In The Accursed Share, George Bataille asks: ‘Why would classical economy have thought that in the beginning a mode of acquisition such as exchange had not answered the need to acquire, but rather the contrary, the need to lose or squander’? He goes on to suggest that excess and transgression are not aberrations but rather logical outcomes of the general economy, of which classical economy, developed by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, is only a subcategory.
Bataille’s general economy is based on the concept of the inexhaustible flow of energy or surplus. This surplus can be found everywhere; the sun expends its energy on the earth, but once expended, this energy is not used up; plants imbibe it and generate new energy. A part of the newly produced energy is used for survival; however, like the sun, plants, too, produce an excess of energy which they expend on what appear to be ‘useless elements,’ such as the beauty of their leaves. Bataille insists that the same principle extends to all economic phenomena:
A society always produces more than is necessary for its survival; it has a surplus at its disposal. It is precisely the use it makes of this surplus that determines it. The surplus is the cause of the agitation, of the structural changes and of the entire history of society. But this surplus has more than one outlet, the most common of which is growth. And growth itself has many forms, each one of which eventually comes up against some limit.
On this view, it is the expenditure of excess energy that matters, not efficient utilisation of resources. Religion, art, aesthetics, games, and entertainment are all expressions of this surplus, which can be found in sacrifice and the gift as well. In a rational economy, goods and production are designated to meet the general needs of life, and to aid expansion and growth. Given that all production is designed with the future in mind, all objects are pre-ordained.
In sacrifice, however, goods, humans, and other-than-humans are subtracted from this ordaining towards a future end and are no longer subordinated to a predetermined system of values. Both the sacrificed and the person who offers sacrifice are here removed from utilitarian circulation. For Bataille, ‘the victim is surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth’ and ‘can only be withdrawn from it in order to be consumed profitlessly’ in other words: ‘utterly destroyed.’
Once chosen, ‘the victim is the accursed share. […] But the curse tears him away from the order of things; it gives him a recognizable figure, which radiates intimacy, anguish, the profundity of living beings.’ No longer available for any future, planning or use, the person to be sacrificed becomes a free subject. As a free subject, it can enter the realm of the sacred. Bataille writes: ‘The world of the subject is the night: that changeable, infinitely suspect night which, in the sleep of reason, produces monsters. The free ‘subject,’ is […] occupied only with the present.’
It is only in the present moment that the intimacy and the existential depth can become manifest. A fraction of this exchange can also be felt in gift giving, which doesn’t belong to the category of rational exchange. Influenced by Marcel Mauss – who, in his well-known work, The Essay on the Gift proposes that in the so-called archaic societies the gift was a carrier of spiritual force – Bataille forges a connection between the excess energy and the potlatch.
In Mauss’s system, every gift requires a counter-gift to return the inherent power of the gift. A gift places a hold on the receiver and the only way to lift the hold is to return the gift. In archaic societies, social structures were kept in place through the process of gift giving of which the potlatch, practised by the Haida, Makah, Nuxalk and the Tlingit who inhabit the Pacific coast of Canada and the U.S., is the most extravagant example. During a potlatch, there is an orgy of gift giving by the person holding the event; the emphasis is on abundance and excess.
Economic wealth is regarded with disdain and gifts are often destroyed. However, the destruction of precious objects is not meaningless; it shows just how much the potlatch holder honours their guests, how highly they think of them, given that they are prepared to destroy absolutely everything in their honour. In the potlatch, goods are subordinated to the unity of life and living beings; in order to honour life, one needs to annihilate excess, not to hoard and accumulate. The giving away of the surplus, even in the form of human sacrifice, is here seen as an act of existential intimacy.
As Bataille notes in Inner Experience, existential intimacy can be known only through experience. Experience is superior to all knowledge precisely because it comes from non-knowledge, as only non-knowledge can communicate ecstasy and the intensity of life. There can be nothing that attributes meaning or value to experience. Life cannot be comprehended from the outside, since life is new in every moment. Understanding, empathy, communication, and community are all founded in the rupturing of single existence. For Bataille, communicating with that intangible, intimate part of existence, incomprehensible in its intensity, unpredictability and mutation, is only possible through the witnessing of pain. This sort of experience takes individual being to ‘the extreme limit of the possible’, a limit at which ‘everything gives way.’
‘Nature,’ on this view, is the condition of unbroken, unconscious continuity between the individual being and its environment. InTheory of Religion, Bataille uses the word ‘animality’ to refer to immediacy because ‘the animal’ is not a separate consciousness defining itself in opposition to the world but is rather fully continuous with the world. Each animal is in the world like ‘water inside of water.’ This state of indivisibility is most clearly seen when one animal eats another.
The indivisibility of this world is such that violence and death are no disruption to it. Rather, they are stages through which indivisibility passes. Bataille claims that there is no hierarchy in the animal world either; a lion devouring other animals is not a ‘king.’ In the ‘movement of the waters,’ a lion is only a ‘slightly bigger wave,’ overturning other, smaller waves. Bataille writes: ‘the animal opens before me a depth which attracts me and which is familiar to me. In a sense, I know this depth: it is my own.’ Yet the undifferentiated continuity glimpsed in the animal is also that ‘which is unfathomable to me.’
Somewhat facilely, Bataille suggests that the emergence of a subject-object relationship between humans and the world points to the end of the intimacy which envelops and dissolves the animal in its environment. This rupture is consummated by the human use of tools. Although other-than-humans use tools as well, the status of the tool in the human world is different. The tool has no value in itself; it derives value from the expected result and the use to which it is put.
As more and more objects, actions and beings come to be perceived as instruments, the reifying approach spreads like contagion through the world of experience. In what Bataille calls ‘the order of utility,’ materials, time, humans and other-than-humans all become tools in a never-ending chain of production. Yet the nostalgia for surplus energy haunts human beings forced to exist under the order of utility. This yearning lies at the heart of the sacred. The sacred, which humans usually perceive with a mixture of fascination and horror, can be seen as that in which the power of the continuity of being and the excess of energy become manifest.
Natasha Lushetich