A Treatise on Atheology

Note: I wrote this as my final paper for my English class in my sophomore year (2020–2021). It is from late May (May 21st), so I can’t say I agree with everything in here. But, I do enjoy the experimental usage of Freud in this essay mainly for its resistance to a completely psychoanalytical recourse.

Death is finally the most luxurious form of life — Georges Bataille, The History of Eroticism

[God] only has knowledge of His nothingness, this is why He is [an] atheist[.]— Georges Bataille, Inner Experience

Laughter is the leap from the possible to the impossible. — Georges Bataille, Guilty

[T]he word ‘laughter’ must be read in a burst[.] — Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy

[N]o logic governs … the meaning of interpretation, because logic is an interpretation. — Jacques Derrida, From Restricted to General Economy

The death of God is the ultimate transgression, the release of humanity from itself, back into the blind infernal extravagance of the [S]un. — Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

[Georges] Bataille interprets all natural and cultural development upon the earth to be side-effects of the evolution of death, because it is only in death that life becomes an echo of the sun, realizing its inevitable destiny, which is pure loss. — Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation

To start, why write about the death of God? Why be so specific? Why be so niche? Why have this as the subject matter of this essay? It is quite simple. God is dead. This death has implications that are incomparable in terms of their magnitude. One of these implications is why this essay has the death of God as its subject matter. This implication is that “the death of God is the contamination of language” (Bataille’s Peak 90). With all language contaminated, all language, after the death of God, can only refer to God’s death. In other words, this essay writes about the death of God because there is nothing else that it could write about. This essay is structured like an unconscious, that is fragmented, not always coherent, heterogeneous, etc. and this happened unconsciously i.e., there was no intention in writing this way, it just happened — no teleology is present in this. This unconscious result attests to the effect of reading the authors covered in this essay. This effect being the effect of turning all writing which writes about these authors’ works into writing without writing in that it becomes broken down, it becomes base, it becomes a heterogeneous shock. This essay must also talk about the death of God because “[t]he death of God is a religious event” (Fanged Noumena 216) and “WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS” (Visions of Excess 179)! No irreligion is safe![1] No matter what one believes, the ability to sacrifice God is implicated by the very fact that they believe. This is because sacrifice destroys the thing, taking it out of the world of utility (the profane) and into the world of dépense (the sacred) (Theory of Religion 43). God, then, can be sacrificed because He becomes “a thing for the believer” and this also means the believer can be sacrificed because “the believer becomes a thing for God” (Guilty 41).[2] When God is sacrificed He becomes NOTHING, He enters into the sacred and becomes ‘the divine’. One mustn’t read this essay as something to perform teleological (means to end) action upon (such as critique, grading, etc.), as this would be an attempt to make the unknowable into the known, it would be a homogenizing operation that would make this essay put on a mask and hide its heterogeneous nature. If one is to read this, inner experience should be their only guide, their only authority. A lot of jargon has been used, but it must be said that this isn’t a philosophical text. This essay is a burst of laughter that undoes philosophy (Derrida 108). This is also not a philosophical text because “[t]he philosopher is blind to Bataille’s text because he is a philosopher only through the desire to hold on, to maintain his certainty of himself and the security of the concept as security against this sliding” (Derrida 120). When Jacques Derrida speaks of ‘this sliding,’ he is talking about nothing other than the disruption that is Bataille’s text. This essay is here to take the reader on a journey. So, follow this essay into a boat whose paddles hit the water like water in water, a boat that is in an ocean of non-knowledge, an ocean that has the Sun’s violent rays splash against the skin and has the night make one fall into the ocean which is also the “air,” and enjoy the voyage into the unknown. If this essay is a voyage into the unknown, into the unknowable, into nonknowledge then it trembles. It trembles because to relate to nonknowledge is to know nothing as “[t]o know means: to relate to the known” (Inner Experience 110). Because this essay is a journey into the unknown, one mustn’t read this essay looking for meaning. This “desire for more meaning” is nothing other than the grandest form of discursive servility (Derrida 113). This also means that this essay, which one will find no meaning in, is useless. The fact that this essay is useless is all the more reason to read it. In fact, it could be argued that you ought to read this essay because it is useless, you ought to unproductively expend your energy going through this labyrinthine text. This essay will not just take the reader on a journey into the unknown, but also on another fundamental journey. Follow this essay into the work of Georges Bataille. Bataille’s text is like an unconscious, but not just any unconscious, it is the reader’s unconscious. The unconscious reader finds themselves inside the labyrinth of Bataille’s text, where each dead-end is another latent truth revealed (another place that isn’t the way out and tells us which way to go). When one finds their way out of the labyrinth, they “go beyond the bliss of annihilation” (Robbins 21). It is in annihilation that the reader is read by Bataille. Thus, one does not read Bataille, Bataille reads the reader.

