Why do children run around? Do they do it to lose weight or to build muscle? They do it for fun, chasing other kids, laughing while doing the chasing, shrieking from the thrill when being chased. At work, do you make all those powerpoint presentations and spreadsheets because they are so fun to make, full of colour and nice big headlines, looking so pretty? Do you go to all those business meetings to see old friends and have a friendly banter, full of good cheer? Or is your answer more banal, like ‘it’s my job, that’s what they pay me to do.’
Bataille contrasts two economic behaviours, accumulation and consumption. He believes that in the capitalist economic paradigm that most of us live in, the key impulse for the work that we do is not to enjoy ourselves with our earnings. Instead, we sock it away, keeping it aside so that it becomes more and more. Some of us may use the accumulated money to try to make more money, such as investing it in another property, in stocks or some other forms of investment. Businesses use their accumulated profits to expand, building another factory, starting their operations in another country and so on. When does it all stop? When do we actually just finally enjoy the money we have worked so hard for? When do we consume?
Wait a minute, Georges Bataille. We do consume. We firstly buy food and cook it to eat and we buy or rent a home to live in, so we have a roof over our heads. So the first use of our money is to keep ourselves alive. We use it for necessities like nutrition, personal security and rest, and hygiene such as toothpaste to clean our teeth so they don’t all fall out. Bataille may concede that such expenditure fall into the realm of necessity and hence we need to do them. His concern however is more about what we do with the excess, with the extra over and above what we minimally need to keep body and soul together.
What do people do with their excess? Some may go on holidays maybe a couple of times a year. We go to the cinema or the theatre, we go to a concert, we play sports. Some people do these things, so that they are refreshed and then are able to go to work again rejuvenated, and work more and more effectively. Is that so wrong? This mode of doing things has become quite the norm, the kind of thinking that we have weekends or off days to recharge so that we can then do the most important thing in our lives, which is work, our jobs. But when did work and jobs become the most important things in our lives, even more than our family, friends and loved ones?
Another sign that work has taken front and centre position in our lives is how it seems that the whole point of education is to prepare us for the workplace. You go to college to pick up so-called useful knowledge and skills in a specific field, so that you can then put them into practice when you graduate and go to work in that field. Do you hear people talking about how we should learn things because it is a pleasure to know more, that it makes us better people and so we can live a life where we can take pleasure in intellectual pursuits which we otherwise might not be able to enjoy as fully? Do we learn the piano so that we can then get certificates for each level of proficiency and prepare ourselves, as a backup plan, to become piano teachers and have a lifeline there? Or do we learn music so that we can better appreciate this exquisite form of art and enjoy it more deeply, to expose ourselves to a wider repertoire of types of music such as classical or jazz so that we can better appreciate beauty in this world? Do we go on a holiday so we can have new experiences, encounter different cultures and meet new people or do we just want to capture some instagrammable moments for so-called followers that really just view them with bitterness and perhaps malice?
So Bataille thinks, even our consumption, which he advocates, is still in the mode of accumulation. We need to reclaim our sovereignty. What is sovereignty to Bataille? My interpretation of what he has written is that sovereignty is to be masters of ourselves. Instead of being enslaved to another, for e.g. the way a slave is not sovereign because he has a master telling him what to do, we become the master, but not to enslave others but to be in charge of ourselves. While today, slavery in the form of being owned by another human being might not be common, we are still enslaved in other ways. For e.g. we may be enslaved to our jobs since we need the salaries to pay for our debts which we took to pay for our houses or cars or even our families, where we need the money to send our kids to school or in case they fall sick etc.
Sovereignty is, for Bataille, to be in the moment, to do things not for a future benefit but for its own sake, now. For instance, we work to earn that salary that we receive at the end of the month or for some, at the end of the day or when the job is completed. We do the work for a future benefit. If not for that future benefit, would you still do the work? That is, is the work worth doing for its own sake? In some cases, it is. For instance, parents take care of their kids out of love for them. Even if the kid passes away tomorrow, they wouldn’t just abandon the kid. They do those things for their kids for the kid’s sake and for their own sake, because of their love for their children. Of course parents also take care of their kids in the hope that their children will grow up to be good people, who would then in turn return the love that was given to them earlier.
In that way, our desires and aims are not just easily separable into acts done for the moment only and then acts for the future only. They flow into each other. Doing things for the prospect of a better future itself gives a sense of enjoyment, a sense of purpose and even a sense of self-mastery over one’s own destiny. While Bataille does not talk about this in TAS, he might not in principle disagree with this sort of preparing for the future. What he disagrees with is when we lose ourselves completely in pursuit of some kind of material objective, when we do work in the moment that we do not care about or are even repulsed by, for the sake of a future prospect.
