The emergence of expenditure: on Georges Bataille’s first economic essay

O surgimento do dispêndio: o primeiro ensaio econômico de Georges Bataille

Abstract

This paper proposes a recontextualization of Georges Bataille’s 1933 essay The Notion of Expenditure within his own theoretical development and historical context. Current reconstructions of expenditure focus on situating this notion from La Critique Sociale forward or based on his relation to other authors. Instead, by revisiting Bataille’s earlier writings in Documents, I argue that expenditure could also be seen as the culmination of a broader and prior critique of principles that standardize human experience. In this light, Bataille’s engagement with the Communist Democratic Circle is regarded as the occasion for a redirecting of this broader critique toward economics, where utility appears as a guiding principle. Highlighting Bataille’s Marxist influence at that time, the article also challenges the idea that Bataille’s concept of expenditure could be seen as an interpretation or as a presentiment of consumer society.

Key-words:
Georges Bataille; expenditure; utility; Marxism; gift

Resumo

Este artigo propõe uma recontextualização do ensaio A noção de dispêndio (1933) de Georges Bataille a partir de seu desenvolvimento teórico e contexto histórico. As reconstruções atuais do dispêndio focam em situá-lo de La Critique Sociale em diante ou em sua relação com outros autores. Em contrapartida, revisitando os escritos anteriores de Bataille na Documents, argumento que o dispêndio poderia ser visto também ponto culminante de uma crítica prévia e mais ampla a princípios que pretendem estandardizar a experiência humana. Assim, o envolvimento de Bataille com o Círculo Comunista Democrático é encarado como ocasião de um redirecionamento dessa crítica mais ampla para o campo da economia, em que a utilidade aparece como um princípio orientador. Destacando a influência marxista de Bataille à época, o artigo também questiona a ideia de que o conceito de dispêndio pode ser visto como uma interpretação ou um pressentimento da sociedade de consumo.

Palavras-chave:
Georges Bataille; dispêndio; utilidade; marxismo; dádiva

1 Introduction

Georges Bataille (1897 - 1962) was very aware of the awkwardness that he caused to his occasional or more casual readers when proposing a perspective on economic phenomenon. “Coming from me”, he said, “this venture was disconcerting, at least to those who did not know me well.” ¹. From then to now, the rather literary and aesthetic register for which Bataille was known seemed to work as a filter for the reception of his economic writings. While remaining marginal to economics, his notions of expenditure, accursed share, restrictive and general economy were widely developed and mobilized in works of these genres², something that Bataille himself had somehow foreseen³. Fertile and important as these studies may be, they have often driven the interpretation of Bataille’s self-referred political economy texts away from studies on society and its materiality, which they originally intended to discuss⁴.

General economy, as Bataille calls his viewpoint, is a twofold theory.⁵ On the one hand, it acknowledges an unfeasibility of representing the economic system as a closed system. Thus, it proposes an expanded perception of it, in which human activity is concatenated with the solar energy of the universe in general⁶. On the other hand, by introducing the notion of expenditure (dépense) or consumption (consumation)⁷ -- a notion of social and historical unproductive activities --, general economy tackles the insufficiency of utility in describing or guiding human behavior. But while the idea of overcoming a closed system is presented as such only with 1949’s publication of The accursed share’s first volume, expenditure was already well formulated sixteen years before, in Bataille’s 1933 essay The notion of expenditure. First published in inter-war France as a contribution to the journal La Critique Sociale, the essay remained in circulation through its inclusion as a prologue in The accursed share’s 1967 edition⁸ Although expenditure is largely considered one of the most important ideas within Bataille’s work, this essay has rarely been the subject of its own careful investigations, particularly ones that regard it as an economic essay⁹.

Having as its aim the delineation of the emergence and the historical context of the arguments of The notion of expenditure, this article continues the efforts of Besnier (1983; 1990), Stein (1993) and Zhuo (2015) in contextualizing Bataille’s intellectual production of the 1930s. But while these contributions depart from Bataille’s endeavor from La Critique Sociale forward or mainly focus on Bataille’s reading of other authors, this article sheds closer light on the emergence of expenditure in his prior writings (especially in Documents) and in his early manuscripts to The notion of expenditure¹⁰. Also, it discusses Bataille’s provocative contribution within the Communist Democratic Circle, the main political group to which he was affiliated at that time. Without questioning expenditure’s potential roots in psychoanalytic theory (Zhuo, 2015) or in the French reception of Nietzsche (Stein, 1993), my objective is to draw and contextualize the emergence of this notion from within Bataille’s own theoretical development.

Thus, my contention is that expenditure, as conceived in the 1930s, emerged gradually in Bataille’s thought, within an early and more general critique of “higher principles”. That is, a critique of attempts to give form and purpose to the “shapeless” and “purposeless” movement of the universe and its matter in general¹¹. From this viewpoint, his joining the Communist Democratic Cercle and making contributions within La Critique Sociale represents a displacement of this general critique towards a more propositional thought on society and the economy. As I aim to show, it is only then that economic utility can become Bataille’s target, and that expenditure can be conceived as a critical economic notion. Encompassing a Marxist historical framework and a revolutionary perspective, Bataille’s expenditure intends to be a stout critique of capitalism, while also stating a striking difficulty within communist reflection of his time: to abandon utility as a guiding principle.

By reconstructing these aspects, this text challenges both the underestimation of Marxist influence in Bataille’s concept of expenditure (as in Piel, 1995 [1963]; and Baudrillard, 1991[1976]) and the possibility of regarding Bataille’s economy as an anticipation or interpretation of consumer society or of a “postmodern capitalism” (as do Goux, 1990; and Nodoushani, 1999). Moreover, it also relativizes Besnier’s (1983) and Zhuo’s (2015) retracing of expenditure to Bataille’s first contributions in La Critique Sociale, showing how essential elements to this notion were already present earlier in his oeuvre.

According to The notion of expenditure, economic relations can be interpreted through at least four functions: production, conservation, productive consumption, and unproductive consumption. This last form, a synonym of expenditure, is opposed to the first three for its negative relationship towards wealth. That is, while production, conservation, and productive consumption are all more ratified in their senses the more they add, shield, or serve as a mean to replace wealth, expenditure only acquires its sense by destroying it or giving it away. It intends then to gather and define all activities that escape utilitarian purpose or calculation, exemplified not exhaustively with “luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, [and] perverse sexual activity”¹².

What Bataille calls the “principle of utility” refers indeed to the establishment of a normative and moral ideal of behavior that only allows for or legitimizes positive relationships with wealth: an economic “higher principle”. This ideal is shaped, among other things, by conferring a rational and human status only to this kind of relation. In that framework, expenditure (as a negative relation towards wealth) can only be explained through judgmental moral categories linked to the idea of sub-cognition or sub-humanity. Particularly, as an irrational, immature or uncivilized behavior. Attempting a non-moral explanation of these activities, Bataille formulates a “principle of loss” whereby expenditure is held as a normal, natural, social, and historical human activity. The very title of the essay can be seen as a bid on the constitution of a notion, that is, of a certain knowledge¹³ about this part of economic activity not considered apprehensible at first sight except through a moral rejection. Without this notion, reckons Bataille, great part of the economy of indigenous modes of life, of pre-capitalistic societies, and even of our current time would remain without plausible explanation.

