A Response to Ishay Landa’s Critique of Georges Bataille

06/05/2021

First, I want to preface with something that is very important in terms of how I implore you to read this book. You, the reader, may be thinking “I’m pretty deep into this book but I have yet to find Evan’s interpretation of Bataille that isn’t tied down by his exposition of the other interpretations of Bataille” or you may be thinking “where is Evan’s philosophy?”. Let me answer both of the questions. My interpretation is in my critiques. When I respond to the critiques of Bataille that I find, I do it completely off hand, not worrying about citing Bataille for any of my assertions. For me, Bataille is the virulently anti-teleological philosopher of chance. (“My”) Bataille is so far beyond the logic of restricted economy that it rejects all teleological action and in this rejection there is the affirmation of affirmation, of affirmative existence in which we immanently flow with the universe in a continuous fashion. Now, you may then not consider my interpretation of Bataille to actually be an interpretation of Bataille because I don’t quote him word for word every time I make an assertion about him. And this is perfectly acceptable. It really matters not to me. I will not protest, my writings may, but I will sit in an incriminating silence. My “philosophy” which I have constructed painfully and joyfully (therefore ecstatically?) across these pages, is then my own idiosyncratic thought. I will put forward the notion that my thought, like every other thought, has other theorists behind it as having theorists who precede you is almost an unavoidable part of being a theorist. It is an unlimited assemblage after all, right?! Well, at least Bataille says it is in the beginning of Theory of Religion. Either way, my thought has a few theorists as its antecedents: Max Stirner, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georges Bataille. These are the theorists who I haven’t really been able to escape. My original reading of Bataille in October and November of 2020 (see above) painstakingly tried to make Bataille’s thought a radicalization of a combination of Marx and Stirner. Obviously, Bataille goes further than Stirner as Bataille goes beyond not just the individual, but phenomenological subjectivity — a leap Stirner is never willing to take. Obviously, in terms of the restricted economy, Marx and his accompanying economist are the highest and most developed form, and Bataille agrees with this. But obviously, Bataille goes beyond Marx, he is a “post-Marxist” in this sense, but more on that in a moment. He goes beyond Marx via his theory of the general economy. I also think my theoretical past as a Marxist that I had when I was 14 (throughout September 2020) and 15 (throughout October 2020-March 2020) has made me cast Bataille as a very anti-capitalistic thinker. I think this is pretty apparent in my heavy emphasis on his critique of action. I think this critique of action is very important when discussing Bataille in relation to Austrian economics, which is currently a discussion that is not occurring but it ought to. The importance of his critique of action is obvious because of Mises’ synthetic a priori “conception” of man apropos teleological action. To note, it really seems that the Austrian school and Ayn Rand’s capitalism, which are not analogous but actually radically different, could be seen as the antitheses of Bataille’s preferred paradoxical reality of the subject-as-will-to-chance — and Ayn Rand may be much more antithetical to Bataille than the Austrian school, but that has yet to be seen. I will save the subject of Bataille’s critical praxeology contra the Austrian school and its accompanying praxeology for another day. But on this idea of Bataille being a “post-Marxist”. I don’t really think that the claim that he is a post-Marxist is true because he had no intention of going beyond Marx when he lined out his theory of general economy, or at least none that I can detect. I may be wrong on this but for now, I just prefer to not categorize Bataille as anything other than “Bataillean”.

Secondly, I may not be exaggerating when I say that out of all the critics of Bataille I’ve found sound far, and I have found a lot, Ishay Landa may have the most sustained (in terms of length) critique of Bataille, though Habermas’s critique may be a little longer. Ishay Landa doesn’t just write a single article critiquing Bataille but TWO. And these two essays are meant to be read side by side. So, let us kill this angel that is this critique of Bataille which is trying to save the lost souls from the unknown, as they do not know where they are going. GOD IS DEAD! NOW THE BOURGEOIS CLASS MUST BE BEHEADED TOO! THE GOD THAT IS CAPITALISM MUST BE DECAPITATED.

So, let us now begin with Landa’s critique line by line:

1. “His vision of a world in which people are entitled to enjoy ‘the moment,’ live it to the full, without guilty conscience, or a fear that their position in the race for accumulation will be jeopardized, is enticing and ought to figure importantly in a critique of capitalism. In such seductive moments, Bataille compellingly demands a social environment in which human beings are the goal, rather than means to the ends of capitalism; he envisions a world in which consumption will become an activity of immanent value, rather than a mere appendage to exchange value”.[1]
2. “Yet at the same time, he clung ferociously to a Nietzschean perspective which opposes the consumption of the Last Men”.[2]
3. “This meant that Bataille’s ideal of consumption was in the past, in aristocratic and feudal class-societies, and unlike Marx he un-dialectically denied — most of the time — any advance made by capitalism on that terrain”.[3]
4. “Bataille’s Nietzschean elitism was so dominant in his thought, that his celebration of consumption, instead of offering succor to mass consumption, functioned as one more means of writing off its value”.[4]
5. “Bataille thus took a peculiar position on the master-slave dialectic, which he addressed mainly through Kojève’s mediation: unlike Hegel, he mostly sided with the master, and lamented his loss of consumer ‘sovereignty’ in the modern world”.[5]
6. “Being sovereign, for Bataille, denoted a condition in which the subject is in full self-position, free to pursue his or her immanent ends in utter disregard of exterior goals, norms or expectations”.[6]
7. “But at the same time, ‘the bourgeoisie’ for him meant not so much a social class of exploiters, a privileged minority imposing itself on the masses, but the reified masses oppressing a tiny minority of authentic people aspiring to sovereignty. Bataille’s attack on the bourgeoisie, therefore, turned out to be typically bourgeois, incorporating the elite’s disdain for mass society”.[7]
8. “Bataille was thus patently attracted to the fascist leaders, who represented some perverse reincarnation of ancient ‘sovereignty’”.[8]
9. “From Nieztsche, he derived an elitism which permeated his thought”.[9]
10. “[F]or Bataille the term ‘bourgeoisie’ was largely synonymous with the term ‘mass’”.[10]
11. “Because ‘the bourgeoisie’ in such terms was not restricted to the owners of the means of production, nor to the rich, nor even to the middle classes, but a term encompassing virtually everyone outside of Bataille’s close circle of free-thinking people”.[11]
12. “For all his emphasis on consumption, Bataille flatly rejected capitalist modernity, which is after all the historical class system which has ushered in a considerable mass — as distinct from solely elite — consumption”.[12]
13. “Bataille’s ideal of consumption, by contrast, was ensconced in the remote past”.[13]
14. “Consumption he recognized in the first stages of the historical dialectic, in the sovereign activity of the master”.[14]
15. “[I]t is precisely consumption as ‘mad extravagance’ that Bataille sought to reanimate. Bataille conceived of consumption in such a ‘grandiose’ way, as to exclude, ignore, or dismiss the mundane understanding of the term. Common, ‘small’, everyday acts of consumption simply cannot expect to meet such a standard”.[15]
16. “For Bataille, however, human desire rather thrives on torment, not joy. He exalted acts of consumption which tend to be destructive and negative”.[16] Landa uses sacrifice as an example of why Bataille likes violent acts.
17. “Human freedom means to negate, to break the mould, deny the animalism of material satisfaction; sovereign means to act without any consideration of material reward or future consequences”.[17]
18. For Landa, transgression is “absolute negation which tends to move in a circular fashion, and often ends up negating itself”.[18]
19. For Landa, transgression “leads to an affirmation of present institutions”.[19]
20. “Sovereignty as theorized by Bataille recommends itself as an act of total freedom, completely self-referential and autonomous”.[20]
21. “Under close inspection, therefore, the sovereign is seen to react rather than act, not a major offence, perhaps, but one which becomes very grave indeed within a Nietzschean framework where few travesties are as bad as slavish ressentiment”.[21]
22. “[T]o the extent that Bataillean transgression can help to combat institutions, it is by no means clear that its impact would be progressive, rather than conservative or reactionary”.[22]
23. Landa sees that Bataille (and Foucault) critique structure, or “institutions,” but neoliberalism is without structure and therefore Bataille is only lending himself to capitalism.[23]
24. “Jean-Joseph Goux and Benjamin Noys, for instance, have claimed that present-day, postmodern capitalism reveals itself strangely akin to Bataille’s ideal of a Bacchanalian ‘general economy’”.[24]
25. “Gilder had defended capitalism in the early 1980s precisely as a system imbued with the spirit of gift giving — that is, creating a product and marketing it with no guarantee of return, speculating on stimulating the consumer’s desires. Capitalism according to Gilder is a system of infinite risk and gamble”.[25]
26. Landa claims that capitalism has always been a system of mass consumption and excess.[26]
27. Landa claims that because Bataille was a precursor of postmodernism, he actually laid the groundwork and gave force to the idea of a postmodern capitalism.[27]
28. Landa then claims that Bataille is a sort of accelerationist who is an indirect apologetic of capitalism that tries to affirm the contradictions of capitalism to destroy it.[28]
29. “The Nietzschean camp, however, to which Bataille-1 belongs, merely perceives here the sad specter of historical closure and airtight massification; hence the desire to suspend the dialectic, to stay ‘in history’ … From Nietzsche onwards, the challenge was to maintain capitalism as an open wound, not allow it to catastrophically heal” [my emphasis].[29]
30. “The goal was to suspend historical development and remain frozen in a time capsule, within ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ — a circular development which keeps the Last Men forever at arm’s length. Instead of genuine dialectics we get a procedure which mimics a ping-pong exchange between negations, precluding further development”.[30]
31. “Has Nietzsche not provided us here with an oblique description/celebration of capitalism, with its abounding power to ‘build and destroy’, its restless, frenzied ‘eternal changing’, its circular crises of ‘fullness and overfullness’, and its inner ‘contradictions and afflictions’ which it is able to solve ‘only in appearance’ by displacing them to a higher level? This is capitalism as an open lesion, one which will resist all attempts at suture … Bataille as an open wound; Bataille as capitalism”.[31]
32. Landa then claims that Bataille is being indirectly apologetic for capitalism because it diverts our attention from society (production; necessity) to nature (expenditure; excess).[32]
33. “Let us first address the way capitalism is naturalized. General economy to start with attributed to nature the crucial feature of capitalist production, the very creation of a surplus, the ‘excess’ of ‘the accursed share’”.[33]
