The Accursed Share
Cover of the first edition
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| Author | Georges Bataille |
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| Original title | La Part maudite |
| Translator | Robert Hurley |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Subject | Political economy |
| Published |
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| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 197 (Zone Books edition, vol. 1) 460 (Zone Books edition, vols. 2 and 3) |
| ISBN | (Zone Books edition, vol. 1) 0-942299-21-3 (Zone Books edition, vols. 2 and 3) |
The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (French: La Part maudite) is a book about political economy by the French intellectual Georges Bataille. Written between 1946 and 1949 and collected in volume seven of Bataille's complete works, it comprises three volumes: "Consumption", "The History of Eroticism", and "Sovereignty." First published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1949, the book was re-edited in 1967, and was published in English translation in 1988 by Zone Books, in a two-volume edition. The Accursed Share is considered one of the most important of Bataille's books. However, it received mixed reviews on the publication of its English translation.
Bataille presents a new economic theory which he calls "general economy," as distinct from the "restricted" economic perspective of most economic theory. In the Theoretical Introduction, Bataille writes that:
...the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire.
According to Bataille's theory of consumption, the accursed share is that excessive and non-recuperable part of any economy which must either be spent luxuriously and knowingly without gain in the arts, in non-procreative sexuality, in spectacles and sumptuous monuments, or it is obliviously destined to an outrageous and catastrophic outpouring, in the contemporary age most often in war, or in former ages as destructive and ruinous acts of giving or sacrifice, but always in a manner that threatens the prevailing system.
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Wikipedia