Some Notes on Bataille
What is called experience is a moment in the movement of energy.
Energy, for Bataille, exists in stages.
First it is solar, then biological, then the form of it’s appropriation by humanity.
To produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more.
-TTFA, Land
Thus production is illusionary for Bataille (as it is for Marx)
Production consists of directing energy into its expenditure, meaning all economics focused on production are really focused on expenditure, in a confused way.
The radiation of the sun is distinguished by its unilateral character: it loses itself without reckoning, without counterpart. Solar economy is founded upon this principle.
This establishes a rejection of the restricted economic idea of lack and scarcity. Because the sun only gives energy and does not receive, there is not lack, but excess.
It is because the sun squanders itself upon us without return that ‘The sum of energy produced is always superior to that which was necessary to its production’… since ‘we are ultimately nothing but an effect of the sun’.
-TTFA, Land
Bataille said the first men’s conscience were awoken by work, which reminded me of Stirner when he talked about Reason replacing the parents. Work is what necessitates taboos, it necessitates a restriction of desires in order to increase productivity, in order to better serve a cause. Like this, reason in the youth for stirner goes against desire for the sake of this or that cause (a national cause for example). For both of them, it’s seen that we internalize a power perceived as above ourselves, that restricts desire for the sake of an end, which is also seen as “above us”.
Bataille believes taboos arise out of work, out of the restriction of desire, to increase productivity. So taboos for him are the restriction of desire for continuity, thus why death and reproduction are both taboo, they show continuity, they show someone going beyond their discontinuous self, and we are horrified by it. by discontinuous self i mean what makes us us, what makes us unique, the barrier between me and you and everything that makes us all separate beings. Death is returning to the continuity of the universe. Sex is overcoming the limits of your self with another discontinuous being to make continuity.
The Accursed Share is subjectivity “at its boiling point.”
It is continuity
The limits of the self are radically questioned
the fusion, the orgy
This moment of continuity between discontinuous beings transgressing themselves as a subject, or “subject at its boiling point”, is the essence of what Bataille calls eroticism.
Whether it’s religious, physical, emotional, whether it’s because of the sacrifice or the naked woman, this ‘boiling point of the subject’ is the focus of eroticism,
As well as our aversion to it
Expenditure is the ignored movement of the general economy.
The radiation of the sun is distinguished by its unilateral character: it loses itself without reckoning, without counterpart. Solar economy is founded upon this principle.
the excess energy circulating in organisms, wealth, ‘must ultimately be spent lavishly’. This lavish expending of energy is the accursed share, and the ignorance of it is what constitutes the restricted economy. I’m not too clear on restricted economy but it seems to be a productivist economic view with “Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity[…] it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, that of the economic man. It does not take into consideration a play of energy that no particular end limits; the play of living matter in general.”
The general economic perspective (Bataille’s system of thought) sees the necessity of lavishly expending surplus energy, of unproductive consumption. It focuses on the general movement of energy. The restricted economy suppresses expenditure but it does not escape the ‘general movement. Thus, the restricted economic perspective only affirms the general economic, catastrophe is always haunting it.
Possible interpretation of Bataille as a Post-Marxist
My main reasoning is that he definitely follows Marx in the idea of catastrophe, expenditure in Bataille’s case, haunting capitalism. In fact, Capitalist production is dependent on this expenditure to function. Expenditure is class struggle. They’d agree that the processes of capital necessarily lead to collapse; “‘the most complete result’ of bourgeois economic calculation is ironically its own decomposition” (Shaviro, Passion and Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory). Bataille’s criticism of Marx may show a divergence, but it does not sufficiently separate Bataille from him. Nor does it dispose of Marxism, especially when The Grundrisse is taken into account.
Bataille says something really interesting in the last part of the Accursed Share, on page 151
He makes a link between a Stalinist conception of the state and a return to Hegel’s conception of it.
This way of thinking [what Bataille calls imperial socialism or Stalinism] is not opposed to Marxism; it is different, however, in that it gives the state the preponderant and definitive place that Hegel gave it.
