George Bataille´s Expenditure

Bataille’s early pre-war writings delve into thought with an already formed intention of subverting tradition and exposing the canons available to his particular interpretation. Base materialism, the vulgarity locked in abject depreciation, is the ideologue that spearheaded Bataille’s early rhetorical articles in 1930’s France. The materialism offered wished to rid itself of any ideal forms of matter, and in so doing the base material examined would "refuse to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these (idealistic) aspirations". The key to unlocking this materialism is non-productive expenditure, so long sheltered by the economics of accumulation and conservation, excess is located quickly by Bataille as holding the nadir, the temple garden desecrated and abused. By coming to an understanding of expenditure, I believe we may evaluate his entire oeuvre, and make considered judgements on the extremes in philosophy and literature which are to be found there.

Unproductive expenditures have "no end beyond themselves". Like the sun, these activities involve the utter squandering of resources, the sun asks for no recompense for its gift of energy. These expenditures precede activities of production, likewise all consumption for Bataille is made out of expenditure, lack only figures in a luxuriant landscape. Even though these expenditures: e.g. "luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual acts"; may be placed in opposition to one another, their common voluminous flows unite them in the characteristic of a sovereign spent end, a loss which is as great as possible. This loss is the contagious link to more expenditure, explosions of expense, increased chaos.

Enlightenment thought made a champion of utility. Its domination of theory affected all areas of science and the humanities. Bataille’s interpretation of history is that the surfacing of utility played into the hands of the bourgeois industrialist. By basing all thought on a "useful" premise and notions of exchange, scientists made toys for the people, philosophers political economies for the masses. History was altered, our ancestors were seen to be consumed with rational barter and justice rather than senseless loss, art itself was theorised into serving edifying purposes to the delight of the accumulative deipnosophist. Christianity is implicated for its "spasmodic convulsion in religious despair", subverting the common struggle for material. Bataille’s soap box style culminates in the loud proclamation of his expenditure: "order and reserve have meaning only from the moment when the ordered and reserved forces liberate and lose themselves for ends that cannot be subordinated to anything one can account for". Also free expenditure is declared to be the insubordinate value supremely desired by men. This political call to arms is more thoughtfully overturned in the "Accursed share", where the theoretical grounds and interpretative devices are systematically laid out. Yet the "Notion of expenditure" is an energetic signpost on the Marxist avenue, and an essay which Bataille does not come to recant, but expands upon.

The "Accursed share" is perhaps the most systematic and scientific thesis that Bataille elaborated. Central to its cogency is the idea of a "general economy", by which movements of energy may be accounted for on a global scale. Systems (societies are primarily examined by Bataille, but he wished his general economy to apply to all systems down to the molecular), extend by the reabsorption of their surplus energy. When the system no longer grows, this energy must be "lost without profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastrophically". In contrast then to restricted models of energy flow, energy is always in excess for Bataille, questions of life on earth are always posed "in terms of extravagance". Unfortunately there is not the space here to elaborate a complete discussion of theories of energy flow, which engender many crucial and fascinating questions for science and philosophy. Bataille’s engagement with this sphere of thought brings him more premeditatively into the anthropological examination of archaic and modern society.

He wished to elicit a theory of behaviour which takes a decisive perspective and elaborates evidence in light of this viewpoint. By looking at society generally, he wanted to make plain the cosmic circuits of energy that motorise the laws to be found there. For Nietzsche this motor was power, or the differential for degradation of energy, for Bataille it is expenditure. Growth as we know it (progress, or the impetus for increase in production), for Bataille is an impossibility, useless squandering produces pressure which results in two forms 1) Extension 2) Luxury. This is more than a generic reversal of the meaning of growth, but vital to the adaptive nature of the "accursed share". This adaptive nature sets apart the "explosive character of this world, carried to the extreme degree of explosive tension in the present time". When Lazare Carnot theorised that all abrupt changes in motion cause irreversible losses of living forces, he was stating more than a conservative theory of energy for ideal motors. He was also stating a framework by which comprehension of phenomena may be broached. Bataille’s acceptance of abrupt change, indeed his statement of it as the grounds by which theory may be posited, and his extension of it in every possible direction, has profound theoretical implications if we also extend forcefully.

This forceful extension certainly requires libidinal investment, making claims to generality more appropriate. Capitalism is the social arena we find ourselves almost globally trapped within. Bataille’s analysis, preying heavily on Marx is perhaps dated, yet leaves ample space to be rectified for today. In the chapter on capital in the "Grundrisse", Marx said that: "Production for unproductive consumption is quite as productive as that for productive consumption, always assuming that it produces or reproduces capital". Bataille did not perceive the accumulation of capital as being in the common interest. Instead the utter waste of productive forces, for example in sacrificial rites, applies the lit match to the dry forest and encourages more wastage. Marx’s vision of production being assimilable to use-value and thereby destroying the capitalist’s profit margin or exchange-value, relies on the induction of variable capital into the production process. As such a benign distributive system is necessary for Marx, necessarily ignoring the principle of expenditure. Braudel’s study, "A History of Civilisations", which distinguishes historically between capital and the market economy, is taken up by Deleuze and Guattari in "Anti-Oedipus" and "Thousand Plateaus", where the power structures of the capitalist system are most convincingly analysed in the "Apparatus of capture". This analysis takes us further in the direction of understanding how capitalism works, yet Bataille’s expenditure does assist with making inroads into the capitalist complex, specifically because capitalism can be qualified by the rejection of exorbitant waste. Even the rich extravagances of the wealthy are merely consumptive pleasures. Bataille is developing Weber’s ideas with regard to Protestantism and capital:- "....the spirit of the great reformers destroyed the sacred world, the world of the non-productive consumption, and handed the earth over to the men of production, to the bourgeois".

Capitalism masquerades as the "liberation of the natural movement of the economy", and coextensively the liberation of the individual. Yet the individual is commodified, objectified and rationalised into a product, like all the world around him. Bataille qualifies this movement in terms of intimacy, which must be the opposite of all these capital categories. Theoretically, Bataille is perhaps better suited to the exploration of the individual, capitalism is a vast global organization with complex movements and subtle progressive elements. Marxist interpretation of power is commonly thought to be flawed, most probably due to the lack of system inherent within commodification. Bataille’s poetic vision of expenditure is an extreme whereby behaviour may be measured, perhaps as a lost tendency, which may help to explain the explosions of violence and pornography which are simmering below our present position:- ".....subordination to increase, the being in question loses its autonomy: it subordinates itself to what it will be in the future, owing to the increase of its resources. In reality, the increase should be situated in relation to the moment in which it will resolve into a pure expenditure". His general economy looks at the problem of economics, which is to destroy the surplus energy, the essence of the biomass. This lies at the theoretical heart of Bataille’s writings, whether on sexuality, religion or philosophy.

Whereas the first volume of the "Accursed share" concentrates on establishing the general economy and applying it to historical and contemporary society, the latter two volumes shift to eroticism, transgression and sovereignty. Within eroticism, is a section entitled "desire horrified at losing and at losing oneself". Here Bataille talks about the loss and the consumption of resources, and in so doing clears a quite unique space for reflection. "Everything that justifies our behaviour needs to be re-examined and overturned: how to keep from saying simply that thought is an enterprise of enslavement; it is the subordination of the heart, of passion, to incomplete economic calculations". The general economy, by looking at the whole picture wishes to unlock thought from the petty rationalists. Individual fever is paralleled to production, the sweat on the neck of the intellectual which draws a conclusion from previously unregarded endeavour is the gypsy globe, lucubrated and presented. Like Nietzsche in the "Genealogy of Morals", thought is to be kept away from the diseased mediocrity pegging reality to the surgeon’s table, where they are always dissecting it. Bataille positions "daring" in literature as an energising improbability to be sought and willed in constant attrition against moralism. Rimbaud’s "parade" or Henry Miller’s rolling transgressions come to mind; in "Literature & Evil" Bataille points to the authors and their works which for him successfully engender the "daring" and corrosive marauding into the gaps between culture and tradition. Literature for Bataille is loss, a "real daring that has enabled us to find, in the anguish of figurative death or downfall, that singularly excessive joy that engages being in its destruction".

This "singularly excessive joy", is the unreclamable impossibility which extends Bataille’s field to the point of expenditure. Unlike Lyotard, who rejects annihilation on the grounds that it is too subjective, Bataille’s annihilation is the transformation of energy which opens up subjectivity in a blinding flash of brilliance: "At the most intense moment of fusion, the pure blaze of light, like a sudden flash illuminates the immense field of possibility, on which these lovers are subtilized, annihilated, submissive in their excitement to a rarefaction which they desired". In ancient China, instinctive force of the woman (Yin) was stolen or transmitted to the man (Yang), as the augmentation of powers in a circuit of intensity. Instinct is deepened on the condition that the man does not ejaculate, the body is constituted between man and woman internally, the Tao of desire and immanence. Procreation is possible according to Confucianism, where ejaculation releases the circuit of intensity, yet Tao held a deeper secret of life for the Chinese. The Tao also defined a totality. The sense of this totality is vital for Bataille, a vague sensation where nothing is clear or distinct. These animal feelings overrun us in a "high pitched intensity"- Captain Ahab chasing whale, his personal history and myth subservient to "becoming". Among these feelings an embrace is possible, a singular embrace, the "losing of yourself", drowned in the immense ocean, putrefied, buried alive in the casket of your particular design. The hand carved death in Bataille is at once the smile on the face of the virgin or the masochism of banality at the end of a cynical burnt existence. To reprieve opposites is irrelevant, their ignition in any one second of transformative inculcation puts them on the page, spiralling closely around themselves, immanentising all potential before complete disintegration.

Communication is of importance to Bataille, his most sustained engagement with its problems lie in the book "Inner Experience". This attachment to the problem of communication in ecstatic "mystical" states is an attachment to the problem of economics deployed on the plane of expenditure. "Flowing into one another, the contents of various forms of expenditure (laughter, heroism, ecstasy, sacrifice, poetry, eroticism), defined of themselves a law of communication regulating the play of the isolation and the dissolution of beings" This "law of communication" is the extensive end of the intensive interaction and flows of expenditure. Expenditure is always "in excess" for Bataille, which means that when an isolated being communicates, as for example the mystic proclaims that "the spirit of God flows like water", the extensive differential between energy required and energy expended is greater than the communication achieved. A channel for this flow is rectified (through mystical practice, contemplation, alignment with chance), which bridges the gap and explodes into the communication. Then for the mystic, the spirit of God does flow like water, the flow of God is experience as water. At the moment when communication is aligned with intensive energy dissipation, the mystic is filled with more energy, accumulation in the extensive sense occurs, the expenditure "in-itself" leads to greater expenditure. This leads Bataille to write that "the extreme limit is accessible through excess, not want".

This communication is also a communion with death. Death is an incomplete thought for Bataille, the thought that occurs agonisingly and disablingly. Schopenhauer’s solace in his search for the elusive "will-to-live", for Bataille is complicity in "despair, madness, love, supplication. Inhuman, dishevelled joy of communication- for despair, madness, love.....not a point in empty space which is not despair, madness, love and even more: laughter, dizziness, vertigo, nausea, loss of self to the point of death". Bataille wields a kind of transcendence in his theoretical writings. This transcendence is however radically eliminative to the transcendence of Kant which celebrated epistemology, Bataille conversely sets out to destroy the object, the subject is the ruptured heart of the unknowable, the object entirely incompatible with its grasping. Objects are not known, they are to be annihilated:- "....we need to determine the point at which the excessive production will flow like a river to the outside. It is a matter of endlessly consuming- or destroying the objects that are provided". Transcendence is the lightning strike of illusion, immanently rupturing, stuck in the depths of a " dead night", not knowing if it is in heaven or hell, what is true or false, up or down. A drunk senseless self wildly splaying, transcendence is the discontinuity between separate states. Communication, if it may be called a rectification, communicates non-knowledge for Bataille, an ecstasy, an expenditure that completes the cycle and once again sets forth "in reality"- closer to death.

The book "Guilty" was written during the depths of the Second World War. Its tortured paragraphs twist in the confusion of France being overrun by the conquering Germans. Its desperate pit of inertia does strangely contain a gleeful heart. ".....I now see truth as founded on incompletion, though the "founding" is only an appearance....It is not a position but a movement, containing every possible process.....the wild impossibility that can’t avoid limits but can’t stay inside them either". Bataille’s notion of incompleteness is another of his "flickering connections" which stir him on the brink of self-destruction to continue in the face of absolute absorption. The denial of intellectual answers to his incessant questioning of the universe is an attempt to translate the exposure of contemplation into a language which does not mediate itself into self-satisfied figures containing "the truth". Truth for Nietzsche was a feminine basking in security, which had no place in his severe mental cleanliness, urging him to extract thought from the perilous "no to truth" closed to philosophy. Man had paid dearly for this truth, according to Nietzsche, he had paid most apparently- "in physiologicis". Bataille’s need for incompleteness is like the passion of Pyrrho and Epicurus, who hated most what they loved- i.e. dialectics and all theatrical virtue. It sets up the tension by which an escape from the labyrinth is possible. Nietzsche’s hatred for the feminine is obvious and tragic, Bataille’s hatred for answers is the plain alignment with his pulsion to ask:- "Through what could be called incompleteness or animal nakedness, or the wound, the different separate beings communicate, acquiring life by losing it in communication with each other".

Pyrrho’s nihilistic protest against the doctrine of identity, which was highlighted by Nietszche, folds into the passages of the "somme atheologique" like the call of the harpy. Bataille willed the ruin to brandish its juice, to fill his being with its incompleteness, making no path untraceable, no avenue too revolting to pass within. All writing is a bridge to the author, even abstract theory or scientific assemblage of other writer’s thoughts. A will is always apparent, a psychological assessment pertinent. The assessment of Bataille is necessarily a complex one, his total pessimism, his reluctance to know, understand or transcend, forms a startling barrier to the tiny ecstatic moments wherein astounding possibilities suddenly become manifest. His requirement of break-up- similar to Genet’s absorption in his prison cell, is the only fusional link we may tentatively posit when writing "On Bataille":- "If contentiousness is freed in me, it is so I can be a single point, a foaming edge where the waves contradictions break up. My awareness that I’m a point of rupture and communication again elicits laughter at my suffering and rage".

This portrayal of expenditure as the mythical basis for understanding the thought of Bataille is of course beset at the outset by the impossibility of such a movement. All we can hope to do is to briefly align ourselves with the extremes laid down here, then to fade back into other considerations. Yet I hope that you will agree that by bringing expenditure to the foreground, some black diseased light might creep across the page, some savage incendiary might be thrown into the fortress walled panopticon of restricted thought.

Bataille’s importance as a modern or even "post-modern" thinker has frequently been alluded to. His position, emanating from the conundrum of surrealist thought, Marxism and Nietzschean esoterism, is unique. That he could combine these disciplines is remarkable, that he completed an oeuvre which exhibits elements of pornography alongside economics alongside materialist approbation of Christian mysticism deserves investigation. In this section, I shall attempt to apprehend some of the most cogent comments on Bataille in order to extend expenditure into a general concept, comprehensive and viable in fields outside and including its economic nucleus.

The general economy of Bataille has been formulated into a discussion by Derrida. "From a restricted to a general economy" looks at the way in which the metaphysical violence of expenditure clashes against Hegelianism. Hegel’s negativity, agonised and represented via Kojeve, sits uneasily next to the more extreme movement inherent within Bataille’s expenditure. "The blind spot of Hegelianism, around which can be organized the representation of meaning, is the point at which destruction, suppression, death & sacrifice constitute so irreversible an expenditure, so radical a negativity- here we would have to say an expenditure without reserve- that they can no longer be determined as negativity in a process or a system". Hegel’s complex concept of Aufhebung is the crucial idea which is being called into question. Bataille wished to incur "surpassing without maintenance", so reversing Aufhebung and altering the master/slave dialectic, which in "The Phenomenology of Spirit", systemises the directive to absolute knowledge and the ideal system. The complexity of Hegel’s Aufhebung required that Bataille contemplated its subtefuge in a state of anxiety, yet this anxiety is one which is marked with gaiety. That is, Bataille, whilst moving into a zone where the Aufhebung is effective, escapes Hegelian negativity, and likewise any crude satisfaction of it; ie "happiness": by undermining the way in which it is motorised. The dynamic of the Aufhebung is accelerated and made multiple at ever instance of its manifestation, without maintenance of former states, open to the explosion of expenditure. With expenditure as the fuel, system is impossible, fragmentation inevitable. Expenditure affirms negativity, death, perversion, subtefuge; it gives an extra impetus to transgression such that it may transcribe itself, ie it is not necessarily the object of the transgression. "In his discourse he must mark the point of no return of destruction, the instance of an expenditure without reserve which no longer leaves us the resources with which to think of this expenditure as negativity. For negativity is a resource. In naming the without reserve of absolute expenditure; "abstract negativity", Hegel, through precipitation, blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric of negativity. And did so through precipitation toward the seriousness of meaning and the security of knowledge".

Thus Hegel’s need for unity, his instantiation with the State, and his ethical viewpoint are not part of Bataille’s schema. Yet Bataille does align himself with Aufhebung, then agonisingly tries to undermine its power. Derrida continually tries to locate the exact point of departure between Hegel and Bataille, the cross-over mark. Here the two routes stretch in different directions, in one the happy individual of Hegel, in the other the "Dionystic" revelers dancing in some strange intoxicated Bataillan nightfall. Psychological precipitation, relevant after Freud, is not a consideration directly attuned to Hegel. Kantian ethics play a more brutal role in curbing Aufhebung onto a conception paralleling metaphysics with political discourse. Bataille, set outside restricted arenas, is a peculiar renegade, where the theoretical spectrum of Hegel’s thought may be aligned with a practice far removed from the safe bounds of nurchured educational precursors. This movement is an "opening out", in that it takes in previously considered "base" elements, and values them with "noble" elements. Knowledge, at the pinnacle of the negative death in Hegel, is as irrelevant as the loss of self on orgasm. "Instead of being simply overturned, it (the phenomenology of the mind) is comprehended: not comprehended by knowledge-gathering comprehension, but inscribed within the opening of the general economy along with its horizons of knowledge and its figures of meaning. General economy folds these horizons and figures so that they will be related not to a basis, but to the non-basis of expenditure, not to the telos of meaning, but to the indefinite destruction of value". Bataille’s ideas set this impossibilty into play, understanding itself is at stake. With the destruction of value eating away at any possible basis of understanding, understanding is primed to explore darker horizons and more indulgent pleasures. Derrida did not follow these possibilities, but amused himself with the endless play of words swept up along the beach-heads where oceans of thought desecrate themselves. Hegelianism was one such ocean, Batailleism is impossible.

It would seem that Bataille’s expenditure could be subject to sustained scientific engagement. Bataille’s hostility to scientific procedure, results from its assumptions regarding ends, its naivety with respect to politics, and its generally conservative economics. Philosophy, perhaps still endowed with the project of Descartes to found a knowledge firmly based on universal principles, often of a mathematical nature, does however offer the prospect of reconciliation and reversal for Bataille:- "All conscious, particularly theoretical knowledge is an effect of what proceeds by way of a loss in representation and knowledge.....A general economy thus relates consumption and expenditure, gain and loss, conservation and waste. It makes them complementary by both differentiating and intermixing them, and doing so differently under different conditions". Arkady Plotnitsky, in his essay "Bataille", relates the general economy to quantum mechanics, in that it liberates multiple possibilities for any particle in its field, indeterminacy and heterology being concomitant effects of such a liberation. The unproductive loss, expenditure without reserve, is then a connective instrument for Plotnitsky, in that it is a way to relate particles without necessarily tying them to each other. Thus an anti-epistemology may be achieved, such as Bohr’s general economy.

Plotnitsky also describes Derrida as the most radical theorist following Bataille, and that his "differance" is in effect, the trace by which we may refigure classical theories in order to come to to a true anti-epistemology. Plotnitsky’s opinion may be summarised by;- "Intuitively, it seems apparent that expenditure leads to multiplicity and heterogenity, in view of the inexhaustible remainder of any given interpretation and the fundamental iterability, in Derrida’s sense, of any given sign or mark-the trace-resulting from this loss". Bataille is still struggling with totality according to Plotnitsky, in that expenditure hides its totality, present to itself but not available for interpretation. Even though Bataille wields expenditure in a variety of modes from the psychological to the anthropological, the suspicion is that Derrida is required to salvage the conception theoretically, and mobilise it so that extension to presence is not made and we are not left with some hideous, destructive, will to expenditure. Bataille is given credit by Plotnitsky, in that his inscription of loss & waste where classical theories "see" conservation and investment, is an important transformation of modern "theoretical horizons", yet his usage of the general economy differs from Bataille’s in that he envisages a "complementarity" between expenditure and production/conservation. This complementarity is closer to differance, and opens up the theoretical grounds for quantum mechanics to be expanded alongside it. Yet I would want to argue that Bataille’s expenditure, rather than hiding a totality, gives us a non-basis by which totality and multiplicity may be apprehended. This does not contradict Plotnitsky’s view, yet steers it in another direction, by which the work of Blanchot and Foucault may be injected to refigure and lance Bataille’s expenditure so that it will spill its contents for us. In this play of thought, revolving in ceaseless energy, are the limits and areas we exactly wish to unearth.

Blanchot’s relationship with Bataille is a much scrutinised affair, fuelled by literary similarities and personal references scattered throughout their later texts. The powerful collection of essays labelled "The Infinite Conversation", includes a section on the limit-experience where Blanchot engages with the affirmation of negative thought in Bataille, and therefore gives us a close reading of expenditure from a different perspective:- "The limit-experience is the response that man encounters when he has decided to put himself radically in question. This decision involving all being expresses the impossibility of ever stopping, whether it be at some consolation or some truth at the interests or the results of an action, or with the certitudes of knowledge or belief. It is a movement of contestation that traverses all of history, but that at times closes up into a system, at other times pierces the world to find its end in a beyond where man entrusts himself to an absolute term (God, Being, the Good, Eternity, Unity)-and in each case disavows itself". Bataille’s expenditure, wrestling with the impossibilities that it opens before us, is caught in the "double bind" of this movement. The double bind is the paradox of a relation which is not a relation, the multiplicity of possibilities which are an impossibility, the presence which is not a presence. The knowledge sought is non-knowledge, yet this non-knowledge is not the negation of knowledge, but the affirmation of negation when there is nothing left to negate. Through this movement (keeping with Blanchot’s logic), the limit-experience is reached, experience itself. For Blanchot, Bataille is wrapped in the "passion of negative thought", which is a passage through which ecstatic states and apprehension of experience may be breached. "The limit-experience is the experience of what is outside the whole when the whole excludes every outside; the experience of what is still to be attained when all is attained and what is still to be known when all is known: the inaccessible, the unknown itself". This is in keeping with Barthes when he said that morbid-mindedness extends over a greater area than healthy-mindedness. The area that is extended over is the zone of experience, and experience fully in the grip of chance, the play of Heraklitus or the dice roll in Bataille. Closure does not figure in this experience, even in death we see just another number etched on the dye.

Blanchot’s interest in the interior experience devolves the expenditure of the poet or the visionary. He is caught in the incessant world, where the impossibility of his existence is sovereign. As with de Sade or Lautremont, the imaginary demons collect and block any path to action. The inertia of the underground man is prevalent..... "should he allow himself to be seized by the infinity of the end, then he must respond to another exigency- no longer that of producing but of spending, no longer that of succeeding, but of failing, no longer that of turning out works and speaking usefully, but of speaking in vain and reducing himself to worklessness". Mallarme’s visionary epithets or Holderlin’s work which is not work in words, hovers over the literary scene of madness, extreme excitation of vision, Apollonian forces of art. Bataille coluld be aligned with the Dionysiac if we assume Nietzsche’s crude distinction in the "Birth of Tragedy". Later Nietzsche attributed more force to the Dionysiac; "Have I been understood?: Dionysios against the crucified".

The visions of Bataille, prevalent in his fiction, destroy knowledge with a knowing mirth. Expenditure hits the drum, the dance is not a Christian celebration of parable, but a desperate clambouring for life when life has been deemed unliveable; "Yes, as though impossibility that by which we are no longer able to be able, were waiting for us behind all that we live, think and say- if only we have been once at the end of this waiting, without ever failing short of what this surplus or addition, this surplus of emptiness, of "negativity", demanded of us, and this in us the infinite heart of the passion of thought". Blanchot recuperates Bataille in terms of his nihilism and the closure of aspects of philosophical thought represented by his writings. Responding to Heidegger’s examination "the end of philosophy", Blanchot takes expenditure to mean the voidal heart located on the edge of poetry, great literature, the creative genius fully open to the subtle guiding forces locked in brilliant paradox. To write designates these interlocutors as haunting spectres immersing the mind with their powerful twisting gestures and serene connectives to and from the experience that makes experience itself untenable. In order to relieve ourselves of this magnetic presence, yet stepping lightly away from it, Foucault’s essay analysing the paths of transgression is a pertinent thread in the labyrinth.

