Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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?