34. “In that way, Bataille ascribes to nature both the historical achievements of human beings — the creation of wealth — and their failures: the inability of the system they have created to sustain growth. For wealth is anything but natural; plenty and surplus, even on a very small scale, is an extremely rare phenomenon, and far from pertaining to the ‘living organism’ as such it is specifically human. Moreover, for almost the entire course of their existence on ‘the globe’ human beings , too, hardly had to deal with an excess, accursed or otherwise … For almost the entire course of their long trajectory humans lived from hand to mouth, and could only dream of significant surplus, which they knew neither how to produce nor — in times of particularly favorable natural conditions — how to store. Excess is therefore not a cosmic natural gift living organisms ‘receive’ but a product of humanity advancing through history in an arduous struggle with a rather tight-fisted and indifferent nature, that has left humanity to fend for itself … Wealth is thus a colossal human achievement, due primarily not to nature but to labor working on nature: a point which Bataille, furiously resisting the master-slave dialectic, was keen to downplay”.[34]
35. “In his alternative scheme, the cowardly slave was denied not only heroism — which Hegel, too, regarded as the prerogative of the master — but also ingenuity, creativity and productivity. It is as if the base labor of the slave is to be erased out of the picture altogether, leaving consumption as a strictly aristocratic interplay between the master and the life-giving sun. Bataille so radically transfigured the dialectic to the point that the master does not consume the slave’s labor as much as he consumes the slave himself, whom he sacrifices”.[35]
36. “Only under capitalism do we crises of over-production, since here one produces precisely not in order to serve a useful purpose, as Bataille argues, but in order to make profit. And to understand over-production we need to examine the laws of motion of capitalism, not of nature or of terrestrial energy”.[36]
37. “In reality, one can turn against Bataille his admiration for ancient times where sacred sentiment was rife, and hence, allegedly, indifference to utility was great, as compared to profane modernity, obsessed with utility. One might argue exactly the reverse: precisely because they were religious the monuments the ancients built and their extravagant practices were still useful in the sense of enticing or placating the gods. Modern consumption, in that sense, is more deeply indifferent to ulterior consideration of benefits”.[37]
38. Yet looked at from closer range the general economy toward which Bataille beckons us, appears rather like a cosmically inflated capitalism … Capitalism ends up vindicated. General economy is not a realm of freedom, but one of implacable necessity, constant strife and feral competition, risk taking on a massive scale, and permanent flirting with death”.[38]
39. Landa argues that because Bataille see’s man as the living matter which is best suited to consume gloriously, “[g]eneral economy is not more benign than capitalism, not more attuned to human wishes and aspirations, but in fact far more ruthless. It runs roughshod over individuals, using and discarding them for its vitalistic purposes. One of the classical motifs of economic liberalism, especially in its social Darwinist variant, concerned the necessity to subjugate individuals to the wormerings of the economy, up to and including their outright elimination for the sake of a higher good. This is, after all, what natural selection in the social sphere is all about … Bataille, as we saw, subordinates humanity as such to nature. So it is a case of getting out of the frying pan of capitalism into the scorching fire of the general, solar economy”.[39]
40. “Given Bataille’s unlikely proximity to classical economic liberalism, nor can it surprise us that for all his emphasis on natural ‘superabundance’ and solar lavishness, his position often veers in the supposed opposite direction, towards a Malthusian natural scarcity and mortal competition over limited resources”.[40]
41. “In reality, whatever the ecstasies they offer to viewer and victim alike, sacrifices are deemed indispensable precisely from an economic point of view, practical through and through”.[41]
42. “[H]is notion of consumption engages the destructive elements of capitalism, is centered on aggression, struggle and even — or especially — death, and shuns its pleasures and comforts which it finds trifling”.[42]
43. “In some sense, the ‘consumption’ that Bataille espouses is actually more akin to production: it is about enhancing energy, taking risks, using and exploiting individuals as means, sacrificing happiness for the sake of a greater goal, etc.”.[43]
44. “Restricted economy, conversely, looks more like socialism, in its naïve and unmanly attempt to curb the free flow of terrestrial energy, channel it for human aims, and prioritizing ‘justice’ over ‘freedom’. Departing from socialist critique of capitalism as irrational, Bataille faults capitalism fundamentally for its excessive rationality. From this vantage point, mass consumption and mass happiness cannot but look trivial and unacceptable as the goal of economic activity”.[44]
45. “[T]he very cornerstone of Bataille’s theory, the notion of sovereignty, which is supposed to empower humanity and upgrade it from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’”.[45]
46. “This is exactly where the rub is, since a world of human making, for Bataille, is ultimately inferior to the world of nature”.[46]
47. “The excess of the aristocratic past (and implicitly of the capitalist present, too) is marshaled against the future”.[47]
48. “Bataille glimpsed a possibility of achieving a universal sovereignty via the dreaded ‘end of history’ of generalized consumer satisfaction. This utterly dystopian scenario he sporadically entrusted with redemptive potentiality, making it look more like the Marxist realm of freedom. Unexpectedly, reification became not an obstacle to sovereignty but its precondition”.[48]
49. “Contrary to what was then affirmed, Bataille now claimed that the workers, not the bourgeoisie, are actually the champions of a material culture”.[49]
50. “As will be remembered, for Zarathustra the post-historical world would be libidinally tame: the Last Men, he bitterly affirmed, ‘have their little pleasure for the day and their little pleasure for the night.’ Pleasure is all on the side of capitalist history. Bataille-2, however, maintained that the Last Men will have big pleasures and that, indeed, the very distinction between day and night will no longer obtain”.[50]
51. “[T]hese assertions nevertheless outline the possibility of democratizing sovereignty. While accepting the elimination of the sovereign as a distinct person, or as a class, they embrace the prospect of investing sovereignty in the masses”.[51]
52. “The cornerstone of Bataille’s whole theoretical edifice, the notion of reckless expenditure disregarding all costs and consequences, in the sheer self-expression cum self-loss of sovereignty is hardly a Nietzschean ideal”.[52]
53. Landa quotes Nietzsche when he says that semen not being ejaculated but rather kept within the body, within the blood and that a feeling of power comes from this.[53] He then argues that this proves the idea that Nietzsche was actually against expenditure and for accumulation.
54. “[F]or Nietzsche, … the striving for power, domination and rank is the very elixir of life; lavish sovereignty does not, as in Bataille-2, employ power as its means. Power rather uses sovereignty for its own entrenchment and amplification”.[54]

