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(John , The Political Implications of Sacrifice and Loss in the Thought of Georges Bataille http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p317285_index.html)

While it is certainly the case that Bataille’s position does require some sort of re- working of our practices (or perhaps more importantly, the way in which we understand those we currently have) in order to accommodate the experience of sacrificial loss, this does not necessarily entail a complete upheaval of society and politics. As disruptive as sacrifice may be to the stable and logical forms which tend to comprise profane existence, it does not seem to be the case that Bataille is recommending that we simply overturn all things profane. In fact, Bataille specifically argues against such action where, in Guilty, he says, Life is a result of disequilibrium and instability. Stable forms are needed to make it possible however….To shrink from fundamental stability isn’t less cowardly than to hesitate about shattering it. Perpetual instability is more boring than adhering strictly to a rule, and only what’s in existence can be made to come into disequilibrium, that is, to be sacrificed. The more equilibrium the object has, the more complete it is, and the greater the disequilibrium or sacrifice that can result (Bataille 1988b, 28-29). Perhaps the most important insight to take from this quote is that sacrifice (here emphasized as that which disrupts what is) depends upon the logical and stable forms that are marks of the profane world of work and utility. Because sacrifice might be said to represent a transgression of the norms of the profane world, it follows that these norms must exist in order for such a transgression to occur in the first place. While I have been emphasizing the importance for Bataille of sacrificial loss (and to the extent that it follows from it—disruption), in this passage he seems to be affording some sort of recognition to the importance of values like stability, that are associated not with the sacred but rather the profane.

By contrast, if the pre-ontological cannot be seen, and is not un~ problematically manifest, then one cannot theoretically rule out a transcendent reality which gives, which ‘lets be’, and in consequence the (pre) ontological primacy of Love. It is along these lines that (like the French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jean-Luc Marion) one can still proclaim transcendence in a post-metaphysical fashion. However, throughout this book. Land repeats the Heideggerean error of conflating Platonic transcendence, which erects a hierarchy within a totality, with Hebraically derived transcendence which conceives of a donating source beyond time, in no relation with time (such that time and transcendence would equal a third thing bigger than both) and constantly re-giving time so as to prevent it ever constituting a totality. In failing to make such a distinction, Land is the victim of an outdated historiography, and this is even more the case when he treats Kant’s critique of ‘theism’ as a critique of traditional Christian and Jewish thought, rather than of something which (as Amos Funkenstain and Michael Buckley have shown) was only invented in the seventeenth century. It is clear that Land really does suppose that Christians and Jews have worshipped ‘a being’ standing at the top of an ontological pyramid: thus in a notable howler, he cites Aquinas as believing that God only creates Prima Materia, and not composite beings - the latter according to Land, being related by Aquinas to an eternal order of essences and therefore shielded from association with the nihil. In fact, Aquinas only states this position to refute it, and affirm the direct emergence also of composites from nothing. Hence Land fails to see that the doctrine of a creator God can also, as much as immanentism, open to view ‘direct collaboration with zero5. This, despite the fact that he notes that Bataille was much more an invertor of Catholic doctine (such that creation ex nihilo becomes an ultimate nihilistic kenosis) than a neo-pagan. If, in attacking ‘Christian-JewishPlatonic transcendence’, Land is attacking a chimaera, then in his critique of poststructuralism his honesty does not always keep pace with his discernment. I have already referred to his account of ‘unilateral difference’: that which is the realm of appearances seems different from base matter (soul above body, sign above thing and so forth) is really no different at the level of base matter, chaos or void itself - even though such ‘indifference’ is never concretely manifest. In what serious way, however, does this differ from the (anti)ontological schemes of Derrida and Lyotard? For if it is true that their rhetoric of postponement often suppresses death, it is equally true that Land’s rhetoric of death suppresses a postponement which he nonetheless concedes: for he insists that death never finally arrives, since every component of a dissolved individual reality is re-used for a further act of global economic accumulation. In this case, the transcendent illusions which are ‘subjects’, signs pointing to signfieds and so forth, are no more simply ‘superstructural’ for Land than they are for the post structuralists. One is left mystified by his polemic against the humanism latent in semiotics, since this only makes sense in terms of a crude materialism of casually prior base drives, which in the ‘Labyrinth’ chapter he clearly repudiates. Land surely exaggerates the gulf between Bataille and his friend Lacan, who in his later work stresses the imaginary and its direct link with the void, alongside the symbolic and its link to postponement (as Borsch-Jakobsen has pointed out). The real difference between Land’s ideas and post-structuralism concerns much more his undisguised nihilism. But even here, honesty falters and courage fails. We learn that Gilles de Rais’ excesses are still to be condemned, since they show him to have been caught up in a voyeurism which belongs to the metaphysical privileging of representation. How convenient that this archdeviant should still be a sinner under the canons of the new nihilist law! When all has been overthrown, with the utmost daring, political correctness is still maintained, since every violator turns out to have a habitual ocularist. Apparently the brave young Nick stood out against God while still at primary school: sensing immediately that he was being passed off with a scummy old power-crazed onto-theological hybrid at every morning assembly. One can only reflect that it is a pity that our contemporaries have not outgrown such precocity.

