Bataille doesn’t apply to modern capitalism, which is already based on excessive consumption and desire.

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?