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Bataille draws upon Marx as a resource against the surrealists and their ‘pretentious idealist aberrations’ (1985, p. 32). In a revealing statement Bataille declares: ‘It is of course difficult to avoid a feeling of contempt for revolutionaries to whom the revolution is not, before all else, the decisive phase of the class struggle’ (1985, p. 33, emphasis in original). Marxism, for Bataille, is the only revolutionary movement that has freed itself from idealism: it does not seek to raise or elevate all, but to overthrow those who have asserted an elevated position.

Bataille contrasts idealist and imperialist revolutions, symbolised by the eagle which soars high and tears apart its victims with its sharp beak, to materialist revolutions which begin low down, in the earth. The materialist or ‘geological uprising’ is symbolised, for Bataille, by the ‘old mole’, a figure which appears in Marx and Engels’ The Commu- nist Manifesto (1967, originally published in 1848). Bataille often draws attention to human rootedness in dirt: the big toe of the human foot which enables the upright posture does so by pressing into the earth; the ‘dirty’ and ‘defiling’ menstrual blood and seminal fluids are the sub- stances through which humans come into being. Bataille notes: ‘man experiences, in contradiction to strict morality, urges that draw him to what is low, placing him in antagonism to all forms of spiritual eleva- tion’ (1985, p. 36). Just as human beings exist in contradiction, so too do societies, which are ‘universally divided into upper and lower classes’ (p. 36). The upper classes concern themselves with ideas. Even poor- quality ideas are given a high or elevated place by the institutions which the upper classes dominate: the church, the universities, parliaments. In contrast, the lower classes are ‘base materialist’ in the sense of being steeped in sweat and toil, ravaged by unfulfilled desires and boiling with ‘measureless agitation’ (p. 36).

Exceeding the political through repressed affectivity need not result in a community of fierce beasts, especially when a “proper” Bataillean embrace of these affectivities must avoid authoritarian calcification. Thus, the vague similarities between Bataille and fascist thought should not lead one to reject his comments on fascism, the potential for vibrant communities, and subversion of the state. Bataille’s explanation for the development of fascism can inform our current situation: the decline in confidence of democratic systems and heads of state and the lower classes become more acclimated to nationalistic movements. Likewise, if we wish for a community that furthers the value of individuals outside of utilitarian concerns, then there is a time and place to push for subversion of the state structure that will resist sliding into totalitarianism.

The anarchist flavor of Empire is conveyed most strikingly by its romanticization of violence. Although by now everyone knows that there are terrorists in this world, there are no terrorists in Hardt and Negri’s book. There are only people who are called terrorists, “a crude conception and terminological reduction that is rooted in a police mentality.” Terms such as “ethnic terrorists” and “drug mafias” appear within quotation marks, as if no serious revolutionary could believe that there were such things. “Totalitarianism” is another pure construct, simply an invention of cold war ideology, that has been used to “denounce the destruction of the democratic sphere.” Certainly the term has little to do with actual life in the Soviet Union, which Hardt and Negri describe as “a society criss-crossed by extremely strong instances of creativity and freedom.”

Negri, when not in prison, has been a political philosopher, and he is the author of numerous books, manifestos, and theses on subjects ranging from Spinoza’s metaphysics to the nature of insurgency under contemporary capitalism. In nearly all this work, as in Empire, he invariably associates violence with states in the exercise of their power, never with opposition groups and their tactics. For the latter, any action, no matter how insurrectionary, is justified. For the former, any action, no matter how peaceful, is terrorism in disguise.

Politics, the Work of Death, and the “Becoming Subject” – In this section, Mbembe “present[s] a reading of politics as the work of death.” (16)  Starting from Hegel’s account of death, “the human being truly becomes a subject – that is, separated from the animal – in the struggle and the work through which he or she confronts [they confront] death,” (14) Mbembe concludes, “Politics is therefore death that lives a human life.” (15)  [Does Mbembe’s progression make sense in this paragraph?]  Mbembe also draws heavily on Bataille to complete his rereading of politics.  [Since I haven’t read Bataille before, does anyone else want to discuss the accuracy of Mbembe’s interpretation?]

Moreover, Wolin’s claim hinges on a conception of community in which war acts as acatalyst that takes disparate, atomised individuals and puts them into an ecstatic collec-tive. The crux of Wolin’s interpretation is a misinterpretation of the Bataillean con-ception of community. Bataille calls for a community that destroys the traditionalsense of community. As the“Programme (Relative toAcéphale)”states,“1 Form a com-munity creative of values, values creative of cohesion".16This call to form a communitybased on the creation of values implies the destruction of existing communities.However, proposition 7 suggests that proposition 1 refers to a universal community:“Fight for the decomposition and exclusion of all communities national, socialist, com-munist or churchly–other than universal community".17Thus, this concept of commu-nity is a rejection of nationalist, socialist, or typical religious communities. In Bataille,one is confronted with a universal community that breaks with existent communitiesfounded on old ideals or values.

I want to think with and through this statement, for while I suspect I share a number of Rev. Lamar’s sociopolitical leanings, I nevertheless want to rewrite the terms of his critique of what might be termed our current theopolitical, settler-colonial fascism and thereby complexify what he seems to be calling for. Rev. Lamar’s comments suggest that the country’s fortunes or, as the case may be, its misfortunes move in direct relationship to “proper practice” (rather than what he calls malpractice) in the dual spheres of political rationality and theological rationality. The former we often think of as a secular sphere where electoral politics, governance through a system of checks and balances, equality before the law, policies for the good of the citizenry, and so forth, take place or are guaranteed. The latter is often thought of as a private domain that considers religion, salvation, and related personal matters of conscience and of the heart. As Rev. Lamar’s Washington Post comments suggest, these two spheres of the political and the theological offer parallel tracks that contribute to the health and moral well-being of the nation.