This perspective is strongly and openly influenced by Marcel Mauss’ anthropological work Essai sur le don, published in 1925. Mauss gathers in the text the description of modes of life of various indigenous societies, from the American Northwest to Melanesia and Polynesia, in order to argue for a common and archaic form of exchange diametrically opposed to the self-interest of barter. This form, the gift, has as essential trait its apparent giving, voluntary and free nature, repositioning then the matter of the origin and motivation of economic exchange¹⁴. According to this perception, the primary deed enrolled in exchange was not the intention of acquiring something from another (a positive relation versus wealth), but rather that of freely giving or expending one’s own wealth (a negative one): a conception that Bataille extrapolates as expenditure to describe an extension of social behaviors in different times.

Investigating more closely the emergence of this notion, the present paper is divided in the three following sections. The first one is dedicated to analyzing and retracing the emergence of the notion of expenditure in the light of Bataille’s prior essays. There, the recurrent theme of deviant behaviors to principles that appear as limiting the extension of human experience culminates in the need of describing a “social function” in line with the formless ways of the universe: expenditure. In the second, I discuss the influence that Bataille’s intellectual environment had on the essay, addressing how the Marxist grammar of the Communist Democratic Circle was essential to the formulation of expenditure as a historical (and revolutionary) concept. Lastly, I examine Bataille’s critique of utility as an attempt to review the misunderstanding of associating pleasure unliterally with a positive relation towards wealth and denaturalizing productive or self-interested conduct as the essentially human and reasonable behavior.

2 The prior essays (1926-1932) or expenditure as a social function

By the time Bataille published The notion of expenditure (1933), he had already left his hometown (Reims), moved to Paris, graduated in L’École des Chartes and taken a position in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. The political and social moment was a heated one. WWI had established a gloomy social memory and radically changed France’s internal force dynamics. Both left and right-wing radical movements grew internally, influenced by the Russian revolution and Italian fascism. The essay was one of Bataille’s first contributions to La Critique Sociale, the unofficial journal of the Cercle Communiste Democratique (Democratic Communist Circle). Formed by a combination of communist and surrealism dissidents, the group had a vital influence on the formulation of Bataille’s concept of expenditure, as I’ll examine in the next section. However, before joining the Cercle and contributing to this journal, Bataille had already been publishing significant essays since 1926, especially in two different periodicals: Aréthuse, between 1926 and 1929; and Documents, between 1929 and 1930.

In the retrospective light of these prior writings, expenditure emerges gradually as a concept capable of describing the set of social activities that do not operate by a “higher principle”, as that of utility. While these kinds of principles provide a rational standardization of experience, expenditures run instead according to the shapeless and unreasonable movement that Bataille understands as defining the universe and its matter. In social behavior, they mean free outflow to desires and sentiments without regards to morals. Although more easily identifiable in the figures of the “primitive”, the “madman” and the “child”, these social activities are conceived by him as a ubiquitous social conduct. They require, then, to be described as a “social function” present in various societies and their ways of life throughout history. This broader perspective on expenditure’s emergence in earlier writings relativizes the retracing of expenditure to Bataille’s first contributions in La Critique Sociale, as those of Besnier (1983) and Zhuo (2015).

Bataille’s curiosity about the multiplicity of modes of life and economic relations was present from his very first publications, above all related to anthropological readings about ancient societies or traditional indigenous cultures. From the period of his writings in Aréthuse, this is evident in the descriptions associated with the currencies of elder Asian societies (Mongols, Kushans and Indians)¹⁵, and really stands out in 1928 essay L’Amerique disparue (Extinct America)¹⁶. In this text, Bataille describes and mourns the Aztecs’ way of life, with a manifest fascination with the issues of sacrifice, feasting and war in this specific society¹⁷. First coming to light in this text, this fascination would continue to mark Bataille’s subsequent work until the very end¹⁸.

The most significant steps, however, are to be found in the Documents period. Many of the texts written during this time seek to highlight those marginal aspects of art, philosophy and social behavior that could represent a break with a certain standardization of these fields. This standardization, made through the establishment of the “higher principles” of metaphysics (in philosophy), morality (in social behavior), and form (in the arts) would represent repressing the extent of human experience. Bataille aims then to challenge these conceptions by which “human life is erroneously seen as an elevation”, when truly it involves “a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse”¹⁹. This movement is not exceptionally human but consistent with the contrasts found in nature and the universe, which would involve an amorphous game of constant opposition between “higher forms of life” (“correctly calculated”, “harmonious”, “regulated” forms) and “lower” (or “monstrous”) forms²⁰.

For example, when contrasting Hellenic currency and its copies made by the Gauls, Bataille notices how their difference was not a result of clumsiness or lack of technical skills, but a reflection of different social and economic modes of life²¹. While the Greeks engraved in their coins symmetric, athletic, “academic” horses, linked to perfection and classical thought, the Gauls made fantastic, dysmorphic, and subversive ones. The Gauls, says Bataille, “calculated nothing, conceiving of no progress and giving free rein to immediate suggestions and violent sentiment” ²². Doing so, they also did not represent figures any different from “natural monsters, like spiders, gorillas and hippopotami” ²³.

Formless “like a spider or a spit” is also the best representation of the whole universe, according to Bataille²⁴. The attempt to conceive it through a determined form would only correspond to a feeble intellectual endeavor: “for academic men to be happy, the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal: it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what [simply] is, a mathematical frock coat”²⁵. The risk involved in this attempt (to impute form and order to what is shapeless and disordered) is to create limiting and homogenizing principles to experience. After all, the effort to submit material movement to reason would be tantamount to only falsely evoking an authority over this movement through these principles. In return, they would serve no other purpose than to submit the own human experience.

That is, the institution of a “higher principle” can only exist by inevitably rejecting something of the order of reality as “low”. For this reason, when Bataille purposes a “low” or “base materialism”²⁶ in Documents, it is precisely grounded on a concept of matter that refuses to be subjugated by reason:

For it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one’s reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. […] Base matter is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.²⁷

This is not to be confused with an a priori rejection of reason, but rather with an attempt of leading it to its ultimate consequences. That meant, for Bataille, leading reason to the self-perception of its bankruptcy: to its madness. In 1930’s text Rotten sun, the quest for spiritual, moral, and artistic elevation finds analogy in the relation between vision and sun. While midday sun would be confused with the highest clearest disposition, with les lumières, with “the mathematical serenity and spiritual elevation”, it would also be “the most abstract object, since it is impossible to look at it fixedly at that time of day”. To stare at it stubbornly, therefore, implies “a certain madness” and a change in one’s preconceived notion, “because it is no longer production that appears in light, but refuse or combustion [...]”.²⁸

This is why in these early writings Bataille is particularly interested in the connection between social figures who are not committed to the experience of a rational understanding of the world, especially the “madman”, the “primitive” and the “child”. These figures would act in synchronicity with the material, unreasonable, and shapeless movement of the universe, in opposition to the calculated approach of metaphysics, morality, and form. While “the idea”, for Bataille, “has over the man the same degrading power that a harness has over a horse”²⁹, the madman’s madness would only remove these obstacles that prevent satisfaction of elementary impulses. But the self-destructive practices through which they are satisfied -- as sacrificial mutilation --, if compared to those of archaic societies, “would thus appear to be not only generally human, but also very primitive”³⁰. Similarly, the art of “civilized adults” can be opposed both by “primitive” art and by children’s art. They would share the same characteristics and the same means of “asserting their personality”: “the destruction of objects”³¹.