One could raise an analogous criticism of Bataille's treatment of potlatch—the public, demonstrative destruction of wealth—as well [end page 170] as gift-giving. In truth, only those who possess great wealth can afford to destroy it. Consequently, the option to engage in potlatch does not exist for society's lower classes. 56 Like sacrifice, potlatch is implicated in the reproduction of social hierarchy. Such acts reinforce the status and prestige of those who destroy their wealth. In nearly every case, the practitioners of potlatch belong to the upper strata of society. Those who are forced to passively endure the potlatch are in effect humiliated. Through such acts, their lowly social rank is reaffirmed.(170-1)

It is of the utmost importance to recognize that whether or not renewable energy can sustain consumer-capitalist society is not a matter of whether it can meet present energy demand. The essential question is whether it can enable constant increase int he volume of goods and services being consumed and the associated increase in energy demand. Energy demand is rising significantly, although estimates of future demand vary. ABARE’s Energy Outlook 2000shows that the average annual rate of growth in energy use in Australia over the decade of the 1990s was around 2.5% p. a. The Australian Yearbook shows that between 1982 and 1998 Australian energy use increased 50%, an arithmetical average growth rate of 3.13% p.a., and the rate has been faster in more recent years. (Graph 5.12.) However ABARE estimates that Australian energy demand will slow, reaching about 1.9% p.a. by 2040, meaning more than a doubling in annual use by then. In July 2003 Australian electricity authorities warned that blackouts are likely in coming years due to the rapid rate of increase in demand, estimated at almost 3% pa for the next five years. (ABC News, 31 July.) Robbins (2003) reports NEMMCO predicting electricity growth over the next 10 years in NSW, Queensland and Victoria as 3.1%, 3.5% and 2.6% p.a. respectively. Poldy (2005) shows that over the past 100 years Australian energy consumption has followed GDP growth closely, and he estimates that in recent years it has approximated a growth rate of 3.6% p.a. In 2004 world energy use jumped, growing at 4.3% p.a. (Catan, 2005.) Thus the commitment to growth greatly exacerbates the problem, and in turn all of the other resource supply problems, because all involve an energy component. For instance if the cost of fuel increases significantly, then so will the cost of food and minerals, and even university courses, because fuel is needed to produce them. It has been argued above that renewables are not likely to be capable of meeting present electricity and liquid fuel demand, but given the inertia built into growth trends, the demand to be met will probably be three or four times as big as it is now by mid century...and doubling every approximately 35 years thereafter. To summarise regarding Fault 1, consumer-capitalist society is obviously grossly unsustainable. We have far overshot levels of production, consumption, resource use and affluence that are sustainable for ourselves over a long period of time, let alone extended to all the world’s people. Yet our top priority is to increase them continuously, without limit. This is the basic cause of the many alarming sustainability problems now threatening our survival.

We all know the world is finite. The number of atoms is finite, and these atoms combine to form a finite number of molecules. The mix of molecules may change over time, but in total, the number of molecules is also finite.

