Expenditure is not transgressive- limitless consumption is useless theory

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.