But there’s nothing inherently disruptive about these figures apart from their departure from the “higher principles” of social regulation. Although in their cases it appears more evidently, the possibility of disregard for guiding principles is to be found within every person, in every society and time. According to Bataille, “there is, in every man, an animal thus imprisoned, like a galley slave, and there is a gate, and if we open the gate, the animal will rush out, like the slave finding his way to escape”³².

The remarkable breadth of these behaviors in different societies, representations, cosmogonies, and social figures begins to demand their conceptualization as a “social function” ³³. A function that gathers, for example, the Aztec traditions, the violent ways of the Gauls, children’s and madmen’s art and behavior, “American gangster wars”, “circus games in ancient Rome (and the bullfights in present-day Spain)”³⁴. This function is first verbalized as a notion in 1930, yet as a “notion of a spirit of sacrifice”³⁵. Expenditure can be seen as a developed formulation of this notion, a “social function” capable of relating the collection of actions that don’t function according to a higher principle. Particularly, expenditure takes this place when the economic thought on utility is seen as the example par excellence of a higher principle, one that intends to give form and purpose to the disformed and purposeless nature of the universe and of human life.

In the early preparatory manuscripts to The notion of expenditure, Bataille says that utility has historically and socially “assumed an absolute value”³⁶ on modernity. That is, while theoretically claiming to be a mean to achieve pleasure, utility became itself the end to be pursued in all social activities. Pleasure was then reduced to a “subsidiary role”, to a “concession”, while utility was perpetuated as the “conscient bases of modern activity”. Within utility’s framework, for example, the possibility of pleasure enrolled in unproductive consumption is proscribed a priori, since “all individual effort, in order to be valid, must be reducible to the fundamental necessities of production and conservation”³⁷. That is, utility implies, as any “higher principle”, certain submission and limiting of human experience.

Following the prior writings, the published essay is also permeated by the spendthrifts’ figures of youth, madness, and primitiveness. While the last one appears in the references to Mauss’ work, the first two can be seen specially in its first two sections (“The insufficiency of the principle of classical utility” and “The principle of loss”). In this initial moment, Bataille intercalates subjective and social examples, attempting to familiarize the reader with the place expenditure would occupy in daily life. The central comparison made in the first section is that between the austerity of a father in domestic spending and austerity at a nation’s level. Bataille’s unconventional relation with his father acts here as an allegorical catalyst to his perception of French economy during World War I and in the inter-war period, when social spending was constricted first by the warmongering and then by global depression³⁸. The first agent of expenditure in the essay is precisely a “youthful man” capable of wasting and destroying in spite of utilitarian justification and paternal authority³⁹. Human society, according to Bataille, could have analogous needs with this man.

Similarly, when giving examples of modern activities that rarely could be said to function according to utility, Bataille cites the “level of madness” to which addicted gamblers arrive, who often obtain bigger losses than their earnings⁴⁰. This case, alongside jewelry making, cults, art and other examples made in the second section is thought by Bataille as the closest in market societies of operating as in archaic societies, i.e., with sacrificial drives or according to a “principle of loss”. They compose Bataille’s attempt to establish expenditure as a social function of the same importance as the economic categories of production and productive consumption, but drastically opposed to them.

Both Besnier (1983) and Zhuo (2015), when retracing the source of Bataille’s expenditure and his general critique in the 30s, depart from his first contributions to La Critique Sociale: a review (and, later, polemic discussion) around Kraft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis. As I tried to show in this section, a thorough reconstruction of the emergence of expenditure needs to be grounded in an earlier and more general critique of higher principles, already present in the Documents period. Even the “direct affinity between religion and sexuality” that Zhou’s (2015, p.383) sees as an important element of Kraft-Ebing’s work influencing Bataille’s expenditure at that time seems to be already present to some extent in these early writings. Notwithstanding, the discussion around Kraft-Ebing is the first time that Bataille nods to his study of economics⁴¹. And it’s no coincidence he does it when joining the Democratic Communist Cercle.

The fact that Bataille’s economic foray initiated with The notion of expenditure, and not before in Aréthuse’s or Documents’ texts, besides maturation, is much related to the different scopes of the journals and to Bataille’s intellectual and political environment at the time. While Aréthuse primarily focused on numismatics and Documents was a review devoted to themes of archaeology, fine arts, and ethnography, La Critique Sociale was Bataille’s first primary venue of publication that held “political economy” as one of its main themes. In fact, it was broadly presented as a review covering “sociology, political economy, history, philosophy, anthropology, public law, demography, labor movement, literature, and arts” and the published texts echoed this composite depiction. Society was thus the major object of study in the journal and the revolutionary purpose of the political group related to it, the Democratic Communist Circle, animated a propositional thinking, rather than just an interpretative one. Nevertheless, Bataille’s relation with La Critique Sociale and its group was not free of ambiguities.

2 The Democratic Communist Circle or expenditure as a historical concept

The interchange Bataille established with La Critique Sociale contributors and with the members of Cercle Communiste Demócratique (Democratic Communist Circle) played a defining role in his work at the time. Not only the Circle met officially at Thursday nights at cafés in Paris, but they also had a frequent exchange of letters and shared a conviviality beyond political and intellectual issues. Given how whole sections of The notion of expenditure incorporate and are directly influenced by the discussions within the Cercle, authors have arbitrarily considered them as incident or circumstantial or failed to recognize its decisive influence. This is mainly the case of Piel (1995 [1963]), who regards class struggle as an incident part of the essay, but also of Baudrillard (1991[1976]), who greatly underestimates the role of a revolutionary perspective within Bataille’s work. As I show in this section, both assertions are imprecise.

Bataille’s communist ideal and his appropriation of Marxism were in fact beyond merely heterodox reading. They represented an original and critical perspective and animated disagreements among his comrades. But they also strongly relied on them. Both the outlining of the historical process of expenditure and the revolutionary perspective displayed in the text are intimately tied to the discussions he established within La Critique Sociale and the Cercle. This Marxist influence furnished the grammar by which expenditure was historically grasped, making of it a vital condition of possibility to the essay and to the concept.

La Critique Sociale was founded and edited by Boris Souvarine, a French journalist and Marxist activist. Most of the authors of the review were also part of the Cercle Communiste Démocratique, a group created by Souvarine in 1926, two years after his expulsion from the French Communist Party. Although La Critique Sociale served as an unofficial press organ for the group, it also published external contributions, such as Simone Weil⁴² texts, who never really made it into the Circle⁴³. Originally named the Cercle Communiste Marx et Lénine (Communist Circle Marx and Lenin), it adopted its definitive name only in 1930. The change revealed both the group’s increasing necessity of differentiation from Stalinist groups and its increasing intellectual and activist heterogeneity, due to the admission of several of surrealism’s dissidents⁴⁴. This was the case of Bataille, who joined the group in 1931.