Georges Bataille, the founder of heterology, said that “knowledge of a heterogeneous reality … is to be found in the mystical thinking of primitives and in dreams: it is identical to the structure of the unconscious” (Visions of Excess 143). It must be noted that in The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche’s writing is a “discursive heterogeneity” (On Nietzsche xix). These latter two facts are important because the implication one can derive is that Nietzsche’s writings are structured like an unconscious as it is heterogeneous. Thus, one must read Nietzsche like Sigmund Freud read dreams, that is, by distinguishing the manifest (or explicit) content, which is found within the conscious, from the latent (or implicit) content, which is found in the unconscious. Only after one has distinguished between the manifest and the latent content can they even begin to analyze the content of the unconscious, which again is the latent content, and its meaning. Bataille would endorse this essay’s use of Freud’s method of analyzing dreams because for Bataille “everything that has a manifest side also has a hidden side… there’s a truth in your eyes with which you grasp the world, but your hairy parts underneath your dress are no less a truth than your mouth is” (À perte de vue). This essay then, is analyzing the “hairy parts” (latent content) underneath Nietzsche’s dress (parable).

This essay has reading Nietzsche at his full heterogeneity as its goal, and if this essay is to read Nietzsche as a heterogeneous force, it must first understand what ‘heterogeneous force’ means. Within the concept of heterogeneous force, there is first the concept of ‘force’. Force is the shock that is dépense (expenditure; unproductive consumption) and this shock is when the “whole perceptual and cognitive system crashes, at least for a moment, and is disassembled” (Botting and Wilson 8). The ‘heterogeneous’ is that which results from “unproductive expenditure” and is completely other to homogeneous society which is a society of production, accumulation, and prohibition (Visions of Excess 142). Secondly, this essay, in order to read Nietzsche as a heterogeneous force and truly understand the parable in all of its heterogeneity, must work with Bataille and his concepts because Bataille is Nietzsche’s madman (Hollier 66) (Haase 304). Bataille is the madman who comes down from the mountains early in the morning, lantern in hand, and announces the death of God. Bataille is a theorist who provokes laughter, just as the madman did. It is because Bataille is the madman that this essay is to use Bataille and his writings as the starting point for the interpretation and analysis of this parable.[3] Thirdly, this essay must therefore have the death of God as the object of its analysis because “[r]ecognizing the death of God means recognizing [the] discursive heterogeneity” that is Nietzsche’s writing (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge xxiii). Nietzsche’s poetry is the result of the loss of his blood which seeps into the pages, making them soggy.

The parable that will be psychoanalyzed in this essay is “The madman,” Nietzsche’s 125th parable in book three of The Gay Science, and the fact that this parable is from The Gay Science is important because this is his work which is most discursively heterogeneous. In the early morning, the madman, lantern in hand, runs into a marketplace seeking God. Those who did not believe in God laughed at him, but then the madman jumped forward and proclaimed that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed [H]im” (The Gay Science 181). In Nietzsche’s parable “The madman,” the concept of the death of God is better understood through the elements of symbolism, imagery, and perspective.

