For Work / Against Work
Debates on the centrality of work

References for Theme: Bataille Citations

  • Bataille, Georges
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.106) Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations, just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat. The inability to consider in this latter case decay as an end in itself is the result not precisely of the human viewpoint but of the  specifically intellectual view­point (to the extent that this viewpoint is in practice subordinate to a process of appropriation). The human viewpoint,  independent of official declarations,  in other words as it results from,  among other things, the analysis of dreams,  on the contrary represents appropriation as a means...
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.125) Class Struggle: In trying to  maintain sterility in  regard to  expenditure,  in conformity with a reasoning that balances accounts, bourgeois society has  only managed to develop a  universal meanness. Human life  only rediscovers agitation on the scale of irreducible needs through the  efforts of those who push the  conse­quences of current rationalist conceptions as far as they will go.  What remains of the traditional modes of expenditure has become atrophied, and living sump­tuary tumult has been lost in the unprecedented explosion of class struggle. The components of class struggle are  seen in the  process of expenditure, dating back to the...
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.138) It  is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois  class that the  tendential reduction of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity:  a  reflection of the homogeneous things the individual  owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit.  But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible.  It maintains a double relation to  homo­geneous activity:  the  latter excludes it-not from work but  from profit.  As agents of production, the workers fall within the framework of the social organi­zation,...
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.217) It  is exactly in the middle segment of the so-called capitalist or bourgeois  class that the  tendential reduction of human character takes place, making it an abstract and interchangeable entity:  a  reflection of the homogeneous things the individual  owns. This reduction is then extended as much as possible to the so-called middle classes that variously benefit from realized profit.  But the industrial proletariat remains for the most part irreducible.  It maintains a double relation to  homo­geneous activity:  the  latter excludes it-not from work but  from profit.  As agents of production, the workers fall within the framework of the social organi­zation,...
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.228) Simple and strong life, which has not yet been destroyed by functional servility, is  possible only to the extent that it has  ceased to  subordinate itself to  some particular project,  such as  acting,  depicting,  or measuring;  it depends on the image of destiny , on the seductive and dangerous myth with which it feels itself to be in silent solidarity.  A  human being is dissociated when he devotes himself to a  useful labor, which has no sense by itself; he can only find the plenitude of total life when seduced.
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.8) This eruptive force accumulates in those who are necessarily situated below. Communist workers appear to the bourgeois to be as ugly and dirty as hairy sexual organs, or lower parts; sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption in the course of which the asexual noble heads of the bourgeois will be chopped off.
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
      (p.99) Excretion is not simply a middle term between two appropriations, just as decay is not simply a middle term between the grain and the ear of wheat. The inability to consider in this latter case decay as an end in itself is the result not precisely of the human viewpoint but of the  specifically intellectual view­point (to the extent that this viewpoint is in practice subordinate to a process of appropriation). The human viewpoint,  independent of official declarations,  in other words as it results from,  among other things, the analysis of dreams,  on the contrary represents appropriation as a means...
    • Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (1985)
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.109) The life of most of the monks is hard (problems would result if there were an advantage in doing nothing).
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.119) […] a society can also be led to consume all its products. Hence it must somehow destroy the surplus resources it has at its dis­posal. Idleness is the simplest means for this purpose. The man of leisure destroys the products necessary for his subsistence no less fully than does fire. But the worker who labors at the con­struction of a  pyramid destroys those products just as uselessly: From the standpoint of profit the pyramid is a monumental mis­take; one might just as well dig an enormous hole, then refill it and pack the ground. We obtain the same result if...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.120) Religion is the satisfaction that a  soci­ety gives to the use of excess resources, or rather to their destruc­tion (at least insofar as they are useful). This is what gives religions their rich material aspect, which only ceases to be conspicuous when an emaciated spiritual life withdraws from labor a time that could have been employed in producing. The only point is the absence of utility, the gratuitousness of these collective determinations. 
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.124) Religion is the satisfaction that a  soci­ety gives to the use of excess resources, or rather to their destruc­tion (at least insofar as they are useful). This is what gives religions their rich material aspect, which only ceases to be conspicuous when an emaciated spiritual life withdraws from labor a time that could have been employed in producing. The only point is the absence of utility, the gratuitousness of these collective determinations. 
