The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty [Paperback]

Georges Bataille (Author), Robert Hurley (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0942299213 | ISBN-13: 978-0942299212 | Publication Date: October 4, 1993

The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction, based on the versions published in Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation of The Accursed Share.In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility, respectively from an anthropological and an ethical perspective. He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to.useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a philosopher and novelist sui generis, died in 1962.

Editorial Reviews

Review

" The Accursed Share is a brilliant Product of [Bataille"s] loony-toons coupling of critical genres: pseudo/antisurrealist manifestos, leftist political treatises, erotics, Hegel "n" Nietzsche studies, mysticism, anthropology, and sun worship.... This strange and impressive book should not be ignored." Erik Davis , Voice Literary Supplement (review of volume I)

About the Author

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French writer, essayist, and philosopher whose works include The Story of the Eye, The Blue of Noon, The Accursed Share, and Theory of Religion.

Product Details

• Paperback: 404 pages
• Publisher: Zone (October 4, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942299213
• ISBN-13: 978-0942299212
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #136,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. Bataille died in 1962.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sovereignty and Being, April 24, 2008

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P. Cockeram (Harrisburg, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty (Paperback)

Bataille's 3-volume masterwork is the triumph of his life's work in the philosophy of expenditure. For beginners seeking a comprehensive introduction to this most important of 20th century philosophers (a title Foucault bestowed upon Bataille), I recommend reading "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" first, then the three volumes of "The Accursed Share," and finally "The Tears of Eros."

To what has already been written here about "The Accursed Share," I would add a few words about the book's content. Bataille proposes that the sovereign state--that condition of ultimate value, in which we are removed from the world that tallies our value in terms of the work we perform, in which we exist for our own sake--is the secret goal of all humanity. However, this sovereignty is not so much a development of humanity as a return to our lost animal state, a return along the trajectory of self-consciousness that resulted from becoming human. Bataille defines the human as an eternal dialectic between this lost animality and the human world of work and reason.

His masterwork develops ideas that will benefit the fields of study including economics, morality, humanities, politics, aesthetics, Nietzschean philosophy, theology, and ontology, for Bataille elucidates some of the principles that link all these fields together--principles that many of these fields have loathed to discuss for themselves.

5.0 out of 5 stars exploring inner complexity, March 10, 2010

By 

Bruce P. Barten (Saint Paul, MN United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty (Paperback)

I am interested now in a few pages near the end of the book associating destitution with art. Georges Bataille is quite familiar with forms of social analysis making a distinction between accumulation and consumption that directs the worker against growing accumulation as a way to increase current wages. The complexity at this point about the subjectivity of the "man of sovereign art" as a subjectivity lowering himself: "This loss of social standing is not opposed to inner knowledge of the human possibilities that classing alone opened up, but it involves itself in the negation of those possibilities insofar as they attain the cohesion that bestows rank." (p. 423). I see a major opening up between institutional thinking that hopes individuals acquire a regimentation for uniform thinking appropriate to their level within an organization, and those people possessing supernatural powers of an artistic nature that astound a world in which shooting for $14 trillion has become a fallback for coming up with the trillions of dollars that it takes to govern you people each year. The age in which actual solutions for our present problems locating the pillar of fire and cloud of smoke leading us to a promised land is rapidly turning into a time that does not exist, and what are we leaving ourselves with if not destitution?