For Bataille death is excess and self-consciousness, not Hegelian meaning.

Evidence

Georges Bataille also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of sovereignty, the political, and the subject. Bataille displaces Hegel’s conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways. First, he interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance—or, to use his own terminology: excess. For Bataille, life is defective only when death has taken it hostage. Life itself exists only in bursts and in exchange with death. He argues that death is the putrefaction of life, the stench that is at once the source and the repulsive condition of life. Therefore, although it destroys what was to be, obliterates what was supposed to continue being, and reduces to nothing the individual who takes it, death does not come down to the pure annihilation of being. Rather, it is essentially self-consciousness; moreover, it is the most luxurious form of life, that is, of effusion and exuberance: a power of proliferation. Even more radically, Bataille withdraws death from the horizon of meaning. This is in contrast to Hegel, for whom nothing is definitively lost in death; indeed, death is seen as holding great signification as a means to truth. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Bataille’s concept of death-as-excess against Hegel’s death-as-meaning — a core scaffolding concept for necropolitics.
• XREF: Connects to the sovereignty literatures (Schmitt, Agamben) the Islamophobia readings build on. — connects to: In Hegel, voluntary risk of death is what turns natural being into a subject. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 21; For Bataille sovereignty means violating the death taboo rather than avoiding death — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 32; Bataille reads sacrifice as staged self-awareness of dying, a deliberate trick. — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 164

Related

• In Hegel, voluntary risk of death is what turns natural being into a subject. (similarity 0.87)
• For Bataille sovereignty means violating the death taboo rather than avoiding death (similarity 0.86)
• Bataille reads sacrifice as staged self-awareness of dying, a deliberate trick. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• For Bataille sovereignty means violating the death taboo rather than avoiding death #expands (0.85) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 32
• Bataille reads sacrifice as staged self-awareness of dying, a deliberate trick. #expands (0.80) — Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics, 164