We also know that growth is central to our way of life. Businesses are expected to grow. Every day new businesses are formed and new products are developed. The world population is also growing, so all this adds up to a huge utilization of resources. At some point, growth in resource utilization must collide with the fact that the world is finite. We have grown up thinking that the world is so large that limits will never be an issue. But now, we are starting to bump up against limits. Where are we reaching earth’s limits? 1. Oil Oil is a finite resource, since it is no longer being formed. Oil production in a given area tends to increase for a time, then begins to decline, as the available oil is pumped out. Oil production in the United States has followed this pattern (Figure 1), as has oil production in the North Sea (Figure 2). This decline has taken place in spite of technology improvements. There is now serious concern that world oil production will begin to decline (”peak”), just as it has in the United States and the North Sea. I discussed this earlier in . A congressional committee was also concerned about this issue, and asked the US Government Accountability Office to study it. The GAO’s report, titled  confirmed that this is an important issue. Exactly how soon this decline will begin is not certain, but that the decline may begin within the next few years. 2. Natural Gas  in North America is also reaching its limits. United States natural gas production reached its peak in 1973. Each year, more and more wells are drilled, but the average amount of gas produced per well declines. This occurs because the best sites were developed first, and the later sites are more marginal. The United States has been importing more and more natural gas from Canada, but this is also reaching its limits. Because of these issues, the total amount of natural gas available to the United States is likely to decline in the next few years - quite possibly leading to shortages. 3. Fresh Water Fresh water is needed for drinking and irrigation, but here too we are reaching limits. Water from melting ice caps is declining in quantity because of global warming. Water is being pumped from aquifers much faster than it is being replaced, and water tables are dropping by one to three meters a year in many areas. Some rivers, especially in China and Australia, are close to dry because of diversion for agriculture and a warming climate. In the United States, water limitations are especially important in the Southwest and in the more arid part of the Plains States. 4. Top soil The topsoil we depend on for agriculture is created very slowly - about one inch in 300 to 500 years, depending on the location. The extensive tilling of the earth’s soil that is now being done results in many stresses on this topsoil, including erosion, loss of organic matter, and chemical degradation. Frequent irrigation often results in salination, as well. As society tries to feed more and more people, and produce biofuel as well, there is pressure to push soil to its limits–use land in areas subject to erosion; use more and more fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides; and remove the organic material needed to build up the soil. Are there indirect impacts as well? Besides depleting oil, natural gas, fresh water, and top soil, the intensive use of the earth’s resources is resulting in pollution of air and water, and appears to be contributing to global warming as well. Can technology overcome these finite world issues? While we have been trying to develop solutions, success has been limited to date. When we have tried to find substitutes, we have mostly managed to trade one problem for another:

Yet, in his celebratory discussions of sacrifice, potlach, and so forth, Bataille fundamentally misconstrues the historical and contextual parameters of such ritual practices. One could even go so far as to say that, in a certain measure, Bataille’s understanding of these phenomena succumbs to a type of “primitivism”: he decontextualizes the cultural practices he analyzes in order the better to incorporate them within his own theoretical agenda of his own critique of modernity. Here, Bataille seeks nothing less than “an anthropology that will itself provide a living – and orgiastic – myth to overturn, through its experience on a collective level, ‘modern’ sterile bourgeois society.”51 Bataille chooses to view sacrifice and gift-giving in the first instance as gratuitous, non-utilitarian, or, as he puts it, “having no ends beyond themselves” – but this is far from the case. While he is correct in characterizing such practices as related to the production of wealth, they are very much oriented toward the reproduction of existing relations of power. The act of human sacrifice as practiced among the Aztecs redounds to the credit of the sacrificer(s): it reinforces existing relations of authority, viz., the authority of those who are empowered to commission a sacrifice (in this case, the priests and aristocracy). It provides those in authority with a quasi-divine power to preside over life and death. In this sense, it is misleading to claim that sacrifice has no end beyond itself.

