The intoxication of destruction, and its antithetical twin, the impulse to immortality, are the poles of experience that constitute our aesthetic resistance to the socioeconomically reductive restraint of daily life. In Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche positions experiences of culture as expressions (and outcomes) of the desire to expend energy beyond that which is needed for survival. The intoxication of destruction describes an intoxication with being unproductive in the expenditure of energy, using it instead for the pursuit of experiences that transcend the mundane. In this book, I explore the multifaceted variations of the idea that destruction is paradoxically the foundational operation of culture, as it produces, elicits and inspires the experience of sovereignty in the artist, viewer, audience, participant and witness to a variety of media, cultural artifacts and experiences.

This intoxication with destruction in pursuit of ‘any kind of aesthetic doing and seeing’ was adopted by Georges Bataille in a thinly veiled ambition to take up Nietzsche's mantle, through an idiosyncratic, and later, uniquely apolitical interpretation of the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty repeats and returns throughout Bataille's writing as a way to express an element of experience that he describes as inexpressible, but that nevertheless remains tangible within positions, orientations and experiences. This later idea of sovereignty, as constitutive of type of experience that lies beyond the mundane, is described as being made possible by the expenditure (and waste) of energy in The Accursed Share, which in this book, provides a point of departure for theorizing the possibilities of this intoxication through destruction.

In writing on sovereignty and expenditure, Bataille takes from philosophy, literature, anthropology, art history and theory, sociology, archaeology, classics, physics, politics and economic theory (and potentially other disciplines as well) in order to construct what I would describe as a transdisciplinary approach to these ideas. While I have little interest in faithfully replicating or adhering to Bataille's legacy (or anyone else’s), a transdisciplinary approach is one that I have mirrored here, where operations of destruction are found in locations as diverse as state executions, apocalypse and disaster films, eroticism, media archives and digital futures.