Karmen MacKendrick

Takes up a series of literary and physical pleasures that do not appear to be pleasurable, ranging from Christian saintly asceticism to Sadean narrative to contemporary s/m practices.

Counterpleasures

Scott Wilson

William Pawlett

Edia Connole

Gary Shipley

Stuart Kendall

Vanessa Place

Jacquelynn Baas

Martin Bladh

Karolina Urbaniak

Featuring the first English translation of Jean Bruno's "Illumination Techniques of Georges Bataille" (1963), this edited collection brings together an internationally renowned and interdisciplinary group of scholars to commemorate the 85th anniversary of the inaugural issue of the French interwar avant-garde journal founded by Bataille, Acéphale: Religion, Sociologie, Philosophie (June 24 1936). In so doing, it also broaches the "ferociously religious" esoteric activity of the eponymous secret society, as well as the "sacred sociology" of the Acéphale-affiliated Collège de Sociologie. The Acéphale conjuncture--everything written, acted, drawn or imagined around André Masson's excessively iconic figure of the headless man for the "secret society" and journal founded by Georges Bataille in the 1930s, and everything that proliferated among the loose community around Bataille in those years--continues to demand responses, and to insist on them. Connole and Shipley's volume isn't the last word, but proposes a heterogeneous plethora of words, in varying modes, in this direction. It is also a form of response to the event of Nietzsche, which Bataille and friends reiterated, creating an event of their own; in this vein, the volume refuses the division of life and thought and pushes the forms of "discursive hybridity" to excess. The volume is both erudite and visceral, it comprises historical and biographical knowledge, illuminating the Acéphale conjuncture through research and interpretative, intertextual connectivities, and it is raw, it lives with its material; it asks us to both respect and transgress the orthodox modes of "scholarly" endeavour, to see both as complementary and necessary, in alignment with Bataille's proposition that: "We need the system and the excess." --Patrick ffrench is Professor of French at King's College London (UK), and author of After Bataille: Sacrifice, Exposure, Community, and Roland Barthes and Film there is much poetry and laughter amid the poly-swarm-cephalic headlessness of this volume, along with irreverently astute scholarship and canny theological mything, all enjoyed in gloriously bad company [(masson, bataille, laure, klossowski, caillois, weil, blanchot, nietzsche and sade).] [read it and shit.] [read it and scream.] [read it and die.] --Fred Botting is Professor of English Literature and Creative Writing at Kingston University (UK), award-winning author of numerous works on horror fiction, and co-editor, with Scott Wilson, of The Bataille Reader 85 years after the release of the first issue of Acéphale, and the birth of the eponymous secret society, this volume enters inside the sanctuary to invite us on a crazy, labyrinthine journey punctuated by five "stations" where--under the joint sign of Nietzsche and expenditure--thought ceases to be separated from passion and madness, and writing is transformed into a process of self-sacrifice, "acéphale-graphy." --Marina Galletti is Professor of French Literature at Università Roma Tre (Italy) and co-editor, with Alastair Brotchie, of The Sacred Conspiracy: The Internal Papers of the Secret Society of Acéphale and Lectures to the College of Sociology

Responses to the Nietzsche Event

Acéphale and Autobiographical Philosophy in the 21st Century

MacKendrick (philosophy, Le Moyne College) explores language and silence and their temporality and atemporality through works of philosophy, literature, and religion, where eternity and silence have long been matters of concern. Among the authors she considers are Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, four poets, St. Augustine, and Meister Eckhart. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Immemorial Silence

Virginia Burrus

Mark D. Jordan

Augustine's Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine's views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes--secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine's sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine's broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine's corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine's famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

Bodies, Desires, Confessions

Seducing Augustine

Treats time, eternity, language, and silence in an original way. Drawing on philosophy, theology, and literature, from the early Middle Ages to the present, Immemorial Silence traces a series of intertwined ideas. Exploring silence as the absence of language, which is nonetheless inherent in language itself, and eternity as the outside of time, cutting through time itself, the book unfolds a series of connections between these temporal and linguistic themes. Karmen MacKendrick is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College. She is the author of Counterpleasures, also published by SUNY Press.

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