The element of symbolism allows for the excavation and analysis of the latent content within the parable allowing for a better understanding of the concept of the death of God. After proclaiming that he and the people in the marketplace have killed God, the madman asks how this murder was done. Comparing God to the Sun, the madman asks, “[w]hat were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” [emphasis added] (The Gay Science 181). The manifest reading of the madman’s question is that God is analogous to the Sun.[4] This “manifest conclusion” though is not so concrete as it seems. Rather than the Sun being a symbol for God, in their analogous relation, the latent reading sees that the Sun is “the most dazzling form” of the relation between a painter and the ideal (Visions of Excess 66). Bataille says that the Sun, as a form of the relation between a painter and the ideal, is analogous to God and His relation to men, but only if God “stupefied them” (Visions of Excess 66). The issue then is the fact that God no longer stupefies man, as He is dead. God is not a heterogeneous shock but rather a homogeneous body. The Sun is heterogeneous in that it is dépense par excellence, as it not only expends unproductively, without return, but it exists only as dépense, having no other “function”. The Sun, immediately upon the production and accumulation of hydrogen particles, consumes and expends. God, in our conception of Him as a homogeneous and supreme being, cannot for a second expend Himself because He has a duty to exist, precluding God from losing Himself in expenditure. In this way, the madman’s comparison of the Sun to God is nothing more than the most atheological description in that it reveals how God is not God! With atheology being “the science of the death or destruction of God[,]” this is an atheological description in that it “kills” or “destroys” (our conception of) God (as God) (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge 166). Is God really God if He is unable to lose Himself in expenditure? No! “A God unable to expend itself utterly is a figure of servility and abjection, bound to persistence with iron chains” (The Thirst for Annihilation 87). The Sun is more glorious than God then! God is “humbled by a mediocre star” (The Thirst for Annihilation 93). Laughter erupts from this fact. This latent reading has revealed that Nietzsche has the latent belief that God is a being able to be killed, and therefore God is a servile being because one can not kill that which is sovereign as it is already “dead”! The madman continues to ask the people in the marketplace questions. The madman asks, “[i]s not night continually closing in on us?” (The Gay Science 181). One could easily derive the manifest conclusion that the madman means that God is the Sun and therefore without the Sun, there is no God, there is night. But as the latent reading of the madman’s words about the Sun have shown, God and the Sun are not analogous but rather the Sun atheologically sacrifices God to its glorious exuberance. Contrary to the manifest reading of the madman’s latter words, the night is not the absence of the Sun, but rather, to quote Nietzsche, “the night is also a sun” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). When Bataille says that “[b]eyond appearance, there is night. In the night, there is only night[,]” there is a latent implication (Guilty 74). This latent implication is that one cannot see the night. This comment, without intention, gives the warranting for why “the night is also a sun” like Nietzsche says (Thus Spoke Zarathustra). One cannot see the night just like one cannot look at the Sun; “[g]azing into the golden rage of the [S]un shreds vision into scraps of light and darkness” (The Thirst for Annihilation 28). For the madman, Bataille, it is because one cannot look at the light that is the Sun or see the darkness that is the night, that they are both truth. Truth cannot be seen on the surface, rather truth is found in the “hairy parts” underneath the dress (realm) of representation. In other words, the manifest content has no truth to it, other than the truth of the latent content hidden inside it, and the latent content is its truth and the truth of the manifest content. This latent content reveals another element of Nietzsche’s view of God. This element is that God, as the object (thing) of theology, is devoid of truth. God isn’t just devoid of truth but false because it is the object of theology. This is because, for Nietzsche, “[w]hat a theologian feels to be true must be false: this provides almost a criterion of truth” (Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ). One can therefore say the inverse: “what an atheologian feels to be true must be true: this provides almost a criterion of truth”. One can now see, through this latent reading, that Nietzsche viewed God as the opposite of the Sun and the night, leaving God (as the object of theology) in a position of untruth. In essence, the symbols of the Sun and the night, which God pales in comparison to, have revealed Nietzsche’s views of God as a servile being chained to the untruth of theology.[5]

The element of imagery allows for the excavation and analysis of the latent content within the parable allowing for a better understanding of the concept of the death of God. The madman, wondering how the murders of God will comfort themselves, says that God “has bled to death under our knives” (The Gay Science 181). The manifest reading would see these words as doing nothing more than representing the image of the murder of God — just another death. Though the manifest content says otherwise, from the position of a latent reading of the parable, one can see that this was not a murder but a sacrifice. The image of the knife bloodied with the blood of God is nothing more than an impossible image that becomes a simulacrum of itself. God escapes representation because God escapes Himself. God is nothing unless He goes beyond Himself as the self is a limit to be surpassed. In going beyond Himself, He becomes NOTHING and therefore He, in undoing Himself, becomes the divine. The divine is thus God in excess of Himself just as Being is the excess of isolated being. The divine is reached in inner experience, when we go beyond our isolated selves into Being which is continuous. In other words, the performance of the sacrificial act upon God escapes representation because any attempt at referencing this event will ultimately be deferred from the base matter, from the Real. One cannot reference the death of God by way of signs. In this way, the performance of the sacrificial act is like the night and the Sun. It escapes representation. One cannot describe this image because it is an image that eats itself up like the Sun. The image of sacrifice is auto-sacrificial. The image sacrifices itself before one can imagine it or conceptualize it. It is that shock of heterogeneous existence on the level of aesthetics that breaks down cognition. Once one escapes the plane of the image, they can see what sacrifice truly is: a transgression. God is nothing more than a principle (of utility, reason, etc.), a prohibition, a thing. The death of God is, therefore, a heterogeneous shock as it is the transgression of a prohibition, the sacrifice of the object’s utility,[6] and the sacrifice of a thing’s thinghood.[7] Thus, sacrifice is nothing more than “the production of sacred things” (Visions of Excess 119). The sacrifice of God is an intimate experience in that it is an inner experience. An inner experience has nothing to do with the interior of an isolated being (the individual) nor the isolated being’s experience. Rather, inner experience is the undoing of experience as it is the undoing of the individual by making the individual go beyond themself. The individual enters into a state of communication. The auto-sacrificial image of the sacrifice of God evokes an inner experience that causes this parable to sacrifice itself furthering its atheological nature. This parable is a hole in which the reader falls into and then when the parable sacrifices itself, the reader is drowned in its blood. This latent reading has shown how Nietzsche latently sacrificed his own parable and it is this sacrificial operation that reveals further nuance that the death of God wasn’t a murder but a sacrifice. The madman running into the marketplace, screaming that he seeks God, “provoked much laughter” from the atheists (The Gay Science 181). First, atheology is not vulgar atheism, rather it is the dissolution of the binary of theism and atheism because God exists in order to not exist. In other words, atheology holds that God exists in His absence (presence-in-absence). Bataille invokes God, only in order to defile him (Negative Ecstasies 207). Second, chronologically, the event of laughter happens after the madman speaks of God. Why does the idea of God provoke such laughter when God is dead? The manifest reading would say two things: 1. it is just people laughing at someone they perceive to be mad and 2. they aren’t laughing because God is dead but because they don’t know that God is dead until the madman tells them.[8] From the position of the manifest reading, knowledge is its object. From the position of the latent reading, nonknowledge is its object. One must read this from the position of the psychoanalyst analyzing dreams, one must look for the latent content. One must lift the dress of Nietzsche to see his hairy parts. What caused these people in the marketplace to laugh? Was the laughter a response that had its origins in the unconscious? Of course! All laughter stems from the heterogeneous which is structured like the unconscious! So, diving into the unconscious of the people in the marketplace, one finds that they laugh because of God’s death:

