit, a kind of gremlin, a gremlin-like,
troubling spirit” (182). The troubling comes through as a particular kind of sound in the voice,
Mackey commenting on Gar- cía Lorca tells us. A “hurt fractured inside” (161) is how Martin
puts it. Announced in “an almost religious enthusiasm . . . [that] shakes the body” that quakes
the dancer’s voice, that disorients the senses to effect “communication with God by means of
the five senses,” as García Lorca himself puts it, duende’s arrival as “the spirit of the earth”
bespeaks “a real and poetic evasion of this world,” some “lyric” and “constant baptism [yielding]
newly created things.”54 By way of Mackey and García Lorca, we can speak of the duende or the
rapture of the riot, wherein one hears the “black sounds” of a metamorphosis, some “deep
song,” the sonic over- flow of spiritual colors, as the undulating eloquence of a perhaps
squealed, screeching, scorched but no matter how you put it, troubled voice.55 “Its eloquence
becomes eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing eloquence”
(182). As eloquent disorder, duende, we might say, is the explication as the troubled voicing of a
fractured inside. Drawing out the fracture, caressing it and being caressed by it perhaps, duende
is the practice of fractured escape. Robin Blaser, speaking of poet Jack Spicer, who is another
important influence on Mackey and who comes up in Mackey’s reflections on duende, has called
this a “practice of outside.”56 This outside practice, which can show up riotously in writing, in
song, in the visual arts, in the streets, which is to say in and as perfor- mance, might be
understood as (black) spirit’s or life’s “conversation with the dead, intimacy with death and with
the dead” (184), an animacy at the rim of the wound, a “breathing behind the door” (185). That
breathing behind the door is a malpracticed breathing, a “longing without object” or toward
another world (185). What Mackey is addressing is wounded breathing or breathing as
experiment, as the experimentalism of possibil- ity itself, the practice of what moves uncannily
and unsettlingly out of place, what kinetically misbehaves by virtue of an “apparent lack of pur-
pose, efficiency, and function,”57 though what registers as lack (and black) here may in fact be
thought of as the surplus of the subreal, what yet lives at the end of the world, at the rim of the
wound.

The stakes of black malpractice preliminarily come into view: my discourse considers black
malpractice as a kind of explication of a prac- ticed outness where explication as analysis gives
way because it is ani- mated by explication as performance, as atonal, anatheological
movement. I want to follow black malpractice as itself an insovereign, inexplicable movement of
what refuses full emplotment and that thus will not stay in place, an “uncanny . . . movement
[that] happens for the sake of move- ment” itself that is always already internally fractal and
multiple.58 This is the movement of a differential (w)hole, of what I noted earlier that Robinson
called “the collective being, the ontological totality,” indeed, incompletion’s totality. As an out-
movement that displays a condition of internally folded togetherness, an inner loom or serial
coilings that bespeak some other kind of gathering, black malpractice is, I guess we could say,
complicated.
The trick here then is for my explication to be carried out in such a way that the very malpractice
I am concerned with comes into view as itself an alternative imaginary that releases the sacred
(and our imagina- tions of what such a term might mean) from settler logics of sovereignty and
the sovereign. This must be an explication that holds malpractice open to its own outside and in
this way opens out onto a poetics of the sacred, a movement in which a sociality of deviancy, of
deregulated get- ting together, is itself a transcendently immanent and an immanently
transcendent practice of outside. Internal to the sacredness of such devi- ant out(side)ness is a
fundamental claim: black radical malpractice imag- ines and is the practice, indeed, the ritual
conjuring of other modes of being-with, a kind of monastic- or Bedouin-like habit of
otherworldly assembling, of convening what the musician N. in Late Arcade, the latest
installment of Mackey’s serial novel From a Broken Bottle Perfume Still Emanates, calls “Some
Other Sunday.”59 Such malpractice is not anti- American, which is not serious enough;
irreducible to the political as we know it, the radicalism of black malpractice is an ante-American
poetics, the critique of political theology and thus of “God” as governor or world manager.

Tag
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

This all brings me to the question: Is there a breach worth inhabit- ing? I say yes. Indeed, what
has my attention is failure’s internal genera- tivity. This is something that Sarah Jane Cervenak
and I elsewhere have thought about as “inefficiency’s abundance,” which is not unrelated to
failure’s queerness.63 More still, it’s a distinctive kind of breach that I want here to brood upon,
to wit, blackness as the breach of religiosecular administration, the breakdown of political
theology or sovereignty’s onto- theological protocols, protocols that solder sovereignty to the
sacred. A practice of desedimentation, blackness breaks the settler alliance between sovereignty
and sacrality. Given this, we might ask, What opens up when blackness is understood as
breaching political theology, indeed, as breach- ing the theosecular propriety that secures
statecraft? What if, precisely in breaching the settler alliance between sovereignty and sacrality,
the very alliance that produces “civil religion” by subjecting the wild ener- gies or the “total
value” of the sacred to “right-hand” capture, blackness is disclosed as monstrous enthusiasm, as
monstrance of an abundance capturable neither by currency nor politicality, as a kind of
(witch)crafti- ness beyond statecraft?64

I want to stay with these questions. Indeed, the claim I advance here might be framed as
follows: were we to understand blackness precisely as breaching theopoliticality, as that
malpracticed imagination of other- or even no-worldliness in the name of dwelling with the
earth, one that sights and sounds the earth’s regeneration, what would then be given for study
would be a consideration of blackness as that fugitive symptom of what theology cannot
regulate, what exceeds sovereignty’s politicotheological or theopolitical ground and
atmosphere. That is to say, I’m interested in blackness as symptomatic of the always already
ruptured or breached Wor(l)d of Man. Indeed, to understand blackness as breach of theosecu-
lar as theopolitical propriety is to understand blackness with Sora Han and Fred Moten as
“nonperformance,” though nonperformance is now understood as enthusiasm’s insovereign
poetics of the breach—a breach of religious contract in the name of some other freedom.65
From that breach, the sacred, in flight from sovereignty, understood as practices of what
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have recently called “self-owning, earth- owning” accumulation
in and as the history of slavery and settler colonial- ism, comes into view.66 Blackness as rupture
or (de)generative breach is nothing less than a sacred praxis, that Sycoraxian, black feminist
move- ment that eluded Prospero and whose flesh Caliban bore making him a mama’s baby,
bearer of the heritage of the mother dispossessed, carried by the sexual cut to “his own
personhood” by which he is marked by “the ‘female’ within” and in this way denizen of some
day, Some Other Sun- day, earthly inhabitant of no-world.67

Poetics, Beyond

What I am calling here the malpracticed poetics of Some Other Sunday or sacred
nonperformance, Sylvia Wynter takes up in an as yet unpublished, nine-hundred-plus page
manuscript, Black Metamorphosis.68 It is to this work, which I read as anticipating black
malpractice as sacred nonper- formance, that I want to turn to anchor further what I have been
saying.

Written in the decade of the 1970s, the decade that saw the for- mal emergence of black
feminist theoretical discourse, Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is a massive meditation on black
life as on but not of the plantation, on but not of this territorialized world, a dwelling with the
earth. This dynamic of “on but not of,” Wynter compresses into what she calls “beyond” (439)—
beyond this world, indeed, beyond the Western philosophical idea of World because this
beyond concerns baseness itself and, in this way, the thingliness of the earth itself, which I
understand as connected to what Ferreira da Silva has called raw “materia prima”: “akin to
Hortense Spillers’s [notion of] flesh . . . [in] the raw, The Thing, as a referent of undeterminacy
(∞ − ∞) or materia prima, hails blackness’s capacity to release the imagination from the grips of
the subject and its forms, which is but a first gesture in regard to a mode of thinking that
contemplates virtuality and actuality all and at once.”69 As representa- tion’s nullification, this
release from the grips of the subject and its forms is nothing less than a black radical release
from the world’s terms of order in the name of the undeterminancy of matter, in the name of
the earth itself. My use of the notions of “outside” and “beyond” early in this article represents
my attempt to think in the company of Wynter (and Ferreira da Silva), whom here I read as a
thinker both of the theopolitical evis- ceration of the sacred, which evisceration is nothing but
the emergence of the anthropocene as the plantationocene, and of the sacred rethought as the
entanglement of aliveness as such. If entangled liveliness indexes a nonpropertied return to or a
fallenness that is, in fact, a dwelling with the earth, then Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is about
that fallenness, about blackness (to abuse a theological language) as a lapsarian condition. It is
about black fallenness, a dwelling with the earth wherein, as Wynter elab- orates, the African,
transformed by the law of property into something ostensibly ownable by parties to a contract,
nevertheless enfleshes an even deeper transformation. This deeper transformation is what is
meant by metamorphosis—metamorphosis as experimentality, as larval innovation and genres
of the fungible, of an unsettling that exceeds even if coming into view under the occasion of the
colonial violence of enslavement or settlement. For this reason, metamorphosis signals what is
irreducible to representation. It bespeaks that liveliness beyond the plantation placement or
emplotments of what Wynter will later demarcate as “Man (1 and 2).”70 The metamorphic
“trans-iness” if not “tranny-ness,” the “trans*” that arises through “trans*Atlantic” passage, this
fundamental and noniden- titarian queerness or excess of the “asterisked human” is blackness’s
ever receding groundless ground.71

Here I start to get at what is at stake in Wynter’s “beyond,” that asterisked living that exceeds
and nullifies capital’s spatiotemporality. What Wynter means by beyond all unfolds here
between Man’s eviscera- tion of the sacred in and as the plantation bulldozing of the earth, on
the one hand, and those larval architectures of flesh, the flesh of the earth in excess of
plantation landscapes, on the other. More specifically, what Wynter means by beyond turns on
her critical distinction, advanced in another piece of writing also of the decade of the 1970s,
between the plantation and the plot ground. Distilling central ideas of Black Metamor- phosis,
the 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” meditates on that part of the plantation
known as the provision ground or the plot. On, but in some sense not of, the plantation, the plot
is where slaves culti- vated lives of their own replete with practices not at home in the
plantation world. Here, slaves grew yams and other foods for themselves, as well as engaged in
funeral practices for the dead. Not at home or dispossessed of home, they practiced home-in-
dispossession where dispossession itself nurtured if not became a kind of home—home through
lost kinship. Just as in “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (and in Black Metamorpho- sis)
Wynter is interested both in the rise of the novel as a literary form that emerges in relationship
to the plantation system and in what exceeds the plot of the novel as capitalist fiction that
reinforces (plantation) history, we find her also interested in the problem of the plantation itself
as the novel’s geological complement. That is, Wynter is interested in that other exces- sive plot
of the provision ground. Here the plot of the provision ground, on Wynter’s reading, stands in a
geologically excessive relationship to (white) “anthropocenic extraction,” as Kathryn Yusoff has
put it.72 {For a more recent consideration of the plantation and the plot, see Rusert, “Plantation
Ecologies”; Dillon, “Religion and Geopolitics in the New World”; Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations”;
and Paton, “Obeah Acts.” I am particularly taken by Toni Wall Jaudon’s interpretation of Obeah
as Caribbean religious practice in that it aligns with Wynter’s notion of “beyond.” Perhaps the
very word religion, given its emergence within the early modern, imperial-colonial matrix, risks
already overdetermining one’s engagement with the various expressions of religions of the
black diaspora. Perhaps something like Wynter’s “beyond” opens up another vista of
understanding. A practice beyond the terror of territory, Obeah in the Caribbean emerges in
Jaudon’s analysis as a complex “world-making practice” that must be taken seriously. Doing so,
she argues, “shows us that religions do cultural work” of crafting alternative, world imaginations
(“Obeah’s Sensations,” 718). Operating without and beyond a boundary, black diaspora “religion
does not simply ‘spill over and seep through’ national boundaries. . . . Rather, it upends the very
ground on which the nation-state rests” (718). This is all to say that black diaspora religion (and
the black study thereof) refuses the logic of divinized sovereignty as a logic of territory. Its
practice entails the critique of what Stuart Elden has called “territory as political technology”
(The Birth of Territory).}

Nurturing alternative modes of existence amid plantation devastation, the plot moves in
relationship to and yet exceeds the plantation system of racial capital- ism. If “the plantation
system, a system, owned and dominated by external forces,” and whose law of property as the
will to accumulate is bound up with the seizing or would-be enclosing of the earth, which entails
a colonizing of desire itself and ultimately a sovereigntizing of the sacred, then black popular
culture, animated by a “demonic” or “sociopoetic force,”73 Wynter says emerges from the
beyond of the provision ground or the plot that “the planters gave [and] on which [slaves then
grew] food to feed themselves in order to maximize profits.”74 This provision ground or plot
system, which was on but not of the plantation, was an “indigenous, autochtonous” zone of
semiautonomous cultivation, plots of land on the plantation in which what was grown was not
reducible to utility for the enslavers or planters.75 Rather, these were zones of “useless” beauty,
zones where black life could grow in the earth, where black cultures could take rootless,
rhizomatic root. A locus of socioecological cultivation not based in the law and rights of
property, provision ground was as such a scene, Wynter tells us, of malpractice, of “cultural
guerilla resistance to the plan- tation system.”76 In its otherness and underness, the plot was
the scene of alternative ecologies that from the brutal scene of property itself poten- tiated
unbounded, unpropertized, insovereign relationalities. From the activities of “metamorphosis”
that took place provisionally from the plot and in back woods, Wynter glimpses alternative
sacralities, imaginations of the sacred beyond property and its logics of individuation and bound
up with the baseness of the earth itself. Hence, in Black Metamorphosis Wynter directly engages
with questions of the sacred, its settler colonial evisceration, and also its release from (racial)
modernity’s god terms in the unfinishable metamorphosis that is black popular culture.

Here is one particularly poignant statement in which we see Wynter attending subtly to the
theological architecture of the plantationing of the planet or to a certain plantation-godding of
the world, even as we also glimpse her suggesting a metamorphosis of the sacred, that is, a
hidden, exilic sacrality aligned with pollution and wandering, a subterranean dis- turbance of
“the norm”: “The gods had been transshipped and brought their space with them. But the sky
now had to be underground. They themselves were displaced gods, gods as Bastide says in a
fine phrase, in exile. They were kept hidden now not only because their power was feared as
polluting but because they had to avoid the terrible counter-power of the plantation gods.
Knowing exile, they lost their complacency, the com- placency of the norm, and became
contingent gods” (532). Wynter here claims that, as a regime of property, settlerism had to do
with a total environment or a cosmology. It laid organizational claim on “the sky” and ground,
on mortals and divinities. This is a structure of Heideggerian-like worlding in which the
plantation gods superintend or provide a “sacred canopy” for property relations. The plantation
gods provide the ontotheo- logical structure for the ontopolitical theology of property as basis
of mak- ing a world. Moreover, this ontopolitical theology of property is a political theology of
race(ialization) that takes places under the superintendence of the gods and under whose
superintendence masters are themselves, in fact, worlded, coming into being and into view
precisely as so many sovereigns, as parties to a contract, as legal subjects within the law (of
ownership). What is key for Wynter, and for me following her, is that this operation of worlding
is an operation of religioning and race-ing within the terms of what I call the “religious contract,”
religioning and worlding, or religioning as a kind of worlding, as a kind of terror-filled or
terrifying race-ing or racializing, which is also a settler sovereigntizing of things. It is this nexus of
world and religion, property and contract, ownership and sovereignty that Wynter spies out and
meditates on under the rubric of “the gods.” Furthermore, it is under the canopy of the
plantation gods, or what I am calling the canopy of property-worlding, that ontology and
anthropology, World and Man, in fact, emerge. More precisely, it is within this canopy of the
gods that an ontology and anthropology, that an onto- theology, of the World of Man in his
overdetermination of human being emerges. Property-worlding as conditioned by the
plantation gods is what has come to ground the being of beings, including and most especially
the being of human being, Dasein, as the being of ownership, property, and the proper.

By contrast, the transshipped gods understood now as contingent bespeak, Wynter says, a kind
of poetics of the underworld, an underworld animated by contingency. This contingency I want
to align with Ferreira da Silva’s notion of undeterminancy or the infinity of prime matter. That is
to say, I want to suggest here a convergence between Wynter’s “beyond” as bound up with the
transshipped gods in connection with the enslaved and Ferreira da Silva’s “beyond the equation
of value” in which an uncat- egorical, nonrepresentable blackness breaks form, breaks the
equation; this anoriginal breach of the equation bespeaks a power or a “capacity to disclose
another horizon of existence.”77 Not Heideggerian worlding but a black radical Wynterian (and
a Ferreira da Silvan–poethical) underworld- ing and otherworlding and no-worlding beyond
property and sovereignty and toward an ecopoetics of the social whole: this is black
malpractice’s anatheological concern, where the transshipped gods index a sociality of
entanglement.78 {In speaking of worlding, I have Heidegger in mind albeit routed through
Wynter’s “beyond,” Jaudon’s notion of religion as “world-making” (see n. 72), or, in my
language, aided by Ferreira da Silva, as that “poethical” practice, the malpractice of
otherworlding from the site of nonbeing or the condition paraontological thingli- ness (Nahum
Chandler and Moten) and no-bodiness (Ferreira da Silva). See Chan- dler, “Problem”; Heidegger,
“Thing”; and Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art.” If for Heidegger, worlding is a type of
violent process that, as David L. Eng wonderfully summarizes, “[brings] certain creatures and
things . . . into the time and space of European modernity” and in doing so stage the European
Man’s coming into being, which is to say his genesis or his “worlding,” his “Let there be . . .”
(Gen. 1), then that same process “unworlds” others in the very worlding of the world,
“[consigning those others] to wait, excluded and concealed” (“End(s) of Race,” 1485). This
concealment is the condition of “no-bodies,” as Ferreira da Silva might put it, the condition of
being “earthed,” as Eng puts it, rather than fully of this world. See Jaudon, “Obeah’s
Sensations”; Ferreira da Silva, “No-Bodies”; Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist
Poethics”; and Eng, “End(s) of Race.”} In talking specifically about the transshipped gods meta-
morphosed into what we might think of as “trans*gods” in relation to a trans* or a fantastic or
an “asterisked humanity” from the hold to the plot to black popular culture, Wynter says:

The gods . . . express the social whole, not as its sum, but as its mode of interrelationships. The
gods are the conceptual symbols in which the com- munity as the social whole participates. It is
through this participation that they experience themselves as a social whole. It is for the
experience, by the individual or group, of the social whole, that gods . . . are necessary. No
individual or individual group by itself can experience the whole. (502)

If part of the objective of Wynter’s Metamorphosis is to offer a theory of blackness in its escape
from yet within the constraints of property’s bru- talities, then this entails as well a theory, if not
of religion, then certainly of the sacred reconceived as and in the sociality of flight itself where
the indi- vidual “I” is already broken open, “dividuated” and thus now understood as the
ecstatic, enthusiastic yield of a ceremony of collective plot life not reducible to narrativization or
emplotment. This is the radical rapture, the “critical enthusiasm,” to purloin from Jordana
Rosenberg, of black social life—black rapture as black social life.79 Wynter puts it this way:
“Enthu- siasm and exaltation are the uncolonized law of desire that expresses lib- eration from
societal codings, from its ordering of ego-identities. It is the loss of the public self, this return to
the profound interior self and to the experience of unity of these selves that the truly religious
ritual worship- pers or the Carnival revelers, experience. It is a form of knowledge, the gnosist
[sic] form of knowledge opposed yet complemented to the objec- tive knowledge of the
dominant order” (549). What we discover here is that Wynter’s understanding of sacred flight,
or of the sacred as exilic divinities on the run, is part of the inner logic of a theory and practice of
the social that black studies is given to study. More still, this concern on Wynter’s part with
transshipped divinities, who again stand in for the transshipped, is never not ecological,
geographical, and geological. It is always already concerned with that revolution of the ground
that is a revolution of sociality at the scene of property itself. Resilience in trans- shipment takes
the form now of an underness, of being underground.80 From the underground there is a
revolution, Wynter maintains, of the ground and of the atmosphere and the cosmos insofar as
now “the sky had to be underground,” where above is below; from the plot and through the
cultural activities thereof, “there [arises] knowledge of a higher logi- cal typing, knowledge
which can move outside the codes of knowledge, prescribed and determined by the dominant
modes of social relations, the kosmos [sic] of the status quo” (549).

While there is much more that needs to be said about Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis than I
have space to now say, I offer just a few more remarks about the significance of this text for my
argument about black malpractice as a poetics of the sacred.81 What I find interesting is
Wynter’s understanding that at stake in black life from the plot, and therefore as underground
plot life, is her attention to blackness as revolt that ruptures the forces of the gods of the
plantation, the forces of plantation politicality. She is a theoretician of that rupture, that black
rapture of black malpractice, that underworldly poetics of the sacred and of the social that
compels me. Black revolt is a practice of sacred sociality, a transgressing of the god terms of
racial capitalism. In its anatheological breaking of the law of the individuated subject, black
malpractice cannot help but be more and less than heresy. Indeed, the plot was the seedbed of
black popular culture, the site of an anteheretical underworldliness exceeding capitalism’s
malevo- lent, though presented as a benevolent, mathematics. Anteheretical black- ness is given
in practices of living, experiences of excessive enfleshment that Wynter calls “the underlife.”
Here “mystical reunion with the earth” given in and as marronage—reinhabitations of the earth,
exercises of the sacred as practices of property’s unsettlement—took place.82 In one of her
most powerful descriptions of the mysticism of the underlife and what I am calling black
malpractice, Wynter offers this account of revolt as earth dwelling or life’s regeneration:

Brought to the new world in this figuration/representation of the Earth are the complex of
attitudes that will provide the common ground for the cre- ativity of the black popular masses.
The concept of man as generator, both of his material and of his social life, would remain
dynamically viable in the underlife of the slave’s life, in that underlife where they gave
expression to that unique aspect of the soul, at the same time as they conformed to their role as
piezas in the superordinate system of the plantation.

Dance and song and music, like all art in the culture of origin, were represented as the result of
man’s self-expression, his unique fulfillment of the Earth’s generative powers working through
him, as she, the Earth, fulfilled herself in giving birth to the crop and therefore, to man. For the
earth—like the sea for fishing tribes—was the “material” basis of man’s existence, of his
environment, was represented as the generator of life. And the supreme ethic that arose from
this representation was the commandment to generate life as man’s life was itself generated.
Evil was the absence of life. But the absence of life was not death. Rather, death was the ground
of the regeneration of life. Evil was anything that halted or broke the exchange of life and death.
(528)

We find in Wynter’s description here an account of black life reritual- ized as that flesh that
plantation capitalism eucharistically cannibalized and yet could not fully digest, consumed in the
production of value but that itself is of no value or is prodigal because it is anterior to value.
Such malpracticing flesh—manifest, for example, in funeral rites, the growing of crops, and
especially the rhythmic and sonic traditions, the “flow” of Afro-diasporic musics—moves within
and disturbs the bowels of racial capitalism, its indigestible and excremental remainder. Here
we find an “alternative mode of life . . . alternative desires” not captured by what Wynter calls
the “theologization of the material life” in which there is the “production of the economic as
[the] sole reality principle” (439). That theological production, or the theologization of life, is in
fact an attempted reduction, the “reduction of man to his productive capacity” (439). Wyn- ter
has her keen philosophic eye trained on how theologization—the reduction of the sacred to a
god-term or to “God” as form and figure— functions as the symbolic condition and, indeed, the
semiotic condition, of economization through a mathematics of individuation of life, discrete
units of labor. And yet, she also is looking at what discreetly escapes, indeed, meditating on the
practice, particularly the sonic practice, of escape itself. There is that which exceeds
theoeconomic and theosecular reduction, what is before and after and in the break of political
theology, that immanent transcendence that Wynter carefully charts as a mythic practice—as a
(rh)ymthmic malpractice, if I might offer an anagrammatic annotation that points us back to
Mackey—a poetics that returns us to the earth. This return is precisely what Wynter means by
“beyond”:

The Myth of the Return was a central pillar in that figural representation by which black popular
culture was to establish its own form of the tran- scendent Africa—later translated into Heaven
—became the más alla, the Beyond of the gnostics, the kingdom of Jah, that assails and
delegitimates the present reality.

But the Beyond was, for the New World black popular forces, a Beyond which existed spatially
as an alternative mode of being, rather than tempo- rally in an eternally delayed future, the
conceptualization by which official Christianity supports structures of domination. The future
was, for the New World black, incorporated into the now, heaven was here and now because
experienced. The Symbolic Return to Africa or Heaven, to the true Home, was ceaselessly
carried out through the cults, and their U.S. variants, the ring shouts. (439)

What comes into view here is that the plot—a locus both of constraint and capaciousness where
life was reritualized and “the land remained the Earth” rather than a sovereignly managed,
propertized World—was never not a breach of the American “sacred canopy.” A material
“beyond,” which Wynter gives us to understand as bound up with the baseness of the earth and
experienced in the ex-perience of out-of-this-world-ness itself, from the spirituality of cults and
the ecstasy of ring shouts to New World black popular expressive culture, the plot was a soil in
which things “jes grew.” Locus of “an alternative mode of being” that extends a history below
Middle Passage’s waterline, the plot is an ante-American breach of political theology. This
breach indexes a bursting through from the plot of a peculiar, a strange archive—an archive of a
bent and broken sacrality. Here the sacred manifests in degraded, wounded kinship, as some
sort of mysterious collectivity that works in accordance with a Rastafari-like logic of the “I ’n’ I”
and the “we ’n’ we,” and in accordance, as well, with Mack- ey’s engagement with these
Rastafarianisms in his serial poems in which he coins the notions of the “I-Insofar” and the “we-
Insofar.”83 These coinages are meant to index that “play of dislocated identity” that marks
diaspora (which is to say, black social life) as dwelling in the “quantum gap” of “a subjunctive,
qualified I, an alternate, unmortared I.”84 This is what comes through, as Mackey alerts us, in
one of the lines in the poem, “Night in Jaipur”: “Insofar as there / was an I it wasn’t hers.”85 All
of this suggests that we are dealing here with a strange I-ness, a strange we-ness, an “I ’n’ I”-
ness, a “we ’n’ we”-ness, but just as well, shall we say, a “s/he ’n’ they”-ness, if not a “they ’n’
dem”-ness. This strangeness points to that which is ever incomplete and incompletable. It
points, in short, to incompletion as such—the monstrance of the black radical sacred, of black
malpractice. Such is what brews on the plot that is on but not of the plantation, not of this
World. A frenzied zone of “‘enthusiasm’ . . . in the religious sense” (545), Wynter insists, the plot
was a site of rapturous seizures against having been seized, against the ge(n)ocidal seizing of the
earth. The beyond that is the plot, and that evades full narrative emplot- ment, bespeaks an
underlife, a “non-class culture,” that heralds nothing less than the apocalypse of the (plantation)
(as) World, a zone of festive dwelling where plotters are caught up in an ecstasy of black
fallenness, in “Orphic descent into an Other-world,” into that “amorphous, under- ground
Symbolic Order” (708)—into “a world outside of the rationality of the bourgeois world,” outside
of “the instrumental rationality of the dominant order” and thus into the now of the earth in
which each instant is saturated (545): desire itself decolonized, all libidinal energy—at once
nonproductive and yet generative—released, raptured from as well as rupturing the channels of
capitalist, utilitarian production. Bespeaking some other ecology, the plot is an ante-American
no-place, a nowhere that exceeds property management and plantation administration under
the superintendence of the gods or, in short, the terror of politicality.
 Cards
Tag
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi
After an initial consideration in the next section of this article to unfold what I mean by the sacred in such a way that begins
juxtaposing blackness and the sacred, I then reframe the Charlottesville incident and the general crisis of politicality today as nothing
less than a crisis of the sacred that, rather than disavowing malpractice, in fact calls for it. Together these first two sections serve as
a springboard from which I rethink in the remainder of the article the inherently ambivalent
notion of the sacred,
mobilizing it as a tool for black thought—that is, as a tool for thinking blackness precisely as
opening up an alternate imaginary of the sacred from which also opens up other worlds. Here
blackness indexes sacrality without property and without sovereignty, thus activating other
modes of dwelling on and with the earth, other modes of knowing that we might call “abyssal
nonknowledge,” other socialities or congregationalities that exceed settler politicality. I call this a poetics of the
sacred. Stated differently, if in the immediate sections that follow I consider the myth of politicality or political knowledge in which
certain energies of the sacred are harnessed to state projects and incarnated in charismatic
political leadership (this is, what the Charlottesville white nationalists rallied to defend) to produce a kind of “pure”
or “right-hand sacred” meant to secure homogeneity, then in the rest of this article I consider the sacred in its
base, heterogeneous, or immanent modalities—that is, the sacred not as figure but as impure, “left-hand” flight, indeed, as
that movement or passage or diaspora of spirit that enlivens or animates blackness in its would-be corpsing. I now
turn to the question of the sacred.

The Right- and Left-Hand Sacred

Building from Émile Durkheim and especially Durkheim’s student Rob- ert Hertz, Georges Bataille, and Roger Callois give us an
important initial handle on the sacred in its ambivalent double-sidedness and as a tool for grappling with the modern social text.2 In
“The Psychological Struc- ture of Fascism,” published in 1933, Bataille
mobilized a discourse of the sacred to
examine what was happening at the time and, crucially, to begin thinking toward modes of
social life that exceed the political as we know it. For this, he expanded the basic profane/sacred
duality that Durkheim bequeathed to French social theory into a distinction between the homo- geneous and
the heterogeneous. This became for him an analytic frame- work through which to make sense of fascism.
Identified with produc- tion, the sphere of the profane or what Bataille called the homogeneous is an exclusively
utilitarian realm or a restricted economy of exchange. Conversely, the elements of the sphere of the
heterogeneous or what Bataille called the sacred indicate a general economy of an unrestricted
expenditure of energy that, though to a point employable and thus valu- able because useful
and useable within a social system to help render the system coherent , even if fragilely so, remains
fundamentally excessive, ecstatic, or rapturous.3 {Lindon Barrett is similarly concerned with the problematic of capitalism as a
restricted economy of value, though, in
centering the idea of blackness as general excess and thus as
unrestricted general economy, Barrett goes beyond Bataille and much of the tradition of French
thought that emerged in his wake. See Barrett, Black- ness and Value.}
To borrow a formulation from Roger Callois, a colleague of Bataille’s in a dissident study group that met in the back of a Paris
bookstore and that they called the “College of Sociology,” we might think of left-hand experiences of the sacred as those in which
the sacred is nothing less than the experience of sociality through and as infraction given in “inter-
affective” excess, given in and as “collective ecstasy.” 4 The sacred here manifests as the experience of
innovation and improvisation, what Callois calls an “improvisation of the sacred,” that connects with a
“mysterious world” (152). For Callois, such improvisational ecstasy bespeaks a fundamental
“metamorphosis of . . . being.” I will revisit this term again when I consider Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis.
Staying for now with Callois, improvisational ecstasy as the metamorphosis of being indicates an
anguished yet joyous dwelling in a kind of blurred communion apart from and in critique of the
presumptions of individuation (282). Akin to Callois’s description of the sacred as a kind of ecstatic and anoriginal
metamorphosis, thinking with Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Italian female mystic, Bataille figures the sacred as
a sort of fecund, negative space, an “abyss of possibilities . . . where the possible is the impos-
sible itself” and in which “ecstatic, breathless, experience . . . destroys the depths . . . of being
by unveiling” a nonpossessable, a nonsubjective zone irreducible to property and thus
irreducible to propertied subjectivity.5 While Bataille eventually devotes an entire book-length study to such “inner
experience,” where “inner” here is not to be understood as the interiority of a supposedly coherent,
individuated self but a kind of collective aliveness, Callois advances his thinking in this vein in an essay called
“Festival.”6 Presented as a talk to the dissident College of Sociology study group, “Festival” considers the sacred in
terms of a collective effervescence and eruption that characterized ancient festivals and feasts
and whose vestiges one finds, Callois argues, in contemporary carnivals and such. Such festive events of “yesteryear and today,” he
says, are “always defined by dancing, singing, excitement, excessive eating and drinking. It
is necessary to go all out to
the point of exhaustion, to the point of sick- ness. That is the very law of the festival” (281). Here profane
or chronological temporality or the time of Man and his others is disrupted in the name of
dwelling in some other experience of time beyond the logic of separability. To dwell in the
spacetime of “difference without separability,” and thus in ecstatic temporality, is to dwell in
the experience of carnival time, which is the experience of being out of time, of dwelling in
time-out, in out-time. It indicates a dwelling unhistorically in history, which is to say, in
history’s exhaustion. In short, it is to be off beat. 7 Such is Callois’s description of “inner experience,” where
experience here indicates a condition of ek-stasis—a dwelling in and witnessing to out-ness as
such. This is a condition of being dispossessed of a self, which is a condition of (non)possession
that is anterior to property, anterior to propertied self-possession, indeed anterior to a possessive and
possessing self altogether.8 {I cannot help but hear and want to complicate what Callois is detailing here, and by extension
Bataille as well and arguably French feminist écriture too, under the force of black feminism, particularly under the force of M.
NourbeSe Philip’s poetics and more specifically still under the force of her consideration of inner space (the invasion of the space
between black women’s legs) and outer place (the invasion of the Caribbean and the New World and the establishment of what
Philip calls the plantation machine). The
invasion of the former, so as to tether black women to the
plantation machine in order to sustain that machine through reproduction, links the patriarchal
penetration of the space between the legs to the penetration of the place now called the
Caribbean. Philip writes that violent coming together of inner space and outer place as “s/place.” Philip is also clear that space
and place not only violently come together through the slash in “s/place”; they also diverge
through that same slash. That coming together and/as divergence points to a zone irreducible
to the inner/outer opposition or dialectic. On the page, Philip signifies that zone under the sign “dis place,” which
she extends as “dis placement.” All of this, Philip unfolds in her essay, “Dis Place: The Place Between.” Though I am unable to give a
sustained engagement with this profound essay here, I read this essay as Philip’s own speaking back to Bataille and Callois, back to
French sacred sociology, back to the modernist social text more generally. Philip
is involved in a semiotics of
unsaying and untelling that she places under the rubric of “silence” (295). More specifically, Philip unsays
the notion of “inner experience” through the slash that separates and connects “s/place” (288) and by means of the collectively
agentive “silence” (295) operative within “dis place” and that surges as an insurgency through the rupture of “dis placement” (290).
Unsaying here, in other words, is a mo(ve)ment of passage, a movement of blackness. Rapture and
rupture here comingle with and yet beyond the violence that sustains the opposition between
inner space and outer place. This is a poetics of “between,” of “dis place,” of dispos- session in the name of a
carnivalesque or a bacchanalian spirit possession. Later in this article we will see how Sylvia Wynter, another Caribbean
theorist, effects a similar outcome through her notion of “beyond.” Between and beyond is irreducible to
patriarchal settler colonial and enslaving logics that oppose inner space to be invaded and
territorialized outer place. For Philip, “dis place between” indicates a black feminist ecstatics of the
sacred, an ecstatics of “earth and sound” (296) encountered in that other (dis) place: Caribbean carnival, where “women [mash]
the ground—dancing and wining their all any and everything . . . shaking their booty, doing their thing, their very own thing, jazzin it
up, wining up and down the streets, parading their sexuality . . . taking back the streets, making them their own as they speading
their joying up and down the streets of Port of Spain. . . . Is the only time of the year that women—old women, young women, thin
women, fat women, women women— showing off their sexuality without undue censure or fear under the benign gaze of OUR
ROYAL WILL AND PLEASURE. Oh, for a race of women” (312–13). I take up this black radical, black feminist ecstatics of the sacred in
a continued thinking with Philip and other (black) critical theorists in my book in progress, “Black Rapture.”}

A condition perhaps of spirit possession, this socioecstasy given in the ferment of the festival manifests the
sacred as a sociality of infraction against “taboos” and “rules” meant to ensure propriety and
comportment (282). Such a tabooed sociality in festivaled rapture is nonboundaried and thus
nontabooed in the first place.

