The aff’s disaster means that we can’t enage in expenditure

Yet if the intensity of Bataille’s involvement is clear, the details of its expression are not. Does the passage which I have just quoted function as description or as exhortation? On what sort of threshold are we standing, and what is the nature of the "void” which lies beyond it? At such a point, what kind of "alternative” is at stake? What further disaster could be entailed by a “retreat”? And is it even possible to retreat? Since the foundations have already crumbled, is not a fall inevitable? But what sort of courage is available in such a situation? What kind of "conquest" is it which is no longer played out according to the dialectic of master and slave, with the risk of heroic death as ultimate stake? What experience of time is realized by this leap into die void? The only way to answer such questions may be to alter the way in which they are posed. For the peculiar effect of Bataille’s work is that it offers no satisfying conclusions, no points of repose. Not even the satisfaction of absolute destruction. His obsessive meditations concern—a.nd participate in—a catastrophe all the more obscure and unsettling in that it refuses apocalyptic closure. "Ce qui seul demeure est l’agitation circulaire—qui ne s’épuise pas dans l`extase et recommence ai partir d’elle [What alone remains is circular agitation—which does not exhaust itself in ecstasy and begins again from it]" (OC, 5:130; IE, lll). The "yertiginous fall’” takes place in a “bottomless void,” and consequently never hits bottom. The privileged act of sacrifice serves no end, leads to no appeasement. And despite Bataille’s frequent sexual stereotyping and invocations of virility, his "interior experience" does not culminate in any display of phallic mastery. Pure loss, expenditure without recompense, it issues only in an absurd compulsion to repeat, to approach the threshold of disaster again and again. The “summit" of ecstasy cannot be extricated from a concomitant "decline": "De méme que le S0mKIlCt n’est a la fin que l’inacecssible, le déclin des l’abord est Pinévitable [Iust as the summit is finally only the inaccessible, so the decline, from the very first, is inevitable]” (OC, 6:57). The exuberant violence of Bataille’s texts is matched only by the pointless dissipation of the energies they invoke.