AT Bataille K - Michigan 7 2023 BEJJP

AFF
Specific Aff Answers
2AC---Perm
Perm do both solves---only pairing Bataille’s theory with a state-based discourse prevents fascism.
Patrick Miller 22, 8/1/2022, “What is Fascism Without a State?: Countering Claims of Bataille’s Left Fascism,” A Journal of Philosophy and Social Theory, 23(4), pp. 369-370
In contrast to impotent contemporary revolutionary movements, unpredictable events can remove the hurdles preventing fruitful revolutions. Bataille claims that only the “violence of despair” is sufficient to emphasise the real problem of the state. In this moment, the problem of the state appears with monumental force, in the form of the police, which causes any hope to dwindle. Principles ignore that they do not solve social difficulties, but strength does—as learned in the examples of Russia, Germany, and Italy. Bataille ends by claiming, “It is in this sense that it is necessary to say at the present time in the face of three servile societies—that no human future deserving that name can be expected except from a liberating anxiety of the proletarians".Footnote36 One must seek the anxiety stemming from the proletariat to escape the horrible fate of statist oppression and exploitation. Bataille offers a possible route for democratic institutions to avoid annihilation; these institutions can be resurrected through anguish when in the hands of a proletariat party that appreciates the previous three failures. However, this anxiety must be based on a sovereign force, a hatred of statehood itself. As such, a collective powerful enough to reject fascistic energies could exist only through the rejection of a state.
Consequently, Bataille’s anti-statist philosophy presents a major problem for those who identify him with fascism on the left. If we take seriously the criticisms of Benjamin, Souvarine, and especially Wolin, then a question comes to the fore. What sort of fascism has no state? Is this a type of fascism or something completely other? It would have to be the latter, as the only remaining connections Bataille’s thought has with fascism are an association with affective energies and a desire to embrace the proletariat. However, Bataille would use affectivity and embrace the proletariat in different ways than fascist. Furthermore, considering Bataille’s constant desire for a leaderless community, an acephalic community, how do these prescriptions function alongside fascism’s tendency to be organised as a monocephalic hierarchy? Fascism is typically understood as right-wing authoritarian nationalism. It is absurd to characterise Bataille as potentially fascist or fascist-lite when he rejects both centralised power and nation-states in general. Despite looking at multiple aspects of Bataille’s philosophy and its relationship with fascism, the one common complaint is his preference for affective energies informed by Durkheim’s sociology. As stated above, Durkheim was considered proto-fascistic for this reason, specifically through his discussion of Gemeinschaft.Footnote37 This strain of argument forgets just how prevalent the Kriegsideologie was between the World Wars. Yes, there are similarities between Bataille and figures like Spengler and Jünger. Yet, this valorising of war—which for Bataille is but one means to access affectivity—and ties between death and community exist in several other thinkers not associated with fascism: see Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Sigmund Freud’s “Zeitgemässes über Krieg und Tod", Edmund Husserl’s “Fichtes Menschheitsideal", et cetera.Footnote38 These themes existed across the political spectrum at that time; hence, it is outlandish to associate all thinkers at that time with fascism on this basis alone.
Exceeding the political through repressed affectivity need not result in a community of fierce beasts, especially when a “proper” Bataillean embrace of these affectivities must avoid authoritarian calcification. Thus, the vague similarities between Bataille and fascist thought should not lead one to reject his comments on fascism, the potential for vibrant communities, and subversion of the state. Bataille’s explanation for the development of fascism can inform our current situation: the decline in confidence of democratic systems and heads of state and the lower classes become more acclimated to nationalistic movements. Likewise, if we wish for a community that furthers the value of individuals outside of utilitarian concerns, then there is a time and place to push for subversion of the state structure that will resist sliding into totalitarianism.
Perm do both---Bataille’s absolute rejection of modernity is contrived and unnecessary.
Richard Wolin 4, Professor of History and Comparative Literature at CUNY, 2004, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, pgs 166-167, vivi!
Mauss's Weberian lament concerning the fragmentation of modern life is accompanied by admiration for premodern communities. Mauss's flamboyant descriptions of sacrifice, potlatch, gift-giving, and other nonutilitarian forms of ritual were undoubtedly the main sources for Bataille's theory of expenditure or nonproductive consumption. But Mauss's conclusions are unproblematic in a way that Bataille's are not. Mauss—who was politically allied with the French Socialist Party (SFIO)—merely sought to restore an element of balance in advanced industrial societies whose relation to nonutilitarian modes of social interaction had seriously atrophied. His critique represented as a welcome corrective to their potentially debilitating uniformity. Bataille's stance was in fact quite different. His critique of modernity was intended neither as a palliative nor as a corrective, but, in keeping with the leitmotif of transgression, as a type of (non- Hegelian) supersession.' Bataille appeals for a total break with the modernity. He rejects not only its utilitarian predispositions and excesses but also its very status as a form of life: its cultural, political, legal, ethical, and aesthetic aspects. Thus, his theory inclines toward a totalizing indictment of modernity that shares marked affinities with the critique of civilization proffered by the German conservative revolutionaries. Their shared belief that the shortcomings of the modern age can be remedied neither piecemeal nor from within entails an ethos of total contestation.