We are on the threshold, the limen of the thought of the heterogenous or the otherwise. In raptured ecstasy, the element of the
heterogeneous betokens ontopoliticality’s, indeed, the human’s collapse in the face of what the
violent homogeneity of ontopoliticality cannot hold. The unholdable, the unhavable—
notwithstanding that juridical-economic order seeks to seize and thus reduce the unhavable to ownership or property— is in fact
uncapturable; it will not fully “get in formation.” Indexing another horizon of existence (where “ex-
istence” is necessarily “ek-static” and as such neither is nor is not but “is-not”), the energies of heterogeneity are for
this reason ultimately, Bataille says, an unemployable, invaluable, or useless surplus9 that indicates a
kind of energy-in-flux, a charged or “base matter”10 that allows the elements of heterogeneity ,
as Michèle H. Rich- man puts in elaborating Bataille on this point, “to break the conventional barriers upon which
homogeneity relies.”11 Bataille associates this break and, importantly, the noncommodifiable
knowledge or the nonknowledge from the break that surges through it with what is irreducible
to production or monetary and identitarian exchange. This is what makes the heterogeneous
powerful and dangerous to systems of politicality or order, why, in other words, it is dangerously sacred.
Decentralized and acephalous, the heterogeneous, which bespeaks the sacred of “the left-hand,” indexes “a force
that disrupts the regular course of things” (143), though those very disruptive energies can be recruited
for “right-hand” purposes, aggregated to an anointed leader, a political “pastor” who uses a kind of “pastoral
power” to seal the breach of heterogeneity and violently return a polity to homogeneity.12 In “The Psychological
Structure of Fascism,” Bataille interprets the rise of Hitler and 1930s German fascism along with the resulting effects on and uptake
into French politics within this frame- work and as a manifestation of the right-hand sacred—a recruitment of the wild energies of
the sacred to seal the breach of heterogeneity as that political breach of purity at the time came to be figured in the Jews and in
other undesirables. I
read the summer 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the
general rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency in related, right-hand terms.13

But to stay with Bataille, in that same essay he keeps his eye trained on the left side of things where there
is always
heterogeneity or base ener- gies exceeding the terms of order. He finds examples in this regard in the untouchables
of India, on the one hand, and among the destitute in the economically and socially “less ritualistic” or “advanced civilizations” of the
West, as he puts it, on the other. In the latter, “being destitute is all it takes . . . to create between the self
and others—who consider themselves the expression of normal man—a nearly insurmountable
gap” (144). Whether it be the hereditarily untouchables or the destitute in advanced countries, it is the “lowest strata of
society,” Bataille contends, “[that] can . . . be described as heterogeneous . . . those who generally provoke
repulsion and can in no case be assimilated to the whole of mankind” (144). In their
untouchability or destitution, such groups are a heterogeneous element associated with
useless expenditure, with “violence, excess, delirium, madness . . . [that] to varying degrees”
has the capacity because occluded within but not fully subsumed by the juridical-economic
order to unsettle the terms of order (142). Interpreted as mobs, they are outlaw or “[breakers]
of the laws of social homogeneity.” As such, “these impov- erished classes,” Bataille says, “are characterized by
the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things ” (144), particularly those
tabooed things, those things, as Richman explains again elaborating Bataille, placed under “restricted contact”
and whose collective effervescence indicates a “transgression” or a “negation [that] surpasses
itself” in exceeding every closed order “without returning to the original condition or state it had negated.”14 Here we find
the sacred in its excessive, left- hand mode of ceaseless rupture and rapture, as harbinger of a sociality without
limit or completion.
This brings us to an absolutely vital point around which much of what I want to say in this article and, indeed, much of my effort to
mobi- lize a discourse of the sacred for black studies, turns: the ambiguity within the very notion of the sacred itself as both pure and
the impure. Alexander Riley succinctly clarifies the issues here: “The
sacred is not only the holy or consecrated
but can also be the accursed.”15 That is to say, “in addition to being opposed in a binary relationship
to the profane [this is Bataille’s sphere of homogeneity], [the sacred] is itself comprised of two opposing
binary poles: the forces that maintain physical and moral purity and order, life, and health [the
holy that upholds the holy], and those that contribute to impurity , evil, sacrilege, disease, and death [the
accursed].”16 The former sphere of pure divinity depends on an accursed share, an excremental element, to
constitute and secure itself, within the terms of a restricted economy of sacrificial exchange, as
pure. As Giorgio Agamben understood and as Riley reiterates, this doubled, contradictory or ambiguous sense of the sacred is
connected to the Latin word from which it derives: sacer. Riley goes on to explain how the idea of the sacred can trip us up: hewing
close to the Latin sense of sacer, “the French sacré . . . can mean both, and is frequently used in both senses (la musique sacrée, holy
or sacred music, and un sacré menteur, a damned or accursed liar), whereas the English ‘sacred’ has in practice lost the second
meaning.”17

If Bataille associates this second sense of the sacred, whose relationship to the first is not dialectical but excessive or abyssal, with
the untouchables and the destitute, then here I stretch the generally Durkheimian formulation of the right- and left-hand sacred,
bending along with it even Bataille’s more renegade formulation of sacred excess to that blackened or black sacral
(non)position that aroused the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in the first place as a violent
secondary, “right- hand” reaction. This opens up a consideration of the sacred’s proximity to
blackness wherein, following Hortense J. Spillers, we might think of blackness as “symptom of the
sacred,” as terrifying monstrance of that beautiful monstrosity , that inner scar voluntarily
claimed in having been called.18 The monstrosity to be claimed here, this “unbounded sociality,” concerns
“blackness as matter [that] signals [infinity], another world . . . that which exists without time
and out of space, in the plenum”19—the sacred otherwise. Here the sacred is obscure and formless, even “oceanic,” to
stay with Spillers’s Freudian-inflected formulation. More akin to that “raw prime matter” of which Denise Ferreira da Silva has
recently spoken as part and parcel of the virtuality of a “black feminist poethics,” the
sacred here is of the wild, of the
wilderness. To continue to think under the force of Spillers’s thought, the sacred, in its adjacency to blackness
or as itself symptomatically black, points to those hermetic energies or those forces of
enchantment, to metamorphosis bound to devotional practices of un/knowing. Black sacrality
indexes a certain liveliness and aliveness occasioned by, moving in relationship to, and yet
irreducible to the “spiritual ordeal” of death that is settler modernity.20 For this reason, black
radical sacrality, which we might just as well think of as the sorcery of (black social) life itself, unsettles, is ever
poised to incite volatility within regimes of politicality. That is to say, the sacred, as I am given to thinking
about it here as figuring a poetics of malpracticed black (reli- gious) study, is neither transcendental, pure, nor
beneficent but, rather, is base, stank, impure, low to the ground, underground, of and with the earth.
All this is to say, I approach the sacred as a kind of pathological and ek-static threshold before which
other, differential and unrepresentable presences, genres or forms of life, unplottable gatherings in
representation’s colonializing ruins, alternative ways of being with the earth, come into view.21

From the vantage point of regimes of politicality, black ek-static

life, which is to say black social life, cannot
help but be understood as indexing deviance, deviation, and aberration. Moving “in the break” of the
terror of politicality, black radical deviance is a practice of the social not reducible to politicality—a
studied “consent,” it has been said, “not to be a single being.” 22 This is a malpracticed
spirituality, a non/theological or, better put, an atheological and thus a “godlessmysticism”23
that points to frenzied existence that is so much more than resistance because such indeterminate
non/existence is on the far side of the concept, on the far side of a god-concept, on the far side of a god that stalls out as a static
concept and that thus installs the concept—on the far side, I mean, of “God as a Failed Figuration,” to echo poet Phillip B. Williams,
that which grounds “the American aesthetic.”24 That malpracticed, atheological godlessness bespeaks an interior,
collective alivenessconstantly ready, expectantly poised for the unexpectant, the experience of the ek-static—
to be moved, to be terrified, to love, to hate, to live magically, drunkenly, wanderously,
wonderously, erotically, joyously, childishly, prayerfully, in the radicality of a certain moving
stillness, a certain quarreling, in/sovereign quiet.25 This black (w)holiness that (in)sovereignly
exceeds the concept, we might call black rapture. It is along this path that I want to begin to unfold or
explicate black malpractice as the nonperformance of modernity’s god terms, as
nonperformative breach of the religious contract that subtends the racial contract insofar as
the social contract (of racism) is necessarily a religion contract whose terms are secular.26 {My
notion of a religion contract as animating modernity’s social contract as a race contract emerges in conversation with Sora Han’s
ground-shifting medi- tation on the 1857 legal case known in the legal archive as Betty’s Case. See Han, “Slavery as Contract.” At
issue in the case is the relationship between freedom and slavery for a slave woman, Betty, whom Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of the
Massachu- setts Supreme Court declared free by virtue of her arrival from Tennessee with her owners into the northern free state of
Massachusetts. In free territory and by means of a kind of legal alchemy, Betty
moves from being owned property
to free agent who can contract her labor to her former owner . The question of the case was
whether free will could be exercised in any and every way, including the freedom to contract
oneself back into slavery? The reason this legal question arose is because when Betty as slave in the South
traveled with her owners from Tennessee to Massachusetts, she also entered into the legal,
transcendental freedom that spatially obtains by virtue of being in the North, that is, by virtue
of breathing “free air,” as it was often put. And yet, though legally free in the North, Betty nevertheless
exercised that freedom against freedom itself. That is, she opted to return to Tennessee with her
former owners, thus exercising freedom towards unfreedom, towards becoming (again) a slave.
Han astutely walks us through the legal issues arguing that while slavery can be thought about under the rubric of property (which is
typically and most often how it is thought about), what Betty’s Case reveals is that “contract” is the more central
category and problematic. It is, Han says, “the condition of possibility for the slave’s property status” (403). Han further
argues that the kind of freedom Betty enacted was, in fact, an obscenity, an obscene form of
freedom, in that this is a practice of freedom that arrives as the negation of legal freedom, “a
giving away or a giving up on freedom.” This (un)free malpractice of legal, transcendental freedom, this
“nonperformance,” moves “in a subterranean” or outlaw realm, even as it shows up in relationship to the realm of
law and legal thought. Here freedom’s protocols as imagined within liberal (contract) law are
breached, disclosing that in Betty’s case, which is to say in “the case of blackness,” there is a fundamental
indistinction between slavery and (liberal) freedom. But this statement must be quickly sharpened: the
obscenity of Betty’s act of freedom is not merely that it breached the protocols of liberal
freedom. Rather, her freedom act discloses liberal freedom as never not already breached by
“a form of pure performativity” that, referring to Moten, Han calls “improvisation.” Improvisation
here indexes a mode of freedom that “cannot be specifically contracted , nor strictly performed
against a contract, but is nonetheless a legal form contract law might refer to as
nonperformance. We might say that improvisation is the kernel around which contract law’s recognition of
nonperformance circles, and that which it attempts to defend the promise [of the contracting parties]
against” (408). In “Black Rapture,” my book in progress, I extend the idea that I am develop- ing here about blackness as a
(non)performative breach of the modern text, which more specifically I read as a juris-theological contract or a religion contract or a
con- tract of political theology. Within
the terms of this contract the sacred is recruited to subtend or
otherwise sanction modernist concepts of religion and the secular as central to establishing the
anthropocenic world of Man, though that world is even haunted by subterranean earth, black outdoors—
some other, excessive horizon of the sacred altogether. This connects to what earlier in this essay I called an “improvisa-
tion of the sacred.” For another, related take on Han’s notion of “nonperformance,” see Moten, “Erotics of Fugitivity.” On my
invocation earlier in this note of “the case of blackness,” see Moten’s essay of this title.} Stated differently, it is along this path that I
want to engage in sacred poiesis, a poethics of the fugitive sacred. But first, I address the problem of political theology as a species,
we might say, of antiblackness.

Political Theology

From what has just been said, it should already be clear that by political theology I mean more than what Carl Schmitt, whose name
is most aligned with this term, meant by it when he said that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts.”27 I mean more than to suggest, again as Schmitt did, a structural similarity between the domains
of law and politics, on the one hand, and theology or the religious, on the other, such that the exceptionalism of the latter (as, for
example, in the force of the “miracle”) is merely transferred to the former (as, for example, with the “state of exception” and the
“force of law”). Rather, by political theology I mean the ways that the
categories of the political and the
theological are mutually affirming. Differ- ing in magnitude, the political and the theological are scalar,
internally braided together in the logic of the state, for which reason they cannot be extracted
one from the other. As I am using it, political theology is that philosophical , indeed, that metaphysical claim
to the rightness, the purity, the would-be gravity of the state as the telos of society, as the
horizon of order, as what securitizes the world if not life itself. If this order, which is to say, if state
order is the ontological horizon of what holds us, if it is a figure of the Being that holds beings
(most especially the human mode of being, which within the terms of state order is nothing less than the citizen mode of being, the
being that is homo politicus), then political
theology is the discourse of Being in its projection of the state
as the ground of legitimate, political (as opposed to “nonpolitical” or antepolitical or anarchic) assembly, on the one
hand, and as the ground of juridical subjecthood, on the other.

I would like to put a finer point on the problem of political theol- ogy by approaching it in terms of the problem of the evisceration of
the sacred, or that which hovers beyond state-sanctioned horizons of life or what is truly real, what
moves as invisibly felt or as a surging, surreal pres- ence that state operations work hard to
overshadow in monumentalizing itself, often through monuments. Like a kind of astrophysical
dark matter with the unknowable force of a dark energy that exceeds racial capitalism’s
gravitational pull by exerting a force from within and that exceeds this (racial) world’s
epistemological and material circumscriptions, this surging, surreal presence moves at the limit
of the state even if on some level within its constraints. Let us call this limit blackness. America is
structured through the horrific regularity , both in spectacular displays and even more so in everyday or mundane
displays, of experiencing unin- corporable limits to itself. That experience is the experience of the
sacred, an experience in which state sovereignty or lordly sovereignty is crossed (out), transgressed. Political
theology is a discourse that seeks to eviscerate such an imagination of the sacred. As such, it is a
statist discourse predicated precisely on the evisceration of the dark arts of the sacred, those
excessive modes of life and knowing. I am interested in that dark knowing that exceeds theopolitical constraint—what Bataille spoke
of as “nonknowledge” and what he also talked about as “poetry,” and what I want to think about here by way of black radical
thought as the astropoetic release of the sacred from categorical capture. This is the black
radical sacred.
As an entry point into this approach to the problem of political theology and to begin to think about the sacred precisely as
malpractice, consider Rei Terada’s essay “Robinson’s Terms,” in which she provides a patient and brilliant reading of Cedric
Robinson’s underexplored first book (his published dissertation, in fact), Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of
Leadership (1980).28 Her reading of Terms of Order offers us a way to understand the trajectory that led Robinson to the thesis he
develops in Black Marxism (1983) that black radicalism is a complexly differentiated tradition rooted in a revolutionary
consciousness that exceeds the terms of political order, which are also the terms of (racial) capitalist order. Order emerges or is
constituted as the counterrevolutionary evisceration of that which exceeds order. Terada tarries with Robinson as he tarries with the
dynamics of this evisceration. What we learn from her reading of Robinson is that if,
in positioning “the state [as] the
telos of society,” the political “depends on and . . . is reflected in [a series of] politico- legalistic
settlements” whose narrative languages and philosophical concepts establish “the terms [of] a [settler] tenancy” (4), then what
makes the political always already theological, even when it prides itself on being secular (which really must be understood as a
mode of the theological), is this: in establishing the state as the telos of society and thus as a world
that houses (human) being, the political follows, indeed, repeats the religious logic of Genesis
or the primordial, cosmogonic activity of the gods. As the gods found the world or establish the real
by what Mircea Eliade describes as “[projecting] a fixed point into the formless fluidity of profane space, a center
into chaos,” thus allowing an “ontological passage” that in effect establishes the real,29 so too the political is predicated
on a “cosmocizing” (64) or a worlding of territory, a conversion of earth into territorialized
world, by gods/men who imprint terms of order onto what is deemed non- political or
formless (informe). This cosmocizing or would-be worlding of the earth into ownable, bordered territory entails the
production and thus the imposition of spatial order on top of and to the vanquishing of nonpolitical
space or space charged with dark energy or promiscuous intensities figured as aberrantly racial,
sexual, economic, and neurological . These are energies or intensities that are out of this world
and that figure an other- wise totality, perhaps the “collective being, the ontological totality”
that propels the black radical tradition.30 This , says Terada, is the persistent “existence of what cannot
be conceived from the standpoint of the political” (6). Constantly thwarting politicality’s claim to being all
there is, the nonpolitical represents, Terada further says directly quoting Robinson, an open “set of infinite
alternatives irretrievably forsaken” (10), alternatives that index the impossible as nothing less
than the ongoing possibility of what exceeds the terms of political order. Further still, if with Terada
(with Robinson) we understand that myth “[functions] to process ‘insurmount- able contradiction’ in the societies from which they
arise” (10), then the political, which establishes the terms of settler tenancy as terms of order, is but myth’s
rationalization, with language serving the utilitarian function of securing the order of
signification, the grammar of (political) meaning. Put differently, the political seeks to maintain itself
by instituting a form of knowing in which reason is but the declaration of having won the
mythic struggle against an opposing force. This is the struggle of creation itself, a struggle in which Genesis is an
effect of struggle. Political rationality entails the would-be vanquishing or containing or sacrificial corpsing of
the nonpolitical surround to bring into being what in the Western ontotheological tradition has
been called World. And yet, in this instance formless nonpoliticality bespeaks an abyssal prime matter
that as limitless potential for patterning, as “absolute nothingness,” is both base resource for the violent
production of value and at the same time indexes a volatile danger to existing patterns of politicality.31
I can now address even more directly what is theological about the mythic rationality of the terms of political order. What must be
under- stood is that the previously described dynamic of the political is articulated to what historian of
religions Eliade explains as theproduction of “sacred space” or the making of “strong, significant
space” out of “spaces . . . without structure or consistency,” spaces that he describes as “amorphous” (20), or that we
might just as well understand with both Bataille and Spill- ers as “monstrous.”32 The bringing forth of strong space out
of disordered void, the overcoming of “the fluid and larval modality of chaos” so as to establish, as an “act of the
gods who . . . organized chaos by giving it a struc- ture, forms, and norms” (31), the ontological or the
“pre-eminently . . . real” (28), and finally, the ritual reactualization of this paradigmatic work of the
gods to secure a proper place in the world rather than hang sus- pended in the void of the not-
real, the absolute nothingness of nonbeing: these mythic operations ground “religion” in the broadest sense. More still, Eliade
describes these operations, to use Terada’s Robinsonian lan- guage, as establishing the terms of a settler
tenancy. Through that tenancy homo religiosus (like and indeed as homo politicus-economicus) quenches his thirst
for real existence in the face of a terrifying nothingness, in the face of that “absolute
nonbeing” “that surrounds his inhabited world,” as Eliade describes it (64). In communication with the gods who
have, as it were, settled the chaos, homo religiosus by feat of ritual repetition repels the abyss and, indeed, in an
ongoing way believes himself to have settled the abyss , lest “by some evil chance, he strays into [that abyss], [and
comes to feel] emptied of his ontic substance, as if he were dissolving into [the surrounding] Chaos, and he finally dies” (64).

As a discourse, then, political theology as I mean it proceeds under the logic of a cosmology of
settlement, the supposed containment of the surround by a settler-God or settler-gods and as
reactualized by settler- Man. Here, the sacred has been epistemically annexed and (to invoke a
language from the prior section) right-handedly recruited to settling, their adhesion underwriting
political theology as a discourse that rests on the mythotheological as the mythopolitical
founding of the world. This is “Genesis.” Thus, within the terms of political theology, God, State, and Man are all
god terms that name a vanquishing or a supposed conquering of the abyssal , the infinite, the
alternative, the im/plausibly and im/ possibly im/possible.

But what if we do not assume the political (as seems to be the assump- tion in Rev. Lamar’s comments about the
Charlottesville white nationalist rally, his understanding of the general crisis of politicality today, and his understanding of theology’s
relationship to the political)? What if, to the contrary, we take seriously the political precisely as myth,
trying to reckon with what monstrously appears as its internal limit, of which the counter-
protesters were a monstrous sign? (And here I want to keep in mind that in one etymological derivation monster
derives from the Latin word monere, which means a divine omen or portent of what cannot be foreseen.) This is also to ask, what
if rather than assuming political theology we think with the likes of Colin Kaepernick, whose
taking a knee has incited a crisis of politicality, if not a monstrance of what is irreducibly
antepoliti- cal? What if our study, our writing, takes place within political theology’s
astrophysical contraction, “in the break” of politicality , out of the posse of im/poss/ibility? 33
These questions propel this article’s writing practice, which aims to throw language back on itself, to be
suspended in, even exiled within language itself. I am suspended within and yet beyond the ontology of the
sentence (of politicality), held in an ellipsis, a cloud of antepolitical unknowing. What might it mean to write the
experience of semiotic exile, to not be sentenced to the sentence while suspended within it, to
write the experience of decomposition as the experience of the sacred in its monstrous mode?
What “I,” what “not-I,” what “I” who’s neither “I” nor “other,” can write of parenthetical escape, un/sentenced, un/held within the
sentence, in the break, like
sisters in the wilderness of the sentence, in the void of having been
theopolitically sentenced?34 Can (the) I escape the gravitational forces of civilization? What might it mean to
practice escape or refusal, to be of the void, to be voided, potentiating anything and
everything without determination? What is the feeling of fugitive suspension, outlawed
within the law of the sentence? What of this wandering, this unholding? These are Renee Gladman–
and Sarah Jane Cervenak–inspired questions, and they are Layli Long Soldier– and M. NourbeSe Philip–inspired ones too.35 My claim
in this article is that the
poetics of what is beyond the (theopolitical) sentence is language’s taut
tenseness, the tense of an alternative declension or mood, the domain of the “fourth person
singular” perhaps, where some other experience of lan- guage is felt. 36 Here the myth of
politicality and thus of being individuated, of being “I,” is always already subject to being sacrificed along
with the mode of divinity or the god terms meant to secure the state. This poetics of the
beyond is a poetics of the sacred “‘other’-wise,” Denise Ferreira da Silva and Ashon T. Crawley might say.37
Given this, the black malpractice of which I here speak is a practice of the sacred overboard, an
experience of the sacred detached from or in the absence of its reduction to the stabilizer that
has come to bear the name, at least in the Western philosophical tradition, God or the gods and
as duplicated or mirrored in the divination of the state where the state exists in the image of a
stabilizing God.

What I aim for here, then, is a (mal)practice beyond the myth of theopoliticality. Anatheological
malpractice is the “practice of outside,” outdoors—an out not caught in or that already
ruptures the dialectic of inside-outside or the notion of a border or a property line, notions of
inside-outside that are at the heart of myths of order, state or otherwise. Black out is no
ordinary outness. Out even from itself in critique of the notion of a self, blackness’s practiced
outness or black out is “black rapture.” It is akin to what Nathaniel Mackey has called “Mu” in the serial or unending
poem of his that bears this name. Approaching the sound of the first two letters of the Greek-derived word myth (muthos),
Mackey’s serial mu-poem encodes a poetics not so much of myth but of what he calls ythm. 38
The decomposition of myth into ythm (or is it the imposition, in keeping with my earlier discussion, of myth or
propertied world onto larval Earth, as a hieroglyphics onto flesh, that we are dealing with?) is fascinating to think through
as an expression of black malpractice.

Descending into language itself as some kind of founding or mythic violence, Mackey malpractices myth by
anagrammatically reshuffling it. Ythmic shuffle “advances a sense of alternative, ‘a special
view of his- tory,’” that moves in relationship to an alternative sense of language, a dwelling in
the flesh of words.39 What results is the (rh)ythm of black malpractice, an ythmic overdubbing
of myth. With ythm the first two letters of myth are first inverted (possessive my- becomes dispossessed ym-) and then
splayed open so as to reveal a quantum, cosmic, but also womb space that holds an infinite set of phonemic,
phonetic, “parasemi- otic” possibilities.40 That infinite set is signified in the repositioning of the other two letters of
myth, namely, the dental phoneme th-, between the inverted and now spaced apart other two letters. The inverted and spaced
apart other two letters now hold or, perhaps better put, now care for and become a space of caress for the dental phoneme th-. Ym-
is the womb for a crippled sound (Mackey says that “ythm is crippled rhythm”) created by air vibrating through flesh, air pushed
between tongue and teeth and released through the mouth. In this way, the ym-
of ythm is a conduit, a frictional (middle?)
passage, a fleshly resonance chamber through which even if under duress life’s breath might pass,
a quantum gap of pneumatic respiration, life’s harbor, “held but not had / . . . churchical girth.”41

Such is Mackey’s ythmic mu-poetics wherein due to the “creaking of the word” language
becomes an (rh)ythmic paint
brush of otherworldly, undercommon edifices. Trees paint the sky green, and incarnation or lar- val life sings the
flesh, some “other” experience of the sacred. This is an experience of the sacred in the absence of (state)
divinity, the experience of an uncontainable outside. Black malpractice is an open field poetics
of the black out. The rest of this article explicates, by recursive or serial wandering, that beyond, and that
opening of the field that (rh)ythmically cuts the myth of the political. Black malpractice is a ministerial
poetics, an ythmic poiesis of the beyond.

With this said, I can come back to Rev. Lamar’s Washington Post interview. I want to locate the deeper impulse of what I take Rev.
Lamar to be calling for in relationship to what I have just summarized, that sum- mary pointing to a tradition of the sacred that
shadows Rev. Lamar’s read- ing of the Charlottesville incident. Not
presuming the state as teleological principle of
the social, this is a tradition that moves from the “ grounded- ness of an uncontainable
outside.”42 I want to fold Rev. Lamar’s comments into this tradition insofar as they question modernity as a
structure of ontopolitical theology and thus incite a rethinking of the sacred as what is abyssal
to the myth of politicality. Indeed, I would like to (re)turn black studies to the question of the
sacred, a question taken up by black feminist theorists such as Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, and M. Jacqui Alex- ander,
among others, and frame it vis-à-vis the im/possibility of black life within the politicotheological
structures of modernity.

I advance here black radicalism as a movement of sacred deviancy, deviation, and aberration. Black
radical deviance is an anatheological practice of the social—a studied “consent not to be a single being,”43 it
has been said—given in and as a practice of the sacred without standpoint, without locus, in and as sacred
malpractice. We must study the sacral- ity of this dissident deviance , the (w)holiness of a blackness
that moves fugitively and ecstatically, like the ancient vagabonds or revolutionary
“gyrovagues,” those monks who, never staying in one place, were mystic wanderers rather than
possessive settlers.44 If the events of Charlottesville, Virginia, were a doubling down on or a
restatement of a certain counter- revolutionary American settlerism that is not new with Trump but that
also must be thought about in relationship to the “postracialism” of the Obama presidency, then they were only
following in the steps of St. Bene- dict, whose counterrevolutionary monastic rule(s) sought to
subject the gyrovagues to his rule(s) of obedience and thus settle (down) the sacred by arresting
the itinerate, revolutionary energies in the movement of sen- tient, gyrating flesh. Blackness is
gyrovague-ish, given to the insovereign itinerancy of enspirited flesh, America’s phantom limb.
Indeed, blackness is enfleshed spirit and so is (a) spiritual, its wandering an itinerant spiri-
tuality. In other words, black wandering upon the earth, like faith itself, moves as a rapturous,
otherworldly excess. Blackness is a lapsarian condition, a “fallenness” within the racially
gendered world of property, an abiding on and with the unpropertizable, ungiven, and
ungivable earth. Though paradoxical, black fallenness thus bespeaks black rapture. We need a
protocol for this fall, for the fallenness of black rapture as a kind of “base faith,” the spirituality of a
“base materialism.”45 We need a protocol for black malpractice as a practice of the monstrous, the fugitive sacred, this
errantry.

Tag
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

I pose no answers to these questions but instead want to dwell in their poetic interplay, stay with
the splayed ecstatics of a fallen blackness under fire, on fire, in the fire, as fire, the perhaps Pentecostal, perhaps mystical, perhaps
Du Boisian “black flame” fire. Here, blackness might
be thought of as that which burns without being
burnt up, smoky vespers ascending in burning heat. This blue(s) exhaust(ion) puts in mind what the
nonconformist fourteenth-century beguine mystic Marguerite Porete, interestingly judged by her inquisitors as a kind of queered
“pseudo- woman” (quaedam pseudomulier), called as she made her way into the fires of the inquisition, fire’s “relinguishment.”48
For Porete, whose vision approximates Sufi mysticism, fire and air coincide in a kind of “coin- cidence of opposites.”
Alchemically combusting, they interact such that their exhaust(ion) releases a freedom that is
illegible within the terms of politicality. Such freedom pointed for Porete to otherworldly possi-
bilities, vitalities that exceed and that in fact as she saw it could not be contained by the
managerial, priestly class or by inquisitorial governance. The release of which Porete speaks is ecstatic,
which is also to say erotic. Indeed, hers is a social erotics of desire that she saw as the sum and non- substance (insofar as she
identified this as the abyssal nothingness) of the sacred. This is a mode of nonindividuated entanglement, a kind of
quantum sacrality, that moves on the plane of the “pseudo-” and the “para-”—again, her grand inquisitors called her a
pseudomulier, pseudo- woman—on the plane of the ellipses attached to these prefixes that will not allow them to be fixed or come
to a final resting place. This is the plane of the impossibility, the ungraspability and unknowability of
what in Porete’s wake Nicholas of Cusa called posse or possibility itself.

I read Martin’s malpracticing poetics, her micropoetics, as proxi- mate to Porete’s mysticism. A
black flame mysticism of
the riot is how I want to read what’s at stake in Martin’s poetics. I’m jumping on top of a police car on fire.
I’m ecstatic. My heart burns with ecstasy in my sadness. With its imagery of jumping into fiery, aerial
suspension, that is to say, with its imagery of mystically rapturous (social) movement, Martin’s
minor poetics bespeaks spirit possession beyond propertied self-possession. We need a
protocol of the spirit, a protocol of this “inner experience” of black ex-istence, which is also a
protocol of the earth in its irreducibility to the world of politicality and property. This would be as
well a protocol of language’s anteriority to itself , a protocol of spirit-language, pneumatology’s
anagrammatical pneumatography. Such a protocol gives itself in rites of passage, in rituals of
apophatic unsaying, in the poetics of an/nihilating fire, in black mystical nothingness, in the
mysticism of a heart jumping and burning in burnt ecstasy without immolation.

Might there be a poetics of celebration here, of riotous ritual praise, wherein black joy fleetingly
shows up as inconsumably ablaze precisely in the scene of and yet exceeding pain? Immolation
without full consump- tion? Would not such ex/tinguishment and an/nihilation entail the need
for a protocol of joy precisely as part of a protocol of spirit both of which are irreducible to
protocol, to rule/s? I raise these questions inasmuch as Martin’s minor-poem seems to
understand black joy and black sadness as bound to each other precisely in the suspension of
the spirit, in the suspended ecstatics of the leap itself, in rapture’s jump (I’m jumping . . . I’m
ecstatic . . . ). I’m interested in the airy, fiery, atmospheric suspension, in the unlocatable not-
ness or the knot, the nothingness of that blurred “(not) (in) between-ness,” the non- or no-
place, nowhere, the black space of a churchical darkness, the “paracongregationality” (not)
between the upbeat and the downbeat of the jump itself.49 That “blackspace,” Alexis Pauline
Gumbs and Pierce Freelon help us understand, is sacred.50 {In the preface to her poetry
collection Spill, Gumbs says, “This space, which is a temporary space, which we must leave, for
the sake of future travelers and for our own necks, is a sacred dedicated space. Libation for the
named and the name- less . . . for black women who made and broke narrative. The quiet, the
quarrelling, the queer” (xii). In Durham, NC, where I currently live, artist-activist and musician
Pierce Freelon, who also made a recent run for mayor of the city, has developed a space for the
free expression and Afrofuturist cultivation of young, primarily black and brown people of color,
a sacred space called Blackspace (theblackspace.org). See Tullis, “Space Is the Place.”} I’m
interested in the question of celebration that suspension itself poses.51 “Our music hurts so
much that we have to celebrate. . . . That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much.
Exhaustive celebration in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is”
what Fred Moten calls “black study”52 and what I am here thinking about under the rubric of
malpractice. Black malpractice musics the riot as a singed yet celebra- tory song sung with
sadness’s potentiating force of the alternative. I am interested in how the three sentences
making up what I have been calling Martin’s minor, micropoem explicate or ply or draw out a
social move- ment of folding, unfolding, infolding, and refolding celebration.
I own that there is something manic, even deranged—by which I mean something like what
Mackey, drawing on Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, identifies as a duende-like quality—
about what I am sug- gesting here about the method and sociopoetics of black malpractice, the
mysticism of the riot.53 “The word duende means spirit, a kind of gremlin, a gremlin-like,
troubling spirit” (182). The troubling comes through as a particular kind of sound in the voice,
Mackey commenting on Gar- cía Lorca tells us. A “hurt fractured inside” (161) is how Martin
puts it. Announced in “an almost religious enthusiasm . . . [that] shakes the body” that quakes
the dancer’s voice, that disorients the senses to effect “communication with God by means of
the five senses,” as García Lorca himself puts it, duende’s arrival as “the spirit of the earth”
bespeaks “a real and poetic evasion of this world,” some “lyric” and “constant baptism [yielding]
newly created things.”54 By way of Mackey and García Lorca, we can speak of the duende or the
rapture of the riot, wherein one hears the “black sounds” of a metamorphosis, some “deep
song,” the sonic over- flow of spiritual colors, as the undulating eloquence of a perhaps
squealed, screeching, scorched but no matter how you put it, troubled voice.55 “Its eloquence
becomes eloquence of another order, a broken, problematic, self-problematizing eloquence”
(182). As eloquent disorder, duende, we might say, is the explication as the troubled voicing of a
fractured inside. Drawing out the fracture, caressing it and being caressed by it perhaps, duende
is the practice of fractured escape. Robin Blaser, speaking of poet Jack Spicer, who is another
important influence on Mackey and who comes up in Mackey’s reflections on duende, has called
this a “practice of outside.”56 This outside practice, which can show up riotously in writing, in
song, in the visual arts, in the streets, which is to say in and as perfor- mance, might be
understood as (black) spirit’s or life’s “conversation with the dead, intimacy with death and with
the dead” (184), an animacy at the rim of the wound, a “breathing behind the door” (185). That
breathing behind the door is a malpracticed breathing, a “longing without object” or toward
another world (185). What Mackey is addressing is wounded breathing or breathing as
experiment, as the experimentalism of possibil- ity itself, the practice of what moves uncannily
and unsettlingly out of place, what kinetically misbehaves by virtue of an “apparent lack of pur-
pose, efficiency, and function,”57 though what registers as lack (and black) here may in fact be
thought of as the surplus of the subreal, what yet lives at the end of the world, at the rim of the
wound.

The stakes of black malpractice preliminarily come into view: my discourse considers black
malpractice as a kind of explication of a prac- ticed outness where explication as analysis gives
way because it is ani- mated by explication as performance, as atonal, anatheological
movement. I want to follow black malpractice as itself an insovereign, inexplicable movement of
what refuses full emplotment and that thus will not stay in place, an “uncanny . . . movement
[that] happens for the sake of move- ment” itself that is always already internally fractal and
multiple.58 This is the movement of a differential (w)hole, of what I noted earlier that Robinson
called “the collective being, the ontological totality,” indeed, incompletion’s totality. As an out-
movement that displays a condition of internally folded togetherness, an inner loom or serial
coilings that bespeak some other kind of gathering, black malpractice is, I guess we could say,
complicated.

The trick here then is for my explication to be carried out in such a way that the very malpractice
I am concerned with comes into view as itself an alternative imaginary that releases the sacred
(and our imagina- tions of what such a term might mean) from settler logics of sovereignty and
the sovereign. This must be an explication that holds malpractice open to its own outside and in
this way opens out onto a poetics of the sacred, a movement in which a sociality of deviancy, of
deregulated get- ting together, is itself a transcendently immanent and an immanently
transcendent practice of outside. Internal to the sacredness of such devi- ant out(side)ness is a
fundamental claim: black radical malpractice imag- ines and is the practice, indeed, the ritual
conjuring of other modes of being-with, a kind of monastic- or Bedouin-like habit of
otherworldly assembling, of convening what the musician N. in Late Arcade, the latest
installment of Mackey’s serial novel From a Broken Bottle Perfume Still Emanates, calls “Some
Other Sunday.”59 Such malpractice is not anti- American, which is not serious enough;
irreducible to the political as we know it, the radicalism of black malpractice is an ante-American
poetics, the critique of political theology and thus of “God” as governor or world manager.

Tag
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

This all brings me to the question: Is there a breach worth inhabit- ing? I say yes. Indeed, what
has my attention is failure’s internal genera- tivity. This is something that Sarah Jane Cervenak
and I elsewhere have thought about as “inefficiency’s abundance,” which is not unrelated to
failure’s queerness.63 More still, it’s a distinctive kind of breach that I want here to brood upon,
to wit, blackness as the breach of religiosecular administration, the breakdown of political
theology or sovereignty’s onto- theological protocols, protocols that solder sovereignty to the
sacred. A practice of desedimentation, blackness breaks the settler alliance between sovereignty
and sacrality. Given this, we might ask, What opens up when blackness is understood as
breaching political theology, indeed, as breach- ing the theosecular propriety that secures
statecraft? What if, precisely in breaching the settler alliance between sovereignty and sacrality,
the very alliance that produces “civil religion” by subjecting the wild ener- gies or the “total
value” of the sacred to “right-hand” capture, blackness is disclosed as monstrous enthusiasm, as
monstrance of an abundance capturable neither by currency nor politicality, as a kind of
(witch)crafti- ness beyond statecraft?64

I want to stay with these questions. Indeed, the claim I advance here might be framed as
follows: were we to understand blackness precisely as breaching theopoliticality, as that
malpracticed imagination of other- or even no-worldliness in the name of dwelling with the
earth, one that sights and sounds the earth’s regeneration, what would then be given for study
would be a consideration of blackness as that fugitive symptom of what theology cannot
regulate, what exceeds sovereignty’s politicotheological or theopolitical ground and
atmosphere. That is to say, I’m interested in blackness as symptomatic of the always already
ruptured or breached Wor(l)d of Man. Indeed, to understand blackness as breach of theosecu-
lar as theopolitical propriety is to understand blackness with Sora Han and Fred Moten as
“nonperformance,” though nonperformance is now understood as enthusiasm’s insovereign
poetics of the breach—a breach of religious contract in the name of some other freedom.65
From that breach, the sacred, in flight from sovereignty, understood as practices of what
Stefano Harney and Fred Moten have recently called “self-owning, earth- owning” accumulation
in and as the history of slavery and settler colonial- ism, comes into view.66 Blackness as rupture
or (de)generative breach is nothing less than a sacred praxis, that Sycoraxian, black feminist
move- ment that eluded Prospero and whose flesh Caliban bore making him a mama’s baby,
bearer of the heritage of the mother dispossessed, carried by the sexual cut to “his own
personhood” by which he is marked by “the ‘female’ within” and in this way denizen of some
day, Some Other Sun- day, earthly inhabitant of no-world.67

Poetics, Beyond

What I am calling here the malpracticed poetics of Some Other Sunday or sacred
nonperformance, Sylvia Wynter takes up in an as yet unpublished, nine-hundred-plus page
manuscript, Black Metamorphosis.68 It is to this work, which I read as anticipating black
malpractice as sacred nonper- formance, that I want to turn to anchor further what I have been
saying.

