1AC

Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.

But he grew old

This knight so bold
And oer his heart a shadow
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.

And, as his strength

Failed him at length,
He met a pilgrim shadow
Shadow, said he,
Where can it be
This land of Eldorado?

Over the Mountains

Of the Moon,
Down the Valley of the Shadow,
Ride, boldly ride,
The shade replied,
If you seek for Eldorado!

The systematic suppression of cultures of excessive generosity and ritual

destruction of wealth, such as the Wenzhou in China, is justified based on
productive rationality and desire to promote modern utilitarian
mechanisms of productivity and disciplinary power. The Wenzhou people
are an example of a profound holdout against the oceanic tide of the
productive side of economic engagement.

Yang 13 (Mayfair, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara, Two Logics of the Gift and Banquet: A Genealogy of China and the Northwest Coast, Taipei:
National Chengchi University, Institute of Foreign Languages, Translation Center, 2013)

However, Batailles
work takes the Nietzschean spirit of anti- utilitariansim to new heights. Central to
Batailles passionate critique of modernity was his notion of ritual expenditure as a key form of non
-productive consumption that has all but disappeared in our utilitarian and future -oriented modern
life. These expenditures include religious fest i- vals, massive rituals and sacrifices, competitive
spectacles, lavish court luxuries and ceremonies, large non -productive monastic communities, and
giant monuments like the Egyptian pyramids and medieval European cathedrals, that we moderns
consider wasteful and useless (Bataille 1985; 1989a). For Bataille, these expenditures allowed people to
maintain a deep connection with the sacred realm of the gods, ancestors, and supernatural beings. He
envisioned archaic humanity as being like the state of animality, where consciousness is in a state of
original oneness and immanence with the world. This original non -differentiation between self and
the world he called the state of intimacy (Bataille 1989b) . Batailles notion of intimacy resonates with the Daoist state of original cosmic
unity. However, what breaks up this originary monistic world for Bataille is not language, as in Daoist philosophy,

but tool -use, reflecting the Marxist influence on Bataille . For Bataille, in- creasingly in human history,
distinctions are drawn between human and animal, and between humans and supreme beings,
whereas before there was a sense of continuity between humans, animals, and gods (Bataille 1989b). With
progressive tool -use, not only animals become things for the use of humans, but humans
themselves become increasingly objectified as things. According to Bata ille, the longing for a return to our
original lost intimacy is then partially satisfied through periodic effervescent religious rituals and
festivals that refocus people on the present and allow them to indulge in an excess of material
waste and loss. To destroy material wealth is to destroy the thingness that has come to imprison us
and to allow us to get back to int i- macy with the gods for a time. For example, Bataille points out that in
animal sacrifice, wild animals are seldom offered in sacrifice. It is domesticated animals, draft animals
or meat -bearing animals that are slaughtered, in keeping with this posited need to destroy the
useful in the animal. Non -Reciprocity and Wasteful Destruction in Chinese Rituals Turning now to the Chinese cultural past, we find waste
not only in banqueting, but also in rituals and festivals of a religious nature, when sacr i- fices are
offered to transcendent beings residing in other worlds. Sacrifices in China are a form of religious gifts
given to the gods and ancestors. The char- acters , both with the spirit radical, refer to the act of making a sacr i- fice to spiritual forces or supernatural beings. The ancient Chinese
characters display the cow or ox radicals, and referred to animals used for sacrif icial rites, such as oxen, goats, and pigs ( Ci Hai 1976: 872). In sacrifice, the gift that is given

represents the transfer of wealth from this world to another world beyond this one, and return is quite
uncertain or not at all. Sa c- rifice is an archaic mo de of ritual common to all ancient cultures. In sacrifice, the simple Maussian notion of reciprocity in the gift does not suffice. Ce r- tainly there is the
hope that in sacrifice to ancestors and spirits, these beings would respond ( ) to such gifts and rewa rd the sacrificers. However, sacrifice also reaches for something beyond a

return. Sometimes, in excessive no-holds -barred sacrifice, there is simply the desire for destruction or self -destruction for its own
sake, a transgression of the supposedly natural human instrumental pursuit of life, survival, and
species expansion. So Bataille wanted to explore a dimension of sacrifice where it ceases to be a mere means to gain
a repayment from the gods, but displays an excessiveness that becomes a spiritual end in itself. This

second logic of the gift, found in the excess of the gift, enables one to transcend the means -end
relationships that entrap us in the conventional world. I must say here that I did not start doing fieldwork in rural China ha v-ing already r ead Bataille, but I
discovered Batailles relevance to Chinese culture after my fieldwork encounters with the frequent theme of prohibition of waste (Yang 2000). Local officials in rural and small -town

Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province where I did fieldwork i n the 1990s to 2012 were always call-ing on the people to scale down
their rituals and avoid waste or going into debt to pay for lavish weddings and funerals. Many large -
scale religious rituals and ritual processions were just banned altogether. The reasons that off i- cials chastised the local people for
excess ritual expenditure were that people would not have enough money for investing in their family businesses, in

childrens education, and that these activities were superstitious. 6 While officials expected the peoples
excessive waste of money on rituals to decline with increased prosperity and exposure to the rational
influences of modern urban culture in the area, the opposite occurred. As local people had more money to spend,
their family and community rituals became more lavish. Wenzhou local officials attempt to scale down ritual expenditure r e- minds me of the Canadian
colonial authorities in 19th century British Columbia who banned potlatches because they encouraged
heathenism and indolence (even though they always noted how energetically the natives pr e- pared for potlatches) (Cole 1991). Below are two entries
by colonial agents in British Columbia: 1883 The energy they display in collecting property is certainly remarkable... but unfortunately, so much is squandered at
feasts and otherwise, that they have not as they ought to have, conti n- uous comfort. 1890 I am sorry to say that I cannot report any improvement among these
Indians; they seem to have given themselves up again to the Potlatch, which has absorbed the whole of their time and energies..., and, in conse -quence they
have earned very little money, though they could all have ob -tained remunerative employment at the different canneries had they chosen to work. (Codere 1950:
82-83) Anthropologists who have studied the Northwest Coast natives observe that they were quite hard -working, especially for their potlatch accumulations. They
were also quick to adapt to the Western money economy and were skillful in becoming economically prosp erous, compared to other Native American groups.
According to Douglas Cole, amongst the four recorded reasons for the European banning of potlatches in 1885, the economic re a- son was doubtless the most
important: the [potlatch] system was based on the hoar ding of goods, not for savings and investment, but for seemingly sens e- less waste... The potlatch was not
only a waste of time, but a waste of r e- sources, and incompatible with the governments goal of Indian economic and social progress (Cole 1991: 140). 7 Th us in
the entries by colonial agents above, what the colonial authorities really objected to was that the natives did not spend enough time working in the way that they
approved of, in fulltime and permanent employment attached to the modern disciplinary apparatus of capitalist economy. Like the Canadian colonial officials before
them, the Chinese Communist Party in contemporary Wenzhou are also trying to bend the local people to the
modern rational enterprise of ascetic and disciplined savings, investment, accumulation, and
productive expansion ( ). The local culture of Wenzhou, which indulges in excessive ritual waste, is
today an anomaly in China, an obstinate holdout in an oceanic tide of utilitarianism. Earlier in China, Rebecca Nedostup has
shown h ow the Guomingdang government in the 1930s also tried to put an end to lavish expenditures in