2AC---Perm Do Both---UBI
Adopting a UBI is a step towards “embracing the general economy” – viewing UBI via the gift economy is a tool to rethink the model of ecological extraction
Dmitry Vilensky and Oxana Timofeeva ’20, Professor of the Centre for Practical Philosophy “Stasis” at the European University at St. Petersburg, leading researcher at Tyumen State University, 7-12-2020, https://instituteofradicalimagination.org/2020/07/12/the-paradoxes-of-gift-economy-and-how-basic-income-could-salve-change-abolish-art-making-dmitry-vilensky-with-oxana-timofeeva///jeum
Today provoked by pandemic situation we hear more and more often different proposals for establishing Universal Basic Income (UBI). The UBI is often presented as the only measure which could save human life in front of growing precarity and forthcoming competitions with AI and robots.
As correctly and precisely mentioned by previous panel of IRI:
it is a necessary condition in order to rethink our extractivist ecological model, to correct many race and gender asymmetries and, last but not least, to change the art world’s present neoliberal structure. UBI must be seen as a tool to open up new subjective spaces, alternative to the dominating entrepreneurial individualism and focused instead on commons and care.
At the moment looks like that some affluent societies could come closer to implement this measures not at universal/global level but at their national proximity – regulated by local governments and national agencies.
If we look back, we could discover that something similar to BI was already existed – in the West it was called welfare system, in the socialist countries it was a system of all-embracing social support and exchange of basic work/services for basic wage covering basic housing, basic food and basic health care.
I think that we should analyses what is basic?
Within welfare state it was pretty clear that bureaucracy has an expert power to calculate how many calories one should consumer a day, how often one need to new underwear, how many sq. meters should be sufficient for one person, what kind of medical services should stay accessible and at which quality level. So, it did not differ much from the situation when one speaks about regulation of prison’ population or orphanages.
In general we are demanding the return to some bio-political regulations which right now sounds like a golden age of humanity which was later kind of annihilated by the assault of neo-liberalism.
But we definitely not returning – we reconsider this radical survival strategy in completely new political situation. And we should stay sensitive to this new challenges.
To recognize them more precisely we suggest to reconsider the BI through the concept of the gift. Right now young generation do not remember that the topic of the gift economy was the most fashionable in artistic and intellectual discourse during the nineties. Jean Baudrillard (after Marcel Mauss and Georges Bataille and some other anthropologists) in his work differentiate between the symbolic realm and the realm of signs and signification. According to his ideas “signs can be exchanged like commodities; symbols, on the other hand, operate quite differently: they are exchanged, like gifts, sometimes violently as a form of potlatch”. And he warns us that contemporary society more and more often converting this “symbolic” element into commodified signs. This we could watch very clearly in the tendencies of art world.
Anthropologist Marcel Mauss studied the notion of the gift, particularly the notion of the “hau” – the invisible energy emanating from social relations which keeps valuable objects in circulation – to imagine a socialist state or rather commons, based on non-commodified and generalized reciprocity permeating all social relations.
According to Georges Bataille, there are two types of economies: the general and the restricted one. Restricted economies are human activities subordinated to the production, accumulation, and growth of individuals, households, states, etc. The general, or planetary economy is the one of the non-productive expenditure. In nature, it is presented by the sun which gives light and warmth to all living beings without ever receiving anything back. In case of humanity, the general economy becomes the gift economy. How does the gift economy relate to the contemporary condition of total capitalist alienation of labor, and especially artistic labor? What is the connection between labor as our essential activity, and the gift?
So we would like to suggest to look deeper what the idea of gift means nowadays and see if we could re-approach the BI – as a new form of unconditional gift system. And as we know that any gift is a manifestation of sovereign power it imposes a certain rules of exchange – putting someone into position of debt. Gifts are not innocent and to operate inside gift economy one need to acquire a special knowledge and type of behavior – then we could reclaim a gift – basic income not as a basic compensation to temporary save our life (and as a general recognitions of our humanness) but as a precondition for plenitude of living in commons.
2AC---AT: Potlatch
The alt fails and devolves into the same hierarchies they critique---potlatch only serves to reinforce existing power relations and is inaccessible to the lower classes.
Richard Wolin 4, Professor of History and Comparative Literature at CUNY, 2004, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism, pgs 170-171, vivi!
Bataille understands sacrifice as gratuitous and nonutilitarian. Acts of sacrifice, he claims, have “no ends beyond themselves.” But this contention is misleading. Although Bataille is correct in describing such practices as unrelated to the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing power relations. As practiced among the Aztecs, human sacrifice redounded to the credit of the ruling caste (priests and aristocracy), providing them with a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. For these reasons, it is deceptive to claim, as Bataille repeatedly does, that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.