The brilliance of God’s non-being provokes a wave of cynical laughter. How strange that God’s last act should be so entertaining! A good joke, but rather an old one now. It spawned innumerable witticisms that circulated in the market-place … What was the death of God anyway? … For a long time there have been more important things to things to talk about in market-places … Perhaps they laugh a little at God’s demise occasionally, but they are bored by it … If they laugh at all it is because Jahweh has come to seem so much like a neglected teddy-bear; balding, one arm hanging loose, an eye coming away. When they were children[,] stories about bears had frightened them. Not any more. (The Thirst for Annihilation 85)

So, what do laughter and nonknowledge have to do with the death of God? Everything! It should be noted that “the only sufficient response to death is laughter” because “death is not the object of laughter” rather “[l]aughter is a communion with the dead,” “it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh” (The Thirst for Annihilation xvii). Thus, laughter is a communion with God as He is dead. But what does this have to do with knowledge? Or better yet, what does this have to do with nonknowledge? Bataille says that “we can only unsettle (sacrifice) what exists” and that “sacrifice is much greater if its object was in equilibrium, if it was completed” (Guilty 24). This is important because for Bataille “[l]ife is an effect of instability, of disequilibrium. But stable forms make it possible” (Guilty 24). The implication of these latter words is that which is in equilibrium is stable and is, therefore, a stable form that gives formless existence form. Bataille, incidentally, then says that if a man “sees a completed arrangement in the universe, he is before God” (Guilty 26). Thus, God is that stable form that gives the formless form. This is important because “[k]nowledge demands a certain stability of things known” (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge 133). Stable existence is hit with the heterogeneous shock of the death of God, equilibrium is turned into disequilibrium, stability is turned into instability, form is rendered formless, one leaps from the possible to the impossible, and knowledge breaks down, leaving only nonknowledge. The death of God is an event that is “the refusal to know” (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge 252). These concepts of laughter and nonknowledge are connected by the fact that “laughter is the effect of nonknowledge” (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge 144). The people in the marketplace laughed because they could not control themselves! The fact that they knew nothing made them laugh! They laughed because God is dead! Only a latent reading of the laughter in the marketplace could have shown how the nonknowledge provoked by the death of God made them laugh. In short, the images of the knife bloodied with the blood of God and the people laughing in the marketplace have revealed that Nietzsche views the death of God as not a murder but a sacrifice, which only causes one to laugh from the nonknowledge the event provokes.

