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Name/date: Major work: Keywords: Key figures: Subsequent Political aspect: Associations: |
Georges
Bataille –
pseudonyms; Lord Auch, Pierre Angelique The
accursed share Eroticism,
general economy, surplus/ excess, transgression and violence, heterogenus, Nietsche,
Foucault,
Baudrillard, Materialist,
favoured secret societies and sects Surrealist
in 20s, anti-fascism in 30’s. Editor of Documents |
Bataille is usually known as the writer of bizarre
and erotic prose in a surrealist vein. Yet other works of his offer
extraordinary insights into the study of religion, anthropology and economics.
As a thinker of the totality, Bataille is quite unique in combining the history
of religion, eroticism and a consumption based understanding of the economy.
Bataille’s concept of ‘general economy’ propounded most systematically in The Accursed Share is intellectually construed in contradistinction to the pains of analytical specificity. This is to say Batalle consciously construes an epistemic totality that aims not at the isolated particularity of individual economic events, but one that is always regulated by an idea that all organic behaviour is based upon a superabundance of energy. In Bataille this is a natural biological reality of our eco-sphere, all things try to grow, where this growth is limited, an excess of energy is produced. This excess serves as the primary ontological consideration in the treatment of economic behaviour, which is to be considered, ‘the sexual act is what the tiger is in space’. What societies do with the surplus of energy is fundamentally constituted by their religious and economic realities. The pre-modern world is characterised by the ‘unproductive consumption of the surplus’. Hence the gift economy, or potlatch (a crucial concept in Debord and Baudrillard), were events of religious, erotic and economic significance – in the ancient world the building of cathedrals, or pyramids or the sacrifice of animals should be seen as the economic norm of which capitalist productivity is the abberation. With echoes of Marx, the modern Bourgeois world inaugurates the separation of these spheres. alongside the transition whereby surplus becomes redirected into production itself.
Bataille represents a very different example of
problem of the use of a materialist totality. Scientistic - though not in the
sense of the illegitimate seperation of phenomena - but understanding them in
their unity in their interaction with the general. The text of the accursed
share and the study of eroticism, are characteristically interlaced with consciousness
of the method. Bataille offers some curious anecdotal discussions of this…
“How…could I have had the extreme freedom of thought
that places concepts on a level with the world’s freedom of movement?”(pp 10
TAS)
’I could not at the same time give my thinking a
general outline, and lose myself in a maze of interferences, where the trees
constantly prevent one from seeing the forest. I wanted to avoid redoing the
work of the economists, and I confined myself to relating the problem that is
posed in economics to the general problem of nature.’ (pp13 TAS)
the movement…”that of excess energy, translated into
the effervescence of life’. (pp 10 TAS)
Much through
Volume 1 we are largely expected to accept the concept of energy surplus and
growth as, until it can be elaborated more concretely as he deals with its
particular instances. But as a lesson in the totality there is definitely the
coincidence of the desire for totality and its discovery in the science. That
is to say, totality is simultaneously the norm of procedure as well as the
instrumental result of our social desires. Totality is at once; the attempt to
recapture lost intimacy, the orgasm, death (as offering continuity after a
discontinuous existence)
In Eroticism transgression is intimately
related to violence and ultimately death, a connection Bataille explores in
literally in Blue of Noon and The Dead Man. There is an interesting treatment
of De Sade in erotism. What Bataille tries to show is that de sade takes eroticism
to its own conclusion, we might be repulsed by the acts, but they are to be
viewed as an excess rather than completely abnormal and abberant.
Bataille – whole/ totality – from Eroticism
Preface:
“By seeking to present a coherent whole I am working
in contradiction to scientific method. Science studies one question by itself.
It accumulates the results of specialised research. I believe that eroticism
has a signiicance for mankind that the scientific attitude cannot reach.
Eroticism cannot be discusses unless man too is discussed in the process….”
(pp7)
Indeed eroticism cannot be studied independently
from the history of religions either.
Problems:
Batailles theory of general economy has been
problematised in the following way:
“Bataille wants to maintain as a general
anthropological principle the necessity of unproductive expenditure while
simultaneously upholding the historic singularity of capitalism with regard to
its expenditure” pp 209 Yale French Studies
Bataille subscribes in part to the Weberian idea of
the ethic of capitalism, as thrift, profitable investment and accumulation for
its own sake. However these forms have undergone something of a transition in
contemporary consumerist society. Moreover, two world wars and Vietnam have demonstrated
a necessity internal too capitalisms expansionist drive for extremely
unprofitable military expenditure.
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Text on
work and suppression of desire (from Eroticism) |
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Bibliography |
Fiction:
Story of the Eye Blue of Noon L’Abbe C My Mother, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man Eroticism The
Accursed Share (Vol1 1949) Inner
Experience Literature
and Evil (1957) Manet
(1955) Lascaux
or the Birth of Art (1955) |
Secondary Reading: The French Path to Postmodernity: Bataille between Eroticism and General Economics – Jurgen Habermas A preface to Transgression – Michel Foucault Yale French Studies No. 76 – On Bataille 1990,
Yale University Press |