Aff Bataille

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Bataille’s Peak Affirmative – Sam Gelb and Jeffrey Xu 1
Bataille’s Peak Affirmative

Sam Gelb and Jeffrey Xu
Bataille for Aff
Bataille’s Peak Affirmative..............................................................................................................................................................................................................1
Bataille’s Peak 1AC.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................3
Bataille’s Peak 1AC.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................10
Disads 2AC....................................................................................................................................................................................................................................16
Framework 2AC.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................17
AT Framework...............................................................................................................................................................................................................................20
T – Alternative Energy 2AC..........................................................................................................................................................................................................21
AT Limits.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................24
Technology  Anthro....................................................................................................................................................................................................................25
Technology Prevents Net Energy...................................................................................................................................................................................................26
Technology  Exploitation...........................................................................................................................................................................................................27
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................27
Goal-Directed Technology  Expenditure With Reserve ............................................................................................................................................................28
Alternative Energy  Labor Exploitation.....................................................................................................................................................................................30
Traditional Alternative Energy  Exploitation.............................................................................................................................................................................31
Traditional Alternative Energy  Genocide.................................................................................................................................................................................33
Technology Doesn’t Solve.............................................................................................................................................................................................................34
AT Consumerism Solves Expenditure...........................................................................................................................................................................................35
AT Incentives Bad..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................39
Life is Energy.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................40
Finitude Economy Impact..............................................................................................................................................................................................................42
Nuclear War Impact.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................45
Capitalism Internal.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................51
Capitalism Internal.........................................................................................................................................................................................................................53
Capitalism Impact..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................54
Environment Internal.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................55
Environment Internal.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................56
Expenditure Solves Social Inequality............................................................................................................................................................................................57
Expenditure Affirms Life...............................................................................................................................................................................................................58
Human Expenditure Good.............................................................................................................................................................................................................60
Human Expenditure Good.............................................................................................................................................................................................................62
AT Expenditure is Destructive.......................................................................................................................................................................................................63
.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................63
Predictions Bad..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................64
Predictions Bad..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................65
Traditional Economic Analysis Bad..............................................................................................................................................................................................66
Utility Epistemology Bad..............................................................................................................................................................................................................67
AT Heidegger.................................................................................................................................................................................................................................68
AT Empire......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................69
AT Empire......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................71
AT Marxism...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................73
AT Marxism...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................74
AT Nietzsche..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................75
AT Lacan........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................76
Net Energy Bad..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................77
Expenditure Without Reserve Bad.................................................................................................................................................................................................79
Capitalism Turn..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................83
Negative Bataille K........................................................................................................................................................................................................................84
Northwestern University Debate Society

National Debate Tournament Champions
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.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................84
1NC Shell.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................85
1NC Shell.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................87
1NC Shell.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................88
1NC Shell.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................89
1NC Shell.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................91
AT Permutation..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................92

