This book examines the desire for, and intoxication with, destruction as it appears in cultural objects and representation, arguing that all cultural and aesthetic value is fundamentally predicated on its own fragility, as well as the living transience of those who make and encounter it. Beginning with a philosophy of expenditure after Georges Bataille, each chapter maps different operations of destruction in media and culture. These operations are expressed and located in representations of human extinction and explosive architecture, in the body and in sexuality, and in media and digital archives, which constitute a further destabilisation of the notion of destruction in the dynamic between aspirational immortality and material volatility embedded in the archival systems of digital cultures.

Erin K. Stapleton is currently a Lecturer in Media and Communications at the University of Melbourne.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

PREFACE: THE INTOXICATION OF DESTRUCTION

INTRODUCTION: DESTRUCTION AND IMMORTALITY

DESTRUCTION I: ENERGY

Part 1: The General Economy

Part 2: Sovereignty and Heterogeneity

DESTRUCTION II: WORLD

Part 1: Exploding Monuments (The Destruction of Architecture)

Part 2: Extinction (The Destruction of Everyone Else)

DESTRUCTION III: BODY

Part 1: Spectacular Expenditure (From Sacrifice to Execution)

Part 2: Eroticism (The Destruction of Sexuality)

DESTRUCTION IV: MATTER

Part 1: Accelerating Destruction (The Material of Media)

Part 2: The Material of the Digital (Computational Immortality)

CONCLUSION: THE DESTROYERS

LIST OF FIGURES

BIBLIOGRAPHY