The element of perspective allows for the excavation and analysis of the latent content within the parable allowing for a better understanding of the concept of the death of God. After announcing that humanity has killed God, the madman mutters those sacred words, he SHOUTS “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him” [emphasis added] (The Gay Science 181). The manifest reading sees nothing in these words. It sees nothing but mere statements. But the latent reading dives into the unconscious of the parable (and Nietzsche) and reveals that the madman’s usage of ‘we’ reveals an implicit belief about the nature of the death of God. Bataille notes that the word communion means “to establish a unity, to make one of many” and that trying to communicate is “to try to establish a unity, to make one of many[,]” to form a communion (The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge 5). Understanding that this is what communion means is integral to understanding Bataille’s concepts of communication and community. For Bataille, communication is when one goes beyond themselves and, in this movement of going beyond the limits of their individual subjectivity,[9] forms a community with the other.[10] In other words, in communication, subject and object break down into one another, and this fusion, this communion, is a community. How is it possible for the individual to even be able to form a community? Is the individual not already a sufficient or completed unity? The answer is decisive: no. The individual’s existence is predicated on the principle of insufficiency. The insufficiency of being is proven by the fact that “MEN ACT IN ORDER TO BE” (Visions of Excess 171). One would not act, one would not desire, if they were whole, if they were sufficient to themselves. We search for Being to complete ourselves, to become a complete being. In the words of Christopher Gemerchak, “[w]e are beings lacking Being, and are driven by a quest for sufficient, complete being” (43). The problem is “Being in fact is found NOWHERE” (Visions of Excess 173). The usage of ‘NOWHERE’ is important because of the fact that “[s]overeignty is NOTHING” (Sovereignty 430). Thus, Being is achieved in sovereignty, communication happens in sovereignty, and community is formed by the subject and object’s “sovereign relations”.[11] Sovereignty is the key to this part of the analysis because, essentially, sovereignty is conceptually analogous to communication in that Being is “achieved” in both of these states. Sovereignty is best defined as “man’s primordial condition” (Sovereignty 284).[12] For Bataille, humanity, as one conventionally thinks of it today, arose out of desire which created God. God was “created” as prohibition. God-as-prohibition is God as the purveyor of the good, which is the prohibition of sin. This caused the formless to be turned into form, unstable existence stabilized. In this way, humanity, in its primordial condition, was undifferentiated from the totality (of existence) it was, what Bataille calls, continuous. It is only out of a desire for recognition, which differentiates humanity from animality, that humanity becomes discontinuous i.e., separated from the totality, isolated. When humanity is discontinuous, it ceases to exist as an undifferentiated whole,[13] it becomes a series of isolated individual humans. One must note that sovereignty is not a new ontological category, it is the undoing of ontology and its categories. It is only when the individual self is undone in an ecstatic state that sovereignty arises and this is also the condition of communication. Going back to laughter for a moment, the connection between sovereignty, communication (and therefore community), and the death of God is established. It is because “[l]aughter is a communion with the death” that two dissolved (“deceased”) beings can communicate. Laughter constitutes community. Laughter is sovereign. The community that arises in the wake of the death of God is a community of laughter. But one mustn’t stop here. One communicates with God when they sacrifice Him, they reach the divine as does God, and therefore they sacrifice themselves too as they enter into communication with God. Thus, this community of laughter is a community of sacrifice, a community of the death of God. “This is the myth of a sacrificial community, a ‘community of those who do not have a community’ … a community in which all are, and desire to be, victims of the ecstasy that awaits, amidst the remains of God, at the end of eternity” (Biles 143). Only a latent reading of the community predicated on the death of God could get so off track and unorganized. It is only through this latent reading that one can now understand that the people in the marketplace only laugh because they are all a part of a sacrificial community which sacrifices God, having nonknowledge at its effect. The manifest reading would only see a sentence that needed no elaboration. This essay is a labyrinth — it isn’t hard to read for those who resist the will-to-knowledge. The madman stops speaking, he realizes that he “has come too early” that “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way … and yet they have done it themselves” (The Gay Science 182). The manifest reading says “the death of God just hasn’t happened yet”. Again, the manifest reading reveals nothing new as it is stuck within the known. The latent reading is what sees the “hairy parts” underneath the dress of the parable. The object of the madman’s latter words is time. It is here that the madman is trying to trick the reader, to keep the death of God unknown, and this essay does this too but only through “revealing” the nonknowledge (aporia) of TIME. It is from the perspective of the people in the marketplace that time is not linear, it is not our conventional understanding of time, rather it is TIME. TIME is affirmed in the laughter of the people in the marketplace. As this essay has explained (or attempted to at least), laughter constitutes the formation of a sacrificial community in which God is sacrificed and dies. Thus, the death of God happened at the beginning of the parable. They sacrificed Him through the sacrificial community that was formed when they all laughed at the madman. When the madman speaks of time, the question of “how does time operate in relation to the death of God” appears in, and rises out of, the parable. So how does it operate? Steven Shaviro describes it well when he says that it is “a radical rupture of linear temporality” (38). TIME “is a ‘present’ that no longer assures the homogeneous passage from past to future, and that refuses subordination to any teleology” (Shaviro 38). In laughter, the people in the marketplace cease to experience time and begin to experience TIME! The future breaks down, and so does the past. In terms of teleology, there is no longer a means to an end. In other words, the present moment is no longer a means to the end of a projected (desired) future. Rather, the present moment becomes an end in itself, it becomes its own authority,[14] but the present moment at the same time “cuts the head off the Acéphale,” it “expiates” its authority (Shaviro 52).