Ben Dorfman The Accursed Share: Bataille as Historical Thinker ABSTRACT This essay addresses Georges Bataille as a historical thinker by concentrating on The Accursed Share (three volumes, 1949-54), the text Bataille took as his master- work. An amalgam of cultural criticism, anthropological and sociological research, The Accursed Share reveals Batallle's temporalised vision of his four central ideas, excess, expenditure, sovereignty and transgression. Grap- pling with this vision is key for understanding Bataille's ceuvre as a whole because it brings the entirety of his assessments of Western and world culture under its heading,The aim of the paper is to offer a sense,on one hand, of Bataille's dystopic heterology and, on the other hand, the unique formulation of the junctures between economics, power and morality that define him as impor- tant for the irruption of post-structural thought specific- ally and indeed, the postmodern era as a whole. KEYWORDS: excess, expenditure, transgression, sover- ignty, use-value, primitive, medieval, modem, commu- nist, potlach Critical Horizons 3:1 (37-71) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2002‘one day, eroticism might move’ from the fringes of history properly speaking .. ~ Bataille, History of Eroticism By now, it is hardly necessary to introduce Georges Bataille’s name to an audience in the academic humanities. Bataille, the thinker of excess, trans- gression and heterology in the first half of the twentieth century - first against the backdrop of Surrealism and later against the refiguration of the post-War West - has over the past several years been taken up in a great many fields; gender studies, queer theory, critical theory, cultural studies, sociology and French studies. Generally, the impetus to this take-up has been two-fold. First, in the 1960s and 1970s, Bataille was accorded a foundational role for post- War French theory, tying him centrally to the various ‘posts-’ and ‘-isms’ (postmodernism, post-structuralism, deconstruction) connected with this milieu. Foucault, for example, identified Bataille as one of the “calcinated roots” of the then-new ideas on language and culture, and Barthes posited him as one of the rare figures to combat “all modern prejudice” and forecast the intellectual sea-change at hand around the time of his (Bataille’s) death (1962).! Bataille then gained fresh importance in the 1980s and 1990s with the sustenance of debates and ideas from 1960s and 1970s French theory within Anglophone academics and as Bataille’s work itself, not coincidentally, became increasingly available in English. This was especially the case as many of the ideas and perspectives embedded in the ‘posts’ and ’-isms’ that emerged from French theory were transformed into new academic disciplines. It thus became difficult to enter large and important sectors of humanistic and social scien- tific scholarship without encountering his work. The effect of this relative popularity has been varied and interesting. In one way, it has led to a view of Bataille as philosopher. Together with Nietzsche and Heidegger, he is often posited as one in a counter-lineage in late-mod- ern thought, willing to explore elements of the human experience that much of positivistic, rationalistic, post-Enlightenment philosophy was not (for exam- ple: power, time, transgression and deviance). This has particularly been the case as many of his chief popularisers (Foucault and Derrida in particular) became enshrined in the West’s philosophical canon while emerging from the above-mentioned counter-lineage. In another way, Bataille’s popularity has led to a view of him as interdisciplinary thinker supreme, tying together disparate elements of anthropology, sociology, theology and literature to form 38 * Ben Dorfmana particularly distinctive oeuvre. As mentioned, this is what makes him so formidable to many of the studies’ programs that have become increasingly important in university curricula.* And, Bataille, along with Nietzsche and Foucault, has also been taken as a prime theorist of the body for the con- temporary era, giving us a sense of such phenomena as the decentering of the psycho-sexual subject and the obsfucation and mutation of sexual dif- ference, which perhaps explains why gender studies has been the site of the latest and perhaps thus far most interesting push into his oewore.‘ All of these views of Bataille are justified, and none of them, I think, are mutually exclusive. Although a Marxist, and thus to some degree a mod- ernist, Bataille nonetheless sought to counter important portions of post- Enlightenment positivism and rationalism. He did so by challenging the false compartmentalisation of knowledge, one of the worst effects of which was the compartmentalisation out of corporeal and sexual knowledge. Yet, it occurs to me that while these interpretations should be applauded as giving him the place he deserves in the high ranks of French theory, there nonetheless remains a noticeable hole in our understanding of Bataille: Bataille as a his- torical thinker. This is more than just a minor oversight. Let us consider, for example, the following passage from History of Eroticism.? Man essentially denies his animal needs, and this is the point of which his basic prohibitions were brought to bear. Only the Bible, if we must find an example, gives a particular form (the prohibition on nudity) to the general prohibition on the sexual instinct, saying of Adam and Eve that they knew they were naked. But one doesn’t even speak of the horror of excreta, which is a uniquely human trait. The prescriptions that generally concern our foul aspects are not the object of any focused attention and are not even classed among, the taboos. So there exists a mode of the transition from animal to man so radically negative that it is not even spoken of. It is not even to be regarded as one of man’s religious reactions, whereas the most insignificant taboos are so regarded. The negation is so completely successful on this point that merely to note and affirm that something is there is deemed less than human." This passage tells us that ‘man’ has little sense of ‘himself’ in that ‘he’ be- lies ‘his’ own consciousness. What Bataille suggests is that ‘man’ in ‘his’ Bataille as Historical Thinker * 39fundamental state is on one hand aware of ‘his’ nakedness and sex - por- trayed, as