Now for the line by line refutation:

1. Firstly, Bataille does not see human beings as the goal. He sees no goal in fact. And if he does seek a goal, it is the only the goal of escaping project which is having goals. Thus, Bataille doesn’t have human beings (subjects) as his goal but rather the annihilation of subjects in the limit-experience. Secondly, immanence isn’t an activity because there is no subject to act within an immanent mode of being. Rather, this being which is Being is beyond the stage of action which is teleology (project). Thirdly, community is bound together by guilt, by complicity.
2. Essentially, this Nietzschean perspective which even recognizes the ‘Last Men’ presupposes Nietzsche’s concept of the overman i.e. that which is beyond those last men. Bataille doesn’t hold that the overman exists. In fact, Bataille holds that the overman is one of the idealist logics within Nietzsche. Following Bataille’s concept of base materialism, it can be said that the contradiction within the concept of the overman arises in the fact that there is still man within the word. What I mean by this is that the high within the logic of base materialism is always going to be contaminated by the base because the base is what constitutes the high, and in this case, this means that the overman is always going to be contaminated by man, meaning they are never really the OVERman.
3. Bataille never had an ideal form of consumption, there is just expenditure (consumption). If Bataille had an ideal form of consumption it would be the Sun. It is a contradiction to say that past HISTORICAL societies were the ideal forms of consumption that Bataille desired because history itself is constituted by the repression of expenditure, of consumption. Benjamin Noys’s words on the subject are as follows, “Bataille is not advancing a reactionary appreciation of slavery or of aristocracy, or of the violent criminality of Rais, but a displacement of the Hegelian concept of mastery with the ‘a-concept’ of sovereignty”.[55]
4. Bataille doesn’t have an elitism in his thought. His thought is headless, without a leader, without an elite class, etc. Bataille’s base materialism which infests his entire theoretical system, if he can be said to have one, prevents him from privileging any term, much less a high, or elite term.
5. Bataille doesn’t take the side of the Hegelian master but rather the side of the Sovereign who is outside of the dialectic (see Some Notes and Commentary on Death, Desire, and Mastery).
6. Firstly, Sovereignty is the undoing of the subject, when the subject has no object to constitute itself upon i.e., when the subject constitutes itself upon nothing, falls into the abyss and in that annihilation it becomes NOTHING. So this idea that sovereignty had anything to do with the subject besides its annihilation is false. Secondly, imminent ends are not a thing. One has no end beyond teleology, beyond action. Within an ontological state of immanence, there is no subject to have ends.
7. This is blatantly false. Firstly, Bataille definitely conceptualized the bourgeois class as a class because, for Bataille, class struggle happened through the proletarian class’s expenditure which usually happened against the bourgeois class. Secondly, Bataille did not see the masses as imposing themselves on a small minority of bourgeois individuals. Rather, the bourgeois class imposed themselves upon the masses via, for example, idealistic knowledge production (ideology) and structural coercion into labor, which is a domesticating destitution. Thus, Bataille’s critique of the bourgeois class remains base, and is not bourgeois.
8. Firstly, I’ve debunked the idea that Bataille is a fasicst in these essays which you can find above: On (Georges) Bataille and Personal Essays, Bataille and Marx: Another Look, General State, Restricted State, The Maintenance of Capitalism and the Erasure of the Erotic, On the Radical Anti-Fascism of Georges Bataille. Secondly, sovereignty has nothing to do with fascism. It is its antithesis. Sovereignty is the opposite of fascism because it is the dissolution of the subject, the decapitation of the head.
9. (See answer to point 4).
10. (See answer to point 7).
11. (See answer to point 7).
12. Capitalism in its present-day form doesn’t have mass consumption in the general economic sense. Capitalism only has consumption a very restricted sense (see above my two essays titled Bataillean Ventures Into Epistemology #2 and A Response to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Critique of Georges Bataille).
13. (See answer to point 3).
14. There is no sovereign consumption of the master. The master is anything but sovereign. Dependent on the slave’s recognition and never risking without return, the master is servile.
15. This is completely false. BATAILLE WAS NO ELITIST! Bataille did not believe any expenditure was more glorious than another, one cannot quantify that which resists quantification. For Bataille, even the smallest and most unnoticeable actions such as smoking were glorious expenditures.
16. There is no expenditure which is negation. Expenditure is the affirmation of affirmation.
17. Sovereignty cannot be negation because sovereignty is the affirmation of the present moment. It is an affirmation of the present moment in which one, in their annihilation, enters into ecstatic TIME.
18. Transgression doesn’t negate, it affirms the formless existence of continuity that disrupts the taboo. Transgression is affirmation.
19. (See above my essay A Rebuttal to the Idea That Transgression Reaffirms That Which it Transgresses).
20. (See answer to points 6 and 17).
