Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French philosopher, novelist, and critic whose work develops a sustained critique of utility-economic thinking through analyses of expenditure, sacrifice, eroticism, the sacred, and what he called general economy. He worked as a librarian at the Bibliothèque nationale and the Bibliothèque municipale in Orléans for most of his career, founded several short-lived journals (Documents, Acéphale, Critique), and wrote across philosophy, fiction, and political-theoretical commentary.

¶Core ideas

• The general economy. Most economics is restricted economy — the analysis of how scarce resources are allocated among competing uses. Bataille’s general economy widens the frame to include the question of what is done with surplus. Living systems on earth produce more energy than they need; the question is not “how to allocate scarcity” but “how to expend surplus.” Sacred-festival, war, eroticism, art, gift, religious sacrifice are all modes of expenditure that the restricted-economy frame cannot account for.
• The accursed share. The portion of the surplus that must be expended without return — sacrificed, destroyed, given away. A society that fails to find adequate channels of expenditure suffers the consequences (violently, structurally). Modernity’s attempt to recapture all expenditure as productive investment produces the catastrophic forms of the accursed share — total war, mass extermination, ecological devastation.
• Sovereignty (Bataillean sense). The condition of acting without subordination to future-oriented utility — the sovereign moment is the moment that consumes itself rather than serving an end beyond itself. Distinguished sharply from political sovereignty in Schmitt’s sense.
• The sacred / profane distinction. Sacred is not the opposite of secular — it is the realm of intense affective-religious-political expenditure that profane productive life cannot accommodate. The sacred is the domain of the heterogeneous, where violence, death, and ecstasy meet; the profane is the homogeneous order that requires the sacred’s exclusion to function.
• Inner experience. A non-discursive, non-utility-oriented mode of attention to one’s own condition — distinct from mystical-religious experience and from rational reflection. The site of an authenticity that conventional discourse cannot capture.

¶Key works

• Story of the Eye (1928)
• Inner Experience (1943)
• On Nietzsche (1945)
• The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I (1949); Volumes II-III (posthumous, 1976)
• Eroticism (1957)
• Literature and Evil (1957)
• Theory of Religion (posthumous, 1973)

¶Where his work figures in this library

Bataille is upstream of coherent-confusion, where his analysis of the accursed share — surplus that must be expended — provides the structural account of why sensemaking labor is the contemporary form of necessary expenditure under cybernetic capitalism.