| Title | : | The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0942299116 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780942299113 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 200 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1949 |
The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption Reviews
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Georges Bataille’s book of, um, ‘political economy’ begins “That as a rule an organism has at its disposal greater energy resources than are necessary for the operations that sustain life [...] is evident from functions like growth and reproduction” and follows this energy surplus of the terrestrial-host animal through to its dissolution “willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically”. We receive more energy from the sun than can be spent productively; so it must be expelled unproductively. Bataille asserts with characteristic puissance that the excess of energy & the onanistic inferno of its disposal is the primary process which pulsates through economic systems and activates productive forces--rather than demand, capital, labour power, etc. This doesn’t necessarily contradict orthodox theories of the market but insists that we understand them as epiphenomenal functions to a solar metaphysics of thermodynamic circulation.
The energy surplus itself is ‘The Accursed Share’ because its disposal is a volatile process; for every beneficent carnival, potlatch and festival amid tight-knit social bonds, there is also opulent religious wastefulness, human sacrifice and the evil wars of bloodthirsty empires--special mention to WWI and WWII. And this ritual euthanasia of unspent energy is not merely primary to our survival; disbursal of the explosive plethora of solar residue flows into joy, art, eroticism and transcendence. There is quite a lot of historical / anthropological data used to support the slightly exorbitant claims, which are impossible to prove but interesting to observe in context. Still, for all its research, The Accursed Share will never be taught in an economics class and cannot be arbitrated except by the stiffest criteria of falsifiability--which would be seriously missing the point.
Bataille brought this to speed with the contemporary post-war environment and you could continue to do so long after his death. Think of our depraved piracy of smaller nations, seizing the glut of resources interred there; energy sources converted into a surfeit of corpulent exuberance which are binged to resource our next imperial adventure. Only slightly further afield, think of modern consumerism, proxy / drone warfare and, I would say, certain developments in technology; nanotech, automation, the AI singularity and other shades of posthuman silicone-fetishism may be the final jailbreak of the accursed share.
My only gripe is stylistic. The sentences are really choppy in some places, flip flopping between clauses arbitrarily, an infelicity which frustrated me with Eroticism and Literature and Evil. I don’t know if this is a problem with the translations or is being faithfully reproduced from Bataille’s French--but the translations of his literary works, especially The Story of the Eye, are very lyrical and pleasant to read (on the level of style anyway...) So what gives? -
Weary of “analyzing the complexities of a crisis of overproduction” (13), one of the standard exercises of restrictive economy, Bataille’s libertine interest alights on so-called general economy, “tracing the exhausting detours of exuberance through eating, death, and sexual reproduction” (id.). This sounds promising:
The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy (wealth) can be used for growth of a system (e.g., an organism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically. (21)
That last refers us both to Agamben’s discussion of glory in Homo Sacer V and to Dutt’s discussion of destructive waste in Fascism and Social Revolution. As it turns out, war is only the most obvious form of the necessary waste of surplus, and the remainder of the book details different solutions to the problem of excess.
We see a smithian confrontation of the wealth of nations against the theory of moral sentiments in how “the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles – the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspective of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking – and of ethics” (25). That is,if a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. (25-26)
Bataille wants to acknowledge “the dual origin of moral judgments”: whereas at one point “value was given to unproductive glory” now “it is measured in terms of production” (29). In that context, “The history of life on earth is mainly the effect of a wild exuberance; the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of increasingly burdensome forms of life” (33). We see some left politics in his insistence nevertheless that protest against wealth is made in the name of ‘justice’ (38), which is placed into opposition with ‘freedom’; however, “General economy suggests, therefore, as a correct operation, a transfer of American wealth to India without reciprocation” (40). The argument proceeds through chapters that analyze paired mechanisms of handling a general surplus.
The first pair is Native American sacrifice versus potlatch. The Aztecs’ “wars were created ‘so that there would be people whose hearts and blood could be taken so that the sun might eat.’” (49). The Aztecs were nevertheless “not a military society” (54)—“A truly military society is a venture society, for which war means a development of power, an orderly progression of empire” (id.). It is by contrast “a relatively mild society; it makes custom of the rational principles of enterprise, whose purpose is given in the future, and it excludes the madness of sacrifice. There is nothing more contrary to military organization that these squanderings of wealth represented by hecatombs of slaves” (54-55). (cf. Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason.) Sacrifices are “surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth. And he can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly, and therefore utterly destroyed. Once chosen, he is the accursed share, destined for violent consumption” (59).