Nanjing for the lunar calendar Ghost Festival and other traditional festivals by switching to a solar
calendar (Nedostup 2008). Later, the Chinese Co m- munists of course went much further than the Guomindang in prohibiting
public religious rituals altogether, and persecuting those who dared defy the ban. Thus, we can see clearly here that
both the colonial Canadian authorities and the Chinese Guomindang and Communists were modern
colonizing state forces who sought to systematically suppress archaic Bataillean cultures of excessive
generosity and ritual destruction of wealth in order to promote modern utilitarian mechanisms of
productivity and disciplinary power. Ho wever, at the same time, I have also discovered that in China, the condemnation of wasteful
ritual expenditures is not limited to either the R e- publican era or the Communist period, but has a venerable genealogy stretching back into
ancient Chinese history. For example, one often finds sentiments by educated Confucian scholars like this one,
traveling through the Wenzhou area during the Qing Dynasty, chastising Wenzhou people for their
wastefulness: The local custom o f the people within the Commandery of Wenzhou is to support spirit mediums and get access to
spirits and ghosts. They hold elaborate Buddhist ceremonies and Daoist rituals, engaging in extravagant
expenditures and exhausting their energies in these ef forts. Unconcerned with heavy -duty
wastefulness, each year during the first lunar month, they hold a lantern festival that lasts over ten
days. These attract festival -goers late into the night, the men mixing freely with the women. They also get into competitions
of dragon lanterns, each with fine d e- tailed craftwork. Well over several tens of gold pieces are wasted
on a single large dragon lantern. Gongs and drums are beaten thunderously, the boisterous din is
insane. In just a few days, the dragon lanterns are then put to the torch. This sort of reckless
wastefulness must be immediately prohibited. Lao Daoyu, Leisurely Tour of the Ou River ( Oujiang Yizhi ), Qing Dynasty, 18 th c. 8 Unlike modern
Chinese elites who wanted to end the superstitions that prevented China from developing modern
science and economic growth, what disturbed educated Confucian sensibili ties in late imperial China
about popular religion was its wastefulness and the foolhardy ritual extravagance of poor people.
Confucians in late imperial China did not oppose religion against science, or see religion as backwards or primitive in a linear history, but they looked down on the
customs of the common people and decried the popular overindulgence in reli gious sentiments. In Qing
Dynasty Quanzhou, a city that was Chinas greatest cosmopolitan port city in the Song and Yuan
Dynasties, Confucian o fficials also objected to wasteful expenditures: During the Universal Salvation
Festival, all households in Quanzhou put t heir offerings in the streets. They set up opera stages and dis
play many precious things. These cost people all their property and ex haust the funds of temples... Even
though poorer families are strained by the amount of expenditure, they never stop trying to make more
offerings than the others. (Xu and Xu 1990; quoted in Wang, M.M. 1995: 62)
Economic productivity has formed the American supercapitalist state,
where individuals are reduced to bare life and code causing the worst form
of biopower and maintaining the capitalist death drive
Featherstone 10 ([Mark, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Keele University, Death-Drive America: On
Scott Wilsons Vision of the Cultural Politics of American Nihilism in the Age of Supercapitalism, Fast
Capitalism 7.1, 2010] https://www.uta.edu/huma/agger/fastcapitalism/7_1/featherstone7_1.html,
NC)

The totality of global capitalism, the symbolic order is reflected in the state that provides significance
and codes the image of the global economy, and the real is embodied by the practices of war,
violence, and expenditure understood in the widest sense. Regarding the fusions between the three registers, Wilson explains that
economy and war meet in the explosion of joyful immanence linked to destruction and consumption,
war and state collide in the production For Wilson (2008a), we are currently living in the
Americanized supercapitalist state of technological second nature where we are totally exposed to
the coding mechanisms of state power. In Agambens work this means that the liberal individual is
completely open to construction through discourse and that they can, therefore, easily be reduced to a
state of bare life by stripping away their legal identity. However, Wilsons postmodern, surrealistic, take on the significance
of the new coding technologies of the supercapitalist state takes this Foucauldian theory a step further. In his view, the contemporary
supercapitalist empire, which is in the process of reducing everything and everybody to the status of
code, deconstructs and reconstructs the individual as either normal or pathological on the basis of their
sociological and biological identity that flows through the globalized communication network as
streamed data. At this point the individual, who has already been reduced to the status of a quantum of economic power by the
Hobbesian / Lockean logic of the supercapitalist system, is totally surveilled by the normalizing power structures implicit in the Americanized
global communication network. In many respects this vision of a total system that covers every conceivable scaling on the planet, reaching from
the global level of networked communications to the micro-biological level of individual genetic code,
represents Foucauldian (2008) biopower in its ultimate form. What the contemporary American
supercapitalist war machine achieves through the reduction of the individual to digital data is the
complete immersion of humanity into a technological coding system that simply works by endlessly
circulating information. The difference between this Americanized biopolitical machine and what Roberto Esposito (2008) calls the archetypal
biocracy of modernity, Nazism, is that the Nazi machine was never able to globalize its model of normality and pathology because its central mechanism for
reducing humanity to the status of bare life, the camp, remained at an experimental level that required the relatively primitive industrial production of corpses,
rather than the system we live with today which creates postindustrial postmodern Muslims or muselmnner through the reduction of humanity to the status of
code. In this respect Nazism was nowhere near as effective in achieving the normalization of humanity as the contemporary American supercapitalist machine
because its mechanism for creating robotic men relied on brutal violence and the systematic humiliation of the embodied human. We know that the American
system sometimes slips back into the same logic, because we have all seen the images from Abu Ghraib, but these kind of events represent a primitive or, in
Wilsons Lacanian language, real form of punishment that the supercapitalist war machine would prefer to avoid where possible...But the problem with this work
hard-play hard ideology of endless life is that it creates a culture of mystical enjoyment based on perfect mechanical motion to screen out what Wilson (2008a)
suggests is the truth of the contemporary supercapitalist system, which is death, destruction, and the transformation of humanity into pure malleable data to be
bought, sold, and disciplined over the media-scapes of the global communications network. In this condition, which Wilson expresses through the idea of the death
drive of capitalism,
humanity is reduced to the status of pure commodity and the veneer of civilization is
stripped back to leave the world in what may appear to be a state of nature, but it is in reality a
condition of manufactured technological brutality. Supported by the ideological fantasy of the post-
human body, there is no end to death drive supercapitalism.

