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My project traces the interrelated discourses of eroticism, modernism and transgression in the twentieth century through a nexus of thinkers, writers and architects focused around the French theorist and pornographic writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962). My aim is to consider what it means to think of eroticism as a transgression, and what transgression might look like. The topics of eroticism and transgression demand an interdisciplinary approach, and my thesis responds to this need through analysis of cultural theories, literature and architecture. Bataille, D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin and Le Corbusier were contemporaries who explored similar ideas through different disciplines and using different language. My thesis draws them together to explore these similarities and what they reveal about the different disciplines, their relationship to one another, and their relationship to eroticism and transgression. My method involves close theoretical readings of Bataille’s texts – chiefly Eroticism, but also The Accursed Share, History of Eroticism, Theory of Religion and selected essays and fiction – to develop a rigorous reading of Bataille’s notion of erotic transgression. This notion and related ideas of expenditure, sacrifice and poetry provide the basis for original analysis of the literary motifs and language used by Lawrence and Nin who, like Bataille, were concerned with writing eroticism. The importance of the sites of eroticism in fiction by all three writers and the structure of the language they use reveals a connection between their erotics, and between transgression and architecture. I explore this connection further by analysing the ideas and productions of architects who have openly engaged with Bataille’s thinking, focusing on Le Corbusier and Bernard Tschumi. I examine the possibility of transgression and poetry in architecture, and what the relationship between literary and architectural modes of transgression reveals about eroticism.

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This thesis argues that Gilles Deleuze, as philosopher, reader, and critic, recognised the central importance of a defined authorial subjectivity, closely associated with a philosophical or intellectual project, and that his analyses of philosophy, literature, visual art and cinema were shaped and determined by his recognition of that authority. In this respect, my reading challenges those critics who find in the work of Deleuze an assault on ‘author-centric’ interpretations of texts, and more generally on the concept of a unified self, and which uphold experimentation on the part of the reader or critic rather than interpretation. I argue that Deleuze has a coherent and meaningful conception of an author as a consciousness which persists through time, learns, plans and makes projects, differentiates itself from the work of other authors, is inspired and creative, takes positions in relation to the inheritance of artistic and philosophical traditions, and which is capable of entering into collaboration with others. Through close reading of Deleuze’s texts, I demonstrate that he consistently relies on the authorial function to impose unity and coherence on the distinctive - and often remarkable - body of work of an individual theorist or practitioner. I argue that the historical, political and social situation of an author is of great importance to the analysis of a text. Finally, unlike Roland Barthes or other critics invested in the ‘death’ or displacement of the author, I argue that Deleuze considers the competing interpretations of a text advanced by the reader or spectator to be of little or no importance.

The thesis examines the theory of intensity and affectivity which is presented in Bergson’s first work, Time and Free Will, in conjunction with the major topics and problems that arise from Bergson’s study of sensibility and mark the transition from his first to his second major work, Matter and Memory. The main problems that are examined comprise the critique of the measurement of sensations, the relationship between intensity and multiplicity, the problem of nuance and degree, the relationship between psychic tension and effort in the experience of freedom and finally the relationship between representative and affective sensation. The thesis aims to provide an account of the transition between TFW and MM through a thorough study of the problem of intensity. This aim is pursued in a twofold direction: the conceptual transformation that led to the genesis of the concept of tension and the emergence of the psycho-physiological problem out of the investigation of the intensity of psychic states.

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and unplublished material and covering the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence (from the early 1970s onward) of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project.

In Memoires for Paul de Man (1986) Derrida acknowledges the urgency, for any rigorous deconstruction, of closely confronting Austin's notion of the performative. This study aims to countersign Derrida' s acknowledgement by elaborating a certain deconstructive tradition of thinking the performativity of the performative and, thus, of retracing the performative (as auto-performative) back to the modem philosophical tradition of (self- )positing. In particular, it focuses on Derrida's thought of the iterability of the (auto-)performative, as the speech act of self-positing. The chapters investigate Derrida's elaboration of the notion of positing by bringing to light his engagement with a certain French and continental tradition of the Hegelian concepts of recognition and mastery, as they are exposed in the Phenomenology's chapter on self-consciousness. My argument is that Derrida understands positing as always caught up in a struggle for recognition, what he calls war in the infinite and among finite ipseities (drawing on Lévinas's concept of war), as the self's positing itself as such or imposing itself and, thus, as making itself recognized, mastery, ipseity, etc. This positing always admits iterability (or, enforceability, as Derrida will suggest, for instance, in 'A Number of Yes' or in 'Force of Law') to the extent that it calls for repetition. It originally allows the movement that replaces and supplements it (the very concept of différance) by granting to it the possibility of repetition. This movement is understood by Derrida as the text of the recognition that the self posits or gives to itself and, therefore, as the text that the self writes or posts to itself. In fact, this text accounts for the slave or the representative of self-positing, for those who have given up the desire for recognition, but also for the other to come, for the absolutely other, for the unconditioned risk of death or non-sense. As I will attempt to demonstrate by following Derrida's reading of the master/slave dialectic and of its tradition, he understands the relation between the master and the slave as the structural relation between positing and iterability. It is from this perspective that I propose looking at Derrida's elaboration of the performative as the speech act of (self- )positing, mastery and ipseity. It can be described as the engagement that the self takes with itself, as the act of faith toward the representative, as the appeal for credit and preservation addressed to others. Therefore, as Derrida suggests, it is always threatening or making itself fear by necessarily admitting its enforceability.

This thesis is an explication of Glas, a text which reflects Derrida's profound respect for the Hegelian dialectic, a structure in which each part has and knows its place. But Glas also works to expose a fundamental contamination between Hegelian conceptuality and those elements of textuality which the dialectic seeks to subordinate to, or expel from, itself. One such area of contamination is that of representation. For while Hegel determines representation as (the) outside of truth, Derrida demonstrates that this very determination is in fact structured and instituted by those `outsides. ' One such `outside' is that of family relations, which Hegel utilises as a metaphor for the relations of the dialectic in general. The question Derrida raises is whether this recourse to the family metaphor is a matter of pedagogy and exemplarity, or whether it conforms to a more fundamental necessity? This question forms the focus of Chapters One and Two of this thesis, which explore Derrida's reading of the Hegelian family as both a moment on the path to absolute knowledge and as a metaphor whose capacities disrupt and re-write the concept of metaphoricity. However Derrida's question also points to a more fundamental problematic which Chapter Three will address. For what is it that determines and sanctions this opposition of inside and outside, that underpins these relations of production, of metaphoricity and representation? The answer to this is, I believe, mimesis. By transporting Derrida's understanding of mimesis into the context of the Hegelian family and Glas, it becomes possible to see the crucial role that this concept plays in the Hegelian dialectic, a role which also points the way to a philosophy that is not bound always to repeat the same, but which is open to chance and necessity, and to the possibility of writing philosophy differently.