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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

sovereignty & the economy « Previous | |Next »
November 11, 2003

Bataille remains a shadowy figure in Anglo-American culture. His presence behind the poststructuralist current of postmodernism (ie., Foucault, Barthes, Derrida, Baudrillard) is barely discernible. Bataille's texts have been translated in the Anglophone world, but his ideas have yet to be received, let alone sorted through and made use of.

Bataille is still seen as a literary figure; an pornographer who is the heir of de Sade and Apollinaire. The literary Bataille is the author of Blue of Noon, Abbe C, Madame Edwarda, The Dead Man, and the Story of the Eye. I do not think that Bataille is taken at all seriously as a philosopher in Australia, even if it is acknowledged that philosophy can be purposely, or even willfully without system; or be anti-systematic and still be philosophy. Philosophically speaking, Bataille can be seen as the mediator between Kojeve's Hegel and the Nietzschean turn taken by French philosophy after the war, as with Foucault and Deleuze.

Whilst Trevor is away I would like to mull over Bataille's idea of sovereignty to further the reception of Bataille as a philosopher. As we have seen sovereignty, for Bataille, is the domain of non-utility and non-objectivity; it is the useless, it disdains use. It chooses the present rather than the future; the transgressive rather than the obedient. It's domain is excess, the realm of the accursed share.

In an earlier post I briefly connected sovereignty to the economy. I said that:


"...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 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."

It is in the first volume of The Accursed Share that Bataille contrasts his idea of sovereignty in relation to consumption and the general economy his idea of servility, production and restrictive economy.

Bataille’s restrictive economy is the contemporary marketplace as we know and live it. In it we are economically servile and a slave to the future. In it we are servile humans who labor in the economy for the sake of the future, to prepare for the future. We servile humans labor to earn money so we can buy goods and consume them. In effect, he is preparing for a temporary sovereignty in the future, as Bataille relates sovereignty to consumption. This restrictive economy is based on scarcity and necessity. Goods are scarce, otherwise we servile humans could just take what we need from an infinite supply. We servile humans need these goods for consumption, otherwise he would have no reason to labor for them. This is the world of classical political economy, which presupposes scarcity and necessity, and obliges us to labors for the future. In this restricted economy we will always be servile.

Now we do attempt to achieve sovereignty in the later consumption of our earnings from the marktplace, such as buying clothes, food and lesiure. But we are really only consuming to survive in order to labor more. So even in our consumption we are servile beings.

Things are quite different in the general economy, which is based on the idea of consumption, of luxurious expenditure. Here sovereignty comes by consuming without producing. The argument is spelt out well in this link I came across. It says that a general economy based on consumption


"....is based on the idea that systems, both natural and economic, have excess energy. This excess energy may be used for growth, but given limits of space--an environment cannot accommodate an infinitely growing system--growth must stop or at least slow down at some point. It is then that the question of how to use excess energy comes into play. In natural systems, excess energy can be given off as heat loss. But in human societies, the expenditure of excess energy is what defines a culture. In terms of individuals, it is those that do the expending that are sovereign. The sovereign individual consumes only, and is not concerned with scarcity, necessity, or utility. He has at his disposal the results of the servile man’s labor, he can consume what he wants, and he is not concerned with profit, for it is his job to waste. The sovereign is completely free of concerns about the future and lives only to consume in the present."

So sovereignty for Bataille is based on the dissipation of excess energy and it involves dedicating ourselves to the expenditure of energy. What he does is flip Marx and the economists on their head. He argues that the question of the economy is not always one of coping with scarcity; it is one of coping with excess or superabundance.

There is an anthropological aspect to this. In Volume 1 of The Accursed Share Bataille explored the crucial role of sacrificing or destroying the "excess" produced in any economy through a series of hsitorical examples. These include the Northwest Coast Indians' potlach; the sacrificial rites of the Maya; the territorial imperative of early Islam, and the massive monasticism of Tibetan Lamaism. Bataille locates the excess, the "accursed share" with the different mode of dispersal in this historical societies. of which these
otherwise widely varying cultures have had to cope. A society can do many things with its excess; it can throw it into refuse pits, it can expend it in endless war, or it can disperse it with a massive movement of non-production as in
Tibetan monasticism.

What of free market consumer capitalism? What is the mode of expenditure in our society? Capitalism re-invest excess in economic growth--that is, in the production of both greater means of production (and consequently a still larger excess).Activities that come under prohibition are those that are interfere with productivity, since in a capitalist economy all effort is to be turned to profit and accumulation, rather than to dissipation and expenditure.

Was the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and the massive expenditure on arms and technology by the US, a way of expending the excess?

Is sovereignty alive in a liberal capitalist society?

One of probing this is to return to Kojeve's reading of Hegel's account of
consciousness and desire in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Kojeve articulates an "end of history" on the grounds that consciousness need no longer be founded upon "slavish" labor, but upon a new possibility. What then is this new possibility? Bataille suggests that it lies in the realm of exchange, giving and receiving.


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