Despite Souvarine’s satisfaction at having him as a “recruit” and his close friendship with other members of the Cercle, Bataille’s role in the group could be seen as that of “a man alone, defending a position that alarmed everyone, including those close to him”⁴⁵. Indeed, when the editors of La Critique Sociale published The notion of expenditure on January 7, 1933, they felt the need to accompany it with a warning:

The following text is a fragment of a work with the same title that will be published shortly. In many aspects, the author is at odds with our general direction of thought, but a research journal cannot avoid such disagreements. We will publish a critical analysis of this study in a forthcoming issue.⁴⁶

Although ninety years separate us from this moment, the promised analysis of the editors has not yet been made public. It was Simone Weil who, in expressing the judgments by which she decided not to take part in the group, best outlined the internal differences within the Cercle. In doing so, she not only subscribed the visions of Souvarine and Pierre Kaan⁴⁷, but assumed that they would hardly find a dialog in the terms of Bataille’s thought. The mentioned reservations made by the editors in the journal’s notice, about the “many aspects” in which Bataille would be “at odds with our general orientations of thought”, possibly imply divergences in the same direction as those of Weil:

Bataille has written to me that he wants me to join the Circle, because many of the comrades have brought forward, he says, reservations as serious as mine and probably the same ones. […] Now the revolution is for him the triumph of the irrational -- for me, of the rational; for him, a catastrophe --- for me, a methodical action in which one must endeavor to limit the harm done; for him, the liberation of the instincts, and above all those that are currently considered pathological -- for me, a superior morality. What do we have in common? I know that Boris is in agreement with me on all this, and I hope that are also others. Notably, I believe, Ch. and P.K⁴⁸. How can one coexist in the same revolutionary organization when on either side the revolution means two contrary things?⁴⁹

Hence, even among the “independent communists”, as Souvarine described himself after his expulsion from the PCF, Bataille’s ideas were appreciated with a certain distance. They were, however, never censured, either by Souvarine or by other members. In the post-scriptum of a 1932 letter to Bataille, for example, Pierre Kaan says: “I gave, after reading it, the Chapter I of Unproductive expenditure to Boris Souvarine. I see no reason to exclude research of this kind from the volumes of Critique. This is the opinion I expressed to Souvarine”⁵⁰.

Echoing the composite attribute of its contributors and the broad scope of the journal, La Critique Sociale welcomed unorthodox perspectives. In the Circle, as in the other groups Bataille frequented at the time⁵¹, communist revolutionary perspective was possibly the only common ground of discussion. The very purpose of La Critique Sociale, from the standpoint of its founder, could be seen as that of “revitalizing Marxism”⁵². Bataille’s concern in situating expenditure in relation to Marxist grammar is therefore an unsurprising element of the essay, which can be best approached through his depiction of historical movement.

The notion of expenditure relies on Mauss’ description of the “form of exchange in archaic societies” as a way of denaturalizing self-interested barter as the origin of exchange⁵³. However, the “archaic societies” are also the historical limit of this reference. To go from the gift in these societies to expenditure and affirm a contemporary pertinence of its subject, an extrapolation is needed. Expenditure must be a transhistorical (and transcultural) notion, capable of describing behaviors in different epochs. Bataille fills this space between the archaic and the contemporary revisiting the history of class struggle. The Marxist grammar doesn’t offer then only a bridge of communication with his Cercle comrades, but the possibility of a diegesis of the “principle of loss”.

In Bataille’s depiction of history, the development of modes of production is accompanied by the degradation of modes of expenditure. These last are increasingly neglected, amortized, and restricted to private forms of outflow, which denounces the growing stinginess of the wealthier classes. As addressed by the revolutionary perspective, this process evolves into a radical disclosure, with a revolution led by the proletariat and a new communist society to come. To Bataille, this society unavoidably needs to recognize and give free outflow to the spendthrift nature of humanity, in opposition to the “hatred of expenditure” that characterizes capitalism.

This historical dimension is essential for Bataille’s concept of expenditure, as he intends it to be a notion as transhistorical as production or (productive) consumption. Therefore, “the importance attributed to the class struggle” in the essay could rarely be seen as being among the “aspects that one may be permitted to consider incidental to ‘The Notion of Expenditure’”, as imprecisely states Piel⁵⁴. It is a fundamental element in the very conception of expenditure, as it provides the key by which the notion was elaborated transhistorically.

In fact, from the second to the third section of The notion of expenditure (called “Production, exchange, and unproductive activity”), the essay undergoes a cleavage in its structure. There’s no more interchangeable comparison between subjective and social experience, but the search for the origin and historical determinations of expenditure as a social function. The ruptures Bataille depicts in the historical process follow the same as the ones described in the Communist Manifesto and in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State⁵⁵. Namely, primitive communities in the beginning, to which the European economic history offers the subsequent moments of economic “development”: slavery, serfdom and, finally, capitalism⁵⁶. The main argument of the section could be described like this: If expenditure, inasmuch as production, defines the sense of economy in a society, the history of societies, before being described as the history of modes of production, could be described as the history of modes of expenditure.

The fundamental change from Marx and Engels’ historical scheme to that of Bataille is Marcel Mauss’ overcited essay The gift. To Bataille, the “primitive communities” that inaugurate historical trajectory are not as described by Lewis Morgan⁵⁷. And, more decisively, for him barter no longer holds its place as the origin of exchange and of mercantile societies. Now, the gift and, specially, potlatch occupies this position.

The gift as described by Mauss attempted to shift this essential theme in the history of economic thought. It’s common for the origin of exchange to be understood as a process initiated by the necessity or desire of acquiring something possessed or produced by another. And, therefore, also of searching or producing the same reciprocal feeling in this other. But Mauss’ anthropological evidence would suggest the opposite: it was not in the form of self-interested barter that exchange first took place, but in the form of gifts⁵⁸. As summarizes Bataille, acquisition would only be a “unwanted result” of a prior process “oriented in the opposite direction”: that of giving⁵⁹.

Bataille focuses mostly on the potlatch, a particular form of the gift among northwest American groups. Mauss described the specificity of this form based on the “more radical and more marked” profile of their gift-exchange institutions. According to his portrayal, they are characterized by the “violence, exaggeration, and antagonisms that it arouses, and by a certain lack of juridical concepts, and a simpler and cruder structure”⁶⁰. In the potlatch, rather than the simple exchange of gifts between communities, we find pure destruction of goods and persons “in direction” of another. This movement doesn’t even allow for the acquisition part of the exchange process. “In a certain number of cases”, says Mauss, “it is not even a question of giving and returning gifts, but of destroying, so as not to give the slightest hint of desiring your gift to be reciprocated”⁶¹.

The indigenous peoples that practice(d) potlatch (the Haida, the Tlingit, the Tsimshian, and the Kwakiutl) are described by Mauss as very wealthy, skilled fishermen, navigators, cedar extractors, craftsmen, builders and blacksmiths. During the warmer seasons, they disperse in their hunting, gathering and fishing activities. During the winter, they retire to their villages to visit and be visited among tribes, clans and families. Through the visits, they put themselves in a state of “perpetual effervescence” or “perpetual excitement”, with continuous, repeated, and long feasts where, in various ceremonies (matrimonial, shamanistic, funerary and initiations), everything is spent, and potlatches are made “everywhere” and “prolonged indefinitely”⁶².

Bataille cites extreme cases of potlatch, as when a “rival Tlingit chief appeared before his rival to slash the throats of some of his own slaves” or when “destruction goes as far as the burning of villages and the smashing of flotillas of canoes”⁶³. His greater interest in the potlatch (over other forms of gift) can be traced precisely to this agonistic character of the system, whose complete exclusion of barter and haggling could be seen as the earliest form of exchange. The more extravagant the expenditure in potlatch, in gift or destruction form, the more it confers honor, nobility and glory to the spendthrift. That is read by Bataille as the constitution of a “positive property of loss”, in contrast to efficiency calculation, which would regard expenditure as a fundamentally undesirable element.

