(p.418) Thirdly, the transformative action of work is a maintained tension that is unable to realize itself in its own results. Drawing from Hegel and Marx, Bataille agrees that work is the foundation of human self-awareness. It is true that work is motivated by fear, as well as class struggle, but it is likewise the dialectical means for achieving mastery and freedom. It is in and through work that humanity separates itself, in part at least, from the immediate drives and impulses of animalism: “Work was, above all else, the foundation for knowledge and reason. The making of tools and weapons...

(p.419) Insofar as the contradiction of work cannot be resolved for transcendent individuals, it is argued that humanity is inherently alienated, that work is nothing but anguish, contradiction, and play. Because of work, we both anticipate and protect ourselves from death.

(p.81) While Bataille’s moi is also separate from Being, he would repudiate the essential role of revealing beings through language and Being. Even this duty, from his perspective, remains subordination. His language does not illuminate beings. The “taste of garlic” that Bataille evokes in the apprehension of death is not revealed in his language. It is instead presented as enigmatic, untruthful, and dirty. Bataille’s language is a being that is obscured by death. It is material. Heidegger criticizes Marxism for a metaphysical commitment to materialism, which posits all beings as “the material of labor” (1993: 243). The tendency to see all...

(p.146) Bataille’s general economy introduces the domain of the nonhuman that remains alien to all restrictive economic activities of human beings on Earth. The more that will be produced and accumulated by humans, the more will be destroyed on the planetary level, as there are natural phenomena that humanity can neither appropriate nor even properly control—such as epidemic outbursts, global warming with its multiple effects, tsunamis, or volcanic eruptions. These planetary activities are opposed to work: according to Bataille, they rather express the idle wastefulness of nature that time and again seem to obstruct the processes of capitalist accumulation and economic...

(p.158) They think that they struggle for survival or work for prosperity, but altogether their economic activities only contribute to the planetary feast indistinguishable from a plague. It is this destructive aspect of the accursed share, outlined by Bataille, that relates to his later concept of full violence, or violence of the nonhuman, presented in “Pure Happiness.”

(p.161) From the quarantine to the viral strike; from climate change to the solar strike—these could be the mottos for a general politics in times of pandemics and global warming. If we put it like this, we should explain the strike not as an expression of need, but as an excessive wave of dangerous festivities that replace work.