Written in the decade of the 1970s, the decade that saw the for- mal emergence of black
feminist theoretical discourse, Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is a massive meditation on black
life as on but not of the plantation, on but not of this territorialized world, a dwelling with the
earth. This dynamic of “on but not of,” Wynter compresses into what she calls “beyond” (439)—
beyond this world, indeed, beyond the Western philosophical idea of World because this
beyond concerns baseness itself and, in this way, the thingliness of the earth itself, which I
understand as connected to what Ferreira da Silva has called raw “materia prima”: “akin to
Hortense Spillers’s [notion of] flesh . . . [in] the raw, The Thing, as a referent of undeterminacy
(∞ − ∞) or materia prima, hails blackness’s capacity to release the imagination from the grips of
the subject and its forms, which is but a first gesture in regard to a mode of thinking that
contemplates virtuality and actuality all and at once.”69 As representa- tion’s nullification, this
release from the grips of the subject and its forms is nothing less than a black radical release
from the world’s terms of order in the name of the undeterminancy of matter, in the name of
the earth itself. My use of the notions of “outside” and “beyond” early in this article represents
my attempt to think in the company of Wynter (and Ferreira da Silva), whom here I read as a
thinker both of the theopolitical evis- ceration of the sacred, which evisceration is nothing but
the emergence of the anthropocene as the plantationocene, and of the sacred rethought as the
entanglement of aliveness as such. If entangled liveliness indexes a nonpropertied return to or a
fallenness that is, in fact, a dwelling with the earth, then Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis is about
that fallenness, about blackness (to abuse a theological language) as a lapsarian condition. It is
about black fallenness, a dwelling with the earth wherein, as Wynter elab- orates, the African,
transformed by the law of property into something ostensibly ownable by parties to a contract,
nevertheless enfleshes an even deeper transformation. This deeper transformation is what is
meant by metamorphosis—metamorphosis as experimentality, as larval innovation and genres
of the fungible, of an unsettling that exceeds even if coming into view under the occasion of the
colonial violence of enslavement or settlement. For this reason, metamorphosis signals what is
irreducible to representation. It bespeaks that liveliness beyond the plantation placement or
emplotments of what Wynter will later demarcate as “Man (1 and 2).”70 The metamorphic
“trans-iness” if not “tranny-ness,” the “trans*” that arises through “trans*Atlantic” passage, this
fundamental and noniden- titarian queerness or excess of the “asterisked human” is blackness’s
ever receding groundless ground.71

Here I start to get at what is at stake in Wynter’s “beyond,” that asterisked living that exceeds
and nullifies capital’s spatiotemporality. What Wynter means by beyond all unfolds here
between Man’s eviscera- tion of the sacred in and as the plantation bulldozing of the earth, on
the one hand, and those larval architectures of flesh, the flesh of the earth in excess of
plantation landscapes, on the other. More specifically, what Wynter means by beyond turns on
her critical distinction, advanced in another piece of writing also of the decade of the 1970s,
between the plantation and the plot ground. Distilling central ideas of Black Metamor- phosis,
the 1971 essay “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” meditates on that part of the plantation
known as the provision ground or the plot. On, but in some sense not of, the plantation, the plot
is where slaves culti- vated lives of their own replete with practices not at home in the
plantation world. Here, slaves grew yams and other foods for themselves, as well as engaged in
funeral practices for the dead. Not at home or dispossessed of home, they practiced home-in-
dispossession where dispossession itself nurtured if not became a kind of home—home through
lost kinship. Just as in “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (and in Black Metamorpho- sis)
Wynter is interested both in the rise of the novel as a literary form that emerges in relationship
to the plantation system and in what exceeds the plot of the novel as capitalist fiction that
reinforces (plantation) history, we find her also interested in the problem of the plantation itself
as the novel’s geological complement. That is, Wynter is interested in that other exces- sive plot
of the provision ground. Here the plot of the provision ground, on Wynter’s reading, stands in a
geologically excessive relationship to (white) “anthropocenic extraction,” as Kathryn Yusoff has
put it.72 {For a more recent consideration of the plantation and the plot, see Rusert, “Plantation
Ecologies”; Dillon, “Religion and Geopolitics in the New World”; Jaudon, “Obeah’s Sensations”;
and Paton, “Obeah Acts.” I am particularly taken by Toni Wall Jaudon’s interpretation of Obeah
as Caribbean religious practice in that it aligns with Wynter’s notion of “beyond.” Perhaps the
very word religion, given its emergence within the early modern, imperial-colonial matrix, risks
already overdetermining one’s engagement with the various expressions of religions of the
black diaspora. Perhaps something like Wynter’s “beyond” opens up another vista of
understanding. A practice beyond the terror of territory, Obeah in the Caribbean emerges in
Jaudon’s analysis as a complex “world-making practice” that must be taken seriously. Doing so,
she argues, “shows us that religions do cultural work” of crafting alternative, world imaginations
(“Obeah’s Sensations,” 718). Operating without and beyond a boundary, black diaspora “religion
does not simply ‘spill over and seep through’ national boundaries. . . . Rather, it upends the very
ground on which the nation-state rests” (718). This is all to say that black diaspora religion (and
the black study thereof) refuses the logic of divinized sovereignty as a logic of territory. Its
practice entails the critique of what Stuart Elden has called “territory as political technology”
(The Birth of Territory).}

Nurturing alternative modes of existence amid plantation devastation, the plot moves in
relationship to and yet exceeds the plantation system of racial capital- ism. If “the plantation
system, a system, owned and dominated by external forces,” and whose law of property as the
will to accumulate is bound up with the seizing or would-be enclosing of the earth, which entails
a colonizing of desire itself and ultimately a sovereigntizing of the sacred, then black popular
culture, animated by a “demonic” or “sociopoetic force,”73 Wynter says emerges from the
beyond of the provision ground or the plot that “the planters gave [and] on which [slaves then
grew] food to feed themselves in order to maximize profits.”74 This provision ground or plot
system, which was on but not of the plantation, was an “indigenous, autochtonous” zone of
semiautonomous cultivation, plots of land on the plantation in which what was grown was not
reducible to utility for the enslavers or planters.75 Rather, these were zones of “useless” beauty,
zones where black life could grow in the earth, where black cultures could take rootless,
rhizomatic root. A locus of socioecological cultivation not based in the law and rights of
property, provision ground was as such a scene, Wynter tells us, of malpractice, of “cultural
guerilla resistance to the plan- tation system.”76 In its otherness and underness, the plot was
the scene of alternative ecologies that from the brutal scene of property itself poten- tiated
unbounded, unpropertized, insovereign relationalities. From the activities of “metamorphosis”
that took place provisionally from the plot and in back woods, Wynter glimpses alternative
sacralities, imaginations of the sacred beyond property and its logics of individuation and bound
up with the baseness of the earth itself. Hence, in Black Metamorphosis Wynter directly engages
with questions of the sacred, its settler colonial evisceration, and also its release from (racial)
modernity’s god terms in the unfinishable metamorphosis that is black popular culture.

Here is one particularly poignant statement in which we see Wynter attending subtly to the
theological architecture of the plantationing of the planet or to a certain plantation-godding of
the world, even as we also glimpse her suggesting a metamorphosis of the sacred, that is, a
hidden, exilic sacrality aligned with pollution and wandering, a subterranean dis- turbance of
“the norm”: “The gods had been transshipped and brought their space with them. But the sky
now had to be underground. They themselves were displaced gods, gods as Bastide says in a
fine phrase, in exile. They were kept hidden now not only because their power was feared as
polluting but because they had to avoid the terrible counter-power of the plantation gods.
Knowing exile, they lost their complacency, the com- placency of the norm, and became
contingent gods” (532). Wynter here claims that, as a regime of property, settlerism had to do
with a total environment or a cosmology. It laid organizational claim on “the sky” and ground,
on mortals and divinities. This is a structure of Heideggerian-like worlding in which the
plantation gods superintend or provide a “sacred canopy” for property relations. The plantation
gods provide the ontotheo- logical structure for the ontopolitical theology of property as basis
of mak- ing a world. Moreover, this ontopolitical theology of property is a political theology of
race(ialization) that takes places under the superintendence of the gods and under whose
superintendence masters are themselves, in fact, worlded, coming into being and into view
precisely as so many sovereigns, as parties to a contract, as legal subjects within the law (of
ownership). What is key for Wynter, and for me following her, is that this operation of worlding
is an operation of religioning and race-ing within the terms of what I call the “religious contract,”
religioning and worlding, or religioning as a kind of worlding, as a kind of terror-filled or
terrifying race-ing or racializing, which is also a settler sovereigntizing of things. It is this nexus of
world and religion, property and contract, ownership and sovereignty that Wynter spies out and
meditates on under the rubric of “the gods.” Furthermore, it is under the canopy of the
plantation gods, or what I am calling the canopy of property-worlding, that ontology and
anthropology, World and Man, in fact, emerge. More precisely, it is within this canopy of the
gods that an ontology and anthropology, that an onto- theology, of the World of Man in his
overdetermination of human being emerges. Property-worlding as conditioned by the
plantation gods is what has come to ground the being of beings, including and most especially
the being of human being, Dasein, as the being of ownership, property, and the proper.

By contrast, the transshipped gods understood now as contingent bespeak, Wynter says, a kind
of poetics of the underworld, an underworld animated by contingency. This contingency I want
to align with Ferreira da Silva’s notion of undeterminancy or the infinity of prime matter. That is
to say, I want to suggest here a convergence between Wynter’s “beyond” as bound up with the
transshipped gods in connection with the enslaved and Ferreira da Silva’s “beyond the equation
of value” in which an uncat- egorical, nonrepresentable blackness breaks form, breaks the
equation; this anoriginal breach of the equation bespeaks a power or a “capacity to disclose
another horizon of existence.”77 Not Heideggerian worlding but a black radical Wynterian (and
a Ferreira da Silvan–poethical) underworld- ing and otherworlding and no-worlding beyond
property and sovereignty and toward an ecopoetics of the social whole: this is black
malpractice’s anatheological concern, where the transshipped gods index a sociality of
entanglement.78 {In speaking of worlding, I have Heidegger in mind albeit routed through
Wynter’s “beyond,” Jaudon’s notion of religion as “world-making” (see n. 72), or, in my
language, aided by Ferreira da Silva, as that “poethical” practice, the malpractice of
otherworlding from the site of nonbeing or the condition paraontological thingli- ness (Nahum
Chandler and Moten) and no-bodiness (Ferreira da Silva). See Chan- dler, “Problem”; Heidegger,
“Thing”; and Heidegger, “Origin of the Work of Art.” If for Heidegger, worlding is a type of
violent process that, as David L. Eng wonderfully summarizes, “[brings] certain creatures and
things . . . into the time and space of European modernity” and in doing so stage the European
Man’s coming into being, which is to say his genesis or his “worlding,” his “Let there be . . .”
(Gen. 1), then that same process “unworlds” others in the very worlding of the world,
“[consigning those others] to wait, excluded and concealed” (“End(s) of Race,” 1485). This
concealment is the condition of “no-bodies,” as Ferreira da Silva might put it, the condition of
being “earthed,” as Eng puts it, rather than fully of this world. See Jaudon, “Obeah’s
Sensations”; Ferreira da Silva, “No-Bodies”; Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist
Poethics”; and Eng, “End(s) of Race.”} In talking specifically about the transshipped gods meta-
morphosed into what we might think of as “trans*gods” in relation to a trans* or a fantastic or
an “asterisked humanity” from the hold to the plot to black popular culture, Wynter says:

The gods . . . express the social whole, not as its sum, but as its mode of interrelationships. The
gods are the conceptual symbols in which the com- munity as the social whole participates. It is
through this participation that they experience themselves as a social whole. It is for the
experience, by the individual or group, of the social whole, that gods . . . are necessary. No
individual or individual group by itself can experience the whole. (502)

If part of the objective of Wynter’s Metamorphosis is to offer a theory of blackness in its escape
from yet within the constraints of property’s bru- talities, then this entails as well a theory, if not
of religion, then certainly of the sacred reconceived as and in the sociality of flight itself where
the indi- vidual “I” is already broken open, “dividuated” and thus now understood as the
ecstatic, enthusiastic yield of a ceremony of collective plot life not reducible to narrativization or
emplotment. This is the radical rapture, the “critical enthusiasm,” to purloin from Jordana
Rosenberg, of black social life—black rapture as black social life.79 Wynter puts it this way:
“Enthu- siasm and exaltation are the uncolonized law of desire that expresses lib- eration from
societal codings, from its ordering of ego-identities. It is the loss of the public self, this return to
the profound interior self and to the experience of unity of these selves that the truly religious
ritual worship- pers or the Carnival revelers, experience. It is a form of knowledge, the gnosist
[sic] form of knowledge opposed yet complemented to the objec- tive knowledge of the
dominant order” (549). What we discover here is that Wynter’s understanding of sacred flight,
or of the sacred as exilic divinities on the run, is part of the inner logic of a theory and practice of
the social that black studies is given to study. More still, this concern on Wynter’s part with
transshipped divinities, who again stand in for the transshipped, is never not ecological,
geographical, and geological. It is always already concerned with that revolution of the ground
that is a revolution of sociality at the scene of property itself. Resilience in trans- shipment takes
the form now of an underness, of being underground.80 From the underground there is a
revolution, Wynter maintains, of the ground and of the atmosphere and the cosmos insofar as
now “the sky had to be underground,” where above is below; from the plot and through the
cultural activities thereof, “there [arises] knowledge of a higher logi- cal typing, knowledge
which can move outside the codes of knowledge, prescribed and determined by the dominant
modes of social relations, the kosmos [sic] of the status quo” (549).

While there is much more that needs to be said about Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis than I
have space to now say, I offer just a few more remarks about the significance of this text for my
argument about black malpractice as a poetics of the sacred.81 What I find interesting is
Wynter’s understanding that at stake in black life from the plot, and therefore as underground
plot life, is her attention to blackness as revolt that ruptures the forces of the gods of the
plantation, the forces of plantation politicality. She is a theoretician of that rupture, that black
rapture of black malpractice, that underworldly poetics of the sacred and of the social that
compels me. Black revolt is a practice of sacred sociality, a transgressing of the god terms of
racial capitalism. In its anatheological breaking of the law of the individuated subject, black
malpractice cannot help but be more and less than heresy. Indeed, the plot was the seedbed of
black popular culture, the site of an anteheretical underworldliness exceeding capitalism’s
malevo- lent, though presented as a benevolent, mathematics. Anteheretical black- ness is given
in practices of living, experiences of excessive enfleshment that Wynter calls “the underlife.”
Here “mystical reunion with the earth” given in and as marronage—reinhabitations of the earth,
exercises of the sacred as practices of property’s unsettlement—took place.82 In one of her
most powerful descriptions of the mysticism of the underlife and what I am calling black
malpractice, Wynter offers this account of revolt as earth dwelling or life’s regeneration:

Brought to the new world in this figuration/representation of the Earth are the complex of
attitudes that will provide the common ground for the cre- ativity of the black popular masses.
The concept of man as generator, both of his material and of his social life, would remain
dynamically viable in the underlife of the slave’s life, in that underlife where they gave
expression to that unique aspect of the soul, at the same time as they conformed to their role as
piezas in the superordinate system of the plantation.

Dance and song and music, like all art in the culture of origin, were represented as the result of
man’s self-expression, his unique fulfillment of the Earth’s generative powers working through
him, as she, the Earth, fulfilled herself in giving birth to the crop and therefore, to man. For the
earth—like the sea for fishing tribes—was the “material” basis of man’s existence, of his
environment, was represented as the generator of life. And the supreme ethic that arose from
this representation was the commandment to generate life as man’s life was itself generated.
Evil was the absence of life. But the absence of life was not death. Rather, death was the ground
of the regeneration of life. Evil was anything that halted or broke the exchange of life and death.
(528)

We find in Wynter’s description here an account of black life reritual- ized as that flesh that
plantation capitalism eucharistically cannibalized and yet could not fully digest, consumed in the
production of value but that itself is of no value or is prodigal because it is anterior to value.
Such malpracticing flesh—manifest, for example, in funeral rites, the growing of crops, and
especially the rhythmic and sonic traditions, the “flow” of Afro-diasporic musics—moves within
and disturbs the bowels of racial capitalism, its indigestible and excremental remainder. Here
we find an “alternative mode of life . . . alternative desires” not captured by what Wynter calls
the “theologization of the material life” in which there is the “production of the economic as
[the] sole reality principle” (439). That theological production, or the theologization of life, is in
fact an attempted reduction, the “reduction of man to his productive capacity” (439). Wyn- ter
has her keen philosophic eye trained on how theologization—the reduction of the sacred to a
god-term or to “God” as form and figure— functions as the symbolic condition and, indeed, the
semiotic condition, of economization through a mathematics of individuation of life, discrete
units of labor. And yet, she also is looking at what discreetly escapes, indeed, meditating on the
practice, particularly the sonic practice, of escape itself. There is that which exceeds
theoeconomic and theosecular reduction, what is before and after and in the break of political
theology, that immanent transcendence that Wynter carefully charts as a mythic practice—as a
(rh)ymthmic malpractice, if I might offer an anagrammatic annotation that points us back to
Mackey—a poetics that returns us to the earth. This return is precisely what Wynter means by
“beyond”:

The Myth of the Return was a central pillar in that figural representation by which black popular
culture was to establish its own form of the tran- scendent Africa—later translated into Heaven
—became the más alla, the Beyond of the gnostics, the kingdom of Jah, that assails and
delegitimates the present reality.

But the Beyond was, for the New World black popular forces, a Beyond which existed spatially
as an alternative mode of being, rather than tempo- rally in an eternally delayed future, the
conceptualization by which official Christianity supports structures of domination. The future
was, for the New World black, incorporated into the now, heaven was here and now because
experienced. The Symbolic Return to Africa or Heaven, to the true Home, was ceaselessly
carried out through the cults, and their U.S. variants, the ring shouts. (439)

What comes into view here is that the plot—a locus both of constraint and capaciousness where
life was reritualized and “the land remained the Earth” rather than a sovereignly managed,
propertized World—was never not a breach of the American “sacred canopy.” A material
“beyond,” which Wynter gives us to understand as bound up with the baseness of the earth and
experienced in the ex-perience of out-of-this-world-ness itself, from the spirituality of cults and
the ecstasy of ring shouts to New World black popular expressive culture, the plot was a soil in
which things “jes grew.” Locus of “an alternative mode of being” that extends a history below
Middle Passage’s waterline, the plot is an ante-American breach of political theology. This
breach indexes a bursting through from the plot of a peculiar, a strange archive—an archive of a
bent and broken sacrality. Here the sacred manifests in degraded, wounded kinship, as some
sort of mysterious collectivity that works in accordance with a Rastafari-like logic of the “I ’n’ I”
and the “we ’n’ we,” and in accordance, as well, with Mack- ey’s engagement with these
Rastafarianisms in his serial poems in which he coins the notions of the “I-Insofar” and the “we-
Insofar.”83 These coinages are meant to index that “play of dislocated identity” that marks
diaspora (which is to say, black social life) as dwelling in the “quantum gap” of “a subjunctive,
qualified I, an alternate, unmortared I.”84 This is what comes through, as Mackey alerts us, in
one of the lines in the poem, “Night in Jaipur”: “Insofar as there / was an I it wasn’t hers.”85 All
of this suggests that we are dealing here with a strange I-ness, a strange we-ness, an “I ’n’ I”-
ness, a “we ’n’ we”-ness, but just as well, shall we say, a “s/he ’n’ they”-ness, if not a “they ’n’
dem”-ness. This strangeness points to that which is ever incomplete and incompletable. It
points, in short, to incompletion as such—the monstrance of the black radical sacred, of black
malpractice. Such is what brews on the plot that is on but not of the plantation, not of this
World. A frenzied zone of “‘enthusiasm’ . . . in the religious sense” (545), Wynter insists, the plot
was a site of rapturous seizures against having been seized, against the ge(n)ocidal seizing of the
earth. The beyond that is the plot, and that evades full narrative emplot- ment, bespeaks an
underlife, a “non-class culture,” that heralds nothing less than the apocalypse of the (plantation)
(as) World, a zone of festive dwelling where plotters are caught up in an ecstasy of black
fallenness, in “Orphic descent into an Other-world,” into that “amorphous, under- ground
Symbolic Order” (708)—into “a world outside of the rationality of the bourgeois world,” outside
of “the instrumental rationality of the dominant order” and thus into the now of the earth in
which each instant is saturated (545): desire itself decolonized, all libidinal energy—at once
nonproductive and yet generative—released, raptured from as well as rupturing the channels of
capitalist, utilitarian production. Bespeaking some other ecology, the plot is an ante-American
no-place, a nowhere that exceeds property management and plantation administration under
the superintendence of the gods or, in short, the terror of politicality.

Black Malpractice
Carter’19 |J. Kameron Carter is the Professor of Religious Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.
“Black Malpractice (A Poetics of the Sacred)” in Social Text 139, No. 2, June 2019. DOI 10.1215/01642472-
7370991. Footnotes 3, 8, 26, 50, 72, and 78 included in curly braces|KZaidi

At the conclusion of this article and having come through this all too brief engagement with
Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis, I in fact have returned to where this article began. I have made
a preliminary case that Wynter has been about the work of theorizing the sacred in its
cosmopoetic and subterranean release from the World of racial capitalism and plantation
politicality. I have argued that to address Charlottesville is to address what symptomatically,
fugitively undulates at the limit of politicality. At that limit the surreal—the subreal, the
submerged—flutters as invisibly felt and is apocalyptically unveiled as monstrous, as a sacral
blackness that incites volatility. The theopolitical project of trying to repress the limit so as to
divinize and maintain the state in the image of a stabilizing God is precisely what animates
American politicality, where American political- ity can now be understood as a structure of
belief bound up with property or settler enclosure and manifesting modernity’s “religion
contract,” the centerpiece of which is racially gendered governance as a racially gen- dered
capitalism. This project, this contract, structures being American, for to be American is to be
under theosecular apprenticeship to the con- tract, which as such is apprenticeship into racial
belief—the discipleship of politicization as racialization. In this way, whiteness is that
theopolitical practice that has for one of its names America. It was this that underwrote the
violent events of Charlottesville, Virginia (and those at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,
South Carolina, with Dylann Roof, and the violence against Sandra Bland and Philando Castile,
and . . . ). And it is also this that the abolitionism of black malpractice in its underworldly
sacrality resists and refuses.

All of this is to say that if, as W. E. B. Du Bois a century ago told us,86 the religion of whiteness is
the propertization of Earth, and if that propertizing rests on a mythic substantialization and
imperialization of the sacred converted into a brutalizing property-concept that now theo-
politically organizes the space-time of modernity, then with Tracy K. Smith black malpractice
asks, “Is God being or pure force? The wind / Or what commands it?”87 In raising such
questions and as a poetics of the sacred that cannot help but be a poethics of the sacred, black
malpractice contests, refuses, and objects to the god terms. It contests them because in its
indeterminate and unrepresentable no/thingliness, which points to a ghostly non/existence,
liveliness on the razor’s edge, on the thin blade of non/being,88 blackness cuts the sacred as we
know it. More precisely, it ruptures the god terms in the interest of some other practice of the
sacred, in the interest of an otherworldliness without world.
Infernal Machinery – Nigel Clark
 Thesis – Combustion
Root cause ish card that goes thru history and talks about how fire creates the
foundation of economics/utility.
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 5-7|KZaidi

Ever since plants colonized dry land this has been a planet of fire or combustion (Pyne, 2001: 3-14;
Clark 2011: 170-4). Combustion is the process that occurs when energy-rich carbon compounds are
decomposed in an oxygen-saturated environment - triggered by a source of ignition: a reaction
through which chemical energy is converted into thermal energy (Smil, 2006: 10). While ‘fire’ is the
vernacular term for chain reaction combustion, the technical term for the exothermic process
whereby the heat produced ignites still more fuel is ` deflagration’ - an explosion being very fast
deflagration (Helmenstine, 2018).

Explosive exothermic actions may be relatively new to terrestrial fire regimes, but they inherit a long history.
Human capture of fire goes back perhaps a million years – long before `we’ branched and
evolved into Homo sapiens. Early on, fire theorists speculate, humans learnt that fire could transform
their living environment, cracking open dense forest, promoting new plant growth, attracting
foraging animals. Gradually our forbears gleaned that fire is, `above all, the great transmuter,’ as Pyne
succinctly puts it (2001: 120). Just as we learned that fire softened the flesh and fibers we fed on, so too
did we stumble upon its effects on other materials: ` what began with meat and tubers
eventually fed bone, stone, sand, metal, liquids, wood , whatever might be found, into the
transmuting flames’ (Pyne and Pyne, 2012: 99).

At some point during the transition from the seesawing ice ages of the Pleistocene to the more stable
Holocene epoch, certain human populations discovered that by enclosing fire in purpose-built
containers they could increase its thermal intensity and gain greater control over its
metamorphic powers (Wertime, 1973). In fiery ovens, soggy clay transmuted into durable ceramics,
crumbly ore morphed into lustrous metal, gritty sand fused into diaphanous glass and glazes
(Clark, 2015). While the miraculous nature of such transubstantiations imbued the pyrotechnical crafts with a magical aura, the
same arts produced many of the mundane tools and materials of early agrarian society. From
out of the kiln came new instruments of field and household labour, measures and tokens that
mediated economic activity, and new objects deemed worthy of accumulation – along with the
weapons used to guard or acquire them (Goudsblom, 1992: 63). Long before powder and shot
impacted geopolitically, metals were already playing a constitutive role in the shaping of
empires. As anthropologist Jack Goody reminds us: `(t)he very boundaries of the Roman Empire...were the
result of the distribution of metals’ (2012: 80).

Drawing upon earlier anthropological insights, Gilles

Deleuze and Félix Guattari have speculatively
reconstructed some of the power-knowledge relations at the crux of the ancient agrarian world .
They distinguish between two divergent experiences of mobilizing around physical forces: that of the
miner-metallurgist whose identity is forged through following the flows of a dynamic earth
and the agriculturist whose life-world is contoured by the seasonal demands of farming and
the hard-edged territorial logic of the emergent city-state (1987: 409–15). And yet, Deleuze and Guattari
suggest, an uneasy compromise is reached, as `itinerant’ metallurgists and `sedentary’ state
actors come to rely upon each others’ capacities for understanding and tapping into earthly
powers (1987: 415, 424– 31).

But regulation of pyrotechnology emerged as much from `within’ as from any state imperative.
With only slender fire walls between themselves and temperatures as hot as lava, artisans spent their working lives
inches away from grievous harm . Malfunctioning kilns or mishandled molten material could cause
burns, blindness or death, and bring blazing ruin to whole towns (Gouldsblom 1992, 110-111). Rigorous
discipline, in this context, was inseparable from the miracle of elemental transmutation. `Although they might have been launched
as innocent and isolated skills,’ high-heat historian Theodore Wertime concludes, `the
pyrotechnic crafts in the years
between 10,000 B.C. and 2000 B.C. became formidable industrial ‘disciplines ,’ entailing the most severe
chemical controls on daily operations’ (1973: 670).

However novel the ultra-fast exothermic reaction may be in the history of fire, there
is an important sense in which
the discovery of exploding powders belongs to the ancient lineage of heat-induced
transformation. Evidence suggests that it was Taoist alchemists in 9th century China who discovered
the explosive properties of the charcoal-sulfur-saltpeter mix – in the course of experiments
aimed at concocting life-extending elixirs (Kelly, 2004: 2-4). As in the case of clay figurines that came before useful
earthenware or jewelry preceding metal tools (Smith, 1981: 242), the first significant deployment of the
unpalatable black power was ceremonial and spectacular: the audio-visual splendor of
fireworks. `Before flamethrowers, bombs, and guns filled the world with their terror’, Kelly affirms,
`gunpowder was the servant of delight and the handmaiden of wonder (2004: x).

Gunpowder’s passage from pyrotechnic exuberance to lethal weapon inherits the dialectic of
magic and utility characteristic of artisanal traditions. It is a myth that the predominant Chinese
application of gunpowder was embellishing the night sky . The exploding elixir soon captured the
interest of Sung Dynasty military strategists who were already masters of flaming arrows and
other incendiary weapons. Firecrackers morphed into smoke bombs, fire-spurting metal balls
and primitive explosive devices, and by the late 10th century, Kelly recounts, `the Chinese were producing gunpowder
fire arrows by the tens of thousands’ (2004: 10). Subsequent rounds of military R&D saw development of
rockets, canons and flame-spouting fire lances. Eventually, by the 13th century, came a
portable weapon capable of delivering an explosion-driven projectile – what we now call a `gun’
(Kelly, 2004: 15-17).
 Link – Militarism
Thesis card about how the evolution of the gun regiments social life and forms
the basis of militarism.
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 8-11|KZaidi

The march of gunpowder across the Eurasian landmass and through the centuries is a tale of intensifying
destructiveness on and beyond the battlefield (see Dalby, 2017), and pivotal to firepower’s escalation
is its regulatory enframing. Foucault may be our preeminent guide to the disciplinary practices central to the modern
order and all its sensibilities, but it is Deleuze and Guattari who steer us toward full appreciation of the inhuman powers that
incite new modalities of both supervision and subversion. Whereas Foucault’s notion of the
biopolitical still centres on living forces - a vitality and potentiality that never quite disentangles
itself from human agency, Deleuzoguattarian `geophilosophy’ is fully committed to a material-
energetic dynamism that exceeds the biological (1994: 85-95). And it is on account of the
metallurgists’ rigorous and experimental engagement with this `nonorganic life’ that they
epitomize, for Deleuze and Guattari, the broader human capacity to transform our own being through
joining forces with the Earth (see 1987: 411).

`In short’, Deleuze and Guattari propose, `the

being of sensation is not the flesh but the compound of
nonhuman forces of the cosmos, of man’s nonhuman becomings, and of the ambiguous house
that exchanges and adjusts them, makes then whirl around like winds’ (1994: 183). Swap `house’
for `housing’ – the `full metal jacket’ of the explosive projectile - and conjoin it with emergent
regimes of socio-corporeal control, and we are well on the way to understanding the thermo-
or pyropolitical machinery at the heart of modernity.

As with the discovery of gunpowder, the

ancient lineage of pyrotechnology required capitalization on
chance, most likely fostered by what metallurgist Cyril Smith describes as ‘rich and varied
sensual experience of the kind that comes directly from play with minerals, fire, and colors’ (1981:
203). As long as it hinged upon homemade kilns and non-standardized fuels and `impure’ raw materials, high-heat artisanship always
had an element of trail and error – however much it tracked determinate pathways of thermochemical change (Clark, 2015).
Accelerate the exothermic reaction of the furnace to the explosive deflagration of the firearm,
however, and that residue of unpredictability is likely to prove deadly - for the assailant rather
than the target.

In order to `domesticate’ the explosion, the container of the explosive force, together with its fuel and
ignition systems, needed to be rendered trustworthy. For centuries, the forging of cannon and gun
barrels maintained its dependence on the arts of the metallurgist: `practitioners who were
comfortable with risk’ and who tended to persist in the itinerant habits of their predecessors
(Kelly, 2004: 47). By the 16th century, European gunsmiths were turning from bronze to iron for casting
barrels, not only taking advantage of lower cost iron issuing from proliferating industrial-scale
blast furnaces but actually driving this development (Mumford, 2010: 87-8). Because guns, unlike rockets or
incendiary bombs, required near-instantaneous deflagration of the gunpowder charge, they posed
particular challenges - especially if firearms were to be portable and fast-loading enough to be
advantageous during `live’ exchanges (Kelly, 2004: 59). Successive innovations that upped the
efficacy of `killing from a distance’ included a more granulated powder that facilitated chain
reaction combustion, purification of saltpeter, spring-loaded `matchlock’ and later self-sparking
`flintlock’ ignition, rifling of barrels to put spin on bullets, cartridges combining charge and shot,
the repeating single barrel and – eventually – the revolving multi-barrel firearm (Kelly, 2004: 71, 61-3,
70, 187-9).

If reliability conditions the ascent of explosive weaponry, then standardization - of the entire
assemblage - is the key to precision, dependability, and speedy manufacture. While industrial mass
production has many tributaries, innovation in firearm fabrication holds special significance (Crosby, 2002: 136-7). Taking cues from
late 18th century French efforts to assemble muskets from standardized components, the
US Department of War
successfully introduced mechanized production using interchangeable parts to its armories in
the early 19th century (Mumford, 2010: 90). As writer and journalist Iain Overton concludes: `It was soon to be the
central way to mass produce so many things that define our modern life – cars and bicycles,
clocks and furniture. And, of course, guns in their millions’ (2015: 1689).

Crucial also was the ability to actually hit a target. While medieval thinkers fell short of
understanding the dynamics of exploding gunpowder, they also struggled to comprehend the
forces determining movement of projectiles through the air. This was a challenge that had momentous implications
for conceiving of motion and force more generally. Galileo’s insights on the parabolic curve described by
cannonballs and Newton’s extrapolation from projectiles to planetary motion, Kelly argues, were
pivotal in establishing the modern scientific premise that the object world followed
predictable trajectories (2004: 140-1). Although, he adds, it took centuries to fully translate this into accurate artillery.

Neither the evolving accuracy nor the growing reliability of arms makes much sense without
consideration of the social body that was at once the militarized explosion’s agent and its
target. If one half of the story is the progressive construction of containers capable of channeling
the energy of high-speed exothermic reactions, the other half is the fabrication of social beings able to
function in environments that for the first time include the power to blow them apart. `While
swords, arrows, and battle axes had injured men grievously’, laments Kelly, `the trauma inflicted by gunpowder was of
a new variety’ (2004: 79). Blasted entry and exit wounds, buried shrapnel, burns,
dismemberment: the corporeal impressions made by explosive weapons hardly need
recounting. Indeed, geographer Deborah Dixon notes, much of our `enlightened’ knowledge of anatomy has
been pieced together from the empirical – and visceral - experience of dealing with the carnage
of the modernizing battlefield (2015: ch. 4).
Though the increasing efficiency and power of explosive weapons has generated new challenges for organizing combative bodies,
much of the formative drilling of men-at- arms addressed the long-standing problem of
painfully slow reloading while exposed to enemy fire (Kelly, 2004: 183). Foucault is surely correct to follow
military historians in attending to the breakdown of battlefield operations into discrete, rehearsable
gestures that could be performed in unison by corporate bodies (1991: 135). Or as cultural historian Lewis
Mumford earlier insisted: `The army is ... the ideal form toward which a purely mechanical system of
industry must tend’ (2010: 89). But what defines the modernizing battlefield is not only the
`microphysics’ of power through which soldiers’ bodies are recalibrated, it is also the literal
microphysics of the explosive exothermics around which these bodies convene.
While Foucault’s biopolitical inquiry focuses on the practices through which the vital energies of biological bodies are redirected, a
thermopolitical perspective draws attention to the power of a new kind of fire as an incitement
for reconstructing corporeality in the modernizing world. The military port may be a `crossroads
for dangerous mixtures,’ that calls forth new ordering imperatives (Foucault, 1991:144), but the model
and apotheosis of the `dangerous mixture’ is the coming of a chemical compound capable of
runaway deflagration. Not just one more admixture – the explosion is a threshold in the 400 million-
year history of fire, a turning point in the million-year excursion of a fire-tending primate.
Something very significant, if difficult to define, changes in the construction of social being in order
that foot soldiers – ordinary men, seconded from the `masses’ – are put in charge of explosive devices;
something rends and buckles in the fabric of sociality when exposure to the explosion enters
daily existence.

More than a vital machine, the modern military corps is an `infernal machine,’ the term coined by
film theorist Bill Krohn in response to Stanley Kubrick’s genre-defying war movie Full Metal Jacket (1992: 435). But Foucault’s
fundamental lesson holds up: what is most important is how the `body-weapon, body-tool, body-
machine complex’ is generalized, how it comes to pervade modern social life (1991: 153). What
matters, in our case, is how the shock, the paroxysm, the brutal oxymoron of a `body-explosion
complex’ comes to infiltrate the social organization and cultural sensibilities of modernity. And
how we might conceive of modernity itself as profoundly, constitutively, infernal.
 Impact – Pyrotechnic Militarism
Thermopolitics and the constant drive for surplus accumulation ushers us into a
new system built on the raw manipulation of combustion, fire, and gunpowder.
Absent an analysis of how pyrotechnics sutures the coherence of the human
subject, militarism generates internal instability, warfare, and planetary
destabilization.
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 11-14|KZaidi

How to defuse this thermophysical outburst is perhaps the paramount political and cultural
challenge our species has faced. And the thorniness of this problem would seem to lie at once in
the formidable casing that has been constructed around the explosion in order to facilitate its
insertion into the core of daily existence and in the substantial armature we have forged
around ourselves so that we can live on in the vicinity of explosiveness. Indeed, given the
contribution that individualized internal combustion- powered vehicles make not only to
climate change but to international accidental death and injury statistics, it’s worth considering
that motorized carnage might never have become acceptable without a prior history of
fortifying ourselves through and against firearms. Light-armoured and propelled by explosive
force, many of us cleave to the entitlement of automobility as others hold tight to the right or
opportunity to bear arms. We might say, it’s a hell of thing when a car comes home to live with you.

Sociologist Max Weber made an apt choice in referring to a `stahlhartes Gehäuse,’- a steel- hard casing or
housing - that he feared would define modern selfhood `until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt’
(1976: 181). It’s a diagnosis that gains a new charge read alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s accenting of `man’s
nonhuman becomings’ and `the ambiguous house that exchanges and adjusts them’: a concern that
foregrounds the dynamism of the inhuman elements forces that we enfold into social life – along with
the immense challenges that their incorporation poses. To draw out and elaborate upon the
potentialities of the Earth, Deleuzoguattarian thought suggests, we must find ways to bring these forces
down to a more human scale, to extract and isolate them (Grosz, 2011: 38, Clark, 2015) – as it might be said
the pyrotechnologist does with the fire-walled kiln and the explosive engineer with their steely
casings. But taking hold of, concentrating, and intensifying such earthly powers no longer seems to be
the main challenge we face, so much as how we might go about this capture and discharge without
escalating our capacity for violence - against each other and against our planet.
In this context, we might see Georges Bataille as a vital intermediary between the social thought of Weber and the continental
philosophy of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari’s generation. Bataille
inherits Weber’s alarm over the steely
disdain for `the spontaneous enjoyment of life’ in early capitalist asceticism (Weber, 1976[1920/1]): 166,
Bataille, 1991: 115-6). Inflating this into a full-blown theory of excess and exorbitance, he passes on to
post-structuralist thinkers a sense that all forms of reason, calculation and utility open out into
a vaster realm of unreason, monstrous force and inevitable waste (Clark, 2011: 128- 133). But even his
successors rarely match Bataille’s determination to put a blazing excess of energy figuratively
and substantively at the core of our human and planetary condition (see Stoekl, 2007: xiii).

