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Carbon pricing provides an economic signal to emitters, through which they either change their emission behavior or continue to emit at the same level at an increased cost. The money generated from carbon pricing can then be used to fund advancements in green technology and to fuel the low-carbon movement.

Putting a price on carbon helps to incorporate climate risks into the cost of doing business. Emitting carbon becomes more expensive, and consumers and producers seek ways to use technologies and products that generate less of it. The market then operates as an efficient means to cut emissions, fostering a shift to a clean energy economy and driving innovation in low-carbon technologies. Complementary renewable energy and energy efficiency policies are also critical to cost-effectively drive down emissions.

There are several benefits that can be derived from the use of IoT in agriculture. Some of the benefits have been mentioned in the discussion of application of IoT in Sections III and IV. However, we reiterate and summarize some of the benefits as follows.

Community Farming: The use of IoT can help promote community farming especially in the rural areas. The IoT can be leveraged to promote services that allows the community to have a common data storage, share data and information, increase interaction between the farmers and agriculture experts [101]. Also, through the use of mobile apps and IoT facilities equipment can be shared within the community via free or paid services.

Soil management is an integral part of agricultural activities. A sound knowledge of various soil types and conditions will enhance crop yield and conserve soil resources. It is the use of operations, practices and treatments to improve soil performance. Urban soils may contain pollutants which can be investigated with a traditional soil survey approach [11]. The application of compost and manure improve soil porosity and aggregation. A better aggregation indicates the addition of organic materials that play an important role in preventing soil crust formation. It is possible to adopt alternative tillage systems to prevent soil physical degradation. The application of organic materials is essential to improve soil quality [12]. Production of vegetables and other edible crops is often significantly affected by several soil-borne pathogens that require control through soil management [13]. Sensitivity to soil degradation is implicit in the assessment of the sustainability of land management practices, with recognition of the fact that soils vary in their ability to resist change and recover [14].

A summary in AI soil management techniques is shown in Table I. Management-oriented modeling (MOM) minimizes nitrate leaching as it consists of a set of generated plausible management alternatives, a simulator that evaluates each alternative, and an evaluator that determines which alternative meets the user-weighted multiple criteria. MOM uses “hillclimbing” as a strategic search method that uses “best-first| as a tactical search method to find the shortest path from start nodes to goals [15]. Knowledge of engineering for constructing the Soil Risk Characterization Decision Support System (SRCDSS) involves three stages: knowledge acquisition, conceptual design and system implementation [16]. An artificial neural network (ANN) model predicts soil texture (sand, clay and silt contents) based on attributes obtained from existing coarse resolution soil maps combined with hydrographic parameters derived from a digital elevation model (DEM) [21]. The dynamics of soil moisture are characterized and estimated by a remote sensing device embedded in a higher-order neural network (HONN) [22].

Recognizing and addressing the drivers of Agriculture 4.0 may give farmers a strategic edge in future planning and reduce their worries about sustainability and food and nutrition security during the ongoing economic crisis. This study can aid in developing a portfolio of successful solutions by decision-makers to improve the agriculture industry. In future disruption scenarios, identification and evaluation of Agriculture 4.0 drivers may help calm food security disturbances worldwide. To identify, evaluate, and prioritize the drivers influencing the adoption and implementation of Agriculture 4.0, this study proposed an innovative and comprehensive decision aid that combined issues like adaptability, durability, sustainability, and digitalization. Through strategic prioritizing, our study would motivate and assist farmers and commercial entities in adopting the required steps to ensure the appropriate level of food supply.

Focusing on the key drivers such as “Automation & Robotics to lessen the usage of manual labor (D6)” and “Usage of advanced equipment for large-scale planting and harvesting (D7)” will lead to the usage of modern equipment and automated tools for planting, harvesting, and other agricultural activities. This will reduce the number of tasks that people will perform, freeing up time that can be utilized in other agricultural activities to boost productivity and revenue. The use of “The Internet of Things (IoT) for advanced real-time monitoring of crops and livestock (D8)” will make it easier to keep track of the crops in an efficient manner, which will also assist in cutting down on waste and raising profits and the welfare of animals. The “Global Positioning System (GPS) for operating self-propelled sprayers, tractors, and checking drainage system (D10)” will assist in the construction of a productive drainage system that will prevent water clogging at specific locations, as well as resist various types of pests and, ultimately, improving crop health. “Big Data Analytics (BDAs) to boost agricultural output (D1)” approaches include analytical tools and techniques for evaluating historical data and delivering precise information on forecasting future production levels, rainfall, fertilizer requirements, water cycle, plant health, and soil information. With this knowledge, farmers will be better able to decide which crops to plant when and in what quantities, increasing productivity and profitability.

The global food system must become more sustainable. Digital agriculture — digital and geospatial technologies to monitor, assess and manage soil, climatic and genetic resources — illustrates how to meet this challenge so as to balance the economic, environmental and social dimensions of sustainable food production.

Fifty years ago, many people doubted the ability of the world to feed itself. While food security remains a challenge for the poorest people, the global food system has been so successful in producing cheap food calories that today three-times more people in the world are obese than underweight due to malnutrition1. The current food system is able to do this largely because of crop and livestock production technologies that produce and deliver more food calories to more people than was previously thought possible. But agriculture’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions, water pollution and biodiversity loss show that major agricultural systems are on largely unsustainable trajectories2. As Schramski et al.3 point out, changing the way we produce and use energy in agriculture as well as the rest of the economy must be an important part of meeting the sustainability challenge. However, it seems unlikely that a development pathway for a human population approaching 10 billion could be achieved with less total energy use. And since some environmental costs will be associated with increased energy use and a substantially larger human population, achieving a more sustainable development pathway will involve managing trade-offs in complex natural and human systems among economic, environmental and social dimensions of human well-being4. It now appears likely that moving agriculture towards a more sustainable development pathway will depend largely on crop agriculture, particularly if the sustainable human diet is to be largely based on plant-based foods. This will involve trade-offs associated with the demands such a pathway will place on land, water and genetic resources in many parts of the world5.

