Definition of Heterology

Abstract

In this text, Bataille clarifies his idea of the ‘excluded part’, i.e. that which is left behind by science. Bataille seeks to create an approach that would challenge the abstracted method of science, which presents the world as idealized and homogeneous. The aim of Bataille’s ‘science of the heterogeneous’ is to shed light on the unproductive expenditure of life, which moves between the sacred and the unclean. In pursuing this, he debunks the common idea that what is profane is already impure and vice versa. This text is notable for the new vocabulary that Bataille introduces in order to define heterology. Terms like heterodoxy, agiology and scatology rehabilitate the ideas of the unclean and the profane by structuring them in a new discourse, in which the excluded part is taken as the foundation for the new science of the impossible. Finally, the text shows how Bataille articulates this new science through providing examples largely from the study of religion and psychoanalysis.

Wars of excess: Georges Bataille, solar economy, and the accident in the age of precision war

“…. the science of the excluded part ’ (Bataille, 2018: 31, emphasis added). While Bataille traditionally uses this term to discuss the relationship between the sacred and the profane, it also includes things out of place, waste, and otherness, which cannot be incorporated into a dominant social order.…”

“…While Bataille traditionally uses this term to discuss the relationship between the sacred and the profane, it also includes things out of place, waste, and otherness, which cannot be incorporated into a dominant social order. Put differently, Bataille (2018: 36) is asserting that the rational organization of warfare according to the logic of accumulation cannot account for the production of unruly, contingent violence. Since modern warfare cannot account for this form of violence, it disavowed the untold deaths in the world wars, the cruel rationalization of suffering, the violent production of the means of war, and the inability of these intensely violent episodes to shift the organizing principles of modern societies.…”

“…Instead, it displaces and disguises expenditure in the form of the destruction of disposable lives or the relegation of forms of life to the realm of the heterological. However, Bataille (2018: 36) also argues that things banished to the realm of the heterological, from waste to taboo erotic practices, incite new forms of desire by provoking ‘hypnotic attraction’. In this way, Bataille contends that modern societies recreate strong attachments to warfare because war continues to function as a limit experience, an encounter with the heterological, opened up by the expenditure of excess.…”

“…Nonetheless, Bataille outlines a unique vision of warfare, one that foregrounds the importance of armed conflict to human sociality. Like so many voices criticizing practices of war, Bataille shares a depressive response to the rise of the industrial armed conflict, but also believes that expenditure and violence play a profound role in human life (Bataille, 1985: 201, 2018: 235–236). Consequently, Bataille’s work must be recommended with some caution, and his writings have been criticized from a variety of angles (Graeber, 2014: 402; Marchak, 1990; Noys, 2000: 4; Surkis, 1996; Vanderwees, 2014).…”

Heterology, Transcendence and the Sacred: On Bataille and Levinas

“…That is to say, the science of the excluded part (or at the very least of the mode of exclusion that creates this part). (Bataille, 2018) The face . .…”