As Bataille contended, in conversation with physicist Georges Ambrosino, any

anthropic drive to commandeer the
prodigious matter-energy of the cosmos - in the absence of adequate discharge or release – will
inevitably stoke a vast, planet-scaled `conflagration’ (1991: 37; fn 2, 191; 1993: 428). The pointless,
destructive blow out of warfare was one way of releasing this pressure - though Bataille feared
that even the frightening escalation of nuclear and conventional weaponry he observed in the
postwar era could not keep pace with the inhuman energetic potentiality being amassed
through industrial capitalist accumulation. And this is a prognosis that must be confronted
afresh as we consider the sublimation of the battleground explosion into the ceaselessly
expanding thermo-physical forcing of the internal combustion engine – and the `world
historical blaze’ it is igniting (see Marder, 2015: 164).
 Impact – Climate
Card about climate change in relationship to thermopolitics and Bataille
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 11-14|KZaidi

In its tactics and investments, `if not exactly and directly,’ Foucault ruminated, modern politics is a
continuation of war (1991: 168). But then modern warfare, in circuitous ways, might also be seen as a
continuation of art, as an enfolding and repurposing of the aesthetic, the miraculous, the
enchanting.

political and aesthetic avant gardes envisioned a fiery detonation of

Earlier in our modernity, successive
prevailing social worlds from within. Communists dreamt of a revolutionary `fire of freedom’ ,
futurists yearned for an explosive exit from stultifying tradition, some anarchist factions
actually attempted to blow up their nemeses (Marder 2015: 42, Davis 2007: 1-3). In the wake of World War 1 and
attuned to the nascent reverberations of nuclear physics, Virginia Woolf imagined a kind of dynamic, all-
pervasive creativity that would shatter social conventions . `The idea has come to me’, she wrote in her diary in
1928, `that what I want now to do is to saturate every atom’ (cited in Reynier, 2009: 86).

As with many fellow modernists, Woolf’s molecular dream of socio-cultural transformation resonates with
Kelly’s depiction of the thermochemical reaction at the heart of the firearm - `(f)ire spread
through the mixture by means of a spray of hot, molten saltpeter and gas that leaped from a
burning particle to its neighbors’ (2004: 62). In our own time, however, such imagery seems at once irresponsible
and insufficiently ambitious. It feels metaphorically insensitive on account of the horrific proliferation of
actual explosive events in public spaces. But it also falls short in a literal sense when we consider
the immense practical challenge of reconfiguring the combustive core of our social order.

Today’s world indeed seems to be detonating itself from within, but its fiery dynamics play out
deep in the mundane circuitry of global modernity. While the great majority of the planet’s
estimated 1 billion guns at any moment lie idle (Overton 2015: 35-6), a good proportion of its 1.2
billion hydrocarbon-powered motor vehicles are in use. This means that somewhere in the vicinity
of 400 trillion small but rapid deflagration events take place every day, each one pushing a
cylinder up or down within a metallic casing (Clark and Yusoff, 2014). Mumford presciently grasped the shared
thermophysical logic of the motor and the firearm when he observed ` the gun was the starting
point of a new type of machine: it was, mechanically speaking, a one cylinder internal
combustion engine’ (2010: 88). Or as science historian Joseph Needham later put it: `For half a dozen decades past the
idea has been hovering among the minds of historians that the cylinder and the cannon-barrel
are essentially analogous, and that the piston and piston-rod may be considered a tethered
cannon-ball’ (1986: 544).

Already in the late 17th century, Dutch polymath Christiaan

Huygens had hit upon the idea of harnessing the
force of gunpowder - that had `hitherto served only for violent action’ - to the more productive
task of propelling an engine: a `moteur à explosion’ (cited in Kelly, 2004: 116). Huygens imagined a controlled
series of explosive charges propelling a piston – a concept he was unable to bring to fruition and
one that was sidelined for several centuries by the ascendance of external combustion engines
as the driving force of industrialization. Huygens’ proposal did not overtly come of age until the
rise of the internal combustion engine – with its shift from gunpowder to hydrocarbon-based
deflagration (Kelly, 2004: 118). However, Needham insists that the steam engine – via Papin’s advancements on
Huygens’ research – emerges directly from experiments with `gunpowder engines’ . `Though Denis Papin
never harnessed his piston-rod to anything, his historical position in the transition from gunpowder to steam is
a central one’, affirms Needham – though he credits the inauguration of this line of development to
Chinese military inventors (1986: 558, 545).

Arguably, the
more peaceable moteur à explosion is inflicting deeper, longer-lasting damage to
the world than ever has the profusion of militaristic explosive devices. Human-induced climate
change is largely a matter of combustion. Given available fuel, terrestrial fire follows an exothermic
chain reaction, and as we have seen, the last 1000 years – a geohistorical eye-blink – has witnessed a
singular acceleration of this dynamic to the near- instantaneous feedback loop of the
explosion. If we were to speed up geological time to a velocity suited to human vision, it might
well appear as though the last few centuries had initiated a runaway global deflagration event
– constituted by the self-amplifying combustion of the Earth’s subterranean stocks of fossil
hydrocarbon. In short, we may have sparked a planetary explosion – which is one way of conceiving
of the shift into a new geological epoch or Earth system state of which many geoscientists
now speak (see Clark and Yusoff, 2017, Dalby, 2017).
 Alternative – Expenditure
Exteriority and otherness promise our inevitable dissolution, the question is
how do we respond? Political responses to pyrotechnics based on affordability
already set the terms of that encounter. This is an economizing move that not
only denies one's being lacerated by difference but butchers otherness by
making exteriority conditional upon a subjects accordance with solar models of
vitalism.
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 14-16|KZaidi

Fire, observes Pyne, ‘appears more profusely during times of rapid and extreme climatic change’
(1994: 890). The fiery irruptions of pent-up energy we are observing today across the planet -
roaring wildfires, crop fires, peri-urban blazes – are far from the generous, generative
discharges of which Bataille dreamt. Even more shocking are the flaring fires of conflict, for which
growing environmental stress – `if not exactly and directly’– may often be a contributing factor.
Amongst the novel modes of explosive device now proliferating, the car bomb – what urban theorist Mike Davis describes as
`the nuclear weapon of guerilla warfare’ (2008: 130) - has a cruelly ironic centrality . For just as the modern
automobile enfolds the explosive force of the firearm within its cylinders, the vehicle-borne
improvised explosive device unfolds the force of explosive deflagration back into an act of
war: the steal-hard casing of the ubiquitous car reconverted into the full metal jacket of the militant
projectile.

Still more horrific - if we can imagine a scale to horror - is the

suicide bomber, who instantiates the `body-
explosion’ complex’ in the rawest, most palpable way, literally saturating every atom of their
being with incendiary force. It is worth recalling that Bataille spoke of the profundity of the break with
the infernal logic of accumulation in terms of sacrifice (1991:182). And though his hope was to
imbue ordinary social life with a spirit of giving without return , he did not shy away from the
anguish of actual lives being put on the line (1986: 85-8).

For Bataille, thepath out of the predicament of the planetary powder keg lay in the pointless
expenditure – or `squandering’ – of our amassed material-energetic forces. So he called on us
`to consume, to annihilate, to make a bonfire of our resources’ – linking such exuberance to the
experiences that were once referred to as ` divine, sacred’ (1986: 185). If the idea of non-utilitarian
expenditure seems to grate against the conditions of mass deprivation that the current global
order engenders, we should keep in mind how, above all, it is the planet’s least privileged who
have been most pressured to forgo their customary landscape burning practices, their
artisanal fires, their multitudinous ways of becoming with and through fire (Clark, 2015). As we should
insist that any thermopolitics or pyropolitics to come – any attempt to cut firebreaks in a blazing
modernity – needs to work with and through the historical depth of fiery experimentation and
all the multitude of ways that the inhuman force of fire has been enfolded into human
collectives.
Throughout this paper Ihave been tempted, am still temped, to draw a distinction between the thermal
generativity of the pyrotechnical craftsperson and the fiery nihilism of military explosive
engineers: to insist that the wild entropic outburst of the explosion is categorically destructive while
the tempered transmutations of the artisanal flame are definitively creative or productive . Until I
remember the first use of runaway deflagration , before militarism dressed the explosion in its
steel-hard housing. Kelly’s evocation of pyrotechnic display would make Bataille’s heart sing. `Many have tried to
describe the evanescent beauty of firework’, he writes. `The explosions are splendid waste. They
are wild-haired comets, silver rain, tinsel-starred bouquets’ (2004: 238).

At the other end of our infernal modernity, Alfred Crosby embraces the
post-conflict repurposing of the rocket -
which now tasks exploding fuel with journeying beyond Earth . After collecting data about the gas giant
Jupiter, he recounts, the Pioneer 10 spacecraft is `whiplashed around the planet and hurled away from the Sun at a velocity fifty-five
times that of a rifle bullet and off toward interstellar space’ (2002: 188). Heading into the void, the
rocket in Crosby’s
telling seems more like a firework - a `wild-haired comet’ - than a ballistic projectile, a great
burst of flame on a glorious trajectory that no longer remembers its target.

It is possible that our species’ primordial infatuation with fire could have found modern,
intensified forms of expression other than escalating military firepower and the proliferation
of autonomous internal combustion vehicles. As it might just be conceivable that the high-speed
deflagration of the firework could have segued into the explosive propulsion of the space-
venturing rocket along some trajectory other than a thousand- year spree of killing-at-a-
distance. What we can be more certain of is that no steel-hard casing, no full metal jacket, is going to
protect us from a profusely burning planet. To live in the midst of resurgent flame would seem
to summon a perviousness, a transmutability, a raging curiosity whose embers - if we are
lucky – still smolder somewhere deep within us.
 Framework – Subjectivity 1st
Subjectivity is a prereq to politics
Clark’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Infernal Machinery:
Thermopolitics of the Explosion, Thermal Objects – Theorizing Temperatures and the Social
Special issue of Culture Machine, Vol.17 (2018), Edited by Elena Beregow. Page 2-5|KZaidi

Today there is growing recognition that humans, some decidedly more than others, are acting as geological
or planetary agents. Critical thought most often responds by reaffirming the socio-economic,
cultural, political and historical variables that determine and differentiate such powers to
impact upon the earth and upon fellow human beings. In general, social and cultural thinkers have not been as
willing to ask whether our own inherited concepts and categories might themselves already be infused or
contaminated with `geologic’ force, or to consider how inhuman powers might work through us in
the very process of us working with them (see Clark and Gunaratnam, 2017).

Combustion - in particular, the burning of fossil fuels - is central to the problematic of human geologic
agency and to any meaningful political or cultural response to the planetary predicament (see Clark and
Yusoff, 2014). Who gets to burn, what they burn, and how much they burn are matters that quickly
draw us into the deeply imbalanced power relations of the modern world. But any consideration
of the global structuring of political power in turn raises the issue of another kind of fire: the
explosive combustion that is at the core of state or military arsenals and the crux of most
forms of insurrectionary force. In the words of geopolitics scholar Simon Dalby: `The recent history and very obviously
the future of geopolitics are shaped by ... pyrotechnics – a matter of ‘firepower’ quite literally’
(2017: 4).

As Dalby and others make clear, differential access to the benefits and costs of consuming fossil
hydrocarbons tends to be closely associated with uneven distribution of firepower - in ways
that are bound up with long, fraught colonial and military histories. But what sort of fire is this that is so
central to the geopolitical ordering of our world? What kind of force, power or potentiality defines the thermal
explosion around which modern armaments are configured? And what does it mean that explosive weapons – Bam-Bam’s
new gun and its multitudinous kin - come to live with us, accumulate around us, and reverberate through
us, even as we might suppose they are serving our purposes?

While fire has been part of our planet’s history for hundreds of millions of years, it is notable that no
natural fire behaves
like the blast of gunpowder. Only when members of our own species, just over a thousand years ago,
chanced upon a volatile compound of chemicals did the Earth first witness a combustive chain
reaction sped up to lightning speed. As writer Jack Kelly details in his colourful chronicle of gunpowder: `Instead of
needing minutes or hours to burn, the fuel would go up in a fraction of a second. This violent reaction, a
product of inner oxygen, is man’s fire, concocted, singular, unquenchable. It does not exist anywhere
in nature’ (2004: vii).

The event of near-instantaneouscombustion came about through an exacting combination of

sulfur, charcoal, and saltpeter (Kelly, 2004: 2). Though not all its uses have been destructive, what its Chinese
inventors termed huo yao or `fire drug’ and what the English called ` gunpowder’ was to
transform the practice of warfare, and many would say, to shape the very contours of global
civilization. As historian Alfred Crosby pronounces: `Humanity used gunpowder, which blows things apart,
to compress communities together into empires and nations’ (2002: 107). Or as Kelly reflects on the
European uptake of the Chinese black powder: `To the Western mind, technical advances moved in one
direction. The discovery of gunpowder was a momentous and irreversible milestone on the
path of history....Gunpowder was civilization’ (2004: 97).

We need to be careful, of course, not to credit technical innovations with an autonomous power to
convene or shatter worlds. But neither should we recoil so far into conventions of social
construction that the forces of the Earth itself appear always already under our jurisdiction.
Chiming with Marlon James’s insights on the firearm, researchers specializing in fire have long insisted that combustion is
more than a tool serving our ends. Fire, they propose, is constitutively volatile and excessive –
shaping us even as we mold and apply it. Indeed, fire theorists like to tell stories of our species and
planet from the perspective of combustion itself . With the emergence of a fire-handling creature, environmental
historian Stephen Pyne muses, `the Earth did not get quite what it supposed’ (2001: 26). Or as anthropologist
Loren Eiseley ponders: `What if I am, in some way, only a sophisticated fire that has acquired the
ability to regulate its rate of combustion and to hoard its fuel in order to see and walk? ’ (1978: 151).

If manipulating fire has helped forge who we are , then the arrival of the thermal explosion – within
our own historical memory - undoubtedly brings
a new set of demands and opportunities. What might a
`thermopolitics’ or a `pyropolitics’ of explosive weaponry tell us about the emergence of
modern subject, its fears and hopes, its aims and trajectories, I ask here (see Clark, 2011: 164-5, Marder,
2015). And how does the conjunction of human bodies and weaponized explosions articulate , more broadly, with
the role that combustion – in all its forms – has played in the more-than-human becoming of our
species?

Michel Foucault (1991) paves the way with his meticulous mapping of a biopolitics through which bodies
emerge as objects
of a new `anatomy of power’ in a modernizing Europe. As he points out, the originary locus through
which `an art of the human body was born’ is the training ground of a novel collective being -
fire-armed infantry (1991: 137). But while Foucault’s focus is living bodies, much might yet be said about the
firearm itself – about the inhuman explosive power with which the human body was in the process
of joining forces – in the emergence of a new disciplinary regime.

Today, together with resurgent threats of nuclear conflagration, deployment of conventional

ballistic projectiles coexists with an irruption of newer `improvised’ explosive devices . It is not
only the amassing of weapons that puts the world at risk, however, but the impact of
ceaseless industrial capitalist productivity - an `unprecedented accumulation’ that has, even
`without war’, in Georges Bataille’s prophetic words, `turned the whole world into a colossal powder keg’
(1993: 428). As climate change stokes `planetary burn-out’ (Marder, 2015: 155), thermal upheaval of the Earth is
coming to be viewed as a `threat multiplier’ – an exacerbating factor of conflict. But if this is indeed a
fire planet and we ourselves a fire species, then the current planetary predicament also raises questions about
what other kinds of thermal politics and arts we might conjure, what other modes of fiery
transmutation are behind us – and might yet lie before us.
Firepower – Simon Dalby
 Thesis – Global Ignition
Tag
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page 3-4|KZaidi

Political decisions about economics, who controls landscapes for what purpose, and the scale and
speed of resource extraction, are dramatically reshaping ecosystems and habitats. This is political ecology
at the global scale, a matter of ‘world ecology’ in Jason Moore’s terms.8 It is gradually becoming clear that the long held implicit
assumptions about stable geographical contexts within which humanity’s rivalries and struggles for
power supposedly play out, are no longer tenable .9 Geopolitical rivalries, struggles for dominance and
the related economic practices that shape states and provide the technologies for economic and
military competition, are a key part of global economic activity that is now clearly changing the
earth system. Crucial to this changing earth system context are the processes of combustion that directly, and indirectly
through numerous technological modes, are driving the contemporary environmental transformation.10 As such combustion
and fire processes are a key theme for discussion in contemporary materialist geopolitics
although one that is frequently taken for granted rather than addressed directly . To remedy the
neglect of fire processes, this paper first discusses matters of geopolitical culture before reprising the history of fire and the crucial
role pyrotechnics (very broadly understood) have played in the emergence of humanity as the dominant
force in the biosphere. Sophisticated uses of combustion played a part in modern geopolitical
rivalries and the rise of British and later American hegemony. Now combustion is the key driver
of climate change and contempor- ary patterns of Anthropocene geopolitics. Combustion also
bridges the divides between human and physical sciences, and as such offers a way for linking
traditional social science discussions of geopolitics with the forcing mechanisms that are driving
bio- sphere change.11 It also brings the geophysical processes of earth system transformation explicitly into the discussions of materialist
geopolitics, but does so by emphasising transformative processes rather than assemblages, landscapes, or

material artefacts.12 Likewise, while this paper does engage what Michael Marder discusses in terms of pyropolitics, the focus here is much
more on the material processes of combustion than the metaphoric use of fire in politics.13 Integrating the study of combustion into

geopolitics is, as this paper suggests, one productive way of rethinking the material dimen- sions of the
current processes, ones that are key to shaping both the future climate of the planet and
simultaneously the terrestrial species mix and hence the course of the current global extinction
event. Climate change thus adds new impetus to discussions of geopolitics and claims for
legitimacy and sovereignty by numerous new actors.14 Humanity’s actions shape not just the
arrangements of power among large political actors, their technologies, structures and alliances, a matter
of, in Colin Flint’s terms ‘geopolitical constructs’, but in doing so are now reconfiguring the biosphere at the global scale to

a very large extent as a result of processes of combustion.15

 Link – US Geopolitics
Tag
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page 3-4|KZaidi
Geopolitical Cultures

Nonetheless these new circumstances have been slow to penetrate into the formulations of some key contemporary geopolitical
cultures, notably the more conservative political forces in the Anglosphere. Gerard Toal suggests that geopolitical culture
“is how states see the world, how they spatialise it and strategize about the fundamental
tasks of the state: security, moderniza- tion, the self–preservation of identity.”16 Suggesting that
there is no objective relationship between a territorial entity and its geopolitical culture he goes on to argue that foundational
myths and ideological frameworks shape how states interpret their resource endowments.
Ideological power networks tend to generate cultural and civilizational discourses. Economic power
networks tend to be the supports for modernization and accu- mulation. Security power
structures organize around perceived threats to the state and can use insecurity and
instability to entrench their power and position within the state. Together these networks
generate civilizational (identity), modernization (accumulation), and state security (defense)
forms of geopolitical thinking. Geopolitical cultures tend to feature competing visions that combine
elements of each. Which one predominates and drives state foreign policy is the subject of
struggles and entrepreneurship in the political arena.17

Coherence between these multiple elements is frequently lacking. In

the case of United States foreign policy
relating to energy and climate security there is often a fundamental divide between those who
focus on fuel supply and the geopolitical flexibility that domestic supplies supposedly provide
as key to state security, and those worried about climate change.18 The latter view the relentless fracking and petroleum
extraction across North America as part of the problem of climate change and a mode of accumulation that needs to be tackled
rather than a policy to be supported. Questions of the possible loss of cultural artefacts that express personal and collective identity
also motivate dissent from climate change initiatives. While no government is ‘coming to take away your SUV’, fears that climate
regulations will have such effects are a significant part of contemporary politics and drive dissent- ing views about the need for
climate mitigation actions.19

Combustion is the geophysical process that has facilitated the transforma- tion of much of the
terrestrial surface by humanity and in the process pushed the parameters of the earth system
into a new geological epoch. Combustion is driving climate change and extinction directly ,20 and
indirectly by causing ecosystem disruption and habitat loss. The recent history and very obviously
the future of geopolitics are shaped by these pyrotechnics – a matter of ‘firepower’ quite
literally. The rich and powerful parts of humanity are not only, as classical geopolitics suggests, struggling for
dominance in a partly anarchical arrangement of states, but are simultaneously reshaping the arena of that contest
while arguing over the rules by which the system of rivalry will be governed.

That this is in fact what is happening is rejected by many so-called climate change deniers, and most notably
recently by the Trump administration in the United States, which articulates its vision of the
future in terms of a very simplistic geopolitical framework of competing nation states,
domestic virtue and foreign dangers. This simultaneously implies a stable geographical con-
text for state rivalries and an ‘ideology of isolation’ wherein people and states are understood
as autonomous separate actors with little responsibility for the fate of others.21
The intense political opposition to climate change initiatives in the United States in particular, but also in other parts of the
Anglosphere, notably in Canada and Australia, is partly driven by the short term economic interests of coal and petroleum sectors.
But, as will be elucidated further later in this paper, climate change ‘deniers’ also frequently articulate ‘conservative’ cultural
themes that emphasise competition, struggles for dominance and status tied to technological
artefacts, notably ‘firearms’ and petroleum powered vehicles. These often encompass colonising
tropes, of wilderness and danger in need of conquest, pacification and where that fails,
violent policing to deter threats.22 In the Canadian case during the years when Stephen Harper was prime minister
these themes were explicitly articulated in terms of Canada as an energy superpower, coupled
with the suppression of government scientific discussion of environmental topics and rhetoric of
support for military solu- tions to external political problems in the Middle East in particular .23
Australian politics has mirrored many of these themes in the last decade too, and in particular
themes of the hostility to refugees and migrants fleeing violence in Asia and Africa and antipathy to serious climate change
action.24

But, climate change makes it clear that this framework is anachronistic, and in so far as it provides the contextualisation that is used
to shape crucial policy decisions, is likely to aggravate the pace of environmental change rather than ameliorate coming disruptions.
Unless, that is, one simply refuses to accept this contextualisation of rapid change and dismisses scientific formulations of
environmental phenomena as a distraction from the suppo- sedly much more pressing issues of national security focused on
geopolitical competition and the threat of violence ever present in the international arena. Thus, the politics of climate denial
connects up with larger matters of geopolitical culture and with policy actions on international agreements to tackle, or not, climate
change.

At the heart of this issue is the contested view of combustion as either a source of national power and cultural accomplishment in
the competition for great power status, or as a fundamental threat to future environmental stabilities necessary for civilised life in a
crowded biosphere. Sharply con- trasting geopolitical assumptions shape these competing views of geography and security. Key to
both is the matter quite literally of ‘firepower’.

While the early parts of human history are crucial to understanding the bases of what is now understood in terms of political
ecology, the processes whereby human economies appropriate resources and remake landscapes,
they need to be extended to more recent history to link the theme of the processes of
combustion to the rivalries of states and empires and the search for dominance in human
affairs. The histories of technologies of warfare and urbanisation are tied into this story with the use
of fire both as an ecological transformation device and a weapon of warfare. The increasing control of
combustion and its reworking in engineering and warfare have driven the processes of
geopolitics, and shaped the rise of the West and the subsequent global spread of these
pyrotechnics, a key part of both the subjugation of conquered peoples and the rivalries of
empires that created the global capitalist economy. All of which is in part the story of the recent parts of the
Anthropocene, how in William Ruddiman’s formulation, humans took control of the climate.25
 Link – Climate Politics
Tag
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page |KZaidi

This discussion, and the related ones about the future material configuration of the planet, are all tied
into the processes of combustion to power all manner of machines, production systems and
buildings. These all involve scaling up the human niche.52 In the process of expanding our niche to effectively
shape the whole biosphere the rich and powerful parts of human- ity are reorganising it for
their short term convenience and comfort often in new urban habitats, ones made possible by the
capabilities unleashed by controlled combustion and related technological innovations.53 All this
mat- ters because the transformations set in motion are changing the human context in many ways that, while bringing huge
benefits to some humans, may well be disastrous to most of us in the next stage of the Anthropocene .54

The debate in the social sciences and the humanities over the Anthropocene has in part become preoccupied by a discussion of who
is to blame for this predicament understood as soon to be catastrophic. If
cata- strophe looms and only some
humans have set it in motion then questions of political responsibility arise quickly . Critiques of the
earth system sciences literature focus on the invocation of a singular humanity and suggest that this is failing to locate the causes of
the Anthropocene in the rise of capitalism first and its fossil fuelled variants later. Hence the use of the term ‘capitalo- cene’ as an
alternative to the Anthropocene.55 This attention to the rise of fossil fuelled global change focuses on a
similar timescale for the Anthropocene as Paul Crutzen’s original suggestion of the steam engine as the emblematic
technology marking the start of the period.56 But, a more ecologically sensitive understanding of
contemporary changes suggests a much more complicated set of transformations: ‘The
geological Anthropocene is neither universalist nor technocratic, neither deterministic nor
antipolitical. Rather than designating a general human footprint on the natural world it implies
only a network of evolutionary developments and ecological interactions.’57

The ‘great acceleration’ in global change that dates from the end of the Second World War focuses
attention on the transformative impact of that conflict on technology, the extraordinary expansion of
industrial cap- abilities, the emergence of the atomic bomb and the extension of gasoline and
diesel powered mobility.58 By the end of the war the American economy was producing nearly half of
the total global industrial output. In the war’s aftermath, the spread of automobile lead
suburbanisation and the related consumer economies around the globe were key to the
geopolitical culture of the cold war confrontation.59 American hegemony has facilitated the
expan- sion of this liberal political economy; indeed they are effectively one and the same
thing.60

Internal combustion engines have been a key technology in this transfor- mation; this form of
firepower was crucial to American geopolitical dom- inance, a matter of geopolitical economy
much more than just direct military capabilities . This focus on more recent developments, and the suggestion in
the Anthropocene discussion, that the key transitions that matter in terms of global change date from mid twentieth century, add a
twist to this tale that directly relate to the traditional themes of geopolitics and great power rivalry.
Not least this is because both nuclear fallout from atmospheric weapons tests and fly ash from fossil fuel powered electricity
generation are two of the suggested sedimentary markers that might be used to designate the beginning of the Anthropocene.61
Crucially the period of liberal international economic expansion , the great acceleration in geological terms, has
been one substantively shaped by the flexibility of petroleum and its by-products, both in
transportation, domestic heating and cooking as well as the now globally ubiquitous plastics. 62
These artefacts too, once they accumulate on beaches as a new form of geological deposit, the so-
called ‘plastiglomerates’, are another material indication of the onset of the Anthropocene. While
petroleum isn’t the only energy source, it plays a key role in transportation, both on land in terms of cars
and trucks, at sea where ‘steamships’ are still powered by oil and in the air where jet-fuel and
aviation gasoline are the only fuels that currently matter in powering flight.

The political economy of petroleum is markedly different from that of coal, requiring much less
manual labour, much greater technological sophis- tication in extracting, refining and transporting it, while also
providing flexibility in processing and distribution. These matters have meant that unions have been much
less prevalent in petroleum sectors than was pre- viously the case in the coal industry.63 The
democratic gains won by indus- trial labour in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in
Western states have largely been eclipsed by technological changes in the mining sector and
the reduction in the relative importance of coal as a fuel in these economies. The parallel process was
the rise in the power of the oil barons in the US in the nineteenth century, and subsequently anti-
trust campaigns to break up the huge syndicates . These spin off corporations morphed into the famous seven
sisters in the middle of the twentieth century, and subsequently as more oil production was taken under national
control, into a complex series of large trading and distribution companies , only most obviously BP,
Exxon, Shell, Mobil and other brands familiar to all automobile drivers.64

These corporations have been powerful players in national politics in the United States in particular,
and globally where supplies of petroleum and markets for their products have been found. In
the United States they have
recently been involved in concerted efforts to mislead the public about the effects of climate change, by
funding campaigns of ‘climate denial’ and misinformation while backing politicians friendly to their corporate
interests.65 Donors are now channelling untraceable funds to think tanks and media organisations
for this effort, but the overall pattern is one con- sistent with the ‘libertarian’ funding arrangements
that have long supported ‘conservative’ political movements in the United States .66
 Impact – Climate Change
Tag
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page |KZaidi

Fire had been a crucial dimension of natural history long before humanity made its appearance. It shaped
plant and animal distributions, and used life’s products as its fuel. Hence it has been a key factor
in ecosystem function in many places.26 Once domesticated by early hominids, this process has been
increasingly used by humanity in ever larger and more sophisticated ways. These activities have
suggested to some ecologists that the domestication of fire marks the beginning of large-scale human
change and hence an era best termed the early Anthropocene or perhaps the
Paleoanthropocene.27 Landscape change, and in some cases the use of fire as an aid in hunting, are key
parts of the megafauna destruction that has marked the emergence of humanity . As our niche has
expanded other species have been rendered extinct at an increasingly rapid rate recently , one
with a cumulative extinction impact analogous to the consequences of major volcanic or
asteroid events of the geologic past.

Accounts of the rise of cities, agriculture and the spread of humanity are frequently told in terms of
civilisations and technology.28 Not only weapons and agricultural implements and the practical
matters of using fires for heating in cool climates, but also crucially coins are usually made at
least partly of metal components and the processes of smelting require controlling fire to
generate heat to melt ores. This process frequently involved using charcoal, a processes of firing
too, that changes wood into more useful fuel for intense use . The Roman innovations with concrete
added another important dimension to this, ‘remaking stone’, for more long-lasting exten- sive and robust building
construction. Once again controlling fire is a key part of the processes of remaking other substances to
shape the human context directly and much else indirectly. Concrete is now a new part of
planetary geology, and as such part of what makes the case for the Anthropocene designation.29

In terms of large scale climate change however it is important to remem- ber the
distinction between fire in
terrestrial ecosystems, where plants grow and reabsorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and those in
ecosystems that don’t recover as is sometimes the case in deliberate deforestation , and the
emissions from fossil fuels where geological reservoirs of carbon are burnt, literally turning rocks
into air in the processes of combustion.30 Obviously human actions are involved in all of these, but
the long-term climate change effects of burning biomass, deforestation and fossil fuel
combustion are rather different. Likewise, not all fire is ecologically ‘bad’.31 Fire suppression, in forestry
management practices in particular, which prevents the natural combustion of accumulated
biomass debris, and the regeneration of landscapes, may actually reduce biodiversity, and
hence make them more vulnerable to climate change.

Fire is a crucial part of the earth system , a process that has numerous consequences, but which is dependent on
conditions of fuel availability, context and a source of ignition .32 As such it matters greatly that a
single species, humanity, has taken partial control over its use and done so both by rearranging
fuel’s geography and supplying new forms of ignition to supple- ment those caused by lightning
and volcanoes.33 The expansion of the extractive processes to supply the global economy with
numerous commod- ities, notably in the headlines these days, palm oil from plantations in Indonesia, likewise involves
fire to clear landscapes and eradicate forests. Habitat destruction continues apace in many
places; it’s the landscape change wrought by the processes of economic expansion that simultaneously
dis- places people and ecosystems and drives the extinction of many species. Wild fire for land
clearing is complemented by combustion in chain saws and bulldozers used to hasten habitat
transformation.

The extensive use in terms of fire for agricultural land clearing and in the form of fires for domestic heating and smelting
metals has been complemen- ted by more ‘intensive’ forms of combustion in the form of
gunpowder, and in the industrial revolution powering boilers in steam engines and later for
electricity generation. Other energy sources including timber and peat were also in use during the rise
of European capitalism and the related expansion of colonial modes of resource extraction that
have so shaped landscapes around the world in the last few centuries. Canal systems used complicated systems of
locks, and moved barges without the use of fossil fuels prior to the introduction of mostly coal-
powered steam engines. Sailing ships were in use throughout the nineteenth century only gradually being replaced by
‘steam- ships’. Windmills and waterwheels provided industrial power in numerous places before
being gradually replaced by steam engines; they are once again doing so increasingly as wind turbines and water
wheels in the form of hydroelectric generation spread. But, the nineteenth century and the twen- tieth were
most profoundly shaped by the expansion of fossil fuelled based industry and then modes of
extensive consumption with all the consequences this has had for both the global economy
and geopolitical rivalries.

Promethian Technics

The key technical change in the industrial revolution was the expansion of the use of fossil fuels ,
which when coupled with engineering innovations and the initial rudimentary steam engines, allowed more flexible use of
first pumps and then other industrial processes . Ironically many of the early steam engines were used
for pumping water out of mines, coal mines in particular, to allow deeper digging and more
extensive access to fossil energy. This in turn drove the manufacturing innovations in Britain first, and then elsewhere.

Most recently fire

has been moved inside engineered spaces in the various forms of internal
combustion and jet engines that have so accelerated modernity’s mobility. In the form of
chainsaws these devices have greatly speeded global deforestation . Such engines have also facilitated
the large-scale changes of marine ecosystems too, both directly in powering fishing boats which can
now harvest much of the oceanic biomass, and indirectly as a result of increasing atmospheric carbon
dioxide levels causing sea water acidification, oxygen depletion and ocean warming . Humanity
is now mak- ing carbon dioxide at prodigious rates, which the very tentative efforts to
attenuate in the Paris Agreement of 2015 and various smaller scale initiatives, have, at least so
far, not substantially constrained.

Crucially, Stephen Pyne suggests we

need to attend to the human geogra- phy of fire, and the processes
of landscape change that are involved with the ‘pyric transition’, in his terms .34 This is a process of
increasingly directed uses of combustion, and a move from extensive use of fire to intensive use,
from wildfire to engineered combustion processes, and the precise use of fire to power our
technologies, not least, somewhat ironically, the ‘fire engines’ that we now use to try to control
wild fire. People cause fires, and do so for all sorts of practical matters of heating, cooking,
land clearing and more recently for industrial and transportation purposes. As industrialisation has
spread worldwide combustion has broadly speaking changed from open biomass burning to
contained fossil fuel use; the case of Indonesia just being an extreme case of forest clearing prior to
the dominance of internal combustion taking over in the economy of that country.35

Many combustion processes involve explicitly geographical strategies to enhance human power
over both ‘nature’ and other humans. People move fuel so it is burned in particular places that
are useful whether in incinerators, bonfires, or in stoves, boilers and engines. Domestic living arrangements
frequently inhabit architectures that focus sociability round a ‘fireplace’. Home is intimately
connected to hearth; cooking an essential material pro- cess that is simultaneously key to
most human cultures. Controlled burning is immensely useful for disposing of waste, and bodies
too, in processes of cremation. Attempts to stop dangerous fires from burning buildings, fields,
forests and infrastructure are mostly exercises in geographical containment prior to
extinguishment.

Humanity’s transformation of the contexts of fire, controlling both its ignition and its supplies
of fuel is key both to the immediate uses of fire to power various technologies, as well as to the
large-scale transformation of the current earth system.36 Fire thus now follows human activity
quite directly in burning landscapes for agricultural and resource extraction activities. 37 Indirectly
anthropogenic activity in numerous activities, and landscape trans- formation in particular, is
also changing the flammability and the sources of supply of fuel for combustion. Attempts to
suppress wildfires as part of park management arrangements and in situations where housing
and economic infrastructures are built in natural fire zones have transformed ecosystem
behaviour and, as severe mega-fires in recent years have shown, frequently made combustion
more intense when it does occur.

Crucially the
rise in the use of fossil fuels marks a novel stage in planetary history at the global
scale; evolution is being reorganised dramatically , and industrial forces are indirectly and sometimes directly
determining which species thrive and which are threatened with eradication . The use of
combus- tion by humanity marks a crucial transition in planetary history:

Until that Promethean moment, fire history had remained a subset of natural history, particularly of climate history. Now,
notch
by notch, fire gradually ratcheted into a new era in which natural history, including climate,
would become subsets of fire history. In a sense, the rhythms of anthropogenic fire began to
replace the Milankovitch climate cycles which had governed the coming and going of ice ages.38

Fire is now changing things at a global scale , mostly by the combustion of fossil fuels, reversing the
long-term sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the earth, and in the process
accelerating climate change and in many places making fires more extreme due to drying and
heating processes. The irony of a huge wild fire threatening the petroleum extraction infra-
structure of the Tar Sands in Alberta in May 2016 exemplifies the importance of combustion in
linking human and natural transformations in the pro- cesses of climate change.
 Root Cause – Militarism
Tag
Dalby’17|Simon Dalby, Balsillie School of International Affairs, Wilfrid Laurier University.
Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene (2017) in Geopolitics, DOI:
10.1080/14650045.2017.1344835. Page |KZaidi

Fire has also long been a weapon of war, used on battlefields and in sieges in numerous ways .
Once rapid combustion in the form of gunpowder and other explosives were perfected they shaped

the conduct of warfare profoundly, both directly because of their capabilities for destruction and indirectly in setting projectiles in
motion. The command to use these weapons is of course the word ‘fire’. While most of the ever-

greater precision of these combustion technologies, from rockets, to muskets and cannons to
rifled artillery to guided missiles extended the range and accuracy of weapons it is also
important to note that incendiaries to start wild fires have long been part of warfare. Attempts
to use aerial bombing to initiate ‘firestorms’ to burn German and Japanese cities came to their
apotheosis in the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. 39 The secondary
effects of nuclear devices in causing numerous ignitions are part of their destructive capabilities .
Discussion of nuclear war in the 1980s focused partly on this by thinking through how rapid onset climate change might result from atmospheric
pollution caused by burning cities in the after- math of an American-Soviet conflict.40

Technologies matter in terms of military capabilities, but they don’t determine events nor
require politicians to act in particular ways, even if they do shape the options. Much of eighteenth and
early nineteenth century discussions of resource supplies for the British military related to access to
forests where suitable timber for naval construction was to be had; access to the Baltic mattered crucially in British Naval
strategy, and when access was interrupted in the Napoleonic wars sources in North America had to be
used which dramatically changed patterns of trade across the Atlantic .41 All this changed again
when ‘ironclads’ powered by steam engines gradually replaced wooden sailing ships in the
nineteenth century. Steam engines provided propulsion not dependent on winds and steel
construction meant that timber reserves for naval construction ceased to be a matter of
geostrategy. While replacing sail with steam allowed ships to move regardless of wind patterns, they became
dependent on coal supplies instead. With that went the need for a system of coaling stations
where fleets could be refuelled. Without such access navies were powerless. The saga of the Russian Baltic fleet trying to
secure coal supplies when it was sent to the Pacific in hopes of relieving the besieged Port Arthur, but ending in catastrophic defeat
in the Tsushima strait during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–5, highlighted the logistical difficul- ties of supplying coal-powered
ships.