The long historical passage from societies that esteem loss as positive to the current ones (that regard it as a negative feature) is portrayed by an increasing steady trait of accumulated wealth. That is, accumulation gradually stops meaning only a possibility of greater expenditures to become a purpose on its own. The fourth section of The notion of expenditure, describing “The functional expenditure of the wealthy classes”, narrates how in this process expenditure was increasingly neglected and restricted to private forms of outflow.

In Roman slave society, the wealthy were obliged to bear the costs of games and worship. The decline of paganism, the rise of Christianity and the introduction of feudalism in the Middle Ages replaced this pagan expenditure with free alms and large donations to churches and monasteries taking over most of the expenditure function. In the transition from the Middle Ages to capitalism, the social forms of expenditure lost significant strength. The austerity of Protestant morality conducted economic relations into a mode of production characterized by hatred of the social function of expenditure.

Habermas (1990 [1985], p.230) saw in this implicit reference to the Weberian idea of protestant ethics a consequence of Bataille’s impossibility of recurring to a politico-economic explanation of capitalist development (“in the Marxist style”), preferring then a “history of religions” as a conducting wire of this development. As it is clear in the displayed intricate relation between Bataille’s history of modes of expenditure and the Marxist history of modes of production, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Rather than an impossibility of recurring to a politico-economic explanation, expenditure is itself conceived as a historical politico-economic category, much as “in the Marxist style”.

In the fifth section of the essay (“Class Struggle”), Bataille describes how the dynamic between expenditure and class struggle changed substantially in capitalism. For him, while accumulation in previous societies was also made from the fruits of the labor of the lower classes, the social and ostentatious expenditure that followed it created a heightened circulation of human affections between these classes and the wealthier ones. In the case of the bourgeoisie, private expenditure and rational forms of domination disguised by the sense of legal equality create a “sinister” cancellation of these affections. “And it is right to recognize that the people are incapable of hating them [the bourgeoisie] as much as their former masters, to the extent that they are incapable of loving them”⁶⁴, tells Bataille.

Thus, at this moment in history, it is the lower class that inherits the burden of expenditure. Class struggle in capitalism appears as a direct conflict between expenditure and the complete rational nullification of human affections caused by productivity-driven processes. The former is represented by the proletariat and the latter by the bourgeoisie. “Revolution” embodies, in the penultimate section of the essay (“Christianity and Revolution”), the possibly of a society that doesn’t neglect the spendthrift social nature of humanity but gives it free outflow. Based on The notion of expenditure, Baudrillard’s assertion that “there is no principle of revolution in Bataille’s work”⁶⁵ could hardly be taken as definitive.

In the early preparatory manuscripts, Bataille’s communist horizon is even more unequivocal. “Most obviously”, says Bataille in these writings, “we’re not talking about the foolish squandering of social resources”⁶⁶. The terror associated with spending, caused by its connection with an image of stupid or atrocious waste, would only serve to legitimize the useful and the unilateral destination of efforts and goods. It would only serve as “a defensive reaction -- albeit an ineffective one -- within a demented economic system”⁶⁷.

A communist society would have to free itself not only from the bourgeoisie, but from utilitarian perspective. To not recognize expenditure as a pressing social and historical function would mean to risk a limited revolution. That is, in attempt to put itself at the service of its own happiness after “destroying its exploiters”, a community could blindly find itself in the situation of being really at the service of the useful, “at the service of service”. The development of a socialist economy, according to Bataille, must be linked to the outflowing of “unproductive expenditure in line with demanding needs”⁶⁸. This overcoming of utility as a guiding principle requires facing the naturalized economic misunderstanding of identifying pleasure or happiness with a positive relation towards wealth. The above drawn background of Bataille’s critique of “higher principles” and the intellectual context of the essay allows us to better revisit his characterization and critique of economic utility, as well as some disputable interpretations thereof.

3 The critique of utility or expenditure as a notion

Some commentators saw in Bataille’s defense of expenditure and in his critique of utility an anticipation or interpretation of consumer society and of a new stage of capitalism. Goux (1990) argues that Bataille’s critique of utility would aim only at a “trivial (moral) notion of the useful” that has no basis in political economy. In fact, to Goux, there would be no “normativity in the notion of ‘use-value’ or ‘utility’ as political economy defines them” (p.222). French economist Jean-Baptiste Say would be to him a precise example of how political economy would, “from the start”, separate the idea of utility from moral concerns⁶⁹. Thus, by stripping expenditure of its object of critique, Goux can allow himself to see in Bataille’s focus on unproductive consumption a “presentiment of what capitalism is becoming”: a consumer society (p.233). His contention is then that Bataille’s economic theory appears in “troubling consonance” with postmodern legitimations of capitalism, a suggestion that Nodoushani (1999) thoroughly accepts.

However, as I show in this section, these comments seem to lose sight of important contextual aspects of Bataille’s formulation of expenditure, which the early general critique of “higher principles” and the Marxist influence showed above can help to reconsider. Moreover, by briefly reassessing Say’s remarks on prodigality, I argue that Goux’s assertion that Bataille’s critique does not aim at utility as defined by political economy could be reviewed. Therefore, that expenditure can hardly be seen as an anticipation or interpretation of consumer society or of “postmodern capitalism”.

In The notion of expenditure, the principle of utility is Bataille’s example par excellence of a “higher principle”, as it intends to give form and purpose to the formless and purposeless nature of the universe and of human life. According to his understanding, by proposing to “rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law”, as defines Bentham⁷⁰, the principle of utility would only have limited this same felicity through them. Utility would imply, as any “higher principle”, a submission and limiting of human experience and, particularly, of human pleasure. Bataille regards utility then as an “insufficient”, “elusive”, “flat and untenable conception of existence”⁷¹.

As the propriety of objects “whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness”⁷², as classically stated, utility could be understood as the essence of value and wealth by important economists as Jean-Baptiste Say: “to create objects which have any kind of utility, is to create wealth; for the utility of things is the ground-work of their value, and their value constitutes wealth”⁷³. A unilateral identity was then established between the search for wealth and the search for pleasure. According to Bataille, that meant that pleasure remained only theoretically “as the basis of utility”⁷⁴ and allowed only in “moderate form”, since the “violent pleasure” achieved with expenditures, with the destruction or unproductive spending of wealth and efforts, would be “seen as pathological” within utility’s picture⁷⁵. Or, in other words, rejected as a matter of sub-cognition.

The myth of self-interested barter as the beginning of economic exchange is seen here as a form of naturalizing this productive conduct as the essentially human and rational one. It would serve, in economic discourse, as a general model of behavior. Within Say’s utility framework, for example, even “consumption may be regarded as an act of barter”⁷⁶. And when comparing the value lost and the quantity of satisfaction gained, it would be possible to discern more or less “judicious consumptions” according to their “degree of correctness”⁷⁷. The further away from the simple unproductive dissipation of energy, the more judicious an act of consumption would be⁷⁸.