21. The sovereign does nothing because it is NOTHING, it cannot do anything, but it is not limited by this because it is actually free from action.
22. Well, this goes either way. But I would argue that transgression lends itself to no political position. IT DOES NOT SERVE!
23. Bataille would not be for neo-liberalism, assuming it was beyond structure. It is hard to say that Bataille is a post-structuralist because he endorsed structure in some cases, such as having taboo. As we know, he would not have supported the sexual liberation movement which came after him, because he saw in transgression based on taboo to be the truth of those movements which forwarded a more free-flowing idea of desire.
24. (See above A Response to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Critique of Georges Bataille).
25. (See above A Response to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Critique of Georges Bataille).
26. But this is simply not true. Because consumption in its general economic sense is always suppressed by capitalism. Now, sure restricted consumption exists in capitalism, but this means nothing in terms of critiquing Bataille.
27. But Bataille isn’t the precursor of postmodernism. He is perceived to be. Any reader of Bataille who doesn’t recognize his fundamentally Hegelian attitude when it came to history, as well as his “meta-narrative” of humanity and animality has done a fundamental misreading.
28. Bataille is most definitely not an accelerationist. I will be writing an essay on this latter but note that he definitely doesn’t support the movements of capitalism. He doesn’t want catastrophe, rather glory.
29. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of Bataille’s idea of laceration and being an open wound. The laceration happens when a human being is cut open in communication and they become an open wound which communicates beyond itself. This has nothing to do with capitalism. Capitalism is a system not an individual subject.
30. Bataille had a Hegelian conception of history not a Nietzschean one. The other thing is that for Bataille, amor fati and eternal recurrence are chance, it is NOTHING.
31. (See answer to point 29).
32. This is rather what needs to be done to attack capitalism. The viewpoint of general economy is the farthest thing from apologetic to capitalism. General economy is the farthest thing from capitalism (see above A Response to Jean-Joseph Goux’s Critique of Georges Bataille).
33. This is the issue: production. The excess of capitalism is at most pure heterogeneous, and at the least, homogeneous. And excess isn’t created by nature. Nature is excess.
34. Bataille doesn’t ascribe production to the general economy in the sense that work is a part of the restricted economy. Now, Landa here goes against Bataille’s thesis. Landa holds that there is scarcity but not excess. But again, we know that the truth of restricted economy is general economy. This critique has no bearing upon Bataille’s argument because it is already presupposing a restricted view point: that of history. History is the master and slaves “battle”. Thus, history is from the position of those who are not sovereign because they are.
35. Firstly, labor is not base. Labor is transcendence, it is productive negation. Secondly, the master is not sovereign, it does not risk without return (see answer to point 5). Thirdly, if the master sacrifices the slave, it is not a sacrifice Bataille would endorse because it is a cowardly sacrifice. It is a sacrifice in which the sacrificer (in this case, the master) would not sacrifice himself. It would not be an expenditure without return.
36. Firstly, capitalism is restricted economy because it is a system of production, I’m glad that you admit that. Landa also admits that capitalism is restricted economy because its object is production and its problem is consumption. Secondly, the production-for-profit present in capitalism is useful production because its end is profit, which has multiple uses.
37. Now, it is a misinterpretation to think that Bataille thinks that the end of religious monuments to the Gods were useful. I say this because the end of, for example, the Aztec pyramid was sacrifice which is the undoing of ends.
38. Firstly, this critique is already predicated off of the 34th critique Landa makes, but even if we ignore that fact, he is still wrong. Secondly, general economy is beyond necessity because there are no subjects within it that can need or want. Desire is desire for the totality, for immanence, for expenditure, and thus there is no desire once you reach those respective “states,” because there is NOTHING in those “states”. Thus, there is no competition either. Thirdly, risk happens but risk is not something one does, or “takes”, because it undoes the self.
39. Bataille isn’t subordinating man to the general economy or arguing that we should subordinate man to the general economy. Individuals are not used within the general economy. There is no use within the general economy. Rather, Bataille recognizes that man is already “subordinated” to general state power. Man is already subject to the laws of general economy.
40. But this is not true. Just because Bataille recognizes growth doesn’t mean anything. There is no need to get rid of people, as this, for most, would be a catastrophic loss, and again, Bataille prefers “glorious” loss. And obviously, there is not competition over resources. At the most, there is competition over space but only for subjects who fear death, who are within the restricted economy.