Foucault’s homage to Bataille appeared when Bataille’s influence in France was beginning to be appreciated in full. Foucault rightly points to Bataille as the inheritor of the legacy of Nietzsche, he sees in his writing the possibility of transgression set forth with the style and fortitude of a thinker not boxed or implicated in herd intellectual pursuit. Bataille writes to "awaken us from the confused sleep of dialectics and anthropology; to do this we require the Nietzschean figures of tragedy, Dionysios, the death of God, the philosopher’s hammer, the Superman approaching with the steps of a dove, the Return". The centrality of "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" to Nietzsche’s work is more than a matter of taste. The extreme polemic and rhetorical passages, the mythical riddles, the declamatory paradoxes are paralleled by Bataille’s fictional work. Both types of writing are heavily defended against trivial analysis, they challenge you to look at the whole, to make connections from the fictional to the philosophical and vice versa. They leap immensely from one sentence to the next, from one word to another, so that the emptiness of relation shines through like every nightmare fear can conjure;- "Bataille’s language, continually breaks down at the centre of its space, exposing in his nakedness in the inertia of ecstacy a visible and insistent subject who had tried to keep language at arms length, but who now finds himself thrown by it, exhausted upon the sands of that which he can no longer say".

Kant’s God, rectified in Nietzsche’s marketplace, the most common arena of exchange, rears itself as another monster in the work of Bataille. Edwarda the prostitute is God. God is spent, expended by the slow horror, where fear is mixed with ecstacy, obscenity with intimacy. The absence of meaning is apparent in the hairy crack, the precise bolero and violence, as Edwarda slides her fully naked form onto the recumbent taxi driver, we are forced to watch God fuck the mute worker. "It indicates the moment when language challenges itself in laughter, tears, the over turned eyes of ecstacy, the mute and exorbitated horror of sacrifice, and where it remains fixed in this way at the limit of its void, speaking of itself in a second language in which the absence of a sovereign subject outlives its essential emptiness and incessantly fractures the unity of discourse".

Foucault’s concerns revolve around the transgression of language and the surpassing of limits which sets the limits more firmly into place. Yet "transgression" presupposes a subject to transgress. Again this is being threatened by the expenditure of energies. The "transcendental" recesses are being explored in Bataille’s writing. Kant’s "dialectic of production", by which man produces objects and therefore his agency, gives a simple reading of the gratification of need. "But it would undoubtedly be misguided to conceive of hunger as that irreducible anthropological factor in the definition of work, production and profit: and similarly, need has an altogether different status, or it responds at the very least to a code whose laws cannot be confined to a dialectic of production". Grounded instead in expenditure, the economics of accumulation, which set into play Kant’s legislative procedures, are ruptured into a downward spiral. The acts of writing and knowing are reconfigured as projectiles hurtling into the space of alienation, disjunction, miscomprehension. Here we do not encounter the moral universe, but the isolated codes of volumptuous war and crime. Bataille is again responding to Nietzsche in his fragmentation of the transcendental subject, yet his projection of it into the abyss reanimates the methodology of de Sade and the profound perversion of the incarnated atheist ceaselessly seeking the extreme lack of God.

The reading of Bataille as the transgressor of limits concentrates on the limits more than the transgression itself. The "Story of the Eye" is filled with an "excrutiating restless sexual intensity". By refocusing on this intensity, the reader passes through limits effortlessly, via a complex of metaphors encircling and surrounding new horrors without time to measure their efficacy. "The narrative is simply a kind of flow of matter enshrining the precious metaphorical substance". Yet what is being transgressed, or the sacrificial vicims themselves, do deserve consideration. Jean-Luc Nancy in his essay "The unsacrificable", takes such a perspective and examines the objects of sacrifice, and the West’s relation to sacrifice via figures such as Christ and Socrates. This fascinating and potentially infinite area of research could take us far from the focus of expenditure, right up to the most hideous sacrifice of the Nazi concentration camps. Systematic death nominally unites the writing of Bataille and Blanchot, yet Blanchot’s "Death Sentence" and "Literature and the Right to Death", more persuasively retain the artistic tension of "death and the other", in contrast to Bataille’s headlong situation within the decentred criminality of disgust and recoiling from the barbarity of culture.

Nancy interestingly locates a dialectic and mimesis at the sacrificial extremes where Bataille’s expenditure would have them dissipate chaotically in vile words and the impossibility of reproduction:- "Denunciations of economism and simulation run throughout the dialectical understanding of sacrifice, up to and including Bataille. Indeed - and here Bataille’s contribution cannot be contested, a fascination with sacrifice does not prevent one from remarking on a generalised "economism" and "mimetism" in its dialectic. Sacrifice as self-sacrifice, universal sacrifice, truth, and sublation of sacrifice is itself the institution of the absolute economy of absolute subjectivity, which can only ever mimic (in the pejorative sense) a passage through negativity, from which, symmetrically it cannot but reappropriate or trans-appropriate itself infinitely". Nancy contrasts the Nazi absolute sacrifice of the Aryan for the community, with the Jewish sacrifice for self-preservation. Bataille’s position here is ambiguous and contradictory, mainly due to the scope of his writing on sacrifice and the historical events which unfolded during the last war. Alan Stoekl asks the question, was Georges Bataille a fascist? and explores the political shifts that surround his writing. It seems clear to me that a decisive political stance cannot be rectified with any satisfaction. Bataille is more elusively Nietzschean in his destruction of the object , and he does not enter into the revitalisation of the subject through Dasein or Ereignis. His attack on dialectics is also an attack on Kant’s sublime, and leaves no escape from sacrifice through discourse or the imagination. Sovereignty for Bataille is meaningless, which rectifies death not as a movement in work. Representation of death cannot be sublated or used. Only "the world of discontinuity" has the power to imagine death, knowledge is possible in discontinuity- death lies beyond knowledge and the conceivable. Death then is decisively not the destruction of a race as proposed by the Nazis, but a pit of meaninglessness which may be examined positively with evidence and argument to inscribe it once again into the world whereby its stench carries it forth to sensibility and intelligence. After the holocaust, sacrifice cannot be adequately portrayed, as Adorno has noted, it is the question which defies an answer. For Bataille, the answer, if at all, lies in poetry.

Nancy’s comments do hold cogency, yet this importance is a morally ambiguous one, which derives its power from the cyclone of death initiated by Nazi Germany. If we would want to place expenditure with purpose and to the radical degree it extends itself to, we could dispel the problems of dialectic and mimesis which give some rational ground to the procedure. If we only conceive of Bataille as replotting Hegel and Kojeve as Shadia B Drury does in her book, then his revelling in the abyss takes on a more juvenile aspect. Drury argues that Bataille took Kojeve’s reading of Hegel to heart and the tragedy of history that ends in the death of man requires that Bataille maintain opposites in a dualistic contestation, a perpetual negation or poetic dualism. Her position is reminiscent of Habermas’s in the "Philosophical Discourse on Modernity", where Bataille is retaylored to fulfill a parallel trajectory to Heidegger. Both thinkers (according to Habermas), wished to overcome subjectivism, and merely take different routes to this goal. Heidegger produces a critique of metaphysics whereby the ontological presuppositions are delved into, Bataille employs a moral critique by which the foundations of subjectivity are "unbounded". Heidegger’s self-transcendent subject is "disempowered in favour of a superfoundationalist destining of Being", whereas the spontaneous drive ridden subject of Bataille is liberated in true sovereignty.