While Rev. Lamar indicts both spheres of politics and religion, nevertheless the force of his criticism falls decidedly on the so-called private sphere of religion. On asking why this might be the case, it seems the answer lies in the social imaginary Rev. Lamar works with or the picture of society he paints. It is as if in the picture he paints the last line of defense to keep the state on the moral straight and narrow, even when or perhaps most especially when political institutions are failing us, is proper theological practice. Religion is our (political) salvation. But what do we do when religion does not uphold its societal duty? It is for this reason that Rev. Lamar is keen to call out this particular sphere. Theological malpractice, or a religious imagination that has abdicated its duty to keep the state on the moral straight and narrow by surrendering to “the sweet bye-and-bye,” is as responsible, if not more so, for a country gone off the rails as political malpractice or the failure of our political institutions.

What has not been so well recognized is that there is a corresponding, though less frequent, uncertainty in the use of "and". Thus, it is not always clear whether the writer intends the several "and" (A and B, jointly or severally) or the joint "and" (A and B, jointly but not severally). This uncertainty will surprise some, because "and" is normally used in the former sense. Even so, the authors of documents sometimes intend things to be done jointly or not at all. This idea inheres in the purchase of a pair of shoes (try to buy one shoe separately!) without, however, posing any grammatical problem. On the other hand, a reference to "husbands and wives" may create a grammatical uncertainty as to whether the right, privilege, or duty extends to husbands without wives, and vice versa, or whether it may be enjoyed or discharged only jointly.3 Where such a doubt exists, it is desirable to recognize and deal with it.

Observation of legal usage suggests that in most cases "or" is used in the inclusive rather than the exclusive sense, while "and" is used in the several rather than the joint sense. If true, this is significant for legal draftsmen and other writers, because it means that in the absence of special circumstances they can rely on simple "or's" and "and's" to carry these respective meanings. This, incidentally, greatly reduces the number of occasions for using the undesirable expression "and/or" or one of its more respectable equivalents, such as "A or B, or both", or "either or both of the following".

It is important to note that Bataille does not simply champion excess over utility, or sacrifice above production, that is, he does not simply invert the values of rationalist, utilitarian thought. For Bataille, the sys- tem of production could not function without its periodic suspension, nor could wealth be expended sacrificially if it were not first accumulated. Further, the demarcation between the two spheres – sacred and profane, sacrificial and economic, heterogeneous and homogeneous – is vital for society because the marking of limits enables transgressive experience (such as festivity) to take place, as well as drawing the boundaries that construct and protect order. Without such limits there is neither order nor disorder.

What characterizes traditional sovereignty, which the modern rebel rejects? A squandering of resources in useless expenditures; excess consumption in the present; scorn for useful activity; benefiting from property without laboring for it; and giving exorbitant gifts, indulging in luxuries beyond measure — whether by building palaces, churches, gardens to inspire wonder, or by destroying surpluses to win the challenge for prestige.

By definition, the sovereign does not work — “labor is the exact opposite of the sovereign attitude” (283). Not only are sovereigns free from the necessities that rule the work world, they also enjoy to no purpose what has been produced. The sovereign’s symbolic role is therefore separate from whatever practical ‘governing’ they may do, however much these aspects get mixed up — for example, in the classic theological problem: why did God, who is not constrained by any necessity, create and order the universe? The “perfect God,” constrained to uphold order in the universe, is for this reason not sovereign but constrained and servile. By contrast, for Bataille, the sovereign qua sovereignty possesses an utterly non-servile attitude. They are not subordinated to any goal, neither the maintenance of order (cosmic or worldly) nor individual survival, for “subordination is always grounded in the alleged need to avoid death” (222). At the limit, the sovereign denies the boundaries of the individual and risks death in the moment, preferring symbolic prestige over personal survival (220), magnificence over life (353). No caution or concern is exercised for the sake of future benefit or pay-off. Its existence is thus antithetical to the world of work, to the maintenance of society, and to concerns of rational accumulation and survival. Bataille links sovereign uselessness directly to joy: “The truth is that we have no real happiness except by spending to no purpose” (178); “Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty” (198).

We presented one case study for a community-based sustainable economy and lifestyle, from which we could learn lessons for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). It is a rural–urban hybrid, yet nature-grounded, economy, and lifestyle; that is, living within the green environment while accessing modern social services and convenient facilities, where the gift and sharing modes of economy play a vital role for SWB. Previous literature has questioned economic growth as being incompatible with nature conservation and human SWB and has proposed degrowth, especially in high-income settings (Dawes, 2020; Hickel, 2019; LPHE, 2019). In the light of our findings, SWB can be achieved by applying alternative modes of economy, such as gift economy and sharing economy, as well as by having access to other direct sources of well-being, such as social cohesion, natural environment, cultural identity, and spirituality, when basic human needs are already satisfied. These findings can help the resolution of the incompatibility. One additional route for degrowth may be to increase the opportunity for high-income populations to have a close contact with natural environment and experience nature and nature's reproductive cycle, which can foster a sense of security, joy, and satisfaction and alleviate the drive for consumption. It allows human beings to be aware of their life as part of the eco-system and, thus, meaningful. Another rout is to increase low-income community's control over environmental resource management and put their views at the centre of policy and programme planning (Nerfa, Rhemtulla, & Zerriffi, 2020). The family farm campaign by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO, 2020) may be one such example. The small-scale, primary-sector populations are the caretaker of the earth as well as the foundation of the global market, thus we endorse protecting their nature-grounded lifestyle and non-market economy, learning from their knowledge and views.

