The Accursed Share
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings3
Average rating4.3
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."
Series
1 released bookThe Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy is a 1-book series first released in 1988 with contributions by Georges Bataille.
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An interesting and influential work of philosophy, history, and economics. He focuses a broad discussion of “general economy” on the aspect of expenditure, which he argues is a key aspect ignored for too long in favor of the theoretical concern over production. Expenditure and loss of the surplus of energy and production is the de facto state of the natural systems which form the base of economic activity, and this situation carries to some degree all the way up to human civilization. Bataille points out in repeated historical and anthropological examples, quite a bit of human culture, historically speaking, was centered around providing meaning and social value to this expenditure of surplus, and only recently have the value systems which favor the attempt to preserve surplus for future use become the standard for humanity.
Bataille is an artful writer even when dealing with relatively dry matters, and although it can be difficult at times to discern exactly what he means, the poetic quality of how he states things cannot be denied. Well worth reading and doing so surely puts one in a position to better appreciate Bataille's influence on later theorists and philosophers.
