The Scientific Imperative: Improductive Expenditure and Energeticism

Few who know the writer Georges Bataille have neglected to signal the importance of improductive expenditure in his writing. In his erotic novels, rare poetry, political critique, and aesthetic and philosophical essays, the fact of transgression also stands out. Those who know Bataille very well have elucidated the sources of his notion of expenditure (or aspects of it) in the work done in the French College of Sociology by Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss, in Hegel’s logic, in psychoanalytical interpretation by Sigmund Freud, in political philosophy by Marx and Engels, as well as in a branch of German sociology that became known as the School of Frankfurt (Horkheimer, Adorno, Benjamin). ¹ Some have even been inspired by Bataille’s work to develop key theories of their own to describe the dynamics of modern capitalist society. The overall political significance of Bataille’s collective activities in parasurrealist groups has yet, however, to be affirmed. ² Usually a subject of literary criticism, Bataille’s use of dark humor, witty irony, and playful reversal of values has sometimes obfuscated the very serious core of his writings.

As more and more of Bataille’s important works are translated into English, ³ the key notion of improductive expenditure can be reconsidered in terms of how it exemplifies a stunning phenomenon in the history of writing: namely, how a thinking man, steeped in theoretical social sciences and experimental politics, involved in dissident parasurrealist expressions of art, pushed to the brink, creates a concept that—without surrealist fiction or parody—reconnects social phenomena to the natural sciences.

I. Beyond the Social Sciences: The Second Class Revolts

In his groundbreaking article “La notion de dépense” (in La Critique Sociale 7 [1933]), Bataille transformed Marx’s theory of surplus value (by emphasizing and adding to the second category of consumption, individual consumption), Freud’s pleasure principle (by enlarging the scope of the second kind of libido, the death urge), and Mauss’s theory of the gift (by expanding the implications of a secondary type of gift-giving called “potlach”). These reevaluated notions were a springboard, the means by which Bataille was able to question the primacy of production (profit in capitalism), the labeling of destructive desires as perverse (the Oedipalization of revolt), and the pecuniary obligations of humankind as values. In all of these examples, he was able to transcend dialectics by considering the second term (life-death; obligation-potlach; production-consumption, etc.) as a powerful force overwhelming dialectical constructs created by limited human minds.

During the 1920s and early 1930s, while Bataille was developing the notion of improductive expenditure, he was also educating himself in philosophy. His association with the philosopher Léon Chestov, followed his introduction to the works of Nietzsche, which he had begun to read as early as 1922, on his own, at the Bibliothèque Nationale. ⁴ The Nietzschean concept of nature informs the notion of improductive expenditure more than any other: “The artist and the philosopher are evidence against the purposiveness of nature as regards the means it employs. . . . Nature is a bad economist: its expenditure is much larger than the income it procures; all its wealth notwithstanding, it is bound sooner or later to ruin itself.” ⁵

By the time Bataille was exposed to Hegel’s philosophy through various critics of the German philosopher who were writing or being translated in France, he was already immunized by Nietzsche’s critique of “the Hegelians and their deformed offspring”; although he did “slip back into the Hegelian mud” ⁶ from time to time, it was only to better know the enemy he confronted, and ultimately to “know himself as radically non-Hegelian.” ⁷ Interestingly enough, most of the critics in France concentrated on the young Hegel: the mystic roots of dialectical thought, and the importance of the negation of negativity as (self-)consciousness, the dynamic impetus for social change. ⁸ Bataille challenged the idea of dialectical resolution— that the negative, that which is negated in the dialectical process, is at once superseded (suspended) and preserved (Aufhebung)—and he eventually found examples of negativity...