they are, in perhaps the West’s most fundamental text (the Bible) as topics of discussion between ‘man’ and God, and between the first ‘men’ themselves, Adam and Eve. Embedded in these discussions, however, is also a shame of nakedness and sex - the shame, of course that generates the taboo that surrounds them. This puts Bataille firmly on the ground of body theory, in that he discusses the psychosexual, and philosophy (at least in the exis- tential vein), as he discusses ‘man’s’ fundamental state. Yet, he also tells us. that what is striking about the taboo on nakedness and sex is actually less the taboo itself than that this taboo covers over the silence of our truest shame: contact with excreta. A universal taboo, it is precisely because we do not voice it that we know it is our deepest. To speak of it would be to transgress the law for which we need no law, which are in fact our most fundamental laws. And in law, of which taboo define the human. ‘Man’, Bataille argues, is propelled through time and into culture by a fear for which ‘he’ has no vocabulary; the recognition of excreta s a form, we construct the limits by which we is exterior to the discursive shift necessary for the social constructs - law, which then involves morality, knowledge and indicates the coming of insti- tutions - by which ‘he’ must define himself. Let us define the terms of our criticism here. It is perhaps the case - I hap- pen to think it is - that philosophy, body theory and historical investigation cannot be separated from one another. It is the case, however, that at least in relation to the problems of consciousness and un/non-consciousness, alteri- ority and discursive opera, Bataille, at least in this passage, is talking about our collective progress over time, and not dehistoricised philosophical or the- oretical relationships. The fear of excreta he describes (and, as we will see, many things ‘other’ and exterior), motivates us. It drives ‘man’ to construct himself and his world, to reformulate himself and his milieu, again and again - even though the basic trajectory of this construction is strangely ruinous. This is a fundamental tension for Bataille - how is it that we create culture, the world and reality at the same time that we go “in constant fear” of our- selves, despise and look to destroy ourselves?” Surely, raising this question means that Bataille philosophises in terms of the body. But it is also the case that for Bataille, understanding those complex domains means understand- ing the unique junctions between how we have been, how we are now, and how we will be - junctions that carve out, to some extent, a unique problem 40 * Ben Dorfrnanwithin the domain of knowledge that deserves to be called historical, and also deserves to be considered a distinct problem for his oeuvre in and of itself. There is a need, then, I think, to address Bataille with this unique domain in mind. Specifically, we might ask the following; (1) what types of history does Bataille tell, in terms of specific narratives, forms of narrativity and theoret- ical frameworks, (2) from where in his oeuvre do we derive his historical thought, and, (3) what do we gain from understanding Bataille as a histori- cal thinker, either in terms of Bataille himself or history itself? As we will see, these are neither easy nor clear-cut questions; they mean, on one hand, decom- partmentalising him out of what are by now well-established categories in relation to his work. It also means, to be sure, recompartmentalising him in ways that present their own problems. However, as Bataille himself pointed out, very little ever came out of the “narrow limitations” of the easy or the clear-cut anyway.* Navigating the Bataillan Oeuvre Given the freshness of history as a question for Bataille’s oewvre, we should perhaps begin with the second of the above questions: from where do we derive Bataille’s historical thought? In the most direct terms, the answer lies with The Accursed Share, Bataille’s three-volume masterwork from which we took the quote I used to suggest the problem of history. Generally, Bataille’s euvre is divided into three parts - that which he wrote before the Second World War, that which he wrote during the War, and that which he wrote after the War. The portion that he wrote before the War is generally domi- nated by his writings on Surrealism and his fiction, both of which made his reputation, giving him his interesting, if slightly marginalised place within the Parisian intellectual scene.’ The portion of his @uvre which Bataille wrote during the War - largely the Summa Atheologica - represents a transitional moment in his career. During this period, partly because of the occupation and his radical leftist past, Bataille began exploring what he termed ‘inner experience’ - an amalgam of philosophy, (anti-) theology and psychology. It was during this period that he began to explicitly work out certain of his key concepts, sovereignty and transgression, and tie them to two that he been developing earlier, excess and expenditure. Bataille as Historical Thinker * 4)The third, post-War portion of his oeuvre represents the extrapolation and modification of those four concepts in the context of practical social and humanistic research. The predominant works from this latter period are his writings on Lascaux (1955), Eroticism (1957), The Tears of Eros (1962, his final book) and The Accursed Share. It is an interesting group of works. In all, they represent the statements that Bataille thought to be his most complete and coherent. As Jean Piel, long time friend and co-founder with Bataille of the journal Critique, argues, it was in these works that Bataille really took to the project of “knowing and representing” his philosophic, fictional and critical ideas." As Bataille put it, these texts made his visions of sovereignty, trans- gression, excess and expenditure matters of “historical data.”" Eroticism did this through a concentrated study on, as we might guess, eroticism. This took the form largely of analysing painting, religious ritual and deviant social practices (for example: prostitution, a particular interest of Bataille’s in this latter stage). Bataille, who since the 1920s had been deeply involved in prob- lems in the visual arts, took up those topics again in the specific of contexts of primitive art in Lascaux, or the Birth of