41. This is simply not true. Sacrifice is not useful, it is not practical, etc. Just because sacrifice may solve some issue as a byproduct doesn’t mean anything-there is no intent, if that makes sense.
42. But, again, Bataille is not an accelerationist. Consumption engages NOTHING!
43. This is not true. I’ll address each thing he tries to conflate Bataille’s conception of consumption with. Firstly, consumption is not production because consumption does not serve an end, as production does. Consumption (expenditure) is the opposite of production (work) for Bataille on an ontological level-one leaves the immanent consumption that is continuity through work, through production. Secondly, it is the loss of energy, the expenditure of it. Consumption is not enhancing energy. Nothing can be done to “energy” because, for Bataille, energy is matter just in “fluid form”. Matter for Bataille is not another ontological category. Consumption, again, is the expenditure of energy, loss without return. Thirdly, again, consumption isn’t about consciously taking risks. One cannot wantingly reach sovereignty. Sovereignty is not an end. Fourthly, consumption cannot be used, for if it is, then it is not Bataille’s unproductive consumption, it is productive consumption which is of restricted economy. Fifthly, consumption is the undoing of the subject. There is no subject to exploit another subject in consumption. There is not enough stability in consumption to establish non-sovereign relations of hierarchy or inequality. Sixthly, consumption cannot be a means to an end. It is the undoing of teleology. Seventhly, ONCE MORE, consumption, sacrifice, etc. cannot serve an end, they cannot be used because if they are then they cease to be “Batalle’s consumption”.
44. But the general economy isn’t a perspective of economic ACTIVITY, of economic ACTION. It is beyond the stage of action.
45. No. Sovereignty is not an “upgrade” from being an object to a subject. It is the undoing of that very relation. The undoing of the subject. The undoing of the object.
46. Bataille never claims that one is inferior to another. He doesn’t categorize general economy because one cannot categorize the general economy on the level of the universe because it is formless, beyond category.
47. (See answer to point 3).
48. Reification is just the condition of discontinuity. When one is within the world of things, and they relate to things, they are reified as a thing. Thus, sovereignty doesn’t have it as a precondition in the sense that we must reify individuals, as they already are. It isn’t forced servility, as in one makes themselves reified to achieve sovereignty, then sovereignty. It is servility then sovereignty.
49. Bataille always claimed this. The proletariat have always been the contagious base that the bourgeois class have stood upon for Bataille. They have always had the potentiality for class struggle in expenditure.
50. This presupposes that Bataille had a Nietzschean conception of history, which is not true (see answer to point 30).
51. Now, I would first say that nothing can become sovereign in the sense that sovereignty would be their undoing. So, the idea that something can become sovereign and not be undone is problematic. Secondly, I would say nothing can be done to NOTHING. One cannot democratize NOTHING. Now, this critique is interesting because I believe it prompts us to ask the question of “is Bataille a communist?”. So, let us answer this question. Firstly, communism “drew its strength from sovereignty only to overthrow it … Communism is also that vast world where what is sovereign must come back to life, in forms perhaps, but perhaps in the most ordinary form”.[56] In this context, communism has a sovereign element to it, but ultimately this element only comes to erase itself into NOTHING, which leaves communism as non-sovereign, as that which causes the formless sovereign “subject” to take form once more. But let us look further. Secondly, there is a common view among communists, especially certain Marxists, that communism is the end, the teleological goal, of history. For them, history has done nothing but strive forward toward communism. If this is so, then it cannot be sovereign. I say this because sovereignty “cannot be given as the goal of history. I even maintain the contrary: that if history has some goal, sovereignty cannot be that goal, and further, that sovereignty could not have anything to do with that goal, except insofar as it would differ therefrom”.[57] But what is the goal of history for Bataille? It is nothing other than communism; Bataille says that the goal of history “is perhaps, on the contrary, classless society”.[58] Thirdly, it is to be noted that Nietzsche’s, for Bataille, thought, position, if he had one, etc. was sovereign. So, when he says that “Nietzsche’s position is the only one apart from communism,” we should take note.[59] He even says earlier that “there are only two admissible positions remaining in the world[:]” communism and Nietzsche’s thought, which further differentiates them.[60] Fourthly, I do think that this comment Bataille makes is hilarious: “Assuming one were to ask communists to state the principles underlying their morals, they would probably refuse. Everything is clear in their eyes; they have no need for discussion”.[61] But it is this funny comment which Bataille makes that allows us to delve further into the question of if Bataille is a communist. He says that communism “affirms nothing,” and it is this fact that “implies a system of values that it is possible to define after the event”.