Modern politics serves the productive suppression of excess, giving way to co-option by Fascist demagogues towards whom traditional politics is defenseless and even servile and who channel sacred impulses towards conquest, work, and the suppression of racialized others: instead, we advocate for a revolutionary politics which embraces expenditure in opposition to existing political formations.

Bataille's analysis of capitalist-democracies is cursory, presumably because he condemns them as a short-lived phenomenon, which will inevitably give way to other forms of political organization (P 198). This damning judgment stems from two arguments that relate to the genesis of a capitalist spirit that is hostile to unproductive expenditure. In the first, he follows Max Weber in crediting the Protestant Reformation with a decisive role in shaping the capitalist spirit (AS 123). In the Middle-Ages, Catholicism masterfully manipulated the desire for squandering by institutionalizing indulgences and other forms of buying spiritual credit, and by spending its prodigious wealth lavishly on churches that were packed with awe-inspiring but otherwise useless ornaments (AS 122). Nobles and merchants felt obliged to match this spectacular expenditure, creating an ostentatious equilibrium (AS 122). When Luther insisted on "the Gospel's principle of hostility to wealth and luxury" he drove the imposition of a moral code opposing excess and squandering (AS 121). This destroyed "the world of unproductive consumption" and obliterated the remnants of religion's sacred appeal (AS 127). In the second argument, Bataille claims that capitalist-democracies emerged from revolutions awash in antiauthoritarian fervour, including hostility towards institutions that have traditionally tapped into sacred desire, notably the monarchy, church, and the military (PF 158). This atmosphere fostered the rise of the bourgeoisie, a ruling class peerless in their hatred of expenditure, who are unwilling to fulfil their "obligation" to expend part of their wealth gloriously (AS 124–5). Capitalism is, then, an "unreserved surrender to things", a "metamorphosis" in the "civilized world" where future accumulation is prioritized over present desires (AS 136/LE 55). Democratic politicians are merely spokespeople for the world of work, competing with rival plans for economic efficiency.

Ignorance of sacred forces is, for Bataille, politically catastrophic. Not only does it reflect a lack of awareness of the experiences that make human existence meaningful, but it also exposes society to the explosive release of repressed forces. Many commentators have emphasised Bataille's concern that the decline in spectacular festivals under bourgeois capitalism will lead to an excess of sacred desire and surplus resources being invested into imperialistic adventures and catastrophic wars on a scale hitherto unimagined. Another consequence of societies neglecting sacred desire is that they become increasingly vulnerable to the challenge posed by charismatic leaders who establish otherness to the world of work. This increases the likelihood of populist movements and exposes society to the extreme expression of this tendency: the risk of fascist coups.

Fascism is the supreme example of a system where sacred impulses are directed into avenues abstracted from the natural world. Fascist leaders embody sacred force by establishing their otherness from the everyday world: "opposed to democratic politicians… Mussolini and Hitler immediately stand out as something other" (PF 143). This otherness, which accounts for their psychological sway over the population, derives from a confluence of abstract sources. Fascist leaders exploit the desire for lost intimacy, conjuring up and exploiting nostalgia, both real and imaginary, promising the "recovery of the lost world" and a rejuvenated communal life that opposes democratic disintegration. They capitalise on crises by promising "vulgar and facile solutions" (NC 204). They bolster this power by appropriating the power of traditional institutions capable of generating, disciplining and controlling sacred impulses. Fascist societies tend to exploit the military model, expanding it to encompass the entire state. The leader performs the role of the army chief, who embodies "intense sacredness" through identification with the glorious triumphs of the institution. Each soldier equates himself with the leader's glory, and thus people from "different origins" are symbolically assimilated into the collective (this contrasts with other elites, such as monarchies, characterised by their otherness to the lower classes (PF 154)). The chief's glory forms and disciplines individuals: "the mass that constitutes the army passes from a depleted and ruined existence to a purified geometric order, from formlessness to aggressive rigidity" (PF 151). Bataille observes that military authority alone rarely secures "long-lasting domination"; the leader usually needs to co-opt the sacred appeal of religion by adopting a quasi-divine role (PF 151–2). The fascist leader exploits sacred impulses to generate allegiance and underpin the world of work by imposing "duty, discipline, and obedience" (PF 155). Thus, sacred impulses are placed firmly in the service of the world of work and its ideals. Unruly elements are suppressed by "socially heterogeneous institutions like the government, army and police".13 For Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, the imperative to sacrifice oneself for the world of work and the good of the community reached its most excessive form in Nazi Germany, producing its truth in "genocidal extermination".14