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.139) The Remnants of Feudalism and Religion:The necessity of first eliminating the values of the past must be made clear, however. In the economic system of the Middle Ages wealth was unevenly distributed between those who manifested the accepted values, in the name of which wealth was wasted, and those who furnished the wasted labor.14 The work of the fields or the towns thus had a servile quality with respect to the values manifested, but so did the worker with respect to the clerics and nobles. These latter claimed not to be things, but the quality of thinghood, verbal protests notwithstanding,...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.141) Communism and Man's Adequation to the Utility of Things:  A radical position, to which the working-class world has given its political consequences, emerges from the above. In a sense it is a  strange position. It is  first of all a  radical affirmation of real material forces, and a no less radical negation of spiritual values. The communists always give precedence to things, as against that which dares not have their subordinate character. This attitude is  based solidly on the tastes of the proletarians, who commonly lack a sense of spiritual values, who of their own accord reduce man's interest to interest pure...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.153) What is the deeper significance of the strikes, the struggles of wage earners for increased wages and the reduction of labor time? The success of workers' claims augments the cost of pro­duction and reduces not only the share reserved for the luxury of the bosses, but that reserved for accumulation. One hour of labor less and an increase in the cost of hourly labor, which the growth of resources has made possible, show up in the distribu­tion of wealth: If the worker had worked more and earned less, a larger quantity of capitalist profit could have been used for the development...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.167) In a fundamental way, the current system of the USSR, being geared to producing the means of production, runs counter to the workers' movements of other countries, the effect of which tends to reduce the production of capital equipment, increasing that of objects of consumption. But, at least on the whole, these workers' movements are responding to the economic necessity that conditions them just as the Soviet apparatus is responding to its own. The world economic situation is in fact dominated by the development of American industry, that is, by an abundance of the means of production and of the...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.35) Man's activity is basically conditioned by this general movement of life. In a sense, in extension, his activity opens up a  new possi­bility to life, a new space (as did tree branches and bird wings in nature). The space that labor and technical know-how open to the increased reproduction of men is not, in the proper sense, one that life has not yet populated. But human activity transform­ing the world augments the mass of living matter with supple­mentary apparatuses, composed of an immense quantity of inert matter, .which considerably increases the resources of available energy. From the first, man has the...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.36) In actual fact the quantitative relations of population and tool­making -and, in general, the conditions of economic develop­ment in history -are subject to so many interferences that it is always difficult to determine their exact distribution. 
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.37) Thus, man is only a  roundabout, subsidiary response to the problem of growth. Doubtless, through labor and technique, he has made possible an extension of growth beyond the given lim­its. But just as the herbivore relative to the plant, and the carni­vore relative to the herbivore, is a luxury, man is the most suited of all living beings to consume intensely, sumptuously, the excess energy offered up by the pressure of life to conflagrations befit­ting the solar origins of its movement. 
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.46) The serious humanity of growth becomes civilized, more gen­tle, but it tends to confuse gentleness with the value of life, and life's tranquil duration with its poetic dynamism. Under these con­ditions the clear knowledge it generally has of things cannot become a full self-knowledge. It is misled by what it takes for full humanity, that is, humanity at work, living in order to work without out ever fully enjoying the fruits of its labor. Of course, the man who is relatively idle or at least unconcerned about his achieve­ments -the type discussed in both ethnography and history ­is not a...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.56) Destruction is the best means of negating a utilitarian rela­tion between man and the animal or plant. But it rarely goes to the point of holocaust. It is enough that the consumption of the offerings, or the communion, has a meaning that is not reducible to the shared ingestion of food. The victim of the sacrifice can­not be consumed in the same way as a motor uses fuel. What the ritual has the virtue of rediscovering is the intimate participation of the sacrificer and the victim, to which a  servile use had Pitt an end. The slave bound to labor...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.57) Slavery is abolished, but we ourselves are aware of the aspects of social life in which man is relegated to the level of things, and we should know that this relegation did not await slavery. From the start, the introduction of labor into the world replaced intimacy, the depth of desire and its free out­breaks, with rational progression, where what matters is no longer the truth of the present moment, but, rather, the subsequent results of operations. The first labor established the world of things, to which the profane world of the Ancients generally corresponds. Once the world of things...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
      (p.76) The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes  his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of the rich. Beyond a mili­tary exploitation, a  religious mystification and a  capitalist mis­appropriation, henceforth no one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is in the splen­dor of rags...
    • The Accursed Share (1988)
    • Theory of Religion (1989)
      (p.101) Here is my table, my chair, my bed. They are here as a result of labor. In order to make them and install them in my room it was necessary to forgo the interest of the moment. As a matter of fact I myself had to work to pay for them. that is, in theory, I had to compensate for the labor of the workers who made them or transported them, with a piece of labor just as useful as theirs. These products of labor allow. me to work and I will be able to pay for the work of the butcher, the baker, and the , farmer who will ensure my surivival and the continuation of my work. 
    • Theory of Religion (1989)
      (p.41) The Worker and the TooI:Generally speaking, the world of things is perceived as a fallen world. It entails the alienation of the one who created it. This is the basic principle: to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered oneself. The tool changes nature and man at the same time: it subjugates nature to man, who makes and uses it, but it ties man to subjugated nature. Nature becomes man's property but it ceases to be immanent to him. It is his on condition that it is closed to him. If he places the...