By contrast with sacrifice is potlatch: “one of the functions of the sovereign, of the ‘chief of men,’ who had immense riches at his disposal, was to indulge in ostentatious squander” (63)—involving festivals that were “an outpouring not only of blood but also of wealth” (64). “The gift that one made of it was a sign of glory, and the object itself had the radiance of glory” (65). “Classical economy imagined the first exchanges in the form of barter. Why would it have thought in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to lose or squander?” (67). “Potlach is, like commerce, a means of circulating wealth, but it excludes bargaining” (67). Aside from gift-giving, it also takes the form of “a rival is challenged by a solemn destruction of riches” (68): “If he destroyed the object in solitude, in silence, no sort of power would result from the act; there would not be anything for the subject but a separation from power without any compensation” (69 ). This leads to the inference that ”present-day society is a huge counterfeit, where this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme poverty”—“a genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches” (76).
The next pair is Islam versus Buddhism. As a higher development, Islam is noted for its “generally despotic nature of sovereignty” (82), which works itself ultimately in war, which is permanent (84): “for Mohammed the great holy war is not that of the Moslem against the infidel but that of the renunciation one must engage in against oneself” (83). The pre-Islamic moment featured “ostentatious giving and squandering,” and we “infer the existence of a ritual form of potlatch from a prescription of the Koran: ‘do not give in order to have more’ (LXXIV 6),” as well as “bloody sacrifices” (85). Bataille connects plainly “the pre-islamic arabs” with his prior analysis, insofar as they “had not reached the stage of military enterprise any more than the Aztecs had,” both of which have “ways of life [eidos zoe, of course]” consistent with “a society of consumption” (86). The “pietism of primitive islam” deserves study along Weberian lines because of “the pietist way of thinking in the origins and development of capitalism” (86). This system allowed for a conflation of all functions: “the religious leader was at the same time the legislator, the judge, and the military chief. One cannot imagine a more rigorously unified community” (88), about which Bataille comments: “it was an admirable machinery. Military order replaced the anarchy of rival clans, and individual resources, no longer consumed wastefully, went into the service of the armed community” (88). And yet it lacks “Christ’s death on the cross or to Buddha’s rapture of annihilation” (90): “As soon as Islam ceased, because of its victories, to be a rigorous devotion of vital forces to growth, it remained nothing but an empty, rigid framework” (90).
One difficulty is that this rigid framework has no morality of its own but rather “adopted a morality that pre-existed it” (93). Not so in Buddhism: “In a humanity everywhere prepared to start a war, Tibet is paradoxically an enclave of peaceful civilization, incapable of attacking others or defending itself” (93). Tibet thus became “the same thing as the monasteries” (104); in Tibet, there wasa total of 250 to 500 thousand religious persons out of a population of 4 to 5 million”; “the total revenue of the government of Lhasa in 1917 […] was approximately 720,000 [pounds] yearly. Of that amount, the budget of the army was 150,000. That of the administration was 400,000. Of the remainder, an appreciable share was set aside by the Dalai Lama for the religious expenditures of the government. But in addition to these government expenditures, […] the revenues spent yearly by the clergy (income from property holdings of the monasteries, gifts, and payments for religious services) was well over 1,000,000. Thus in theory the total budget of the Church would have been twice as large as that of the state, eight times that of the army. (105)
The rationale thus for Tibet’s development: “Monasticism is a mode of expenditure of the excess that Tibet undoubtedly did not discover, but elsewhere it was given a place alongside other outlets. In Central Asia the extreme solution consisted in giving the monastery all the excess” (108), “a closed container” (id.). Perhaps he is enamored of the radical implications: “the lamic enlightenment morally realized the essence of consumption, which is to open, to give, to lose, and which brushes calculations aside” (109). And then there’s the great historical irony that the Tibetan system spread to Mongolia at the end of the sixteenth century,” a “denouement of the history of Central Asia” (109)—“totalitarian monasticism answers the need to stop the growth of a closed system” (id.).
The third set of opposed pairs is Calvinism versus Marxism. “Calvinism’s zone of influence […] roughly corresponds to the areas of industrial development. Luther formulated a naïve, half-peasant revolt. Calvin expressed the aspirations of the middle class of the commercial cities; his reactions were those of a jurist familiar with business matters” (115). For the medieval economy, “its basic principle was the subordination of productive activity to the laws of Christian morality” (117). The Calvinist ideal by contrast was “an economic world independent of the service of the clerics and the nobles, having its autonomy and its own laws as part of nature, is alien to the thought of the middle ages” (id.). In the old system, “the seller must part with merchandise at the just price. The just price is defined by the possibility of ensuring the subsistence of the providers” (id.)—“In a sense, this is the labor value of Marxism,” and one might see “Marx as the ‘last of the scholastics’” (id.). Usury is unlawful because it “would make time pay, and time, unlike space, was said to be god’s domain and not that of men” (id.). Calvinism “gives precedence in the use of the available resources to the expansion of enterprises and the increase of capital equipment; in other words, it prefers an increase of wealth to its immediate use” (119). In its war against luxury, Calvinism draws certain concordances: “idleness, the pyramid, or alcohol have the advantage of consuming without a return – without a profit – the resources that they use: they simply satisfy us; they correspond to an unnecessary choice that we make of them” (id.) – aesthetics management as non-production? Overall, Calvin “was to the bourgeoisie of his time what Marx was to the proletariat of ours” (123).