Digital innovation in agriculture represents a great opportunity to eradicate poverty and hunger and mitigate the effects of climate change [86]. Through digitalization, all parts of the agri-food production chain will be modified since connectivity and the processing of large amounts of information instantly allow for more efficient work, greater economic return, greater environmental benefits, and better working conditions in the field. However, implementing these changes will require governments to increasingly strengthen rural infrastructure and promote the development of rural communities and small rural businesses so that they can adopt and implement innovative solutions [86]. The perspectives of digital agriculture adoption were assessed in research conducted in the United States, which revealed that the perceptions of the derived benefits are heterogeneous and differentiated according to the agricultural culture [87]. In order to better understand farmers’ adoption decisions or lack thereof, it is important to understand their perception of the benefits that technology can provide for them.

Previous studies on digital agriculture [88] emphasize that digital agriculture supports better decision-making based on consistent analyses of agricultural systems, supporting the farmer in the form of digital solutions associated with robotics and artificial intelligence. However, they stress that it is necessary to coordinate more solid user training, especially for young farmers eager to learn and apply modern agricultural technologies and to grant a generational renewal yet to come. They consider the right time for society to advance in modern and sustainable agriculture, becoming capable of presenting all the power of agricultural management based on data to face the challenges posed to food production in the 21st century.

Two-thirds of the world’s ultra-poor depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Low productivity growth in this sector is the biggest obstacle to poverty reduction and sustainable food security. The Food and Agriculture Organization’s 2022 report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World estimates that around 2.3 billion people—nearly 30% of the global population—were moderately or food insecure in 2021 and as many as 828 million were affected by hunger. Improving smallholder farmer incomes and local food security is critical to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, particularly ending poverty (SDG 1) and eliminating hunger (SDG 2). Yet smallholder farmers typically harvest only 30%–50% of what they could produce. Smallholder farmers are particularly at risk from climate-driven shocks, and fundamental changes to growing conditions make climate adaptation a key challenge to improving and securing their yields.

More than $540 billion is spent in the agricultural sector each year through public budgets, mostly subsidies on farm inputs and outputs. Of USAID’s over $1 billion annual budget for agricultural aid, much attention is given to direct nutrition and economic assistance as well as institution and market-shaping programs. By contrast, efforts in climate adaptation and food security innovation like the Feed the Future Innovation Labs and Agriculture Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM for Climate) rely on traditional, centralized models of R&D funding that limit the entry and growth of new stakeholders and innovators. Not enough investment or attention is paid to productivity-enhancing, climate-adaptation-focused innovations and to translating R&D investment into sustainable interventions and scaled products to better serve smallholder farmers.

Bataille's notion of communication involves a dialectic with two positives (hence a non-dialectic) where two sovereigns confront death not in view of an end but as an end in itself: "confronting death," in fact, "puts the subjects at stake-"l'être en eux-mêmes [est] mis en jeu" (Sur Nietzsche 61). Further, Bataille affirms that "[p]ersonne n'est-un instant-souverain qui ne se perde" (OC VIII 429). It is the Nietzschean self-forgetfulness that is here evoked; a self-forgetfulness which implies a transgression of the limits of both communicating subjects. Again, for Bataille "[l]a 'communication' n'a lieu qu'entre deux êtres mis en jeu-déchirés, suspendus, l'un et l'autre penchés au-dessus de leur néant" (Sur Nietzsche 62). However, if according to Nietzsche, self-forgetfulness takes place in solitude, for Bataille it necessitates the presence of an "other."(5) Communication in fact, asks for "deux êtres mis en jeu" who participate in what he defines as "une fête immotivée" (Sur Nietzsche 31). There the sovereign loses himself (se perde) with the other, through the other, in the other, in a process of "mutual laceration" (Essential 105) which is simultaneously tragic and ludic.

The emphasis on the other is Hegelian, but unlike dialectics, communication does not confront the subject with an object (Gegen-stand, something that stands against the subject). As Bataille puts it (apparently echoing Baudelaire), communication takes place with "un semblable," "mon frère" (OC VIII 289). And he adds: "Cela suppose la communication de sujet à sujet" (OC VIII 288). Bataille's notion of communication is not based upon a "violent hierarchy" (Derrida's term) but rather upon egalitarianism. Moreover, transgressing the limits of the subject implies that the two subjects already possess (in potential) the characteristics of sovereignty. Hence, the status of sovereign is not achieved as a result of a fight to the death, but requires the subject to be open to an other who is outside the limits of the self.

On an occasion when I have been given so many reasons to feel joy and gratitude, it seems appropriate to begin my response with a reflection on happiness, or more exactly on the possibility of being happy. At the outset of his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identifies happiness as "that which is always desirable in itself and never for the sake of something else" (2001, 1097a). Even when we seek the most elevated virtues, we do not seek to attain them only for their own sake but also because we believe that they will make us happy. In seeking happiness, on the other hand, we do not seek any state of being beyond happiness itself. Happiness is thus the highest good because we desire it as an end in itself. When Aristotle analyzes this end, however, he runs into the problem of temporality. Aristotle himself defines happiness as [End Page 227] an activity, which means that it takes time to be happy. But in being temporal, happiness is exposed to a future that may shatter it. Even at the moment one is happy, the moment is passing away and opens the experience of happiness to loss. According to Aristotle, happiness therefore requires a "complete life" (1098a), namely, a life that has come to an end. As long as one is alive happiness is never secured, which would seem to mean that one only achieves happiness through the completion of life in death. "Surely this is a paradox," Aristotle remarks, "that when a man is happy the attribute that belongs to him is not to be truly predicated of him because we do not wish to call living men happy, on account of the accidents that may befall them" (1100a).1

The problem outlined by Aristotle is at the core of the deconstructive logic I develop in Radical Atheism. If one defines the highest good as a state of absolute immunity—for example, as a happiness that is immune from accident and loss—it is inseparable from a state of death, since nothing can happen to it. Inversely, happiness or any other state of being requires a process of survival that takes the time to live by postponing death. On the one hand, to survive is to retain what passes away and thus to keep the past in resistance to loss. On the other hand, to survive is to live on in a future that separates itself from the past and opens it to being lost. The movement of survival is thus characterized by a double bind. Life bears the cause of its own destruction within itself, so the death that one defends against in the movement of survival is internal to the life that is defended. No matter how much I try to protect my life, I can only do so by exposing it to a future that may erase it, but which also gives it the chance to live on.

