His influence on Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva and Baudrillard is now more clearly understood and Bataille has emerged as a front-rank cultural theorist who posed questions and paradoxes that were extraordinarily prescient.
Bataille G 1933 ?The Notion Of Expenditure? Full Range OfThis book offers a comprehensive and detailed presentation and analysis of the full range of his writings - political, philosophical, aesthetic, literary, anthropological and cultural.And tackles his thoughts on waste, sacrifice, death, eroticism, surplus, ecstasy and drunkenness, offering the best available guide to this challenging a.The notion of the general economy emerges in its own right in the essay The Notion of Expenditure, which draws together the various strands already at work in Batailles writing Hegel, Nietzsche, Sade, anthropology.
The ideas announced in this essay are more fully developed throughout the three volumes of The Accursed Share, and persist, in a slightly different formulation, in the late texts, such as Eroticism. Whilst Batailles uvre could be categorized as consisting of an array of more or less interchangeable. London: SAGE Publications Ltd, 2000, pp. SAGE Knowledge. 21 Dec 2020, doi. ![]() Bataille G 1933 ?The Notion Of Expenditure? Trial Development CreatesBut a sudden industrial development creates a call for manpower to which the response cannot long be delayed. A librarian by profession, he wrote a great many poems, essays and books during his life (he died in 1962). Some of these writings were novels; most were works of critical theory (non-fiction writings on society and politics). Batailles name is often closely associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, Surrealism, Marxism and the occult. No doubt many of these books are required reading in courses in literary theory, the history of modern art, sociology, political economy, psychology, and ethnology. It was re-printed again in the 1970s, when Gallimard began publishing Batailles Oeuvres Completes (nine volumes so far). In 1989, Zone Books in New York City published a hardcover translation under the title The Accursed Share, Volume I: Consumption (the trilogy as a whole is subtitled An Essay on General Economy). In 1998, Zone published a paperback edition of the book, as well as both hardcover and paperback editions of translations of Volumes II and III. Its as if (Bataille wants us to believe that) this is the very first time that he is pointing out that 1) classical political economy is built on the unquestioned and yet demonstrably false premises that scarcity is the defining aspect of the economy, that individuals will always act according to their self-interest, and that self-interest always involves growth, the accumulation of wealth, and a reduction of waste; but that 2) a study of non-European, non-Christian cultures shows that surplus is actually the defining aspect of the economy, that growth can never be an end in itself, that wealth can indeed be accumulated but precisely for the purposes of deliberately wasting it in spectacular displays of power (human sacrifices, wars, religious monuments, festivals and mass entertainments); and that, in any case, 3) waste is unavoidable. And Bataille (almost) gets away with it, too: he introduces so much new material, material not covered in The Notion of Expenditure -- Islam, Buddhism and the 13th Dalai Lama, and the connections between Calvinism and Marxism -- that his 1933 essay is apparently outmoded, superceded, discarded and forgotten. Bataille has discretely tried to place The Notion of Expenditure into the proverbial Trashcan of History, hoping that no one would notice or care. Writing this book in which I was saying that energy finally can only be wasted, I myself was using my energy, my time, working; my research answered in a fundamental way the desire to add to the amount of wealth acquired for mankind. Should I say that under these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book and could not go on writing it A book that no one awaits, that answers no formulated question, that the author would not have written if he had followed its lesson to the letter -- such is the oddity that today I offer the reader. Note the (intentional) ambiguity of Should I say that under these conditions I sometimes could only respond to the truth of my book and could not go on writing it The only response to this evasively rhetorical question is: Look, Georges: You should say that you stopped writing it, but only if its true. He certainly didnt finish Volume I because of the uniqueness of the Marshall Plan, which is the subject of its very last chapter, or because of the unprecedented scale and extent of the devastation during the Second World War. Bataille finished the book because, like Breton, Aragon, Eluard and others in the Surrealist movement, hed become a Stalinist (15 years after the others), and because Stalin -- the whole Soviet Union, even -- really needed people like Georges to come to its defense. Andre Breton and most of the others had distanced themselves from or openly denounced Stalinism (if not the Communist Party, as well) because of the Soviet Unions murderous campaign to collectivize the kulaks in 1937 (an infamous example of what Karl Marx called primitive accumulation ) and because of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939. The same may be said for 1967, when The Accursed Share was first re-printed: though there (still) were Trotskyists in France, there were very few Stalinists. Those who were Stalinists -- Jean Paul Sartre, among them -- were denounced by the Situationist International. ![]() While this remark might be taken as indirect evidence that Stalin himself wasnt much of a Marxist, it doesnt even admit that Bataille was a Stalinist. The collectivization of lands is in theory the most questionable part of the changes in economic structure. There is no doubt that it cost dearly; indeed, it is regarded as the cruelest moment of an endeavour that was never mild. But if one judges this development of Russian resources in a general way, one risks forgetting the conditions in which it was begun and the necessity that compelled it. These considerations had all the more force since industrialization always demands a large displacement of the population to the cities.
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