References for Theme: Visions of Excess
- Bataille, Georges
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.106) Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations, just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat. The inability to consider in this latter case decay as an end in itself is the result not precisely of the human viewpoint but of the specifically intellectual viewpoint (to the extent that this viewpoint is in practice subordinate to a process of appropriation). The human viewpoint, independent of official declarations, in other words as it results from, among other things, the analysis of dreams, on the contrary represents appropriation as a means...
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.125) Class Struggle: In trying to maintain sterility in regard to expenditure, in conformity with a reasoning that balances accounts, bourgeois society has only managed to develop a universal meanness. Human life only rediscovers agitation on the scale of irreducible needs through the efforts of those who push the consequences of current rationalist conceptions as far as they will go. What remains of the traditional modes of expenditure has become atrophied, and living sumptuary tumult has been lost in the unprecedented explosion of class struggle. The components of class struggle are seen in the process of expenditure, dating back to the...
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.138) It is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois class that the tendential reduction of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity: a reflection of the homogeneous things the individual owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit. But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible. It maintains a double relation to homogeneous activity: the latter excludes it-not from work but from profit. As agents of production, the workers fall within the framework of the social organization,...
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.217) It is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois class that the tendential reduction of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity: a reflection of the homogeneous things the individual owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit. But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible. It maintains a double relation to homogeneous activity: the latter excludes it-not from work but from profit. As agents of production, the workers fall within the framework of the social organization,...
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.228) Simple and strong life, which has not yet been destroyed by functional servility, is possible only to the extent that it has ceased to subordinate itself to some particular project, such as acting, depicting, or measuring; it depends on the image of destiny , on the seductive and dangerous myth with which it feels itself to be in silent solidarity. A human being is dissociated when he devotes himself to a useful labor, which has no sense by itself; he can only find the plenitude of total life when seduced.
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.8) This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below. Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
(p.99) Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations, just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat. The inability to consider in this latter case decay as an end in itself is the result not precisely of the human viewpoint but of the specifically intellectual viewpoint (to the extent that this viewpoint is in practice subordinate to a process of appropriation). The human viewpoint, independent of official declarations, in other words as it results from, among other things, the analysis of dreams, on the contrary represents appropriation as a means...
- Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
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