    • Theory of Religion (1989)
      (p.49) This is the meaning of "sacrificing to the deity," whose sacred essence is comparable to a fire. To sacrifice is to give as one gives coal to the furnace. But the furnace ordinarily has an undeniable utility, to which the coal is subordinated, whereas in sacrifice the offering is rescued from all utility. This is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice, that one sacrifices what is useful; one does not sacrifice luxurious objects. There could be no sacrifice if the offering were destroyed beforehand. Now, depriving the labor of The Consummation of Sacrifice The power that death generally has...
    • Theory of Religion (1989)
      (p.51) Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual. If one describes the individua] in the operation of sacrifice, he is defined by anguish. But if sacrifice is distressing, the reason is that the individual takes part in it. The individual identifies with the victim in the sudden movement that restores it to immanence (to intimacy), but the assimilation that is linked to the return to immanence is nonetheless based on the fact that the victim is the thing, just as the sacrificer is the individual. The separate individual...
    • Theory of Religion (1989)
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.130) For the "individual as entirety" or the individual who has experienced impalement: the fatality of not being    fully possessed of his or her intellectual resources. The fatality of work  done in a slipshod. or messy way. We live under a threat, since the function we employ tends to supplant us! This function can't be  employed in excess, We escape the danger only by overlooking it.  Work  done in a  slipshod or  messy way--often-is the sole means  of not becoming a function. The opposite danger is as great, though (vagueness. imprecision. mysticism). The notion  of ebb and flow. There's a...
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.143) To act is to speculate on subsequent results-to sow in hopes  of future harvests. In this sense action is  "'risk," and the "'risk'" is both the working and the things worked on-such as ploughing. a field, grain, or a single part of the possibilities of some individual. 
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.145) II I refuse to  limit my ends, I act without relating my acts to  the good-­and without preserving or enriching given beings. To aim at  the  beyond, and not at  a givenness of  beings, signifies not closing up but leaving open all possibility. "It's in our nature to create supermen. To  create what surpasses us! This is the reproductive instinct, the instinct for action and work. Because a will always supposes some end, humanity assumes an existence that is not yet in existence but one that's the end of  our existence. That's the real meaning of free will!  In this end...
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.149) If one day I broke apart.  dividing if not my whole life  from the masses. at least the important part of  it-if the masses are dissolved in endless immanence-it would only happen at the cost of depleted strength! In the period in which I write, transcending the masses is like spitting in the air: what you spit out  falls back on  you  ... Transcendence (noble existence. moral disdain an attitude of sublimity) has declined, becoming hypocrisy. It's  still  possible  to transcend states of apathy, but  only on condition of losing ourselves in immanence-and given that we fight for  others too....
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.162) Between the ideas of Fascist reactionaries and Nietzsche's notions there is more than simple difference-there's radical incompatibility. While declining to  limit the future, which  has  all rights according to  him, Nietzsche all  the same suggested  it  through vague and contradictory suggestions. Which led to  confusions and misunderstandings. It's wrongheaded to attribute definite intentions to him regarding electoral politics,  arguing that he  talked of  "masters of  the world." What he intended was a  risked evocation of  possibility. As for  the  sovereign humanity whose brilliance he  wanted to  shine forth: in  contradictory ways he  saw the new humankind sometimes as  wealthy, sometimes ...
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.35) [quoting Ecce Homo I can '/ ",all efforts, there's no trace o[struggle in my life, and I'm the opposite of heroic natures. My experience knows nothing at all about what it means to "will" a thing or work at it ambitiously or relate to  some goal or realization of  desire. -Ecce Homo]So that ordinarily, mystical statts are conditioned by a search for salvation. It appears that the  summits link  between a mystical  state and impover­ished existence. with fear and greed expressed as values of decline.  is in a sense superficial and very likely to be   deeply fallacious. This doesn't make it  any less what is...
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
      (p.39) I can't deny the inevitability of decline. The summit itself indicates it. U the summit isn't death, the  necessity of descent follows thereafter. Essentially, the summit is where life is  pushed to  an impossible limit. I reach it,  in  the faint way that I do, only by recklessly expending my  strength. I won't again possess a strength to waste unless, through work, I can gain back the strength lost. What am I moreover? Inscribed in  a human context, I can't dispossess myself of my will to  act. The  possibility of  giving up work  forever and in some way pushing myself...
    • On Nietzsche (1992)
    • The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (1993)
      (p.302) What distinguishes sovereignty is the consumption of wealth, as against labour and servitude, which produce wealth without consuming it. The sovereign individual consumes and doesn't labour, whereas at the antipodes of sovereignty the slave and the man without means labour and reduce their consumption to the necessities, to the products without which they could neither subsist nor labour. In theory, a man compelled to work consumes the products without which production would not be possible, while the sovereign consumes rather the surplus of production. The sovereign, if he is not imaginary, truly enjoys the products of this world - beyond...
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