Kirkpatrick and Navarette’s (this issue) first spe- cific complaint with TMT is that it is wedded to an out- moded assumption that human beings share with many other species a survival instinct. They argue that natu- ral selection can only build instincts that respond to specific adaptive challenges in specific situations, and thus could not have designed an instinct for survival because staying alive is a broad and distal goal with no single clearly defined adaptive response. Our use of the term survival instinct was meant to highlight the gen- eral orientation toward continued life that is expressed in many of an organism’s bodily systems (e.g., heart, liver, lungs, etc) and the diverse approach and avoid- ance tendencies that promote its survival and reproduc- tion, ultimately leading to genes being passed on to fu- ture generations. Our use of this term also reflects the classic psychoanalytic, biological, and anthropological influences on TMT of theorists like Becker (1971, 1973, 1975), Freud (1976, 1991), Rank (1945, 1961, 1989), Zilborg (1943), Spengler (1999), and Darwin (1993). We concur that natural selection, at least initially, is unlikely to design a unitary survival instinct, but rather, a series of specific adaptations that have tended over evolutionary time to promote the survival of an organ- ism’s genes. However, whether one construes these ad- aptations as a series of discrete mechanisms or a gen- eral overarching tendency that encompasses many specific systems, we think it hard to argue with the claim that natural selection usually orients organisms to approach things that facilitate continued existence and to avoid things that would likely cut life short. This is not to say that natural selection doesn’t also select for characteristics that facilitate gene survival in other ways, or that all species or even all humans, will al- ways choose life over other valued goals in all circum- stances. Our claim is simply that a general orientation toward continued life exists because staying alive is es- sential for reproduction in most species, as well as for child rearing and support in mammalian species and many others. Viewing an animal as a loose collection of inde- pendent modules that produce responses to specific adaptively-relevant stimuli may be useful for some purposes, but it overlooks the point that adaptation in- volves a variety of inter-related mechanisms work- ing together to insure that genes responsible for these mechanisms are more numerously represented in fu- ture generations (see, e.g., Tattersall, 1998). For exam- ple, although the left ventricle of the human heart likely evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem, this mechanism would be useless unless well-integrated with other aspects of the circulatory system. We be- lieve it useful to think in terms of the overarching func- tion of the heart and pulmonary-circulatory system, even if specific parts of that system evolved to solve specific adaptive problems within that system. In addition to specific solutions to specific adaptive problems, over time, natural selection favors integrated systemic functioning (Dawkins, 1976; Mithen, 1997). It is the improved survival rates and reproductive success of life forms possessing integrated systemic characteris- tics that determine whether those characteristics be- come widespread in a population. Thus, we think it is appropriate and useful to characterize a glucose-ap- proaching amoeba and a bear-avoiding salmon as ori- ented toward self-preservation and reproduction, even if neither species possesses one single genetically en- coded mechanism designed to generally foster life or in- sure reproduction, or cognitive representations of survival and reproduction. This is the same position that Dawkins (1976) took in his classic book, The selfish gene: The obvious first priorities of a survival machine, and of the brain that takes the decisions for it, are individ- ual survival and reproduction. ... Animals therefore go to elaborate lengths to find and catch food; to avoid being caught and eaten themselves; to avoid disease and accident; to protect themselves from unfavourable climatic conditions; to find members of the opposite sex and persuade them to mate; and to confer on their children advantages similar to those they enjoy them- selves. (pp. 62–63) All that is really essential to TMT is the proposition that humans fear death. Somewhat ironically, in the early days of the theory, we felt compelled to explain this fear by positing a very basic desire for life, because many critics adamantly insisted, for reasons that were never clear to us, that most people do not fear death. Our explanation for the fear of death is that knowledge of the inevitability of death is frightening because people know they are alive and because they want to continue living. Do Navarrete and Fessler (2005) really believe that humans do not fear death? Although people some- times claim that they are not afraid of death, and on rare occasions volunteer for suicide missions and approach their death, this requires extensive psychological work, typically a great deal of anxiety, and preparation and immersion in a belief system that makes this possible (see TMT for an explanation of how belief systems do this). Where this desire for life comes from is an interest- ing question, but not essential to the logic of the theory. Even if Kirkpatrick and Navarrete (this issue) were correct in their claims that a unitary self-preservation instinct was not, in and of itself, selected for, it is indis- putable that many discrete and integrated mechanisms that keep organisms alive were selected for. A desire to stay alive, and a fear of anything that threatens to end one’s life, are likely emergent properties of these many discrete mechanisms that result from the evolution of sophisticated cognitive abilities for symbolic, fu- ture-oriented, and self-reflective thought. As Batson and Stocks (2004) have noted, it is because we are so intelligent, and hence so aware of our limbic reactions to threats of death and of our many systems oriented to- ward keeping us alive that we have a general fear of death. Here are three quotes that illustrate this point. First, for psychologists, Zilboorg (1943), an important early source of TMT: “Such constant expenditure of psychological energy on the business of preserving life would be impossible if the fear of death were not as constant” (p. 467). For literature buffs, acclaimed novelist Faulkner (1990) put it this way: If aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual con- fronting with that which over a long period of bewil- derment and dread it has been taught to regard as an ir- revocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it. (pp. 141–142) And perhaps most directly, for daytime TV fans, from The Young and the Restless (2006), after a rocky plane flight: Phyllis: I learned something up in that plane Nick: What? Phyllis: I really don’t want to die. An important consequence of the emergence of this general fear of death is that humans are susceptible to anxiety due to events or stimuli that are not immedi- ately present and novel threats to survival that did not exist for our ancestors, such as AIDS, guns, or nuclear weapons. Regardless of how this fear originates, it is abundantly clear that humans do fear death. Anyone who has ever faced a man with a gun, a doctor saying that the lump on one’s neck is suspicious and requires further diagnostic tests, or a drunken driver swerving into one’s lane can attest to that. If humans only feared evolved specific death-related threats like spiders and heights, then a lump on an x-ray, a gun, a crossbow, or any number of weapons pointed at one’s chest would not cause panic; but obviously these things do. Of what use would the sophisticated cortical structures be if they didn’t have the ability to instigate fear reactions in response to such threats?