After Protestantism, Marxism, “which inherited its rigor, and gave a precise form to disorderly impulses, denies even more than Calvinism a tendency of man to look for himself directly when he acts: it resolutely excludes the foolishness of sentimental action” (134)—describing precisely “what Calvin had merely outlined, a radical independence of things (of the economy) in relation to other (religious or, generally, affective) concerns” (135): “Marx’s originality in this regard lies in his wanting to achieve a moral result only negatively, by the elimination of material obstacles” (id.). Marx however presents “less the completion of Calvinism than a critique of capitalism” (136); “capitalism in a sense is an unreserved surrender to things, heedless of consequences” (136). The problem as diagnosed by Marx: “to the extent that mankind is in complicity with the bourgeoisie (on the whole that is), it vaguely consents to be nothing more (as mankind) than a thing” (138). This means that capitalism generalized the reification of the medieval system wherein “wealth was unevenly distributed between those who manifested the accepted values, in the name of which wealth was wasted, and those furnished the wasted labor” (139); the aristocrats “claimed not to be things, but the quality of thinghood, verbal protests notwithstanding, fell squarely on the worker” (id.). The objection is accordingly that “one cannot expect to liberate man by going to the limit of the possibilities of things and nonetheless leave free, as capitalism does, those who have no other reason for being than the negation of work, which is base, in favor of more elevated activities” (140).
The final opposition is Stalinism versus the Marshall Plan. Some notes follow in opposition to Stalinism, doctrinally: “Stalinism is not at all the analogue of Hitlerism; on the contrary, it is not a national but an imperial socialism” (151)—“a universal state that would put an end to the economic and military anarchy of the present age,” the Soviet Union “is a framework in which any nation can be inserted” (id.). Normally, leftwing politics feature “a greater share of wealth devoted to nonproductive expenditure” (154)--“whence the paradox of a proletariat forced to impose its will inflexibly on itself, to renounce life in order to make life possible” (156). That is, “Stalinist policy is the rigorous—very rigorous—response to an organized economic necessity, which actually calls for extreme rigor […] the strangest thing is that it is judged to be terroristic and thermidorian at the same time” (165). Ultimately, “the current system of the USSR, being geared for producing the means of production, runs counter to the workers’ movement of other countries, the effect of which tends to reduce the production of capital equipment, increasing the objects of consumption” (167).
In order to fight the left, “The Marshall Plan offers an organization of surplus against the accumulation of the Stalin plans”’ (173), though it “is intended to remedy the balance of payments deficit of the European nations vis-à-vis the United States” (174): it became “necessary to deliver goods without payment: it was necessary to give away the product of labor” (175). In the post-war world, “the Bretton woods agreements gave a precise definition to the impasse of the international economy”—“it had to renounce its founding principles, or, in order to maintain them, renounce the conditions without which it could not continue to exist” (177). Cf. Horkheimer: “it is the paradox of the capitalist economy that it is oblivious to general ends, which give it meaning and value, and that it is never able to go beyond the limits of the isolated end” (177). And yet the wheel is come full circle, insofar as capitalists are bound together to sacrifice against their own apocalypse. -
This book is generally acknowledged as an attempt at articulating a major theory of political economy out of Nietzsche's ideas with a lethal dose of clarity.
First, however, this is a very "Heideggerian" Nietzsche (though, no surprise as Heidegger's work was the only major systematic apprehension of Nietzsche's philosophy at the time). Heidegger's claim that for Nietzsche, nihilism defines some kind of a-historical key to understanding all of Western history seems to me to be reproduced in its entirety (and fallibility), by suggesting that the economy has its own 'will to nothingness'. (Some of the most interesting ideas, further explored in volumes II and III is a kind of positing of Heidegger's 'cleared' stage of authentic, pre-metaphysical knowledge as refigured through the Hegelian concept of totality, certainly used in a much more "french" way, thus building up a kind of historical ontology of the material world, as dependent on the symbolic order of the economy.) What is less Heideggerian is a setting up of a dialectic of production and consumption that is materialized in the concept of 'excess' that comes up with its own historical and peculiar incarnations. I'd say that as much as Mick Dillon's book "Security" uses the concept of security to suggest there is a much richer 'lifeworld' of politics that we can start to see if we handle (that is, deconstruct) the term properly, here the same could count with respect to the use of 'excess' (that as well borders on the now somewhat deflated concept of 'affect') as a key to our economic imagination.EDIT: Having read more Bataille, I no longer think this is really the case, and I no longer think (based on texts prior to the Accursed Share, where some of the differences are stated [for example, a footnote to Method on Meditation]) that Heidegger marks as much influence on his thought as I did before. I actually think that the Nietzsche here is quite different from Heidegger's interpretation on some major and important points (I don't think any more that Bataille's thinking is nihilistic in terms of the usual binary of 'active' and 'passive' nihilism, but it can be refigured as a kind of 'radical' or 'perfect' nihilism). I think that comparison to Dillon's book "politics of security" I've made before are however quite correct, as indeed, the book gives us a richer, deeper and nuanced (i.e. 'extended') view of what we view as the Economy.