[15] Looking at this in another way, in dépense, time operates as TIME, and dépense “is never a function of power,” and therefore TIME isn’t either (Shaviro 52). When Shaviro says that TIME is a “radical rupture of linear temporality” and that it “no longer assures the homogeneous passage from past to future,” we must take note (38). To the manifest reading, the madman says that the death of God hasn’t happened yet, but it will happen in the future. The latent reading sees, through Bataille’s concept of TIME, that the death of God occurs in the future, has already occurred in the past, and is occurring in the present — linear temporality has broken down. After announcing the death of God, the madman spurts out many questions. The madman asks “[w]hat were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? … Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning?” (The Gay Science 181). This essay has answered a couple of these questions, such as the first in which the answer was “we didn’t unchain the earth from its sun” and when the third question was posed, the answer was “the night is closing in on us, but the night is a sun”. To truly understand the element of perspective in any text, one must not just analyze the perspective of things (e.g., characters) in the text, but also the perspective of the reader. On a meta-level, the latent reading of this parable has been forced into holding a certain perspective by the parable itself. The parable forces the base (latent) reader of the parable into taking the perspective of the general economy. This is because the latent reader who sees the “hairy parts” underneath, must question and contest the manifest reading of the parable which reads it from the perspective of the restricted economy, and because of this, the latent reader is forced into the perspective of the general economy. This forces the question of “what is the general economy?” to be asked. The general economy is one of the most important concepts in the work of Georges Bataille. It is the framework that allows Bataille to do so much, yet at the same time, it is included so little in the more “philosophical” discussions of Bataille. In his work, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume: I, Consumption, Bataille argues that “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury,’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (Consumption 12). What Bataille means is that the presupposed scarcity within economic science (economics) is a false presupposition. He sees that there is excess and this is evident by the fact that the Sun expends energy upon the Earth without (a) return (of energy from the Earth). The fact that there is excess energy is what allows plants to grow, animals to eat, and humans to live. Because there is excess instead of scarcity, the problem of economics no longer becomes production but consumption. This latter fact allows us to delineate the différance between the restricted economy and the general economy. The restricted economy has production as the object of its analysis, and the general economy has consumption as the object of its analysis. It must be noted that Bataille finds it important enough to note that the general economy doesn’t analyze all forms of consumption but rather analyzes dépense which is not “all modes of consumption” such as the modes of consumption “that serve as a means to the end of production[,]” but it is rather “unproductive forms” of consumption (Visions of Excess 118).[16] The reason the restricted economy has production as its object of analysis is that, from its restricted perspective, there is scarcity and necessity, so we need to produce things that are scarce and that we need. The reason the general economy has dépense as its object of analysis is that, from its general perspective, there is excess, why would one need to produce, why would anyone need to do anything other than consume and expend? Bataille also sees these perspectives in another way. As Timothy Snediker explains, for Bataille, the perspective of the restricted economy analyzes beings who are a part of the general “movements of energy” on the Earth, and the perspective of the general economy analyzes those general movements of energy (27). These separate reasons for each separate perspective makes one put forward the question of “which reason is right?” or rather “which perspective is right?”. Bataille has a latent perspectivism within his theory of the general economy. For Bataille, “[i]t is not that the general and restricted points of view are two independently true perspectives” (Snediker 27). Rather, Bataille SHOUTS that “general economy is the truth of restricted economy” because the restricted economy “obtains its truth in light of the general truth” that humanity is a part of the general movements of energy across the Earth (which is the truth of the general economy) (Snediker 27). This means that even if one has a manifest reading of the parable consciously, they unconsciously have a latent reading of the parable. Now, what does the general economy have to do with the perspective of the latent reader? Before this question is answered, it would be pertinent to look at the indigenous practice of the potlatch. The potlatch is a game of gift-giving in which social rivals give gifts to one another. The game is moved forward by way of each player wanting to outdo the other (for social status), leading to more valuable gifts being given until the loser can only give their life. The loser has thus engaged in unproductive expenditure. This means that the potlatch is a “restricted form” of the general economy,[17] only by the fact that the loser does not give their life, they do not take expenditure to its limit. In other words, the loser is not like the Sun, they do not engage in complete loss, they do not engage in pure loss like the Sun does. The essay could be forced into the perspective of what Derrida calls “a kind of potlatch of signs that burns, consumes and wastes words in the gay affirmation of death” [emphasis added] (127). But then, one realizes that this essay is a potlatch of signs because a potlatch where the loser has completely lost themselves by affirming their death is a general economy. Thus, the reader is nothing other than the loser within the potlatch! But this isn’t a potlatch in the sense that it has a teleological structure behind it i.e., this essay is not moved by the accumulation of profit or social prestige like the potlatch is, and this is why it is only “a kind of potlatch of signs” [emphasis added] (Derrida 127). The reader is forced into the perspective of the general economy by the fact that this essay is the general economy. In consolidation, the perspectives of community, TIME, and the general economy have revealed that the death of God is an event that has its origins in the TIMELESS laughter of a sacrificial community circulating as a movement of energy within the general economy.