The move to a wider ecological sense of self is in large part a function of the dangers that are threatening to overwhelm us. We are confronted by social breakdown, wars, nuclear proliferation, and the progressive destruction of our biosphere. Polls show that people today are aware that the world, as they know it, may come to an end. This loss of certainty that there will be a future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time. Over the past twelve years my colleagues and I have worked with tens of thousands of people in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia, helping them confront and explore what they know and feel about what is happening to their world. The purpose of this work, which was first known as “Despair and Empowerment Work,” is to overcome the numbing and powerlessness that result from suppression of painful responses to massively painful realities. As their grief and fear for the world is allowed to be expressed without apology or argument and validated as a wholesome, life-preserving response, people break through their avoidance mechanisms, break through their sense of futility and isolation. Generally what they break through into is a larger sense of identity. It is as if the pressure of their acknowledged awareness of the suffering of our world stretches or collapses the culturally defined boundaries of the self. It becomes clear, for example, that the grief and fear experienced for our world and our common future are categorically different from similar sentiments relating to one’s personal welfare . This pain cannot be equated with dread of one’s own individual demise. Its source lies less in concerns for personal survival than in apprehensions of collective suffering – of what looms for human life and other species and unborn generations to come. Its nature is akin to the original meaning of compassion – “suffering with.” It is the distress we feel on behalf of the larger whole of which we are a part. And, when it is so defined, it serves as a trigger or getaway to a more encompassing sense of identity, inseparable from the web of life in which we are as intricately connected as cells in a larger body. This shift in consciousness is an appropriate, adaptive response. For the crisis that threatens our planet, be it seen in its military, ecological, or social aspects, derives from a dysfunctional and pathogenic notion of the self. It is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its boundaries, that it is so small and needy that we must endlessly

