Reading Journal: Georges Bataille's The Accursed Share Vol. 1

I was eating escargot with a butter-encrusted slice of garlic bread at a chic bistro when my brilliant friend, and dinner guest, suggested I read Bataille. For reasons I still can't totally grasp, that seemed like an appropriate intro to Bataille's work. My friend, a PhD in the humanities, is about as knowledgeable about social theory as anyone could be, so when she suggested I read Bataille, and later gifted me a copy of The Accursed Share Volume 1, I didn't wait long before reading. 

The first chapter was hard to grasp, as Bataille attempts to describe his unconventional theory of "political economy," a term which Bataille himself concedes is insufficiently descriptive of his grandiose ideas. After reading and re-reading chapter one, I asked my friend if she could explain it for me. She said, "no one really gets it, just keep reading and don't think about it too much."    

I finished the book in a matter of days. "What the [EXPLETIVE] did I just read?" I thought, after closing the book. 

Let's start with that enigmatic, but provocative, chapter one. Bataille uses his first few pages to describe his idea of "General Economy," which has less to do with money and production, and more to do with energy consumption at it's very basic level. The sun feeds the plants, they consume its energy to grow and multiply, animals eat those plants and to do the same. General Economy, in Bataille's view is an ecology of consumption. Any individual, or system, of individual beings must consume some energy to survive, grow then reproduce. After that, if beings continue to amass energy, the excess becomes "wealth." 

Think about a financially well-off person whose home is paid off, and whose children are grown and independently successfully themselves. This person still works and makes money, even though they could retire comfortably. We'd call that extra money "wealth" in General Economy the same way we would in our conventional economy. Bataille claims that the extra money (or energy) must be consumed -not just spent but spent lavishly! (and without profit). Furthermore, he argues that the same is true of societies at large. When a nation or culture generates collective wealth they must also blow it all on something huge and unproductive, like a grand monument, a festival or a war.  

That kind of makes sense when it comes to our well-off man or woman; I've seen enough of them cruising around in their Tesla's. But what about the frugal millionaire? The one who still drives a Ford pickup or rides a scooter to the office? What exactly is forcing them to blow their cash so auspiciously? Well eventually it'll get spent one way or another I suppose. But, it's not individual wealth that Bataille is concerned with, it's societal wealth, which is even harder to get my mind around. But, it all kinda makes sense if you read on. 

To demonstrate his point, Bataille spends the rest of the book exploring the various way different cultures and societies have consumed their excess energies throughout history. Societies have always wasted their wealth in more or less normal ways since the beginning of recorded history, by erecting giant beautiful monuments and architecture, holding mass festivals, etc. But Bataille argues this is sometimes not enough to quench a collective thirst to consume the remaining share. That remaining wealth, the cursed share, will ultimately doom "multitudes of human beings" who are themselves ripe for consumption. 

Take the Aztec practice of ritual human sacrifice, which Bataille covers in gruesome detail in chapter two. The Aztec Empire, a military power of pre-Columbian America, practiced a religion that worshiped the Sun, the all-giving light without which no life would exist. To the Aztecs, according to Bataille, the Sun god created not only people, but also war and death, and the only way to repay humanities dept to it was to offer up life in return. This was why war, or conquest, was crucial to Aztec society. The greatest gift for man to offer was his life on the battlefield, and equally valuable was to capture a prisoner to sacrifice. 

But why not use the prisoner for labor, or incorporate them into the Aztec society? Therein lies the sacrifice. The sacred person, the victim of ritual execution, is not meant to be of service to you, he is meant to please the Sun, who gives all without anything in return. In fact, the victims of sacrifice were treated as sacred themselves, often being given luxurious feasts and treated as guests of honor for many days leading up to, well, the end. 

Another, less gruesome, aspect of this is "Potlach," a gift-giving ceremony also practiced by the Aztecs, and still practiced by some indigenous people of North America today. In Potlach, the point is to present a gift to your rivals, not to please or help them, but to humiliate them. To give a gift so valuable that they can't reciprocate it. You give a handsome gift, and your rival has a certain amount of time to return a gift of their own (of greater value). And this goes on until one rival can't out-gift the other. The loser, recipient of the final gift, must concede defeat. (But at least they got something really cool, I guess.)

The Norte-Dame Basilica, Montreal

 

Bataille goes on through history looking at similar cultural wealth/energy consumption traditions, ranging from the monks of Tibet, financially supported by lay people to meditate and study all day, to the great religious wars of Europe and the near east in the middle ages. If anything, it's compelling reading. Anyone who enjoys the detailed archeologies of Michel Foucault, or binges on Dan Carlin's hours long "Hardcore History" podcasts will enjoy Bataille's historic ethnographies.
       
So what's the point of The Accursed Share? What are we supposed to learn? That, apparently, was just as opaque to Bataille's contemporaries as it was to me. But, it seems as though he's artfully trying to give us an over-arching ethic about what to do when one society accumulates more wealth than it needs to carry on. At the end of the book Bataille, a Frenchman and democratic Communist who lived through World War II, praises the Marshall Plan, the United States plan to spend trillions re-building Western Europe after the war, without any expectation of re-payment. To preface this, he describes the brutal tactics the Soviet government used to force-industrialize the nation into a military power on par with the US. These tactics worked, but not without a brutal cost. Bataille was rightfully appalled by the Soviet-style of government; he believed the Marshall Plan was a critical strategy in challenging the rise of Soviet Communism and avoiding a third more devastating world war. The irony in this is that, in order to save itself from Communism, the US was forced to abandon it's own capitalist values of profit and give lavishly to war-torn Europe without the expectation of return. 

I'll let Bataille speak for himself here...   

Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican trans-formation: a reversal of thinking -and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return."... "The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. (25) 

So what is a "profitless operation"? A public library, an air drop of rice and grains, 50 percent off a Domino's hand-tossed pizza? An offering to the Sun god? And what is "wealth," or "excess?" A national treasury, a corporation's reservoir of stock, six months rent in a savings account, escargot? And how do we all fit into Bataille's General economy? Who should receive? Who should sacrifice? And what ultimately happens to the cursed share of the wealth if it's not usable? Those are questions not entirely answered in Volume 1, but maybe the point is just to ask them. 

The Accursed Share Volume 1, published by Zone Books in 1991, is translated by Robert Hurley. The original book, titled La Parte Maudite, was published in France by Les Editions de Minuit in 1967.