[62] But this isn’t all that pushes forward the idea of a Bataillean communism, though I do not want to confuse ‘nothing’ with ‘NOTHING,’ it is still nonetheless something that needs to be noted. Bataille then says that it is “[t]he very silence of the doctrine” which is communism that “places this first point beyond doubt”.[63] The fact that this doctrine is silent may be the place which a Bataillean communism could start. The issue I find is that the “value principle” of communism “is man”.[64] The fact that the authoritative “value principle” of communism is a contradiction, as man is a contradiction, may be why the communist doesn’t want to speak on their values, but this isn’t the problem. The problem is that communism, here, has the subject as its value principle, and not inner experience or sovereignty as Bataille does. Nonetheless, we will continue in our analysis! But the communist conception of human beings sees human beings as no different from animals, for Bataille.[65] This is problematic because, for Bataille and us, there is a difference between human beings and animals, though this is not predicated on anthropocentrism. Fifthly, Bataille argues that both capitalist society and communist society entail a society of things.[66] Is communism and capitalism not thus the opposite of what Bataille calls for? He then says that the thing is the inverse of “the NOTHING of sovereignty”.[67] So, is it not now true that Bataille is not a communist? Maybe, but let us go further! Sixthly, Bataille makes some comments on communism that at first seem favorable.[68] But they are not because “the original sovereignty belonging to all men alike is spared” by communism’s elimination of difference “but this is conditional on the renunciation of it which the revolutionary has made in advance”.[69] Seventhly, Bataille notes that capitalist society debases the potentiality for sovereignty that “is in” the subject, and it is communism that negates this.[70] It is here that the “negative sovereignty” of communism is realized as “communism accentuates this hostile attitude towards subjective life, particularly because it is still obsessed with primitive accumulation, which is not compatible with that enjoyment of the moment, whence comes the subject’s presence to itself”.[71] It should be noted here that “objective activity,” the activity of the object, has a negative sovereignty in it, a “sovereign end”.[72] Now, this is why I still hesitate to call Bataille a communist as, “positive sovereignty” cannot be an end. Ninthly (and we are sort of going back to our fourth point in terms of the question of if Bataille is a communist or not), Marxism, Bataille notes, can have a sovereign value, “a value beyond the useful,” but this value will be man, and man will, “sovereignly,” subordinate production to itself.[73] It is at this point where communism could be sovereign, at the limits of itself, that it ceases to be sovereign, and Bataille goes beyond the limits of communism, of leftism, of Marxism (into post-leftism (post-left anarchism)?). I say this because “man, to whom communism refers production, did not take on this sovereign value on one prior condition: to have renounced, for himself, everything that is truly sovereign. He becomes the measure of things, it’s true, but perhaps to this end he had to deny himself? He is still a man, no doubt, he brings production into his service; but if he brings it into his service he does not do this without having given in to its demands, that is, without having abdicated. For the irreducible desire that man passionately, capriciously is, communism substituted those of our needs that can be reconciled with a life entirely taken up with producing. We should finally ask ourselves, then, whether this world, communist or bourgeois, which gives primacy to accumulation is not obliged, in some form, to deny and suppress (or at least attempt to) what there is within us that is not reducible to a means, what is sovereign”.[74] Tenthly, Bataille speaks of communism as sovereignty’s “most active contradiction”.[75] Eleventhly, Bataille sees that “communists always give precedence to things”.[76] This is obviously problematic because of the fact that sovereignty is beyond the world of things. Lastly, Bataille, in one of his last works, holds that “Communism is action par excellence, action which changes the world. In Communism the goal, the altered world, situated in time, in the future, takes precedence over existence, or present activity, which is only significant in as far as it leads towards the goal: the world must change. Communism, therefore, raises no problem of principle. The whole of humanity is prepared to subordinate the present moment to the imperative power of a goal. Nobody doubts the value or questions the ultimate authority of action”.[77] Thus, I think that it is fair to say that Bataille, who is wholly opposed to action, who creates the exigency to go beyond the stage of action, is not a communist. In fact, it would be fair to say, in light of Bataille’s most “mature” words on communism, that Bataille is virulently anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-fascist (though we will look at the critiques which posit Bataille as a fascist in the future). This causes one to ask “is Bataille beyond the political?”.
52. This is only true if you see Nietzsche as the philosopher of the will to power. Thus, for Bataille, this critique isn’t true because of the fact that, for him, Nietzsche is the philosopher of evil.
53. (See answer to point 52).
54. Again, this presupposes that Nietzsche is the philosopher of the will to power, which he is not (see answer to point 52). But more importantly, sovereignty cannot be used!

