Georges Bataille’s Post-Anarchism

Document Type

Article

Department

Faculty of Arts and Sciences; Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Abstract

Abstract

Post-anarchist philosophy has widely been regarded as an attempt to challenge the ontological essentialism of the traditional anarchist discourse. The problem for the post-anarchists is that by focusing exclusively on the critique of ontological essentialism and universalism inherent in the ideology of traditional anarchism, post-anarchists have demonstrated that they are unable to envision a response to meta-ethical questions that occur outside of the universalism/relativism pair. As a result most post-anarchists have retreated into an epistemological defence of relativism. In keeping with the ethical trajectory of post-anarchist philosophy, post-anarchists could stand to benefit by responding nihilistically rather than relativistically to the epistemological problem of universalism. They could also take the ontological problematic of non-being to its limit by rejecting the subject as the locus of ethical agency. I shall aim to demonstrate that this latter position is correlative to the meta-ethical position of Georges Bataille.

Publication (Name of Journal)

Taylor & Francis

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1080/13569317.2012.716612

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