Hence, the prodigality of expenditures, in its negative relation towards wealth, can only be conceived as “injudicious”, “immoral”, “animal”, “savage” or “unreasonable”, in Say’s terms⁷⁹. For him, that spendthrifts “boast of their prodigality” (as if there was, to put in Bataille’s words, a “positive propriety of loss”⁸⁰) is “absurd”, a sub-human conduct, as “every animal can do as much”⁸¹. It would be “more becoming the character of a being gifted with reason and foresight never to consume, in any instance, without some reasonable object in view”⁸².

Although Say is one of Goux’s (1990) preferred examples in political-economy, these remarks on judicious consumption and prodigality seem to be at odds with Goux’s assertion that there’s no “normativity” (p.221) in the political-economy definition of utility and that this would be the case “from the start” (p.219). Bataille’s expenditure does not find itself without its object of critique in economics when referring to the “principle of utility” as the establishment of a normative and naturalized ideal of behavior. Rather, by naming the first section of The notion of expenditure as “The insufficiency of the principle of classical utility”, he seems well aware of his stand.

The concept of expenditure intends then to oppose the two related sides of utility as the “conscient basis of modern activity” discussed above: the wrongful identity between wealth and pleasure; and the naturalization of self-interest. In both cases, it’s crucial that expenditure is described as a social and historical function. On the one hand, it demonstrates how a variety of ubiquitous social activities related to (the strongest) pleasures are hardly described as utilitarian: “games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity”⁸³. On the other, it shows how a diversity of societies regarded loss as a positive and desirable feature of life. Doing so, it places self-interest historically as a primarily modern problem.

Again, Bataille’s reliance on the gift and its historical extrapolation appears as indispensable to denaturalizing the unilaterality of self-interest and wealth pursuit as the essential and enlightened human behavior. Mauss himself had already acknowledged the incompatibility of these unproductive social modi with the idea of utility, without need to relate it to any judicious categories of sub-humanity or sub-cognition: “It is indeed something other than utility that circulates in societies of all kinds, most of which are already fairly enlightened”, he says⁸⁴.

For both of them, what appears to us there as an archaic form has actually the potential to unveil various sidelined aspects of life in contemporary society. It constitutes to our time, more than an origin, a possible point of arrival. To Mauss, we should “adopt as the principle of our life what has always been a principle of action and will always be so: to emerge from self, to give, freely and obligatorily”⁸⁵. Similarly, to Bataille, establishing expenditure as a notion would imply the possibility of its conscious social recognition, diminishing the sense of utility in economic representations and social activity⁸⁶. It would be a condition of possibility to a society that doesn’t neglect the spendthrift social nature of humanity but gives it free outflow.

As shown in the former section, even developing a critical perspective of Marxism, Bataille’s horizon when formulating expenditure in the early 30s was a revolutionary one. Based on it, the centrality he gives to spending could only offhandedly be related to the ascension of consumer society, a relation most dear to Nodoushani (1999). In order to affirm consumer society as some kind of realization or echo of Bataille’s economic perspective, Nodoushani needs to staunchly overlook Bataille’s critique of capitalism. He affirms that “Bataille’s theory of general economy is an attempt to comprehend this new stage of consumerism” based on the centrality that Bataille gives to “consumption”, without really explaining how the unproductiveness of expenditure could be identified with consumerist consumption (so willfully integrated in the production and reproduction of capitalist society).

In fact, Bataille criticizes capitalism not simply because it privileges production over consumption, but over unproductive consumption. This means that, as a social form grounded in a “higher principle”, capitalism prescribes an integration of every human activity in utilitarian forms, i.e., that “all individual effort, in order to be valid, must be reducible to the fundamental necessities of production and conservation”⁸⁷. Thus, a mere rising or expansion of capitalist consumption cannot be said to overcome this rationale⁸⁸. It doesn’t change, for instance, the steady trait of accumulated wealth, in which it is accumulated for accumulation’s own sake, as discussed in the previous section. Moreover, neither does it change substantially capitalist’s homogenizing process of labor, in which the utilitarian destination of efforts reduces man to its production⁸⁹. These aspects may help to reaffirm Bataille’s critique of utility as having a different horizon than that of consumer society.

In the manuscripts to the essay, Bataille called the “paradox of absolute utility” the manner in which objectifying pleasure through the “higher principle” of utility would end up by actually historically disavowing it in activities that are negatively related to wealth⁹⁰. “From a mean”, says Bataille, “utility became an end”⁹¹. But when expenditure is socially apprehended as a relevant notion without which it would never be possible to accurately describe and to experience the diversity of human behavior, utility can go back to having a “relative value”⁹².

In other words, expenditure’s finding is that it would never be plausible or desirable to reduce human experience to the order of the useful, to the purpose of producing increasing and stable wealth, unilaterally associated to pleasure. For Bataille, subjectively and socially, what is useless is also object of pleasure, if not of a more pronounced one. To the study of political economy and of economic history, this would mean to recognize a “principle of loss” running aside that of utility in every society since its origins, instead of discarding unproductiveness as a matter of sub-cognition or sub-humanity.

Conclusion

By focusing on Bataille’s early writings and on his involvement with the Communist Democratic Circle, this paper aimed at tracing the theorical development that led to the formulation of expenditure in the early 30s. As shown, the concept of expenditure emerges in Bataille’s thought as a culmination of his broader critique of the standardization of human experience through “higher principles”. Specifically, expenditure takes this critical place when the economic thought on utility is seen as the example par excellence of such standardization. Expenditure, thus, embodies a social function of free and immediate enjoyment of purposelessness, in opposition to the functions of production and conservation. It serves as the basis of an opposing principle to the principle of utility, the “principle of loss”, through which expenditure becomes apprehensible as a notion, and no longer rejected as a trace of sub-cognition or sub-humanity. It is his joining the Democratic Communist Cercle and contributing to La Critique Sociale that displaces his general critique towards a more propositional thought on society and the economy. At that time, by dislocating the anthropological basis of Marxist historical framework through Mauss’ gift, Bataille articulates a historical development to expenditure, while maintaining a revolutionary panorama hardly compatible with capitalist consumer society.

Acknowledgments

Drafts of this paper were presented at the ANPOF National Meeting in Recife and at the II Simpósio de Filosofia Contemporânea da UFMG in Belo Horizonte, for which I thank the participants at both events for their helpful comments. I am especially grateful to Hugo Cerqueira for his careful reading, insightful comments, and advice throughout many evolving versions of this work. I also thank Leonardo de Deus for his comments when this work was first presented. Finally, I am grateful to the editors and referees of Nova Economia for their invaluable assistance in improving the text. The remaining issues and all opinions expressed are, of course, my responsibility. This work was supported by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES).