Thus we affirm a luxurious engagement with China as a method to subvert modern

mechanisms of productivity, utilitarianism and globalized capitalism

Featherstone 16. (Mark Featherstone, professor of sociology at Keele University, Luxus: A

thanatology of luxury from Nero to Bataille, Cultural Politics Vol 12 Issue 1 pp. 67-71, NC)

I propose to develop an an economic theory of luxury that locates the meaning of the state
In this article,
and experience of the luxurious beyond restricted economics in the space of the sacred. In this
respect, I will seek to propose a theological understanding of luxury, with the qualification that what we
might call the theology of the luxurious is essentially atheological by virtue of its lack of a godhead. Against
classic interpretations of the history of luxury, such as those of Christopher J. Berry (1994) and William Howard Adams (2012), my objective in
this article is, therefore, to try to separate the notion of luxury and the luxurious from its dependence on ideas of need and necessity, which
tends to confine luxury to an abstract space of excessive quantity, and instead to develop an understanding of the human or more precisely
nonhuman quality of the luxurious. However, in order to reach this state and suggest a theory of the quality of luxury, my discussion will pass
through the work of Berry and others who have shown how luxury resides on the other side of necessity. While my article seeks to move
beyond Berrys work, his discussion has influenced my analysis, primarily because his theory of the de-moralization of luxury informed my
position that
luxury may function as a critical device able to transgress neoliberal, capitalist realism and
the kind of utilitarian calculus that has come to dominate contemporary society (Fisher 2009). Under
these conditions, need, necessity, and utility is everything and the world is organized around a form of
instrumental rationality that cannot accept waste and useless expenditure. However, there is a sense
in which the discussion and analysis of luxury, and in particular a discussion and analysis of luxury in
contemporary global capitalism, unlocks a critical perspective capable of moving beyond this utilitarian
position. That is to say that an exploration of the idea of luxury enables a shift in perspective that takes in both Max Webers (2010) vision
of capitalism, where instrumental rationality necessarily results in an austere approach to life and the world, and Werner Sombarts (1967)
alternative view, which explains how capitalism revolves around enjoyment, excess, and, centrally, sexual desire. Given these two spirits of
capitalism, which revolve around austerity and luxury, I would suggest that it would be a mistake to imagine that neoliberal global capitalism is
simply an iron cage, where instrumental rationality is everything, and instead show how it is possible to locate a space, and world, beyond this
miserly condition, in the state of the luxurious. In order to develop this position, I want to extend Sombarts claim that capitalism is founded in
sexual desire into a Freudian (2001) theory of desire and, beyond desire, drive, where the psychoanalytic economy of lack and the satisfaction
of lack collapses toward a paradoxical space of absolute plenitude and infinite poverty. The essential point of my article is that this moment,
the moment of drive, which is accessible through the state and experience of the luxurious, may open
out onto the possibility of a world beyond what Fisher (2009) talks about in terms of contemporary
global capitalist realism. In what follows, then, I seek to construct a psychopolitical theory of the quality of luxury and the quality of the luxurious
through a consideration of Roman luxury, which I explore through reference to the relationship between Seneca and Nero (Romm 2015); Sigmund Freuds (2001)
central statement of the psychology of luxury, Beyond the Pleasure Principle; and finally Georges Batailles (1991, 1993) dark theology of the luxurious, which we
find in his three-volume work The Accursed Share. The title of my article is luxus, the Latin word for dislocation, excess, overabundance, extravagance, exuberance,
and moving beyond, and I employ this male noun over the female variant luxuria, which has the same English significance, because I want to explain the concepts of
luxury and luxuriousness in terms of decline, decay, and eventually the death of phallic austerity. In this respect, my use of the male term luxus relates to the
Oedipal, or rather anti-Oedipal, story I want to develop, where the luxurious opens a space for the transformation of male phallic power from an austere form that
represses waste into a new form that embraces excess in the name of moving beyond an obsession with restricted economy and productivity. Thus I employ the
male noun luxus, rather than the female luxuria, because I want to show how phallic power implies its own collapse and contains the seeds of its own destruction.
By contrast, the female term luxuria suggests that opposition to phallic power emerges from somewhere else, the feminine, and that male austerity, rationality, and
reason are somehow self-identical. It is this position that I seek to undermine through, first, my exploration of first-century Roman history and, specifically, the
struggle between the Stoic philosopher Seneca and the emperor Nero, who together may be seen to symbolize the twin infinitives of ancient austerity and luxury
(Romm 2015); second, Freud (2001), who identified Oedipal trauma and desire with the luxuriousness of death; and finally Bataille (1991, 1993), who is clear that
there is nothing austere about phallic sovereignty, which is, on the contrary, defined by overabundance and destruction of all forms of vertical authority. The
takeoff point for my discussion is, therefore, the relationship between Senecas Stoic philosophy and Neros reign of luxury, which I connect to Freud (2001) through
the idea of Thanatos, or the death drive to nothingness, and his metaphorical connection between Rome and the unconscious, where the ruins of the ancient city
become symbolic of repressed unconscious content that psychoanalysis seeks to liberate in the name of self-understanding. On the basis of this connection, my
claim is that there is an unconscious state and experience of luxury and luxuriousness that is transhistorical and links the experience of the Romans to the present.
My turn to Freud thus pitches Seneca and Nero into the present, where I turn to the works of perhaps the modern theorist of luxury, Georges Bataille, and his
concepts of the accursed share, consumption, eroticism, sovereignty, and atheological mysticism. Working through Bataille, I conclude through an exploration of an
aneconomic understanding of luxury that has previously been understood economically on the borderline of need. This is where my reference to the Freudian
(2001) notion of thanatology, or the word of death, comes into view, because I want to suggest that the principal significance of the state and experience of luxury
resides in an attempt to escape the passage of time through either the simulation of death orin the real experience of the luxuriousthe flatline itself. In my
view, luxury and the luxurious are, therefore, about escape from the thingness, and the temporality of life. Thus I conclude with the claim that luxuryand
this
is the case for the experience of luxury in contemporary capitalismshould be understood in terms of
the sacred and cannot be thought through in profane, instrumental terms, even though today, in the
global, capitalist, secular world, the luxurious is hidden inside the profane economy of things. In this way,
my final point is that contemporary luxury represents the sacred unconscious of the profane world and, as a consequence, a kind of religiosity without religion,
which has the potential to tip over into what Eugene Thacker (2011) calls Batailles divine darkness, a kind of transcendental materialism, where things suddenly