Art and modern painting in The Tears of Eros. The Accursed Share, the fourth major text from this period, was writ- ten as a work of political economy. In a sense, it is because of its focus on political economy that The Accursed Share stands out the most. In engaging the arts in Lascaux and Eros, as well as in portions of Eroticism, Bataille was working on terrain where his opin- ions, if not generally accepted, were at least listened to. However, with the exception of the short-lived “College of Sociology” (1937-39) and, in certain ways, his relatively constant political activism, he had been noticeably less involved with social research or theory. This changed in the late 1940s, though, as Bataille became aware of Lévi-Strauss’ work and reconsidered Mauss and Durkheim, whom he had drawn upon in his initial forays into defining excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty. Indeed, it is in this period that we gained the most precise definitions of these four central concepts, although they were always to be interrelated and often intention- ally presented as difficult to discern from one another. Let us get a direct sense of these concepts as he defined them in the first divi- sion of The Accursed Share. Excess was the idea that “as a rule an organism has at its disposal greater resources than are necessary for the operations that 42 + Ben Dorfmansustain life.” In the psuedo-biological terms in which Bataille sometimes wrote, this meant that the growth of any system would be impossible if it was not endowed with more energy than was needed to preserve it in its current state. In human terms, it meant that we were bound to do more than keep ourselves alive; we would also create, destroy, make love, make war, and make gross and glorious displays of ourselves. Expenditure was the dis- pensation of excess energy [the French is dépense], an act that was bound to happen within all systems (in biological terms) and among all individuals (in human terms), given the reality of excess. Transgression was a more specif- ically human trait, although again bound to excess and expenditure. The act of expenditure, for example, was a transgressive act. It meant moving beyond the borderlines of a given system - and in human terms, systems meant economies, ideologies, moralities and social structures - to the domain where excess could be dispersed and allowed to exist. And it was here that man found sovereignty, or what Bataille defined in the third division of The Accursed Share, as “life beyond utility.” This was a purely human concept, as it was our ability to imagine such a life that made us human; only we, among all creatures on earth, could. One way or another, with The Accursed Share, the task for Bataille became to transcend art. As his definitions of his central con- cepts indicate, he looked to extend his analysis to the social, cultural, political and economic. The text was to be, as Piel put it, Bataille’s “Universal history,” and as Bataille put it, a book that accomplished nothing short of a “Copernican reversal” of all previous socio-cultural and political-economic thought." Shortly put, it was here that Bataille sought to establish a full, temporalised view of the world and man within it, in all his different modes and settings. It is the case that Bataille did not quite come out with the book that he planned. The first volume sold few copies, and the second and third volumes were only published posthumously. It is also hard to say what, precisely, Bataille’s models were for the text. In terms of the content of the text, there is exten- sive space dedicated to Nietzsche (in the third division), as well as a fair amount dedicated to Lévi-Strauss and Mauss (in the second division) - or at least to Lévi-Strauss and Mauss-esque analyses. We also know that Bataille held a complicated antagonistic relationship with Hegel, whose works loom large over the entire history of 19th and 20th century thought, providing tempting models even for those who oppose him.'* And, of course, there is Marx. Bataille knew Marx well, operated among the most radical of Marxist Bataille as Historical Thinker © 43circles early in his career, and, after all, self-identified The Accursed Share as a matter of political economy, as did Marx with Capital.” However, the results did not quite achieve the level of concentration of a Capital, a Phenomenology of Spirit or a Philosophy of History. Nor did they have the scientificity of an Elementary Structures of Kinship, or The Gift (Mauss). And although he cer- tainly at least attempted to in his literary works, The Accursed Share did not achieve the aphoristic mastery of Nietzsche. What he did achieve, though, is something uniquely Bataillan - something that somehow sat in the midst of these other, varied texts. He managed to truly, if with occasional awkward- ness, interpolate philosophy with political analysis, infuse the anthropolog- ical past with a theoretical vision of the future and create a text with enough literary awareness to aspire to epic proportions, yet also realise that “the announcement of a vast project is always its betrayal.”"* In short, it may not have been the book he wanted, but it was close. The Historical Narrative of The Accursed Share |: Modernity The book he did come out with comes at the reader with a slightly strange narrative in terms of its temporal unfolding (Here we move back to our first question as to the types of history that Bataille tells.). To present a rough out- line, as the dividing lines are not so neat and the conversation is wide rang- ing, the three volumes of The Accursed Share run something of a narrative loop, beginning with the (then) present in the West, turning off into non- Western societies (Muslim, Hindu), whose time-period he never really defines, sian then to an analysis of Mezoamerica, then to a Lévi-Straussian/Mau: analysis of primitivism, back to modernity in the form of analysing modern deviance, then to medieval society, and finally to modern Communist soci- ety, Interspersed among these cultural analyses are also philosophical expo- sitions, most noticeably a section on de Sade in the second division and on Nietzsche, which actually concludes the text in its third division. The main thrust of the text, however, is clearly within the domain of a global assessment of modernity with an emphasis on the West. It is