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• Research Data Availability
  The dataset supporting the results of this study is available at: https://doi.org/10.25824/redu/ZOEOAQ
• JEL Codes:
  B24; B40; Z13
• Códigos JEL:
  B24; B40; Z13

• 1
  Bataille, G. (1988c, p. 9); Œuvres complètes (tome VII, p.19), henceforth referenced as OC.
• 2
  Relevant examples are Derrida (2017 [1967]), Didi-Huberman (2017), and Moraes (2023).
• 3
  “The interest that is usually conferred on my books is of a literary sort and this [disconcerting] was doubtless to be expected: One cannot as a matter of fact class them in a pre-defined genre.”, says Bataille (1988c, p.9; OC VII, p.19).
• 4
  On this reorientation in the reading of Bataille, see Stoekl (1997, p.245).
• 5
  For the detailed argument of a twofold character of Bataille’s general economy, see Gomes (2024).
• 6
  For detailed remarks on the sense of a “solar economy”, see Piel (1995 [1963]), Stoekl (2007) and Sørensen (2012).
• 7
  In Bataille’s latter published The Accursed Share, the French neologism consumation takes dépense’s place as the preferred word to describe unproductive activities. They are, apparently, perfect synonyms within his work, as it’s clear in the 1949s preface to the book: “I had to try in vain to make clear the notion of a “general economy” in which the “expenditure” [dépense] (the “consumption” [consumation]) of wealth, rather than production, was the primary object.” (OC VII, p.19). While retaining the idea (and most of the sonority) of consommation, consumation seems to point to the specifically unproductive part of it. It’s a similar but more implicit strategy than Derrida’s later formulated “différance”. The English version did not incorporate that aspect, translating consumation simply as “consumption” (Bataille, 1988c).
• 8
  In comparison to the previous ones, Gallimard’s 1967 edition of The accursed share underwent some key changes: the mention of the work as a trilogy was omitted, completely erasing the title of the volume (La consumation); the subtitle “Essay on political economy” was also omitted; Jean Piel’s introduction was added; and, finally, the essay The notion of expenditure, written sixteen years earlier, was included. This became the “canonical version” of the work, translated into a number of languages (Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Chinese, Greek, etc.) with some exceptions, as the English one.
• 9
  In fact, a great part of the comments on Bataille’s economic inquiry focuses heavily on the first volume of The accursed share (cases of Duvignaud, 1967; Bennington, 1995; Nodoushani, 1999; Stoekl, 1997, 2007; Sørensen, 2012; Sdenzy, 2014; McGoey, 2018; Jantzen, 2018; and Fèvre, 2022), with some exceptions (Zhuo, 2015; Besnier, 1932). Also, much of the discussion around Bataille’s economy is self-referenced in regard to economic theory, meaning that there’s no intention of contrasting him with the actual theory or intellectual background that he intends to criticize or discuss, a tendency confronted by more recent works as those of McGoey (2018) and Fèvre (2022).
• 10
  Besnier’s (1983; 1990) point of departure is, respectively, Bataille’s endeavor since La Critique Sociale in the early 30s, and his relation vis a vis Hegelianism, in the late 30s. Stein (1993) reconstructs the French reception of Nietzsche in order to criticize Habermas’ interpretation of Bataille. Zhuo’s (2015) text, in turn, discusses how expenditure could be grounded in a critique of Freud’s “second” description of desire, as it no longer emphasized its useless character, as Kraft-Ebing and Bataille would prefer.
• 11
  Bataille, Base materialism and Gnosticism (p.49) in Visions of excess [Le bas matérialisme et la gnose (1930), OC I, p.225].
• 12
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 118) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 305].
• 13
  Notion comes from the Latin notio, knowledge.
• 14
  It must be noted that the giving nature of the gift is not its only characteristic. Unlike the myth barter or the dynamic circulation of goods in our societies, exchange in a gift system happens between groups (tribes, families, clans) rather than between individuals and it is not restricted to goods, as non-material items are also exchanged. On it, cf. Mauss (2002 [1925]).
• 15
  Bataille, Extinct America (pp.3-9) in October 36 [L’Amerique disparue (1928), OC I, pp.160-163].
• 16
  Although from this period, l’Amérique disparue was not published in Aréthuse, but was in fact Bataille’s only contribution to the journal Les Cahiers de la République des Lettres, des Sciences et des Arts.
• 17
  Bataille, Extinct America (pp.3-9) in October 36 [L’Amerique disparue (1928), OC I, pp.160-163].
• 18
  The discussion of the Aztecs’ way of life occupies the entire first chapter of the second part of the fisrt book of The accursed share and reaches even the images and discussion present on his last book, Les larmes d’Eros, from 1961.
• 19
  Bataille, The big toe (p. 20) in Visions of excess [Le gros orteil (1929), OC I, p. 200].
• 20
  Bataille, The academic horse (p. 237 -239) in Undercover Surrealism [Le cheval academique (1929), OC I, pp.159-163].
• 21
  The Gauls were a group of Celtic peoples who lived on mainland Europe during the Iron Age and the Roman period. According to Bataille’s text, of the Gauls’ both hostile and commercial relation to Italy and Greece, remained imported coins for economic exchanges, which they themselves initiated to produce from the fourth century BC by copying the classical engravings.
• 22
  Bataille, The academic horse (p. 237 ) in Undercover Surrealism [Le cheval academique (1929), OC I, p.160]. For an iconographic analysis of this currency, see Didi-Huberman (2017) and Filho (2005).
• 23
  Bataille, The academic horse (p. 238) in Undercover Surrealism [Le cheval academique (1929), OC I, p.162].
• 24
  Bataille, Formless (p.31) in Visions of excess [Informe (1929), OC I, p.217].
• 25
  Bataille, Formless (p.31) in Visions of excess [Informe (1929), OC I, p.217].
• 26
  Bataille, “Bas matérialisme” in the original French. On discussions around the concept, see Noys (1998) and Grindon (2010).
• 27
  Bataille, Base materialism and Gnosticism (p.49) in Visions of excess [Le bas matérialisme et la gnose (1930), OC I, p.225].
• 28
  Bataille, Rotten sun (p.57) in Visions of excess [Le soleil pourri (1930), OC I, p. 231].
• 29
  Bataille, The “Lugubrious Game” (p. 24) in Visions of excess [Le « Jeu lugubre » (1929), OC I, p.212]. Moreover, Fèvre (2021) shows how the horse becomes an important figure within Bataille’s economic thought, representing both the historical human restraint of natural expenditure and the possibility of its liberation (in contrast to the inherently souverain figure of the tiger).
• 30
  Bataille, Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh (p.69) in Visions of excess [La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh (1930), OC I, p.267].
• 31
  Bataille, The primitive art (p.36) in The Cradle of Humanity [L’art primitif (1930), OC I, p.248].
• 32
  Bataille, Metamorphosis (p.36) in Encyclopedia Acephalica [Métamorphoses (1929), OC I, p.208].
• 33
  Bataille, X marks the stop [(1930), OC I, p.256]. This text has not yet been translated to English.
• 34
  Bataille, X marks the stop [(1930), OC I, p.256].
• 35
  Bataille, Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh (p.67) in Visions of excess [La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh (1930), OC I, p.264].
• 36
  Bataille (OC II, p. 148).
• 37
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 117) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 303].
• 38
  Historical information is from Popkin (2020). Kendall (2007) is the one to notice the autobiographical outlining of this example.
• 39
  In the Story of the eye, novel published by Bataille under pseudonym in 1928, we can find a kind an example of this relation. The protagonists are young people who indulge themselves without any regards for authority. The paternal figures of the two adolescent protagonists appears as subjugated or indifferent to their sexual activities - which, in any case, can only be define as anti-utilitarian (cf. Bataille, 1987 [1928]; OC I, p.9-78).
• 40
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 119) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 306].
• 41