lose their value and the empire of economy collapses toward a new sustainable future where humans live in intimacy and sympathy with their environment.
However, before I turn to this thesis, and my line through Seneca, Nero, Freud, and Bataille, I want to contextualize my discussion and explain the relationship
between luxury and contemporary social and political thought. In his classic work on the idea, Berry (1994) points out that luxury resides on the borderline of need
and necessity. Here, luxury is understood in the context of the shift from ancients to moderns, and the related move from a closed to open conception of the
universe. In the modern, open world, the dynamism of desire becomes a positive attribute, and the endlessness of luxury predicated on shifts in understandings of
need is recognized as essential to growth. Although Berrys story takes in the de-moralization of luxury, so that the Socratic-Platonic, Stoic vision of the evil of the
passions no longer holds in the modern world, I would suggest that the moral critique of luxury remained a force in Marxism, neo-Marxism, and psychoanalysis,
where Freud and Jacques Lacan explained the necessity of Oedipus and repression. In the case of psychoanalysis, the tendency to the de-moralization of luxury
really took effect in the late 1960s when Lacan came into conflict with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari over the fate of Oedipus (Dosse, 2010). Against the classic
Freudian figure of necessary repression, Deleuze and Guattari (1983) celebrated anti-Oedipus and the useless figure of the schizophrenic, whose principal
characteristic was transgression. Following the same approach, Michel Foucault (1990) would later reposition Seneca and the Stoics, so that the Roman guides to
 living with lack became champions of transgression and self-transformation. In this context, luxury is never simply about economic growth, which, Berry points out,
we find in Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith, but also the transgression of the self and the overcoming of the repressive, austere system set up by Freuds
Oedipus. Of course, in recent years, and centrally since 2008, the moral critique has returned center stage, and the revolutionary power of the transgressive
critiques of Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault has faded slightly, simply because the new spirit of capitalism has made luxury its core principle. In the wake of
Weber (2010), who imagined an austere, purely instrumental form of capitalism, Sombarts (1967) economy of luxury and desire is now hegemonic. Although it
would be a mistake to imagine that the Weberian model is no longer relevant, because the majority of people still labor under conditions of austerity, postmodern
capitalism lives off luxury, which ensures growth and essentially supports its very existence. As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1997) saw in the mid-
consumer capitalism survives on the basis of its utopian function/fiction the promise of
twentieth century,
luxury and the escape from the pain of production is sold to everybody through the culture industry.
But the problem of contemporary global capitalism is that the space of luxus, the space of
transgression and luxurious expansion, the space for going beyond, the space for more, no longer really
exists. In this situation, the modern, open world has started to close down, toward a postmodern, or globalized, world characterized by a lack
of space, possibility, and hope. Work is everywhere. Under conditions of closure, where there is no more space, luxury shifts to time, and we
seek escape from need and necessity in moments of bliss, but even these moments are now rare. When time is also exhausted, and there are
no more moments for luxurious expansion, we are essentially caught in what Paul Virilio (see Armitage and Roberts 2002) calls the grey zone,
a nonspace of fullness, finitude, and pollution. The problem of luxury today is, therefore, not simply one of environmental resource, which is
that the biosphere simply cannot cope with the expansion of the global consumer society in China and India, but also one of planetary
dimension, where space and time have become completely full of past luxuries, which are present necessities, and there is effectively nowhere
else to go.
Here, the very idea of luxury itself, or at least the limit form of luxury and luxuriousness we find
in things, has tipped over into absurdity, and there is no more space for material expansion. Thus we
approach the idea of the decadence of the super-rich or, in the language of Occupy, the 1 percent who consume the majority of the worlds
resources and live in a state of luxury that lapses into absurdity precisely because it is simultaneously inside and outside the profane world of
things. The luxuriousness of this class, which is represented in Martin Scorseses The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) by the figure of Jordan Belfort,
who lives on the borderline of excess and suicide, is also symbolic of the decadence of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) call
Empire and link to the globalization of American capitalism. For Hardt and Negri, the problem of Empire resides in its endless transgression
and the condition of overreach. That is to say that, when it reaches its highest level of development, Empire starts to overproduce and sow the
seeds of its own destruction because it can no longer recycle its own surpluses. In this respect, Hardt
and Negri suggest that
overproduction and superabundance, the luxury of Empire, will eventually empower the multitude
that will have no need for the control system of capitalism, which survives on the basis of their
productivity. While Hardt and Negris thesis updates Marx for the twenty-first century, it also relies on the history of Rome and the
struggle between the forces of Empire and the Republic to support its vision of the inevitable collapse of the luxurious imperial model. Of
course, this connection is not simply coincidental, because the leading nation of Empire, America, was founded upon the Roman Republican
ideal and has always remained fearful of the fall into imperial decadence, a concern made explicit in Cullen Murphys (2008) popular book, Are
We Rome? The story of the decline of Rome is, of course, well known, and has been explored by numerous writers. For example, in his massive
The City in History, Lewis Mumford (1968) explains that Republican Rome existed in a contained, managed, bound, Platonic state organized
around virtue, or virtus, which we can link to phallic, paternal authority. Drawing on Platos original urban psychopolitical theory of the
necessity of the just, austere division of labor from The Republic, Mumfords history moves on to show that military victory, territorial
expansion, and economic growth eventually led Rome to become a monstrous psychopatholopolis characterized by excess. In other words,
Mumfords claim is that when Rome lost its connection to necessity and the city was no longer about need, it fell into what he calls
purposeless materialism, with the subsequent collapse into an orgy of sex, violence, and luxury. Although the particular period Mumford
identifies with Romes psychopathy, the first century, was under imperial rule, the problem is that this particular version of the rule of the
father was never likely to impose Freudian discipline upon the people, primarily because the famous leaders of this period, Caligula and Nero,
were essentially out-of-control teens who had never been subject to Oedipal discipline themselves and therefore could never possess
masculine virtus, or virtue. As a result of a lack of proper order, Mumford explains, first-century Rome collapsed into excess and luxury to the
extent that there was no restriction on desire and the city became a space of Thanatosthe death drive that heads over to the other side of
material things.

