Bataille: Expenditure, Enjoyment, Ecstasy with Erin K. Stapleton

About this episode

The episode features Erin K. Stapleton discussing her research on destruction and its implications in digital and visual cultures.

Erin Stapleton researchs destruction, archival imperfection, material volatility, resistance and ambiguity in digital and visual cultures, identity and media. Her current project, Catastrophic Loss, investigates how colonial logics continue to inform everyday digital media cultures and practices, the fragility of these systems, and the losses they threaten and produce.We discuss her book, The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille, which was published in 2022 by Amsterdam University Press (and published in paperback by Routledge in 2025). In it, she takes destruction as the founding operation of culture and trace it through philosophy, the media of September 11 and disaster films, end-of-the-world narratives, execution and eroticism, before addressing the effects of the displacement of linear destruction on the culture and media produced in digital systems. In other words, it’s got sex, death, explosions… and computers. And an unexpected amount of Walter Benjamin for some reason. And a joke that will only be funny to people who are intimately familiar with Australian slang and Georges Bataille.She completed her…

People in this episode

Host: Hermitix

Guest: Erin K. Stapleton

Topics covered

• destruction
• digital media
• colonial logics
• cultural theory
• philosophy
• identity
• media

Keywords

• destruction
• digital media
• Bataille
• cultural theory
• identity
• media
• September 11
• disaster films
• eroticism

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amsterdam University Press, Routledge

Books & works: The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media: A Philosophy of Expenditure After Georges Bataille

Places: Australia, London Graduate School, Kingston University, University of Melbourne

More episodes of Hermitix

• Friedrich Georg Jünger and the Failure of Technology with Thomas Crew · June 10, 2026 · 1h 2m
• Liber Null and Chaos Magic: On the Work of Peter Carroll · June 6, 2026 · 39 min
• Crowley: Qabalah, True Will, and the Holy Guardian Angel with Ian Rees · June 3, 2026 · 1h 1m
• J. Allen Hynek, Vallee, Steiner, and UAPs with Aaron French · May 27, 2026 · 1h 11m
• Ramsey Dukes Rides Again! / Magick, Science, and Virtual Reality with Lionel Snell · May 20, 2026 · 1h 34m
• 'Lacan is about pain' with Judith Gurewich · May 18, 2026 · 1h 13m