Abstract

In this study aimed at uncovering the new economic logic of social networks, I concentrate on a substantial re-machining of Bataille’s notion of a sovereign ‘accursed share’ of general economy to add a theoretical dimension that I propose to term ‘ecanomie’ which suspends, I will argue, the traditional moral-numerical restrictions of a hitherto dominant ‘economic housing’. The lodging here of this portmanteau is coined to uneasily combine the previously separate concepts of ‘economy’ and ‘anomie’ into something that suspends the classical modeling of each. AswellasconvertingthesediscursivepositionsofBataille’stothebenefitofoutlining this recent historical turn I will also be utilising Heidegger’s regional take on signification [Bedeutung] to uncover the ‘concrete re-arrangements’ or re- configurations of embodied worldview that such ecanomic acts formally indicate or entail. Signification, it is argued, is not an abstract upper ‘layer’ or a mere outer ‘ontic shell’ of representation, but a corporeal networked substance that works-over all individual comportments. I will finally explore this substantively through the optic of Derrida’s deployment of biopolitical ‘autoimmunity’, here in the concrete re- signification of ‘the suicidal’ within social networking ecanomic technologies of the self.