Not to pick on any specific occupation but simply to make his meaning clearer, I want to illustrate it with my own example. For instance, say your job is to deliver food. You go to a restaurant, pick up the order a customer had made and then bring it to their place, rain or shine, day or night. You ring their bell, they take it from you, end of task. At the end of the day, the platform where these orders are processed pays you for each delivery you made. Now, imagine you are not going to be paid at all for the work. Would you continue doing it? For most of the delivery workers, clearly not. Their main purpose is the money. Being in the moment while doing the work is probably not an aim for them. The pain of the work can be alleviated by for instance sitting down while waiting for the order to be ready or exchanging a greeting with fellow deliverers or giving and receiving a smile when handing the order over to the customer. In that way, a deliveryman can make the work more ‘in the moment.’ But the actual work itself remains toil for the sake of the pay.
However, imagine you enjoy cycling a lot and was already cycling all over the place throughout the day. So bringing orders from restaurant to customer is just an additional step to what you would already be doing for the sheer joy of cycling. That changes the equation. Or better still. Imagine that you find meaning in making the delivery. For instance, there are volunteers who collect bread which would otherwise be thrown away by bakeries and supermarkets at the end of the business day, to bring them to the needy. No one is paying them anything. In fact, they are using their own time and have to provide their own transport which cost money, to deliver the bread to their needy clients. They spend time and money doing it, yet they do it because they find meaning in it. They didn’t have to be paid to do the delivery. In fact, if they were paid, it would demean the meaning of the service they are providing. They do it for the sake of helping those in need. In that way they are sovereign, because they find meaning in the activity itself and are in that way “in the moment.”
Not to knock food delivery workers or for that matter any worker whose aim is their salary. Bataille’s focus is not on the portion of work we have to do to meet our basic needs. His focus is on the excess. Once you have met your basic needs, what should you do with the excess? ‘Eat to work and work to eat’ is certainly a mode of living but Bataille would detest that approach to life. He also would hate its variants such as having holidays and rest just so as to recharge for work, since that puts work as the raison d’etre of life.
He thinks that the functional reason to do things, such as, working to earn enough to live, makes us into things, into objects. Even though he advocates consumption, when we consume not for its own sake, for the sake of the sheer exuberance of consuming but towards another purpose, then we are not sovereign over the object of our consumption but it is sovereign over us. It is almost as if we are serving the object rather than the object is serving us. He thinks of it as productive and non-productive consumption in volume 1, where for instance for productive consumption, we buy a bicycle so that we can then use it to earn money doing food delivery. For non-productive consumption, we buy that same bicycle but simply to cycle around for the sheer pleasure it gives us. He likes non-productive consumption but dislikes productive consumption since he thinks that we are somehow subordinating ourselves when we do things for the sake of something useful.
This idea of his is interesting, counter to what we are accustomed to in our way of thinking and doing things, though once you get it, you will probably find that his idea is almost common sense. Perhaps the idea is clearest when we consider how by being productive, in doing things for some kind of productive purpose like earning money and making profits, we subordinate ourselves. Instead of doing something for the sake of enjoying the current moment, we instead toil for money that we will use for something in the future. So we are not enjoying the current moment, we are not being in the moment, but instead are delaying our gratification for the future. You might be thinking, what’s wrong with that? Indeed, that is precisely what is so puzzling and interesting about Bataille’s views. We seem to be serving this master called money in trying to have more and more of it instead of being the master of our money, in deciding how to use this money to serve ourselves.
Remember, Bataille is talking about excess, the excess money we make and have and not what is needed for our life’s necessities. When we already can meet our needs, why would we try to make even more money instead of enjoying the excess? And yet we do. I can imagine Bataille asking us, so when is it going to be enough such that you can finally enjoy yourself and be your own sovereign being? I do think that he makes a valid point. Sure, to spend all our excess in an exuberant way might seem to be almost careless should things go badly one day. Saving for a rainy day might be a good idea, and that savings itself can give us a feeling of security which itself is a source of comfort. But I think Bataille also has a point to ask, when are we finally going to live.
Often, he seems to be going overboard, in talking about giving money away, even destroying useful things just for the hell of it, using his conception of potlatch where tribal people in earlier times supposedly threw big feasts and foisted gifts onto everyone in a demonstration of God’s favour on them, and in that way achieving glory and honour. This type of extravagance might seem gauche, almost in bad taste for those having more modest lifestyles. I think however, he is simply trying to make a point. What I take away is that we must not lose the plot, the plot of our lives. For instance, we work so that we can be able to live well. Once work instead take over our lives, where we lose our peace of mind over it, where our desire to climb the corporate ladder makes us act in dishonourable ways, where we devote all our time to it at the expense of time spent with our loved ones or to have no loved ones and friends left because we have just sacrificed all of that to our work, perhaps that is too much.
So far, I have been talking more on volume 3, Sovereignty, instead of following the order of his book. That is because I want to use his ideas in volume 2, The History of Eroticism, to underscore his point on sovereignty. Those new to Bataille might find volume 2 strange, as Bataille seems to be almost advocating for perversions and transgressions so as to be sovereign. In volume 2, he talks about incest, orgies, faeces and death among other taboo topics. But once again, he has a point to make and he leads us on an interesting journey using these topics to lead us. Looking at the history of humanity, he thinks that the reason why we are disgusted with all those things is because we want to distance ourselves from our animality. Lest we forget, human beings are animals too. However, we distinguish ourselves from animals by putting in place prohibitions that negatively help define our humanity. According to Bataille, animals are not afraid of dead bodies, their faeces or have qualms about having sex whenever they feel like it. Quite a few species are known to commit incest. It is all rather natural to them.