5 CONCLUSION

As indicated earlier, the affirmative degrowth position exists as a political and academic platform that may gain further support in the face of current developments. At present, however, it is far more common to advocate the conjoint transformation of the economic and the socio-political order—and as the demand for environmental sustainability becomes increasingly urgent, this position could overtake that of affirmative degrowth completely. Across the board, ecologists, anarcho-communists, Marxist-feminists, and other key proponents of degrowth as an underlying principle of social transformation are adopting UBI as a key instrument (see inter alia, Beckford, 2019; Blaschke, 2016; Cabaña, 2019; Flanigan, 2018; Weeks, 2011). Thus, the transformative degrowth logic is gaining intellectual and political momentum as the strongest rationale for UBI.

Full implementation of the ideas inherent to proposals of this type of UBI would entail an ‘extreme makeover’ of society, one that we have yet to see—and with which it is difficult to experiment. The ‘all or nothing’ character of this position does not lend itself easily to pilot testing, but could, potentially, be rolled out incrementally. As examples of existing initiatives that may be associated with this intellectual movement, Mein Grundeinkommen (n.d.) in Germany encourages a ‘focus on our life-goals rather than on existential needs’, and the Swiss initiative Verein Grundeinkommen (n.d.) supports ‘a more liberal way of life’.

Using unconditional basic income (UBI) as its empirical prism, this article offers new impetus to the foundational debate within critical theory as to whether and how redistribution and recognition can relate productively to each other. We explore the possibility of redistributive solidarity, arguing that unconditional and universal redistribution may be a means of furthering the recognition of different subjectivities that are not solely defined by their productive relations of labor. Seeing such redistributive solidarity as a potential but not necessary outcome of UBI, we develop a typology of existing UBI experiments that divide these according to whether they seek to affirm or transform the current social order based on principles of growth or degrowth. Surveying these four types of UBI, we find that the envisioned form of economic redistribution shapes the potential for social recognition. While the relationship is one of utopian potential rather than causal necessity, UBI may indeed enable redistributive solidarity.

There are several explanations for why some commentators have misinterpreted Bataille as celebrating archaic practices and ignoring the role of self-interest and exploitation. He is often less interested in the intentions behind transgressive festivals than in how they function in the overall economy, i.e., putting accumulated wealth back into circulation. Analyzing practices on the level of the individual are often his secondary concern, and such abstraction can make him appear uninterested in the motivations of those organizing and participating in transgressive festivals. Moreover, at times he dismisses the stated intentions for festivals as rationalizations that mask unconscious desires towards the squandering of life and resources. This can make it appear as if he is interpreting archaic practices as spontaneous responses to irrepressible impulses. For example, he argues that archaic people rationalized orgies as attempts to ensure a successful crop yield, but this stated intention was subordinate to the primary role of an explosive release of sacred impulses (AS II 115). Similarly, in On Nietzsche, he claims that we always motivate ourselves with the language of utility, even when we desire to unproductively expend energy and resources (ON 37). We are sometimes wracked by powerful unconscious urges to transgress taboos and experience the sacred, but justify the resulting actions in terms of their usefulness, because this allows us to reconcile them with the world of accumulation and self-preservation. This is a plausible interpretation of how ordinary citizens represent transgressive events to themselves: they seize every pretext to fulfil repressed desires, grasping whatever justification is available. It does not, however, fully account for the existence of transgressive festivals. If they exist because human beings always unconsciously organize opportunities to express sacred impulses, then Bataille could not account for a society where this does not happen. This would render his critique of bourgeois capitalism (examined later), as a form of society that does not allow for the expression of sacred desires, incoherent. There is more at work in creating and maintaining transgressive festivals than the unconscious desires of the participants: the exuberance shown by the participants of transgressive events often contrasted with the relatively sober reasoning of those organizing them, who channelled and exploited the malleability of sacred desire.

We can see, therefore, that the criticism that Bataille falsifies archaic rituals and glorifies them as celebrations of unproductive expenditure is unjustified. He does partially invite this criticism by claiming that these rituals are one way of obfuscating the negative consequences of repressing sacred impulses (although, as we will see, there are other means of avoiding ruinous destruction). But he does not succumb to the illusion that the rituals of archaic societies were spontaneous responses to essential human needs. In contrast, he is aware that in organizing transgressive rituals, elites deliberately infused themselves with sacred power. While sacred desires might erupt sporadically and destructively when unchecked, they can also be manipulated by elites and used as a currency to purchase certain goods: personal power, stability, social cohesion, etc.