the story of the development of capitalist /bourgeois dominance that Bataille wanted to tell, meaning that although he addressed non-Western societies, they very much function as examples to explain a particular history of humanity at-large that culminates in the post-War West, with Western ideas and culture shaping 44 © Ben Dorfmanthose of the world at-large. Thus, although it means bringing various sec- tions of analysis together from disparate areas within the text, the narrative that lies at its core represents an analysis of modern society that sets up cer- tain historical problems, which then took Bataille into an analysis of the his- torical past in the specific forms of what we might call ‘primitivism’ and ‘medievalism’. Bataille then comes back to the modern world, but this time to its communistic rather than capitalistic half, in order to show the stemming- off of Western ideas and the world situation that they created for the 20th century. What emerges, then, is not a chronologically correct historical read- ing, in the sense of a traditional world or Western history. But we do get a linked set of certain developmental stages for both world and Western culture, conceived of temporally and intended to address specific historical questions. We might perhaps begin the narrative by noting that it is the case that these historical questions are politically driven, emerging from Bataille’s particu- lar brand of leftist politics. What they were is difficult to say - they might be described as being as far to the left as possible without swinging right. His group Contre-attaque, for example, was meant to combat complacency in the Socialist and Communist parties as much as it was to combat fascism. This might be taken as simple far-leftism; left wing attacks on the orthodoxy of already left wing parties is hardly unusual. Things become more complicated, however, when one looks at Bataille’s mystical vision of proletariat revolu- tion, his emphasis on personal experience therein, and his emphasis on life beyond utility." One way or the other, however, he asserts in The History of Eroticism that this much is clear: The fundamental problem of modern soci- ety is that “the privileges of race and class are indefensible, and they are the only one that find defenders!”” This is a typically Bataillan statement, and one that gives us a sense of his central concerns for The Accursed Share. Vast portions of the modern population were oppressed, and clearly so. All one needed to do to see this, he thought, was look at the disparity of rights and living standards along the lines of race, class, and it should be added, gen- der. Something, he thought, should be done. This situation gave Bataille his basic socio-analytical questions for modernity, and cleared modernity as the historical ground on which he would operate first; we needed to understand its historical characteristics in order to set-up the historical problems for other periods. These were elementary problems Bataille as Historical Thinker » 45in a pseudo-Marxist vein. How were we unable to break from the social divi- sions and mentalities that created disparities of rights and living standards, and created the proletariat, women and non-whites as underclasses? How were the bourgeoisie, men, and white Westerners able to sustain their power, especially when the disparities of rights and living standards were indeed so obvious? How especially were the bourgeoisie, men and whites able to make the social structures and mentalities that sustained their power hold good among the proletariat, women and non-whites? In short, how was it that soci- ety at-large adopted ideas, practices and social structures that really served the interests of a specialised few? As Bataille saw it, the answer lay, on one hand, in a relatively straightfor- ward Marxian take on capitalistic political economy. At the core of capital- ism was an enormously seductive idea - one that made it the keystone of modern, Western society. Capitalism, Bataille posited, claimed to be about utility or necessity. Generally, it - or at least those that upheld its continued operation and social dominance - purported to maintain a naturally equal relationship between production and consumption. Supposedly, all produc- tive action was necessary because it met the consumptive demands of society. Necessity also dictated consumptive demands because they were sup- posed to be about ‘man’s’ material sustenance. Thus it was the case that in the modern world, all action, and the individuals prosecuting action, derived their value from how much they appeared to contribute to systems of pro- duction. The bourgeoisie, men and whites held social pre-eminence because their monopoly on wealth and work meant that they took a first order role in the factory and marketplace; they provided the capital and labour that drove production. Of course, also d la Marx - yet also, in an interesting way, d la Nietzsche - the de facto belief in this system, the rectitude of such social stratification, or at least general society’s complicity in it, was more complicated than simple economic ideology. In terms of the perceptions that sustained social rank, Ba- taille was pointing to the relationship between economics, power and morality, which also meant understanding law as well as - prefiguring Foucault - extending social analysis to questions of marginalisation beyond the border- lines of bourgeoisie / proletariat, man/woman and white / non-white. We came more to the essence of things when we realised, for example, that from cer- 46 + Ben Dorfmantain perspectives, proletarian men had a social rank ahead of bourgeois women, because although they might not hold capital wealth, they were clearly involved in systems of production by way of labour. And beyond the pale of even women (never mind proletarian women) were the truly derelict, the criminal and the prostitute. Morality coupled with economics to empha- sise hard work and ‘good’ behaviour - they supposedly lead to the produc- tive life and moderate consumption. Idleness and ‘bad’ behaviour - and, Bataille notes, the co-option of Christianity to this end was nothing less than “astoundingly successful’ - led to non-productivity and excessive consump- tion, by which one became deserving of either marginalisation, or being cast- out of society altogether." Herein, law was