Experiences of the Self between Limit, Transgression, and the Explosion of the Dialectical System: Foucault as reader of Bataille and Blanchot

Research output: Journal contributionsJournal articlesTransferpeer-review

Authors

Bataille and Blanchot figure among the authors who influenced Foucault the most. In this article we show how close Foucault was to these authors and to what extent his proximity to them permitted him to deviate from the prevailing university culture, i.e from those great philosophical machines called Hegelianism and phenomenology. The questions we pose are the following: How important were these experiences for Foucault? How did he receive them? How did he transform their theoretical stakes? In the first part of this article we argue that the encounter with Bataille's work and Blanchot's was for Foucault a kind of experience of the self. In Bataille and Blanchot, experience has the function of wrenching the subject from itself: it is a project of desubjectivation and of destruction of the notion of the foundational subject and system in philosophy. The second part focuses on the contemporary experience of the death of God. According to Foucault, such an experience discloses the limitless reign of the Limit. We show how the work of Bataille, his discovery of the categories of irreversible expenditure, death, sacrifice, excess, limit, negativity pushes the (Hegelian) system beyond its limit. In the third part we take into account the literary experience of Blanchot. According to Foucault, Blanchot's work focuses on the disappearance of the subject: the being of language emerges in the exclusion of the subject. How is it possible to have a language stripped of dialectics?.

Original languageEnglish
JournalPhilosophy & Social Criticism
Volume31
Issue number5-6
Pages (from-to)649-664
Number of pages16
ISSN0191-4537
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 01.09.2005
Externally publishedYes

    Research areas

  • Philosophy
  • Bataille, Blanchot, conversion, death of God, dialectics, experience of the self, finitude, Foucault, Hegelianism, impossible, inner experience, Klossowski, language, limit, limit-experience, negativity, Nietzsche, phenomenology, sexuality, sovereignty, subject, subjectivation/desubjectivation, thought of outside, transgression

DOI

Recently viewed

Researchers

  1. Lucas Lang

Publications

  1. Adaptive Item Selection Under Matroid Constraints
  2. The Inada conditions for material resource inputs reconsidered
  3. 2. Advent
  4. Investigating Factors on R estorative Sleep Quality and its Relationship with Personal Work Performance - An Analysis of Diary Data
  5. Zapping-Fernbedienung
  6. Re-Thinking Tasks in Inclusive Science Education
  7. Bioassay-directed chemical analysis utilizing LC-MS: a tool for identifying estrogenic compounds in water samples?
  8. Sense of Place in Spatial Planning
  9. Fostering pre-service teachers’ knowledge of ‘teaching games for understanding’ via video-based vs. text-based teaching examples
  10. Ecologies of things and texts
  11. Beyond pandemic populism
  12. Eine Revolution des Begehrens?
  13. INSA Indicator System Sustainable Agriculture
  14. Transferability of approaches to sustainable development at universities as a challenge
  15. (Z)-3,7-bis(phenylsulfonyl)octabisvalene - improved synthesis and X-Ray structure analysis.
  16. Audit quality and materiality disclosure quality in integrated reporting
  17. The role of emerging scientists in restoration ecology
  18. The social-cognitive basis of infants’ reference to absent entities
  19. Useful synthetic reagents derived from 1-triisopropylsilylpropyne and 1,3bis-[triisopropylsilyl]propyne, direct, stereoselective synthesis of either Z or E enynes
  20. Das zweite Buch der Könige
  21. Genotoxic effect of ciprofloxacin during photolytic decomposition monitored by the in vitro micronucleus test (MNvit) in HepG2 cells
  22. Beyond the Supply Chain – Sustainability-Oriented Product Innovations through a Transdisciplinary Approach
  23. Effects of interfacial reactions during solidification on mechanical properties in short fiber reinforced AlSi12CuMgNi composites