The strongest criticisms of Bataille come from Richard Wolin’s article, “Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology". Throughout his article, Wolin compares Bataille to many proto-fascistic German thinkers. Wolin draws a connection between Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger and Bataille in relation to an “aesthetics of violence” that was common to the generation situated between the World Wars.Footnote11 In an aesthetics of violence, war has a positive position. War destroys the individualisation and subjectivity that grounds bourgeois society. Wolin says that “It is in this spirit that he [Bataille] celebrates the nonutilitarian nature of military combat as a type of aesthetic end in itself". He summarises, In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harboring of a cultural transformation in which the primacy of self-posting subjectivity would be replaced by the taboo values of an “ecstatic” community: a community no longer governed by the identitarian prejudices of visual culture—by norms of transparency, sameness, self-equivalence—but instead by those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. Footnote12 Thus, Wolin believes that Bataille’s concept of community develops through such things as war and conflict. Wolin doubles down on this interpretation, “for it is a model that embraces an aesthetics of transgression as the norm for social action".Footnote13 As war is seen as a transgressive behaviour, it is the basis of social action, or, in other words, community forming and reinforcing behaviours. Wolin’s interpretation is heavily dependent on quotations from one of Bataille’s later works, The Accursed Share, written between 1946 and 1949. A supposed example of Bataille’s embrace of the aesthetic of violence cited by Wolin is “Glory … expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervour of combat presupposes. Combat is glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment".Footnote14 This is not necessarily a glowing endorsement of war. Recognising that combat is beyond calculation is not the same as endorsing combat as a means to exceed bourgeois society. More importantly, this quote from Bataille is in the context of a discussion on rank in a potlatch. Potlatch is an Indigenous tradition from the Pacific Northwest. It is a ceremonial feast in which possessions are destroyed or given away to opposing tribes. The opposing tribes are then, by tradition or social pressure, expected to return with interest the possessions given away or destroyed. Hence, Wolin distorts Bataille's view by ignoring the context of this quotation. Bataille states that glory and warfare are misunderstood if one does not understand them through the acquisition of rank. The clearest form of obtaining rank and its relationship to expenditure is the potlatch. Likewise, communities often recognise glory and bestow accolades in reference to one’s willingness to confront death and the severity of chance in combat. What makes one glorious is the embrace of chance, and “Combat is glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment".Footnote15 Bataille is not recognising combat as the highest form of useless expenditure but recognising it as a powerful form that is honoured through rank. Moreover, Wolin’s claim hinges on a conception of community in which war acts as a catalyst that takes disparate, atomised individuals and puts them into an ecstatic collective. The crux of Wolin’s interpretation is a misinterpretation of the Bataillean conception of community. Bataille calls for a community that destroys the traditional sense of community. As the “Programme (Relative to Acéphale)” states, “1 Form a community creative of values, values creative of cohesion".Footnote16 This call to form a community based on the creation of values implies the destruction of existing communities. However, proposition 7 suggests that proposition 1 refers to a universal community: “Fight for the decomposition and exclusion of all communities national, socialist, communist or churchly – other than universal community".Footnote17 Thus, this concept of community is a rejection of nationalist, socialist, or typical religious communities. In Bataille, one is confronted with a universal community that breaks with existent communities founded on old ideals or values.

Is violence an inevitable part of satisfying sacred desire? As we have seen, Bataille's historical analysis does suggest that political communities cannot, in the long-run, repress the source of sacred desire in natural horror. Consequently, as Paul Hegarty argues, we must face violent nature squarely, without falsifying it. It might be concluded from this that violence is inevitable. Kenneth Itzkowitz, for instance, argues that for Bataille violence is not only inevitable but is also desirable as the most powerful entry into the sacred, and that the normative implication of his thought is, therefore, that we should seek to substitute "less damaging acts for the more violent alternatives", because "violence is the only key we have to the experience of the miraculous, of the sacred". This conclusion is, however, too quick, and assumes that only violence can offer insight into natural horror. There are plenty of indications in Bataille's texts that there are non-violent practices that can generate intimacy with horrific nature.

In some of his less cited works, particularly the second and the unfinished third volumes of The Accursed Share, Bataille repeatedly emphasizes that certain forms of culture are valuable because they are capable of invoking the sacred. Indeed, sacred desire is the basis for the arts: "If human life did not contain this violent instinct, we could dispense with the arts." (LE 60). Not all art possesses the power to invoke the sacred. Art is "authentic" or "sovereign" when it is not reducible to utility and is capable of offering a window into the sacred realm, capable of producing a "suspended, wonder-struck moment, a miraculous moment" (AS III 200), of responding to the desire "to lose ourselves—tragically, comically—in the vast movement where beings endlessly lose themselves" (AC II 109). The most powerful incarnation of this desire is the desire to glimpse the violent squandering at the heart of nature. The highest forms of art are, therefore, those that produce "derangements" and "laceration" in the mindset of everyday life, exposing the "wound" of human existence, the ceaseless circulation of anonymous life (LE 68). In this moment of laceration, we glimpse and experience the continuity between horror and ecstasy. For example, in "the most engaging" iterations of the "authentic" novel the protagonist embodies the virtues excluded from the world of utility, glory, splendour, prestige, and exhibits a disregard of utility that gradually leads him to his own destruction (AS II 107). The reader takes pleasure in his anguish, "in the feeling of loss or endangerment it gives us" and experiences the lure of ruination (AS II 106). It is the ability of art to represent and invoke the horror of the natural world that leads Bataille to claim that it is possible for literature to be the "principal heir" of religions and sacrifices: "this longing to lose, to lose ourselves and to look death in the face, found in the ritual of sacrifice a satisfaction it still gets from the reading of novels" (AS II 106). Both sacrificial practices and authentic novels are enactments of a crime against the everyday world (AS III 106). It is possible, then, for culture to be a viable heir to sacrificial rites, a naturalized means of satisfying sacred desire. For this reason, Bataille flirts with the idea that surplus resources could be poured into cultivating culture (AC III 429). Not only would this provide outlets for the investment of sacred desire, but this would also offer a solution to the pressing problem of how to spend the surplus resources that make up a society's accursed share: "We must seek exhaustion through rational means, as against the subjective means of the pursuit of rank and of war" (AC III 428). While this line of reasoning is not comprehensively worked out in Bataille's work, it is, nonetheless, a clear indication that there are more palatable methods for cultivating a meaningful intimacy with natural horror than resorting to violence itself.