Here, the analysis must begin with an examination of Bataille’s essay, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” often rightly hailed as a theoretical breakthrough in our understanding of the mass psychological appeal of modern authoritarian rule. Yet, the essay also contains a barely veiled admiration for the vitality and energy of the existing fascist states, especially when contrasted with the decadence and inertia of the contemporary European democracies. Bataille purveys a critique of parliamentarianism that is as zealous as anything one finds in the work of Carl Schmitt. Parliamentary decision-making, he claims, partakes wholly of the order of the homogenous. It aims solely at co-optation, the elimination of difference. As such, it is purely instrumental and serves primarily to suppress the breakthrough of heterogeneous elements that threaten to explode the normative bases of the given economic and political order. As Bataille observes, in a striking anticipation of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s association of “consensus” and “terror”: “The reduction of differences in parliamentary practice indicates all the possible complexity of the internal activity of adaptation required by homogeneity.60 Bataille can perceive no fundamental differences between the conduct of political and economic life in modern democratic societies, insofar as both are examples par excellence of homogeneity – this despite the fact that discussion aims at mutual understanding, whereas economic activity is goal-oriented and utilitarian. Given this curt dismissal of the institutional bases of democracy, it comes as little surprise that Bataille glorifies the role played by fascism in modern political life as a type of breakthrough of the heterogeneous. For Bataille, “the fascist leaders are incontestably part of heterogeneous existence. Opposed to democratic politicians, who represent in different countries the platitude inherent to homogeneous society, Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other.”62 What he admires about these men and the movement they represent is that they embody “a force that situates them above other men,” which accounts for their “sovereignty.” Yet, he also esteems greatly their thoroughgoing antagonism to law: “the fact that laws are broken is only the most obvious sign of the transcendent, heterogeneous nature of fascist action.”63 Here, the parallels with Schmitt’s critique of bourgeois legal positivism are of course profound. Both Schmitt and Bataille view the institution of law as the consummate embodiment of the spirit of bourgeois rationalism. It symbolizes everything they detest about the reigning social order: its prosaic longing for security, its unrevolutionary nature, its abhorrence of “transcendence,” its anathematization of the vitality and intensity one finds in the “exception” (Schmitt) or “transgression” (Bataille). Moreover, for Bataille the system of law merits especially harsh treatment insofar as it signifies a type consecration of the profane order of things, as such, it stands as an impediment to contact with the heterogeneous or the sacred. Bataille concludes his endorsement of fascist politics with the following encomium: “Heterogeneous fascist action belongs to the entire set of higher forms. It makes an appeal to sentiments traditionally defined as exalted and noble and tends to constitute authority as an unconditional principle situated above any utilitarian judgment.” As opposed to the bourgeois order of life, which, with its utilitarianism and its legalism, merely sanctifies “the prose of the world,” fascism offers a new political aesthetic, the return, as it were, of an aesthetic politics: a type of politics that reintroduces the long lost elements of charismatic leadership (in Bataille’s terms, “sovereignty”), violence, and martial glory. It is, moreover, a politics that facilitates a great emotional cathexis between leaders and masses, a point which Bataille emphasizes repeatedly. For one of fascism’s great attributes is that it “clearly demonstrates what can be expected from a timely recourse to reawakened affective forces” – forces capable of guaranteeing a measure of collective solidarity, which have been banished from a society in which the division of labor and rationalization reign supreme. In sum, fascism serves to reintroduce a type of ecstatic politics into the forlorn and disenchanted landscape of political modernity, a politics that aims at the creation of a quasi-Nietzschean ecstatic community.

Moreover, the cultural attitudes of both Spe\ngler and Bataille are linked by an aesthetics of violence that is highly characteristic of the “front generation.” In a key passage in The Decline of the West, Spemgler, depicting the “life-world” of blood and instinct that had been repressed by the Faustian spirit of modernity, observes: “War is the primary politics of everything that lives and so much so that in the depths battle and life are one, and being will-to-battle expire together.”28 Similarly, for Junger, “War is an intoxication beyond all bonds. It is a frenzy without cautions and limits comparable only to the forces of nature.”29 Bataille (the meaning of his name in French should be recalled), too, is convinced that “conflict is life. Man’s value depends on his aggressive strength. A living man regards death as the fulfillment of life; he does not see it as misfortune. ...I MYSELF AM WAR.”30 As Jay observes in this connection: “on a deeper level, the war [World War I] seems to have exercised a certain positive fascination [on Bataille]. For it is striking that many of Bataille’s obsessive themes would betray an affinity for the experiences of degradation, pollution, violence, and communal bonding that were characteristic of life in the trenches.”

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, Bataille 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 primacy 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).

