Bataille Citations
• The Accursed Share

References for Theme: The Accursed Share

• Bataille, Georges
• 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)