Perm do both---Bataille’s absolute rejection of modernity is contrived and unnecessary.

Mauss's Weberian lament concerning the fragmentation of modern life is accompanied by admiration for premodern communities. Mauss's flamboyant descriptions of sacrifice, potlatch, gift-giving, and other nonutilitarian forms of ritual were undoubtedly the main sources for Bataille's theory of expenditure or nonproductive consumption. But Mauss's conclusions are unproblematic in a way that Bataille's are not. Mauss—who was politically allied with the French Socialist Party (SFIO)—merely sought to restore an element of balance in advanced industrial societies whose relation to nonutilitarian modes of social interaction had seriously atrophied. His critique represented as a welcome corrective to their potentially debilitating uniformity. Bataille's stance was in fact quite different. His critique of modernity was intended neither as a palliative nor as a corrective, but, in keeping with the leitmotif of transgression, as a type of (non- Hegelian) supersession.' Bataille appeals for a total break with the modernity. He rejects not only its utilitarian predispositions and excesses but also its very status as a form of life: its cultural, political, legal, ethical, and aesthetic aspects. Thus, his theory inclines toward a totalizing indictment of modernity that shares marked affinities with the critique of civilization proffered by the German conservative revolutionaries. Their shared belief that the shortcomings of the modern age can be remedied neither piecemeal nor from within entails an ethos of total contestation.