Trevor, a question. It will help to ease my puzzlements about sovereignty.

You wrote in a previous post here that a key theme in Bataille is sovereignty. Sovereignty is one way to access Bataille's thought paths.

From what I have been able to make out sovereignty for Bataille seems to be connected to wasteful expenditure, or more accurately self-sufficient activity performed for its own sake as historically displayed in the luxury of the ruling classes. Sovereignty stands in oppostion to instrumental reason in the public sphere of politics and economics. As I understand it, the core of sovereignty consists of wasteful consumption.

Bataille gives a historical account of sovereignty: ritual sacrifice of the Aztecs; the sacral power of priests and the building of the pyramids in Egypt or the cathedrals in feudal Europe; the military power of the nobility; and the absolute power of the monarch and his court at Versailles. In this excess that disposes of surplus through different modes of expenditure we have something----what is sacrificed--- that is radically opposed to the the rational utilitarian vision of the capitalist economy.

Hence we have religion, art and eroticism built into a mode of expenditure. That is a powerful counterpoint. It is much more more than an ethical reason that is concerned with a flourishing lives.

What Bataille gives us is a general economy founded on the expenditure of excess, on the unproductive and ecstatic consumption of the surplus. I can see that this is a different economy to the restricted economy of capitalist utility that we know live in.

Here is my question.

Does contemporary Australian society have a general economy equivalent to building the pyramids? It seems to me that productive economic activity completely rules our lives in Australia. What has happened to the sacred? Eroticism is a part of the consumer economy. Where is the universality of spending as pure loss in Australia? Where is the general economy as distinct from the restricted economy that reinvests surplus in productive activity?

I pose these questions because I do not see that the great opposition between the sacred and the profane in consumer capitalism that continually creates new desires. Has not this opposition been eased?

What I do see in consumer capitalism are a lot of goodies in the department stores and supermarkets that are there to tempt us----organized to seduce us---to buy what we don't really need.

Around our holiday shack at Victor Harbor sit many many homes built on spec by builders. They sit empty waiting for buyers. The builders are taking a chance here and they could quite easily take a loss if the market turns down.

Is this a capitalism of abundance based on gamblers who make sacrifices?

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