The Accursed Share: ConsumptionZone Books, 1988 Most Anglo-American readers know Bataille as a novelist. The "Accursed Share "provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess: a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy. The result is a brilliant blend of ethics, aesthetics, and cultural anthropology that challenges both mainstream economics and ethnology. The three volumes of "The Accursed Share" address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, "The History of Eroticism" and "Sovereignty", Bataille explores the same paradox of utility from an anthropological and an ethical perspective, respectively. "The History of Eroticism" analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. In the third volume, Bataille raises the ethical problems of sovereignty, of "the independence of man relative to useful ends." |
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Página 57
... things , to which the profane world of the Ancients generally corresponds . Once the world of things was posited , man himself became one of the things of this world , at least for the time in which he labored . It is this degradation ...
... things , to which the profane world of the Ancients generally corresponds . Once the world of things was posited , man himself became one of the things of this world , at least for the time in which he labored . It is this degradation ...
Página 130
... things . Perhaps it is absolutely right : Often a com- plete separation seems necessary . If we are in search of an object of possession , then we can only propose to look for things , since only things are within the province of ...
... things . Perhaps it is absolutely right : Often a com- plete separation seems necessary . If we are in search of an object of possession , then we can only propose to look for things , since only things are within the province of ...
Página 136
... things ( products and production ) are not , as for the Puritans , what is becoming and wants to become ; if things are within it , if it is itself the thing , this is in the way that Satan inhabits the soul of someone possessed ...
... things ( products and production ) are not , as for the Puritans , what is becoming and wants to become ; if things are within it , if it is itself the thing , this is in the way that Satan inhabits the soul of someone possessed ...
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accumulation Accursed Share action activity amban anguish animal Aztecs Bernardino de Sahagún bourgeois Calvinism capitalism capitalist ceased Charles Bell Chinese communist conquest consequences considered consumption contrary Dalai Lama death defined demands destroyed dissipated divine dominated economy effect energy enterprise excess expenditure exuberance fact festival François Perroux freedom gift give given grasp growth human Ibid immense increase individual industrial interest intimacy Islam isolated labor Lamaism less Lhasa limits luxury man's Marshall Plan Marxism meaning ment military monks moral Moreover Moslem movement Nanauatzin necessity negation nonproductive object offered operation opposed opposition organization paradoxical political possible potlatch precisely principle problem productive forces profit R.H. Tawney reduced religion religious result revolution rich rigor Russian sacrifice self-consciousness sense share social society solution Soviet Soviet Union squandering Stalinism subordinated surplus Tawney things thirteenth Dalai Lama Tibet Tibetan tion truth USSR victims violence wealth