transitional. Hard working, moderate people were left alone. Idle people, and people who engaged in, or were at least expected to engage in, questionable behaviour were pushed to the social fringe (slums, flophouses, and other generally poor quarters). And when idle- ness and ‘bad’ behaviour reached their ultimate forms in truly transgressive figures (we will get to the criminal and the prostitute shortly), the idle and the ‘evil’ might be cast-out altogether - incarceration or other forms of insti- tutionalisation, the denial of rights and legal status or even execution in the worst cases. The power of capital - ultimately male, bourgeois and white - was thus right in all quarters. It was ideology, mentalité and everyday life rolled into one. It became somehow moral that vast portions of the modern population were oppressed, even to the oppressed. For Bataille, though, as effective as the capitalist connexus of economics, power and morality was, it nonetheless represented a self-contradictory ide- ology. Again here, we get a reflection of Marx with an interesting Nietzschean spin. There was a problem in positing the equality of production and con- sumption as all encompassing. If society genuinely hinged on that equality, Bataille argued, all human action, no matter where its origins on the social map - bourgeoisie or proletariat, man or woman, criminal or Samaritan - played into its system. This led to a discrepancy between social ideology and social reality: within the systematic of equal production and consumption, deviant behaviour could not exist. Such things demanded non-productive activity, or specifically what Bataille characterised as sovereign, excessive activity - actions that were beyond use-value, oriented toward the frivolous, luxurious, non-sensical and dangerous. This gave us, he thought, an interesting hypothesis: to maintain power, the bourgeoisie and men needed the excessive, Bataille as Historical Thinker * 47or at least those who engaged in it or represented it. They needed the mar- ginalised; figures such as the criminal, the prostitute and, to a lesser extent (because their activity could be at least somewhat productive), the proletariat and women. Without them, there would be no one over whom to wield power. ‘Truly recognising the universality of productive/consumptive equilibrium, or the full and more or less equal participation of all people in the capitalist system, was dangerous. It meant the end of bourgeois and male power.* It was this situation that produced the intellectual framework Bataille would extrapolate into pre-modern contexts, as well as use to imagine a post-modern future. It was this situation that demanded his ‘Copernican reversal’ of previous socio-cultural thought. If we could not understand the world solely through its neat or orderly dynamics, through its equilibrialising operations, we had to find something else to explain it. We needed, he thought, to find counter- vailing principles to the ideologies of capitalism and their reliance on utility. These principles, of course, were what we earlier identified as the four cen- tral Bataillan concepts: excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty. In the same manner that their theoretical definitions are not completely sepa- rable from one another, neither are their applications in terms of social analy- sis. For example, in Sovereignty (third division of The Accursed Share), Bataille defines excess as a “sovereign truth,” suggesting that their definitions and applications overlap.* However, to gain a sense of how they play out, Bataille’s point was that the problem in maintaining utility as the leading determinant of value was not only that it broke from social reality, but also that it threw humanity into servility. If utility was society's guide, one was utterly sub- sumed to the relations of production, and thus played nothing more than the abject function of tool. Yet, no matter how entrenched the ideology of utility, through capitalism, might be, he felt that it was simply too much to say that no one ever imagined a life outside utility. In fact the imagination of such a life - a sovereign life - gave us the supposition that such a life was possible. That is to say that, for Bataille, the limitation of our imagination was due to bourgeois and male power. They propagated utility through capitalism, and made it hold good as an ideology through social, legal and moral power. Yet, he asked, what precisely was bourgeois and male power? Higher claims aside, they were clearly attempts to transcend the boundaries of use. Unless deployed, wealth was idle wealth - and clearly not all wealth was employed simply to 48. + Ben Dorfmanthe ends of utility. He also argued the same in relation to men’s power over women. Unless one was to make arguments about the rectitude of gender oppression, what could gender power represent except power for its own sake, or perhaps the frustrated expenditure of men’s excess energy? The bour- geoisie and men, it seemed, were thus transgressors of their own standards. They claimed to be defined by utility, but were clearly not. Their economics was driven by the principle of expenditure, their character was defined by excess, and their mentality was defined by a vision of sovereignty. This made those at the social centre, those in its high positions, no better than the mar- ginalised and cast-out. Indeed, there might be a sense in which we all imi- tate the marginalised and cast-out. Far from being defined by our productive relations, we are defined by our transgression of their bounds, by our use- less expenditures and our non-productive activities. For Bataille, this meant that we needed a new historical writing, and new figures at the centre of that writing. National histories were of little interest to Bataille (except as points of criticism), nor were the oft-told tales of the tri- umph of reason and liberal democracy, underwritten, as they were, by the presumptions of capitalism. Instead, the interesting historical tales lay in themes of violence, punishment and eroticism, and revealing the essential tragedy of the capitalist legacy. This meant looking beyond the pale of the traditional heroes of history, and, in fact, even beyond the proletariat (as Marx would have it), women in general or non-whites as new heroes. It meant looking to the lowest of the low, the most marginalised of the marginalised. It meant - at least to Bataille’s mind - looking specifically at the criminal and the prostitute. What revealed the prostitute as a primary figure on the modern scene, espe- cially in the context of the capitalist-Christian moral axis - is that few char- acters are more hidden in society, less likely to stand as the topics of polite discourse, and more pushed to marginal locations within our urban land- scapes. In other words, while prostitution was unquestionably present on the modern scene, there was an effort on the part of ‘good society’ to expunge it from discourse and shared social identity. However, asserted Bataille, again we were faced with the realiti s of excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty. At the very least, the use of prostitution represented the suppli- cation of the powerful (men, and perhaps even the bourgeoisie specifically) Bataille as Historical Thinker +. 