In the British case in particular technology and fuel supply had dramatic geopolitical consequences. In
the early years of the twentieth century the Royal Navy decided to change from coal power to petroleum
powered vessels despite the fact that Britain had excellent coal supplies , especially in the Welsh
coalfields, but little petroleum. The supplies to be had in Persia were a great distance from the home base of the Navy and
widespread alarm at the obvious supply vulnerabilities that would result was part of the discussion. But, as Winston Churchill, a key
player in the British admiralty in this period, put the matter subsequently in his inimical prose:

The oil supplies of the world were in the hands of vast oil trusts under foreign control. To commit the navy irrevocably to oil was
indeed to take arms against a sea of troubles... . If we overcame the difficulties and surmounted the risks, we should be able to raise
the whole power and efficiency of the navy to a definitely higher level; better ships, better crews, higher economies, more intense
forms of war power—in a word, mastery itself was the prize of the venture.42

The involvement of the British in petroleum extraction in Persia, and subsequent involvement
across the Gulf set the scene for twentieth century geopolitics in the region.43 The Royal Navy’s fuel
supplies were a key con- sideration in World War Two’s grand strategy although American sources, not
Asian ones, were an important part of the allied war effort. Likewise after the failure to capture the Caucasus oil
fields in 1942, German petroleum shortages constrained the mobility of their forces especially
in the latter stages of the war, even if much of the Wehrmacht still relied on trains and horses
for most of its logistics. In the Pacific Japanese access to petroleum supplies in the face of American sanctions in 1941 were
a key part of the calculus for going to war in attempts to assure supplies from the Dutch held East Indies in particular.

The destructive power of petroleum fuelled industrialised war making suggests that perhaps
the Thanatocene (after Thanatos, the personification of death in Greek mythology) might be an appropriate term
for the present too.44 War and ecocide are directly related; scorched earth policies and
environmental modification, epitomised by American attempts to defoliate Vietnam and Laos in
the 1960s and 1970s, are part of landscape change and habitat destruction as war strategy. The
extraordinary expansion of American industrial production during the Second World War set in
motion the capabilities to produce vast quantities of weapons, vehicles, ships and aircraft all
powered by petroleum. This infrastructure subsequently formed the basis of mass
consumption societies. Petroleum supplies have been crucial to modern military operations since the
Second World War; contemporary war machines still run on gasoline and jet fuel. Given their key role
in quite literally keeping both the global economy and military machines mov- ing, petroleum
supplies are a matter intimately involved in state decision- making as well as corporate
strategies worldwide.

That said, the pattern of warfare in the Middle East in recent years has never been just about securing
access to the supplies for international markets; the story is much more complicated.45 Nonetheless petroleum
supplies to the global economy that originate there remain a major theme in twenty-first century geopolitics; resource
supplies and the threats of their interruption now involve the Straits of Hormuz more than the
Kattegat. The converse was true two centuries ago. Strategy related to access to resources remains a major
theme in geopolitics, but the relevant geographies shift as the resources needed for military
technology change along with the larger patterns of resource extraction in the global economy.
46 Major American warships, aircraft carriers and submarines in particular, use nuclear propulsion
in part to avoid the logistical complications of such fuel supplies; but the point about strategy and
resources remains important in considerations of contemporary geopolitics.

This is accentuated in contemporary American strategic thinking that explicitly discusses the
need to prepare battlefields, and take actions to preempt potential threats, to literally attempt
to ‘shape the future’, matters that John Morrissey argues have long been part of imperial practice.47
These discussions of geopolitics, security and climate change extend this argument into anticipating likely conflicts, as well as
identifying facilities threatened in particular by rising sea levels.48 The
US military has added solar powered units
to many bases to reduce vulnerabilities to supply disruptions of diesel and other petroleum
fuels. At the global scale the discussion of geoengineering explicitly ponders the future configuration of
the planetary system and in whose interests the planetary thermostat will be adjusted and with what
potential geopolitical consequences.49
Fiery Arts – Nigel Clark
 Thesis – Pyrotechnology
Tag
Clark’15 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Fiery Arts:
Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene, GeoHumanities, December
2015. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1100968|KZaidi

Nearly all pyrotechnology theorists stress the significance of trade networks as conduits of raw
materials, products, people, and innovations. For many millennia, what has been termed the Eurasian corridor—
the Fertile Crescent and its surrounding highlands—functioned as an active hub and transit zone in an
intensely generative relay of pyrotechnic know-how that spans the Euroasian landmass (Goody
2012). Smith’s account of European efforts to replicate Chinese porcelain during the eighteenth century
speaks of just one, comparatively belated, episode in a transcontinental traffic that Goody (2012, 154) insisted is
“of fundamental importance in the story of Eurasian cultures.” By 1500 BCE Chinese artisans had
taken the lead in high-heat pyrotechnology, attaining kiln temperatures well over 1200°C—enabling the
manufacture of glazed stoneware or “primitive porcelain” (Goody 2012, 165). Such heat levels were also sufficient to
melt copper and to cast iron, which became the crux of a pyrotechnical complex characterized
by “a large scale, labour-intensive chain of production, with ore-miners, fuel gatherers, ceramacists and
foundry workers” (Goody 2012, 166). Only much later, Goody added, did the high-heat methods pioneered in China move westward.

Although it is a relatively brief interlude by geological or archeological standards, the

decline of the Western Roman
Empire from the fourth century saw a corresponding fall in the production of metals in Europe and the
abandonment of numerous mines—although some of the more accessible mineral resources had already been
exhausted (Nef 1967, 7–8; Goody 2012, 81–82). With the tenth-century discovery of new metalliferous lodes
in the mountainous regions in Central Europe came a gradual revitalization of European mining
and metallurgy, reaching a takeoff point somewhere in the mid-twelfth century (Nef 1967, 9–10). By
the late fifteenth century, as Braudel (1982) recounted, increasingly ambitious mining operations had spawned
a new kind of wealthy absentee investor —which also served to place formerly independent mine workers in a more
dependent position. “Capitalism,” declared Braudel, “entered a new and decisive stage” (321).

These emergent social relations, together with a complex configuration of other changes— including new
technological capacities to exploit subsurface resources and the expansion of extractive industry to
overseas colonies—set European extractive and industrial development on a self-amplifying
pathway. This, of course, brings us to familiar terrain for social scientists and historians. Less conventional, perhaps, are the
reminders by pyrotechnology researchers of the relative tardiness of Europe’s industrial ascendance and of the depth of its
inheritance from the much broader Euroasian pyrotechnic lineage. Until well into the eighteenth century, Goody (2012, 305) noted,
England—and Europe more generally—lagged behind China in high-heat technology and industrial
organization. By the sixteenth century, the Chinese were mass-producing ceramics for the
international market using what have been described as assembly-line techniques: With more than
1,000 kilns and some 70,000 workers, the Jingdezhen porcelain works in Jiangxi Province was reportedly
the largest industrial operation in the world (Goody 2012, 157). Five centuries earlier, faced with advancing
deforestation, the Chinese were already using coal for iron and ceramics on an industrial scale
(Goody 2012, 175, 218). “Eleventh century China’s blast furnaces were run by private industrialists and
manned by hundreds of wage labourers . . . they were fuelled by coke and they churned out
thousands of tons of iron yearly” (Freese 2006, 205).

Reviewing the intensive movement of pyrotechnic products and skills along the Eurasian corridor—
dominated for long periods by east to west traffic —Goody (2012) cautioned against generalizing from Europe’s “temporary
superiority” (290): “European advantage in the nine- teenth century ,” he concluded, “has distorted our

understanding of history and the coming of the modern world” (280). In this way, what thinking
through the multimillennial and transconti- nental nexus of the pyrotechnic phylum can do for us is to unsettle
notions of a single, decisive thermo-industrial revolution . Without making a claim for their epochal imprint on the
Earth’s geological record, so-called premodern pyrotechnical developments comprise a multitude of interwoven and

nodal breakthroughs in the heat-driven transformation of earthy matter. Indeed, such a distributed
sense of ascendant thermodynamic agency would seem to resonate much more strongly than
the prevailing Eurocentric model with the complexity theory at the core of Earth systems science—as well as the
relational materialisms now popular in social thought.

There is a perhaps more important point, though, one that takes us back to the very core of the pyrotechnic adventure. The
mechanical, metal-encased engines of the last three centuries have to be robust enough to
handle the highly concentrated energy of fossilized hydrocarbons (Pyne 2001, 126, 135–36). These
heat engines are precision-engineered and standardized, just as fossil fuels have now been chemically distilled
and processed into high consistency. The precise, continuous, and repeatable operations this enables are a
world away from the vagaries and inconsistencies that rendered most ancient pyrotechnical
procedures a unique event—although it is certainly anticipated by some of the earlier Chinese uses of high heat in
industrial production.

From the perspective of the pyrotechnical longue durée, however, what

most characterizes the thermo-industrial
regime that eventually conduced to transform Earth systems was not so much their amplification of metamorphic
or geomorphic potentiality, as their contraction (Clark and Yusoff 2014, 222).

This is less a matter of what fuels thermo-chemical transformation —or the rate and scale at which this takes
place—as it is about the motivation for using heat to transform matter . Reflecting on the essence of
terrestrial combustion, Pyne (2001) reminded us that “Fire remains, above all, the great transmuter” (120). By
enclosing and intensifying the force of fire, as we have seen, skilled pyrotechnic agents precipitated
a momentous expansion in this metamorphic “fire power”: contriving, over the course of some 10,000
years, a spectrum of thermal operations that augmented and elaborated on the transformational
possibilities inherent in the physical world. What characterizes the combustive operations of the emergent
eighteenth- and nineteenth- century thermo-industrial regime, on the other hand, is that heat is predominantly used to do
mechanical or kinetic work (Clark and Yusoff 2014, 222). In brief, chambered fire morphed from a transmuter
into a prime mover.

From the point of view of prime moving, fossil-fueled heat engines have replaced wind, water, and animal
power—which gives the impression of massive expansion in capacity (see Mumford [1934] 2010, 112). If
we take a fire-centered perspective, though, what has occurred is a channeling and compression of the
work of heat—more in the nature of a contraction of the multidirectional and polymorphic
potential of combustion. As prime mover, fire has progressively migrated deeper into or further
from the production process. New regimes of heat engines, manufacturing machines, and,
eventually, electronic apparatuses have “separated combustion from flame and segregated
the chambers where burning occurs from the places where its energy is felt” (Pyne 2001, 128). All
across the great transcontinental spaces of the pyrotechnic phylum, the
work done by the new regime of
combustive machinery will eventually, often forcibly, displace or engulf the functions of a great many
other enclosed fires. This is more than a matter of new fossil-fueled productive technologies
outperforming less powerful machines and it is more than a matter of the imposition of new
set of social relations—although this is undoubtedly important. It is also, perhaps primarily, a shift away from the
metamorphic preoccupations of the pyrotechnic phylum . In this sense, it stands as a fundamental
reorganization of the way fire occurs on Earth.

Alternative – Molecular Reconfiguration

Tag
Clark’15 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Fiery Arts:
Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene, GeoHumanities, December
2015. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1100968|KZaidi

Pressing although they might be, such concerns still tether us to an imaginary of need and utility .
It should also be noted that the way most environmental concerns are articulated —both at the planetary scale
of Anthropocene problematics and at more localized levels—tends to make appeals to subjects as if they were
preformed and lying in wait. The politics of the environment and Earth, that is, characteristically assumes the
existence of practical-political agents who already know who and what they are—and thus
should be capable of judging what is in their best interests. Our excursion into the deep, originary aesthetics
of pyrotechnic innovation, however, suggests a more complicated—or implicated—sense of subject formation and collec- tive
action.

In generating new materials and processes, pyrotechnic artisans changed the composition of
everyday existence. They produced new things to see or feel or to value, and they helped
transform the makeup of built space in ways that precipitated new patterns of movement,
encounter, and gathering. In ways that could never have been anticipated, such changes affected the
individual and collective sensorium (see Grosz 2008, 77). In this sense, by channeling and elaborating on
the forces of the Earth, pyrotechnicians also helped shape the selves or subjects who shared
the worlds they were helping fabricate. In this way, reflection on the pyrotechnic phylum reminds
us that subjects are constantly in the making, and that they are in the making with and through the
Earth (see Yusoff 2013, 2015).

Such a view of the subject has implications for how we conceive of and engage in politics.
Politics, some critical thinkers have lately been insisting, is much more than a matter of discourse, of
conflicting interests and vociferous debates. It is also, to some degree, “aesthetic”—a process of
imagining how the ordering of people, signs, and things might be otherwise and of actually
trying to construct alternative arrangements (Rancière 2004; Dikeç 2015). Our historical probing of the
pyrotechnic phylum—although it inevitably shades into the speculative—adds substance to this sense of the
political as a work of fabulation and crafting— in a way that also stresses the open-ended,
experimental, and pragmatic nature of these processes. This is not to say that the aesthetic is
always already political, although it might well imply that “the political is inherently aesthetic at the conceptual and
substantive level” (Dixon 2009, 412). In other words, experimentation and creativity that is broadly artistic
plays a crucial role in generating the sensibilities, base materials, and platforms that are the
conditions of political action (see Yusoff 2010, 79). By the same token, it must be acknowledged that aesthetic
dispositions are also implicated in the diagramming of things and the distributions of the
sensible against which collective actors mobilize—however much we foist responsibility for the
darker side of these orderings onto the “state” or other powerful interests.

Much collective action in the manner I am suggesting might be described as pyropolitical (Clark 2011, 164–65; Marder 2015).
This is not just, in Marder’s sense, that it concerns struggles over situations and threats involving “the dyad
of fire and atmosphere” or that fire is frequently unleashed during political uprisings. I mean
pyropolitical in the more archeological sense; that fire is implicated—all the way down into the depths of our human being—
in processes of collective self-making and reshaping. Although it might be true that fire as a physicomaterial
force and as an element of political mobilization never fully escapes its “explosive ambiguity” (Marder 2015, xiii), a focus on
artisanal fire use draws attention to the degree to which flame can be corralled, modulated, and
ushered into world-making work.

Collaboration and diffusion, as we have seen, have been essential elements in this marshaling of fire.
In their affirmation of the potential of “the common,” Hardt and Negri (2009) looked to contemporary forms of creative
production—especially those deploying digital media—as the site for the “metamorphosis” of new
subjectivities and collaborative dispositions. They noted that the fashioning of images, codes, and
information is not bound by scarcity: “When I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not
lessened” (Hardt and Negri 2009, 283). The pyrotechnic arts have rarely been open source in this sense—their transmission has most
often been guarded and selective (here we need to bear in mind not only the magical element of fire-induced transmutation, but the
more prosaic fact that escaping flame could envelop villages, pasture, or forests). Even so, fire
might be regarded as the
primordial form of an element undiminished by its reproduction—and this extends into
technical uses. It is not simply that pyrotechnical ideas and materials have traveled along
networks, but that they have often been catalysts or vital components of the assemblages that
made networking possible. Just as metallurgy combined with the domestication of the horse to enable new kinds of
nomadism, so, too, did metals and literacy emerge together and forge a mutually supportive—and
momen- tous—association (Goody 2012; cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 399). Pyrotechnology, in short has
helped compose the very networks it has traversed . Without its material and ideational traceries, Hardt and
Negri’s nascent (2009) informatic commonwealth would be only so much whispering in the wind.

Merged into a vast, decentered, and “polyarchic” platform of know-how and componentry, the
pyrotechnic phylum has been so fundamental to the shaping of sociomaterial life that it has
tended to recede into murmuring anonymity, so much so that its attenuation and contraction—
its progressive partitioning out of the collective sensory field—seems to have attracted little
sustained attention. Just as it is next to impossible to gauge the impact of introducing a new object or technique into an
existing milieu, so, too, is it devilishly difficult to assess the ultimate consequences of the disappearance of
skills or material practices. Pyne (1997) documented some of the damage—social and ecological—arising from
attempts to extirpate broadcast fire from landscapes adapted to its rhythmical presence. The
waning or extinction of so many varieties of chambered artisanal fire, to my knowledge,
however, has attracted no comparative attention. This not a good time to be losing, or to have
lost, varieties of fire. As Pyne (1994) counseled, this is a planet that “will burn regardless of what
humans do” (907). Combustion got us into the Anthropocene, and we would do well to consider
that in fire’s capacity to shape both built and biotic landscapes lies an immense potentiality to
respond to the current situation. One way or another, it looks likely we will find ourselves fighting fire with fire (Clark
2012, 259).
This is not about trying to rewind our way back to the technical and industrial explosions of the mid-Holocene, but it
is about
seeking to preserve or enhance the diversity of fire on Earth. Pyrotechnology has been a vital
element in the construction of a common global existence as well as in the diversification and
partitioning of human collectivities. When pyrotechnic skills are extinguished or appropriated,
what is lost is not only part of the scaffolding of communal life, but a form of expression of the
Earth itself—an actualization of the planet’s geological potentiality . If, in its capacity to bring something
new into the world, politics—as Dikeç (2015) suggested—has a sublime aspect, then much of that sublimity
ultimately derives from channel- ing and expressing the forces of the Earth. In quelling fire, we
diminish not only the technical resources, but also the political prospects for crafting
prodigiously livable worlds. By keeping our variegated fires stoked, we hold open our transmutational
possibilities—because in doing so we are holding ourselves open to the exuberance of the
Earth itself.

In times of accelerating geophysical change, preserving and proliferating the pyropolitical arts might be a
matter of some urgency. It might be almost impossible to predict or even imagine what
“species” of fire will flourish under geoclimatic conditions the likes of which our species and
genus has never yet encountered, although experience suggests that we should look for signs of
experimentation along a broad and mobile front. Although the pressing sense of necessity conveyed by most
Anthropocene theorists seems fully justified, so, too, might we hold out the hope that a novel fusion of well-modulated
fire, earthy materials, and collective imagination would also be an occasion, in the words of Smith
(1981), for “creative participatory joy” (355).
 Framework – Aesthetic Experimentation
Tag
Clark’15 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at Lancaster
University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Fiery Arts:
Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene, GeoHumanities, December
2015. DOI: 10.1080/2373566X.2015.1100968|KZaidi

It is this
intimacy with the negotiation of “unanalyzable complexities” (Smith 1981, 325)— both in the realm
of production and in the milieu into which new products are introduced—that leads Smith to a vision of innovation
every bit as eloquent as that of his philosophical counter- parts . “Discovery requires
aesthetically motivated curiosity, not logic,” he vouched, “for new things can acquire validity only
by interaction in an environment that has yet to be” (Smith 1981, 325). Such an environment, Smith
continued, can be less than welcoming, for “a new thing of any kind” opens up “a region of misfit
within the pre-existing structure” (325). What Deleuze and Guattari brought to the generous-spirited genealogies
typical of pyrotechnical history is a more incisive account of the way such “misfit” tends to be dealt with. They offered an analysis of
the political machinations through which the
novel products and the sensorial breakthroughs proffered by
the artisan come to be captured by the powerful vested interests they shorthanded as “the State”;
a process of appropriation that tends to recur at different historical and geographical junctures
(Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 415, 424–31; Protevi 2013, 49).

According to Forbes (1950), anticipating Smith’s more general point, “Metal made its first impression as a
fascinating luxury from which evolved a need” (11). As objects of splendor and beauty, metallic artifacts
came to be signifiers of status—their shimmering visual cues comple- menting the more stolid impositions of mineral
infrastructure in the partitioning of bodies and the ordering of encounters. Metals were set to work as tools,
implements, and measures or tokens of value. If metallurgy created objects worth hoarding,
Goudsblom (1992) noted, “it also supplied the weapons with which these objects might be
appropriated” (633), thus reinforcing trends toward uneven distributions of wealth and property
—in ways too profound and complex to do justice to here. Eventually, Goody (2012, 80–81) added, whole empires in the
ancient world came to configure their boundaries around the distribution of metallic ores and
other mineral resources.
Deleuze and Guattari tried to avoid simply idealizing the “itinerating” metallurgist or demonizing the state for its capture of artisanal
innovation, although it is clear where their sympathies lie. What they do insist on is that there
are always openings to
resist the state’s “restratification” of the material pathways opened up and traversed by the
experimental practices of the artisan. It is from Deleuzo-Guattarian geophilosophy that Grosz developed the idea that
the potentialities of a dynamic and complex Earth are always in excess of the actual ways in
which they are framed and channeled by skilled operators. This superfluity of possibility is what
enables art or craft to “take what it needs —the excess of colors, forms, materials—from the
earth to produce its own excess” (Grosz 2008, 9). So, too, for Smith (1981), it is the very exorbitance of the
physicomaterial world—its play of regularity and irregularity; its stunningly varied hues,
textures, and patterns; its compositional richness—that lure human actors into acts of creation.
Or as Wertime (1964) chimed in, “The assortment of ores confronting early man was staggering” (1257).

Pyrotechnical scholarship—including its Deleuzo-Guattarian inflections—drives home the real depth of the
human experience in negotiating pathways in dynamic physical systems. It also gestures at the
way that aesthetic sensibilities—joy in discovery and creative expression—might have been a
precondition of the eventual crystallization of scientific and technical disciplines . Although insisting
that—by virtue of its embedding in ritual and its lack of formalized transmis- sion—the metalworking arts remain essentially craft
lore, Childe (1942) nonetheless vouched for their formative contribution to later knowledge complexes. “ Metallurgical lore,”
he observed, “is the first approximation to international science ” (86). As Smith (1981) would have it,
much of today’s industrial knowledge and practice has ultimately arisen out of “a rich and
varied sensual experience of the kind that comes directly from play with minerals, fire, and
colors” (203). By extension we might imagine that the very sciences of the Anthropocene have transmuting
flames and “little crucibles” bubbling in their distant and not so distant past.
 Rice
This stockpiling of arms ensures a constant re-emergence of warfare and
environmental degradation as the system’s growth necessitates a dissipation of
the surplus accumulated in the form of pre-emptive strikes and waste dumping.
Rice’18 |Stian Rice is a Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and a
Visiting Assistant Research Scientist at Kent State University. “Radioactive pigs, American bombs, and lazy
plants: the making of toxicity and the metabolism of excess”, Presented at the Annual Meeting of the
Association of American Geographers, New Orleans, LA. USA. April 2018|KZaidi

Bataille’s theory begins with a simple premise: the energy received by the earth, and that drives all
productive activity, vastly exceeds what is needed to maintain this productive activity (1993).
After an organism’s basic requirements for survival have been satisfied, the surplus energy must
be used or disposed of in some way: “The living organism, in a situation determined by the play
of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for
maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an
organism); if the system can no longer grow , or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must
necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or
catastrophically” (1993, 21). At the scale of society, the ‘spending’ of this excess may take two forms. The first is extension or
the development of the system through improvement. Surplus energy (the result of production) is reinvested into the
system to improve its efficiency—to produce more from less. Initially, extension alleviates the
problem of excess by diverting the surplus into the system. But the improvements in efficiency
realized by this investment quickly reproduce the problem of excess, usually in a more extreme
form. The second form of spending is dissipation, variously called “luxury,” “sacrifice,” and
“squander” (Bataille 1993, 32). Here, excess may be directed into the production of useless products
or activities (luxury), destroyed or consumed through ceremony (sacrifice), or obliterated in
catastrophic fashion (squander, usually by way of war). A key feature of dissipation is that the energy—or
material product— is severed from the social systems that valued it : money is gambled away at the poker table,
slaves are sacrificed to gods, and bombs are detonated on the battlefield . Bataille notes that between extension and
dissipation, modern society tends to use dissipation as its primary means for disposing of excess: “I
insist on the fact that there is generally no growth but only a luxurious squandering of energy in every form! The history of life
on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance; the dominant event is the development of
luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life” (Bataille 1993, 33). However, the failure
to successfully direct excess toward luxury or sacrifice may bring about catastrophe. WWI
represented an “orgiastic” release of energy built up during the Industrial Revolution. The
development of productive forces (extension) during the 19th century led to the growth of surplus which
was reinvested in productive forces, further expanding the surplus, and so forth. Wealth was
spent stockpiling weapons and supporting the luxurious lifestyles of kings and aristocrats. But
even these gilded spaces were not sufficient to spend the accumulated excess. Eventually this
pressure could not be sustained and the excess was squandered on the battlefield. To avoid
war, Bataille notes that “we must divert the surplus production, either into the rational extension of a
difficult industrial growth, or into unproductive works that will dissipate an energy that cannot
be accumulated in any case” (1993, 25). For Bataille, an essential problem with modern thought is that
it focuses too narrowly on processes of accumulation not excretion. And yet, it is excretion—the release
of excess—that determines the success or failure of organisms, ecosystems, and societies. This
ignorance “consigns men and their works to catastrophic destructions. For if we do not have
the force to destroy the surplus energy ourselves, it cannot be used … it is this energy that
destroys us; it is we who pay the price of the inevitable explosion” (Bataille 1993, 23–24). Thus, the
essential problem facing society is not the limits imposed by scarcity, for scarcity (in a general sense) is a
fiction. Rather, the essential problem is the obligation to dispose of excess . The measure of the success—
the humanity—of a society is the manner it has developed for disposing of its surplus energy: the
commodities it overproduces, the unwanted byproducts of accumulation, even the human and non-human lives it
chooses to valorize. To be sure, Bataille’s theory of excess is, at times, esoteric and opaque. The “revolution” in philosophical
thought that would be needed to operationalize the theory is one that Bataille himself considers exceedingly difficult (1993, 25). In
his writing, Bataille does not clearly distinguish between energy and matter (in an ontological sense); he is non-specific when it
comes to concepts of use-value, exchangevalue and production; and it is not entirely clear that his frequent use of biological and
ecological metaphors for society serve the purposes he intends. That said, at a high level, the
theory of excess provides a
unique counterpoint to a long history of production- and accumulation-centered economic
thought. Most importantly, it highlights an all-too-often overlooked side of modern capitalist
production: the dissipation of excess through the making of toxic space. This legacy is the subject of the
following case studies. Case 1: The U.S. bombing of Cambodia Between 1965 and 1973 the U.S. embarked upon
an unprecedented campaign of aerial bombardment in Cambodian territory. Ostensibly, these actions
were taken to kill or destroy communist fighters attempting to overthrow the U.S. backed government of Lon Nol. In fact, the
reasons had more to do with President Nixon’s desire to hold off a communist victory in Cambodia until American troops could leave
Indochina (Porter and Hildebrand 1975; Haas 1991). Figure 1 shows a map of US bombing targets in Cambodia between 1965 and
1973, produced from a dataset compiled by the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. Each dot
represents a bombing target, a total of 115,272 during the eight years. After
the signing of the Geneva Accords in
1973, the intensity of bombing increased : that year, led by B-52 heavy bombers, the US Air
Force dropped the equivalent of 1.5 million tons of TNT on Cambodia, slightly more than the
previous three years (1970-1972) combined. The total tonnage dropped between 1965 and August 1973 when the
campaign ended is a staggering three million tons: more than was dropped on Europe, by all parties, during
WWII. The effects of this campaign were far reaching in both space and time. The bombing campaign killed
indiscriminately and destroyed villages, fields, water control systems, and livestock. As many as
10-15% of the rural population were killed between 1970 and 1973 (Porter and Hildebrand 1975). The primary
economic activity in the bombed regions was rice production—indeed, the destruction of fields and displacement of
farmers led to an 84% decline in rice production, precipitating widespread famine and the rise
of the Khmer Rouge in 1975. Exploded ordinance left volatile organic compounds and toxic heavy
metals in the soil that quickly entered the water system . These consequences continue to impact
public health through birth defects and low birth weights (Kingshill 1990). The bombing campaign still claims
lives and limbs: recently, Cambodia was ranked third in the world for the number of casualties from unexploded ordinances (UXO),
with over 800 casualties per year (Wells-Dang 2006). The
explosive squandering of millions of tons of TNT in
Cambodia produced spaces of toxicity throughout the countryside that remain to this day. Here,
Bataille’s observation of the necessity of energy squandering through war is on full display. In
fact, the increase in bombardment after the Geneva Accords in 1973 serves to demonstrate the
compelling nature of this dissipation. The Accords effectively ended major armed conflict
between the U.S. and North Vietnamese forces, but with this truce, the extraordinary
stockpiles of American bombs in Indochina could no longer be used on Vietnam. To keep the
dissipation going, foreign policy objectives and the chemical potential energy of thousands of bombs (with only one
possible use) found a common expression through the devastation of Cambodian fields and bodies.
Case 2: Radioactive pigs Seven years after the tsunami-triggered Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster, the
exclusion zone around the power plant has unintentionally become a site of rewilding. In the areas
still considered too radioactive for human life, many towns and villages still lie abandoned, much as they were the day the
evacuation orders were given in March 2010 (Hurst 2018). The new occupants—wild boars that have migrated into the exclusion
zone from surrounding areas—are thriving without human competition. “After people left, their ecosystem changed … they found a
place that’s comfortable, there’s plenty of food and no one will come after them … this is their new home now, and this is where
they have children,” observed Shoichi Sakamoto, a hunter hired by the Japanese government to assess the pig infestation (The
Independent 2017). The problem has less to do with pigs or radiation than the combination of the two: as the human population
waits at the cordon, the pigs gorge themselves on the irradiated plants, making their meat toxic and leading to a ban on eating them.
Sakamoto and other hunters have been given authority to enter the exclusion zone to trap and kill the pigs: after all, the
explosion in the porcine population has led to radioactive pigs leaving the zone and re-entering
human settlement where they have been known “to attack people and cause potentially fatal
car crashes” (The Independent 2017, np). Authorities are now faced with containing radiation and pigs,
the latter exhibiting a stubborn and unpredictable agency. The story of Fukushima’s irradiated
pigs reads like other parables of the Capitalocene in which Nature appropriates capitalist
spaces of production made so toxic by accumulation that humans are forced to leave—for
example, the spike in biodiversity in the de-militarized zone on the Korean peninsula (Kim 1997),
and the explosive ecological regrowth in Chernobyl’s exclusion zone (Deryabina et al. 2015). In these stories,
it seems clear that non-human growth has not been limited by toxicity, at least in the number and
population of species. It remains to be seen what capitalism does with this natural regrowth. It is possible we will
see a future in which the irradiated pig (or byproduct of its life) acquires value through some form of
capitalist or non-capitalist appropriation, not unlike Tsing’s (2015) matsutake mushrooms growing in the ruins of a
post-capitalist forest? Or will we see the destruction of the pigs become part of the ‘cleanup,’ a
partnership between the state and capital to accumulate new wealth through the
reconstruction and repopulation of the exclusion zone? Bataille and toxicity These two cases provide
clear examples of capitalist processes—articulated through geopolitical discourses and state-
operated energy production schemes—producing toxicity. But what is toxicity, and most importantly for this paper,
how does toxicity fit into Bataille’s theory of excess? Unfortunately, Bataille does not discuss toxic spaces, degradation, or lifeless
socio-natures. What follows, then is a sequence of inferences based on his theory of excess and principles of general economy.
Consider a popular modern commodity: an iPhone. During its manufacture, a share of energy in
the general economy of the universe goes into the physical device , while a massively larger
share of energy is directed into heat, waste material, electrical power generation, engine
fumes, chemical synthesis, and the maintenance of the laboring bodies that do the work. Global
supply chains for raw materials, labor, manufacturing, and financing all dissipate sizeable amounts of energy to support the
manufacture of a single phone. Meanwhile,
the waste materials and lost energy from production—as
well as the phone itself when it becomes obsolete and is discarded—contribute to the
production of toxic spaces somewhere, and for some time. Toxicity, then, is a condition that is (1) the result
of a dissipation and (2) not immediately available to be re-appropriated for human benefit. As such, toxicity is (3) a source of energy
(in Bataille’s sense) that momentarily stands outside, or beyond, the accumulating capabilities of the current mode of production.
Furthermore, because‘the toxic’ cannot be immediately re-used, it has an additional sideeffect: (4)
so long as it remains un-accumulated by capitalist processes, it encourages additional
dissipation through the death of living things. As Bataille notes, death is the most significant form of
squandering (1993, 33). A nuclear reactor melts down and radiation is scattered into the
environment, making toxic the air, soil, and water. Plants absorb this toxicity from the
surroundings—some die and some others are eaten by wild boars. The wild boars absorb this toxicity into their tissues—some
die and some others are killed by hunters hired by the state. ‘Hot’ pork is returned to the soil and the cycle continues. In this way,
toxicity exhibits a transitive property: toxic space makes more toxic space through the agency
of humans and non-humans pursuing their own imperatives of accumulation and metabolism.
Where the pig goes, so too goes Caesium-137. Perhaps the most important feature of toxification is that it places so-called ‘waste’
material and energy outside or beyond the accumulating capabilities of capital. It is this feature that ensures that toxification is, in
fact, dissipation: if
such material could be immediately valued and accumulated, it wouldn’t be
considered squandered. The process of toxification—like Bataille’s (1985, 1993) examples of
Mayan sacrifices, potlatch gifts, and the explosive releases of war— liberates material from the
symbolic bond that once made it a commodity. Toxicity and modern capitalism Bataille’s shining
example of the relationship between mass production and mass squandering is the “orgiastic
release” during World Wars I and II of the energy that had been built up during the Industrial
Revolution (Bataille 1993, 24). But capitalism has changed in the intervening years. Modern capitalism has become masterful at
dissipation. Today, we have many new ways to dispose of excess: financial market collapses —like
the housing crisis of 2007—squander wealth on an enormous scale. Endless wars like those
being fought in Syria, Afghanistan, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Africa provide a deep
sink for both the products of multinational weapons manufacturers and the bodies of those
deemed expendable based on class and skin color. Shifting geopolitical regimes, embargoes,
trade wars, and monetary manipulations can squander the value of whole economies,
markets, and currencies within hours. In addition to these mechanisms, modern economies have found
new ways to make things toxic and new places to toxify—for example, subterranean CO2
sequestration, like hydrofracking, puts undesirable chemistry into deep and distant crevices of
space and time. Indeed, I would argue that the production of toxicity is the most important (and diverse) form of dissipation
under modern capitalism. The neverending movement of toxic materials and waste into new
arrangements—like a global Ponzi scheme for trash— has become the modern version of
ceremonial mass sacrifice.
Solar Inferno – Reza Negarestani
 Thesis – Heliocentrism
The 1AC’s fixation on death and destruction only reinvests within the
exorbitant heliocentric model of the sun which depicts the normative way to
live and die – this ensures that we live and die within the very confines of the
cosmic systems of normative thought which establishes an energetic model of
life fixated on the solar economy
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

According to the energetic models of psychology (Freud, Reich, Ferenczi, et al.) the
organic system – by virtue of its
conservative and economical nature – seeks to fixate upon the first exorbitant source of energy that it
directly encounters. This source of energy must surpass the lifespan of the organic system and
issue forth a problematic amount of energy that exceeds the capacity of the organic system.
Consumption of this exorbitant energy, therefore, becomes a problem for the organism. For the
organism, consequently, modes or courses of life are in fact solutions found and developed by the
organism to confront the problem of consumption. In other words, ideas of how to live are reduced
to solutions to afford the exorbitant energy. The more diverse the solutions of the organism
become, the easier the organism can maneuver between different courses of life and the
firmer the organism is fettered to its exorbitant source of energy. This growing dependency on
the exorbitant source of energy through the ever-increasing shackles of life singularizes the
exorbitant source of energy as the only model exorbitant energy instigates and imposes
plurality of dissipation for the organism i.e. the only model of death and the only way out .
Accordingly, the in modes of life but only in accordance with the conservative and economical nature of
the organism. The plurality of life is enforced at the expense of monism in death . And it is the
monism in death – as a mode of injection upon the outside (or what is exterior to the organism) – that
rigidly restricts the image of exteriority associated with the cosmic abyss and in doing so
forestalls a radi- cal change in life and its ventures.

The organism tends to die, or more accu- rately, tends to open to the exterior horizon by means of the same
energetic models and channels from which it conservatively secures its vital economy. To put it
simply, the organism tends to use the same energetic model for its death – or openness to that which is
exterior to it – as the model that it has previously used for conserving energy and living . This recurring
energetic model is fundamentally established by the source of the exorbitant energy and
thereby, implements both the traumatizing effects of excessive energy and the inherent
limitations of the source of energy which itself is another interiorized horizon envel- oped
against its abyssal cosmic backdrop. There- fore, although life can manifest itself plurally as opportunities for
diversification and complexi- cation brought about by different economical ways for conservation of the exorbitant energy, death
or binding exteriority is only possible in one and only one way. This way is both qualitatively and
quantitatively restricted in that it strictly corresponds to the fundamental limitations of the
exterior source of energy and how these limitations are increased in the conservative
economy of the organism. Any image of exteriority that the exorbitant source of energy promises or creates for
the organism will remain within the confines and limits of that source of energy itself.
 Link – Capitalism
Heliocentrism sustains itself through the obsession with organic systems of
thought and consumption – this is enhanced by the technocratic managing of
society – this form of new capitalism masqurades itself as “saving the planet”
yet is invested in the sustainment of itself rather than staring into the abyss
that is death. Affirm the cosmic abyss
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

Like all modes of slavery, heliocentrism

has its own market strategy; it is called base-capitalism. For
schizophrenic capitalism, whilst
everything should be accelerated towards a techno-economic
meltdown along paths of expenditure entrenched in solar economy, modes of life as ever more
con- voluting circuitous paths towards death must not only be embraced but also emphatically
affirmed. The seemingly paradoxical proclivity of capital- ism – that is to say, its concomitant
dynamism towards thanatropic meltdown and its advocation of lifestyles – amounts to the very
simple fact that for the Sun the phenomenon of life on the planet is but a modal range of
energy dissipation prescribed by the solar economy and afforded by organic systems. This does
not merely suggest that death – especially for planetary entities – is inevitable but that such
death or vector of exteriorization is exclusively restricted to modes of energetic dis- sipation
(modes of life) that the Sun imposes on the planet. Yet these modes of energetic dissipa- tion which
exteriorize Earth are themselves part of the economy of the Sun which also mark its economic
restrictions and limits of affordability against its abyssal and exterior cosmic backdrop.
Capitalism, in this sense, conceals its restricted economy in regard to the cosmic exteriority (or
death) by overproducing modes or styles of life which are in fact different rates of energetic
dis- sipation or circuitous paths of expenditure. To put it differently, capitalism which terrestrially
envelops the restricted economy of the Sun in re- gard to death and exteriority masquerades
as the so-called general and free economy in regard to life and the problem of consumption.

