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WRAP THESIS Dibben 1994
Influence and Infection: Georges Bataille and the Fate of Critique
A Warwick dissertation on Bataille, critique, and infection, asking how critical thought survives contact with excess and contamination.
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Core idea
Dibben argues that Bataille cannot be contained within the standard phenomenological image often imposed on him. The dissertation reopens critique by asking what happens when thought passes through influence, infection, and excess.
It uses Kantian topography and the fate of critique to read Bataille against the dominant Derridean framing. The result is a thesis that treats infection not as metaphorical flourish but as a problem for philosophical orientation.
This matters because it brings one of the department's darker lineages into focus. The Warwick context around critique, excess, and Bataillean contamination helps explain later tonal and conceptual emphases in the broader archive.
How to read this text
Start with the summary and early framing of the Derrida/Bataille dispute, then move to the sections where critique is redefined rather than abandoned. That is where the dissertation becomes most distinctive.
Read for the repeated language of infection, excess, and topography. Those terms organize the whole argument even when the historical discussion broadens.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 7
The point of departure of the thesis is an argued refutation of Derrida' s influential interpretation of Bataille as a quasi-Hegelian philosopher (in other words, as a philosopher like Derrida himself). I argue that Bataille's transformation of the Kantian conceptual topography (the deployment of concepts in an 'inner space') is of primary importance for understanding every single one of his fundamental philosophical notions: Time and the annihilatory subject, the distinction between continuity and discontinuity, o
Definition · paragraph 23
Derrida is in this sense very much a part of the Kantian project of negative critique, and involved in policing philosophical claims (especially the claims of radically different solutions to the problems of transcendental philosophy). For Derrida, the negative, like the related notion of death is a limit law of representation; whereas for Bataille it is the communicative flows of energy with their designated speeds and intensive magnitudes.
History · paragraph 2
INFLUENCE AND INFECI'ION Georges Bataille and the fate of critique COLIN DIBBEN Thesis submitted for the Phd in Philosophy Department of Philosophy, Warwick University submitted 9.5.94
Afterlife · paragraph 4
Sill+1ARY The thesis argues for the pertinence of the Kantian 'topography' of the mental faculties and the power of critical thought in assessing the philosophical importance of Georges Bataille' s writing. Such an argllDent nms counter to the received tradition of interpretation of Bataille's work, which has, given the influence of Derrida, construed these texts as works of phenomenological philosophy.
Afterlife · paragraph 4
Such an argllDent nms counter to the received tradition of interpretation of Bataille's work, which has, given the influence of Derrida, construed these texts as works of phenomenological philosophy. The thesis shows that Derrida's interpretation must, by virtue of its exclusivity, be incorrect.
Appears in sections
Warwick and Formation Primary section
How the CCRU emerged around Warwick, Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and an unstable collaborative scene.