Surplus energy and wealth must be expended. Capitalist productivity has redirected
the surplus towards military expenditure this causes explosive uncontrollable
violence. Unproductive Expenditure destroys the deadly hand of utility and
productivity.

Yang 2k (Mayfair, Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies, University of California, Santa
Barbara, Putting Global Capitalism in its Place, Taipei: National Chengchi University, Institute of
Foreign Languages, Translation Center, 2000, NC)

Baudrillards emphasis on consumption and the radical difference of precapitalist formations owes
much to the earlier work of Georges Bataille. Bataille produced a very different kind of critique of
capitalism, one focused not on production but on consumption. He found that in archaic economies
production was subordinated to nonproductive destruction (1989a:90). The great motive force of these
societies was not the compulsion to produce (which unleashes a process of objectification whereby all
forms of life, including humans, become things) but a desire to escape the order of things and to live
for the present moment through exuberant consumption in the form of excesses of generosity,
display, and sacrifice. The societies of Kwakwa_ka_wakw potlatch feasting, Aztec human sacrifice, Islamic militarism, and Tibetan
monastic Lamaism all understood the necessity of nonproductive expenditure (Bataille 1989b). They set aside a major proportion
of their wealth for expenditures which ensured the wasting and loss of wealth rather than rational
accumulation. This destructive consumption allowed them to avoid the deadly hand of utility and to
restore some of the lost intimacy of an existence without a separation between sacred and profane.
Whereas Weber (1958) looked to religion to explain the origins of the capitalist ethic, Bataille looked to
archaic religion for seeds of a subversion of capitalism. If forms of archaic ritual prestation and
sacrificial destruction of wealth could be reintegrated into modern economies, capitalism would have
built-in mechanisms for social redistribution and for limiting its utilitarian productivism and incessant
commodification of nature and culture. Its expansionary tendencies would suffer frequent shutdowns
and reversals. Batailles project called for widening the frame of our economic inquiry to what he called
a general economy, which accounted not only for such things as production, trade, and finance but also
for social consumption, of which ritual and religious sacrifice, feasting, and festival were important
components in precapitalist economies. In Batailles approach, religion was not an epiphenomenal derivative of the
infrastructures of production but an economic activity in itself. A general economy treats economic wealth and growth as
part of the operations of the law of physics governing the global field of energy for all organic
phenomena, so that, when any organism accumulates energy in excess of that needed for its
subsistence, this energy must be expended and dissipated in some way. What he proposed in his
enigmatic and mesmerizing book The Accursed Share was that, in our modern capitalist productivism,
we have lost sight of this fundamental law of physics and material existence: that the surplus energy
and wealth left over after the basic conditions for subsistence, reproduction, and growth have been
satisfied must be expended. If this energy is not destroyed, it will erupt of its own in an uncontrolled
explosion such as war. Given the tremendous productive power of modern industrial society and the
fact that its productivist ethos has cut off virtually all traditional avenues of ritual and festive
expenditures, energy surpluses have been redirected to military expenditures for modern warfare on
a scale unknown in traditional societies. Bataille thought that the incessant growth machine that is the post-World War II U.S.
economy could be deflected from a catastrophic expenditure on violent warfare only by potlatching the entire national economy. In giving
away its excess wealth to poorer nations, as in the Marshall Plan to rebuild war-torn Europe, the United States could engage in a nonmilitary
rivalry for prestige and influence with the Soviet Union, that other center of industrial modernitys radical reduction of nonproductive
Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy,
expenditure.14
nonproductive expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist
modernity. Scholars such as Jean-Joseph Goux (1998) have pointed to a troubling overlap between Batailles views on luxury and sacrificial
expenditure and postmodern consumer capitalism. Consumer capitalism is also predicated on massive consumption and waste rather than on
the thrift, asceticism, and accumulation against which Bataille directed his theory of expenditure. It exhibits potlatch features in the tendency
for businesses to give goods away in the hope that supply creates its own demand; it collapses the distinction between luxury and useful
goods and between need and desire (Goux 1998). Unlike modernist capitalism, postmodern consumer capitalism is driven by consumption
rather than production. Thus, Batailles vision of the ritual destruction of wealth as defying the principles of accumulative and productive
capitalism does not address this different phase of consumer capitalism, whose contours have only become clear since his death in 1962. It
seems to me that despite their overt similarities, the principles of ritual consumption and those of consumer capitalism are basically
incompatible. If
Bataille had addressed our consumer society today, he would have said that this sort of
consumption is still in the service of production and productive accumulation, since every act of
consumption in the world of leisure, entertainment, media, fashion, and home decor merely feeds
back into the growth of the economy rather than leading to the finality and loss of truly
nonproductive expenditure. Even much of modern warfare is no longer truly destructive but tied into
the furthering of military-industrial production. Nor, despite its economic excesses, does our consumer
culture today challenge the basic economic logic of rational private accumulation as a self-depleting
archaic sacrificial economy does.15 Furthermore, capitalist consumption is very much an individual
consumption rather than one involving the whole community or social order.

Americas goals of interaction and engagement are rooted in the will to

productivity, constantly seeking a more positive future. This form of interaction
only serves to intensify feelings of lack and absence, causing an endless cycle of
exploitation and usage politics.

That is the failure of being. As we attempt to act and be productive, we foreclose on

a politics of becoming and structure hierarchies of domination. In response to
future-utility, we should use language to embrace that failure of being, refusing to
navigate the labyrinth that is the world. Our expenditure is a shift back toward
archaic humanity, dissolving those violent hierarchies.