49to base instincts and useless behaviours that were supposed to be outside their arena of operation, Why, asked Bataille, would men, and especially bour- geois men, give into an instinct “liable to cause ruination” and transgress the behavioural boundaries that were crucial for demarcating and preserving their status? There could only be one answer: the power of the prostitute as an excessive object, an opportunity for expenditure of excess wealth and transgression into the territory of the sovereign. With “that sparkling finery and that make-up, those jewels and those perfumes, those faces and those bodies dripping with [apparent] wealth,” argued Bataille, the prostitute became “the focal points of luxury and lust [that would] dissipate a part of human labour in a useless splendour.”® The prostitute, claimed Bataille, resided in a realm that men did not - outside the relationships of good society and out- side systems of utility. The prostitute was a lonely, derelict, cut-off figure. Yet, therein, in their isolation, they lived the life of sovereignty that men per- haps claimed to, but could not, have. This is why, asserted Bataille, men want them. ‘The criminal offered a similar social dynamic. As with the prostitute, the crim- inal was not supposed to be a part of our social identity; we made an effort also to keep the criminal on the margins, or somehow on the outside our field of vision and self-conceptions. His (and, as with his use of ‘man’, Bataille’s vocabulary is interestingly gendered here) non-useful or even destructive nature wrote him out of the equalibrialising systematics that supposedly defined the modern scene. Yet again like the prostitute, the criminal was unquestionably present on the modern scene, and demanded an enormous amount of attention from the rest of society: Man-power and money for polic- ing and incarceration, political effort for legislation and the material resources needed to construct prisons and execution apparatuses. How could we account for this, wondered Bataille? How could the criminal reside so much on the outside, yet also so much on the inside, of modern history? The answer lay in the nature of crime. Crime, and specifically what Bataille referred to as ‘cold blooded crime’ - by which essentially he meant murder - was among the most human of actions.* As with prostitution in the sexual domain, it represented the removal of the constraints that bind us to utility. “Anyone who believes in the worth of others,” he wrote, “is necessarily lim- ited - he is restricted by this respect for others, which prevents him from 50. * Ben Dorfmanknowing the meaning of [the parts of himself] that are not subordinated.”” Crime, and especially ‘cold blooded crime’, was about denying the worth of others. In doing so, however, we made a strike against servility (and because of servility’s modern form, a strike against capitalism). Thus, although negat- ing in the sense that it meant doing harm to others, crime was creative. It represented “not a negation of oneself,” or one’s removal from utility, but a removal so far beyond the bounds of utility that one again became essen- tial2* In the criminal act, one asserted “the throbbing of one’s being” - it enacted the sovereign imagination, as well as excessive, transgressive and, in a certain way, expenditive behaviour.” There was something pure about the criminal. The attention and resources devoted to penality were tanta- mount to veneration; the criminal did what we only wished we could, and we loved him for it.” Yet, Bataille also argued, evidencing this love, or veneration, could and should be done through more than looking inside prison walls and down society's proverbial back alleys. This dark side to human behaviour also illuminated more overt, or more ‘in discourse’ historical matters - the sorts that usually are treated in history books. A new historical writing with new characters also meant transforming the old characters, and revealing them for what they really were. The pursuit of the excess, the practice of expenditure, the move to transgression and the vision of sovereignty - and, to a degree, thankfully so - also coursed through the realm of high politics, and international diplo- macy. In these domains, claimed Bataille, we witnessed not only men sneak- ing-off to use prostitutes, or a surprising fascination with criminality, but in fact a direct engagement in criminal behaviour itself, and with the deploy- ment of an abject opulence usually attendant only to the prostitute. The primary example of this, thought Bataille, was war. The tragedies of the First and Second World Wars were highly present in Bataille’s life - he was seventeen when the First broke out (he was mobilised but did not fight), and forty-two for the Second. And it was precisely as tragedies that he viewed these wars. They were not triumphs of democracy over fascism or militarism, but rather the highest expression of white, Western male capitalist excess. Systematics of equal production and consumption, he held, simply did not provide the means to account for the killing of tens of millions of people. Bataille as Historical Thinker * 51What did explain these death tolls, however, was realising that, as it stood in the 1910s and 1930s (at least up to 1933 in Germany, and with the Soviets excepted), the political fate of Western, and world society (because of the imperial system), rested in the hands of men and the bourgeoisie. It