Abstract
Building and expanding on George Bataille’s analysis of the restricted economy, the
paper theorises violence as a plastic and productive force. Challenging accounts that, in different
ways, define political violence solely as a negative and dis-integrating power (i.e. destructive of preexisting – actual or potential – “things”), the essay concentrates on the force that is unleashed to
produce “unity” and “integrity”, be it at the individual or at the collective level. This perspective, I
suggest, might contribute to gauging the limits of the (potentially unbounded) violence needed by
contemporary political and economic regimes to construe and secure their integrity