The interiority of life on Earth rests on the thermo-nuclear interiority of the Sun which itself is
contingent upon its exterior cosmic backdrop. Solar capitalism is only a market for representing
the Sun as both an inevitable and unfathomably rich exteriority for the planet and terrestrial
life, marketing the energetic model of the Sun as the only way to the great outdoors of the
abyss. Yet it is precisely the Sun that circumscribes the image of such outdoors and narrows the
speculative op- portunities ensued by thought’s binding of radical exteriority. In line with the
vitalistically pluralist and thanatropically monist regime of solar econo- my, Earth can be
reinvented and recomposed only as a new planet or slave of the Sun whose life and death are
emphatically determined by its star or exorbitant source of energy. On such a planet, the ventures
of thought and art are burdened by a nar- row scope in regard to cosmic exteriority imposed
by the Sun as well as the axiomatic submission of terrestrial life to the empire of the Sun.

Just as the pluralist regime of life inherent to solar economy is parasitically hydrophilic, the in-
dulgence of capitalism in lifestyles and vitalistic detours also has an intimate af nity with terres-
trial juices. The solar model of consumption can duplicate itself as the dominant energetic
model wherever life emerges, that is to say, wherever water exists . Water can implement the
energetic peculiarities of the solar climate in quite a vitalis- tic fashion and thus, re-enact the
Sun’s model of energy expenditure within manifestations of life. Capitalism, in a similar manner,
sniffs out plan- etary waters so as to employ its models of accu- mulation and consumption
through their chemical potencies. This is not only to use the hydraulic ef- ciency of terrestrial
waters in order to propagate its markets and carry out its trades, but more im- portantly to
overlap and associate its indulgences with the very definitions and foundations of life . Since
terrestrial waters (or liquid forms in gen- eral) are closely associated with the formula of life, by
investing in them and operating through them capitalism can also give a biopolitical sense of
inevitability (in terms of growth and vitality) to its rules and activities. In dissolving into ter- restrial
waters, capitalism like solar energy can create climates or contingencies of its own on the
planet, triggering the rise of new territories, lines of migrations and reformations. Yet water is an
open receiver of chemistry as the applied dynam- ics of contingencies. As previously mentioned,
if terrestrial waters are attractors of contingencies or chemistry, then they do not merely imple-
ment solar climates but also energetic models of dynamism associated with other
contingencies or cosmic climates. Accordingly, terrestrial waters develop into sites for the
irruption of contingen- cies into the already established and interiorized contingency which in
the case of the planet Earth is solar economy of the Sun and its restricted climates . Therefore,
terrestrial waters are agents of complicity whereby cosmic climates irrupt into the interiority of
terrestrial life itself. It is this irruption of cosmic climates that draws a line of exteriorization or
loosening into the abyss forboth the terrestrial life and the climates generated by the Sun.
However, the complicity between the water of life and cosmic climates or what we call chemistry is
endowed with a chemical slant; it gives the death of life and water weirdly produc- tive
aspects. The irruption of cosmic climates into the terrestrial biosphere generates a dynamics of
death or line of exteriorization whose expression and dynamism are chemical rather than
spectral, ghostly or hauntological. The dying water is blackened into heaps of slime and the
biosphere feeding on such water respectively dies or chemi- cally loosens into the cosmic
exteriority. As these deaths have chemical slants, they spawn more contingencies or lines of chemical
dynamisms which render the universe climatically weird . This climatic relationship between a dying Sun and a
dying Earth as chemically projected in water has been intriguingly portrayed by the artist Pamela Rosenkranz. What Rosenkranz
artistically pro- poses is that water – despite its apparent loyalty to terrestrial life – chemically
unbinds the potencies
of cosmic contingencies whose inevitable irrup- tion into our super cially solar world
necessitates a chasmic terrestrial ecology.
Cosmic Ecology or the Order of the Weird

Life ecologically extinguishes as its waters die , or more accurately, as they chemically react with other
cosmic contingencies whose climates are exterior to that of terrestrial life and its solar bonds.
Since the expression of dying water signifies nothing but a chemical marriage between water and cosmic contingencies,
ecological death means nothing but to perish via a blackening water which is too chemically
potent to support the vitality of life or endurance of survival. Eco- logical death becomes a form of
descent into the cosmic abyss which is chemically too productive to be considered either
misanthropically gloomy or post-humanistically promising. This ecological death of Earth is strongly
reminiscent of Victor Hugo’s description of the appalling slime pools of Paris: “[I]n a pit of slime [...] the dying man does not know
whether he has become a ghost or a toad. Everywhere else the grave is sinister, here it is shapeless.” (Victor Hugo, Les Misérables)

In the slimy grips of a universal nature whose contingencies have chemically irrupted into the water of life, the ecological death of
Earth is a weird chemical reaction from which no ghost emerges to either haunt the universe or demand an appropriate mourn.
Being truly terrestrial is not the same as be- ing superficial , that is to say, it is not the same as
considering Earth as a planetary surface-bio- sphere (slave of the Sun) or exalting the planet to the
position of the Sun (solar hegemony). Being genuinely terrestrial demands presupposing the death
and pure contingency of the Earth in each and every equation, thought, feat of creativity and
political intervention. Earthly thought em- braces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent
core. If the embracing of Earth’s perishability should be posited as the hallmark of earthly
thought, it is because such perishabil- ity – as argued earlier – grasps the openness of Earth
towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correla-
tions (as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic
abyss. By the word ‘alternative’, we mean those ways of exteriorization and loosening which are not
dictated by the economical correlation between Earth and Sun . These alternative ways of binding
cosmic exteriority or loosening into the abyss entail, firstly, a terrestrial ecology for which
both Earth and Sun are bound or grasped as merely contingent and hence, necessarily per-
ishable entities. The only true terrestrial ecology, for this reason, is the one founded on the
unilat- eral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance – there
are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity . To this extent, terrestrial thought and
creativ- ity must essentially be associated with ecology, but an ecology which is based on the
unilateral powers of cosmic contingencies such as climate changes, singularity drives, chemical
eruptions and material disintegration. Any other mode of thought basking in the visual effects
of Earth as a blue marble or the Sun as the exorbitant flame is but submission to heliocentric
slavery.
 Alternative – Radical Exteriority
Tag
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

For us, this exorbitant source of energy is the Sun and its solar economy. The solar excess has
developed a conservative image of thought in which one can only dissipate or die according to
the model of energetic dissipation that the Sun has engrained within the terrestrial organisms.
One can afford numerous modes of conservation or live in different ways but must die solely in
the way that has been dictated by the energetic model of dissipation inherent to the Sun. It is in
this sense that Georges Bataille’s model of general or non-restricted solar economy is itself a form of
restricted economy whose restriction does not end its expression in its relatively diverse modes
of living but in the rejection of those modes of death or binding exteriority which cannot be
indexed by the economical correlation between the solar excess and the conservative structures
of the terrestrial biosphere. For the terrestrial biosphere, the dominant model of dying, or more
precisely, ‘openness to the outside’ is limited to ‘being open to the Sun’ , that is to say, finding a
generally affordable consumptive solution to the problem of solar expenditure . To put it differently,
openness to the Sun does not conjure a hyperbolic Icarian humanism as some might object but
rather a restricted Inhumanism for which exteriority is only perpetuated by the solar economy
and injection upon death and exteriority is limited to dying by the Sun and through the
dissipative model of energy that it dictates. For this reason, solar economy is a straitened model of
openness or injection upon death and exteriority insofar as it entails the possibility of pluralism
in life only at the cost of a strict monism in death. A vector of thought configured by solar
economy knows nothing of the freedom of alternatives in regard to death as a vector of
exteriorization or loosening into the cosmic abyss. Hence, the Descartesian dilemma, ‘What course in life
shall I follow?’ should be bastardized as ‘ Which way out shall I take?’ It is the latter question
that radically breaks away from life-oriented models of emancipation whose putative
opportunities in life and dismissal of death are none other but manifests of heliocentric
slavery. The ecological emancipation in the direction of the great outdoors , a ‘new Earth’ (Deleuze and
Guattari) or the earthbound abyss require not alternative ways of life – with which capitalism is
grossly overwhelmed – but alternative ways of binding the exteriority of the cosmic abyss or
injection upon death (of both mind and matter). Whether identified as modes of radical openness (paths
for loosening into the abyss) or injection upon non-dialectical negativity (dying in ways other
than those afforded by the organism), alternative ways of binding exteriority mobilize the
terrestrial sphere according to climates of the cosmic abyss. Yet, as argued earlier, in terms of the cosmic
abyss, climates are pure contingencies and therefore, draw the limitropically convoluted
trajectories along which various horizons of inte- riorities are undone and loosened into the
yawn- ing chasm. If solar economy and its associated capitalism are inexibly monistic in death, it
is because Sun itself is a contingency whose interior- ized conception is in the process of
loosening into the abyss – a contingency that tends to manifest as a necessity so as to inhibit
the irruption of other contingencies qua climates. For the irruption of contingencies through
another contingency – as in the case of a dying Sun – is a chemical journey in which the solar horizon
breaks into innumer- able other contingencies, each carrying thousands of turns and twists,
giving the depth of the abyss a nested twist that is asymptotic with it radical exteriority. Life
on Earth, in this sense, is a con- tingency begotten by the decaying Sun whose body, already a
corpse, has been overridden by cosmic climates qua irruptive contingencies.
 FW – Inorganic Life
Tag
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

The marriage between the sublunary terrestrial slum and the Sun has become a strictly monoga- mous model
that regulates not only ethics, poli- tics and art but also the entire history of thought and
organic activities. It is time to return to the promiscuity of the Earth as a dense constellation of
interstellar rubbish with dead stars. Roaming the cosmos aimlessly with an Earth whose Sun is itself contingent upon
the cosmic abyss, that is to say, it is already-dead – this is the geophilo- sophical art in which all human
endeavors must be invested: to embrace the Earth as a fractal clump rather than an exotic
blue marble, to think of it as a passing oval meteorite whose crater has already bored into the skin of astral corpses. The
idea of ecological emancipation must be divorced from the simultaneously vitalistic and
necrocratic relationship between the Earth and the Sun . It must instead be coupled with cosmic
contingency as the principle of all ecologies. Only an ecology permeated with radical
contingencies of the cos- mic abyss can reinvent the Earth in the direction of the great
outdoors. For such an ecology, every moment is an apocalypse which cannot be cul- minated, and
the Sun is not the heart of darkness but that which cauterizes the gaping wound from which
pulverizing contingencies (or climates) of the cosmic abyss bleed into our world. As much as the
Earth must be divested of its conception as the ark of life, the Sun must also be stripped of both
its stellar privileges and hegemonic ecological imports. For after all, the Sun is only an inevitable
blind spot for the Earth that bars the scope of the abyss. For this reason, the Sun should neither be
embraced as the dark flame of excess nor glorified as a luminous end, but reconsid- ered and
rediscovered as an infernal element in the chain of complicities which open the Earth into a
universe that is more weird than infernal , its climatic events are more asymptotically noneventful rather
than catastrophically climatic, its exteriority is more immanent to the inside rather than the
outside. An Earth surveyed (ars terram) by such a radical ecology can be reconceived as a circuitous
part of a nested abyss, and for this rea- son, its somatic characteristics (the differentiation of its body into
inorganic layers and bio-terrains) and consequently its geographic contingencies and ultimately histories are the products of
an abyss for which all climates are convoluted and detoured sloped-curves (klima) which are
asymptotic with the unclimatic depths of the universe and its cosmic contingencies. Ecologically
speak- ing, in an abyssal cosmos where heliocentric slavery has been abolished, the aquatic vitality
of the Earth is either a detoured expression of a starless-nature that appears as rotting slime or
the earthbound abyss which erupts in the form of corrosive oil. Whereas Venice and its aquatic capitalism
are asymptotically converging upon an indifferent nature which is a pit of slime and mold; its dry middle-eastern twin
Dubai and its oily capitalism are plunged into the madness of petroleum brewed up by the deep
chthonic earth. In either case, the cosmic abyss and its radical ecology and their blackening
expression in the water of life where all climates (biological, so- cial, political, etc.) are terminally
determined by chemistry or the contingent dynamics of radical exteriority . It is in this sense that a
capitalist life either driven forward by the tourism of water or the industrialism of oil becomes
a perfect locus for chemical twists of an abyss whose weird ecol- ogy is nowhere better
manifested than in the so- called potent water of life.
Combustion and Society – Yusoff and Clark
 Thesis – Combustive Agency
This article is more abt agriculture type stuff – not really relevant
Clark and Yusoff’14|Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet
(2011) and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a
professor of Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London.
She received her PhD in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she
worked on the chrono-geographies of Antarctica. Combustion and Society: A Fire-Centred
History of Energy Use; Theory Culture Society, Special Issue: Energy & Society (2014). DOI:
10.1177/0263276414536929. Page 204-|KZaidi

In this paper we are interested in what it might mean for our under- standing of human energy use, and of social
life more generally, to put combustion at the centre of our analysis. But, as with other approaches to ‘the energy
question’, thinking through combustion quickly draws us beyond the human, beyond life, and
even beyond the Earth. While the Anthropocene thesis suggests that the issue of human energy use is tied up with a
certain humanization of geology, we propose that a deep tem- poral and wide-ranging focus on
combustion points to another option, a kind of geologization of the human (see Yusoff, 2013). Such a
move, however, is not without precedent in social thought.

As Georges Bataille (1991: 10) observed half a century ago, ‘the

move- ment of energy on the earth’ binds
human social existence to the rest of the living world , it connects biological life to the planet
as a whole, and in turn implicates our planet in the inhuman reaches of the solar system (see
Stoekl, 2007: xiv–xvi; Clark, 2011: 126–30). Drawing on geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s (1998 [1926]) pioneering depiction of a
solar-pow- ered biosphere, Bataille offered a vision of earthly life as embroiled in a dynamic interplay
between the limited space of a spherical planet and the effectively limitless excitations of
solar energy (1991: 29). Just as it is an imperative for biological life in general, how to expend a superabundance
of energy is a challenge for every human society. Jettisoning economic modernity’s self-understanding as a
ceaseless struggle with scarcity, Bataille insisted that all societies grapple with the problem of what to do when
they generate a surplus. With its institutionalization of a posi- tive feedback loop of reinvestment and growth, he argued,
industrial capitalism is an extreme case. At its heart is a ceaseless productive build-up with no
safety valve, an energetic material amassing that has already ‘turned the whole world into a
colossal powder keg’ (1993: 428).
We take the exigencies of the current energetic and environmental predicament as a prompt to ‘substantiate’ some of the more
speculative Bataillean themes. In particular, the
consequences of the spiralling com- bustion of fossil fuels
invite a more literal reading of the frequent figur- ations of fire in Bataille’s work . If not to reach an
explosive pressure, accumulated wealth, he wrote, must be ‘immolated’, consumed in ‘con-
flagrations’ or ‘incandescence’. Likewise, for environmental historian and fire scholar Stephen Pyne (1994, 1997a) the
idea that organic matter can endlessly pile up in forests, scrubland or savannah without ever
being ‘expended’ in an occasional outburst of fire is a modern myth. The con- sequence is an
ever greater amassing of flammable phytomass, which will eventually discharge itself in wildfire
– the longer the wait the fiercer the inferno. Just as deadly, Pyne proposes, is the idea that fossil-fuelled com-
bustion can replace the fires that periodically sweep through vegetated landscapes.

Bataille’s energy-centred geophysics and, more directly, Pyne’s pyro- centric global ecology draw attention to those human
communities who know how to send biotic bullion up in a blaze of glory. In a broader sense, they prompt us to look at all
the multifarious practices through which combustion is incorporated in and animates social life.
But both theorists also encourage us to track the flows and outbursts of energy far beyond their
‘capture’ in particular social forms or orders. More recently, political theorist Timothy Mitchell has suggested that
in order to make any sense of the current energy predicament, we need to ‘follow the carbon
itself’ (2011: 6; 2009: 400). The pursuit of the elemental under- pinnings of the contemporary ‘social-
energetic metabolism’ takes Mitchell through pipes and tanks and distillation towers, down into
deposits of carbon locked in the lithosphere, and back to the carbon- plumped ecosystems of
150–300 million years ago (2011: 12–13). And finally, echoing Pyne, Bataille, Vernadsky – not to mention Nietszche – it
draws him out beyond the confines of our own small planet to the exuberant solar source of
terrestrial heat and light.
Following fire itself, we too set out to explore social-energetic metab- olisms – tracking flows, congealings and irruptions that soon
exceed the bounds of conventional social scientific analysis – and begin to stretch even the more recent affirmations of the
heterogeneous composition of society. The generalized study of combustion – we suggest – is a key to
contextualizing human energetic practices within a broader ‘economy’ of terrestrial and cosmic
energy flows (Bataille referred to this as a ‘general’ rather than a ‘restricted’ economy). The fire that burns beneath the cook-
ing pot is much the same fire that rages through a forest, and has raged through foliage for hundreds of millions of years. Fire, in
other words, is a force that binds intimate and mundane human activities to some of the most
‘monstrous’ energetic movements of the Earth. As Gaston Bachelard puts it, fire ‘links the small to the
great, the hearth to the volcano, the life of a log to the life of a world’ (1987: 16).
Queer Fire – Clark and Yusoff
 PDB vs Identity K’s/Expenditure Alt
Alt about why prolif of weapons good AND Perm for Identity K’s
Clark and Yusoff’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of
Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD
in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she worked on the chrono-geographies of
Antarctica. “queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire” (2018), in feminist review 118. Page 8-
12|KZaidi

That many of us have come to see fire as loss rather than renewal, destruction rather creation,
is bound at once to Western ideas of ecology and economy. From the eighteenth-century naturalist Gilbert
White’s observation that ‘nature is a great economist’ (Worster, 1985, p. 9), through to the 1972 Blueprint for Survival’s affirmation
of ‘the essential cyclic nature of all ecological processes and the absolute necessity for recycling everything’ (The Ecologist, 1972, p.
71), the
otherwise contrary fields of ecological and economic thought have frequently mirrored
each other’s abhorrence of inefficiency and waste. Nowhere has this shared disdain been more
acute than in the condemnation of uncontained, free-burning fire.

Constantly fearful
of the use of fire in urban uprisings—the metropolitan elites of a modernising
Europe saw open fire as an affront to reason and order, just as they viewed the other unruly
energies of the masses with trepidation (see Marder, 2015, pp. 41–60). It is no coincidence that the idea of a
curfew to regulate the movements of urban bodies derives from couvre feu—the covering or
extinguishing of fire (Pyne, 2001, p. 109). Exporting their pyrophobia from city to country,
Enlightenment agronomists came to see fire in forest or field not only as a form of disorder but
also as the squandering of organic wealth that ought to be put to productive use (Pyne, 1997a, pp.
162–169).

As a means to tighten and amplify the circulation of vital energies, suppression of the urge to burn has
often been accompanied by regulation of other bodily desires. Along with an abiding suspicion of fire, we
suggest, the anxiety about sex and procreation in much ecological thinking points to its
complicities with the power-knowledge relations of a modernising Europe. We are far from alone in
divining continuities between otherwise ‘radical’ ecological imaginaries and more orthodox modes of modern thought and practice.
Such misgivings resound through a throng of ecological ‘heterodoxies’ that include feminist,
queer, indigenous, postcolonial, post-structural, Marxist, anarchist and animal liberationist
positions— and their many cross-fertilisations. Fervently ‘ecological’ in their own ways, these approaches
often find themselves, or construct themselves, in opposition to some of the precepts and
axioms of more ‘mainstream’ environmentalism—a field that is itself by no means singular or
unitary.

Our own wish to ignite some thinking

around sex and fire is a response not so much to the presence of limits in
more ‘orthodox’ environmentalisms, but to a
pervading assumption that the best way to deal with
limitation is through greater economy, parsimony, self-moderation. Though not quite as easy to demonise
as wildfire, we note that unregulated human reproduction has also been taken as a threat to the essential cyclicality favoured by the
ecological imagination—an observation that inherits earlier insights at the intersection of queer, feminist and ecological thought. As
Catriona Sandilands (1999, p. 81) observed some time ago, ‘one
of the most disturbing sites of ‘self-limiting’’
ecological wisdom lies in discourses around population’, or as she puts it more bluntly, ‘limits to
sex’. And as Sandilands discerns, coming down on the side of curbing desire, renouncing pleasure and
policing ‘expenditure’ is not simply a matter of disgruntling feminist or queer critics—it may well be one of the
most significant impediments to the broad appeal of ecology as a social movement.

In critical social thought, the

usual response to talk of limits —ecological or otherwise—is to insist that all
boundaries are socio-culturally or discursively constructed rather than ‘natural’. Consequently, if
neither our desires nor the point at which desirous behaviour crosses over into excessiveness is
dictated by nature, it is up to us to collectively decide how, where and when to express
ourselves—and to actively oppose any authority who would deny us this right and this
responsibility. But is this the last word on the play or the negotiation of desire? For there are other ways to
conceive of desire that would see any such socialisation of limits and excess as itself a kind of
circumscription or containment. Other approaches, that is, which have asked what it might mean if our excitations, our
incitements to desire, lay in some part beyond the social. Or even beyond the earth itself. And
with such an opening—the imagining of an ‘ecology’ or an ‘economy’ that is not restricted to our own
world—come some interesting questions on what we might do with fire and sex.

The second corollary of releasing desire into the cosmic or incorporeal realm is to engage with questions
of reproduction via fire. As a mode of reproduction that is decidedly non-normative and breaches
the impasse between sexual and asexual reproduction, fire provides a material register and figure for queer
theory that ‘jumps’ questions of inheritance to initiate new genealogical configurations. As a
‘queer’ reproductive logic that regenerates prodigiously without recourse to sexual or species
reproduction, fire models genealogies that are both exuberant and future-orientated—to offer
another kind of reproductive futurism which is not grounded in those logics of patriarchy,
family or progeny that remain decidedly intra-species and intra-planetary. Structurally, fire licks the
boundary between biologic life and inhuman materialities,1 offering a pyro-evolutionary tack that
substantially restructures the asexual-sexual binary with lateral forms of agency and modes of
intensification (or desire). Rescripting ideas of ancestrality beyond the logics of reproductive
futurism that are so firmly secreted in biologisms (and its tying together of reproduction and
forms of productivity), fire queers the pitch of sex with excessive pyroerotic potentialities and
untimely temporalities.
Extrapolating on Nietzsche’s (1969 [1883], p. 39) notion of a sun that pours out its radiance endlessly and without expectation of
return, Georges Bataille (1991 [1949]) forged an entire ‘social’ theory around the idea that the
prime challenge of
earthly existence is how to deal with an excess of incoming solar energy. But for Bataille (ibid., pp. 20–
23, 2013 [1949]), the very idea of ‘excess’ is coupled with a conception of limits —for it is the
bounded sphericality of our planet that ultimately imposes a limitation on the expansion of
life, a threshold that no amount of discursive or political wrangling can evade. Bonded to a
finite astronomical body, we and other creatures have no option but to expend the superfluity
of energy available to us. For Bataille, sexual activity that is geared to reproduction sooner or later
comes up against these terrestrial limits—as does economic activity that cycles consumption
into more production. But sex for its own sake, sex for the pleasure of it—just like any
offloading of economic goods that manages to escape the circuit of reinvestment—is pure
discharge, non-productive expenditure, a waste of energy (Bataille, 1991 [1949], p. 181, 2013 [1949], p. 35).
It is more than just the breaching of cyclicality in the thought of Bataille and his heirs that offends ecological sensibilities. As historian
Anna Bramwell (1989, p. 97) has noted, it is above all ‘the fear of irrevocable loss that characterises the ecologist’. And facing up to
unsublatable loss is what Bataille does best. For while he may aspire to prolonging the free gifts of the sun in as generous and
benevolent ways as possible, Bataille (2013 [1949], p. 35) acknowledges that this is only a temporary solution, and that
ultimately the fate of everything on earth and in the cosmos is pointless destruction, or ‘pure
loss’. It is this intuition, he adds, that underpins ‘[o]ur desire to consume, to annihilate, to make a
bonfire of our resources, and the joy we find in the burning’ (Batille, 1986 [1957], p. 185). Until
recently, this ‘pure loss’ has been cul-de-sacked in the repository of geologic time, neatly
separated from the productive lifeworlds of biology.
While Bataille deserves credit for envisioning both sex and fire as expressions of an exorbitant energy flow, his sexual scenarios are
clearly not to everyone’s taste. We would add that like most Europeans, Bataille is stronger on fiery metaphors than he is on the
practicalities of working or playing with flame. But whatis intriguing about his insistence that endless
acquisition without discharge results in explosive energetic buildup, is the way that it resonates
with a rising—if still contentious—tendency amongst fire ecologists to accept the periodic
necessity of fire in most of the earth’s forests, scrublands and grasslands. For an increasing number of
fire researchers now concede that a world of traditional and indigenous practitioners had it right all along:
this is a planet that is bound to burn, and if fire is withheld from accumulating biomass, we
invite deadly, uncontrollable conflagrations (Pyne, 1994, 1997a, p. 546; Langton, 1998, p. 53; Bowman et al., 2009).
A conclusion that is not a world away from what the psychoanalytic tradition, amongst others, has said about the buildup and
release of libidinal energies.

Our own thinking in this paper is shadowed by the escalating animosity in certain quarters over the
apparent refusal of other bodies to manage their desires , to contain themselves, to stay in
place. This is a set of concerns, it has been noted, which is increasingly linked to global climate change
(Bettini, 2014). So too are we mindful of the claim of fire researchers that terrestrial wildfire
‘appears more profusely during times of rapid and extreme climatic change’ (Pyne, 1994, p. 890). But
fire and sex— conceived in the broadest sense—are not simply on a collision course. To think critically
and creatively through the current conjuncture , we suggest, needs a long run-up, a genealogy that
traces the deep, conjoint history of sexual desire and fiery consummation .

By coupling sex and fire, by contextualising the ‘pyrosexual’ within the wider economy of the earth and cosmos, we at
once seek ways to escape industrial capitalism’s current hyper-consumptive cycles of
accumulation and ways around ecological thought’s consternation over unmanaged desire.
Putting speculative thinking about sex and reproduction in conversation with a range of ways of theorising fire, we explore how fire
mediates between organismic desire and the energetic dynamics of the earth and solar system
in ways that differ from biologism’s attachment to a ‘productive’ sex.

celestial fertility, green fire

‘Light my fire’, ‘the fire down below’, ‘with sighs of fire’: popular
culture, present and past, has routinely linked
sexual urges to the more elemental force of fire. But the metaphoric movement should really go
in the other direction, for it is the reproductive capacity and profligacy of life—organismic desire
—that is the condition of the possibility of fire. With our fidgety, fire-wielding hands and our
unseasonable passions, we hominids may burn with desire, but it is fire itself that is pyrosexual
—all the way down.
 Inevitability
Tag
Clark and Yusoff’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of
Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD
in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she worked on the chrono-geographies of
Antarctica. “queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire” (2018), in feminist review 118. Page
12-13|KZaidi

Fire can be deferred, fire ecologists and pyrogeographers increasingly insist, but it cannot be abolished any more
than plant reproduction can be prohibited. If leaf litter and other biotic matter builds up, it will
sooner or later attract an igniting spark (Pyne, 1997b, pp. 252–253). As Bataille and his fire science counterparts agree, if life
cannot grow or expand indefinitely, it must eventually expend itself—or go out in a blaze of
glory. The wider lesson being that the most or best any organism can do is to prolong, for a time, the
gratuitous, irrecompensable offerings of the sun. In Bataille’s (1988 [1943], p. 94) words, ‘to live signifies for
you not only the flux and fleeting play of light which are united in you, but the passage of
warmth and light from one being to another’. And perhaps no being does this with more passion or fervour than the fire-
adapted plant. As geographer Lauren Rickards elaborates: Fire adapted plants make the ultimate parental sacrifice, filling themselves with oils in order
to ignite the life cycle of their young. Once disintegrated through combustion, these plants do everything they can to nurture their offspring, waking
them from their slumber with complex chemical signals, gifting them with an abundance of nutrients, sheltering them in a warm bed of ash, and
stepping aside to allow them their time in the sun. (Rickards, 2013)
 Art Alt
Tag
Clark and Yusoff’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of
Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD
in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she worked on the chrono-geographies of
Antarctica. “queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire” (2018), in feminist review 118. Page
13-14|KZaidi

For philosopher Elizabeth Grosz (2008), the scents, shapes and colours of plants and the desirous
behaviour of sexual beings are examples of a natural exuberance that exceeds the dictates of
survival. This excess, for her, is what defines art. ‘Art’, writes Grosz (ibid., p. 79), ‘is where the becomings of the
earth couple with the becomings of life to produce intensities and sensations that in
themselves summon up a new kind of life’. And it is the pleasure of sexualisation that is the prime
means by which living organisms draw out and expand upon inorganic or earthly potential: ‘Art
is the sexualization of survival, or equally, sexuality is the rendering artistic, the exploration of
the excessiveness, of nature’ (ibid., p. 11). While it is not a theme Grosz herself develops, we would see fire as
one of the most vital and effusive ways through which the generative potential of the organic
and the inorganic meet and join forces, a pre-eminent means by which living things ‘contact and
cross-fertilize the earth’ (ibid., p. 20). Indeed, if the earth has its own art forms, then the flame that
irrupts where sex and solar energy join forces is surely one of its most splendid productions.

An understanding of the implication of fire and biological life, we suggest, does two things for our thinking through
and about sex. First, it helps us to see that earthly forces which are often assumed to be more basal or
‘elemental’ than life processes, may turn out to be much more entangled with the biological—
and with life’s constitutive sexual and asexual desires—than we previously imagined. Second, the focus on fire
helps bring into relief the complex, variegated sexual and asexual geneses of plant life that are
the condition of possibility of our own ‘animal’ existence. Bringing these two points together
foregrounds the literally world-shaping power of sexualities that are far from the
heteronormativities and filial modes of inheritance prevalent in contemporary ‘green’
thought. In this way, the idea of an originary pyrosexuality draws our attention to differential forces at the
juncture of organismic life and the non-living earth. Appreciating that these ‘primordial’ forces remain vibrant,
open and unfinished, we propose, is a step towards the material and imaginative rescripting of
environmental futurism.

The hominids who began tending fire could not have anticipated most of its effects on
ecosystems and life forms (including themselves). In the light of Grosz’s sense of creative elaboration on the earth’s
expressiveness, we might speculate that the first wielding of a flaming branch was no more or less
than a gesture, a dance, a rhythmic extension of wildfire’s own glorious display. While landscape
burning developed into both a rigorous discipline and an artful celebration, this was by no means the culmination of
human fire play. For the fire creature was also to learn how fire could be extracted from its
natural milieu—how it could be contained and magnified. In this way, humans engendered forms
of beauty and utility that rivalled even the sensuous productions of the flowering plants,
intensifying the already intense materiality within the logics of a profligate lineage. And in the process
of bringing new fiery arts and novel fired objects into being, they also transformed the fabric of
their lived existence—and the very contours of their sensual and sexual relations.
 Root Cause for Social Relations
Tag
Clark and Yusoff’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of
Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD
in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she worked on the chrono-geographies of
Antarctica. “queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire” (2018), in feminist review 118. Page
15-17|KZaidi
Rather than simply pointing out the uneven ways that women and men were impacted by this stream of new things, we would
suggest that in changing the mineral or geologic composition of everyday life, pyrotechnology
helped recompose social and sexual subjectivities (see Yusoff, 2013, pp. 780–781; 2015, p. 209). In the
increasingly populous urban centres of the ancient world, kiln-fired materials afforded substance and durability
to the built environment. Under conditions of unprecedented social proximity, the hard-baked bricks, tiles,
cements and concretes served to channel ‘the movement of human flesh’ keeping some bodies
apart, holding others together (De Landa, 1997, pp. 27–28). But as in the reproduction of biological worlds, the dance
of fire and life at the core of human ‘civilization’ overflowed the strictures of necessity or
purpose. From much the same ovens that seemed to bind some women to domestic space
came artful objects and eye-catching adornments: things to see, to feel, to flaunt, to be enticed
or enchanted by. If the glittering products of the artisan’s kiln functioned as ‘visual displays of identity’
that signalled where and when people belonged (Roberts et al., 2009, p. 1019), so too did they help
precipitate surges and poolings of desire that could not so easily be corralled.

As an ecology—as a shifting imbrication of organic and inorganic forces—the city itself might be
seen as a turning point, an event in the transformation and intensification of sex. As Colebrook proposes:

what makes a city a city is the intensity with which relations among bodies exceed self-interest
and self-preservation (or are sexual). By the same token, a relation between two bodies is sexual (rather than
bound by organic preservation) to the extent that it is urbane—oriented to differences, style, flair or
display, and not to reproduction. (Colebrook, 2017, p. 40)

The pyrotechnical transmutation of earthy matter into both structures of containment and
objects of enchantment, we suggest, is the molten core of this reconfiguration of sexual desire.
From the ancient foundries came the shimmering stimuli of urban desire—but also the implements that
would increase agricultural production and direct reproduction to certain kinds of human,
animal and plant bodies. If the artisanal furnace fabricated bodily ornaments that captivated the
senses, so too did it forge the shackles that fettered other bodies; if it poured forth the metallic
tokens that aided trade and circulation, the same glittering coinage facilitated the purchase of
bodies, their labour, enslavement and sexual favours. As archaeometallurgist Theodore Wertime (1973, p.
680) concludes of the metals that pyrotechnology injected into early urban existence: ‘ They became
catalysts of social life for men even as they had been catalysts of energy exchanges for cells in
the biological organism’. But so too did the arrival of metals enable the hoarding of wealth as never
before—just as it furnished the weapons to amass and guard these stockpiles (Goudsblom, 1992, p.
63).
As Margulis and Sagan (1995, p. 165) deftly observe, ‘[t]hemonetary economy attempts to arrest the solar
flux of Earth’s economy’. Fuelled by wood or charcoal, we are reminded, the traditional kiln is still an
extension of solar excess, an elaboration on green fire, a set of variations played on the forces
of earth and cosmos. Karl Marx (1975 [1857–1858], p. 8330), incidentally but delightfully, is not far off when in the
Grundrisse he cites an old Peruvian saying that ‘Gold is the tears wept by the sun’ . If the chambered flame at
the heart of urban life intensifies, enhances and extrapolates upon sexual possibility, not
everything that arises out of the ‘creative participatory joy’ of working with fire and earthy
matter extends the flow of warmth or light from one urban body to another (see Smith, 1981, p. 355). It
is only too obvious that many new things, new expressions, new potentials for exploring erotic and
sensual desire were not protected or apprised ‘for reasons more like love than purpose’. And as
the ability to contain and intensify fire advanced, as human pyrotechnics turned for its
feedstock from solar flow to fossil sunlight, so too was desire in all its permutations subjected
to forces and pressures without precedent.
fossil capital, Carboniferous love

The emergence of the city, Manuel De Landa (1997) proposes, can be viewed as a kind of re- mineralisaton of
biological life: the clay and stone structures of urban built space constituting a literal re-
enfolding of the geologic into the world of the (human) organism. We would extend this argument to
include the many ores and minerals that the pyrotechnic arts introduced, in transmuted form, into the fabric of urban life. To this
we have been adding that the fire-forged minerality of the city serves as a conduit and catalyst
of human desire. If flame helps simmer, fuse, meld and alloy the heterogeneous elements of social life
into a workable unity, so too do its lustrous productions incite passions that urban socio-sexual orders
struggle to contain.
 A2 – Feminism
Tag
Clark and Yusoff’18 |Nigel Clark is professor of social sustainability and human geography at
Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011)
and co-editor of `Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene’ (2017). Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of
Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London. She received her PhD
in Geography from Royal Holloway University of London, where she worked on the chrono-geographies of
Antarctica. “queer fire: ecology, combustion and pyrosexual desire” (2018), in feminist review 118. Page
18-20|KZaidi
Just as the creative energy of pyrotechnics was so often turned to the forging of shackles, armour, weapons—the apparatus of
oppression and appropriation—so too were coal-fuelled industrial engines set to the task of entrammelling a ‘superabundance of
unemployed hands’ (ibid., p. 153). In
these dynamics of capital accumulation, feminist theorists have repeatedly
pointed out, there is a complicitous logic of control of labour power and of women’s reproductive
capacities—a pronounced link between specific regimes of production and particular sexual
ethics (Mitropolous, 2012, pp. 106–108). Critical discourses on biopolitics have helped us to understand
how the management—increasingly the self-regulation—of sexual desire needs to be
understood not only in terms of individuated bodies but through the more extensive realms of
biological life (Parisi and Terranova, 2000). But as we have been suggesting, the thematic of fire—combustion in all its
forms—implicates organismic interests, affects, passions in a still more encompassing material-
energetic field.
Connecting up the ‘problem’ of female desire to the abiding concerns of the high era of heat engines, Luciana Parisi and Tiziana
Terranova (2000) note that entropy is that ‘energy which cannot be reabsorbed back into the industrial
social machine; it is energy which becomes a threat to the disciplinary order once it is pushed
outside its walls’. Like the robust chambers built to contain the condensed, explosive energy of fossil carbon, the energy
of the female body—with its risk of explosive discharge—has been seen to be in need of
channelling into orderly (re)productive outlets. Strict geneaological continuity and filiative reproduction, that is,
as the counterpart to evermore efficient and prodigious machines. In the bigger picture, overflowing energy presents a
profound challenge not only to orthodox economistic thinkers and anxious ecologists, but to those forms of critical
thought that cleave to notions of individuated, organismic being. For as Parisi and Terranova (ibid.,
emphasis in the original) explain, ‘female flows are not attributes of the organism and therefore of the
woman’s body. They are not defined by organization but by relations of matter and energy’ . In the
current fossil-fuelled world, the very matter and energy in question, we would add, is itself the
expression of sexual and nonsexual reproduction—which is to say, the organismic desire of ancient plant life.
As we now know only too well, energy does indeed escape the heat engine’s conversion of fuel to motive force: nineteenth-century
enthralment with universal heat death rebounding as the current preoccupation with global climate change. But what
is now
pushing the earth system closer to irreversible change, what makes it so difficult to ‘overcome’ reliance on detrital carbon,
seems to be less the regulation of sexual desire as its hyperbolisation . More so than even Bataille
imagined, late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalism has found ways to cycle even the
most gratuitous and voluptuary discharges back into the ‘powder keg’ of ceaseless
accumulation. For Colebrook (2017), the sensually and erotically charged interactions that constitute
the intrinsic sexuality of the city have now reached unprecedented, and unmaintainable, levels
of intensity. Furnished by mass industrialisation and manifest as a kind of hyper-consumption,
‘the global expansion of human desire’ now weighs so heavily on the earth that it threatens
geological catastrophe (ibid., p. 56). ‘This suggests that the city provides the condition for its own virtual
destruction, and that it is essentially—like all sexual forces— unsustainable’, Colebrook (ibid., p. 54)
concludes.