Bataille's notion of communication involves a dialectic with two positives (hence a non-dialectic) where two sovereigns confront death not in view of an end but as an end in itself: "confronting death," in fact, "puts the subjects at stake-"l'être en eux-mêmes [est] mis en jeu" (Sur Nietzsche 61). Further, Bataille affirms that "[p]ersonne n'est-un instant-souverain qui ne se perde" (OC VIII 429). It is the Nietzschean self-forgetfulness that is here evoked; a self-forgetfulness which implies a transgression of the limits of both communicating subjects. Again, for Bataille "[l]a 'communication' n'a lieu qu'entre deux êtres mis en jeu-déchirés, suspendus, l'un et l'autre penchés au-dessus de leur néant" (Sur Nietzsche 62). However, if according to Nietzsche, self-forgetfulness takes place in solitude, for Bataille it necessitates the presence of an "other."(5) Communication in fact, asks for "deux êtres mis en jeu" who participate in what he defines as "une fête immotivée" (Sur Nietzsche 31). There the sovereign loses himself (se perde) with the other, through the other, in the other, in a process of "mutual laceration" (Essential 105) which is simultaneously tragic and ludic. The emphasis on the other is Hegelian, but unlike dialectics, communication does not confront the subject with an object (Gegen-stand, something that stands against the subject). As Bataille puts it (apparently echoing Baudelaire), communication takes place with "un semblable," "mon frère" (OC VIII 289). And he adds: "Cela suppose la communication de sujet à sujet" (OC VIII 288). Bataille's notion of communication is not based upon a "violent hierarchy" (Derrida's term) but rather upon egalitarianism. Moreover, transgressing the limits of the subject implies that the two subjects already possess (in potential) the characteristics of sovereignty. Hence, the status of sovereign is not achieved as a result of a fight to the death, but requires the subject to be open to an other who is outside the limits of the self. Derrida speaks of the "trembling" to which Bataille submits Hegelian concepts (253). This trembling, I would argue, has its source in Nietzsche (6): "The figs fall from the trees" says Zarathustra, "they are good and sweet, and when they fall, their red skins are rent. A north wind am I unto ripe figs" (qtd. in Philosophy 135). If we apply this passage to Bataille's philosophy, we could say that inherent in this "fall" is an explosion of Hegelian concepts, and in particular, as we have seen, the notion of Herrshaft. Further, communication, for Bataille, involves a similar "fall" which rents (déchire) the skin of the subjects (their limits) exposing the red flesh which lies beneath the skin. According to the French philosopher, Nietzsche's critique of the subject is more radical than Hegel's, since, as he puts it in "Hegel, la mort et le sacrifice," Hegel's philosophy, and I would add Kojève's interpretation of it, is "une théologie, où l'homme aurait pris la place de Dieu" (OC XII 329). Hegel's "theology" preserves the identity of the subject. Now, Bataille makes his position to this "theology" clear as he writes: "I don't believe in God-from the inability to believe in self" (Essential 10). By establishing a direct link between the death of the subject and the death of God, Bataille extends his critique of "beings" into the larger, ontological, critique of "Being." Implicit in this theoretical move is the articulation of the ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's philosophy is Nietzschean insofar as it is grounded in experience and in the immanence of the body. Communication, for Bataille is first and foremost a bodily affair. Hence the interrogation of the limits of the subject starts from an interrogation of what we could call the "gates," or openings of the body: the mouth, the vagina, the anus and the eyes are for Bataille central places for philosophical investigation because at these gates, the integrity of the subject is questioned; its limits can be transgressed. They are spaces of transition where a "glissement hors de soi" (OC VIII 246) can take place. These bodily openings, which Bataille also defines as "blessures," (Sur Nietzsche 64) found his conception of the sovereign subject. In fact, each "blessure" can be linked to a specific dimension of communication which obsesses Bataille. His central themes match different bodily openings: the mouth connects to laughter; the vagina to eroticism; the eyes to tears; the anus to the excrements which he links to death. Through these openings the subject is traversed by different fluxes and its integrity, totality and stability is challenged. They allow for the possibility of a glissement of the subject's being. The same could be said of Bataille's corpus: it is a unitary entity, which, like a body, escapes the totalizing temptation of closure. Despite the fact that Bataille defines sovereignty in terms of the Kojèvian/Hegelian "nothingness" (Bataille's Rien), his conception of communication is built upon the Nietzschean ontological distinction between the Dionysian and the Apollonian. In fact, the ontological movement that takes place in communication "exige que l'on glisse" (OC VI 158) from an "insufficient" and "discontinuous" being to a reality of "continuity" that transcends binary oppositions (Erotism 13-14). To put it more simply, communication introduces a movement from the "many" to the "One"; from a "discontinuity of being" to a "continuity of being;" from separate "beings" to a common ontological ground ("Being"). The source of Bataille's ontology is clear: it stems from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy which in turn, is construed upon Schopenhauer's distinction between will and representation. "As a sailor sits in a small boat in a boundless raging sea," writes Schopenhauer," surrounded on all sides by heaving mountainous waves, trusting to his frail vessel; so does the individual man sit calmly in the middle of a world of torment, trusting to the principium individuationis" (Birth 21) .(7) Communication, for Bataille, as the Dionysian for Nietzsche, involves the shattering of the principium individuationis, a tearing down of the veil of Maya which constitutes, what Bataille calls, with a blink of the eye to Schopenhauer, the "illusion of a being which is isolated" (Essential 10; my emphasis). Communication, thus, involves an opening of the subject to the larger ground of Being. The sovereign's boat is constantly leaking. Yet, in order for communication to take place, the boat needs to keep floating. That is to say that for transgression to take place, the limits of the subject need to be preserved (Erotism 63; Foucault 34). The being of the sovereign subject is suspended upon the abîme-what Bataille also calls "une realité plus vaste" (OC II 246)-which means that the subject neither dwells safely within the limits of the "small, insufficient boat" of individuation, nor within the depth of the undifferentiated "raging sea," but in the space of contact in-between the two spheres. This precision is key in order to delineate the originality of Bataille's ontology of sovereignty. Bataille's conception of the communicating subject (i.e., of sovereignty) walks a thin line between its self-dissolution and its self-preservation. Hence the idea that he is above all a thinker of limits or borders. The sovereign's being, in fact, is "suspended" on the "bord de l'abîme" (Coupable V 355) but never actually falls, except, of course, in death. Hence, for Bataille, "[i]l s'agit d'approcher la mort" [it is approaching death] that is to say, the abîme, or the continuity of being, "d'aussi près qu'on peut l'endurer" [as close as one can endure] (337-338). The sovereign subject confronts death while preserving his life. His being is placed at the border between life and death. Hence, if Bataille defines philosophy as "existence striving to reach its limits" (Essential 146), it should be specified that the being of the subject is not found beyond its limits, as his use of "existence" seems to suggest (Ek-sistenz) since that would imply a total dissolution of the subject. Bataille's philosophy of transgression implies the preservation of the limits of the subject so that the sovereign can experience and endure death in life. The tension between self-expenditure (Nietzsche's Verschwendung) and self-preservation (linked to Hegel's Anerkennung) is analogous to the movement of a moth that is first attracted by the fire of a candle and subsequently distances itself from the fire in order to preserve its life.(8) This repeated back and forth movement recapitulates the movement of communication and is responsible for the underlying tension which traverses Bataille's philosophy. It is an inner (bodily) drive that attracts the moth to death and not, as it is the case for Hegel's master, a reasoned project in view of an end (recognition). The moth's self-sacrifice, in fact, is perfectly useless (it serves no purpose) and hence is truly sovereign. Bataille would call it "une négativité sans emploi." Or, as he says with respect to eroticism in his first and last interview before he died, "it is purely squandering, an expenditure of energy for itself" (in Essential 220). This movement forwards, towards the flame of self-dissolution (which takes place in death, eroticism, laughter…) and its retreat backwards, towards life and the limits it involves, epitomizes Bataille's notion of communication. A practice which for Bataille seems to have the characteristic of a fort-da game in which the subject is not in control of the movement. This movement, Bataille writes in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, happens "malgré nous" (III 11). Thus conceived the sovereign accepts the place of a toy in the hands of a child playing-a definition similar to Heraclitus' vision of life, which he defines as "a child at play, moving pieces in a game (Fragment 52, in GM 149). This view of communication is both tragic and joyful; violent and useless. A joyful tragedy, which challenges the limits of the subject; that puts the subject's being en jeu. If Bataille is deeply fascinated by death, decay and the dissolution of the subject in a continuity of being, he escapes the temptation to embrace death at the expense of life. His definition of eroticism sums up this fundamental tension: "Eroticism," he writes, "is assenting to life up to the point of death" (Erotism11). This applies not only to eroticism but also to all communicating activities such as laughter, play, tears, and ultimately to the ethos that sustains the totality of Bataille's philosophy. If Kojève defines dialectics as a "negating-negativity" (5), Bataille's communication can be read as an affirmative negativity. In fact, death is confronted and even invoked, but what is found in death is the ultimate affirmation of life. Negation of the integrity (the limits) of the subject leads to a radical affirmation of life. And if in the Preface to Madame Edwarda, Bataille can affirme "l'identité de l'être et de la mort" (OC III 10), let us also note that the identity of being and death is realized in life. Faithful to Nietzsche, Bataille does not become a negator of the will; a negator of life; a pessimist, a Buddhist or worse, a nihilist (some of the derogatory terms used by Nietzsche to retrospectively define his first and last master). Bataille remains truthful to life. While the ontological premises grounding sovereignty are taken from Schopenhauer (via Nietzsche), Bataille's conclusions are diametrically opposed to Nietzsche's first master. In fact, Bataille's philosophy can be seen as an affirmation of the will (he operates an inversion of values) through Dionysian practices (included sexuality which Schopenhauer condemned) that put the subject in touch with the ultimate ground of being, without dissolving him/her in it.