Bataille 1985 (Georges the Dead Dude. "The labyrinth." trans. Allan Stoekl, Visions of Excess, ed.
Allan Stoekl (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1985) 5 (1985). The Labyrinth (1930))

Negativity, in other words, the integrity of determination - Hegel I.

THE INSUFFICIENCY OF BEINGS [Humans] act in order
to be. This must not be understood in the negative sense of conservation (conserving in order not to be
thrown out of existence by death), but in the positive sense of a tragic and incessant combat for a
satisfaction that is almost beyond reach. From incoherent agitation to crushing sleep, from chatter to turning
inward, from overwhelming love to hardening hate, existence sometimes weakens and sometimes
accomplishes "being". And not only do states have a variable intensity, but different beings "are"
unequally. A dog that runs and barks seems "to be" more than a mute and clinging sponge, the sponge more
than the water in which it lives, an influential [human] more than a vacant passerby. In the first movement, where the
force that the master has at [their] disposal puts the slave at [their] mercy, the master deprives the slave of a part of [their] being. Much later,
in return, the "existence" of the master is impoverished to such an extent that it distances itself from the material elements of life. The slave
enriches [their] being to the extent that [they] enslaves these elements by the work to which [their] impotence condemns him. The
contradictory movements of degradation and growth attain, in the diffuse development of human
existence, a bewildering complexity. The fundamental separation of [humans] into masters and slaves
is only the crossed threshold, the entry into the world of specialized functions where personal "existence"
empties itself of its contents; a [human] is no longer anything but a part of being, and [their] life,
engaged in the game of creation and destruction that goes beyond it, appears as a degraded particle lacking reality. The very
fact of assuming that knowledge is a function throws the philosopher back into the world of petty
inconsistencies and dissections of lifeless organs. Isolated as much from action as from the dreams that
turn action away and echo it in the strange depths of animated life, [they] led astray the very being that
[they] chose as the object of [their] uneasy comprehension. "Being" increases in the tumultuous
agitation of a life that knows no limits; it wastes away and disappears if [they] who is at the same
"being" and knowledge mutilates himself by reducing [oneself] himself to knowledge. This deficiency
can grow even greater if the object of knowledge is no longer being in general but a narrow domain,
such as an organ, a mathematical question, a juridical form. Action and dreams do not escape this poverty (each time they are
confused with the totality of being), and, in the multicolored immensity of human lives, a limitless insufficiency is
revealed; life, finding its endpoint in the happiness of a bugle blower or the snickering of a village chair-renter, is no longer the
fulfillment of itself, but is its own ludicrous degradation - its fall is comparable to that of a king onto the
floor. At the basis of human life there exists a principle of insufficiency. In isolation, each [human] sees the majority of
others as incapable or unworthy of "being". There is found, in all free and slanderous conversation, as an animating theme, the awareness
of the vanity and the emptiness of our fellowmen; an apparent stagnant conversation betrays the blind and impotent flight of
all life toward an indefinable summit. The sufficiency of each being is endlessly contested by every other.
Even the look that expresses love and admiration comes to me as a doubt concerning my reality. A burst of laughter or the expression of
repugnance greets each gesture, each sentence or each oversight through which my profound insufficiency is betrayed - just as sobs would be
the response to my sudden death, to a total and irremediable omission. This
uneasiness on the part of everyone grows and
reverberates, since at each detour, with a kind of nausea, [humans] discover their solitude in empty
night. The universal night in which everything finds itself - and soon loses itself - would appear to be the existence
for nothing, without influence, equivalent to the absence of being, were it not for human nature that emerges within it to give a dramatic
importance to being and life. But this absurd night manages to empty itself of "being" and meaning each time a [human] discovers within it
human destiny, itself locked in turn in a comic impasse, like a hideous and discordant trumpet blast. That which, in me, demands that
there be "being" in the world, "being" and not just the manifest insufficiency of human or nonhuman
nature, necessarily projects (at one time or another and in reply to human chatter) divine sufficiency across
space, like the reflection of an impotence, of a servilely accepted malady of being. II. THE COMPOSITE
CHARACTER OF BEINGS AND THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF FIXING EXISTENCE IN ANY GIVEN Ipse Being in the world is so uncertain that I
can project it where I want - outside of me. It is a clumsy [person] man, still incapable of eluding the intrigues of
nature, who locks being in the me. Being in fact is found NOWHERE and it was an easy game for a sickly
malice to discover it to be divine, at the summit of a pyramid formed by the multitude of beings, which
has at its base the immensity of the simplest matter. Being could be confined to the electron if ipseity were precisely not
lacking in this simple element. The atom itself has a complexity that is too elementary to be determined ipsely. The
number of particles that make up a being intervene in a sufficiently heavy and clear way in the
constitution of its ipseity; if a knife has its handle and blade indefinitely replaced, it loses even the shadow of its ipseity; it is not the
same for a machine which, after six or five years, loses each of the numerous elements that constituted it when new. But the ipseity that
is finally apprehended with difficulty in the machine is still only shadowlike. Starting from an extreme complexity, being
imposes on reflection more than the precariousness of a fugitive appearance, but this complexity -
displaced little by little becomes in turn the labyrinth where what had suddenly come forward strangely
loses its way. A sponge is reduced by pounding to a dust of cells; this living dust is formed by a multitude
of isolated beings, and is lost in the new sponge that it reconstitutes. A siphonophore fragment is by itself an
autonomous being, yet the whole siphonophore, to which this fragment belongs, is itself hardly different from a being possessing unity. Only
with linear animals (worms, insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals) do the living individual forms definitively
lose the faculty of constituting aggregates bound together in a single body. But while societies of nonlinear animals
do not exist, superior animals form aggregates without ever giving rise to corporeal links; [humans] as well as
beavers or ants form societies of individuals whose bodies are autonomous. But in regard to being, is this autonomy the final appearance, or is
it simply error? In men, all existence is tied in particular to language, whose terms determine its modes of
appearance within each person. Each person can only represent [their] total existence, if only in [their] own eyes, through
the medium of words. Words spring forth in [their] head, laden with a host of human or superhuman lives in
relation to which [they] privately exists. Being depends on the mediation of words, which cannot
merely present it arbitrarily as "autonomous being," but which must present it profoundly as "being
in relation". One need only follow, for a short time, the traces of the repeated circuits of words to discover, in a
disconcerting vision, the labyrinthine structure of the human being. What is commonly called knowing -
when a [human] knows [their] neighbour - is never anything but existence composed for an instant (in
the sense that all existence composes itself - thus the atom composes its unity from variable electrons ), which once made
of these two beings a whole every bit as real as its parts. A limited number of exchanged phrases, no matter how conventional, sufficed to
create the banal interpenetration of two existing juxtaposed regions. The
fact that after this short exchange the [human] is
aware of knowing [their] neighbour is opposed to a meeting without recognition in the street, as well as
to the ignorance of the multitude of beings that one never meets, in the same way that life is opposed to death. The
knowledge of human beings thus appears as a mode of biological connection, unstable but just as real
as the connections between cells in tissue. The exchange between two human particles in fact possesses the faculty of surviving
momentary separation. A [human] is only a particle inserted in unstable and entangled wholes. These wholes
are composed in personal life in the form of multiple possibilities, starting with a knowledge that is
crossed like a threshold - and the existence of the particle can in no way be isolated from this
composition, which agitates it in the midst of a whirlwind of ephemerids. This extreme instability of
connections alone permits one to introduce, as a puerile but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated
existence turning in on itself. In the most general way, every isolable element of the universe always appears