The contemporary contours and intensities of desire, in other words, take their force from sunlight sequestered during bygone
epochs of the earth, and it
is the very excess of ‘geopower’ fuelling these attractions and discharges
that makes sex itself a geologic force (see Yusoff et al., 2012). Playing this scenario through the lens of planetary fire,
global climate change and the coming of the Anthropocene express more than just the logic of
capital accumulation or patriarchal socio-sexual relations. If in ways that are diffuse and difficult to define,
the current planetary predicament is also a matter of social, sexual and political
subjectification nourished by fossil hydrocarbons; an expression of overheated urges that channel the sexual
chemistry of the Devonian, the Carboniferous, the Permian (Yusoff, 2015, p. 204).

Even more so than the pyrotechnic products that inflamed ancient passions, fossil-nourished
objects of desire play
variations on the theme of earthly generativity that the earth itself never attempted, at
intensities it cannot long endure, at least in its current state. To be sure, contemporary
environmentalism grasps the unsustainability of the present order, although it tends to assume
that reproductive discipline and a more measured filial intergenerationality provide the means
to defuse and safely duct this (re)productive outburst —as if exuberance itself was a surpassable human
aberrance rather than a planetary predilection. Agreeing that there is an urgent need to explore alternatives
to certain of the sexual and energetic extravagances of the hydrocarbon era, our notion of
thinking through the pyrosexual brings us back to the issue of our own inescapable implication
in the ‘fertility’ of the earth and cosmos. The challenge of repositioning ourselves within the ancient, ongoing
cross-fertilisation of the organic and the inorganic, we suggest, raises profound questions not only about
what else we might make of our desires, but inseparably, what else we could do with a planet
of fire.
The Manic Ecstasy of War
 Thesis
Makes a few args (1) war is an inevitable facet of hum an existence, the
question is only its scope and destructive capacity (2) monocephalic, or the
sacred, constructs social relationships via certain norms and codes – framework
(3) root cause arg as to why war constantly re-emerges in response to the
beheading of Gods and their subsequent re-emergence – ek-stasis to stasis and
vice versa
Hamblet’05 |Wendy C. Hamblet is a philosopher, author, philosophical counselor, and consultant. She
has completed a two year term as Executive Director of the Concerned Philosophers for Peace and is an
activist-scholar in the Transcend Network of Conflict Transformation Professionals. “The Manic Ecstasy of
War”, in Peace Review: A Journal of Social Justice (2005) Taylor & Francis, Inc. DOI:
10.1080/14631370500292052|KZaidi

Eli Sagan’s At the Dawn of Tyranny posits the advent of civilization as coincidental with the dawn of tyranny and oppression. War,
one of the oldest human institutions, has proven invaluable to states in establishing their power over
subgroups within the system, as well as in acquiring territories from neighboring peoples to
permit their expansion in space and power. Because of war’s great functionality to the state, there remains little
mystery to the long-term success of war as a state institution over the formative millennia of civilization. The continuing
popularity of war among modern states ostensibly dedicated to democracy, freedom, and the
dignity of human beings, remains baffling to violence scholars. Karl von Clausewitz’s On War, considered
by many scholars to be the canonical treatment of the war philosophy, attributes to war a logic all its own: war
composes a compulsion, a dynamic that aims at excessive overflow, absolute expenditure of
the energies of the state. War seeks absolutization as it feeds and fires the population’s martial
enthusiasm; if unchecked by political goals, war will fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of
self-expenditure—self-annihilation. War composes a potlatch of state resources, a useless
splurge of the nation’s human and economic wealth for no better reason than wanton
celebration of state power. The language of absolute expenditure resonates with the philosophy of Georges Bataille.
His philosophy explains two principles of expenditure— the principle of classical utility defined by
utilitarian goals serving current power relations, and that of nonproductive expenditure—that
is, orgiastic outflow or ek-stasis that escapes mundane servitude to reason and utility. Political
implications of the two economies are exposed in Bataille’s “Propositions on Fascism.” There, the two dialectical
opposites represent extreme possibilities for the state structures. The first model aspires to
perfect order, like the timeless realm of the gods, a frozen homogeneous perfection that is
monocephalic (single-headed). Like the god, the monocephalic state becomes self-identified as
a sacred entity—changeless, eternal, and perfect, its laws and customs fixed and imperative.
People within the acephalic social structure enjoy abundant ritual lives that offer escape from
the mundane in orgiastic festivals involving drunkenness, dancing, blood rites, wanton tortures,
self-mutilation, and even murder in the name of dark monster gods. The monocephalic state, on
the other hand, has overcome all death. The civilized state boasts an enlightened stable form
that promotes reason, life, and progress, whereas the primitive society is referred to chaos,
madness, and death. Bataille’s dichotomy provides a valuable framework for analyzing global realities, even in the modern
world. Because Bataille insists the models represent dual extreme possibilities in the cyclical evolution of all states, then all states
seek timeless stability, secured against time with absolute truth claims, infallible social codes,
and enduring legislation. States are duly secured by the legalized violence of police and military
that appropriate the illegal violence of the people and ultimately suppress all transformation.
Intricate unyielding systems of rules and regulations—passports, licenses, identity cards, forms
completed in triplicate, travel restrictions, immigration regulations, police interrogations,
surveillance of social and financial transactions among subgroups, security checkpoints,
departments of homeland security—weed out the deviant lifeforms until ultimately all
countervoices have been silenced, all rebellion quite obliterated, all evolutionary movement
logically contradictory. But, at this evolutionary apex, a problem arises in paradise. As the monocephalic state
increasingly closes itself off, it stifles social existence, smothers creative energies, chokes the
passion from its citizen-devotees, suffocates their spiritual urges, and reduces all sacrifices to
mundane utility. When the perfect eternality of the structure is complete and the nation duly
deified, all labors have become co-opted in utter servitude. Bataille names this culminating
stage of development, the peaceful, stable end sought by all states, in its most excessive extrapolation— fascism.
Ultimately, however, life and time must break free and move forward into futures. This most solid
state holds firm for a short while only; then there begins a condensation of forces. Life rises up
and explodes the suffocating stasis, disintegrating the solid, erect whole. Existence and liberty
flow forth in rage, blood, tears, and passion. The death of God is complete. For Bataille, these endless cycles
describe the movement of history: the erection of unitary gods of knowledge and power that
ultimately ossify into totalities, and then explode in hysterical, raging catastrophes, releasing
the explosive liberty of life from mundane servitude. The acephalic chaos will eventually
recompose, slowly heaving up an ugly divine head once again. Life turns back on its chaotic
freedom and develops what Bataille calls an aversion to the initial decomposition. The chaotic
structure moves from the ek-stasis bliss of wanton pleasures and pains toward the stasis of the
deity once again. Time, states, and human individuals , for Bataille, move between the two contradictory
forms: stasis and ek-stasis. Time demands both forms in the world—the eternal return of an
imperative object, and the explosive, creative, destructive rage of the liberty of life. Bataille’s
analysis of state evolution offers resolution to the mystery of the frequency of wars in the modern civilized era: It suggests
that war composes a “potlatch”—a manic ecstasy of useless self-expenditure that permits a
breakout from mundane servitude. We may not readily recognize, in our states, the extreme forms
that Bataille describes—fascist stasis or chaotic ecstasy. We believe that, although chaos is unquestionably
undesirable, fascism is promoted only by madmen —Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin. We may be convinced
that fascist urges fade with global democracy where all people will, eventually, know the order
and security of the first world. Modern Western states, we may object, compose a golden mean
between Bataille’s two economies, aspiring neither to fascism nor to a manic primitivism, but to the reasonable metron
of golden rules. But the roots of the Western world are well planted in the fascist drive for hyper-
order and changeless eternality. Hesiod and the PreSocratics, as much as Jewish and Christian myth, cite a common
arche of the universe in the good works of a god that renders order (cosmos) out of chaos (kaos). For the ancients, one
head (cephalus) is far superior to many; simplicity is beauty, whereas the many compose hoi poloi, an
embarrassment of riches. The foundational logic that posits monocephalic order as ontologically and
morally superior to acephalic multivocity remains an unquestioned assumption embedded in
the Western lifeworld. A single well-ordered edifice, stretching high into the sky—erect, rigid, unyielding—is
preferable, in the Western mind, to the broadest playing field studded with incongruous heroics.
Bataille’s meditations on the dark underside of reason’s projects and triumphs, on such prohibited subjects
as monstrous tortures, illicit sexual excesses, and the colorful anuses of apes, provide a theater of cruelty and death
that is designed to challenge the polite threshold of civilized culture, to shock and interrupt the
philosophical tradition it invades, and to subvert the pretenses of refined sophistication
thought definitive of civilized society. Bataille shows that people are torn by conflicting drives, by
lofty ideals, and by the dark concealed forces they suppress and deny. Lorenz states that Bataille’s
treatment of the dark, concealed urges in human nature offer resolution to the paradox of the
simultaneous lofty goals of modern states and the frequency of brutal aggressions by those
very states naming themselves the most civilized. Perhaps the popularity and frequency of war even in
the civilized modern era represents the release of suppressed subterranean drives within
industrialized, rationalist, rigidly hierarchically ordered populations enslaved to reason and
utility. The violence that floods the globe in modernity , that claims to be serving reasonable projects of global
freedom and democracy, may represent new forms expressing old desires, the projects of
monocephalic statehood aspiring to deification. Bataille recognizes chthonic forces as instrumental in the modern
world: “The economic history of modern times is dominated by the epic but disappointing effort of
fierce men to plunder the riches of the Earth [and turn its fire and metal into weapons] . . . . [M]an
[lives] an existence at the mercy of the merchandise he produces, the largest part of which is devoted to death.” The fierce
men of modernity—gods, kings, and their modern sequels (presidents, popes, corporate rulers)—extend their control
to the ends of the planet. Fierce men disembowel the Earth and turn on their own kind the products of molten metal torn
from her bowels to ensure the permanence of their nations. War, states Bataille, “represents the desperate obstinacy
of man opposing the exuberant power of time and finding security in an immobile and almost
somnolent erection.” Bataille believes that primitive urges are still at work in the projects of
modernity. Human beings, as much as superstructures of power, must satisfy their dark urges for the good
of their communities. They must release their death drives if they are to gather together in
heartfelt communities. Human beings crave mystical, passionate, frenzied escape from the
rigorous projects of their ordered systems. If Bataille is correct, people must ultimately break free
from the mundane enterprises of their everyday lives. Their inner demons will beckon them
from their ordered worlds to revel in orgiastic festival. Surely Bataille’s claim—that life’s erotic drives will out
and fulfill themselves in deathly destructiveness and wanton joy—should trouble us greatly, given the leveling effects of modern
industrial society, its will to mediocrity, utility, and conformity. But is Bataille correct in his attribution of a measureless and rending
character to modern war? Is modern warfare the aimless catastrophe that Bataille claims it to be? If so, then modern wars can be
explained, according to Bataille, as ecstatic release from the fascist orientation of modern ordered states and from people’s
imprisonment within the merchandise they produce. Modern war, with its Shock and Awe techno-theatrics, should provide a
wondrous release from mundane servitude. War could be said to satisfy collective fantasies of manic
omnipotence and the drive for self-sacrifice for sacred values. Perhaps the wars of modernity
occur with such rabid frequency because people must satisfy their suppressed lust for a
sexualized release from the cold reality of state projects, the utilitarian reasons of state. This
resonates with Clausewitz’s claim that people’s martial enthusiasm must find release in politically restrained
wars or fulfill itself in the maximum exertion of self-expenditure, that is, self-annihilation. For
Clausewitz, modernity represents that unfettered stage when war has escaped all political bounds
and reasonable restraint. Although ostensibly a world driven by the lofty goals, modernity—for Clausewitz—composes an
era of absolute war. The democratic revolution may have embraced other goals—citizen welfare and the grandeur of their rulers—
but democracy, for Clausewitz, composes
merely one of a number of crucial forces (the scientific
revolution that provides the technology, the industrial revolution that provides mass
production of weaponry, and the imperialism that draws the entire globe into the war system)
that have been successfully harnessed to the power- projects of the mightiest nations. The
goods of the modern West, including the good of democracy, exist to extend Western hegemony globally
in the marketplace of military power. But Bataille claims that war is useless expenditure—a release of
the primal urges of a community toward excessive overflow. He states: “Military existence is based
on a brutal negation of any profound meaning of death and, if it uses cadavers, it is only to
make the living march in a straighter line.” But, if war is to be posited as an ecstatic release, it
must compose orgiastic overflow, an entirely useless and pointless expenditure of the nation’s
finest goods. Excessive expenditure is defeated the moment the violent explosion of forces serves
mundane projects of servitude and utility. When war serves the purposes of the state, it loses
its manic and ecstatic character and ceases to fulfill the people’s deepest needs for release from servitude and
instrumentality. But Bataille is mistaken; the apparent uselessness of modern warfare is a deception, an illusion. War is one of the
oldest traditions of our species. It has become a timeworn vehicle precisely because it serves a great many functions in states.
Clausewitz names the institution of war a form of com- munication between nations. Franco Fornari states: “War is a multi-
functional institution. . . . It is extremely difficult to find a substitute that would perform all of its functions.” One of the most crucial
functions that war provides in service of the state is the crystallization of its monopoly on violence. War is
a crucial aspect of the centralizing, evolutionary process that culminates, ultimately, in fascist
stability. The establishment of a massive and robust military is utterly necessary to the
deification of the structure and the raising of a sturdy cephalus, because, along with the
creation of strong policing and military forces, war serves to alienate the private violence of the
citizens and place their collective aggressive energies into the hands of the cephalus. War serves
the collective illusion of eternality. War serves other crucial functions in the state: it confirms the values,
virtues, and meanings of one’s own cultural group. Sacred symbols—flags, national anthems,
tales of past heroes, fallen ancestors—are put to work in luring the best of the nation—its
strong and courageous youths—to the extreme patriotism required to maintain order in
fascist regimes. The seduction of the nation’s best to its wars includes their provision of an
inter-national stage to display the collective prowess of the nation, a point of pride for all citizens, even
the most oppressed of the society, and it allows for the individual display of the soldiers’ manly
character—the valor, the selfless- ness, the loyalty. The wars of modern super-states continue in
the tradition of imperialist projects of old. Posited as serving the most selfless values—the
advancement of freedom, democracy, and the spread of civilization— today’s wars clearly bring too massive a
booty to be named selfless expenditures. In fact, for the past fifty years, wars have increasingly
become shameless lootings of helpless peoples—the projects of economists and accountants
and big busi- nessmen purified by political propaganda and backed by an arsenal of modern
techno-weaponry. War serves the needs of the cephalus; it serves the personal narcissism of
the leaders, and the collective narcissism of the combatants and civilians. Above all, modern wars
serve economic goals; their booty is prodigious. They may cost the sacred love-object (the nation)
massive capital, human and monetary, but the generals, the political leaders, and their
corporate cronies profit handsomely from the hostilities. War also serves the fantasy that the
sacred love-object is the savior and benefactor of the globe; war serves the paranoid collective
delusion that the cephalus is infallible and indestructible, unlimited as the god in its strength
and in its moral substance. Killing the enemies, propagandized as evil, the collec- tive illusion is
fed that evil is overthrown: thus the sanctity of the love- object is preserved. Sacred values are recomposed;
the cephalus stands taller, more erect, more firm than ever in the wake of a good war. But for all the benefits served by the
institution of war, modern wars are deeply tragic; they do waste millions of innocent lives; they tear apart societies and disburse
homeless families across the globe. One in nine of the earth’s seven billion now lives a miserable, wandering, hopeless existence on
parched lands where even the earth mother is barren. Ultimately the
greatest tragedy of modern war lies in its
stark utility to the few at the extreme expenditure of its many. The utility of war defeats the
purposes of war by frustrating the deepest needs of the society—the people’s need to build
heartfelt communities, a need that can only be served by expressing the collective aggressive
energies of the society beyond utility. Bataille states that: “Since [war] is essentially constituted by
armed force, it can give to those who submit to its force of attraction nothing that satisfies the
great human hungers, because it subordinates everything to a particular utility . . . it must force
its half-seduced lovers to enter the inhuman and totally alienated world of barracks, military
prisons, and military administrations.” In fact, it may well be the non-release of ecstatic urges
that explains a state’s return, year after year and decade after decade, to that old institution. It
may be that the deepest paradox of modern war is that, in its usefulness to the cephalus and in its
service to the fascist drives of the state, war proves utterly useless in dispensing its most
fundamental function; it ceases to discharge the most vicious and cruel needs of the people,
their deepest primitive motivations, whose collective release makes possible the formation of a heartfelt community. Bataille counts
this failure as the most tragic of the multiple tragedies of modern war. The
sacred values of community—life, freedom,
festival, and the joy of communal fraternity—are rendered meaningful only in juxta- position to their
opposites. Bataille states: “The emotional element that gives an obsessive value to communal life is death.” But, ultimately,
insists Bataille, the sacrifice will be celebrated beyond the reasonable purposes of the cephalus. If
Bataille is correct, then we can be certain that, for those states whose wars are utterly
utilitarian, self-annihilation is imminent.
 More new cards
Perm do both – we can decenter the subject
Dragon’96 |The Work of Alterity: Bataille and Lacan. Jean Dragon|KZaidi

The question of the subject may be the most evident point of articulation in Bataille- Lacan's
topology. It also positions Bataille's lpse (Lacan'sAphanisis) ahead of a pleasure that destabilizes
the subject and shows the connection of pleasure, from a Lacanian point of view, to an ethics of
truth but also to the heterogeneity of the real, conceived as a gap, as an impossible. Excentered
subject searching like Lacan's occurs through decentered speech ahead of consciousness: the
subject constitutes himself by continuous "with- drawal," just as in Bataille, where the word is
the sovereign way to decentering and even "de-centering," that is to say, the splitting of the
subject in an incessantly renewed experience. This leads us to the question of the impossible
subject, or rather the "unsymbolizable" self, since it is associated with a compulsive definition of
a subject on its way to dissolution: "Bataille and Lacan conceived the 'true' self, paradoxically, as
an unsymbolizable and hence inaccessible other.... The self, in their view, is impossible to
locate," suggests Carolyn Dean [5-6]. However, we should not believe in a perfect transparency
between their conceptions of the subject. For Bataille, contrary to Lacan, the subject is already
split, a consequence both of inverted (negative) Oedipus and the priority of the imaginary. In
Bataille, this results not only in the ineffectiveness of symbolization but in the possibility that it
can occur, in and by an impossible that does not have the same characteristics in Lacan. Lacan
constructs a self that become phallic and upright through a process of splitting, whereas Bataille
constructs a self that is always already split (in his imaginary, castrated). In Lacan, the self is at
once symbolized and lost; in Bataille the self "lives itself as a loss," meaning that it is caught up
in paradoxical mobility that can never be frozen, petrified by a gaze in the mirror. [Dean 246]
The self becomes phallic in Lacan in a recognition process marked by the separation of the
specular image, whereas Bataille insists instead on an "already-split" subject not looking to
reinstate the missing image but to maintain this originary default at the foundation of its
identity. Bataille rejects the "all-powerful" symbolic and a rigid separation between the
imaginary and the symbolic. In Lacan, the subject's alienation justifies the recourse to the
symbolic; in Bataille, this alienation conditions a subversive desire for the Law. Although
different implications arise concerning the question of the subject, we find common
preoccupations, such as that of producing a subject defined by imperatives of desire rather than
reason, an irrational subject rather than a rational one, as Dean argues here: for "both Bataille
and Lacan, the self is indisputably and fundamentally constituted in and through desire rather
than reason and morality" [247]. Moreover, both authors offer a definition that evokes alterity:
"Both Bataille and Lacan thus formulated a self that the law constitutes as an irretrievable other
[247]." This similarity could be a consequence of Kojeve's seminar but most likely Lacan was
influenced by Bataille's objection to Kojeve's solved negativity at the end of History. Finally,
Lacan's tribute to Bataille would seem even greater if we were to consider that Lacan's work
began with women; I suggest that in this matter Lacan's biggest influence was probably Bataille.
This seems more than likely if we remember that Lacan, at the time, tried to listen to an
"idiologue" (psychosis) in the absence of an interlocutor or of an "objectivating" image of the
body, while, at the same time, Bataille undertook an exploration of virtual dementia (through
his fictional characters). This enterprise already attests, in the narrative dimension, to a
reflection of Bataille upon psychopathology, to an experience on the couch (with Dr. Borel), and
finally to a space of interlocution where Bataille defines the outlines of a body still dislocated in
Lacan. Bataille, through the dissemination of such a scared body, will find another way to meet
himself at an "other" impossible level. How can we not be tempted to believe that Lacan tuned
into Bataille's words and those vague, disquieting, cruelly cryptic "steaming bodies" in Bataille's
stories? Yet, if we are to better understand a filiation about which there is so much more to say,
we must first try to convert literature into theory; thus elaborating upon Bataille's conception of
Oedipus.

The 1AC’s fixation on death and destruction only reinvests within the
exorbitant heliocentric model of the sun which depicts the normative way to
live and die – this ensures that we live and die within the very confines of the
cosmic systems of normative thought which establishes an energetic model of
life fixated on the solar economy
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

According to the energetic models of psychology (Freud, Reich, Ferenczi, et al.) the
organic system – by virtue of its conservative and
economical nature – seeks to fixate upon the first exorbitant source of energy that it directly
encounters. This source of energy must surpass the lifespan of the organic system and issue forth
a problematic amount of energy that exceeds the capacity of the organic system. Consumption of this exorbitant

energy, therefore, becomes a problem for the organism. For the organism, consequently, modes or courses of life

are in fact solutions found and developed by the organism to confront the problem of consumption. In other
words, ideas of how to live are reduced to solutions to afford the exorbitant energy. The more diverse the
solutions of the organism become, the easier the organism can maneuver between different courses of life and the firmer the organism is fettered to its
exorbitant source of energy. This growing dependency on the exorbitant source of energy through the ever-increasing
shackles of life singularizes the exorbitant source of energy as the only model exorbitant energy

instigates and imposes plurality of dissipation for the organism i.e. the only model of death and the only way out.
Accordingly, the in modes of life but only in accordance with the conservative and economical nature of the

organism. The plurality of life is enforced at the expense of monism in death. And it is the monism
in death – as a mode of injection upon the outside (or what is exterior to the organism) – that rigidly restricts the image of
exteriority associated with the cosmic abyss and in doing so forestalls a radi- cal change in life and its ventures.

The organism tends to die, or more accu- rately, tends to open to the exterior horizon by means of the same energetic
models and channels from which it conservatively secures its vital economy. To put it simply, the organism
tends to use the same energetic model for its death – or openness to that which is exterior to it – as the model
that it has previously used for conserving energy and living. This recurring energetic model is
fundamentally established by the source of the exorbitant energy and thereby, implements both
the traumatizing effects of excessive energy and the inherent limitations of the source of energy
which itself is another interiorized horizon envel- oped against its abyssal cosmic backdrop. There- fore, although life can
manifest itself plurally as opportunities for diversification and complexi- cation brought about by different economical ways for conservation of the
exorbitant energy, death
or binding exteriority is only possible in one and only one way . This way is both
qualitatively and quantitatively restricted in that it strictly corresponds to the fundamental
limitations of the exterior source of energy and how these limitations are increased in the
conservative economy of the organism. Any image of exteriority that the exorbitant source of energy promises or
creates for the organism will remain within the confines and limits of that source of energy itself.

For us, this exorbitant source of energy is the Sun and its solar economy. The solar excess has
developed a conservative image of thought in which one can only dissipate or die according to
the model of energetic dissipation that the Sun has engrained within the terrestrial organisms.
One can afford numerous modes of conservation or live in different ways but must die solely in
the way that has been dictated by the energetic model of dissipation inherent to the Sun. It is in
this sense that Georges Bataille’s model of general or non-restricted solar economy is itself a form of

restricted economy whose restriction does not end its expression in its relatively diverse modes
of living but in the rejection of those modes of death or binding exteriority which cannot be
indexed by the economical correlation between the solar excess and the conservative structures
of the terrestrial biosphere. For the terrestrial biosphere, the dominant model of dying, or more precisely,
‘openness to the outside’ is limited to ‘being open to the Sun’ , that is to say, finding a generally
affordable consumptive solution to the problem of solar expenditure . To put it differently, openness to
the Sun does not conjure a hyperbolic Icarian humanism as some might object but rather a
restricted Inhumanism for which exteriority is only perpetuated by the solar economy and
injection upon death and exteriority is limited to dying by the Sun and through the dissipative
model of energy that it dictates. For this reason, solar economy is a straitened model of openness or
injection upon death and exteriority insofar as it entails the possibility of pluralism in life only at
the cost of a strict monism in death. A vector of thought configured by solar economy knows
nothing of the freedom of alternatives in regard to death as a vector of exteriorization or
loosening into the cosmic abyss. Hence, the Descartesian dilemma, ‘What course in life shall I follow?’ should be bastardized as
‘Which way out shall I take?’ It is the latter question that radically breaks away from life-oriented models of emancipation whose

putative opportunities in life and dismissal of death are none other but manifests of heliocentric slavery . The ecological

emancipation in the direction of the great outdoors , a ‘new Earth’ (Deleuze and Guattari) or the earthbound
abyss require not alternative ways of life – with which capitalism is grossly overwhelmed – but
alternative ways of binding the exteriority of the cosmic abyss or injection upon death (of both
mind and matter). Whether identified as modes of radical openness (paths for loosening into the abyss) or injection

upon non-dialectical negativity (dying in ways other than those afforded by the organism),
alternative ways of binding exteriority mobilize the terrestrial sphere according to climates of the cosmic abyss. Yet, as argued earlier, in terms of the
cosmic abyss, climates are pure contingencies and therefore, draw the limitropically convoluted trajectories along which various horizons of inte-
riorities are undone and loosened into the yawn- ing chasm. If solar economy and its associated capitalism are inexibly monistic in death, it is because
Sun itself is a contingency whose interior- ized conception is in the process of loosening into the
abyss – a contingency that tends to manifest as a necessity so as to inhibit the irruption of other contingencies qua climates. For the
irruption of contingencies through another contingency – as in the case of a dying Sun – is a chemical
journey in which the solar horizon breaks into innumer- able other contingencies, each
carrying thousands of turns and twists, giving the depth of the abyss a nested twist that is
asymptotic with it radical exteriority. Life on Earth, in this sense, is a con- tingency begotten by the decaying Sun whose body,
already a corpse, has been overridden by cosmic climates qua irruptive contingencies.

Heliocentric Cap
Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi
Like all modes of slavery, heliocentrism
has its own market strategy ; it is called base-capitalism. For
schizophrenic capitalism, whilst everything should be accelerated towards a techno-economic meltdown
along paths of expenditure entrenched in solar economy, modes of life as ever more convoluting circuitous paths
towards death must not only be embraced but also emphatically affirmed. The seemingly paradoxical
proclivity of capital- ism – that is to say, its concomitant dynamism towards thanatropic meltdown and its advocation of lifestyles –
amounts to the very simple fact that for the Sun the phenomenon of life on the planet is but a modal
range of energy dissipation prescribed by the solar economy and afforded by organic systems.
This does not merely suggest that death – especially for planetary entities – is inevitable but that such death or vector of
exteriorization is exclusively restricted to modes of energetic dissipation (modes of life) that the Sun imposes
on the planet. Yet these modes of energetic dissipation which exteriorize Earth are themselves part of
the economy of the Sun which also mark its economic restrictions and limits of affordability against its
abyssal and exterior cosmic backdrop. Capitalism, in this sense, conceals its restricted economy in regard to the
cosmic exteriority (or death) by overproducing modes or styles of life which are in fact different rates of
energetic dissipation or circuitous paths of expenditure. To put it differently, capitalism which terrestrially envelops the
restricted economy of the Sun in re- gard to death and exteriority masquerades as the so-called general and free
economy in regard to life and the problem of consumption.

The interiority of life on Earth rests on the thermo-nuclear interiority of the Sun which itself is contingent
upon its exterior cosmic backdrop. Solar capitalism is only a market for representing the Sun as
both an inevitable and unfathomably rich exteriority for the planet and terrestrial life,
marketing the energetic model of the Sun as the only way to the great outdoors of the abyss. Yet
it is precisely the Sun that circumscribes the image of such outdoors and narrows the speculative
opportunities ensued by thought’s binding of radical exteriority. In line with the vitalistically pluralist and
thanatropically monist regime of solar economy, Earth can be reinvented and recomposed only as a new planet or
slave of the Sun whose life and death are emphatically determined by its star or exorbitant source of
energy. On such a planet, the ventures of thought and art are burdened by a nar- row scope in regard to
cosmic exteriority imposed by the Sun as well as the axiomatic submission of terrestrial life to the
empire of the Sun.

Just as the pluralist regime of life inherent to solar economy is parasitically hydrophilic, the
indulgence of capitalism in
lifestyles and vitalistic detours also has an intimate affinity with terrestrial juices. The solar model of
consumption can duplicate itself as the dominant energetic model wherever life emerges , that is
to say, wherever water exists. Water can implement the energetic peculiarities of the solar climate in quite a vitalis- tic fashion and
thus, re-enact the Sun’s model of energy expenditure within manifestations of life. Capitalism, in a similar manner, sniffsout
planetary waters so as to employ its models of accumulation and consumption through their
chemical potencies. This is not only to use the hydraulic efficiency of terrestrial waters in order to propagate its markets and
carry out its trades, but more im- portantly to overlap and associate its indulgences with the very definitions and foundations of life.
Since terrestrial waters (or liquid forms in gen- eral) are closely associated with the formula of life, by investing
in them and operating through them capitalism can also give a biopolitical sense of inevitability (in
terms of growth and vitality) to its rules and activities. In dissolving into ter- restrial waters, capitalism
like solar energy can create climates or contingencies of its own on the planet, triggering the
rise of new territories, lines of migrations and reformations. Yet water is an open receiver of chemistry as
the applied dynam- ics of contingencies. As previously mentioned, if terrestrial waters are attractors of
contingencies or chemistry, then they do not merely implement solar climates but also energetic
models of dynamism associated with other contingencies or cosmic climates. Accordingly, terrestrial waters
develop into sites for the irruption of contingencies into the already established and interiorized contingency
which in the case of the planet Earth is solar economy of the Sun and its restricted climates. Therefore, terrestrial waters are
agents of complicity whereby cosmic climates irrupt into the interiority of terrestrial life itself. It is this
irruption of cosmic climates that draws a line of exteriorization or loosening into the abyss forboth the terrestrial
life and the climates generated by the Sun. However, the complicity between the water of life and cosmic
climates or what we call chemistry is endowed with a chemical slant; it gives the death of life and water weirdly
productive aspects. The irruption of cosmic climates into the terrestrial biosphere generates a dynamics of death
or line of exteriorization whose expression and dynamism are chemical rather than spectral, ghostly or hauntological. The dying
water is blackened into heaps of slime and the biosphere feeding on such water respectively
dies or chemically loosens into the cosmic exteriority. As these deaths have chemical slants, they spawn
more contingencies or lines of chemical dynamisms which render the universe climatically weird. This
climatic relationship between a dying Sun and a dying Earth as chemically projected in water has been intriguingly portrayed by the
artist Pamela Rosenkranz. What Rosenkranz artistically pro- poses is that water – despite its apparent loyalty to terrestrial life –
chemically unbinds the potencies of cosmic contingencies whose inevitable irrup- tion into our super cially solar world necessitates a
chasmic terrestrial ecology.

Perm Do Both vs Cap

Negarestani’10 |Reza Negarestani Iranian philosopher, artist, and writer; contributes to
Collapse and CTheory regularly. Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, 2010|KZaidi

Being truly terrestrial is not the same as be- ing superficial, that is to say, it is not the same as considering
Earth as a planetary surface-bio- sphere (slave of the Sun) or exalting the planet to the position of the Sun (solar
hegemony). Being genuinely terrestrial demands presupposing the death and pure contingency of
the Earth in each and every equation, thought, feat of creativity and political intervention. Earthly thought
embraces perishability (i.e. cosmic contingency) as its immanent core. If the embracing of Earth’s perishability should be
posited as the hallmark of earthly thought, it is because such perishability – as argued earlier – grasps the openness
of Earth towards the cosmic exteriority not in terms of concomitantly vitalistic / necrocratic correlations
(as the Earth’s relationship with the Sun) but alternative ways of dying and loosening into the cosmic
abyss. By the word ‘alternative’, we mean those ways of exteriorization and loosening which are not dictated by the
economical correlation between Earth and Sun. These alternative ways of binding cosmic
exteriority or loosening into the abyss entail, firstly, a terrestrial ecology for which both Earth and Sun are
bound or grasped as merely contingent and hence, necessarily perishable entities. The only true terrestrial ecology,
for this reason, is the one founded on the unilateral nature of cosmic contingency against which there is no chance of resistance –
there are only opportunities for drawing schemes of complicity. To this extent, terrestrial
thought and creativity
must essentially be associated with ecology, but an ecology which is based on the unilateral
powers of cosmic contingencies such as climate changes, singularity drives, chemical eruptions
and material disintegration. Any other mode of thought basking in the visual effects of Earth as a blue marble
or the Sun as the exorbitant flame is but submission to heliocentric slavery.

Tag
Arnould-Bloomfield’16 |Elisabeth Arnould-Bloomfield is an Associate Professor of French
and Comparative Literatures at the University of Colorado, Boulder, “Sacrifice,” Georges
Bataille: Key Concepts, edited by Mark Hewson and Marcus Coelen, Routledge, 2016|KZaidi
This last point is essential for anyone wishing to understand the economy of sacrifice in Bataille’s work. When Bataille reinterprets
Hubert and Mauss’s sacrificial paradigm and emphasizes the moment of destruction at the expense of any
other phases of the ritual, he is saying, indeed, that the destruction of the consecrated offering is
paramount and that “this offering cannot be restored to the real order” (AS 1, 58). But he is also saying that
this principle of absolute heterogeneity “liberates violence while marking off the domain in
which violence reigns absolutely” (AS 1, 58). What Bataille means by this last statement is that there can be
violent communication with the sacred world opened by sacrifice but no rational appropriation
of it. “The world of intimacy is as antithetical to the real world as immoderation is to moderation, madness to
reason, drunkenness to lucidity” (AS 1, 58). Because it is the very negation of the objective world, it does not share its separateness
and definition. It is therefore impossible to substantialize as well as to conceptualize. No more
durable than the blinding flash, which restores life’s fullness at the very instant of sacrificial death, it
communicates nothing but “the invisible brilliance of life which is not a thing” (TR, 47). Far from
revealing death or opening for us the mysteries of the sacred, it blinds us to the very intimacy it illuminates. And
Bataille’s sacrificial experience is ultimately a question without an answer. As a sacrifice “without
reserve or gain,” it is also a sacrifice “for nothing” (French 2007, 75). Bataille’s sacrifice, it should now be clear,
owes little to the traditional sociological phenomenon we call sacrifice. It is a “sacrifice in the second degree,”
whose redoubled destruction is aimed not only at the victim but also at sacrifice itself. Because
it refuses to give its ritual a result and identifies its only moment of truth with the rapture of
death, it questions its own operativity. Indeed, the suggestion that sacrificial death reveals nothing leaves sacrificial negativity
“unemployed.” It destroys the process by which habitual sacrifice instrumentalizes the victim’s destruction to
gain mastery over death, and it frees the rapturous moment of death from any appropriation by the participants. Such
“total immolation,” which Bataille has also described as a “sacrifice where everything is a victim” has little to do with the traditional
transitive sacrifice (IE, 130). As an “access without access to a moment of disappropriation” it is scarcely more than a
simulacral gesture towards an impossible experience of finitude (Nancy, 30). And sacrifice is ultimately, for
Bataille “a notion violently separated from itself” (Blanchot 1983, 30).