“A strange madness has taken hold of the working class in nations where capitalist civilization reigns…this madness is the love of work, the moribund passion for work, pushed to point where the vital forces of the individual and his progeny are exhausted.” These are the words of Paul Lafargue from “A Right to Be Lazy”, an anti-capitalist, anti-productivist, and anti-work tract published in 1883. “The Right to Be Lazy” was a piece of writing whose impact and influence in its day was practically on par with Marx and Engels “The Communist Manifesto”. Like the “Manifesto” this was not a work of high theory; Lafargue’s intention was to send a shockwave throughout the mass of workers, opening their eyes to the reality of the soul-crushing grind demanded by life under capitalism. In his work, Lafargue observes that societies in antiquity generally manifested an absolute hatred for work. He notes, for instance, that in Ancient Greece only it was the slaves who were permitted to work. However, in Lafargue’s view, the 19th century proletarian worker expressed a willingness to embrace the servile labor demanded by their capitalist masters. Lafargue writes that the proletariat has been “perverted by the dogma of work, tempted to abandon its historical mission to emancipate itself from the fetters of capitalism. He chastises the working class for allowing themselves to be infected with the oppressive moralism of the bourgeoisie. The European ruling class elevated the virtues of work to a kind of religion. Moreover, their de facto priesthood advocated for putting the poor and dispossessed into workhouses where they would suffer the humiliation of working 14-hour days. Those imprisoned in workhouses were enslaved under the pretense that poverty and the supposed idleness associated with being poor was a kind of moral illness.

Lafargue also excoriates the bourgeois ideal of “Progress”. For Lafargue, “progress” was the capitalist’s empty promise, a chimera, as what actually “progressed” was the capitalist’s methods of exploitation and his grip on the means of production. Lafargue furthermore criticizes workers’ demands and organizing strategies amidst crises of industrial overproduction and ensuing work stoppages of his time. Massive surpluses of commodities would leave laborers out of work and without a wage. However, rather than demand equitable distributions of the excess and an extended break from the job, workers would pound on factory doors demanding more work. Meanwhile, their capitalist counterparts destroyed stores of surplus commodities, creating an artificial scarcity which in turn left the proletariat dependent upon wages for survival. Buying into the capitalist virtues of hard work and progress meant a kind of trade off for the working class. Rather than reclaiming time for leisure or asserting “the right to be lazy”, the workers enlisted to build the edifice of industrial capitalism remained enslaved to it.

Having looked at money’s relationship to capital in Chapter 2, its configuration as a form of debt in Chapter 3, and its underlying structures of guilt in Chapter 4, we now turn to a fourth conceptual framework for exploring the theory of money, namely, notions that connect it to waste. This conception of money emerges with particular clarity when it is viewed through the perspective of general economy. The central thinker here is Georges Bataille, who although he remains largely a peripheral figure in anthropology and sociology, is best known for his theory of expenditure and the accursed share. Bataille’s work has particularly strong connections with—although it must also be distinguished from—the arguments of Mauss on sacrifice, primitive classification, and gift exchange, which we considered in Chapter 1. Following a discussion of Bataille in which we consider his notion of money against the background of his philosophy of base materialism, his conception of unproductive expenditure and his theory of general economy, I want to look at two thinkers whose arguments resonate with his, although both move in quite different directions. These are Derrida and Baudrillard. I am not giving general introductions to these figures but focusing specifically on what they had to say about (and how they used) notions of waste and general economy, and more narrowly, what they said about the nature of money in relation to these notions.

By addressing money from the perspective of waste, I am inverting its more customary textbook treatment as a function of utility. This is a familiar theme in the study of consumption: luxury objects express the capacity of their owners to waste what they have, and the “Veblen good” is more coveted the higher its price goes. As Veblen describes it in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), the capacity to indulge in wasteful expenditure—and to make others use up their productive time catering to one’s luxurious tastes—is a key marker of distinction (Veblen 2009). Waste is a cultural symbol, in Veblen’s theory; indeed, one might refer to wasteful rather than conspicuous consumption (Varul 2006: 104–105). Waste is sociologically loaded as well as culturally rich. Alongside gambling, conspicuous or wasteful consumption belongs to the group of “fanciful uses of money” that Bataille associates with expenditure. Having said this, I will focus specifically on theories that view money itself as a form of waste—or what Bataille calls heterogeneous matter.

One of the things you hear whenever you talk about degrowth is that, if the economy doesn't grow, people are going to be without jobs, people will go hungry, and no one wants that. Rich countries might be able to afford slowing down their economies, but not poorer ones. You hear this argument mostly in countries from the Global South, like my own. This misses the point. Degrowth is a critique of our dependency on work. This idea that people have to work to stay alive, and thus the economy needs to keep growing for the sake of keeping people working.

Basic income goes well with the ideas of slowing down the economy, of becoming less dependent, and of stopping the increasing and continuous production of stuff that we don't really need. A UBI would precisely allow individuals the freedom to work less and to say no to negative jobs, for instance in the fossil fuels industry. It would also allow them to have more free time to take care of the people they care about.

EB: So, I think this concept of gift is specifically a stronger mean against these two strategies, so, how to have—so—this strategy to have massive mass control through digital tools in order to rank, in order to evaluate you as a citizen and so in which money is not so central but the value of what you are is based on a ranking system centralized in a social control by the state—this is China—and on the other side, that, you are—you are—fitted by an income and—and—a liquidity only in order to have access to services that are privatized by the market. These are the two main dystopian—but not so dystopian—but, if the paradigm turn that I think we are facing—and so to reframe a UBI that is not for this is our is our goal and our task. So, gift economy, yeah, gift economy, theoretically, for me is linked to the concept of value—so, in both—in the market and in the social control of top-down—everything is based on a system of evaluation, of measurement, so, you have to be measured, no? And the gift is a concept that states especially—apart from Bataille, but also with Klossowski and also Derrida a lot—that gift states that the Other is not measurable—measurable—that is not measurable—that only the Other can state its value. Nobody else can rank you and evaluate you, but only you can say if this is a gift. Only you can say that this is a gift, only the Other—you, I mean, you—it is the one that receives the gift, no?—but—and this is for example also something that we experimented with in the basic income pilot we did in the Macau community, because—basically just to explain we established, as an organization and our community, to create a common wallet feeded by our income as an organization and then we decided to share this common wallet monthly—we see that the artists community has a basic income! But in the very beginning we started to do schemes in order to understand who could receive this basic income, so for example: the only one that was participants, the only one that was active in the time bank, only the one that was able to demonstrate, to do something, no? And I think we understood that it was a super dangerous bureaucracy mistake and after a while, after one or two years, we decided to base the basic income on a self-evaluation. So, it was the freedom of everyone to state if they were allowed or they wished to take this money or not, and actually, the only gesture that everyone, that our participants in this common pot when they received the basic income, are invited to do is to describe in total freedom why they are belonging to this community. So, someone has the freedom to say “because I simply need it and I am doing nothing because I need also for the community to do nothing” or “because I cleaned the flora for fucking twenty days and the community is not running without me”. But anyway, we are, like, experimenting this freedom to self-define the value you have. B’oh, that's all, I spoke too much.

DV: Thank you, I'm really appreciate that you also think that the gift can be really a challenge and actually what came into my mind that, actually, we might actually express that, actually basic income can come under the pressure of the gift, of all that uncalculatable labor which we as society already contribute and actually, if it cannot as a kind of dole—you know, I found very interesting in this word “dole”, actually very close to the Russian word “dolya”, which means a lot, but at the same time it means also a pitiful, miserable, amount of support which actually the sovereign provides you that you not die, you know? And actually, but that could be—really—that's why my—actually—point is that we should really—so—the idea of returning and reconsidering the concept of the gift, we could radicalize that basic income movement, because right now—I'm very often—for me it's lacking some kind of real radicality, and especially when it's also misused from neoliberals and different types of economists I see that we should do something more, you know? And that, it’d be really a point on which we should insist. So that's my very modest kind of contribution, I'm not sure if I'm right, but at the same time, this what I'm thinking right now.