Last, the chapters on Bataille's own views of the Cold War and Soviet Communism / Stalinism are to me a fascinating way of suggesting that the Communist imagination (conventionally understood) of the economy reproduces the same fallacy and narrow understanding of the economy in the form of an obsession with 'primitive' accumulation (in Bataille's own words). The nicest thing about Bataille, however, is, that despite his fallacies and his own 'brand' of nihilism, this conceptual system allows for its own broadening and corrections without a need of falsifying. A major and badly 'overlooked' book. -
The overall thesis of the book seems to me to be that as organisms we get more energy than we need (surplus, excess) and must (profitlessly, needlessly, uselessly) expend this excess and that while other theories of economy focus on production, his "general economy" focuses on this expenditure/consumption. Everything in this book seems to build off these ideas and it goes in pretty bizarre directions. The chapters on the Aztecs and Soviet Industrialization were very good. The last section of the last chapter talks about "self-consciousness" and how it is a different kind of consciousness because it is not a consciousness OF anything, but of "pure interiority". He likens this not yet realized development as the equivalent of the transition from animality to humanity. He also admits it associates him with mysticism. It was a very strange ending and I can't say I totally understood where he was going with it or if I'm even interpreting it right! Still a really enjoyable read and I'm interested to read volumes 2 and 3.
Re-read Update 4/22/21:
So I still like this book a lot but I often felt like he was losing the thread of his argument in certain places, or more probably, I just didn't understand what exactly he was doing. Particularly in the Islamism and Lamaism chapters, I didn't really see the point of what he was doing. It kind of becomes a bit of a slog to read while simultaneously being oblique. It seems to me that he is really just building upon the central thesis of the book (the sun gives more energy than we need, and we are pressured by forces of life to either use it productively or expend it uselessly whether willingly or not) but I felt myself unsure of where he was going with the details of certain chapters.
The Marshall Plan chapter is totally nuts and kind of funny. I don't know enough history or economics to say if he was right about it. But the self-consciousness stuff is interesting... Bataille really is just working through various binaries in his work (which aren't oppositions per se, but are co-present and make the other possible, i.e. a dialectical relationship) and in this one its restricted/general economy. His thought is pretty decentered, but I don't think it's hugely controversial to say that pretty much all of his writing is concerned with violence and how it's a sort of necessary evil. The Accursed Share shows that this excess energy must be expended. Sometimes it is expended "gloriously" like in festival, other times "catastrophically" like in war.
Despite the details I can't really pick up on, this book (and his thought in general) really is fascinating and I think it is worth taking seriously. The way I have been thinking about Bataille recently is that he is really thematizing and taking up Dionysian excess originally brought up by Nietzsche (after all, Bataille is, if anything, a Nietzschean). -
Bataille gets absolutely lost in the sauce by the end of this volume but that’s alright i’m still one of his biggest defenders... all this has me thinking about the gamestop stock, have any Bataille scholars written analysis on meme stocks
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This is a somewhat paradoxical book of speculative anthropology. Bataille warns us right from the start that acquisition of knowledge can only consummate itself in the annihilation of the object of knowledge.
This curious observation follows from the fact of what he calls "general economy" (as opposed to particular or resticted economy such as the capitalist economy, presupposing scarcity) that "use" is subservient to the ends beyond it, namely, useless or nonproductive expenditure/loss/. From the viewpoint of general economy, the founding axiom is excess, not scarcity. The Sun is the model for this economy.
So if accumulation must ultimately terminate in pure expenditure, does the same law apply to the very knowledge one acquires of the torturous circulation of solar energy on the terrestrial surface and its ultimate fate, in otther words, precisely the knowledge supplied by the book?
Despite this practical impasse, Bataille insists that Man can no longer afford to be ignorant of the volatile gift of solar energy which throbs and pulsates in excess of the use he can make of it, and learn to dispose of this excess on "his own terms" (excess does not accumulate until all the available space for the growth of the system is saturated). We must find if not invent sacred outlets to dissipate this built-up of excess.
Failure to carry out this urgent task of "glorious operation...useless consumption" (interestingly enough, Bataille sees inklings of the so called general approach in historical Bretton Woods Agreement and Marshall Plan) will result in nothing less than our annihilation.
