Abstract

In "Georges Bataille: Invocations of History, Visions of Redemption," I examine the development and implications of the relationship between Bataille's 'theory' of general economy and his historical practice. ;First, I explore the paradoxical philosophical and political concerns that lead Bataille from an engagement with materialism to the idiom of the general economy. In work culminating in his lectures at the College de sociologie , he shows that the social is a material composition which is "criminal." This means that the social always remains work-in-progress. In a polarized cultural and political field, Bataille intervenes to guard the unrealized possibilities of the social against attempts to purify and presence it. His invocation of history is a necessary result of both this political and phiolosophical engagement. ;La part maudite is the focus of my second chapter. I argue that although Bataille claims that the social is determined by the specific mode by which it wastes the excess energy at its disposal, this does not mean that he writes a history of expenditure. Expenditure is always experienced through a set of historical and social restrictions . Thus a history of expenditure is necessarily a history of the restrictions of expenditure, the slippage of expenditure through restriction and the ruin of all restrictions of expenditure. Bataille presents a vision of finitude, in its necessary alterity. ;In chapter three, I explain how, in L'Histoire de l'errotisme , Bataille hopes to awaken and materialize this vision of finitude. A presentation of eroticism permits a critical politics to insert itself into the age of mature capitalism, a present which is structured by the excitation of desire. This historical presentation unleashes the furious potential within all desires. By disarticulating the simultaneity of the present, Bataille asserts the ethical dimension of historical discourse, charging it to redeem the infinite possibilities contained in finitude. Thus, Bataille puts forward the history of eroticism as the midwife of an other 'subjectivity' and an other politics