Habermas and Drury both misequate sovereignty with value. The perpetual negation is meant to be Bataille’s sovereign act of man which distinguishes him from the animals. Man negates nature because it was the given;- "But today, situated as we are in a rational, sanitized fortress, in a civilization where nature has all but been banished, human negativity must be directed toward the new given- toward civilization itself". Therefore (according to Drury), Bataille attacks the moral foundations of civilizations, which can be readily seen to be a futile procedure, (likened by Drury to postmodernity and its defiance of logocentrism). Habermas’s characterisation of Bataille reaches a similar conclusion when he exhibits the difficulty with Bataille’s project to name the incommensurable. Habermas also criticised Bataille for drifting in and out of the "dialectic of enlightenment" and erotic writing. Yet sovereignty for Bataille is not true or valued, it is the realm beyond any utility. Bataille does not maintain perpetual negativity as man’s sovereignty, but analyses its energies by which it may be shattered. His "moral critique", is not an unbounding of the self, but a wrenching of any claims to selfness through unbridled horror, absolute waste, and the most extreme occasions that one could possibly attach to experience. His writings, whether on a theoretical or mythical level portray the vacated lot where sovereignty perhaps once stood. Civilization whilst certainly not undermined by Bataille, can be seen to be stretching. Our society is not so far removed from the one which spawned the National Socialists. We cannot locate ourselves in a safe liberal outside in which the resolution of demonic drives to power has been satiated. Habermas’s formulation of Bataille as a Dionysiac apologist, fatally bound by theoretical flaws is as trivial as the one which posits Bataille as an idiosyncratically perverted reader of Hegel. A thinker less imbued with conservative credentials is Baudrillard.

His work on symbolic exchange and death incorporates a section on death in Bataille. The death drive of Freud is set against the expenditure of Bataille:- "Instead of establishing death as the regulator of tensions and an equilibrium function, as the economy of the pulsion, Bataille introduces it in the opposite sense, as the paroxysm of exchanges, superabundance and excess". The constraint in Freud is the repetition of the death drive as the pulsions hit ever deeper onto the surface of the objects, as differences and intensities are eliminated, as the ultimate route to death is plummeted systematically and methodically. The turnings of the maze which are Freud’s inscriptions of energized life, are merely residues in the seabed of death. Death obliterates, the inorganic subsumes the organic, structuralised life dissipates. Freud’s destruction sets up an economism to which death is the profit-maker. Objectively the finality of death as a drive is the systems pay master, all energy dispersals are dissipated in its wake, the register clocking its score ever higher, the idealism breached (according to Baudrillard). "Only sumptuous and useless expenditure has meaning; the economy has no meaning, it is only a residue that has been made into the law of life, whereas wealth lies in the luxurious exchange of death: sacrifice, the "accursed share", escaping investment and equivalence, can only be annihilated. If life is only a need to survive at any cost, then annihilation is a priceless luxury. In a system where life is ruled by value and utility, death becomes a useless luxury, and the only alternative".

Bataille’s inscription of expenditute to the point of death defies the death drive of Freud. A circular notion is counterpoised to a linear model. Death may be freely mixed with sexuality, as Bataille does in his fiction and theory, the point of life is not death, death appears as uneconomic luxuriating next to sexuality, a horrific testament to the discontinuous exposures of ambiguity, chance and the spontaneous. Marcuse’s humanism or freedom does not make an entrance at death’s gate. Bataille’s death drive, bound in anguish and restlessness, is the judge at the trial of Gilles de Rais. The poetry of the intense confession, exorbitant perversion, set against death, at last raising a smile on the face of the judge, the monster is forgiven, yet still sentenced to death.

Baudrillard locates the difficulty with sumptuous expenditure not in the last gasp inscription of dialectics or sublimation, but in the influence of naturalism. Whereas Bataille subverts the death drive to counter its idealistic closure, he "naturalises a tendency to discontinuity". Sex and death are conjoined in a continuum, the discontinuous death of the individual is secreted finality as their "own" death. As such, Bataille says that we "yearn for our lost continuity", thus, according to Baudrillard reawakening a Romantic naturalism of natural order or even the soul. Since Schopenhauer’s elimination of the soul and his depiction of the liberum arbitrium indifferentiae as the unconscious striving of the will-to-live, growing philosophical atheism has banished such theological indulgence. Nietzsche deepened the conception as the will-to-power, how then could Bataille be labelled with such a misnomer?

This criticism of Bataille centres on the use of tendencies or "yearnings". Bataille’s urge to live on, the desire for continuity which founds the discontinuity of the individual, is for Baudrillard the weak link in the expenditure package. Baudrillard wants the loss of order to be unassailable, without any preservation. He makes clear the difference between the symbolic and the real and asks;- "Why seek the security of an ideally prodigious nature, as opposed to the economists ideally circulating nature?" Bataille’s "natural" urge is for Baudrillard a betrayal of the materialism he seeks, and an idealism which would help to reinstate the hierarchies being levelled. Expenditure would therefore lead to a natural model of prodigality with a "substantial ontological definition of economics". This is inadequate due to the subjective dialectic it incurs whereupon elated expenditure is lost into Christianity and perversion: it is also "a kind of objective dialectic between continuity and discontinuity where the challenge posed by death to economic organization is effaced in the face of a great metaphysical alternative".

This interpretation of Bataille, taken mainly from a reading of "Eroticism", is acceptable if you concur with Baudrillard’s materialism. Personally I find Baudrillard’s conclusions extreme, given the base materialism of Bataille, the yearning for lost continuity could be aligned with the anguish and restlessness which is always for Bataille a precursor to the annihilation of unity in thought or action. As with all problems with expenditure, they figure in a clear path to the author and the reader in a directive made relevant by indifference and delight set against the volcano.

In this section I shall examine the thoughts of writers who have specifically looked at the economics of expenditure. In so doing, I will explore the social implications of "pure loss" and relate the comments on the general economy to Bataille’s need and understanding for community.