In 1933, Bataille contributed a review of André Malraux’s novel La Condition humaine to the ultra left-wing journal La Critique sociale.1 In this article, Bataille questions the place that revolution occupies in the larger and more general context of “human agitation.” He asks, for example, whether the convulsive movements of revolt, social upheaval, and revolution should be situated outside of, or above, what is normally experienced as life in its quotidian expressions of tenderness, enthusiasm or even hate. In the name of what authority, for example, might one be justified in placing the fascination with pleasure, torture and possible death outside the limits of acceptable social practice – extreme states often linked to revolutionary upheaval outside the limits of acceptable social practice? Another way of situating the convulsion of revolutionary movements – an approach clearly endorsed by Bataille – is to place it squarely within the framework of any activity marked by agitation. From this perspective, the acts of torture and murder would arise from an excitability or arousal similar in nature to that intensifying the fury of the revolutionary impulse. This impulse, writes Bataille, is a means by which the proletariat – who had for a long time been deprived of the possibility of attributing any value to suffering and to life – is able to gain access to value itself, a value linked to states of excitation unsubordinated to any simple political means or end. This value, and the state of agitation to which it is linked, gives the proletariat both life and hope, for which even death in all its atrocity might be the payment required.

Bataille sought “sovereignty” through loss of self, which is achieved through transgression and excess, notably through laughter, religious ecstasy, sacrifice, eroticism, death, and poetry. Considering human sacrifice the ultimate transgression, Bataille was fascinated by religious feast days that included rites of sacrifice. This fascination led Bataille to the work of the anthropologist Marcel Mauss and to a particular interest in the cultures of the Aztecs and North American Indians. In their use of human sacrifice and potlatch, respectively, Bataille saw an excessive, generous spirit which he admired. As a direct result of this, Bataille wrote an unconventional theory of economics that promoted waste and excess, rather than acquisition. Believing that transgression existed beyond mere words, Bataille constantly battled with the problem of writing the inexpressible.

Where do we situate Bataille’s claim? What happens to the demand of the sacred in capitalist society? How do we reconcile the affirmation that capitalism represents an unprecedented break with all archaic [precapitalist] forms of expenditure and the postulate of the necessary universality of spending as pure loss? This is the difficulty Bataille wants to maintain as a general anthropological principle the necessity of unproductive expenditure while simultaneously upholding the historic singularity of capitalism with regard to this expenditure. Bourgeois society corresponds to a “general atrophy of former sumptuary processes” (41). An anomaly whereby loss is not absent (which would contradict the general principle) but virtually unreadable: “Today, the great and free social forms of unproductive expenditure have disappeared. Nevertheless, we should not conclude from this that the very principle of expenditure is no longer situated at the end of economic activity” (37). So what happens to ostentatious expenditure in capitalism? And can we really believe, furthermore, that the even more radical desacralization effected by communism could become a libertarian affirmation of sovereignty – the feast of self-consciousness, without divinities and myths? Everything suggests that Bataille was unable to articulate the mystical 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 society the consumption of the surplus beyond its reinvestment in production. Now it is quite clear that today’s capitalism has come a long way from the Calvinist ethic that presided at its beginning. The values of thrift, sobriety, and asceticism no longer have the place that they held when Balzac could caricature the dominant bourgeois mentality with the characters of pére 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. Undoubtedly, the pace at which all residual sacred elements inherited from feudalism are eliminated has quickened. but hasn’t contemporary 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 expenditure has been replaced by private expenditure, it is no less true that advanced capitalism seems to exceed the principle of restricted economy 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?

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).

In sum, the sovereign stands opposite to all objective ends — accumulating material goods, accomplishing useful works, being something, and so on, for it is oriented to a totally subjective end — the magnificence of being nothing, the splendor of total futility, of unlimited loss.