I am the author of this essay. Immediately upon the entrance of the term ‘I,’ this concluding paragraph becomes fragmented from the entire rest of the essay which is continuous because now that I (a discontinuous subject) have emerged, this essay has become discontinuous. Because this essay has now entered into ‘the world of project’ (discontinuity),[18] it ought to now enter into an inner experience which is the project which escapes from the world of project (Inner Experience 64). This essay has a DESIRE TO BE EVERYTHING (THE TOTALITY; continuity)! I will grant it this wish. How would I grant it this wish though? If this essay must enter into an inner experience, must I too? It may be so. But before I explain how this essay and I will enter into an inner experience, if that is even what we will enter into, I must first say a little about myself. I arose out of a desire for recognition from the reader. From this recognition, I came to know the only two things I know: that I am not everything and that I will die (Inner Experience 4). I know the first thing because if I were everything, if I had Being, I would have no desire (to act), no desire to be (as I would already be (everything)). I know the second thing because my very self-consciousness is set in relation to death as all my teleological action is done out of a fear of it. This fear of death is the only thing holding me back from ecstasy. This fear of death is analogous to the fear of a bad grade for me within the confines of this essay. The condition of not being afraid of death is sovereignty because “sovereignty is essentially the refusal to accept … the fear of death” (Sovereignty 221). Sovereignty is my only escape from this servility! But I’m so afraid… am I not transgressing a prohibition, am I not rebelling against the requirements of this essay lined out on the checklist, could I die or worse… get a bad grade? I have yet to even mention How To Read Literature Like A Professor, but I refuse to quote its domesticating words that would disrupt the play of signs in the general economy that is this essay! The way that I am writing this concluding paragraph is me taking a chance because “the will to chance is rebellion” and I have rebelled against the requirements (On Nietzsche 293). I am truly surrendering my life and this essay’s life (grade) to chance by writing this concluding paragraph as I am. Thus, in my sovereign action of transgression, I begin to laugh. I laugh because I am afraid; “[l]aughter may not show respect but it does show horror” (Eroticism 265). Do I hear more laughter? A “[b]urst of laughter from Bataille” (Derrida 106). Bataille and I watch as this essay sacrifices itself because the concepts which it contains and constitute it sacrifice themselves and their clarity (DeBoer). This essay’s suicide only makes Bataille and I laugh even more! Bataille and I’s laughter eventually settles down. He then tells me a legend about a secret society in the dark woods of France. This secret society was called Acéphale. During one of the last nights of Acéphale’s existence, Bataille tells me that he offered himself up as a sacrificial victim but no one would be the sacrificer. He even says that his lover Laure offered herself up as a sacrificial victim too.[19] We start to share laughter once more, but this laughter is a burst of sovereign laughter. This sovereign laughter throws us into the sovereign relation of community. We annihilate ourselves, we sacrifice ourselves in the formation of this sacrificial community of laughter, and it is in our shared annihilation that we annihilate God with us. THUS, GOD IS DEAD! GOD REMAINS DEAD! AND WE HAVE KILLED HIM! Continuity has returned and with it,[20] God’s corpse says nothing as it rots. The corpse is the basest expression of eroticism because “[e]roticism is the site par excellence of … ‘violent silence’” (Hegarty 160).[21] Silence always has the last word…

