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 · 3 mentions across 2 readings
In this course
Bataille's concept of general economy—treating capitalist exchange as merely one regional system within a broader logic of expenditure and excess—enables the course's critique of how systems theorists and Marxists alike have sought revolutionary agency in spaces imagined as outside commodity circulation. His insistence on the non-productive drives (jouissance, violence, eroticism) that exceed rational economic calculation appears in the readings as a counterweight to functionalist and determinist accounts of technology and social order. The course uses Bataille to trouble the fantasy that there exists some pure exteriority from which to overturn the system, complicating utopian narratives about AI and cybernetic transformation.
Background
Georges Albert Maurice Victor Bataille was a French writer, essayist, librarian and theorist whose work crossed the boundaries of literature, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political economy, religious studies and art history. His writings include novels, erotic fiction, poetry, philosophical essays, art criticism, lectures, diaries and fragmentary meditations. Although frequently described as a philosopher, Bataille resisted treating his work as a conventional philosophical system. He conceived writing as an exploration of the limits of human experience in which theoretical reflection, literary form and personal exposure could not be cleanly separated.
Wikipedia →Mentioned in 2 readings
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