as a particle that can enter into composition with a whole that transcends it. Being is only found as a
whole composed of particles whose relative autonomy is maintained. These two principles dominate the
uncertain presence of an ipse being across a distance that never ceases to put everything in question.
Emerging in universal play as unforeseeable chance, with extreme dread imperatively becoming the demand for
universality, carried away to vertigo by the movement that composes it, the ipse being that presents itself as
a universal is only a challenge to the diffuse immensity that escapes its precarious violence, the tragic
negation of all that is not its own bewildered phantom's chance. But, as a man, this being falls into the meanders of the
knowledge of [their] fellowmen, which absorbs [their] substance in order to reduce it to a component of what goes beyond the virulent
madness of [their] autonomy in the total night of the world. Abdication and inevitable fatigue - due to the fact that
"being" is, par excellence, that which, desired to the point of dread, cannot be endured - plunge human beings into a
foggy labyrinth formed by the multitude of "acquaintances" with which signs of life and phrases can
be exchanged. But when [they] escapes the dread of "being" through this flight - a "being" that is autonomous
and isolated in night - a [human] is thrown back into insufficiency, at least if [they] cannot find outside of himself the blinding
flash that [they] had been unable to endure within himself, without whose intensity [their] life is but an impoverishment, of which [they] feels
obscurely ashamed. III. THE STRUCTURE OF THE LABYRINTH Emerging out of an inconeivable void into the play of beings, as a lost satellite of
two phantoms (one with a bristly beard, the other softer, her head decorated with a bun), it is in the father and mother who transcend [them]
that the miniscule human being first encountered the illusion of sufficiency. In the complexity and entanglement of wholes, to which the human
particle belongs, this satellite-like mode of existence never entirely disappears. A
particular being not only acts as an element
of a shapeless and structureless whole (a part of the world of unimportant "acquaintances" and chatter), but also
as a peripheral element orbiting around a nucleus where being hardens. What the lost child had found in the self-assured
existence of the all-powerful beings who took care of [them] is now sought by the abadoned [human]
wherever knots and concentrations are formed throughout a vast incoherence. Each particular being delegates to the
group of those situated at the centre of the multitudes the task of realizing the inherent totality of "being". [they] is content to be a part of a
total existence, which even in the simplest cases retains a diffuse character. Thus relatively stable wholes are produced, whose
centre is a city, in its early form a corolla that encloses a double pistil of sovereign and god. In the case where many cities abdicate
their central function in favour of a single city, an empire forms around a capital where sovereignity and the gods
are concentrated; the gravitation around a centre then degrades the existence of peripheral cities, where the organs that constituted the
totality of being wilt. By degrees, a
more and more complex movement of group composition raises to the point
of universality the human race, but it seems that universality, at the summit, causes all existence to
explode and decomposes it with violence. The universal god destroys rather than supports the human
aggregates that raise [their] ghost. [they] himself is only dead, whether a mythical delirium set [them] up to be adored as a cadaver
covered with wounds, or whether through [their] very universality [they] becomes, more than any other, incapable of stopping the loss of being
with the cracked partitions of ipseity. IV. THE MODALITIES OF COMPOSITION AND DECOMPOSITION OF BEING The
city that little by
little empties itself of life, in favour of a more brilliant and attractive city, is the expressive image of
the play of existence engaged in composition. Because of the composing attraction, composition empties
elements of the greatest part of their being, and this benefits the centre - in other words, it benefits composite
being. There is the added fact that, in a given domain, if the attraction of a certain centre is stronger than that of a neighbouring centre, the
second centre then goes into decline. The
action of powerful poles of attraction across the human world thus
reduces, depending on their force of resistance, a multitude of personal beings to the state of empty
shadows, especially when the pole of attraction on which they depend itself declines, due to the action of another more powerful pole.
 Thus if one imagines the effects of an influential current of attraction on a more or less arbitrarily isolated form of activity, a style of clothing
created in a certain city devalues the clothes worn up to that time and, consequently, it devalues those who wear them within the limits of the
influence of this city. This devaluation is stronger if, in a neighbouring country, the fashions of a more brilliant city have already outclassed
those of the first city. The objective character of these relations is registered in reality when the contempt and laughter manifested in a given
centre are not compensated for by anything elsewhere, and when they exert an effective fascination. The effort made on the
periphery to "keep up with fashion" demonstrates the inability of the peripheral particles to exist by
themselves. Laughter intervenes in these value determinations of being as the expression of the circuit of movements of attraction across a
human field. It manifests itself each time a change in level suddenly occurs: it characterizes all vacant lives as ridiculous. A kind of incandescent
joy - the explosive and sudden revelation of the presence of being - is liberated each time a striking appearance is contrasted with its absence,
with the human void. Laughter casts a glance, charged with the mortal violence of being, into the void of being, into the void of life. But
laughter is not only the composition of those it assembles into a unique convulsion; it most often decomposes without consequence, and
sometimes with a virulence that is so pernicious that it even puts in question composition itself, and the wholes across which it functions.
Laughter attains not only the peripheral regions of existence, and its object is not only the existence of fools and children (of those who remain
vacant); through a necessary reversal, it is sent back from the child to its father and from the periphery to the centre, each time the father or
the centre in turn reveals an insufficiency comparable to that of the particles that orbit around it. Such a central insufficiency can be
ritually revealed (in saturnalia or in a festival of the ass as well as in the puerile grimaces of the father amusing [their] child). It
can be revealed by the very action of children or the "poor" each time exhaustion withers and weakens authority,
allowing its precarious character to be seen. In both cases, a dominant necessity manifests itself, and the profound
nature of being is disclosed. Being can complete itself and attain the menacing grandeur of imperative
totality; this accomplishment only serves to project it with a greater violence into the vacant night. The
relative insufficiency of peripheral existences is absolute insufficiency in total existence. Above knowable existences, laughter traverses the
human pyramid like a network of endless waves that renew themselves in all directions. This reverberation convulsion chokes, from one end to
the other, the innumerable being of [human] - opened at the summit by the agony of God in a black night. V. THE MONSTER IN
THE NIGHT OF THE LABYRINTH Being attains the blinding flash in tragic annihilation. Laughter only assumes its
fullest impact on being at the moment when, in the fall that it unleashes, a representation of death is cynically
recognised. It is not only the composition of elements that constitutes the incandescence of being, but its
decomposition in its mortal form. The difference in levels that provokes common laughter - which opposes the lack of an
absurd life to the plenitude of successful being - can be replaced by that which opposes the summit of imperative
elevation to the dark abyss that obliterates all existence. Laughter is thus assumed by the totality of being. Renouncing the
avaricious malice of the scapegoat, being itself, to the extent that it is the sum of existences at the limits of the night, is
spasmodically shaken by the idea of the ground giving way beneath its feet. It is in universality (where, due to solitude, the possibility of
facing death through war appears) that the necessity of engaging in a struggle, no longer with an equal group but with
nothingness, becomes clear. THE UNIVERSAL resembles a bull, sometimes absorbed in the nonchalance of animality and abandoned
to the secret paleness of death, and sometimes hurled by the rage of ruin into the void ceaselessly opened before it by a skeletal torero. But
the void it meets is also the nudity it espouses TO THE EXTENT THAT IT IS A MONSTER lightly assuming many crimes, and it is no longer, like the
bull, the plaything of nothingness, because nothingness itself is its plaything; it only throws itself into nothingness in order to tear it apart and
to illuminate the night for an instant, with an immense laugh - a laugh it never would have attained if this nothingness had not totally opened
beneath its feet.<b>Georges Bataille</b>

