Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille ; French: ; 10 September 1897 – 9 July 1962 was the French philosopher & intellectual working in philosophy, literature, sociology, anthropology, and history of art. His writing, which covered essays, novels, and poetry, explored such(a) subjects as erotism, mysticism, surrealism, and transgression. His cause would prove influential on subsequent schools of philosophy and social theory, including poststructuralism.
Bataille developed base materialism during the gradual 1920s and early 1930s as an attempt to break with mainstream materialism, which he viewed as a subtle defecate of idealism. He argues for the concept of an active base matter that disrupts the opposition of high and low and destabilises all foundations. Inspired by Gnostic ideas, this impression of materialism defies strict definition and rationalisation. Base materialism was a major influence on Derrida's deconstruction, and both thinkers attempt to destabilise philosophical oppositions by means of an unstable "third term." Bataille's opinion of materialism may also be seen as anticipating Louis Althusser's conception of aleatory materialism or "materialism of the encounter," which draws on similar atomist metaphors to sketch a world in which causality and actuality are abandoned in favor of limitless possibilities of action.
La element maudite is a book or done as a reaction to a question by Bataille between 1946 and 1949, when it was published by Les Éditions de Minuit. It was translated into English and published in 1991, with the designation The Accursed Share. It introduced a new economic theory, which Bataille calls "general economy," as distinct from the "restricted" economic perspective of near economic theory. Thus, in the theoretical introduction, Bataille writes the following:
I will simply state, without waiting further, that the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. if a element of wealth subjected to a rough estimate is doomed to waste or at least to unproductive ownership without all possible profit, this is the logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the opportunity of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial developing of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire… It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannotwithout consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who reconstruct a tire.
Thus, according to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which is destined to one of two modes of economic and social expenditure. This must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is for obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring in war. Though the distinction is less obvious in Hurley's English translation, Bataille introduces the neologism "consummation" akin to a fire's burning tothis excess expenditure as distinct from "consommation" the non-excess expenditure more familiarly treated in theories of "restricted" economy.
The notion of "excess" power to direct or determining is central to Bataille's thinking. Bataille's inquiry takes the superabundance of energy, beginning from the infinite outpouring of solar energy or the surpluses offered by life's basic chemical reactions, as the norm for organisms. In other words, an organism in Bataille's general economy, unlike the rational actors of classical economy who are motivated by scarcity, commonly has an "excess" of energy available to it. This additional energy can be used productively for the organism's growth or it can be lavishly expended. Bataille insists that an organism's growth or expansion always runs up against limits and becomes impossible. The wasting of this energy is "luxury." The form and role luxury assumes in a society, are characteristic of that society. "The accursed share" refers to this excess, destined for waste.
Crucial to the formulation of the theory was Bataille's reflection upon the phenomenon of potlatch. It is influenced by Marcel Mauss's The Gift, as living as by Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals.