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

Both classical and critical studies of warfare often comment on the relationship between war and excess. However, even in richly theoretical work, this connection is unanalyzed. This article focuses on the link between excess and war, and seeks to deepen our understanding of why excess reappears so frequently in the study of armed conflict and security studies. Specifically, the article turns to the work of Georges Bataille, an overlooked figure in the critical tradition, who extensively theorized linkages between excess and war. In Bataille’s thought, excess is a key term for explicating the design, mobilization, and transformation of war. Moreover, Bataille sees the exposure to excess as playing a key part in social attachments to violence and armed conflict. The article unpacks how Bataille theorizes excess and applies his insights to the context of precision warfare. Using the case of the accident in the era of precision war, it reveals how Bataille anticipates many of the dynamics that structure late warfare through his understanding of excess. The article concludes by describing how Bataille’s vision of excess would challenge critical war and security studies literatures in relation to the problems of war experience, relationships to death, and scholarship.

Martyr Milestones

This chapter looks at several vignettes through which one sees the history of a crucial swathe of the revolution told through performances of martyrdom. These link to important political events in the revolution, but also to a dense network of textual and spatial anchors far beyond the scope of discrete acts of political contention. The experience of uncloseable liminality in the revolution was disorienting and uncomfortable, but it was also truly liminal in the sense that it enabled new forms of agency, or one might just say that “thinking outside the box” becomes obligatory when the status of the box itself is thrown into doubt. For some, this absence-of-the-box agency was a source of creativity. When a contest for power ensued after the collapse of communitas it did not mean that all forms of history and prior social attachments disappeared, but it did allow revolutionaries much greater license as bricoleurs who could do things in performance spaces that could not have been previously thinkable, and join things together that could not have been joined. But it must not be forgotten that ritual exists for a reason, namely as a means for controlling the dangers of liminality.

Environmental and Social Justice in Sustainable Materialist Movements

Many of the movements we examine define themselves, in part and in name, as movements for social and environmental justice. We explore what activists and organizations actually mean by justice. Unlike other movements for environmental justice, equity is rarely an explicit concern. We find three key areas of justice articulated by movement activists: the crucial nature of political and material participation, the importance of responding to power, and, in particular, the necessity to address basic capabilities and everyday needs. All of these are articulated at both individual and community levels, with the functioning of communities, and social attachments to that community, central to conceptions of justice.

From Paganism to World Transcendence

This chapter draws on one of the new cognitive and evolutionary psychological theories of religion, religious attachment theory, to explain the emergence of the Axial Age religions of the late first millennium bce. These religions—Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Daoism—introduced new kinds of gods into world history—gods that were transcendent and capable of providing release from suffering. Religious attachment theory views religion as providing “substitute attachment figures” under circumstances in which people’s social attachments have been severely disrupted. The basic argument of the chapter is that the new Axial Age gods were responses to heightened levels of anxiety and ontological insecurity that accompanied massive increases in warfare and urbanization in the period between approximately 600 bce and 1 ce. The anthropomorphic pagan gods of the ancient empires had become inadequate in the face of the new religious needs that people began to experience, and thus they came to be replaced.

Queer cosmopolitanism in the disaster zone: ‘My Grindr became the United Nations’

This article reflects on the significance of cosmopolitan socialities and intimacies following disasters, and the opportunities and risks they offer for restorative and reparative action for survivors and their communities. Reporting in particular on the experiences of LGBTQ Filipinos in post-Haiyan Tacloban, I discuss how the presence of foreign aid workers in everyday social spaces provided opportunities for queer identity expression and social attachments. I argue that cosmopolitan socialities, including new connections initiated via mobile dating platforms, were embraced by LGBTQs for their potential to share and repurpose wounds after rupture, especially in a conservative small-town context where LGBTQ identities have been historically repressed. This article attends to the opportunities and risks of queer cosmopolitanism as an uneven experience between middle-class and low-income LGBTQs.

Freedom in Hegel: Contra Pippin

The Kantian concept of self-legislation plays a central role in Robert Pippin’s influential interpretation of Hegel’s theory of freedom. I isolate two competing notions of freedom present within Pippin’s own specification of the concept: freedom as reflective transparency and freedom as self-identification with one’s deeds. The former is compatible with Hegel’s own quasi-Spinozist conception of freedom and allows for historical conceptual change. It is also consistent with Pippin’s truly Hegelian contention that the justification of “modern ethical life” must assume the form of a historical, developmental account, and that a plurality of our moral and social attachments can be integral to our freedom. The ideal of self-identification. however, and Pippin’s development of it in terms of self-legislation and a theory of the normative social conditions of rational agency, involves a dichotomous conception of freedom that is incompatible with Hegel’s. Pippin’s ultimate privileging of self-legislation thus introduces a tension into his account and prevents him from achieving his distinctly Hegelian ambitions.