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" The Accursed Share is a brilliant Product of [Bataille"s] loony-toons coupling of critical genres: pseudo/antisurrealist manifestos, leftist political treatises, erotics, Hegel "n" Nietzsche studies, mysticism, anthropology, and sun worship.... This strange and impressive book should not be ignored." Erik Davis , Voice Literary Supplement (review of volume I)
Book Description
The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction, based on the versions published in Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation of The Accursed Share.In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility, respectively from an anthropological and an ethical perspective. He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to.useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a philosopher and novelist sui generis, died in 1962.
We never grasp the human individual - what he signifies - except in a delusive way: humanity always contradicts itself; it goes suddenly from goodness to base cruelty, from extreme modesty to extreme immodesty, from the most attractive appearance to the most odious. Read the first page Browse Sample Pages
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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To what has already been written here about "The Accursed Share," I would add a few words about the book's content. Bataille proposes that the sovereign state--that condition of ultimate value, in which we are removed from the world that tallies our value in terms of the work we perform, in which we exist for our own sake--is the secret goal of all humanity. However, this sovereignty is not so much a development of humanity as a return to our lost animal state, a return along the trajectory of self-consciousness that resulted from becoming human. Bataille defines the human as an eternal dialectic between this lost animality and the human world of work and reason.
His masterwork develops ideas that will benefit the fields of study including economics, morality, humanities, politics, aesthetics, Nietzschean philosophy, theology, and ontology, for Bataille elucidates some of the principles that link all these fields together--principles that many of these fields have loathed to discuss for themselves.
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