What Nancy admits is that “strictly speaking we know nothing decisive about the old sacrifice” and that “the Western economy of sacrifice has come to a close…it is closed by the decomposition of the sacrificial apparatus itself” (Nancy, 35). These confessions are significant because it indicates the fear that Nancy has of appropriating a symbol which has a remainder and a vector he cannot predict or control. What Bataille wanted from sacrifice was one thing, but Nancy fears that sacrifice carries its own valence. It is like the art that accedes to extinction, but suspends above it indefinitely. The force to accede to extinction is not guaranteed to suspend. The force that Bataille borrows from sacrifice is not guaranteed to behave in the way atheism dictates. Nancy reasserts that Western sacrifice always knew it sacrificed to nothing, but this latent knowledge makes the institution of sacrifice absurd, and Nancy is not willing to deny that sacrifice “sustained and gave meaning to billions of individual and collective existences” (Nancy, 35) What Nancy fears is this ignorance. He knows he does not understand the significance of the old sacrifice. If sacrifice was to no one and everyone knew it; why was and is it so universal and why have so many been tempted into believing its significance? But if one assumes that there is no one to whom one sacrifices, Bataille may not use sacrifice as the centerpiece of his philosophy because if sacrifice is not to anyone, it is not truly significant. If it is not significant or meaningful, it has no power. It becomes comedic. And it becomes massacre. That is why Nancy spends much of his time talking about the sacrifice of the Jews at Auschwitz. Without over-determining the significance, the sacrifice becomes a genocide or a holocaust. Bataille is trapped between two uncomfortable positions—let the blood continue to spill to make sacrifice real and significant and concrete, or deny the death the status of sacrifice, which in Bataille’s mind, would be to deny it realization. Nancy asks if Bataille’s “dialectical negativity expunges blood or whether, on the contrary, blood must ineluctably continue to spurt” (Nancy, 27). If Bataille spiritualizes sacrifice, it no longer has the power of real death, the concreteness of finiteness and the ability to rupture finitude. But if Bataille insists on the real death, he necessitates the constant spilling of blood in mimetic repetition until history is completed in the Sage

Indeed, as Bataille's discourse shows with extraordinary power, it is the economic insistence on consumption at the multiple and often interacting levels of theoretical economies—economic, political, conceptual—that is most problematic. The theoretical problem is a metaphoric loss of the economy of loss and thus of the general economy. It is not that consumption and the pleasure of consumption are not important or theoretically and otherwise pleasurable. To reverse the configuration absolutely and to privilege expenditure unconditionally would be just as untenable. As I indicated earlier, Bataille's heavy insistence on waste and expenditure must be seen as problematic in this respect and is "saved" only by the enormous labyrinthine complexity of Bataille's inscription of these concepts.

I would like at one and the same time to affirm this model and to dismiss it as the most desperate alibi of all. For “sacrificial consumption” can never become an explicit critical motive.13 At the moment it presents itself as a proper element of some critical method, it degenerates into another useful trope, another bit of intellectual currency, another paper-thin abyss, another proxy transgression; and the force of transgression moves elsewhere, beneath a blinder spot in the critical eye.14 Questions of motive or understanding, the fact that one might be self-critical or at least aware of recuperation, are immaterial: what is at stake here is not self-consciousness but economics, material relations of appropriation and exclusion, assimilation and positive loss. Whatever transgression occurs in writing on Bataille does so only through the stupid recuperation and hence evacuation of the whole rhetoric and dream of transgression, only insofar as the false profundity of philosophy or theory evacuates the false profundities it apes. To justify this as the sublime loss of loss is merely to indulge a paradoxical figure. Excess is not a project but a by-product of any discourse; the interest of Bataillean discourse lies chiefly in the compulsive and symptomatic way it plays with its feces. The spectacle of critics making fools of themselves does not reveal the sovereign truth of death: it is only masocritical humiliation, a pathological attempt to disavow the specter of death. As for the present essay, it makes no claims to any redeeming sacrifice. Far from presenting you with a truer Bataille, far from speaking in his voice more clearly than his other readers, this essay pleads guilty to the indictment against every appropriation. Until philosophy and theory squeal like a pig before Bataille’s work, as he claims to have done before Dali’s canvases, there will be no knowledge of Bataille. In the end, one might have to take and even stricter view: there is no discourse of transgression, either on or by Bataille. None at all. It would be necessary to write a “Postscript to Transgression” were it not for the fact that Foucault already wrote it in his “Preface,” were it not for the fact that Bataille himself wrote it the moment before he first picked up his pen. It makes no difference whether one betrays Bataille, because one lip syncs Bataille’s rhetoric or drones on in the most tedious exposition. All of these satellite texts are not heliotropic in relation to the solar anus of Bataille’s writing, of the executioners he hoped (really?) would meet him in the Bois de Boulogne, or depensives in spite of themselves. It would be sentimental to assign them such privileges. They merely fail to fail. They are symptoms of a discourse in which everyone is happily transgressing everyone else and nothing ever happens, traces of a certain narcissistic pathos that never achieves the magnificent loss Bataille’s text conveniently claims to desire, and under whose cover it can continue to account for itself, hoarding its precious debits in a masocriticism that is anything but sovereign and gloriously indifferent. What is given to us, what is ruinously and profitably exchanged, is a lie. Heterology gives the lie to meaning and discourse gives the lie to transgression, in a potlatch that reveals both in their most essential and constitutive relation. Nothing is gained by this communication except profit-taking from lies. We must indict Bataille as the alibi that allows all of this writing to go on and on, pretending it is nothing it is not, and then turn away from Bataille as from a sun long since gone nova, in order to witness the slow freezing to death of every satellite text. The sacrificial consumption of Bataille has played itself out; the rotten carcass has been consumed: no more alibis. What is at stake is no longer ecstatic sexuality or violent upheavals or bloody sacrifices under the unblinking eye of the sun; nor was it ever, from the very beginning of Bataille’s career. These are merely figures in the melodramatic theater of what is after all a “soft expenditure” (Hollier 1989, xv), a much more modest death, a death much closer to home. It has never been more than a question of the death of the theory and of theory itself as death. Of theory-death. A double fatality.

