Technology and Intimacy in the Philosophy of Georges Bataille

The goal of this article is to examine the nature of technology in view of Georges Bataille’s notion of intimacy. After providing a summary of Bataille’s critique of technology, I offer my response and show that a technological device can reach such a degree of familiarity that it becomes indistinguishable from our psychophysical personality. In this sense, we experience technology not as instrumentation, but in intimacy. The old theory of technology as organ-projection is, therefore, reinterpreted to produce a theory of technology that includes the technological process in its entirety, from the moment of invention and innovation, involving a movement of transcendence and objectification, to the moment of intimacy.

Crossing borders and demolishing boundaries: the connected history of the Israeli transgender community 1953–1986

ABSTRACT

This is the first study to examine the early history of the Israeli transgender community. It covers three decades of transgender activity, from Rina Nathan’s public campaign in the 1950s to permit gender confirmation surgeries in the country to the decision in 1986 to allow surgeries in one public hospital after a lengthy vetting process that de facto held up or disqualified the great majority of applications. The main focus of this study is the generation of “founding mothers” of the transgender community in the 1960s and 1970s and their quest to obtain knowledge, medical technology and paperwork necessary for their gender journeys. We argue that decades before the creation of the internet, Israeli trans pioneers crossed domestic and international boundaries (both social and spatial) and created a network, which later generations of transgender women and men would depend on. This article relies on oral history, contemporaneous media reports and archival documents.     

GEORGES BATAILLE'S MYSTICAL CRUELTY

In this reply to Kent Brintnall's response to my essay on Georges Bataille and the ethics of ecstasy, I explore two primary questions: whether instrumentalization is inherently violent and non‐instrumentalization is inherently non‐violent, and whether there is a way to intervene in the world that avoids both “apathetic disengagement” and domination. I endorse the view that instrumentalization can be good as well as bad, and I suggest that it is possible to strive to intervene in the world without striving to master it. I make reference to Sarah Coakley as a Christian theologian who advances particular practices that aim for non‐dominating intervention in theworld.     

LOSS OF SELF AS ETHICAL LIMIT

This Comment argues that Stephen Bush's critique of Georges Bataille's meditative practice fails to recognize how the disruption of the self, and the challenge to goal‐oriented activity that comprise the heart of that practice, serve as an ethical limit that protects against sadistic and violent engagement with the world. The ethical disposition fostered by Bataille's practice is a dissolution of the self.     

Violence as an Expression of Energy

ABSTRACT

The literary oeuvre of Marquis de Sade (1740–1814) has attracted a great deal of interest over the past 200 years, not only from writers, but also from numerous leading philosophers. Among them is Georges Bataille, who particularly emphasizes the apathetic character of the Sadean libertines, meaning that they feel nothing at all. More specifically, the French philosopher focuses on their apathetic enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the abuse of victims. The goal of this article is to clarify that peculiar pleasure by comparing it, among other things, with stoicism and mysticism. It will be shown that in the Sadean universe not moral transgression is central, but rather the transgression of a metaphysical boundary, i.e. the boundary between the human and non-human.     

Rac(e)ing from Death

In response to recent events that demonstrate the persistence of racial trauma, this essay revisits James Baldwin's claim that racism is a symptom of fundamental human tendencies and constraints. For Baldwin, we cannot understand the legacy of racism if we do not take seriously all too human attempts to evade, and deflect, death and its intimations. To flesh out this component of Baldwin's thought, I engage with the thought of Georges Bataille, an author who thinks generally about the fraught relationship between the preservation of life and our responsiveness to suffering. To test the insights that Baldwin provides on racial matters, this essay engages recent discussions in black studies and queer theory around futurity, racial difference, and the category of the human. I maintain that we must think “the human” and racial difference together, as a tension‐filled relationship, in order to understand the limits and possibilities regarding our efforts to change the order of things.