A criticism of the general economy comes in a short essay by G.Bennington, which marks it alongside Kant. He writes that the general economy is restricted like Kant’s because the world is round or "at least by its being a closed finite surface". Bataille’s alignment with the decay of objects is only comprehensible within the closure of a finite surface according to Bennington. Luxury also only exists as always already restricted into the "signification of its failure to be excessive". Such a restriction, or Derridean "stricture", means that attempts at generalisation are already part of an economy of restriction, as Bennington states:- "there is only ever exchange and signification, even in the thermodynamics of solar energy".

Taking a Bataillan position (is this possible?), one would want to argue against such a phylactery. Space is not contained in the closed object of the world for Bataille, but is a "mortuary abyss of debauchery". The general economy does not apply to the world as we know it, but as we don’t know it, as it appears lost and blinded in the venomous complexities of agonised sacrifice. The world is not a discreet object for Bataille, but a maze, where interior and exterior merge, where limits are maelstroms of unrelenting cyclonic dimensions. Bennington’s comments do not approach such a perspective, luxury as we have seen exists in expenditure, not in its failure to be excessive, signification as sovereignty can only be reclaimed as entirely meaningless expense, e.g. the thermodynamics of solar dissipation. Bennington does confuse the issues in his light-hearted piece, yet represents some of the objections to expenditure which spring from a rationalist position.

It is surprising to find amidst the horror and pornography in Bataille, the appearance of "community". As JL Nancy has remarked, the despair for the lost (sacred) community, inured through lovers, recurs throughout Bataille’s writing. Is Bataille nostalgic for this lost sensation? Since the war, strikes, inner city riots, bankruptcy have all provided economists with unerring headaches. Our situation does cause frequent escape to a feudal or religious past where power sedimented into stricter formations. Bataille is not yearning for this past, but augmenting the feelings of despair, this is where his sovereignty lies. An essay by Jean Joseph Goux takes the general economy more seriously than G. Bennington and working through it attempts to analyse our present situation.

He locates in the economic the distinction between the profane and the sacred:- "Whereas the profane is the domain of utilitarian consumption, the sacred is the domain of experience opened by the unproductive consumption of the surplus: what is sacrificed". This distinction for Bataille rests on the understanding of consumption and production. As noted above, the general economy applies when resources are "in excess". For Bataille this excess is to be dealt with, consumption cannot fall back into a secondary rational consumption, a utilisation of its power for productive purposes, but must be promoted to the level of unredeemed loss. Unlike Marx, whose socialist community theoretically succeeded by the re-integration of surplus, Bataille does not figure growth or progress beneficial. Indeed both notions are impossibilities, production itself is a difficulty for Bataille precisely because it succeeds.

Both Marx and Bataille wrote at a time when capitalist production could be seen to be a well oiled machinic continuum of readily comprehensible capital accumulation. Now production has taken on a wholly spectacular "post-modern" turn, in a sense validifying Bataille’s general economy, and in a sense negating it. The validification lies in that unproductive expenditure now dominates social life, so much so that it takes on the importance of the sacrificial (fun-parks, television "events"). The negation lies in that all production now has to be umbilically connected to consumption, so destroying the categories and making complete loss or expenditure irrelevant. JJ Goux takes the second line of argument, and says that the surplus has lost its meaning of glorious consumption, is now only re-invested capital. He says that Bataille could not have imagined that to compete productively now, industrialists have to infinitely refine unproductive consumption (comforts, luxury, technical innovation, the superfluous). Like Baudrillard, Goux concludes that the value of expenditure is now negated, the symbolic and synthesised expenditures that are a huge part of the current state of capitalism, make any recourse to utter loss of resources unimportant. Production does not have a rational consumptive end, but a non productive leisure based end, the profane nineteenth century is now the hyper-profane or flatly consummate nihilism of the twentieth.

There is certainly some grounding in this argument. If Bataille was writing now, I am sure he would take new economic developments into account. His expenditure could then make room for the unproductive expenditures that television and cinema and the media in general are converging towards. As Deleuze and Guattari wrote in their Anti-Oedipus, the capitalist phenomenon is the "transformation of surplus value of code into the surplus value of flux". Do we stop and try to halt this transformation? Do we want to re-institute our codes as they were before? Or do we take the other path:- "For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialised enough, not decoded enough from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to "accelerate the process", as Nietzsche put it: we haven’t seen anything yet".

Perhaps such hyperbole is not to everyone’s taste. Certainly in France among some intellectuals the extreme end of Bataille’s work lead to a brief flourishing of economic thought tied to sexual considerations. JF Lyotard’s "libidinal economy" is one such book, which stands apart from the rest of his oeuvre in its peculiar sexual intensity. Expenditures are divided by Lyotard into the ones receiving a return in money or words, the small change of language; and the irreversible dissipations of pure loss- the expenditure of Bataille. Lyotard explores the former in depth, concluding that the only way out of the cycle of exchange is God or a plurality of Pagan Gods, thereby rejecting the atheism of Bataille and Nietzsche as too reactive; if he had not rejected atheism, he would have prioritised pure loss, and not sublimated the jouissance against criminality. Bataille did not take such a route, but affirmed the pressure of looting in accordance with Nietzsche, out of respect for its uneconomic foolish squandering, and amazing preservational qualities for the species- what is called evil.

Bataille refuses apocalypse, which as S.Shaviro notes makes his meditations all the more unsettling. Expenditure makes social homogeneity more precarious and led Bataille to formulate his "realm of the heterogeneous", which J.Pefanis has looked into in his book about post-modern thought. Heterogeneous social elements are unconscious, representing the social expression of structure and function. Heterology is the analysis of the heterogeneous, which combines psychoanalytic categories (desire, transgression), with philosophical/critical and anthropological procedures. The book "Eroticism" offers a full account of Heterology, here we are more concerned with expenditure. Pefanis has mentioned that expenditure in the form of potlatch is not the total celebration of destruction, but relates to the normative functioning of primitive societies; for example the Tlingit, the Haida, the Tsimshian, the Kwakiutl Indians of Northwest America and the Chukchee of the Siberian Northeast. Bataille writes in a footnote to the "Accursed Share";- "What it comes down to is that squandering of energy is always the opposite of a thing, but it enters into consideration only once it has entered into the order of things, once it has changed into a thing". Potlatch ensures an undivided social body and forbids the development of class struggle: the useless squandering, or transformation from a non-thing to a thing, is a non-representable unconscious "flow", as expenditure has been characterised. Crucial to Bataille’s argument is the change from primitive society, when expenditure developed social cohesion, and modern capitalist society where expenditure threatens social homogeneity. Is this a valid distinction to make?

