Accumulation without discharge must eventually boil over in the form of destructive warfare which represents the obliteration of all that we have accumulated.

15.4 Energetic Ethics Bataille’s economic thought has an ethical character inasmuch as it addresses what he calls the “failure of humanity” (Bataille 2007, 15) to take heed of the general economy. In exclusively adhering to the restricted economy and thus solely addressing energy in terms of its efficient production, humanity becomes increasingly exposed to the abundant influx and pressure of the general economy. As with any living system, this causes expansion. But where the logic of the restricted economy celebrates such expansion under the heading of economic growth, Bataille stresses that all growth must eventually run out of space. When this happens, pressure builds up, and like any limited system that is subjected to increasing pressure, it finally explodes. Writing in the aftermath of two world wars which he understands as “the greatest orgies of wealth that history has recorded” (Bataille 1991, 37), Bataille imagines—with Argus’ eyes—the eruption of another war as the explosive and catastrophic outcome of (or rather outlet for) uncontainable pressure. As with other constituents of the general economy, “the impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander” (Bataille 1991, 29), which in the case of forgetful human existence takes the catastrophic form of war. For Bataille therefore, the failure of neglecting the general economy “causes us to undergo what we could bring about in our own way” (Bataille 1991, 23). This failure evidently concerns ethics, and Bataille explicitly aims to find better ways of dealing with excess energy, of “exhausting the surplus without war” (Bataille 2007, 428). In exploring cultural history, he famously finds examples of pressure exhausts in the ritual of potlach, where the indigenous people in the American northwest wasted surplus energy by way of the destruction of accumulated and produced resources, for instance by wrecking one’s canoes, up to setting one’s own village on fire (Bataille 1991, 67–68). Other examples include pyramids as an energetically inefficient burial method (119), Lamaist monks who avoided activity in contemplative life, thus dissipating the surplus generated by Tibetan workers (Bataille 1991, 93–110), jewels, works of art (Bataille 1989; Wendlin 2007, 39), and most eminently eroticism (Bataille 1986, 2007). All of these indicate a different approach to energy: rather than considering it a scarce good to be accumulated and put to work, they acknowledge rather than forget its constitutive abundance, accordingly attesting to how “it is not necessity but its contrary, ‘luxury’ that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems” (Bataille 1991, 12). For Bataille, such luxury is a fundamental ethical problem, given how refraining from burning off (178 J. Zwier and V. Blok) excess energy eventually causes humanity to undergo its catastrophic dissipation in war.