Yet if the intensity of Bataille’s involvement is clear, the details of its expression are not. Does the passage which I have just quoted function as description or as exhortation? On what sort of threshold are we standing, and what is the nature of the "void” which lies beyond it? At such a point, what kind of "alternative” is at stake? What further disaster could be entailed by a “retreat”? And is it even possible to retreat? Since the foundations have already crumbled, is not a fall inevitable? But what sort of courage is available in such a situation? What kind of "conquest" is it which is no longer played out according to the dialectic of master and slave, with the risk of heroic death as ultimate stake? What experience of time is realized by this leap into die void? The only way to answer such questions may be to alter the way in which they are posed. For the peculiar effect of Bataille’s work is that it offers no satisfying conclusions, no points of repose. Not even the satisfaction of absolute destruction. His obsessive meditations concern—a.nd participate in—a catastrophe all the more obscure and unsettling in that it refuses apocalyptic closure. "Ce qui seul demeure est l’agitation circulaire—qui ne s’épuise pas dans l`extase et recommence ai partir d’elle [What alone remains is circular agitation—which does not exhaust itself in ecstasy and begins again from it]" (OC, 5:130; IE, lll). The "yertiginous fall’” takes place in a “bottomless void,” and consequently never hits bottom. The privileged act of sacrifice serves no end, leads to no appeasement. And despite Bataille’s frequent sexual stereotyping and invocations of virility, his "interior experience" does not culminate in any display of phallic mastery. Pure loss, expenditure without recompense, it issues only in an absurd compulsion to repeat, to approach the threshold of disaster again and again. The “summit" of ecstasy cannot be extricated from a concomitant "decline": "De méme que le S0mKIlCt n’est a la fin que l’inacecssible, le déclin des l’abord est Pinévitable [Iust as the summit is finally only the inaccessible, so the decline, from the very first, is inevitable]” (OC, 6:57). The exuberant violence of Bataille’s texts is matched only by the pointless dissipation of the energies they invoke.

(Jean-Luc, The Unsacrificeable* Yale French Studies, No. 79, Literature and the Ethical Question (1991), pp. 20-38 )

But if sovereignty is nothing, if the “obscure God” is only the obscurity of desire ecstatic in the face of itself, if existence arranges itself only towards its own finitude, then we must think apart from sacrifice. On the one hand, what is at stake since the beginning of the Western sublation of sacrifice should definitively be acknowledged: strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice. We need to admit that what we consider as a mercenary exchange (“Here is the butter…”) sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences, and we do not know how to think about what founds this gesture. (We can only guess, confusedly, that this barter in itself goes beyond barter.) On the contrary, we know that, for us, it is absolutely impossible to declare: “here are the lives, where are the others?” (all the others: our other lives, the life of a great Other, the other of life and the other life in general). Consequently, on the other hand, it should be definitively acknowledged that the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close, and that it is closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself, that bloody transgression by which the “moment of the finite” would be transcended and appropriated infinitely. But finitude is not a “moment” in a process or an economy. A finite existence does not have to let its meaning spring forth through a destructive explosion of its finitude. Not only does it not have to do so; in a sense it cannot even do so: thought rigorously, thought according to its Ereignis, “finitude” signifies that existence cannot be sacrificed. It cannot be sacrificed because, in itself, it is already, not sacrificed, but offered to the world. There is a resemblance, and the two can be mistaken for one another; and yet, there is nothing more dissimilar. One could say: existence is in essence sacrificed. To say this would be to reproduce, in one of its forms, the fundamental utterance of Western sacrifice. And we would have to add this major form, which necessarily follows: that existence is, in its essence, sacrifice. To say that existence is offered is no doubt to use a word from the sacrificial vocabulary (and if we were in the German language, it would be the same word: Opfer, Aufopfertmg). But it is an attempt to mark that, if we have to say that existence is sacrificed, it is not in any case sacrificed by anyone, nor is it sacrificed to anything. "Existence is offered" means the finitude of existence. Finitude is not negativity cut out of being and granting access, through this cutting, to the restored integrity of being or to sovereignty. Finitude utters what Bataille utters in saying that sovereignty is nothing. Finitude simply corresponds to the generative formula of the thought of existence, which is the thought of the finitude of being, or the thought of the meaning of being as the finitude of meaning. This formula states: "the "essence" of Dasein lies in its existence.22 If its essence (in quotation marks) is in its existence, it is that the existent has no essence. It cannot be returned to the trans-appropriation of an essence. But it is offered, that is to say, it is presented to the existence that it is. The existence exposes being in its essence disappropriated of all essence, and thus of all "being:" the being that is not. Such negativity, however, does not come dialectically to say that it shall be, that it shall finally be a trans-appropriated Self. On the contrary, this negation affirms the inappropriate as its most appropriate form of appropriation, and in truth as the unique mode of all appropriation. Also, the negative mode of this utterance: "being is not" does not imply a negation but an ontological affirmation. This is what is meant by Ereignis. The existent arrives, takes place, and this is nothing but a being-thrown into the world. In this being-thrown, it is offered. But it is offered by no one, to no one. Nor is it self-sacrificed, if nothing—no being, no subject—precedes its being-thrown. In truth, it is not even offered or sacrificed to a Nothing, to a Nothingness or an Other in whose abyss it would come to enjoy its own impossibility of being impossibly. It is exactly at this point that both Bataille and Heidegger must be relentlessly corrected. Corrected, that is: withdrawn from the slightest tendency towards sacrifice. For this tendency towards sacrifice, or through sacrifice, is always linked to a fascination with an ecstasy turned towards an Other or towards an absolute Outside, into which the subject is diverted/spilled the better to be restored. Western sacrifice is haunted by an Outside of finitude, as obscure and bottomless as this "outside" may be. But there is no "outside." The event of existence, the "there is," means that there is nothing else. There is no "obscure God." There is no obscurity that would be God. In this sense, and since there is no longer any clear divine epiphany, I might say that what technique presents us with could simply be: clarity without God. The clarity, however, of an open space in which an open eye can no longer be fascinated. Fascination is already proof that something has been accorded to obscurity and its bloody heart. But there is nothing to accord, nothing but "nothing." "Nothing" is not an abyss open to the outside. "Nothing" affirms finitude, and this "nothing" at once returns existence to itself and to nothing else. It desubjectivizes it, removing all possibility of trans-appropriating itself through anything but its own event, advent. Existence, in this sense, its proper sense, is unsacrificeable. Thus there is room to give meaning to the infinite absence of appropriable meaning. Once again, "technique" could well constitute such an horizon. That is once more to say, there must be no retreat: the closure of an immanence. But this immanence would not have lost or be lacking transcendence. In other words, it would not be sacrifice in any sense of the word. What we used to call "transcendence" would signify rather that appropriation is immanent, but that "immanence" is not some indistinct coagulation: it is made only from its horizon. The horizon holds existence at a distance from itself, in the gap or the "between" that constitutes it: between birth and death, between one and the others. One does not enter the between, which is also the space of the play of mimesis and of methexis. Not because it would be an abyss, an altar, or an impenetrable heart, but because it would be nothing other than the limit of finitude; and lest we confuse it with, say, Hegelian "finiteness," this limit is a limit that does not soar above nothingness. Existence alone breaks away from even itself. Does this mean rejoicing in a mediocre and limited life? Surely such a suspicion could itself come only from a mediocre and limited life. And it is this same life that could suddenly be exalted, fascinated, by sacrifice. Neither pain nor death are to be denied. Still less, if possible, are these to be sought after in view of some transappropriation. At issue, rather, is a pain that no longer sacrifices, and which one no longer sacrifices. True pain, doubtless, and perhaps even the truest of all. It does not efface joy (nor enjoyment), and yet, it is not the latter's dialectical or sublimating threshhold either. There is no threshhold, no sublime and bloody gesture, that will cross it. After all, Western sacrifice has almost always known, and almost always been ready to say, that it sacrificed to nothing. That is why it has always tended to say that true sacrifice was no longer sacrifice. Yet henceforth it is incumbent upon us to say—after Bataille, with him and beyond him—that there is no "true" sacrifice, that veritable existence is unsacrificeable, and that finally the truth of existence is that it cannot be sacrificed.