Long before objects were bought and sold, they were given, circulated, and venerated. The intensely meaningful, demanding, and ambivalent nature of gift exchange has long been recognized. In giving a gift, it seems, we give a part of ourselves; something of our emotions, hopes, and fears is embodied or carried along in the giving of a gift. Further, the acceptance of a gift, a remarkably formal process even today, somehow indebts and obligates the receiver, binding him or her to reciprocate. Where giver and receiver are of sim- ilar standing or are relatively equal in power, gifts are received with polite words of thanks, while the giver will often “downplay” the act of giving with words like “It isn’t much but . . . .” Where power relations are deeply unequal, gifts are often given anonymously, as in charitable acts, so that the giving does not humble or obligate the receiver. In mythology, the generous giver is sometimes masked, hooded, or exceptionally elu- sive so as not to confront the receiver with obligations. For example, Robin Hood is an aristocrat who appears poor and so may give to the poor as their equal, while the figure of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus “gives” without actually giving, or even existing, and allows families to give generously but indirectly through an enchanted medium. The children who hope to receive presents from Santa Claus are obli- gated only by a vague, yet significant, request to “be good” in a small reciprocation of Santa’s goodness. Complexity of Gift Exchange However, the force of reciprocity in gift giving is certainly not confined to mythical tales or what might be thought of as “sentimental” occasions, such as holidays and birthdays. The notion of give and take and the “special” relationships this can generate are central to the understanding of power, and of political and military alliances. In the field of new reproductive technologies, we speak of the giving or donation of sperm and eggs; but where the individu- als, biotechnology companies, or nation-states con- cerned seem to be acting solely in economic terms, their activities are widely condemned and sometimes judged illegal. In the realms of everyday leisure and entertainment, the force of giving, sharing, and reciprocating is vitally important. What is given often cannot be measured, certainly not by the abstract system of money: when a friend cooks a meal for you, the “value” of this act cannot be calculated in terms of cost of ingredients, cost of heating and light- ing, and cost of labor devoted to the production of the meal. In reciprocation, you may cook a meal for your friend, but you might do any number of other things, such as listen to their troubles or forgive them for their perceived role in a preceding event: persons, objects, and feelings seem to merge or travel together in gift exchange. The complexity and ambivalence of these reciprocal relations seem to persist even in the most high-tech forms of virtual social networking where photos, videos, and stories are exchanged with an expectation of reciprocation, though the sanctions protecting this expectation are largely eliminated by the distance afforded by the technological medium. To what extent new technologies might curtail, trans- form, or even enhance moral relations of reciprocity is a hotly contested issue that will motivate further research in the humanities and social sciences. In exchanging gifts, then, both parties seem to be drawn into a process that is not reducible to the economic. Indeed, where the economic value of the gift is low, negligible, or irrelevant, the emotional impact of gift exchange may be at its highest—such as in the giving of a kiss or the paying of a compliment. Most forms of gift exchange involve an expectation or even an obligation to “repay” the gift by reciprocation at some point in the future, but not immediately. For example, if you buy a friend a birthday present, you feel snubbed if he or she does not reciprocate at your birthday: the person who has not reciprocated may appear lesser, somehow drained of moral worth. Yet we would undoubtedly feel very uncomfortable if the birthday gift were reciprocated immediately; it would be as if your act of gift giving was cancelled out. The rule seems to be that if you receive, you must give, appropriately and in turn. There is, then, a moral or ethical dimension to gift exchange that is fundamentally irreducible to economic calculation, even as economic or financial value seems to dominate more and more aspects of modern life. Approaches The social meanings and consequences of gift exchange have been studied by philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacques Derrida; by soci- ologists and social anthropologists, notably Marcel Mauss, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu; by economists, theologians, and literary critics; and by feminist scholars such as Luce Irigaray. Many of these thinkers approach gift giving in the broadest possible sense, covering not only the exchange of presents but also the gift of being itself: the gift of being alive, of the giving of life in birth, and the giving of death in sacrifice. For Nietzsche, gift giving is the “highest virtue,” and many thinkers have explored the ethics of gift giving, arguing, in dif- ferent ways, that the gift exchange process involves, implies, or points toward a form of ethical relatedness that is vital for the well-being of individuals and soci- ety but that is, perhaps, being erased, forgotten, or replaced by patriarchal, consumerist, and technologi- cal culture. Gift exchange, then, has been presented as a radical alternative to dominant liberal capitalist modes of economic exchange. Capitalist economic exchange is based on utilitarian and financial calculation that measures all values in terms of an abstract system of money—as general equivalent. The goal is the continual accumulation of capital, owned or invested privately. Gift exchange, by contrast, tends to generate social obligations of collective reciprocity, responsibility, and ethical relatedness. Moreover, these “values” cannot be measured or calculated in terms of monetary equivalence because their meaning cannot be separated from the acts of exchange themselves, which are often ambivalent and are bound to a temporality that is alien to financial calculation, as we observed in the case of birthday presents. The earliest instances of gift exchange are drawn from religion. The obligatory exchange of gifts, sometimes in the form of sacrifice to gods, spirits, or ancestors, was practiced widely in classical civiliza- tion and continued throughout Christian antiquity and into medieval societies. Gift exchange ceremo- nies also feature prominently in the Vedic scriptures of Hinduism and in ancient Chinese law. Though not always obligatory, the tradition of almsgiving, the donation of money, food, or other goods to the poor or needy on request, are important components of Christianity, Islam, and Sikhism. Gifts and sacri- fices were, and still are, given to gods in the hope or expectation of protection, favor, or intervention. Further, gods give of themselves: they make sacrifices and perform deeds that, in turn, obligate and indebt worshippers, making demands on them in a recipro- cal but radically unequal relationship. While many gifts are expensive, none is as costly as a sacrifice: an act of giving that gives life as a gift to the receiver and “gives” death to the giver. Sacrificial giving remains a vital component of many religions. Contemporary academic interest in notions of gift exchange can be traced to Mauss’s hugely influential Essai sur le don (1924, translated as The Gift, 1990). Mauss, following the work of Emile Durkheim (his uncle and the founder of modern sociology), under- stood collective rituals of gift exchange as ancient and near-universal expressions of social “effervescence,” the very energy that binds society. Indeed, the social circulation of gifts and services has been understood as the foundation of human culture, as constitutive of the incest taboo and practice of exogamy through which women were circulated (as “gifts”) among neighboring tribes, forging alliances, deterring war, and preventing incest. For the influential French feminist Luce Irigaray, this circulation of women, as commodities rather than as gifts proper, she con- tends, constitutes the very foundation of patriarchy and the exploitation of women and nature by men. Gift exchange appears to forge social bonds by generating and maintaining relations of obligatory reciprocity between elements of the social