Specifically on incest, Bataille develops an argument that the reason why mankind prohibited it is for economic reasons. Archaic societies wanted to give gifts to each other to build relationships outside their families and to develop their society presumably. Since the men then had dominion over the women in their families and treated them as property, instead of just keeping their property within their family, they exchanged their women on the understanding that other families would reciprocate so that relationships can be built across families. Hence incest was outlawed and made taboo. He makes it clear that while we may think this prohibition on incest is because it is wrong by nature, it in fact has nothing to do with nature or natural law since as already pointed out, animals do it. Moreover, different societies have different incest laws where for instance, some societies considered incestuous marital relations between paternal first cousins while some between maternal first cousins. If indeed the prohibition came from nature, then all societies should have converged on the same incest laws.
With such a great need for human beings to distinguish themselves from animals, other behaviours which are natural in the animal kingdom were likewise frowned upon. Bataille suggests that people need to transgress societal norms and perhaps even laws to regain their sovereignty. Just to be clear, I do not advocate breaking the law. Nonetheless, as bizarre and even repulsive as Bataille’s suggestion may seem, if we give a generous reading to The Accursed Share, perhaps Bataille might agree that unfair norms such as the pressure to conform to societal expectations against one’s wishes can be the ones transgressed against, so that individuals can regain their sovereignty and actualise their true selves to live exuberantly. What are some of these societal norms that oppress us and prevent us from being the best versions of ourselves? You, my dear listeners, come from across the globe and so I have to leave it up to you to consider which norms in your society are oppressive and unfair.
Ultimately, Bataille declares rather mysteriously that “sovereignty is NOTHING” at the end of volume 3 which is also the end of the entire The Accursed Share. I understand this in a few ways. Sovereignty is not a thing, as in, it is not an object, something concrete and the same for everyone. We possess our own subjectivity and can be sovereign in our own way – there is not one pre-defined universal way of being sovereign. Another sense of looking at how sovereignty is nothing is that it is a state of mind, of being free to be ourselves. If we can choose to be happy, to find meaning in our work beyond the salary, to be in the moment in whatever we are doing, then we are sovereign.
So it isn’t that we all need to quit our jobs and be impoverished but instead to find work that allows us to express our creativity and that we can be in the moment in while doing that work. He talks in volume 3 about artists making art as an expression of their sovereignty, he talks about Nietzsche and the Ubermensch, where he surpasses the limitations and boundaries set by society to become a supreme and sovereign being. He talks about how communism is not that different from capitalism in suppressing our sovereignty, or of allowing the leaders of communist societies to be sovereign on condition that they denied their sovereignty, and its similar politics of accumulation instead of exuberant consumption.
My takeaway is that Bataille has told us in a rather complex way what may seem obvious to some of us, though it might be necessary that he does so since it doesn’t seem to be that obvious, looking at the way people conduct their lives. We need to live in a sovereign manner, where we live in the moment, not denying the present for an unknown future. We should not let the as-yet-unfulfilled and perhaps never-to-be-fulfilled promise of a better future rob us of our present happiness. We should not just do things for the sake of profit but do them for their own sake. That is, it is not a trade-off between profit or meaning but it can be both. If, however, it can only be one, then let it be meaning. Play the piano, run, love, study, all for their own sake, for the pleasure they bring and not for some kind of profit motive which may rob these activities of the joy they bring. Do the work we find meaningful and not sell our time doing work we find meaningless and perhaps even downright harmful. All that to me, is the challenge that Bataille’s The Accursed Share has confronted us with.
For this video, I decided to just write down my first impressions, my immediate takeaway, after I finished reading both volumes 2 and 3. I had read volume 1: Consumption multiple times for my Bachelor thesis in philosophy and had made a video of a practice run for my thesis presentation, the link of which you can find in the description. Volume 2 and 3 is an expansion on his ideas on general economy but directed towards how we should reclaim our lives to be our own sovereign beings. My usual way of approaching philosophical texts for my essays is to have a kind of ‘casual’ but attentive read the first time round and then to read it again, at least for selected chapters, this time taking notes, before writing a synopsis and incorporating my thoughts into a coherent essay. This time round, I thought that in keeping with the spirit of the book, to be in the moment and to be sovereign in my own thoughts concerning the book and not be ruled by my usual way of working on the text.
I wanted to see what remained with me, what I think is the immediate key takeaway that I had derived from it. The Accursed Share is not a particularly difficult read. Bataille is a joy to read compared with some other thinkers like Hegel. While not everything is super easy to understand, Bataille does try to explain himself clearly with examples and metaphors which can in themselves be thought provoking and often rather entertaining. So please consider this a performative response to Bataille’s The Accursed Share volumes 2 and 3, and perhaps I will in future make another video where I do a deeper and closer reading of the text.
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