(Richard, Left Fascism: Georges Bataille and the German Ideology in The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism )

In the worldview of both Bataille and that of German young conservatives, war plays an essential, positive role. It serves as a means of dissolving the principium individuationis: the principle of a bourgeois subjectivity, on which the homogenous order of society - a world of loneliness and fragmentation – depends. For, according to Bataille, “the general movement of life is... accomplished beyond the demands of individuals.”32 It is in precisely this spirit that he celebrates the non-utilitarian nature of “combat” or “war” as a type of aestheticist end in itself: “Glory...expresses a movement of senseless frenzy, of measureless expenditure of energy, which the fervor of combat presupposes. Combat it glorious in that it is always beyond calculation at some moment.”33 For the same reasons, Bataillsssse eulogizes those premodern “warrier societies in which pure, uncalculated violence and ostentatious forms of combat held sway.”34 For under such conditions, war was not made subservient to the vulgar ends of enterprise and accumulation, as is the case for modern-day imperialism, but served as a glorious end in itself. Yet in the early 1930s, it was precisely this aestheticist celebration of “violence for violence’s sake,” or “war for war’s sake,” that Benjamin viewed as the essence of modern fascism. As he remarks in a well known passage: “Fiat ars – pereat mundus,” says fascism, and, as Marinetti admits, expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense pereption that has been changed by technology...Mankind, which in Homer’s time was an object of contemplation for the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which fascism is rendering aesthetic.35 In Bataille’s thought war serves as the harbinger of a cultural transfiguration in which the prismacy of self-subsistent subjectivity would be replaced by the values of an “unavowable” or “ecstatic community”: that is, a community that would no longer be governed by the goals of a “visual culture” – transparency, self-identity, etc. – but instead, those of self-laceration, difference, and finitude. In fact this Bataille-inspired program of an ecstatic community has been quite explicitly carried forth and explored in the political writings of Maurice Blanchot (La Communaute inavouable; 1983) and Jean-Luc Nancy (La Communaute desoeuvree; 1985).

(Kenneth, To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of Georges Bataille, College Literature Vol. 26, No. 1, Cultural Violence (Winter, 1999), pp. 19-33 )

Yet in our lives there are also limits. It is unlikely that Bataille would applaud Manson for the same reason he ultimately rejects Sade. They are both indiscriminate; they both go too far. "Continuity is what we are after," Bataille confirms, but generally only if that continuity which the death of discontinuous beings can alone establish is not the victor in the long run. What we desire is to bring into a world founded on discontinuity all the continuity such a world can sustain. De Sade's aberration exceeds that limit. (Bataille 1962, 13) In other words, our wasteful consumption must also have limits. To actually approve of our own self-destruction goes too far. Later on in Death and Sensuality, Bataille continues, Short of a paradoxical capacity to defend the indefensible, no one would suggest that the cruelty of the heroes of Justine and Juliette should not be wholeheartedly abominated. It is a denial of the principles on which humanity is founded. We are bound to reject something that would end in the ruin of all our works. If instinct urges us to destroy the very thing we are building we must condemn those instincts and defend ourselves from them. (Bataille 1962, 179-80) This passage is crucial for understanding Bataille's ethics. Usually Bataille writes on behalf of the violence that remains unaffected by absolute prohibitions. Prohibitions cannot obviate this transformative violence. There is always ample motive to produce the experiences of sacred transformation, i.e., to transgress the prohibitions. Yet self-preservation is also a fundamental value for Bataille; there is also ample motive to resist the violence that denies the value of the well being of life itself. As he says in the second of the above passages, we must condemn what threatens to destroy us; our sovereign aspirations can be taken too far. In another passage he speaks of our need "to become aware of . . . [ourselves] and to know clearly what . . . [our] sovereign aspirations are in order to limit their possibly disastrous consequences" (1962, 181). It is when we are ignorant of these aspirations that we are most vulnerable to them, enacting them anyway, albeit inattentively.