might be the case, for example, that by the early 20th century, voting rights in Western democracies had been extended far enough such that national pol- itics might be considered an expression of the popular will (whereas before the extension of the franchise to women, the case could be more clearly made that national politics was the domain of men). However, as for other mea- sures of political power, it was clearly the bourgeoisie and men who had pre- dominance. For example, he asked, how many members of government came from sectors other than the moneyed classes, and men? Where else other than the bourgeoisie and the world of men did the locus of social wealth lie? Thus, at least in Bataille’s view, it was precisely with the question of bourgeois and male accumulation that the problem of understanding the two wars lay." Industrialisation, of course, was the basis for the rapid growth of bourgeois wealth, which Bataille claims yielded a period of ‘relative peace’ from 1815 to 1914.* However, to allow this period of peace to equal the growth of gen- eral prosperity, that is, prosperity in non-bourgeois and male sectors, we could have denied imagination of excess and sovereignty that subtly under- wrote capitalism - the accumulatory nature of capitalism was, by definition, about excessive displays or actions. “It is sometimes denied that the indus- trial plethora was at the origin of the recent wars,” Bataille wrote. “Yet, it was undeniably this plethora that both wars exuded; its size was what gave them their extraordinary intensity.”* 19th and early 20th century accumula- tion, as the great ages of capital, demanded a catastrophic expenditure of eco- nomic and social energy outside the boundaries of utility. It may have been the case, acknowledged Bataille, that from particular perspectives, the con- flicts of 1914 and 1939 were useful, or necessary. The First World War, for example, may have been necessary for displacing, in a final sense, absolutist monarchical power from the European stage in favour of liberal democracy. Or, the Second World War may have been necessary to combat the absolute evil of Nazism. What was undeniable, though, he thought, was the spectac- ular expenditure, in terms of violence and the expenditure of resources that characterised these events, regardless of the side one took. The most impor- tant facts of the wars were their death tolls (eight million for the First World 52 * Ben DorfmanWar and roughly thirty-five million for the Second); their cost ($337 billion for the First and $4 trillion for the Second); and that most of the dead came from the lower class.“ No matter what the political justifications for the wars might be, he argued, these were grossly offensive figures. The bourgeoisie and men, who stood as the political captains of western society, it seemed, had found their excessive display: guided by the imagination of sovereignty - a life beyond utility - they transgressed into the territory of the ‘cold blooded’ criminal with a display, perhaps not unlike the prostitute, of ruinous opu- lence. They marched their people off to war, drained their economies and condemned millions to death. We should be careful here, I think, not to take Bataille’s analysis of the mod- ern, his interest in figures like the prostitute and the criminal, and his sym- pathy for the proletariat and women as amounting to a victimology. It is true that the interplay between the derelict and the decent, between the social ‘interior’ and the marginalised was a process that clearly tended toward the dystopic. However, it was also the case that the importance of understand- ing the role of excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty in society was not just that we might note their play. Politically driven as his history was, the recognition of this interplay might force us to establish a political vision in which “the disparity of rights and living standards would be reduced,” as we could at least acknowledge the socially marginalised, and thus address their condition.* We might establish at least better conditions for the prole- tariat, women, non-white and non-Westerners. Yet, we need to be careful here as well. If this reduction were to be realised in the most utter sense, “history would be ended,” and the import of excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty diminished - the marginalised and their attraction, of course, would disappear. Left wing and Marxist though he may have been, Bataille nonetheless differs from Marx in his lack of a utopic vision, giving him one of his Nietzschean edges. The point, he tells us, is not “looking for a rest [from history],” but to realise the apiaries of self-knowledge and contingen- cies of discourse that underwrite it.” The modern condition, he held, is that reality is bound to dissipate into chimera, good into evil, and usefulness into uselessness. True, we are bound to a return across the borderlines that divide these categories, as to a certain extent, our fantasies, silences and immoral- ity are products of the limited nature of the real, the articulated and the moral. Bataille as Historical Thinker * 53Yet, their limited nature meant crossing our borderlines again, or making another transgression into the realm of chimera, silence, evil and uselessness - otherwise we would remain bound to the limitations of relations of production. We steal, then, away to brothels and march off to war. To invoke Carolyn Dean’s vocabulary on Bataille, we ‘unravel’ ourselves both individually and collectively, leaving us to wonder around what points we ‘ravelled’ ourselves in the first place. The Historical Narrative of The Accursed Share II: From Primitive Man to Communist Man This question of whether or not we had ever ‘ravelled’ ourselves, or had any meaningful self-cognisance, posed the dominant question for Bataille in The Accursed Share with regard to those portions of the text not devoted to analy- ses of the modern. Was the modern playing-out of excess, expenditure, trans- gression and sovereignty an isolated phenomenon? Did these concepts / practices provide frameworks for understanding other historical periods? Was it pos- sible to conceive of a trajectory for ‘man’s’ historical existence that precursed the characteristics of the modern, capitalistic West? As we might guess by now, Bataille’s answers were no, the