Excess, Apocalypse and Crisis: Religious and Political Visions in Bataille, Girard and Critical Theory
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As much as they are opposites, ways of thinking as much as topics of interest-obsession – sacrifice, violence, and guilt – tie Georges Bataille and Rene Girard in knots of similarity. Their theories offer bold and surprising ways of understanding the extraordinary fate of a global society in which traditional religious and economic forms have been all but obliterated. Their theories are equally marked by a kind of violence, both stylistically and substantively speaking – that suggests a particular understanding of nature that points respectively toward excess or apocalypse. I argue that, far from rendering their ideas irrelevant or meaningless to contemporary political crises, their understanding of nature reflects an aspect of our (now global) civilization that the critical theory of Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse explicitly addresses. Bataille and Girard, much like Benjamin’s Marinetti, have ‘the virtue of clarity,’ but they remain unable to articulate a robust critical theory addressing the substantive political alternatives of our time. Tracing the relationship between the Bataille-Girard impasse and critical theory helps to deepen and clarify what Adorno called ‘negative dialectics.’
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".