Solar Economy Thesis—critique of technology—being impact and sustainability

fails—what is necessary is a philosophy and an ethic of energy.
Jacobs et al 14. |Josette Jacobs, Assistant professor at Wageningen University, Robert-Jan
Geerts, Bart Gremmen, Guido Ruivenkamp; collectively they are part of a Philosophy Group at
Wageningen University. “Towards a Philosophy of Energy,” Scientiae Studia, 2014|KZaidi

In his groundbreaking book Technics and civilization, Lewis Mumford (2010 [1934]) places
energy usage squarely in the middle of his analysis of society. From his perspective, there are
four steps in the functioning of energy in society: conversion, production, consumption, and
creation. All energy we know originates from the sun, and solar energy is converted into food
and fuels via photosynthesis. "This seizure of energy is the original source of all our gains: on a
purely energetic interpretation of the process, all that happens after this is a dissipation of
energy" (p. 375). Next to organic conversion, Mumford mentions mechanical conversion: water-
wheels, steam engines, and so forth. These technologies opened up new sources of energy and
allowed for "the gigantic scale [the apparatus of production and transport] attained in the
nineteenth century" (p. 376). Production, then, involves the usage of converted energy to
gather, transport, and shape raw materials into products, which are subsequently consumed by
society. The final step - that of creation - is what everything really revolves around for Mumford.
Not until the economic process reaches the stage of creation - not until it supplies the human
animal with more energy than he needs to maintain his physical existence, and not until still
other energies are transformed into the more durable media of art and science and philosophy,
of books, buildings and symbols - is there anything that can be called, even within a limited span
of time, a gain (p. 376). Simply sustaining society is not enough. The goal of all our efforts must
be to develop into something better, to create a lasting heritage of worthy cultural products
such as art and science. This leads Mumford to a critique of capitalism. According to his position,
the surplus energy that could be used for creation instead gets deployed for re-investment to
increase production, which leads to the overexpansion of production facilities and
correspondingly to efforts put into marketing and promotion in order to be able to sell all these
superfluously produced goods. The reason behind this, as Mumford proposes: "there is no
capitalist theory of non-profit-making enterprises and non-consumable goods" (p. 377). The
few bits of "creation" that do occur, do so accidentally: there is no place for them within the
system. This disquiets Mumford, due to his belief that a society able to harness increasing
amounts of energy should also be able to devote an increasing share of this to the things that
actually matter.3 One does not have to share Mumford's position on capitalism to appreciate his
more general insight as to how the availability of more energy does not automatically lead to
either a better society or better lives lived within this society. Mumford drives this point home
as follows: The real significance of the machine, socially speaking, does not consist either in the
multiplication of goods or the multiplication of wants, real or illusory. Its significance lies in the
gains of energy through increased conversion, through efficient production, through balanced
consumption, and through socialized creation. The test of economic success does not, therefore,
lie in the industrial process alone, and it cannot be measured by the amount of horsepower
converted or by the amount commanded by an individual user: for the important factors here
are not quantities but ratios: ratios of mechanical effort to social and cultural results. A society
in which production and consumption completely cancelled out the gains of conversion - in
which people worked to live and lived to work - would remain socially inefficient, even if the
entire population were constantly employed, and adequately fed, clothed, and sheltered. The
ultimate test of an efficient industry is the ratio between productive means and the achieved
ends (Mumford, 2010 [1934], p. 378-9). In Technics and civilizations, Mumford implicitly
develops a philosophy of energy. He seems to subscribe to an instrumental position. Energy is a
resource we can consume however we please, but we are not currently doing so in the best way
imaginable. This position makes possible, and perhaps even requires, the additional
development of an ethics of energy: if it is essentially a neutral instrument, there are better and
worse ways of dealing with energy. It is clear that, for Mumford, the main target for an ethics of
energy is to steer as much as possible towards creation. The creation stage is still notably absent
in current debates on energy transition. Implicitly it is assumed that whatever energy we can get
hold of will be put to good use. In a recent article, Carl Mitcham and Jessica Smith Rolston
(2013) problematized this assumption. They argue for an energy ethic that does not equate
more energy with better lives, by pointing to historical data that show little growth in quality of
life in the US in the second half of the twentieth century , even though energy consumption
increased significantly. Although Mitcham and Rolston do not go into it, their approach raises
questions regarding "good" energy consumption: is there really a ceiling to it? Is there a
maximum creation-to-conversion ratio? Are there different levels of energy consumption at
which we attain the same quality of life, by organizing society differently? However, before
plunging into such questions, we take a step back and move onto the work of Georges Bataille,
who contests the instrumental conception of energy proposed by Mumford. In The accursed
share, Bataille (1991 [1949]) suggests that our energy practices are not instrumental to
satisfying our needs, but rather it is the other way around; satisfying our needs is a way of
dealing with the excessive emission of energy by the sun. This reversal may strike the reader as
far-fetched, but does contain some insights, as well as a number of striking parallels between
Bataille's and Mumford's position and some statements in renewable energy projects. Life,
argues Bataille, has always been about abundance rather than scarcity. The surplus of
abundant solar energy makes life possible and, over the course of evolution, life has found
ways to consume increasing amounts of this energy. Every organism has, after using energy for
its sustenance, access to a certain surplus, which is used either for growth or reproduction
(which represents growth on the population level), leading to an accumulation of biomass.
However, this process cannot proceed indefinitely; at some point, carrying capacity is reached,
and it becomes impossible for a certain organism to continue accumulating. "[T]his movement
of growth runs up against limits at every stage of life. It is continuously stopped and forced to
wait for a change in the conditions of life before resuming" (Bataille, 1991 [1949], p. 180). Two
examples of such changes in the conditions of life referred to by Bataille are the development of
trees (the tendency of plants to grow skywards to increase their photosynthetic surface) and the
emergence of carnivores. The former is a way of life to increase accumulation potential, the
latter is a means of burning off useless excess. Death is not strictly necessary for life, as infinitely
dividing bacteria prove, but it is a way for life to burn off excess energy that cannot be used in
a productive manner. According to Bataille, the development of technologies by humanity must
be understood in this light. And similarly, once domination of the available space is ensured at
the expense of animals, men have their wars and their thousand forms of useless
consumption. Mankind is at the same time - through industry, which uses energy for the
development of the forces of production - a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and
an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption (Bataille, 1991 [1949], p. 181). Our growing energy
production and consumption simply represent an extension of this natural tendency of life to
look for ever increasing accumulation and niches to fill , and to burn off the excess when
accumulation is not possible. As the reference to war in this quote suggests, this dynamic
comes with a certain danger. The burn-off of excess often happens in violent ways, and, with our
increasing capabilities to accumulate large amounts of energy, the burn-off events display an
increasing intensity. Wars in the twentieth century were far more deadly and devastating than
their predecessors in earlier centuries. This problem only gets exacerbated by the capitalist
ethic, which, as we have already noted, always aims to re-invest any surplus available, rather
than expending it on lavish consumption. This has created a society with relatively few pressure
valves in place for shedding accumulated excesses. As Bataille maintains that it is only a matter
of time before our accumulative practices reach their limits, he believes we can only ever be
heading towards another and even more violent war. Only understanding an economy from the
general perspective of the cosmos - rather than that of particular players in that economy - can
render this problem visible. Rather than understanding energy as a resource to help society
advance, Bataille perceives society as the result of an energy surplus, and a surplus that is
explosive and impossible to fully control. Whereas Mumford believes that we might deploy
energy in better or worse ways to improve our lives, Bataille suggests that the ways in which we
deal with energy might not only be simply unproductive, but downright destructive. If his
analysis holds any merit, this considerably increases the stakes for a philosophy of energy. In
addition to the significance of energy practices at the global level, Bataille details the
implications of his perspective for individuals. The beings that we are are not given once and for
all; they appear designed for an increase of their energy resources. They generally make this
increase, beyond mere subsistence, their goal and their reason for being. But with this
subordination to increase, the being in question loses its autonomy; it subordinates itself to
what it will be in the future, owing to the increase of its resources. In reality, the increase should
be situated in relation to the moment in which it will resolve into a pure expenditure. But this is
precisely the difficult transition. In fact, it goes against consciousness in the sense that the latter
tries to grasp some object of acquisition, something, not the nothing of pure expenditure. It is a
question of arriving at the moment when consciousness will cease to be a consciousness of
something; in other words, of becoming conscious of the decisive meaning of an instance in
which increase (the acquisition of something) will resolve into expenditure; and this will be
precisely self-consciousness, that is, a consciousness that henceforth has nothing at its object.
(Bataille, 1991 [1949], p. 190). Bataille here suggests that while efforts towards increasing our
energy utilization capacities come naturally, concluding that we should therefore embrace this
tendency would be a naturalistic fallacy. Instead, Bataille argues that we should attempt to
embrace ourselves as we currently are, with the energy-using capabilities we currently have,
and focus on the ways and means of burning off the excesses now available to us. It is precisely
in useless expenditure that we find our true selves. One might conclude that Bataille's sketch of
the history of energy consumption bears little resemblance with the present situation. After all,
we are not currently trying to expand the energy base of society but rather trying to rid
ourselves of the fossil fuel-based portion of it, and thereby shrinking it. Our problem is not that
we do not know how to expend uselessly, but that we need to find less polluting resources to do
so. When Bataille wrote The accursed share, the finitude of fossil fuels did not seem to be on his
radar, let alone the effects of their combustion on the Earth's climate. Arguably, moving away
from fossil fuels serves to extend the time before society reaches any limitations as to its
capacity for accumulation. In Bataille's peak, Alan Stoekl (2007) suggests that we should not
disregard Bataille so quickly. Even though Bataille did not foresee the current energy crisis, his
perspective remains valuable to elucidate why neither proceeding on the path of ruthless fossil
fuel exploitation nor the green perspective of sober frugality provide proper answers to the
current situation. The former leads to a problematic build-up of explosive potential that will
sooner or later become destructive; the latter does not do justice to our nature (aiming for
growth) or our Bataille stipulated potential (aiming for self-consciousness through useless
expenditure). Meanwhile, spokespersons for green technology appeal neither to paths of
ruthless fossil fuel exploitation nor to sober frugality. Instead, they tend to sketch Bataillean
visions of abundance: "the Earth receives more energy from the Sun each hour than humans use
in a year", implying that we simply need to better harness this energy and thereby avoid any
such thing as an energy crisis. Bataille's paragraph on the perspective of the individual cited
above appears to hold direct relevance to such bold statements. Why exactly would our lives
become better should we command an even greater amount of energy? Both Mumford and
Bataille develop critiques against the energy practices of their day agreeing on how energy is not
guided towards its proper purpose while disagreeing sharply on just what would constitute that
proper usage. Mumford would like to see long-lasting cultural projects (art, architecture)
developed and Bataille would like us to simply embrace the burn-off of surplus energy that
makes our existence possible. Any attempt at applying the available energy to alternative ends
would fail to appreciate the dynamic in which we currently find ourselves. One other twentieth-
century thinker needs addressing in this context. In a quote above, Bataille appeals to our
existence as individuals with access to a certain amount of energy. This represents a rather
specific perspective on just what forms the human existence, with a similar perspective playing a
key role in the writing of Martin Heidegger, for whom human existence changed radically with
the advent of modern technology. Heidegger argues that, in modern times, the only way of
understanding the world and ourselves is as a "standing-reserve" that is ready to be put to use.
Stored energy proves the purest form of this standing-reserve. Heidegger reaches this insight in
his essay "The question concerning technology" (1977 [1954]), in which he searches for the
essence of technology. This essence can be found, he holds, in the way that that which is comes
into being. In ancient Greece, the process of coming into being was called poiesis, a bringing-
forth. This concept served both for that which emerged of its own accord (like a flower) and
whatever had a specific creator (a poem, or a tool). Bringing-forth thus represented a particular
form of "unconcealing" that which was previously concealed, one in which Aristotle's four
causes have play. The general process of shifting from concealed to unconcealed was called
revealing, from aletheia, veritas in Latin, and now usually translated as truth. The word
technology comes from techne, which is a form of bringing-forth and therefore a way of
revealing, and is correspondingly located in the realm of truth. Technology thus reaches beyond
a simple means we use to become a fundamental way through which the world emerges before
us. One should therefore be able to recognize the four causes in the things that have been
brought-forth by technology. However, Heidegger holds that it is impossible to distinguish these
causes in the case of modern technology, because technology uses a different form of revealing
than bringing-forth. What is modern technology? It too is a revealing. Only when we allow our
attention to rest on this fundamental characteristic does that which is new in modern
technology show itself to us (...). The revealing that rules in modern technology is a challenging
[Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can
be extracted and stored as such (Heidegger, 1977 [1954], p. 14). The tendency of modern
technology to store and extract energy on demand features here as a crucial moment in history.
It is the central characteristic of a new way of revealing. Whatever is ordered about in this way
has its own standing. We call it the standing-reserve [Bestand]. The word expresses here
something more, and something more essential, than mere "stock". The name "standing-
reserve" assumes the rank of an inclusive rubric. It designates nothing less than the way in
which everything presences that is wrought upon by the challenging revealing. Whatever stands
by in the sense of standing-reserve no longer stands over against us as an object (Heidegger,
1977 [1954], p. 17). From this moment onwards, we cannot but understand a forest as a place
that produces wood, a river as hydropower potential, a mountain as a container for ore, and a
natural area "as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation
industry" (p. 16). The very way the world presents itself to us has been changed by this new way
of revealing, which Heidegger proceeds to call enframing [Ge-stell]. But how does humanity
relate to this enframing? Because modern technology remains a human invention, one might
assume we control it or can at least remain outside of its scope, but this does not prove the
case. Although we might have put it in place, we have no control over the way of revealing.
Enframing is the gathering together that belongs to that setting-upon which sets upon man and
puts him in position to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve. As the one
who is challenged forth in this way, man stands within the essential realm of enframing
(Heidegger, 1977 [1954], p. 24). This makes enframing not simply a new form of revealing, but
the only form of it available to us while simultaneously threatening to strip us of our humanity
as we learn to see one another and ourselves as standing-reserves rather than subjects as well
(terms like human resource management spring to mind). Modern technology therefore poses
the ultimate danger. The way out and forward into a new form of revealing is unclear, but
Heidegger suggests the answer might be found in poetry, which was one and the same as
technology to the Greeks: techne. There is no coincidence behind Heidegger introducing his
gloomy vision of modern technology through recourse to energy technologies. As mentioned
above, energy is an exceptionally powerful concept for connecting and equating a variety of
forms of potential with each other with this potential serving numerous ends. Energy is indeed
the perfect standing-reserve. From this perspective, one must conclude that our efforts to move
from one energy system to another are hardly significant: these simply represent different ways
in which enframing reveals the world to us. Energy, to Heidegger, is no mere means, but also
not akin to Bataille's cause of life. Instead, it proves the form through which modern times
reveal the world.
A2 Bataille
 at bataille: theory of expenditure bad
Bataille’s theory of expenditure doesn’t apply to postmodern consumer
capitalism, which is based on massive amounts of consumption and waste –
exactly what Bataille advocates.
Yang 2000 (Mayfair Mei-hui, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa
Barbara, has held fellowships at the Center for Chinese Studies of the University of Michigan,
the Chicago Humanities Institute, University of Chicago, and the Institute for Advanced Study,
Princeton, “Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual
Expenditure,” Current Anthropology, University of Chicago Journals)

Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s
views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer
capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the
thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of
expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply
creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire
(Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by
consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the
principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer
capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt
similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are
basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would
have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive
accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home décor
merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive
expenditure.
Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the
furthering of military‐industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer
culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self‐depleting archaic sacrificial
economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving
the whole community or social order.

Valorizing expenditure recreates instrumental reason Bataille hopes to escape

Wolin, PhD, 04

The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with

(Richard, Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in

Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )

At times, Bataille's
celebration of transgression for its own sake seems woefully simplistic. In lieu of a conceptual
framework that would permit one to distinguish between constructive and retrograde instances of transgression,
we are left with an ethos of shock, rupture, and disruption simpliciter. Bataille seeks to ground postmodern ethics
in the attitudes of a cultural avant-garde (Acephale and the College of Sociology) oriented toward precapitalist life forms that
modernity has scorned. Yet the very idea of achieving a conceptual reckoning with Bataille-generated ideals such
as "transgression," "heterogeneity," and "expenditure" would seem inimical to their very spirit . In his idiom, to rely on
procedures of principled legitimation or a rational accountability would be to succumb to the logic and rhetoric of
"productive consumption"—the values of a society predicated on instrumental reason and commodity exchange .
(165)
Expenditure is not transgressive- limitless consumption is useless theory
Paul Mann, 1999, “The Exquisite Corpse of Georges Bataille” in Masocriticism, p. 67-9

the most desperate alibi of all. For “sacrificial

I would like at one and the same time to affirm this model and to dismiss it as

consumption” can never become an explicit critical motive .13 At the moment it presents itself as a proper element of some
critical method, it degenerates into another useful trope, another bit of intellectual currency, another

paper-thin abyss, another proxy transgression ; and the force of transgression moves elsewhere,
beneath a blinder spot in the critical eye .14 Questions of motive or understanding, the fact that one might be
self-critical or at least aware of recuperation, are immaterial : what is at stake here is not self-consciousness but economics, material

relations of appropriation and exclusion, assimilation and positive loss . Whatever transgression occurs in writing on
Bataille does so only through the stupid recuperation and hence evacuation of the whole rhetoric and dream of transgression, only insofar as the false profundity of philosophy

To justify this as the sublime loss of loss is merely to indulge a

or theory evacuates the false profundities it apes.

paradoxical figure. Excess is not a project but a by-product of any discourse ; the interest of
Bataillean discourse lies chiefly in the compulsive and symptomatic way it plays with its feces.
The spectacle of critics making fools of themselves does not reveal the sovereign truth of death :
it is only masocritical humiliation, a pathological attempt to disavow the specter of death . As for the
present essay, it makes no claims to any redeeming sacrifice. Far from presenting you with a truer Bataille, far from speaking in his voice more clearly than his other readers, this
essay pleads guilty to the indictment against every appropriation. Until philosophy and theory squeal like a pig before Bataille’s work, as he claims to have done before Dali’s

canvases, there will be no knowledge of Bataille. In the end, one might have to take and even stricter view : there is no
discourse of transgression, either on or by Bataille . None at all. It would be necessary to write a “Postscript to Transgression”
were it not for the fact that Foucault already wrote it in his “Preface,” were it not for the fact that Bataille himself wrote it the moment before he first picked up his pen. It

makes no difference whether one betrays Bataille, because one lip syncs Bataille’s rhetoric or
drones on in the most tedious exposition . All of these satellite texts are not heliotropic in relation to the solar anus of Bataille’s writing, of the
executioners he hoped (really?) would meet him in the Bois de Boulogne, or depensives in spite of themselves. It would be sentimental to assign them such privileges. They

merely fail to fail. They are symptoms of a discourse in which everyone is happily transgressing everyone else and nothing ever happens, traces of
a certain narcissistic pathos that never achieves the magnificent loss Bataille’s text conveniently
claims to desire, and under whose cover it can continue to account for itself, hoarding its precious debits in a masocriticism that is anything but sovereign and
gloriously indifferent. What is given to us, what is ruinously and profitably exchanged, is a lie . Heterology gives the lie

to meaning and discourse gives the lie to transgression, in a potlatch that reveals both in their most essential and constitutive relation. Nothing is gained by

this communication except profit-taking from lies . We must indict Bataille as the alibi that allows
all of this writing to go on and on, pretending it is nothing it is not, and then turn away from
Bataille as from a sun long since gone nova, in order to witness the slow freezing to death of
every satellite text. The sacrificial consumption of Bataille has played itself out; the rotten
carcass has been consumed: no more alibis . What is at stake is no longer ecstatic sexuality or violent
upheavals or bloody sacrifices under the unblinking eye of the sun ; nor was it ever, from the very
beginning of Bataille’s career. These are merely figures in the melodramatic theater of what is
after all a “soft expenditure” (Hollier 1989, xv), a much more modest death, a death much closer to home. It has never
been more than a question of the death of the theory and of theory itself as death . Of theory-death. A
double fatality.
The aff's absurd extreme expenditure recreates the SQ
Plontisky, 95 (Arkady, Professor of English and Theory and Cultural Studies, Purdue University, “On Bataille: Critical Essays,” State University of New York Press, pg.
111, Tashma)

Indeed, as Bataille's discourse shows with extraordinary power, it is the economic insistence on consumption at the multiple and often interacting levels of
theoretical economies—economic, political, conceptual—that is most problematic . The theoretical problem is a metaphoric loss of

the economy of loss and thus of the general economy . It is not that consumption and the pleasure of consumption are not important or theoretically and
otherwise pleasurable. To reverse the configuration absolutely and to privilege expenditure unconditionally would be just as untenable . As I indicated

earlier, Bataille's heavy insistence on waste and expenditure must be seen as problematic in this respect and is "saved" only by
the enormous labyrinthine complexity of Bataille's inscription of these concepts.

Their sacrifice is insignificant- can't change relationship to death

C. Michael Minkoff, “Existence is Sacrificeable, But It Is Not Sacrifice,” April 25, 2007, http://smartech.gatech.edu/dspace/bitstream/1853/14446/8/Michael
%20Minkoff--LCC%204100--Animal_Sacrifice.pdf

What Nancy admits is that “strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice” and that “the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close…it is closed by
the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself” (Nancy, 35). These confessions are significant because it indicates the fear that Nancy has of appropriating a symbol which

What Bataille wanted from sacrifice was one thing, but Nancy fears that
has a remainder and a vector he cannot predict or control.

sacrifice carries its own valence. It is like the art that accedes to extinction, but suspends above it indefinitely.
The force to accede to extinction is not guaranteed to suspend. The force that Bataille borrows
from sacrifice is not guaranteed to behave in the way atheism dictates . Nancy reasserts that Western sacrifice always
knew it sacrificed to nothing, but this latent knowledge makes the institution of sacrifice absurd, and Nancy is not willing to deny that sacrifice “sustained and gave meaning to
billions of individual and collective existences” (Nancy, 35) What Nancy fears is this ignorance. He knows he does not understand the significance of the old sacrifice. If sacrifice

if one assumes that

was to no one and everyone knew it; why was and is it so universal and why have so many been tempted into believing its significance? But

there is no one to whom one sacrifices, Bataille may not use sacrifice as the centerpiece of his
philosophy because if sacrifice is not to anyone, it is not truly significant. If it is not significant or meaningful, it has
no power. It becomes comedic. And it becomes massacre. That is why Nancy spends much of his time talking

about the sacrifice of the Jews at Auschwitz. Without over-determining the significance, the
sacrifice becomes a genocide or a holocaust. Bataille is trapped between two uncomfortable positions—let the
blood continue to spill to make sacrifice real and significant and concrete, or deny the death the status of
sacrifice, which in Bataille’s mind, would be to deny it realization. Nancy asks if Bataille’s “dialectical
negativity expunges blood or whether, on the contrary, blood must ineluctably continue to
spurt” (Nancy, 27). If Bataille spiritualizes sacrifice, it no longer has the power of real death, the
concreteness of finiteness and the ability to rupture finitude. But if Bataille insists on the real
death, he necessitates the constant spilling of blood in mimetic repetition until history is
completed in the Sage
 at bataille: no link to modern capitalism
Bataille doesn’t apply to modern capitalism, which is already based on
excessive consumption and desire.
Goux et al 90 (Jean-Joseph, the Lawrence Favrot professor of French and chair of French studies
at Rice University, Kathryn Ascheim, PhD and editor of Nature Biotech, Rhonda Garelick, taught
at Yale, University of Colorado at Boulder, and Columbia, critic of literature and politics, PhD in
comparative literature, “General Economics and Postmodern Capitalism,” Yale French Studies
No. 78 On Bataille, pp. 206-224)

Where do we situate Bataille’s claim? What happens to the demand of the sacred in capitalist society? How
do we reconcile the affirmation that capitalism represents an unprecedented break with
all archaic [precapitalist] forms of expenditure and the postulate of the necessary universality of spending as
pure loss? This is the difficulty Bataille wants to maintain as a general anthropological principle the
necessity of unproductive expenditure while simultaneously upholding the historic singularity of capitalism with regard to
this expenditure. Bourgeois society corresponds to a “general atrophy of former sumptuary processes” (41). An anomaly
whereby loss is not absent (which would contradict the general principle) but virtually unreadable: “Today, the great and
free social forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. Nevertheless, we should not conclude from this that the
very principle of expenditure is no longer situated at the end of economic activity” (37). So what happens to ostentatious
expenditure in capitalism? And can we really believe, furthermore, that the even more radical
desacralization effected by communism could become a libertarian affirmation of
sovereignty – the feast of self-consciousness, without divinities and myths? Everything suggests that Bataille was
unable to articulate the mystical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness “without form
and mode,” “pure expenditure” (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed
capitalist society the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in production. Now it is quite clear that
today’s capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its
beginning. The values of thrift, sobriety, and asceticism no longer have the place that
they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois mentality with the characters of pére Grandet or the
usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical
purity in Benjamin Franklin’s principles [“he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced:
entire stacks of sterling pounds”] [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be considered the spirit of the times. Undoubtedly ,
the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated
has quickened. but hasn’t contemporary society undergone a transformation of the ethic
of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical [Weberian] analyses of the spirit
of capitalism [to which Bataille subscribes] inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no
longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expenditure has been replaced by private expenditure, it
is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy and utility that presided at its
beginning. No society has “wasted” as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess?
 at bataille: no alt solvency

Bataille believes human sacrifice is the ultimate form transgression- this proves
his alt is awful.
Pavlovski 2005 (Linda, editor for the database Enotes and of multiple academic
collections, “Bataille, Georges: Introduction,” Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism,
http://www.enotes.com/twentieth-century-criticism/bataille-georges)

Bataille sought “sovereignty” through loss of self, which is achieved through transgression and
excess, notably through laughter, religious ecstasy, sacrifice, eroticism, death, and poetry.
Considering human sacrifice the ultimate transgression, Bataille was fascinated by religious feast
days that included rites of sacrifice. This fascination led Bataille to the work of the
anthropologist Marcel Mauss and to a particular interest in the cultures of the Aztecs and North
American Indians. In their use of human sacrifice and potlatch, respectively, Bataille saw an
excessive, generous spirit which he admired. As a direct result of this, Bataille wrote an
unconventional theory of economics that promoted waste and excess, rather than acquisition.
Believing that transgression existed beyond mere words, Bataille constantly battled with the
problem of writing the inexpressible.

Bataille’s reasoning justifies atrocities and death.

Boldt-Irons, 2000 (Leslie Anne, Associate Professor of French at Brock University, “Military
discipline and revolutionary exaltation: the dismantling of “l’illusion lyrique” in Malraux’s
L’Espoir and Bataille’s Le Bleu du Ciel,” Romantic Review, vol. 91 issue 4, p. 481)

In 1933, Bataille contributed a review of André Malraux’s novel La Condition humaine to the
ultra left-wing journal La Critique sociale.1 In this article, Bataille questions the place that
revolution occupies in the larger and more general context of “human agitation.” He asks, for
example, whether the convulsive movements of revolt, social upheaval, and revolution should
be situated outside of, or above, what is normally experienced as life in its quotidian expressions
of tenderness, enthusiasm or even hate. In the name of what authority, for example, might one
be justified in placing the fascination with pleasure, torture and possible death outside the limits
of acceptable social practice – extreme states often linked to revolutionary upheaval outside the
limits of acceptable social practice? Another way of situating the convulsion of revolutionary
movements – an approach clearly endorsed by Bataille – is to place it squarely within the
framework of any activity marked by agitation. From this perspective, the acts of torture and
murder would arise from an excitability or arousal similar in nature to that intensifying the fury
of the revolutionary impulse. This impulse, writes Bataille, is a means by which the proletariat –
who had for a long time been deprived of the possibility of attributing any value to suffering and
to life – is able to gain access to value itself, a value linked to states of excitation unsubordinated
to any simple political means or end. This value, and the state of agitation to which it is linked,
gives the proletariat both life and hope, for which even death in all its atrocity might be the
payment required.
 at bataille: apolitical / alt fails
cant solve politics
Fortuna, PhD candidate in political philosophy and IR – UC Santa Barbara, ‘9

(John, “Loss and Sacrifice in the Thought of Georges Bataille (And their Political Implications),”
http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p317285_index.html)

While it is certainly the case that Bataille’s

position does require some sort of re- working of our practices (or perhaps more importantly,
the way in which we understand those we currently have) in order to accommodate the experience of sacrificial loss, this does not necessarily

entail a complete upheaval of society and politics. As disruptive as sacrifice may be to the stable and logical forms which tend to
comprise profane existence, it does not seem to be the case that Bataille is recommending that we simply

overturn all things profane. In fact, Bataille specifically argues against such action where, in Guilty, he says,
Life is a result of disequilibrium and instability. Stable forms are needed to make it possible
however….To shrink from fundamental stability isn’t less cowardly than to hesitate about shattering it. Perpetual instability is
more boring than adhering strictly to a rule , and only what’s in existence can be made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to
be sacrificed. The more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or sacrifice that can result (Bataille
1988b, 28-29). Perhaps the most important insight to take from this quote is that sacrifice (here emphasized as that which disrupts
what is) depends upon the logical and stable forms that are marks of the profane world of work and utility.
Because sacrifice might be said to represent a transgression of the norms of the profane world, it follows that these norms must exist in order for such
a transgression to occur in the first place. While I have been emphasizing the importance for Bataille of sacrificial loss (and to the extent that it follows
from it—disruption), in this passage he seems to be affording some sort of recognition to the importance of values like stability, that are associated not
with the sacred but rather the profane.

The alt fails –

Arnould, lecturer – Johns Hopkins U, ‘96

(Elisabeth, The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice,”
Diacritics 26.2)

Sacrifice is unquestionably the most prominent model in Bataille's thinking of finitude. But it is also, if one accepts Nancy's allegations, the most
problematic. While hoping to find in the exemplarity of sacrifice a new paradigm for the thinking of
finitude, Nancy explains in "The Unsacrificeable," Bataille does nothing but resubmit this finitude to the most
traditional determinations of ontotheology. Sacrifice remains, in Bataille's thought, a deficient model for finitude insofar as it continues
to be conceptually dependent on traditional philosophical and Christian interpretations of sacrifice. Thus, Nancy asserts that the

characteristic valorization Bataille grants to the finite and cruel moment of immolation in his rethinking of
sacrifice does nothing but repeat , by simply inverting its valence, the classical interpretation of an occidental

sacrifice that conceives itself as the ideal sublation of this same moment. The philosophical and Christian version of
sacrifice is understood as the spiritual transformation of a sacrificial moment the finite nature of which it denounces even as it appropriates its power.
The Bataillian version, on the contrary, insists upon this finite moment in order to escape the dialectical comedy that transforms sacrifice into an ideal
process. Performed
in the name of spiritual rebirth, the sacrifices of Plato and Christ, for instance,
reappropriate death by transfiguring it as resurrection. Grotesque and replete with horrors, death in Bataille
appears alone on a stage whose cruelty is neither explained nor redeemed through transfiguration. Thus,
Bataille withholds nothing from the scene of sacrifice but lets it emerge in the fullness of its amorphous violence. He valorizes its sanguinary horror in
order to denounce the dialectic idealization of a death nothing should domesticate. He exhibits it "as it is": opaque, silent,
and without meaning. According to Nancy, however, the valorization itself remains caught in the
sacrificial logic of the idealist tradition. For, he argues, only in light of its ontotheological conceptualization can sacrifice become
at once the infinite process of dialectical sublation and the blood-spattered moment this process both negates and sublates, simultaneously [End Page
87] avers and contests. The Bataillian thesis, granting efficacy and truth (reality) to sacrificial cruelty, is irremediably linked to the processes of
dialecticization and spiritualization through which the philosophical and Christian West appropriates the power of sacrifice. It is the cruel counterpart of
its idealization. And if this conception gives to sacrificial death an importance proportionally opposite to that which it receives from the Christian and
philosophical transfiguration--since the finite truth of death plays at present the role of the infinite truth of resurrection--it still does nothing but repeat
its ontotheological scheme. For it also pretends to find, on the cruel stage of sacrifice, a singular and more
"real" truth of death. The stage of the torment is, for Bataille, that place where death appears with the full strength of a nonmeaning that can be
exposed only through the immolation of the sacrificial victim. If this is so, then should we not suppose that this immolation pretending to give us the
"inappropriable" truth of death's rapture appropriates in its turn the excess of the "excessive" meaning of this rapture? Does
it not
transform its excess into an "excessive truth," to be sure a negative one, though no less absolute than the
philosophical and spiritual truths to which it opposes itself ? At the heart of modern theories of sacrifice is thus, as
Nancy puts it, a "transappropriation of sacrifice" by itself, even when, as is the case for Bataille, this theory tries to overcome sacrifice's spiritual
operation through an excessive and volatile negativity. As soon as sacrifice thinks itself as revelation , be it that of a spiritual
beyond or its negative counterpart, it remains a sacrifice in the name of its own transcendence , a loophole to a
finitude powerless to think itself in terms other than those of a revelation: the revelation of a clear or obscure god, symbol of resurrection or of death's
blind horror. If one wants to think finitude according to a model different from that of its sacrificial appropriation, one should think "apart from"
sacrifice. If finitude is, as Bataille has himself wanted to think, an "access without access to a moment of disappropriation," then we must also call it
"unsacrificeable" [Nancy 30].

This is too complicated for them to answer.

Arnould, lecturer – Johns Hopkins U, ‘96

(Elisabeth, The Impossible Sacrifice of Poetry: Bataille and the Nancian Critique of Sacrifice,”
Diacritics 26.2)

But if finitude thus appropriates itself in a self-sacrifice that reveals its truth, if it becomes "its
own subject," how can we, once again, make a difference between the philosophical, Christian
version of sacrifice and the modern Bataillian interpretation? Do they not entertain the same
goal: mastery of the unthinkable excess of finitude? And do they not both pretend to manifest
a truth of the experience of nonknowledge: a truth that is, on the one hand, that of an ideal or
divine resurrection and, on the other, a purely immanent but nonetheless presentable reality of
death? The figure of a self-immolating Rimbaud and the inner experience it embodies are,
intentionally or not, analogous in design and purpose to the ontotheological figures of the
idealist and dialectical tradition. And this particular sacrificial figure is all the more suspect in
that it recasts and replays the much-talked-about "sacrifice of poetry" constitutive of the
Western philosophical tradition. It is scarcely necessary to remind the reader that the
emblematic scene of the birth of philosophy in the West has traditionally been represented both
by the sacrifice of the poet in the public square and the legendary tale of self-sacrifice depicting
young Plato burning his poems. Now, Bataille, it would seem, is merely reproducing these
scenes. His version resituates the immolation of poetry in the context of a nonknowledge, but
this new context does not alter the fundamental identity of the meaning and purpose of these
sacrifices. Plato's sacrifices sought to demonstrate that truth, though hidden, is accessible
through the sacrificial machination of a philosophical dialectic. Similarly, Bataille reasserts that
finitude, though absent, is accessible through the negativity and self-immolation of the
experience. Just as Plato and Socrates informed us that, in order to obtain the idea in its purity,
it must first be abstracted from the verbiage of representational falsification by way of
sacrificing the falsifier, the mimetician, so Bataille informs us that only a sacrifice of poetry will
allow the experience to achieve the inner void of its nonknowledge. Hence, the experience
separates its "inner" truth from a poetic exteriority that could only "simulate," as Bataille
himself often writes, "its absence." And it is as this inner "presence-to-itself of absence"
("présence-à-soi de l'absence") that Bataille seems to be conceptualizing finitude. Finitude is the
"impossible presence" that one must preserve and purify through a renewed sacrifice of
meaning. How can we thus avoid thinking that such an experience, intent upon wresting its
finitude from the bad repetition of a mimesis, not only misjudges the nature of finitude but also
the nature of a poetry whose "mimetic imposture" could actually, as Nancy says, teach us a few
things about the "impossible"--or "inappropriable"--nature of finitude itself.
 Links / Turns
Expenditure as a strategy can't cope with the changing face of capitalism- it
sanitizes neoliberalism
GOUX , PhD, 90
(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the my- stical tension toward
sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a utopia
of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist soci- ety the
consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in pro- duction . Now it is quite clear that today's
capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The val-
ues of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant
bourgeois men- tality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism , which according to
Weber is expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of
sterling pounds") [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from

feudalism are eliminated has quickened. Buthasn't contempo- rary society undergone a transformation of the ethic
of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical ( Weberian) analyses of the spirit of
capitalism (to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred
and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expendi-
ture has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems
to exceed the principle of restricted econ- omy and utility that presided at its beginning. No
society has "wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism . What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These
questions strike directly at the historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's
thought. Is it not clear that his passion for the "notion of expenditure ,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his
economic reflections to come-emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism , in the 1920s and 1930s,

which also saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and

re- stricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an inter- nal conflict that
undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradic- tion with itself ? (209-210)
 at bataille: sacrifice bad
Voting AFF does nothing to solve their impact
Paul Mann 99, Literature prof @ Pomona, 1999, Masocriticism, p. 67-69

I would like at one and the same time to affirm this model and to dismiss it as the most desperate alibi of all. For “ sacrificial
consumption” can never become an explicit critical motive.13 At the moment it presents itself
as a proper element of some critical method, it degenerates into another useful trope, another bit of
intellectual currency , another paper-thin abyss, another proxy transgression ; and the force of
transgression moves elsewhere, beneath a blinder spot in the critical eye.’4 Questions of motive or
understanding, the fact that one might be self-critical or at least aware of recuperation, are immaterial:
what is at stake here is not self-consciousness but economics, material relations of appropriation and exclusion,
assimilation and positive loss. Whatever transgression occurs in writing on Bataille does so only through the
stupid recuperation and hence evacuation of the whole rhetoric and dream of transgression, only insofar
as the false profundity of philosophy or theory evacuates the false profundities it apes. To justify this as the sublime loss of loss
is merely to indulge a paradoxical figure. Excess is not a project but a by-product of any
discourse ; the interest of Bataillean discourse lies chiefly in the compulsive and symptomatic
way it plays with its feces. The spectacle of critics making fools of themselves does not reveal
the sovereign truth of death: it is only masocritical humiliation, a pathological attempt to
disavow the specter of death. As for the present essay, it makes no claims to any redeeming sacrifice. Far from presenting
you with a truer Bataille, far from speaking in his voice more clearly than his other readers, this essay pleads guilty to the indictment
against every appropriation. Until philosophy and theory squeal like a pig before Bataille’s work , as he
claims to have done before Dali’s canvases, there will be no knowledge of Bataille . In the end, one might have to take
an even stricter view: there is no discourse of transgression , either on or by Bataille. None at all. It would be
necessary to write a ‘Postscript to Transgression” were it not for the fact that Foucault already wrote it in his ‘Preface,” were it not
for the fact that Bataille himself wrote it the moment before he first picked up his pen. It
makes no difference whether
one betrays Bataille, because one is hip to heterology or does it by accident, whether one lip syncs Bataille’s rhetoric or
drones on in the most tedious exposition. All of these satellite texts are not heliotropic in relation to the solar anus of
Bataille’s writing, or the executioners he hoped (really?) would meet him in the Bois de Boulogne, or dépensives in spite of
themselves. It would be sentimental to assign them such privileges. They
merely fail to fail. They are symptoms of
a discourse in which everyone is happily transgressing everyone else and nothing ever
happens, traces of a certain narcissistic pathos that never achieves the magnificent loss Bataille ’s
text conveniently claims to desire, and under whose cover it can continue to account for itself,
hoarding its precious debits in a masocriticism that is anything but sovereign and gloriously
indifferent. What is given to us, what is ruinously and profitably exchanged, is a lie. Heterology gives the lie to meaning
and discourse gives the lie to transgression, in a potlatch that reveals both in their most essential and constitutive relation. Nothing
We must indict Bataille as the alibi that allows all
is gained by this communication except profit-taking from lies.
of this writing to go on and on, pretending it is the nothing it is not, and then turn away from
Bataille as from a sun long since gone nova, in order to witness the slow freezing to death of
every satellite text. The sacrificial consumption of Bataille has played itself out; the rotten carcass has
been consumed: no more alibis. What is at stake is no longer ecstatic sexuality or violent upheavals or bloody sacrifices under
the unblinking eye of the sun; nor was it ever, from the very beginning of Bataille’s career. These are merely figures in the
melodramatic theater of what is after all a “soft expenditure” (Hollier 1989, xv), a much more modest death, a death much closer to
home. It has never been more than a question of the death of theory and of theory itself as death. Of theory-
death. A double fatality.