There is enough anthropological data/statistics to support the general thrust of Bataille's argumentation in this book, but many of his rather brilliantly provocative claims are decisively non-empirical in character. This book will interest anyone looking for heteredox interventions into mainstream economics. -
A combination of the Erotic with the Economic. How does Georges Bataille combine the two. One of the most original thinkers in contemporary (20th Century) literature. Bataille not only sees economy as a means to exchange goods but also the the extras that are there and how one uses the 'extras'. The excess of power, exchange, and perhaps love itself. Difficult at times, but also incredibly rewarding.
A good introduction to Bataille's work is for sure his fiction (The Story of the Eye, etc.) but that's not really enough. It is like reading just the noir novels of Boris Vian - you need to read everything by this man to get a complete picture of who and what he is. And that is a very rewarding journey my friends. -
Bataille's philosophy of History. Totally cogent and elegant. More legible than his theories of erotics.
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Žrtva je, uzeta u masi korisnog bogatstva, višak. Ona odatle može biti izvučena samo da bi bila potrošena bez dobiti, prema tome, zauvek uništena. Ona je, čim je izabrana, prokleti deo, namenjen nasilnoj potrošnji. (61)
Od svih zamislivih luksuza, smrt je, u svom sudbonosnom i neumitnom vidu, svakako najskuplji. Krhkost životinjskog tela, njegova složenost, već izlažu njegov luksuzni smisao, ali ta krhkost i luksuz kulminiraju u smrti. Ona neprestano ostavlja mesto za dolazak novorođenih, a mi nepravedno proklinjemo onu bez koje nas ne bi bilo. (32) -
Ritual sacrifice, potlatches, conquest, festivals, opulence and luxury, lavish public works--avenues through which given social formations must expend their surpluses or risk descending into famine, imperial wars, genocide, mass unemployment, etc. Focusing on consumption in this first volume, Bataille traces societal mechanisms of expenditure through their archaic, medieval, capitalist and communist iterations and offers a model of a solar economy based on excess rather than scarcity.
Bataille's prose here is lucid, lacking the sometimes overwrought style of some of his earlier work on eroticism. -
Not gonna be a long review here, because I think I'll need to read Volumes 2 and 3 before I can really say I understood this book.
Bataille's general economy is based on a simple premise: the Earth receives essentially unlimited energy from the sun. Living beings use this energy to grow and compete with each other, but humans specifically can use this energy to accumulate wealth, that is, capital, or whatever you want to call it. The problem is that there is always what Bataille calls "the accursed share"--the surplus of energy that is destined to be squandered wastefully. Earlier societies engaged in grand festivals of sacrifice or ostentatious gift-exchanges, but nowadays, what with all our modern industry and lack of interest in eating one another, we're poised to squander the excess by exterminating each other in grand acts of war instead, unless we come up with an alternative solution.
What makes it hard to judge this text is, ultimately, the fact that I can't tell if Bataille is being serious about his proposed solution, which is basically to look to raise everybody's living standards and redistribute wealth instead of directing economic activity towards profit/accumulation of military weapons. The idea that a radical economy of solar flux and Dionysian excess gives way to a feeble endorsement of social-democratic globalism rubs me up the wrong way, even if the idea is nice. After all, does this not just kick the problem of accumulation down the road? There's no way that states will sit in peaceful equilibrium (or "dynamic peace", by which Bataille means that everyone is scared of fighting each other because they'll all die) forever. Human error, or just good old-fashioned irrationality, or the contingencies of nature, guarantee that things eventually break down.
However, just as the book was winding up, leaving me with a vague sense of disgust and disappointment, the final line seemed to suggest that Bataille was in on the joke.
"In the end, everything falls into place and takes up its assigned role. Today Truman would appear to be blindly preparing for the final - and secret - apotheosis. But that is obviously an illusion. More open, the mind discerns, instead of an antiquated teleology, the truth that silence alone does not betray."
So then, what is that truth? Could it be that we ourselves are the excess to be spent? That we are the accursed share? -
It seems that this one is a big deal for a lot of the postmodernists. Bataille is shy in the preface about writing on political economy, and the text reads beautifully - possibly due to his literary background and possibly because I've been stabbing at Hegel lately so most things are easier.
I think this text is the best generalisation of Bataille's work (at least so far as I have read). I prefer Erotism as a stand-alone text, and it's still my favourite of the bunch. But this text is entirely worth heading to directly.
The anthropological mid-section is mixed. The Aztec series is by far the best that I've read from GB, but the Islam/Lamaism section is lacking. Impressed by the insight during the USSR section, especially given the time of writing - could be better, but I think justified overall.
Neato -
What can I say, masterpiece.
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I love complimenting people. Sometimes you can sense what someone is really proud of.
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"Bütün olarak bir toplum daima geçinebilmesi için gerekenden fazlasını üretir, bir fazlalığa sahiptir. Onu belirleyen de özellikle bu fazlayı kullanma tarzıdır. Fazlalık, hareketliliklerin, yapı değişiminin ve bütün tarihin nedenidir. Ama birden çok çözüm vardır yolu vardır ve büyüme bunların en sıradanıdır."
