PHL499H1S - Bordun The Accursed Share and Me: The Implications of Excess By: Troy Bordun In the “Theoretical Introduction” to The Accursed Share (1949) Georges Bataille rethinks the way in which economic science is studied. 1 Rather than a restricted economics, focusing on particular systems and their functions regarding the production and consumption of energy (wealth), a general economy is of interest to Bataille, an economics which attempts to elucidate the general movement of energy, “the exuberance of living matter as a whole”. The former is a theory of the deficiency of resources while the latter looks at the excesses of resources and what the individual and society at large makes of its surpluses (AC1, 39). With his concern being the global movement of energy and wealth Bataille provides us with multiple historical accounts of cultures and societies either expending or conserving their excesses. After a system has put enough energy and wealth to productive use for the maintenance of life and for growth, Bataille argues that the surplus must be spent unproductively. As he goes on to show, unproductive expenditure is a very difficult task, excesses then being the defining problem of an economic system. Thus Bataille names this surplus the accursed share. In an economics considered in general, how does the individual participate in the global movement of energy? How might the individual expend his excess energies nonproductively? In analyzing numerous societies and their practices of expenditure Bataille uncovers two forms: “glorious” and “catastrophic” expenditures, or as Allan Stoekl calls them, “good” expenditures and “bad” ones. 2 What I will be addressing in the subsequent essay is the correct path an individual should take in order to squander his excess energies and wealth, specifically regarding 1 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, Volume 1: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone, 1991. Hereafter cited as AC1. 2 Allan Stoekl, “Excess and Depletion: Bataille’s Surprisingly Ethical Model of Expenditure”, in Reading Bataille Now , ed. Shannon Winnubst, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007. Much of this article is reprinted in Stoekl’s larger work on Bataille and ecological sustainability. Cf. Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, Chapter 2: “Bataille’s Ethics”. 1