‘Definition of Heterology’ illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of ‘attraction and repulsion’ at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of (...) the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the ‘science’ of the ‘totally other’, may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies. (shrink)

In this article I further Adriana Cavarero and Nidesh Lawtoo’s discussion of “mimetic inclination” to consider the way a person can be known in their uniqueness. Cavarero says that we receive a sense of the uniqueness of another by relating their narrative. I suggest that this also reveals a sense of the uniqueness of the one narrating, and that this can be understood as a practice of care. This narration is, as a consequence, distinct from representation (which itself is distinct (...) from mimesis) and is better described as apprehension. By drawing on Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, I detail a primary form of care connected to apprehension that is engendered by what Sharpe calls “the weather of antiblackness”. Morrison both details this form of care in Beloved and practises it herself in her storytelling. This expands feminist analyses of vulnerability, providing critical resources for rethinking existence apart from its colonial and patriarchal articulation. (shrink)

National University of «Kyiv-Mohyla academy» MEETING THE OTHER AS A CHALLENGE 15th International Conference “Philosophy: the New Generation” Summaries of Reports Kyiv, NaUKMA, April 21–22, 2023 .