system, both intersocial and intrasocial, but these social relations are not equal or symmetrical. Mauss studied the so-called totemic religions of aboriginal Australia, Pacific East Asia, and northwest America, arguing that gift exchange creates and sustains links throughout the “social totality,” not only between tribes and clans but also between ideas: between sacred and pro- fane, living and dead, persons and things. For Mauss, gift exchange consists of three interlocking moments: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate. The ambivalent nature of gift exchange, that it is both happy and festive yet also demanding and solemn, is traced by Mauss to the etymology of the word gift, which in Greek, Latin, and German connotes not only a present or offering but also poison. Mauss suggests that ceremonies such as the potlatch in North America and the Kula of the Trobriand Islands were “both practical and mystical” (1990, 73). Participation is both “self-interested” and obligatory (not freely chosen). Social hierarchy, honor, and prestige are at stake and are contested. These are definitely not societies of communistic equality, Mauss asserts; nor is there a notion of individual freedoms and rights that characterizes modern capitalist societies. Wealth is circulated such that the participants “did not emerge any richer than before” (9), and, Mauss claims, there is no economic advantage in the ceremonies even for the chiefs. The gift objects are living wealth; they generate social meaning and value, and this value actually increases through the act of exchanging. These festivals, for Mauss, demonstrate that the notion of credit and loan predate the emergence of barter and money, so the attempts of both liberal and Marxist thinkers to understand the development of economy from bar- ter to money to credit are, for Mauss, quite simply wrong. As a result of these studies, Mauss proposed a new social democratic program of welfare and a general spirit of generosity distinct from either liberal capitalist or Marxist communist thinking. This was to be fostered by a reformed education system that Mauss hoped would heal modern societies dam- aged by war and egotistic individualism. However, as pointed out by Lévi-Strauss, Mauss did not elaborate on the power differences between members of the tribes, or on the existence of slavery in such societies, and has been much criticized for these omissions. Mauss focused particularly on the potlatch cer- emony practiced traditionally by First Nation peoples of North America, such as the Tlingit and Haida. Recognizing the imprecision and colonial history of the term potlatch, Mauss proposes the term total services and counter services (prestations et contre- prestations totales) to describe systems of social exchange that include the giving of presents but also loans, entertainments, and hospitality in the widest sense. The term potlatch Mauss reserved for “total ser- vices of an agonistic kind” with “very acute rivalry and the destruction of wealth;” such ceremonies are “rare but highly developed” (1990, 7). Among such tribes there is, according to Mauss, honor in destruction; consumption, he suggests, goes “beyond all bounds. . . . One must expend all that one has, keeping nothing back. It is a competition to see who is richest and also the most madly extravagant. Everything is based upon the principles of antagonism and rivalry” (37). The potlatch and its relationship to gift giving, reciprocal social relations, and the possibilities for a new or alternative ethics, have been explored by a number of influential thinkers. For Georges Bataille, dissident French Surrealist and influential theorist of “excess,” the potlatch was a form of “unproductive expenditure” (dépense). Potlatch ceremonies, Bataille declares, provoked intoxication, vertigo, and ecstasy; they had “no end beyond themselves” and fundamentally excluded bargaining and calculation in an open destruction of wealth (1985, 118). The destruction or consumption of wealth had a purpose, however—to defy, humiliate, and obligate a rival clan in a contest for honor or prestige. Honor itself is not a commodity, and the value it possesses can- not be bought or accumulated. In contrast, modern consumer capitalism, for Bataille, is an impoverished social system where “everything that was generous, orgiastic and excessive has disappeared” (124). For Bataille, the rapturous collective effusion of potlatch suggests an alternative ethical relation might be possible in modern Western societies. For Bataille, violence is an inevitable and constitutive feature of any society, and he hoped that violence might be dramatized and expressed in ritual form, rather than “accumulating” or festering into the hatred that pro- motes war. The very destructiveness of potlatch illustrates that there are values higher than commercial and rational calculation. In potlatch-like rituals, even the separateness of individual identities—for Bataille, the condition of narrow and calculative behavior— might be swept away in a convulsive moment. Like Mauss, Bataille supported increased welfare and aid spending such as the U.S. Marshall Plan as a form of gift giving vital for postwar reconstruction. The controversial work of Baudrillard offers one of the fullest explorations of gift and reciprocity in contemporary consumer societies. Baudrillard, deeply influenced by both Mauss and Bataille, argues that consumer societies can be understood in terms of a gift, or potlatch, given by society to individual consumers that cannot be reciprocated and thereby humbles and obligates. In consumer societies, Baudrillard argues, “the commodity becomes once again . . . by virtue of its very excess the image of the gift, and of the inexhaustible and spectacular prodigality which characterises the feast” (1998, 33). For Baudrillard, like Bataille, consumer societies are societies of waste and violence. Examples related by Baudrillard include war and automobile crashes; even advertising and celebrity culture possess “the whiff of potlatch.” However, the essential difference is that, in our current system, this spectacular squandering no longer has the crucial symbolic and collective significance it could assume in primitive feasting and potlatch. This prestigious consummation . . . has been “personalised” and mass-mediated. Its function is to provide the economic stimulus for mass consumption. (46) For Baudrillard, even the violence of 9/11 can be understood as a violent countergift, an attempt to pay back the West with interest for its ambivalent gifts of consumer goods, democracy, and sexual liberation— images, “signs,” or “simulations” of freedom. Derrida also engages in a reading of Mauss and gift exchange, focusing on the temporality of the gift: the interval or term between the moment of giving and the moment of reciprocation. Derrida argues that the gift, at least as present or simple act of generosity, can never take place, precisely because of the ambivalence of the process: that giver and receiver are all too aware that a gift is given and that something is owed. The exchange of gifts is, strictly speaking, impossible because the notion of exchange under- mines the possibility of a gift being a gift. However, this very impossibility suggests, for Derrida, a form of ethical relatedness that exceeds or escapes the ambivalent logic of gift exchange. As an exemplar, Derrida (1995) discusses the Old Testament story of Abraham, on whom God (Yahweh) has placed the terrible demand that he sacrifice his eldest son Isaac. Abraham must give what he values above all else; he must violate his instincts and social morality by making the ultimate sacrifice. Only in accepting God’s demand is he released from the demand, and for reasons he cannot fathom. In this story, Derrida finds a basis for an alternative ethics, one that reaches beyond reason and calculation. Following the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas, Derrida writes of “the absolute other,” of a uniqueness and incomparable singularity beyond language, beyond definition, beyond calculation. For Lévinas, this absolute other is God. However, for Derrida, we are all, in our unique and fundamental singularity, absolute other to and for each other. We are all capable of absolute sacrifice in an uncalculating ethical response to the demands of the absolute other. According to Derrida, only the gift of death that is sacrifice, the sacrifices involved in giving birth, and the openness to absolute otherness are truly disinterested and suggest an ethics untainted by the calculation of a return or reward.