CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/23/2017

Read Georges Bataille with Glenn A. Elmer Griffin at ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles

Sunday, May 28 from 11AM-1 PM ARTBOOK @ Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles presents Reading Group 2 on Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share with Glenn A. Elmer Griffin.

ARTBOOK at Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles is pleased to introduce a bi-monthly Reading Group dedicated to the immersion of reading in dialogue with an engaged community of artists, writers, thinkers, and educators. The Reading Group will be focused on social and political polemics of today and back to the 19th century to look and discuss solutions to the multi-varied and complicated issues of our contemporary times and how these issues pertain and overlap in our every day as artists, thinkers, writers, and everyday people. All Reading Group participants will receive 25% off the selected Reading Group book each month!

Reading Group 2 will continue with the philosophical polemic on political economy by French intellectual and surrealist dissident Georges Bataille in his work The Accursed Share, Volume 1. This text was first published in French in 1949 and later translated into two parts by Robert Hurley and published by Zone Books, of which we will be reading the first part. In this work, Bataille ethnographically examines diverse models of civilizations and their various utilizations of surplus energy. Bataille argues that this expenditure of surplus energy, or the accursed share to him, is integral to defining societies. Using the examples of the sacrifice among the Aztecs, the potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet, Bataille debunks and revises traditional economic models of scarcity and utility for a model of excess and exuberance. This book examines the very nature of human progress and helps to assess our own position inside capitalism today.

The second meeting is slated for Sunday, May 28th 11 AM at the bookstore and facilitated by Glenn A. Elmer Griffin Ph.D., a distinguished professor at Occidental College. We will be discussing up to the completion of Volume I/page 195 for the second meeting.

Get your Reading Group copy of Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share, Volume I now as limited copies and space are available and receive your 25% off!

Email bookshw-la@artbook.com or bgrice@artbook.com for more details or if you have any questions.

Glenn A. Elmer Griffin Ph.D. is a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist and professor in the Department of Critical Theory and Social Justice at Occidental College. He is Director of the clinical psychology lab and founding editor of Critical Theory and Social Justice Journal of Undergraduate research. He is a three-time recipient of the Loftsgordon Award for Distinguished Teaching and three-time recipient of the Opencare Patient’s Choice Award for Best Psychologists in Los Angeles. He is currently teaching courses on the topics of Foucault, Stupidity, Whiteness, and Bataille.