modern playing out of excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty were not isolated phenomenon. These concepts/ practices did provide frameworks for under- standing other historical periods and it was highly possible to imagine a tra- jectory for ‘man’s’ historical existence that precursed the characteristics of the modern. Much of the rest of The Accursed Share is dedicated to demonstrating that we never really did ‘ravel’ ourselves. Humanity had always set border- lines, argued Bataille - conditions of law, morality and social structure - seen as non-transgressable, yet where the imagination of transgression, the vision of life on the other side of borderlines, was precisely what drove us to con- struct them in the first place. Moreover, these constructions were the quint- essential human project; they were what linked all of human historicity, ftom its earliest, most primitive stages to (at least as of the late 1940s and early 1950s) its most contemporaneous, industrio-capitalistic forms. Bataille sought to prove this in two ways. One was to make a sampling of world historical cultures where he saw excess, expenditure, transgression and 54 * Ben Dorfmansovereignty at play, and explicate how those concepts/ practices functioned as those cultures’ predominant historical features. The second was to expli- cate certain practical social results of these concepts/ practices - social strat- ification and the exercise of power - that were shared among pre-modern cultures and modern culture, and, as we will see, between the non-Western, non-capitalistic modern world, that is, the communist world, and the mod- ern capitalistic West. The first of these ‘cultures’ was the primitive - a nebulous concept for Bataille, but meaning a condition of pre-modern, non-Western, non-Christian, pre- ‘industrialness’ that might give us a sense of how ‘man’ was before the events of the specific institutions, ideologies and practices that give modern, Western excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty its specific forms. Drawing, heavily on the work of Marcel Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, the primitive was enigmatic for Bataille. While he sought to highlight historical continuity as much as change, primitive societies did hold some noteworthy differences from the modern, capitalistic West, and it was with those differences that he suggested we might begin. The primary difference was what Bataille took as a certain level of overtness - we might simply say honesty - in primitive society’s engagement with excess, expenditure, transgression and sovereignty. Taking an amalgamated view of the primitive from texts such as The Gift and Elementary Structures of Kinship, and matching it up with other sources - such as Bernadino de Sahagun’s Historia general de las comas de Nueva Espana (1956) - he found items such as public human sacrifice, the use of hallucinogens at festivals, and the public destruction of valuable objects to stand as explicit homages to excess. Thus, rather than hiding these ideas under the veil of utility, as happens in the modern world, primitive peoples used festivals, violent rites and ritualistic orgies to ‘display their power’ in public and participatory contexts.” Bataille employed several examples of such practices and behaviours. His analysis of the Aztec merchant in the first division of The Accursed Share is telling. In essence, what intrigued him about this figure was that he was a political and economic go-between among the various peoples of Mezoamerica. The merchant would take with him in departing the Aztec realm gifts from his king to the chieftain of a foreign land. He would then return with wealth Bataille as Historical Thinker * 55from that land, some of which was intended for the king, and some intended for himself, as fee for his services. However, according to law, the merchant was then expected to share his wealth by providing a feast or banquet for his peers. At the banquets, he would provide intoxicants, give away opulent presents, and, on the highest level of these banquets - called the panquetzal- iztli - sacrifice slaves. However, he was expected to do this not because of his unique role in society, but because these displays were, in essence, replica- tions of festivals held by the king - events such as sacrifices on the tops of temples, and great feasts in honour of the gods. What was at stake, then, in Bataille’s view, was the excessiveness and sovereignty - the ability to stand outside the useful - of all people in society. There was an expectation of par- ticipation from non-royal members of society in royal festivals, and a playing out of festivals on a smaller scale than the regal. This, thought Bataille, demon- strated that for all men, “it would have been considered base to die without having made some splendid expenditure that might add luster to [one’s] per- son by displaying the favour of the gods who had given him everything.” On the other hand, however, as honest about excess and expenditure as prim- itive societies might have been (or at least pre-modern Mezoamerican soci- eties), Bataille also noted that there was nonetheless a way in which excess played the same role in primitive society as it did in the modern world - the establishment of rank and power. Excess in ritual may have been the cultural expectation, yet the combination of destruction and opulence that occurred in ritualistic events played out in a graduated form. Not all members of soci- ety, noted Bataille, made sacrifices of the same magnitude, or gave away equally opulent gifts. The festivals of the king were greater than those of the merchant, and the public played a limited role in both. It was perhaps, the case, he asserted, that excess, or at least its purpose, may not have been as obvious as it seemed. To explain this situation, Bataille drew from Mauss’ analysis of the archaic economic institution of the ‘potlach’. What intrigued Bataille about the pot- lach, was that it was not about the equal exchange of goods, but “[giving or] returning with interest gifts received in such a way that the creditor becomes the debtor [or vice versa].”"' The potlach was, in short, a high-stakes game of opulence. The chief of a tribe or the king of a land must give a gift to another to show that the gods regarded him favourably. The chief’s author- 56 * Ben Dorfinan