Author version. Please cite final published version available here or on request: https://www.mohrsiebeck.com/en/book/the-unthinkable-body-9783161637551/ The Poverty of Excess: Religion, Affect, and the Unthinkable Donovan O. Schaefer University of Pennsylvania Introduction: The Excess Paradigm Early in his book Theory of Religion, Georges Bataille announces his intention to “express a mobile thought, without seeking its definitive state.” 1 Bataille goes on to argue for a vision of religion that is fundamentally exterior to human consciousness—more like the shadowy mind of an animal than the work of reason. “Divine life,” he writes, “is immediate, whereas knowledge is an operation that requires suspension and waiting.” 2 He dedicates the final section of the book “TO WHOM LIFE IS AN EXPERIENCE TO BE CARRIED AS FAR AS POSSIBLE....” 3 Closely correlated to this religious outlook is a fixation on the “excessive,” that which is beyond economic or rational capture. 4 This book is one of many exemplars of what I will here call the “excess paradigm.” Bataille’s work knots together the religious, the affective, the unthinkable, and the motif of “excess” in a particularly compact package, but these elements are found in other combinations and permutations elsewhere. This interest in something called excess is, in fact, a widespread feature of philosophical and theoretical work in the twentieth century, and has had a particularly salient shaping role in approaches like affect theory and continental philosophy of religion. My goal in this essay is to investigate the thematics of excess, especially where they intersect with (1) affect theory and (2) religion. In spite of the extraordinary reach of this intellectual framework and its near unchallenged dominance in some academic spaces, my suggestion will be that the excess paradigm does not and cannot live up to its promises. On 1 Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1992), 11. 2 Ibid., 98. 3 Ibid., 110. 4 Ibid., 105.