I dream to touch the sadness of the world

The bog of unenchant upon the eaves
Ive felt to hand corruptions caudal fur
The night of harrow wood it had elide
And saw this were the sinister you died
I limn it laughing sadness of the world
Lucific crack in mad a thunder scree
Immense in splendor last illumine me
I saw your sad as if a charity
In radiant in night long morphic sheen
And tears the tomb of your infinity
(Georges Bataille)

Brennan, 2015 (Eugene Brennan, Literature and Intoxication: Writing, Politics and the Experience of
Excess, 2015, CP)
Poetry occupies a privileged place in the work of Georges Bataille. Along with a number of recurring signifiers throughout his work, it
suggests a form unproductive expenditure. For Bataille this referred to states or practices which were not
subservient to a future goal or specific purpose. Bataille characterizes eroticism for example, along these lines as a loss of
energy, a loss of self in a moment of intensity, as distinct from the future oriented goals of procreation
or attaining pleasure. Productive expenditure is based on conservation for the future while unproductive
expenditure is all about loss in the present moment, exceeding the servile confines of everyday life. In
an early landmark essay Bataille characterized poetry in these terms a synonymous with expenditure it in fact signifies, in the most
precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore close to that of sacrifice (BAtaille, 2013, p. 120). The type of
poetry envisioned here would have only a secondary relationship to representation and symbolism, and would primarily seek actually
to enact a sacrifice of words, dramatizing moments of loss.
In this chapter I consider the theoretical significance of poetry for bataille in relation to the more obscure and under-examined portion of his
oeuvre occupied by the actual practice of poetry. I focus on the importance of intoxication, particularly as it manifests itself as a loss
of self and as an excess that results, somewhat counter-intuitively, from states of lack, absence, and
dissatisfaction. Intoxication as an experience of absence and loss is frequently precipated by a practice of mourning. Poetry and mourning
often seem to be actually synonymous with intoxication in Batailles thought. Mourning is similarly characterized alongside a disparate group of
other states such as war, games, cults and perverse sexual activity as activities which at least in primitive circimstances have no end beyong
themselves. In at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves, In Batailles schema these states are privileged moments
when servility towards either the future, the world of work, or any form of production is ruptured.
Mourning and poetry are thus considered here as instigators of intoxication, a state of excess perhaps more usually considered from a vitalist or
hedonist position of presence and plentitude, filling up the emptiness and sense of lack rather than accentuating and intensifying it. Where
Bataille often linked alcohol-induced drunkenness wit the inebriation induced by religious experience, he was at the same time highly critical of
hedomism and mysticism. For Batialle, the hedonist is enslaved to the future in the form of attaining pleasure
just as the Christian is enslaved do the hope of salvation. Bataille, rather searches for states which intensify the present
moment in all its anguish, obliterating concern for both past and present. If the mystic has a vision of God and the future, Batailles
mysticism, an experience of the sacred he reffered to as inner experience, renounces the traditional objects
and external authorities of mysticism. It begins from and intensifies, a state of dissatisfaction. If I describe the
experience I had on that day, he clafiries, it is because it had a partly lacking character (BAtialle, 1972, p 133). As opposed to implications of
plentitude of fullness normally inferred from experience, the type of experience he is attempting to communicate is one based on lack and
absence. FOrthernore its
only authority is not God, as traditional mysticism, but the continuous putting into
question of all authority, including itself. The writing of such an experience would seem to be a betrayal of its object then,
through it is presicely these sorts of contradictions and tensions which interest us. Mysticism without God and intoxication without alcohol are
aligned for Bataille with a poetry that negates itself. He advocates
a poetry which would profess a hatred of poetry
meaning a disdain for mere aesthetics and beauty, as well as representation and symbolism. Poetry is conceived here as
a sacrifice of itself.