Bataille, McGowan, Sacrifice, & Enjoyment.

I’m diving into Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, after reading about Bataille’s ideas in Todd McGowan’s Capitalism and Desire.

In Capitalism & Desire:

McGowan states

Despite its conceptual beauty, Ricardo’s vision of a closed loop between capitalism and desire must be rejected for its failure to account for the origin of desire. The test of capitalism as an economic system is not that it meets all the needs that appear within it, since this is one it can’t fail. The test is rather whether or not capitalism can permit the avowal of the satisfaction that it produces. This is a test that capitalism does in fact fail. Capitalism relies on the violent sacrifice of workers, consumers, and even capitalists themselves, and it uses this sacrifice to produce satisfied subjects. But this sacrifice can play no part in capitalism’s ideological self-understanding. In response to this failure to make sacrifice explicit, reactionary alternatives to capitalism have proliferated. These alternatives seek a system in which they can rediscover the sacrifice that capitalism appears to deny to us. The first thinker to focus the critique of capitalism on its failure with regard to sacrifice was Georges Bataille, an anticapitalist apostle of sacrifice.(pp. 109-110).

Reading this I was interested in reading some Bataille, and looking at McGowan’s footnotes and references revealed that The Accursed Share would be a good place to start. I got my hands on a pdf of the first three chapters of that book and stared reading. Thus far I’m finding Bataille’s writing to be very enjoyable indeed!

In Bataille’s own words:

For some years, being obliged on occasion to answer the question “What are you working on?” I was embarrassed to have to say, “A book of political economy.” … I had to explain myself, and what I was able to say in a few words was neither precise nor intelligible.

That is a solid opening! And then he knocks it out of the pack when he follow that up with:

Indeed, I had to add that the book I was writing (which I am now publishing) did not consider the facts the way qualified economists do, that I had a point of view from which a human sacrifice, the construction of a church or the gift of a jewel were no less interesting than the sale of wheat. In short, I had to try in vain to make clear the notion of a “general economy” in which the “expenditure” (the “consumption”) of wealth, rather than production, was the primary object.

What’s interesting bout this?

I’ve added the bold letting at the end of the text above. What Bataille is getting it is that people enjoy/value something only in so far as they have to make a sacrifice to get whatever it is. He is also suggesting that we enjoy the act of sacrificing, which puts a question in my mind: Do we enjoy things so that we can sacrifice rather than sacrifice so we an enjoy?

Back to McGowan for a moment.

The McGowan text also gets into this.

Bataille was also the first thinker to identify sacrifice with enjoyment. His critique of capitalism focuses on its turn away from sacrifice and thus from the possibility for a true satisfaction. In his riposte to the assumptions of political economists like Smith and Ricardo, Bataille locates satisfaction not in accumulation of goods but in their sacrifice. Since sacrifice functions as our basic mode of satisfying ourselves, capitalism represents an ontological retreat and an abandonment of our mode of enjoyment. Bataille notes, “The practice of sacrifice has today fallen into disuse and yet it has been, due to its universality, a human action more significant than any other. Independently of each other, different peoples invented different forms of sacrifice, with the goal of answering a need as inevitable as hunger. It is therefore not astonishing that the necessity of satisfying such a need, under the conditions of present-day life, leads an isolated man into disconnected and even stupid behavior.”(p. 110)¹

This is revolutionary!