  “In particular, I'd like to mention recent discoveries about the economy of savage peoples, which run counter to the traditional view of barter as the primitive form of exchange” (Bataille [1932], OC I, p.294). As it’s evident from the later cited letter of Pierre Kaan to Bataille (from the second half of 1932), Bataille already had a circulating draft of The notion of expenditure in this period.
• 42
  Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) was a French philosopher and political activist, involved in central intellectual and political moments for the working class of the first half of 20^th century in France.
• 43
  For the detailed relation of Simone Weil with the Cercle and with Bataille, see Pétrement (1978), Galletti (1999) and Surya (2010).
• 44
  On the reasons for changing its name, see Kendall (2007) and Surya (2010).
• 45
  Surya (2010, p.224).
• 46
  Bataille (OC I, p.662).
• 47
  Kaan (1903 - 1945) was Marxist activist (dissident from the PCF in 1929) essayist and philosophy scholar, member of the French resistance to Nazism during the Second World War.
• 48
  “P.K.” is undoubtedly Pierre Kaan, while “Ch.” is most probably Charles Rosen (aka Charles Ronsac), who used to sign as “Ch. Rosen” or simply “Ch. R.” in La Critique Sociale’s issues. Labelled as a “souvarinian” by Marina Galletti (1999, p.16), Ronsac (1992) describes himself as having the role of “secretary” of the Cercle in his autobiography (p.42), also calling Souvarine a “hero” (p.42) and “one of the men to whom I owe what I am” (p.44).
• 49
  In Pétrement (1976, p.208).
• 50
  In Bataille (1999, p.76).
• 51
  About the other political groups frequented by Bataille, such as L’Ordre nouveau and Masses, see Kendall (2007).
• 52
  Kendall (2007, p.89).
• 53
  It is likely that Bataille became acquainted with Mauss’ work in the second half of the 1920s, through his friends (and Mauss’ students), Alfred Métraux, Michel Leiris and Roger Callois. The controversial relationship that Bataille and these friends had with the anthropologist’s work and with the whole of the Durkheimian school of sociology, of which Mauss was a respected member, is well documented in Marcel (2003; 2001).
• 54
  Piel (1995 [1963], p.101).
• 55
  During the second half of the 1920s until the publication of The notion of expenditure in 1933, Bataille borrowed a number of works by Marx and Engels from the National Library of France, such as those cited (cf. OC XII, p.553-621). They are also often referenced in Bataille’s previous works, in critical intertextuality (cf. OC I). Marx’s influence is also felt in Bataille’s latter economic work, The accursed share (on it, cf. Sdenzy, 2014).
• 56
  Cf. Marx and Engels (2002, [1848]).
• 57
  Lewis Morgan (1818 - 1881) was a north American anthropologist and writer. The anthropological perspective that grounds Engels (2010 [1884]) in the Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (with Marx’s notes) are those of Lewis’ 1877 book Ancient Society: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization.
• 58
  Cf. Mauss (2002 [1925]). For a general discussion of Mauss’ essay and its influence, see Sigaud (2002) and Hann (2006).
• 59
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 122) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 310].
• 60
  Mauss (2002 [1925], p.43-45).
• 61
  Mauss (2002 [1925], p.47).
• 62
  Mauss (2002 [1925], p.43-45).
• 63
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 121) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 309].
• 64
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 125) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 314].
• 65
  Baudrillard (1991[1976], p.136).
• 66
  Bataille (OC II, p.151).
• 67
  Bataille (OC II, p.151).
• 68
  Bataille (OC II, p.151).
• 69
  The following references to Say are made in order to challenge Goux’s (1990) assertion. Unless I'm mistaken, there’s no evidence that Bataille has ever read the economist. For a longer and different reconstruction of the senses of loss and value in Say and Bataille, see Garcia (2014).
• 70
  Bentham (1974 [1823], p.2).
• 71
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 116-117) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 302-304].
• 72
  Bentham (1974 [1823], p.2).
• 73
  Say (1971 [1814], p. 62).
• 74
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 117) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 303].
• 75
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 116) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 302].
• 76
  Say (1971 [1814], p. 392).
• 77
  Say (1971 [1814], p. 397).
• 78
  Highly judicious consumptions are those of subsistence (opposed to the “luxury of ostentation”); those that are “more gradual” (as they inhibit the renovation of costs of production); those made collectively (as they share common costs); and those “consistent with moral rectitude” (Say, 1971 [1814], p. 399).
• 79
  Say continuously disapproved prodigality and unproductiveness when analyzing consumption on the third book of his Treatise on Political Economy. For him, the consumption of rustic villages that prefer to make a one-day party and spend abundantly rather than construct a cistern is a matter of “injudicious consumption” (Say, 1971 [1814], p. 397). The spendthrifts’ activities of Roman time were “immoral” (p.400). The absence of the industrial productive stimulus is something of the “savage state” (p.401). In general, prodigality is “mischievous” to society (p.402); “every animal can do as much” (p.403). The economic discipline itself, in this perspective, could be defined as “nothing more than the direction of human consumption with judgment and discretion” (p.403).
• 80
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 122) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 310].
• 81
  Say (1971 [1814], p. 403)
• 82
  Say (1971 [1814], p. 403)
• 83
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 118) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 305].
• 84
  Mauss (2002 [1925], p.92).
• 85
  Mauss (2002) [1925], p.91).
• 86
  Despite certain affirmable continuities between Mauss’ and Bataille’s works and the different interpretations Bataille made of Mauss throughout the years (Leveratto, 2012), Mauss did not recognize the way Bataille appropriated his work, and it is highly unlikely that he had no contact with this interpretation, as shows Marcel (2003; 2001).
• 87
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 117) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 303].
• 88
  Even sixteen years later, in The accursed share, Bataille (1998a, p.139; OC VII, p.132) does not see in the rising of capitalist consumption a sufficient solution to the problem of expenditure: “The spirit of rigor, tied to the development of the sciences and techniques, is well equipped for this fundamental operation. But the use of the comfort and the myriad services of industrial civilization cannot be limited to a small number of privileged per­ sons […]. The capitalist law leaves it free to develop the material possibilities that it bears within it, but at the same time tolerates privileges that hinder this development”.
• 89
  “Production is the basis of social homogeneity”, says Bataille (1985, p. 138; OC I, p.340) in The psychological structure of fascism in the end of 1933. But labor was also already fairly seen in a critical way previous to this moment, as in the Documents’ text Lieux de pelèrinage: Hollywood of 1929 (OC I, p.198) and in the manuscripts around The notion of expenditure, where he states: “Material universe is a game, not a job. It is a theistic or idealistic world that is represented as a production workshop.” (OC II, p.153). Thus, it’s also no wonder his describing of revolution in the published essay as “the loss of those who have worked to lose ‘human nature’” (1985, p. 128; OC I, p.318).
• 90
  Bataille (OC II, p.148).
• 91
  Bataille (OC II, p.148).
• 92
  Bataille, The notion of expenditure (p. 129) in Visions of excess [La notion de dépense (1933), OC I, p. 320]. Also, for this argument in the manuscripts, cf. Bataille (OC II, p.150-152)

• Responsible editor
  Alexandre Mendes Cunha (Editor-in-Chief).
  Center for Regional Development and Planning, Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brazil. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9949-0112.

Data availability

The dataset supporting the results of this study is available at: https://doi.org/10.25824/redu/ZOEOAQ

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  14 Nov 2025
• Date of issue
  2025

History

• Received
  15 May 2024
• Accepted
  12 Feb 2025