accursed share

is the general economy as including death, waste, expenditure, violence and sacrifice in addition to the restricted sense of accumulation, profit, savings, and morality.

Bataille argued that the economy as we know it is only a part, the 'restricted' part, of a 'general economy', which would include all types of exchange which had been excluded from the world where 'the economic' has increasingly been taken as the 'real world'. This general economy includes death, waste, expenditure, violence and sacrifice, rather than accumulation, profit, savings, truth and morality. It is first outlined in Bataille's 1933 essay 'The Notion of Expenditure' (Bataille, 1985a), and fully systematised in his Accursed Share of 1949 (Bataille, 1991a). The universe is fundamentally about waste, goes the argument (note that this does not provide a theoretical ground or foundation, as waste only exist as it is about to be destroyed), and therefore human society should try to make sure it is not kept away from waste. Like Baudrillard's notion of symbolic exchange, the accursed share in the form of sacrificial behaviour is both a near-metaphysical(Smith Baudrillard dict) principle and something that takes place in history. Both have gradually been excluded as undesirable and non-utilitarian, and nowhere more so than in capitalism.

accursed share, n.All

accursed share