Whether it merely breaks with the individualist premises about economy or whether it considers the commodity economy as a regional component of a more general economy - which is what’s implied in all the discussions about the notion of valu…The shared error of Marx and Bataille with all their categories of "labor power" or "expenditure" was to have situated the power to overturn the system outside of the circulation of commodity flows, in a pre-systemic exteriority set before …
Georges Bataille
philosopher · 4 mentions across 3 readings
In this course
Bataille is a theorist of excessive expenditure and libidinal economy whose work on transgression, jouissance, and the non-utilitarian aspects of human activity provides a framework for understanding systems that escape rational calculation—making him crucial for thinking about capitalism's irrational drives and the unconscious logics underlying both social order and its breakdowns. The readings invoke him alongside Deleuze and Guattari to map how desire, violence, and repression operate across different economic systems, though they also critique his assumption that transgressive energy exists in some pre-systemic exteriority outside capitalist circulation. His concept of general economy, which expands economic thinking beyond utility and exchange value, helps the course grapple with how AI and algorithmic systems might similarly harbor excesses and drives that formal rational models cannot fully contain.
Mentioned in 3 readings
Appears alongside
People mentioned in the same passages — sorted by co-occurrence weight.
Karl Marx 2Arthur Schopenhauer 1Felix Guattari 1Friedrich Nietzsche 1Gilles Deleuze 1Gregory Bateson 1Gustav Metzger 1Illia Polosukin 1Immanuel Kant 1Jasia Reichardt 1John Horton Conway 1John von Neumann 1Klára Dán von Neumann 1Marcel Duchamp 1Norbert Wiener 1Stanisław Ulam 1Whitney brothers 1Jean Baudrillard 1Jean-François Lyotard 1Krisis 1Marcel Mauss 1Pierre Bourdieu 1L. Frank Baum 1Neil Davidson 1