Economies of Excess

• In Event: Back from the Dead: Old Concepts for New Times

Abstract

How do we make sense of a world in which appetites appear limitless? From obesity to anorexia, to escalating inequalities, corporate excess, penal excess and mass incarceration, we dwell in a social formation in which older bio-political notions of appropriate limit no longer appears to hold. Drawing upon the work of George Bataille, I will examine the shift into a world of limitless appetite in terms of a transition from a postwar economy of limits, towards a neoliberal economy of excess characterized by destructive reproduction and catastrophic deficit expenditure.

Author

• Simon Hallsworth, University Campus, Suffolk