One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille’s treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well as gift-giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society’s lower classes.56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.
The same is true of gift-giving. Gifts are not freely bestowed, shorn of ulterior ends. Bataille seizes on the aspect of gift-giving that serves his purposes. Gift-giving is not an economic transaction; it is neither an act of barter, nor does it aim at the enhancement of social wealth. Instead, in the first instance with gift-giving, social relations among persons are at issue. As with both sacrifice and potlatch, what is at stake with the gift are relations of power. When given in accordance with social ritual, gifts always come with strings attached: unless the gift can be returned in kind, its social function is to intimidate the recipient. The object of gift-giving as a social ritual is to derogate and shame the recipient by virtue of his or her inability to return a gift of equal value. Gift-giving, too, then must be classified as a ritual practice that is in no sense gratuitous or free. Far from being an end in itself, as Bataille claims, it is fully implicated in the production and reproduction of social power.
Nuke War Outweighs
2AC---Nuclear War Outweighs
Nuclear war turns the alternative---it prevents any possibility of re-tasking expenditure.
Allan Stoekl 7, professor emeritus of French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University, “Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability,” University of Minnesota Press, Chapter 5, p. 117
As we have seen, Bataille touched on the same theme, but his emphasis was a bit different. He foresaw not Orwell’s mournful future in which great wealth, the product of ever more sophisticated technology, was wasted in endless war and repression, but rather a glorious future in which industrial societies would give each other gifts, not least the gift of extravagant consumption. The only problem, as Bataille saw it, was that the other future, not that of drab police state repression but of nuclear annihilation, was also a possibility. Either glorious excess, then, or nothing. A more exhilarating future, but also a more terrifying one, than that foreseen by Orwell.
Generic Indicts
Theory of Expenditure Bad
Bataille is wrong about everything.
Nick Land 92, “the father of accelerationism;” The Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, https://archive.org/details/LandTheThirstForAnnihilationGeorgeBatailleAndVirulentNihilism/page/n11/mode/2up, accessed 7/12/2023
What best befits an author is to preface a work with its apology, ornamenting it with the gilt of necessity. After all, one should not beg attention without excuse. That a writer provide some rudimentary justification for a book seems a modest enough expectation, but such a demand obliterates me, since this is a text which has been reared in perfect superfluity, clutching feebly at zero. There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name ‘Bataille’ shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravings . . . but at least it is not that . . . (and even now I lie) ...
In truth, Bataille seems to me far less an intellectual predicament than a sexual and religious one, transecting the lethargic suicide upon which we are all embarked. To accept his writings is an impossibility, to resist them an irrelevance. One is excited abnormally, appalled, but without refuge. Nausea perhaps? Such melodrama comes rapidly to amuse (although we still vomit, just as we die).
So I try to persuade myself that it would have been relatively straightforward to write a sound book on the work of Georges Bataille; a book that would have discussed the contribution he has made to the philosophical and literary culture of twentieth-century France, expositing his doctrines of ‘general economy’, ‘base materialism’, and ‘atheology’, appraising the excellences of his various prose styles and his poetry, recommending that his works be invested by serious reading, scholarship, and eventually a judicious estimation - by my reckoning, a schlecht book. Such books are always depressing enough, but in the case of Georges Bataille the situation is even more acute, touching on something akin to the pure pornography characterizing our contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. To succeed in writing a book of any kind about Bataille is already something wretched, because it is only in the twisted interstitial spaces of failure that contact, infection, and - at the limit - the anegoic intimacy that he calls ‘communication’ can take place. A recovery of the sense of Bataille’s writing is the surest path to its radical impoverishment. It is as pathetic to seek education from Bataille as it is to seek comfort from Nietzsche. (Bataille is, of course, somewhat more honest than this about his own hypocrisies.)
There is no doubt that to season Bataille in preparation for his comfortable digestion by capital’s cultural machine is a piece of twisted prostitution of the kind he would fully have appreciated. The delicious obscenity! A writer who tried to help us to expend, stored away with all the others in our reserve of informaticofinancial assets, in order to be pimped out into the career flows of the Western academies. There are North Americans who have already learnt to gurgle ‘Bataille contra Marx’ for instance, although the issue is rarely this inanely ideological. More insidious is the ‘he was a librarian you know’ Bataille, increasingly snarledup in the deconstructivist pulp industry of endless commentary on Logocentrism, Western Metaphysics, and other various Seinsvergessenheiten, the Bataille who read a lot, and had something very clever to say. Bataille may be praised or condemned in terms of his erudition, but this scarcely matters when compared with his sanctity as a voyager in sickness . . . but books make good burrows in which to hide, and few places are as redolent of the little escape as a library; the shelves of fiction, history, geography, each book a pretext for derealization, patiently awaiting the moment when it will be coupled to some vague reverie.
Not that this book makes any special pleading for itself, it has scratched about for needles in the most destitute gutters of the Earth, cold-turkey crawling on its knees, and begging the academy to pimp it ever deeper into abuse. Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identiti

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