For Bataille, fascism is not a primitive formation, a return to the violence of nature, but a manifestation of the drive towards order and purification from nature, the same drive that creates the world of work. Its methods for generating sacred power are abstract, removed from association with the violent squandering of nature and unproductive resource squandering. It might be objected that part of the appeal of fascist leaders is that they wield the power of violence, and this connects them to the natural world of squandering. Fascist violence, however, has little in common with the indiscriminate squandering [End Page 855] of nature. This is not just because it is organized violence—we know that, for Bataille, Aztec violence was both organized and invoked horrific nature. The Aztecs, however, made every effort to disguise the fact that they were sacrificing an outsider to the community by spending months integrating him into the community, parading him around and showering him with gifts (AC 50). Fascist violence, on the other hand, is explicitly directed at those it portrays as outsiders to the community, at those it considers impure and inferior. When the idea of the sacred loses contact with natural horrors, such as when it is expressed in a desire for lost continuity and when it is embodied by authoritarian demagogues, it loses the power to enduringly captivate and satisfy sacred desire: "The reckless flight from death is impossible and self-defeating, only serving to produce new forms of servitude" (AS II 217). These new forms of servitude are fascist and religious societies where sacred associations are used to justify subordinating citizens to the world of work. Even when not used for this end, fascism still falsifies the fundamental conditions of life, attempting to impose order upon a violent movement that we can neither escape nor fully eliminate from our awareness. The promise of purity and order offered by fascism and religion, among other forces, is undermined by the disorder of nature, which cannot be suppressed indefinitely. The outcome is a "profoundly disappointing" and "stifling" society—once the otherness of the leader wanes, the fascist state can only preserve itself by brutally enforcing discipline (NC 204).

The Political Implications of Bataille's Analysis

Many commentators have attempted to construct an account of Bataille's political commitments by piecing together his philosophical ideas, political statements, and the manifestos of the various societies and journals he was involved with. There has been substantial divergence, however, in the conclusions that have been drawn, and the analysis I have undertaken here sheds some light on the cogency of these interpretations. One strand of analysis is exemplified by Richard Wolin, who, as we have seen, charges Bataille with glorifying and aiming to resurrect the practices of archaic societies. Wolin argues that Bataille advocates anything that he interprets as involving unproductive expenditure, including wars, provided they are fought for "non-utilitarian" reasons: "Bataille's understanding of the prospects for a return of the sacred is relatively pluralistic. The revitalization of any one of a number of rites and occult practices that have been summarily banned by the rise of modernity's "instrumentally rationalist culture" (Weber) will do". Wolin argues that Bataille is committed to all forms of irrationalism and that at times Bataille endorsed a political project that can be best described as "left-fascism", by which Wolin means using fascisttactics for tapping into the sacred to pursue a radical left agenda. My analysis here has, however, undermined this reading of Bataille, since I have shown that he is acutely aware that the rituals of archaic societies were not genuine acts of unproductive expenditure, but were rooted in the self-interest of elites, who frequently exploited sacred desire for their own ends. While Bataille is committed to the claim that society must engage in some form of unproductive expenditure, this is a far narrower field of practices than Wolin allows for and precludes archaic societies and fascism.

Jean-Michel Besnier develops a more plausible reading of Bataille's political commitments, arguing that these commitments are encapsulated in Bataille's phrase "the politics of the impossible". Bataille's political remarks unfolded in the context not only of his rejection of bourgeois capitalism and "the political establishment", but also his awareness of "the evils" of the revolutionary projects of Soviet communism and fascism. For Besnier, Bataille refuses to commit to any specific mode of political organization, and instead engages in a revolt against existing political formations: "a revolt against anything that pretends to be completed, full, transparent, and necessary… a politics of the impossible… underpins revolutionary action while it resolutely rejects the goal of a takeover of political power". Such a commitment to an "unplanned uprising" and a "politics of the unforeseeable" clearly precludes any return to the dominance exercised by elites in archaic societies, not to mention any endorsements of the totalizing order and discipline of fascist regimes. Bataille's commitment to a 'politics of the impossible' is a rejection of all past and present political communities, and also undermines the search for an idealized form of political community in his work. This fits with my argument that Bataille's analysis demonstrates that the history of political societies is one of the exploitation of sacred desire by political elites. If the exercise of political power has consistently involved manipulating sacred impulses, then we can understand why Bataille eschews existing political formations and commits himself to the politics of the impossible.