(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Along with this "postbourgeois" capitalism that at once contra- dicts Bataille's sociological interpretation and confirms his on- tological vision, explode the sociocultural contradictions of cap- italism. Daniel Bell has convincingly shown that with the develop- ment of mass consumption and mass credit (which he situates in the 1930s) the puritan ideology of early capitalism entered into contra- diction with an increasingly hedonist mode of consumption favored by capitalism. The entrepreneur's need to revive seduction, to re- spond to competition with promises of evermore complex pleasures, inscribes him in a consumerist ideology directly at odds with the "bourgeois" virtues of sobriety, thrift, and hard work that had assured the development of production. In this way, the strict moral confines necessary for production enter into contradiction with the ethical liberation (even moral license) necessary to consumption.8 Bataille does not seem to have foreseen this conflict born of abundance and the extraordinary sophistication of production. The Weberian image of capitalism that he maintains, the slightly obsolete conviction that Franklin's precepts of economy and sobriety represent capitalism's morals in its pure state, seem to indicate that Bataille did not imagine the paradoxical situation of postindustrial capitalism where only the appeal to compete infinitely in unproductive consumption (through comfort, luxury, technical refinement, the superfluous) allows for the development of production. (218-9)

(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Let me make it clear that, if there is no question of my subscribing without discrimination to Gilder's apologetic discourse, on the other hand I take it quite seriously as a pointed ideological legitimation strategy of eighties-capitalism. Gilder's theory is exemplary as an attempt to formulate a morality of capitalism at odds with the heritage of the Enlightenment. If his theory is weak as political econ- omy, it is highly significant (although at times disquieting)4 as eco- nomic politics. Any social critic (to go back to a phrase that Bataille would not disavow) who overlooks this type of contemporary justifi- cation risks missing the true target and overlooking once more cap- italism's resources and metamorphoses. Furthermore, perhaps Mauss would not have disavowed Gilder's attempt in principle. The anthropologist does not hesitate to see in the skillful operations of potlatch on the part of the Iroquois (in whose simple disinterestedness he is careful not to believe) a pre- figuration of the operations of capitalism. And it is also his aim, at the end of The Gift to search for something in the contemporary world that could prolong the process of gift and countergift of primitive societies. It is not, however, in "the cold reason of the merchant, of the banker and of the capitalist" (The Gift, Chapter 4, Conclusion, vol. 2) that he detects that prolongation, but rather in the liberality of the industrialist who creates family insurance funds or, better still, in national health insurance, where the community gives to the work- ers something other than a simple salary. We are far from the insane squandering fantasized by Bataille, as well as from the innovator's generous risk invoked by Gilder. There still remains the question of why neither Mauss nor Bataille have pointed out, in some decisive mechanism of capital, a contemporary continuation of potlatch, while Gilder, in 1980, does not hesitate to resort to that ethnological reference, and to make it the guarantee of a moral basis. The reason is that a transformation (already at work but still concealed) has become manifest. In the capitalism of abundance the distinction between luxury and non- luxury has become indeterminable. Clearly, it is only in a regime of luxury, where everything is superfluous, that demand cannot be as- signed and becomes open to possibilities that are less and less predict- able. It is only in a regime of surplus consumption that the subject (the client who chooses) does not know his own desire, and that supply (founded on still unknown, still unimagined technological and aesthetic possibilities) must necessarily precede demand. The distinction is no longer between the necessary and the superfluous, but between several as yet unimagined possibilities. This is why seduction, the aesthetization of merchandise, plays a primordial role. It is vital for this supply economy to deny the naturalness of needs- including the very notion of need and utility (in the trivial sense). In this sense we are witnessing the aesthetization of political economy. (213-5)

(JEAN-JOSEPH, Laurence H. Favrot Professor Emeritus of French Studies @ Rice Yale French Studies, No. 78, On Bataille (1990), pp. 206-224)

Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the my- stical tension toward sovereign self-consciousness "without form and mode," "pure expenditure" (224) with a utopia of social life that would make it possible, nor to explain in a developed capitalist soci- ety the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in pro- duction. Now it is quite clear that today's capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The val- ues of thrift, sobriety and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois men- tality with the characters of pere Grandet or the usurer Gobseck. It is doubtful that the spirit of capitalism, which according to Weber is expressed with an almost classical purity in Benjamin Franklin's principles ("he who kills a five shilling coin assassinates all that it could have produced: entire stacks of sterling pounds") [cited by Bataille, 163], could today be considered the spirit of the times. Un- doubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. But hasn't contempo- rary society undergone a transformation of the ethic of consumption, desire, and pleasure that renders the classical (Weberian) analyses of the spirit of capitalism (to which Bataille subscribes) inadequate? If the great opposition between the sacred and the profane no longer structures social life, if communal, sacrificial, and glorious expendi- ture has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted econ- omy and utility that presided at its beginning. No society has "wasted" as much as contemporary capitalism. What is the form of this waste, of this excess? These questions strike directly at the historical situation and philosophical signification of Bataille's thought. Is it not clear that his passion for the "notion of expenditure,"-which, beginning in 1933, is the matrix of all his economic reflections to come-emerge precisely at a turning point in the history of capitalism, in the 1920s and 1930s, which also saw the appearance of Lukacs and Heidegger?2 Can we not perceive within the principles of secularization and re- stricted economics that were the strength of early capitalism an inter- nal conflict that undermines them, and puts capitalism in contradic- tion with itself ? (209-210)