References

[1–6]: Ishay Landa, “Bataille: The Master, the Slave, and Consumption,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 7–8 (2014): pp. 1087–1102, 6.

[7]: Ibid., 7–8.

[8–10]: Ibid., 8.

[11]: Ibid., 9.

[12–16]: Ibid., 10.

[17–19]: Ibid., 12.

[20–23]: Ibid., 13.

[24–26]: Ishay Landa, “Bataille’s Libidinal Economics: Capitalism as an Open Wound,” Critical Sociology 41, no. 4–5 (April 2014): pp. 581–596, https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514526625, 2.

[27]: Ibid., 2–3.

[28–30]: Ibid., 3.

[31]: Ibid., 4.

[32–33]: Ibid., 5.

[34]: Ibid., 5–6.

[35–37]: Ibid., 6.

[38]: Ibid., 6–7.

[39–40]: Ibid., 7.

[41–45]: Ibid., 8.

[46]: Ibid., 8–9.

[47–48]: Ibid., 9.

[49–50]: Ibid., 10.

[51]: Ibid., 11.

[52]: Ibid., 12–13.

[53–54]: Ibid., 13.

[55]: Benjamin Noys, Georges Bataille A Critical Introduction (London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000), 78.

[56]: Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume II: The History of Eroticism, Volume III: Sovereignty, trans. Robert Hurley (Zone Books, 1991), 261–262.

[57–58]: Ibid., 281.

[59]: Ibid., 373.

[60]: Ibid., 368.

[61–64]: Ibid., 332.

[65]: Ibid., 333.

[66–67]: Ibid., 345.

[68]: Ibid., 349–350.

[69]: Ibid., 350.

[70]: Ibid., 360.

[71]: Ibid., 360–361.

[72]: Ibid., 361.

[73]: Ibid., 314.

[74]: Ibid., 314–315.

[75]: Ibid., 261.

[76]: Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991), 140.

[77]: Georges Bataille, Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamiliton (New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc., 2012), 130.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. Literature and Evil. Translated by Alastair Hamiliton. New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc., 2012.

— — — . The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991.

— — — . The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume II: The History of Eroticism, Volume III: Sovereignty. Translated by Robert Hurley. Zone Books, 1991.

Landa, Ishay. “Bataille: The Master, the Slave, and Consumption.” Critical Sociology 41, no. 7–8 (2014): 1087–1102. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514526624.

— — — . “Bataille’s Libidinal Economics: Capitalism as an Open Wound.” Critical Sociology 41, no. 4–5 (2014): 581–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0896920514526625.

Noys, Benjamin. Georges Bataille A Critical Introduction. London, UK: Pluto Press, 2000.