Intro & Preface & Contents
(Quotes from Wiki) Georges Bataille renounced Christianity in the 1920s after having converted to Catholicism in 1914. He published scholarly articles on numismatics while working at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He published “essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism).” “Initially attracted to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton... He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis.”
“...after his death [he] had considerable influence on authors such as Michel Foucault, Philippe Sollers, and Jacques Derrida... His influence is felt most explicitly in the phenomenological work of Jean-Luc Nancy, but is also significant for the work of Jean Baudrillard, the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, and recent anthropological work from the likes of Michael Taussig.”
The Accursed Share.
In economics he argued for the accursed share... “according to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.”
“The notion of "excess" energy is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses produced by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, normally has an "excess" of energy available to it. This extra energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury". The form and role luxury assumes in a society are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.” I’ve previously talked about the Potlatch (and possibly the “Golden Years”) as being examples of the accursed share.
This idea of “excess” is fascinating to me as it goes against everything I’ve ever been taught in economics. Spending on the military, for example, is usually viewed as a disastrous waste of resources since there is no positive (productive) result. Capital is invested in something that doesn’t produce more capital. But, then again, I had already noticed (and perhaps commented on) the essential role WWII spending played in ending the Great Depression. That everyone in America, for all intents and purposes, after 1941 had decent paying work improved the lives of most people while also building up the participating businesses and even increasing dramatically the productive capital -- in the form of machinery to make things, for example -- of the nation. The nation, business (large and small), and most individuals were much better off in 1945 then they had been before 1941.
Even if you take the construction of medieval cathedrals as an example of the accursed share, the benefits to individuals (workers, tradesmen, and all the people who provided services to those workers and tradesmen) must have been immense. And afterwards these same people were probably much better equipped to tackle large building projects.
I believe I’ve also examined the beneficial consequences of conspicuous consumption, admitting that, as much as it makes me uncomfortable, that particular kind of consumption provides a lot of people with better jobs than they would have servicing the needs of the average person.
The larger, energy, interpretation of this idea also reminds me of how Robert Pirsig, in Lila, viewed life in general as consistently violating the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the law of gravity. Pirsig writes,
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that all energy systems “run down” like a clock and never rewind themselves. But life not only “runs up,” converting low-energy sea-water, sunlight and air into high-energy chemicals, it keeps multiplying itself into more and better clocks that keep “running up” faster and faster...
The law of gravity... is perhaps the most ruthlessly static pattern of order in the universe. So, correspondingly, there is no single living thing that does not thumb its nose at that law day in and day out. One could almost define life as the organized disobedience of the law of gravity. One could show that the degree to which an organism disobeys this law is a measure of its degree of evolution. Thus, while the simple protozoa just barely get around on their cilia, earthworms manage to control their distance and direction, birds fly into the sky, and man goes all the way to the moon.
Limit-experience.
Working in a French tradition of abjection reaching back to Baudelaire and his paradoxes - "O filthy grandeur! O sublime disgrace!" - Bataille was early struck by what he saw as "the fact that these two complete contrasts were identical - divine ecstasy and extreme horror". He went on to challenge surrealism with a kind of anti-idealism searching for what he called the impossible by breaking rules until you reached something beyond all rules.
In this way, he strove for what Foucault would call "the point of life which lies as close as possible to the impossibility of living, which lies at the limit or the extreme". It was at the edge of limits where the ability to comprehend experience breaks down that Bataille sought to live. Wiki
The Pineal Eye.
The notion of a "pineal-eye" is central to the philosophy of the French writer Georges Bataille, which is analyzed at length by literary scholar Denis Hollier in his study Against Architecture. In this work Hollier discusses how Bataille uses the concept of a "pineal-eye" as a reference to a blind-spot in Western rationality, and an organ of excess and delirium.[39] This conceptual device is explicit in his surrealist texts, The Jesuve and The Pineal Eye. Wiki
L'histoire de l'oeil.
Abjection.
Drawing on the French tradition of interest in the monstrous (e.g., novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline), and of the subject as grounded in filth (e.g., psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan), Julia Kristeva developed the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by/disturbs social reason - the communal consensus that underpins a social order. The "abject" exists accordingly somewhere between the concept of an object and the concept of the subject, representing taboo elements of the self barely separated off in a liminal space.
According to Kristeva, since the abject is situated outside the symbolic order, being forced to face it is an inherently traumatic experience, as with the repulsion presented by confrontation with filth, waste, or a corpse - an object which is violently cast out of the cultural world, having once been a subject. Thus the sense of the abject complements the existence of the superego - the representative of culture, of the symbolic order: in Kristeva's aphorism, "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject".
From Kristeva's psychoanalytic perspective, abjection is done to the part of ourselves that we exclude: the mother. We must abject the maternal, the object which has created us, in order to construct an identity. Abjection occurs on the micro level of the speaking being, through his/her subjective dynamics, as well as on the macro level of society, through "language as a common and universal law". We use rituals, specifically those of defilement, to attempt to maintain clear boundaries between nature and society, the semiotic and the symbolic, paradoxically both excluding and renewing contact with the abject in the ritual act.
The concept of abjection is often coupled (and sometimes confused) with the idea of the uncanny, the concept of something being "un-home-like", or foreign, yet familiar. The abject can be uncanny in the sense that we can recognize aspects in it, despite its being "foreign": a corpse, having fallen out of the symbolic order, creates abjection through its uncanniness - creates a cognitive dissonance. Wiki
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