"Ben genel olarak bir büyümenin olmadığı, yalnızca bütün biçimleriyle lüks bir enerji israfının olduğu üzerinde ısrarla duruyorum! Yeryüzünde yaşamın tarihi easesen çılgınca bir taşkınlığın tarihidir: Egemen olay, lüksün gelişmesidir, giderek daha masraflı yaşam biçimleri üretimidir." -
Bir iktisat kitabı denilebilir. Bir hoca ile konuşmamda bana söylediği şuydu, "Sosyal bilimler ve iletişim aslında iktisattan beslenir." Ben bu beslenmeyi çok anlamlandıramamıştım. Bu kitap beni buna yordu denilebilir ama pek de (kendi adıma) başarılı olduğu söylenemez. Çok uzağında okumalar yaptığım için olsa gerek diyerek çekilebilirim aradan...
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Even though there were some paragraphs a bit difficult to understand, this book was a true delight for a economy for someone like me, who is not very familiar with a lot of concepts.
The accursed share is basically the wealth. Bataille argues that for a given living system, there is indefinite energy put at its disposal. The living system uses that energy to grow and to expand itself. However, some point is reached, where the system cannot use the energy any longer. And that is the moment denoted through luxury and squander. The accursed share is what can be consumed, what can be wasted.
Bataille then starts a chronological journey to see how this production destined to non-production was used. We learn that the Aztecs organized sumptuous festivals for the condemned to be sacrificed, the Mexicans used to make gifts to show their superiority ("potlatch") , the Islam world did wars and expanded itself, the lamaism used it for the monchs' lives of pure contemplation.
And now it gets interesting - the catholics used the wealth into worshiping and that was the time when those huge cathedrals were build. With Luther and Calvin, we continue the journey in the capitalism and the use of the wealth for producing more wealth. Methods of letting this wealth go were those two horrible wars (because at some point, even capitalism gets supersaturated apparently).
And then it was the Marshall Plan, a giving away of wealth...with some buts, of course, nicely covered by the nicely gesture of the Americans.
A very intriguing chapter is the one discussing the dawn of communism in Russia. Bataille argues that the whole horror of communism there had purely economical reasons. The world was technologically very advanced in comparison to Russia, so after the WWI they needed a plan. Fast. The whole wealth went into the production of productions and means of production. It was important that the labor force get the impression they are in charge. It was important to collectivize the fields, so that production of food for the labor workers was assured. A very catchy point of view.
A very good book. -
uzun zaman sonra ilk defa bir kitaptan edindiğim bilgiye bi yerlerde rastgeldim, potlaça ve azteklere selam olsun.
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Though Bataille continues to deal with religion and ritual in this book, his concerns are more classically Anthropological than in Theory of Religion (population growth, scarcity, social structure etc.). The project he sets out in the introductory chapters is the development of
a "general economy": a system that not only accounts for the
development and exchange of goods, but of all energy on the Earth. From the perspective of general economy, life is a terrific excess that cannot be fully utilized due to the limits of growth and reproduction. Instead of this excess building up pressure (as in a closed container) and exploding, it is instead squandered, as heat for example, and disposed of in a "useless" manner. The accursed share is this remainder that escapes utility yet is always present. Through the examination of historical data, Bataille proposes that the definitive structure of human cultures can be found in how they deal with this primary excess. -
(I've been reading this on and off, so the registered reading dates are by no means accurate.)
A confusing and choppily written (or translated?) piece of beautiful megalomania. There will be no rating until I feel like I've understood Bataille properly, so this review will be just a quick summary of the ideas and difficulties spotted from the text.
The main thesis here is that the sun gives the world energy, which is consumed for the maintenance of life. After the said maintenance is done for the day, the rest is surplus that must needs be expended in one way or another. This can be done productively or unproductively: the former means that it can be used for the growth of an organism and for the proliferation of life, while the latter manifests itself in killing, giving or somesuch things that do not contribute to growth. Life on Earth wants to invade every nook and cranny, but obviously it has to run counter to the spatial limitations of the terrestrial surface: when Life is up against a wall, it has to start devouring itself.
Bataille lived through both World Wars, and this book was written in the aftermath of the second. He was acutely aware of the misery caused by warfare, so he wanted to showcase, by means of his theory and its necessity, that there are better ways to expend this inevitable surplus. His idea was that people should attain self-consciousness, meaning that humans would become consciously aware of the moment when the use of energy would transition from the necessary maintenance into the expenditure of surplus. Thus, our consciousness would have as its object "the nothing"; we would no longer aim to attain something, but would rather stoically accept ourselves as conduits of energy and cease to be so rapacious and deluded by things such as glory or unlimited growth. By extension, this would also help to diminish warfare and other nasty human scuffles, since we would learn to regulate our desires better and see the bigger picture.