Michael Richardson, in his study "Georges Bataille", confronts this problem by relating Bataille’s social ideology to that of Marx. Like Marx, alienation for Bataille is self-alienation, which lies deep in the psyche. Capitalist commodification makes everything into a thing. In so doing, capitalism homogenises society, and homogenises the individual. Heterogeneous unconscious desire is the opposite of a thing, the expenditure of Bataille. Capitalist desire unites the society with the individual, both desire "things", products, progress, success, universal quantified goals. The useless extermination of desire is a desire which desires nothing except itself, it merely discharges and is impossible to set into the order of things. Marx’s alienation would be transcended according to Marx, only when "individuals reproduce themselves not merely as individuals, but as social individuals". Bataille’s alienation is not remedied so easily, the deep seated primal need for complete loss without relation to society or functional concomitants, is not solved through work, the workers socialist union is not powerful enough to contain this volcanic rupturing potential. It is also not calmed by Blanchot’s "unworking" or JL Nancy’s literary unworking which is the sharing of sacred community through discourse likened to lovers intimate communication.

A logical problem arises in that expenditure is a thing which is not a thing, as Shaviro has written:- "The dissimulation of radical expenditure is already a function of that expenditure". How can expenditure (not a thing), be considered (as a thing), if this is the reverse of its nature? Hollier has already located this difficulty in his "Against Architecture", in that expenditure is an unequation, Bataille’s materialism rupturing all relations to it that infer some exchange or communication:- "Expenditure is not thinkable in terms of exchange or of communication: because it is not measurable and communicates nothing". How can we talk of expenditure? Hollier describes how Zola sensed the "threat of expenditure" as an "undisciplined, uncontrollable energy", which can at any time drag human aspirations down into the dirt. As such it is the "unthinkable". or at least the "unsayable", of all our social affairs.

These objections to the expenditure schema, do not amount to an identity. Expenditure is a direction, "the rupture", "the passage", "the flow", are all inadequate metaphors to designate the path to sovereign waste that Aztec society experienced on seeing "rivers of blood". Curdling within this experience is fear, immanence, power, exigency, myth, foreboding, ecstasy and revulsion. Expenditure, far from being "unthinkable", or not a "thing", is a multiplicity of things, in that it releases a myriad of representations/explanations, whether conditional or spontaneous, hybrid or singular. Christian Duverger objects in that sacrifice for him is a type of holy terror, designed to suppress the masses for imperial expansion (a kind of psychological regulation of production), the expenditure of sacrifice is a totalitarian despotism aimed at complete control. Yet Aztec society in sharp contrast to the invading conquistadores, was stable and did not pillage and massacre its neighbours on mass. Sacrificial victims satiated the social thirst for blood, without the extremes to be found in European war-time extravagance. According to Bataille, we cannot understand the expenditure of sacrifice because we are limited in our perception of economic questions. We perceive them in terms of scarcity, not abundance. As Richardson says, Bataille’s general economy "responds to all elements within the social body", and understands the economy with psychological/sociological and economic factors. We do not sacrifice our captives, but enslave them to servitude (utility). What possible point could there be of useless, meaningless sacrifice?

The question of community and the sacred has been discussed in JL Nancy’s essay "The Inoperative Community". He quotes the vaunted "communion" between Bataille and Nietzsche in "On Nietzsche": "The desire to communicate is born in me out of a feeling of community binding me to Nietzsche, and not in an isolated originality". Is this the "republic of crime" in Sade? or a work of death (recalling Hegel?) Nancy asks. Nancy resolves the question of community in Bataille in terms of communication, or the position of being with "the other"- "Whereas the individual can know another individual, juxtaposed to him both as identical to him and as a thing- as the identity of a thing- the singular being does not know, but rather experiences his like (son semblance)". Nancy is proposing a weaker form of expenditure than the one outlined here. The stronger expenditure dissolves the other in its breach, communication is not a bridge "of the like", but a trespass on the terrain of death. The communion between Nietzsche and Bataille is not a literary savoir-faire, but a sharing of a cigarette between two survivors in the trenches of the First World War.

Thinking through this point, I made a connection to the treatise "Pure Lust" by Mary Daly. In it she attempted to rectify theology in terms of radical feminism. The communion between her and the theology that for her signified the phallic dominance of female powers, led her to write:- "Erupting from the concealed chambers of woman’s Racial memories, it is Pyrosophical, bringing renewed knowledge of the nature and properties of furious Fire/Desire". Such passion is dredged from the same waters as Bataille’s expenditure. Community in this sense is the consummation of "various complex syntheses, that have no logical equivalent, but only real consistency". The most real consistency is the sensation of dying, or undeath, life when it is not "in excess". As Bataille says, the domain of death, where it signifies not only a decrease and disappearance, but the process by which we disappear "despite ourselves", even though we must not disappear, is the crucial point at which we "distinguish the moment of extreme joy and of indescribable but miraculous ecstasy". This is the dread of death, the odour of vomit, the sight of the victim critically wounded, the slab of the mortuary table, when we realise something greater than ourselves. This takes us back to religion and a particularly pertinent section of the Old Testament:-

Or the Koran in a similar vein:-

Perhaps Emmanuel Levinas would describe this as "the hypertrophy of consciousness". Such enlargement is the real consistency of community, which has perhaps been lost amidst the metropolis of modern capitalism. Bataille does not advocate a regression to the primitive sacrificial communities with their cohesive blood rites. The Nazi approbation of folk myth is a pertinent reminder of how modern industrial society can enlarge itself with a pagan religious heart. Bataille’s project (which is of course not a project), could be rectified more clearly in the expression of a "community of researchers", such as the experimental groups Bataille set up and was part of during the 1920s, `30s, & `40s. Reacting against the aspirations of the surrealists, these groups published, discussed and held meetings which kept a radical artistic and philosophical agenda more or less "in tact", thereby consolidating personal artistic creativity against a number of opponents, e.g. capitalism, Christianity, the State, academia, banality and fatigue. Bataille’s involvement withered with the onset of the Second World War, and from then on his engagement with community is less dynamic and more in terms of "communion".

Bataille’s expenditure opens up a space by which pure loss can be thought. The importance attached to it depends on whether or not you think that expenditure does build or extend or destroy or re-create, however the configuration figures in your mind, something of the salient feeling of comprehension. As Bataille has written;- "A philosophy is never a house; it is a construction site........at every point, there is the impossibility of the final state".