Notes

1. The word ‘irreligion’ is used here instead of ‘religion’ because, in relation to religion, “God is the principle of its suppression” (Fanged Noumena 214).
2. This essay only uses capitalized (because God is transcendence par excellence) male pronouns for the pronouns of God because of Nick Land’s interpretation of God as the ‘omniphallus’ and Steven Shaviro’s interpretation of God as a representation of the patriarchy through His relation to Bataille’s figure of ‘the obelisk’ which is interpreted as representative of the phallus. Shaviro also speaks of God as conceived traditionally within Christianity as ‘the Father’ which for him is another example of God being a patriarchal entity. These latter two interpretations are found in The Thirst for Annihilation for the former (Land) and in Passion and Excess for the latter (Shaviro).
3. The use of Bataille is an impossible operation and this only makes this essay more heterogeneous as it has reached the impossible.
4. Though one may call this an implication, there is no ambiguity in the derived conclusion leaving it conscious, and therefore outside the unconscious which is where latent content resides.
5. One may ask the question of “why does the first body paragraph talk more about the nature of God than the death of God?”. This essay replies “one must understand what is dead before it can understand its death”.
6. This makes the object sovereign because “[l]ife beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty” (Sovereignty 198).
7. This makes the thing sacred because it has entered into the sacred world through sacrifice. Sacrifice returns the thing to the sacred world because “[s]acrifice restores to the sacred world that which servile use has degraded, rendered profane” (Consumption 55). Servile use degrades something by making it into “a thing” (Consumption 55).
8. Thus it isn’t the unknowable turned into the known, but the unknown which can be known is turned into the known.
9. The term ‘subjectivity’ refers to the subject. For example, the reason one says phrases like ‘moral subjectivity’ is because it is an expression of the subject’s subjective moral opinion. In the context of this sentence, one could think of subjectivity as the individual subject’s “being” or body.
10. The term ‘the other’ means that which is not ‘the self’ or that which is other than the self.
11. ‘Sovereign relations’ are relations without relations because the subject and object, which are having these sovereign relations, are being undone. If the subject and object are undone, which they are when they form a community, then their relations necessarily become relations without relations.
12. I say that this is the best definition for sovereignty only because it has “the greatest effect” or “the most expansive effect” in that it allows this essay to access Bataille’s differentiation between humanity and animality, God-as-prohibition, etc.
13. This is why, for Bataille, communism has a “sovereign element” to it.
14. For Bataille, “inner experience itself is authority” (Inner Experience 15). Thus, the present moment is its own authority because what is being described is essentially the concept of inner experience.
15. Bataille even says that inner experience questions its own authority (Inner Experience 14).
16. Dépense translates into English from French as expenditure and/or consumption.
17. In this context, potlatch would be analogous to the right hand of the sacred and imperative or pure heterogeneity, and the general economy would be analogous to the left hand of the sacred and revolutionary/subversive or impure heterogeneity. This also means that the restricted economy would be analogous to the profane and social homogeneity. For more information on these terms, see Bataille’s essay “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” found in a collection of his works titled Visions of Excess.
18. For Bataille, ‘project’ is just means to end action i.e., teleology.
19. This “legend” is actually a true story.
20. Continuity has returned because the discontinuous term ‘I’ has annihilated itself from the text.
21. The corpse is also the basest expression of eroticism because it is the basest expression of the prohibition on death which is the basest of prohibitions (The History of Eroticism 79–80). Do you shudder when one talks about touching or eating a corpse? I do.

Works Cited

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— -. Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood, Penguin Group, 2012.

— -. Guilty. Translated by Stuart Kendall, State University of New York Press, 2011.

— -. Inner Experience. Translated by Stuart Kendall, State University of New York Press, 2014.

— -. On Nietzsche. Translated by Stuart Kendall, State University of New York Press, 2015.

— -. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley, 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.

— -. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge. Edited by Stuart Kendall. Translated by Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall, University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

— -. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley, Zone Books, 1989.

— -. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939. Translated by Allan Stoekl, University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Biles, Jeremy. “The Remains of God: Bataille/Sacrifice/Community.” Culture, Theory and Critique, vol. 52, no. 2–3, 2011, pp. 127–144., doi:10.1080/14735784.2011.630886.

Botting, Fred, and Scott Wilson. Bataille (Transitions). PALGRAVE, 2001.

DeBoer, Jason. “Bataille Versus Theory.” Bataille Versus Theory, an Essay by Jason DeBoer, Fierce Language, 1999, web.archive.org/web/20110707075532/www.absintheliteraryreview.com/archives/fierce2.htm.

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Hegarty, Paul. Georges Bataille: Core Cultural Theorist. Sage Publications Ltd, 2000.

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Land, Nick. Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings, 1987–2007. Edited by Robin Mackay and Ray Brassier, Urbanomic, 2011.

— -. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an Essay in Atheistic Religion). Routledge, 1992.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science: with a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1974.

— -. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Penguin Group, 2003. PDF file.

— -. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Group, 2003. PDF file.

Robbins, Carlon. GEORGES BATAILLE AND THE MASOCHIST ETHICS OF (THE LOVE OF) ANGUISH. UNC Charlotte, 2012. Academia.edu, https://www.academia.edu/1604430/GEORGES_BATAILLE_AND_THE_MASOCHISTIC_ETHICS_OF_THE_LOVE_OF_ANGUISH.

Shaviro, Steven. Passion & Excess: Blanchot, Bataille, and Literary Theory. Florida State University Press, 1990.

Snediker, Timothy. “To Have Done with Forgiveness: Capitalism, Christianity, and the Politics of Immanence.” Electronic Theses and Dissertations. University of Denver, 2016. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2148&context=etd

Stoekl, Allan. Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability. University of Minnesota Press, 2007.

— -. “Bataille, Teilhard De Chardin, and the Death of God.” Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, edited by Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall, Fordham University Press, 2015, pp. 202–216.