Or at least I think this is what Bataille is aiming for. What makes this book extremely difficult for me is that Bataille makes a surreptitious transition from necessary physics and chemistry to optional economic activity. He equates energy with capital and money, and I still cannot fully understand how this is possible, even if one accepted that Bataille adheres to the labour theory of value. I mean, where is the necessity of funneling money? If there is any necessity, it would be the energy that is expended in this funneling, which involves writing a cheque and arranging the logistics—and this is hardly sufficient to avert wars.
As for the necessity of warfare, that I don't understand either. Yes, there have been bloody wars in the past and humans seem to be disposed for evil acts, but they do not commit them necessarily in search for Lebensraum when they themselves have run out of it. They can form ideas, and if the ideas hold fast enough, they will act upon them, and can commit unspeakable cruelties. (And this isn't the only way to explain wars, by any means! But it's an alternative to the necessity of energy expenditure and the confines of terrestrial life.)
Despite these problems, I found Bataille's theory fascinating and his historical accounts very informative, albeit obscure in the sense that the reader is supposed to know most of the background stuff before tackling the book. Bataille showcased the paradoxical ideas through centuries on how people want to both have the cake and eat it, and this is done by mixing the profane world with the sacred one. Material is sacrificed in return for the idea of things like glory and rank. (The way Bataille treated the subject on thinghood as applied to humans was extremely enlightening, since it's not necessarily too different from someone considering the human working in a shop as "a shop assistant" rather than a real human being that cannot be replaced.)
This book needs to be re-read carefully, more than once most likely, to be understood by people like me, who cannot let go of perceived inconsistencies. But as for now, I'll leave it at that and move on to the second and third volumes. Time for some bullish turbulence! -
To be very honest...if seeking to read anything on the "flow" of human activities, the general tendency of violent yet sweet betrayal that rooted deep in the abyss, a dynamic awareness of come and go, I would just walk right into Wilhelm Dilthey instead.
Or Zhuang Zhou. *Shrug*
Speaking of Zhuang Zhou, here's a very interesting part:
According to Bataille, The losing autonomy and shattered integrity haunted for generations, can only be resolved by the reconciliation between object and subject from self-consciousnesses.
In Inner Chapters - On Leveling All Things (《庄子内篇·齐物论》), Zhuang Zhou claims an idea that "the world and I combined into one"(“万物与我为一”) , which generates a vital tradition of ancient Chinese aesthetic education which insists that objects of artistic activities must be in accordance with the ones who create them.
If I'm not taking it wrong, what Bataillean thinking will lead is a way to figure out that how the industrial production (the increase, the accumulation) will stop to be the alienation of humanity, by firstly ceasing be a stranger/exist-without to its maker, a.k.a, regaining the intimacy, to be some Art, which is very Heideggerian frankly speaking.
And ICYMI, Bataille roasted Heidegger hard af within the first chapter of the book.
But still, Baitaille is enjoyable. He starts by throwing a nifty roast on Heidegger, which made a good point on how the utility reduction and the power gaining interacted with each other, then later how the reduction and disenchantment into banal reality, since the age of Calvinism, subordinated individuals to the laws of things, into increase, whose peak was the rise of communism, when Carl Marx just claimed material matters most.
One of the most remarkable moment in his writing is when he points out that Soviet industrialism and Marshall plan both have to be crazy enough for recognizing and making full use of such tendency after catastrophic predicaments, and triumph in their own way.
Anyway, I think I won't plunge into any other economic books again until I clear some Adam Smith. -
After being blown away by Erotism this work was profoundly disappointing. Bataille's thesis, and the back cover summary, is wonderfully innovative: (political) economy is driven not by scarcity but by a fundamental surplus that must be wasted via extravagance (luxury, holidays, feasts, wars). But he makes this (interesting, wild) point quickly and then the majority of the book is devoted to poor historical analyses. Sure, the Mayans are relevant here, but I have no faith in his understanding of Mayan or Native American culture. At the end of those sections, I was thinking, "there are no shortage of relevant modern or European examples, use those", but then he wanders into a convoluted analysis of the Marshall Plan which is somehow even less convincing, though it begins with a surprisingly cogent defense of Stalinism.