At times, Bataille's celebration of transgression for its own sake seems woefully simplistic. In lieu of a conceptual framework that would permit one to distinguish between constructive and retrograde instances of transgression, we are left with an ethos of shock, rupture, and disruption simpliciter. Bataille seeks to ground postmodern ethics in the attitudes of a cultural avant-garde (Acephale and the College of Sociology) oriented toward precapitalist life forms that modernity has scorned. Yet the very idea of achieving a conceptual reckoning with Bataille-generated ideals such as "transgression," "heterogeneity," and "expenditure" would seem inimical to their very spirit. In his idiom, to rely on procedures of principled legitimation or a rational accountability would be to succumb to the logic and rhetoric of "productive consumption"—the values of a society predicated on instrumental reason and commodity exchange. (165)

Scholars such as Jean‐Joseph Goux () have pointed to a troubling overlap between Bataille’s views on luxury and sacrificial expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency for businesses to give goods away in the hope that “supply creates its own demand”; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful goods and between need and desire (Goux ). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption rather than production. Thus, Bataille’s vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically incompatible. If Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home décor merely feeds back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into the furthering of military‐industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self‐depleting archaic sacrificial economy does. Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.

What best befits an author is to preface a work with its apology, ornamenting it with the gilt of necessity. After all, one should not beg attention without excuse. That a writer provide some rudimentary justification for a book seems a modest enough expectation, but such a demand obliterates me, since this is a text which has been reared in perfect superfluity, clutching feebly at zero. There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion; a cry at least half lamed and smothered in irony. Each appeal that is made to the name ‘Bataille’ shudders between a pretension and a joke. Bataille. I know nothing about him. His obsessions disturb me, his ignorances numb me, I find his thought incomprehensible, the abrasion of his writing shears uselessly across my inarticulacy. In response I mumble, as a resistance to anxiety, maddening myself with words. Locked in a cell with my own hollow ravings . . . but at least it is not that . . . (and even now I lie) ...

In truth, Bataille seems to me far less an intellectual predicament than a sexual and religious one, transecting the lethargic suicide upon which we are all embarked. To accept his writings is an impossibility, to resist them an irrelevance. One is excited abnormally, appalled, but without refuge. Nausea perhaps? Such melodrama comes rapidly to amuse (although we still vomit, just as we die).

As we have seen, Bataille touched on the same theme, but his emphasis was a bit different. He foresaw not Orwell’s mournful future in which great wealth, the product of ever more sophisticated technology, was wasted in endless war and repression, but rather a glorious future in which industrial societies would give each other gifts, not least the gift of extravagant consumption. The only problem, as Bataille saw it, was that the other future, not that of drab police state repression but of nuclear annihilation, was also a possibility. Either glorious excess, then, or nothing. A more exhilarating future, but also a more terrifying one, than that foreseen by Orwell.