On the whole, I was incredibly excited to read this book given its thesis, Bataille's reputation as an iconoclastic thinker, & my enjoyment of his other works. But it was weak in its evidence. I would've traded its bad arguments for heightened rhetoric, since B is a good writer, but he spends most of the time bogged down in historical analyses that haven't aged well. It's particularly awkward that the English translation came out just after the Berlin Wall fell...I feel like he was trying to be very provocative in a Cold War context but called it all wrong. The Marshall Plan has not proven to be all that historically important and spending a good quarter of the book on the Soviet Union did not work out. -
Highly original writing that incorporates a great deal of intellectual history, along with its critique, into a short space. Bataille believes that behind the specific economic facts that scientists may study, and the mechanistic pecuniary or productive operations of everyday life, is the circulatory movement of a general economy, which carries an ever-present productive excess into the realm of waste. Life is always excess: contained within the possibility of growth there is a possibility of death, which undermines the infinitude we so readily attribute to expansion and calling our very development a salubrious luxury. From the smallest plant to the greatest capitalist machine, the question of expenditure is never one of utility. The end of life is not a purpose, but a question, after all, and Bataille takes on some existential or even nihilistic reasoning in order to craft the fulcrum of his narrative. If are acts are oriented towards death, towards sumptuous destruction, why remain within the framework of logicalism and benefit? Our benefit is never a reward to ourselves but rather a symptom of the system, which may at times be set up in favour of the production of productivity such that our living standards are finally improved. But in the realm of sacrifice, drawing from Mauss and historiographical culture studies, Bataille steps too far: his theories are disproven by the same hand as Graeber and Veblen. I look forward to reading the second and third volume.
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Di tutti i lussi concepibili la morte, ma in una forma fatale e inesorabile, è certamente il più costoso. La fragilità del corpo degli animali, la sua complicatezza, già ne illustrano il senso di lusso, ma tale fragilità e tale lusso culminano nella morte. Allo stesso modo in cui, nello spazio, i tronchi e i rami dall’albero alzano alla luce i piani sovrapposti del fogliame, così la morte ripartisce nel tempo il passaggio delle generazioni. Essa lascia incessantemente il posto necessario alla venuta di nuovi nati e noi malediciamo proprio a torto quella senza di cui non saremmo. In verità, quando malediciamo la morte, noi abbiamo paura soltanto di noi stessi: è il rigore della nostra volontà a farci tremare. Mentiamo a noi stessi sognando di sfuggire al movimento di lussuosa esuberanza di cui non siamo altro che la forma più acuta. O forse dapprima mentiamo solo per provare meglio, in seguito, il rigore di questa volontà, portandola all’estremo rigoroso della coscienza. Il lusso della morte, a questo proposito, viene da noi considerato allo stesso modo che quello della sensualità, dapprima come una negazione di noi stessi, poi, in un improvviso rovesciamento, come la profondità del movimento di cui la vita è l’esposizione.
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I guess the best way to describe the Accursed Share Vol. I is a piece of political economy written by someone that has no interest in actually economy.
The main thesis is that modern economists have used a wrong approach to their study of human economy. Bataille's interest lies not in the production of wealth, but rather in the consumption of wealth. It is the consumption that, according to Bataille, is a determining factor in how human act and think.
It's therefore important to consider economy in a wide scale, as well. Rather than seeing the study of economy as simply relating to capital, Bataille sees it as energy. Economy is the way humans express their energy, and it's the unproductive excesses of this energy that is the "Accursed Share."
While this is only the first of three volumes, and a rather short read, Bataille does manage to argue his case rather well. Going all the way from the Incas of Mexico, of the Caliphs of the Islamic Empire to the Marshall Plan, Bataille demonstrates how consumption is the determining factor in human action.
It's essentially economy view through the collective lens of Nietzsche, Heidegger and de Saussure. -
While I felt like some of the sections didn't quite fit the thesis, and that this volume would have been more successful as volume 3 (I think engaging with the interior of life on a more theoretical level is necessary before doing what Bataille wanted to do with economics here), the idea of excess being rooted in anthro-heliodependence (haha, just spitballing here) is incredibly fascinating and explored well. I really feel like the next volumes will help situate this for a reader, much like Hegel's Phenomenology works at a steady pace to unfold the macroscopic implications of Geist from the inside out.
Anyways, I'm deeply looking forward to Volumes II and III, where I imagine the key to Bataille's insane fiction will be lent out. (Not that there really NEEDS to be a key, the work speaks for itself; its more so a key to what he conceptualized it as...but it's the 21st century and such clarifications serve little purpose lol.) -
George Bataille is a big fucking weirdo.
I tried explaining this book to my friend (who doesn’t read philosophy) at a party today, and I was like:
“Yeah, so it’s like a work of political economy where he places classical “restricted economy” in distinction to “general economy”, which begins from the Suns solar excess. Bataille was into occult shit, started a secret society called “acephalle” and wanted to do human sacrifice”.
He just nodded along, I have no idea what he thought of this. We went on to talk about more tame subjects.
Overall I found this work valuable. I’m reading it with Acid Horizon’s reading group. I would recommend pairing this text with Oxana Timofeeva’s “Solar Politics”. Banger combo.
The last few chapters discussing the USSR and the United States Marshal Plan were my favorite chapters I think, and I also really enjoyed the discussion of Tibetan Buddhism.
Weird book.