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Bataille’s Peak 1AC

We live today in the world of Hubbert’s peak – the fossil fuel economy as we know it and its
accompanying lifestyle face inevitable collapse. The new dream is a sustainable future, one in
which new forms of energy technology and a morality of conservation allows us to maintain our
current way of life.
Stoekl 07 (Allan, professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University, Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion
and Postsustainability, Pg 118 – 120) JXu
But first: the problem of scarcity The current moment, the first decade of the new millennium, in which we are attempting to
think excess and waste, strangely mirrors that of 1949. Not because we are living amid the ruins of war, but because we face
the imminent depletion of fossil fuel resources: what has come to be known as “Hubbert’s peak.” In short, petroleum
geologist M. King Hubbert predicted, in the 1960s, a peak in global oil production for the latter decades of the twentieth
century. Hubbert’s model entailed applying a bell-curve model, used in predicting the rise and fall in production of oil fields,
to world oil production—the projection, in other words, of a model useful for local analysis onto first a national and then a
global scale. Hubbert’s 1956 prediction of a peak in U.S. oil production was accurate to within one year (1970—71). The
chilling lesson of the bell curve is that once production peaks, it declines as rapidly as it increased. There is nothing the
“Empire,” the globalized world economic system, can do to enable the earth (nature) to produce energy
commensurate with its ever-increasing demands. This is the greatest irony: following Hubbert, at least, we can say that
energy production will decrease in tandem with a world increase in demand for energy—for a while, at least (Hem-
berg 2004, 174—79). This time, in other words, the shortages will not be temporary and easily remedied: we face
instead a steady, progressive decline in the availability of resources, a decline that will condition all social life in this
century. As Richard Heinberg puts it: If [it) were indeed the case—that world petroleum production would soon no longer
be able to keep up with demand—it should have been the most important news item of the dawning century, perhaps
dwarfing even the atrocities of September 11. Oil was what had made 20th century industrialism possible; it was the
crucial material that had given the US its economic and technological edge.. . . if world production of oil could no
longer expand, the global economy would be structurally imperiled. The implications were staggering. (2003,86) We
need not concern ourselves here with why this story has been largely ignored in the mainstream media; this is a matter more
for psychologists and sociologists than for social theorists. More important arc the implications: that the more or less
constant growth in productivity, production, and profits the world experienced over the last century, tracked with a
commensurate population increase, based as both were on increases in energy production, is nearing its end.3 This is
the state that Heinberg dubs “Powerdown”: “energy famine,” a progressive, steep decline in wealth corresponding to the
former steep increase, along with the attendant social upheavals implied by this decline. How to respond? Clearly, lowered
expectations are in order, or so it seems. “Sustainability” becomes the mantra of all who would respond to economic
decline: sustainability literally means the sustaining of an economy at a certain, appropriate level. This in turn implies not
just the conservation of energy resources but their utilization in such a way that they will never be depleted. As much
energy will be used as can be produced, indefinitely. Whether sustainability in a literal sense is even comprehensible is
another question. Sustainable for how long? At what level of consumption, decided upon by whom? Is a permanently
sustainable economy even conceivable? As if sustainability were somehow a Kojèvian end of history, beyond all flux,
transposed onto the realm of resource use. . Clearly, this dream of sustainability is very different from the current
energy regime, which is not sustainable following anyone’s definition of sustainability: since all fossil fuel reserves are
finite, limited, their use at current levels cannot be sustained. It will eventually end. This means that another energy
regime must be established in place of that of the fossil fuels; in order to provide in principle a consistent energy
return ad infinitum some sacrifices will clearly have to be made. Solar power, theoretically, can provide energy
indefinitely, as can wind power; all other sources are limited. But, as Heinberg notes, the amount of energy these sources
can provide is much more modest than that delivered by the burning of enormous—but very limited—quantities of oil and
coal.5 Thus sacrifice—not in the glorious sense advocated by Bataille, but in that of “making do, doing without” (the slogan
of World War II rationing).6 “Sustainability” has for this reason become synonymous with a certain morality, one that
implies the renunciation of easy pleasure and the embrace of scarcity. A grim determination, blessed by a certain
religious tradition, replaces the irresponsibility of the fossil fuel era. Thus Lisa H. Newton’s Ethics and Sustainability:
Sustainable Development and the Moral Life (2003) makes clear the connection between survival in a world of scarcity and
the discovery of a vocation. She cites the example of the upwardly striving yuppie whose house and garage are full of
professional-grade accoutrements, each of them appropriate for a life never really lived—for show, in other words (88). In the

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same vein, there is the automobile, purchased not for practical transportation but for living out the multiple fantasies of what
one would (sequentially) like to be. Half the automobile advertisements you can think of describe not the services of the car
or (especially) the SUV but, as it were, the disservices how it makes you feel proud; how it towers over the other cars on the
block, intimidating the owners; how it makes you feel like you’re ramming through the bushes, wrecking the ground cover,
destroying mountains; how it, in short, encourages all the anti-social, proud, sinful, and perverse motivations you can access.
(82) Newton counsels simplicity then, not only as a way of saving the earth— not buying SUVs will help save the
environment—but as a kind of vocation that will allow us to discover our “authentic” selfhood (90). Once we have stripped
away the blind consumption, the effort to be everything to everybody and nothing to ourselves, we come to discover
who we really are: our vocation. “The vocation is the ultimate simplifier of life, because it identifies the one thing that we
should be doing and being” (89). Following Aristotle, we acquire the virtues—compassion, courage—by performing them;
eventually they will become second nature (87).

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Conservation is not the answer – some form of sustainability is inevitable, but the status quo’s
particular form of sustainability through a “powerdown” of society will not only fail to capture the
attraction of the public but also falls again into the same traps of an economy of scarcity. Instead,
we should affirm expenditure without reserve. The question is not how much energy is spent but
how we spend it. Our expenditure is an intimate one that affirms a life without austere restraint.
It should not be surprising that sustainability and autonomism are two versions of essentially the same mode of
“challenging” (in the Heideggerian sense). They are both technological solutions to the dread of human temporality and
mortality. Both entail an ideally stable subject that conceives of a natural world as a collection of resources at Man’s
disposal. The only difference is that the autonomist world is one that emphasizes speed, movement, consumption, and
destruction, while the sustainable one stresses consumption, conservation, and recycling. In both cases the standing reserve
is there, at the ready; raw materials are there to be used for Man’s survival and comfort. Both exist to procure for Man a
certain emotional state that is deemed to be morally superior: autonomism supposes a joy in the heedless exercise of
individual will (“freedom”), sustainability supposes a dogged contentment through renunciation and the sense of
superiority engendered by a virtuous feeling of restraint. In both cases the human self as overweening, protected,
permanent jewel is inextricably bound to the destiny of all matter. Bataillean generosity from this perspective is
unthinkable. All matter is capable of taking, and holding, beautiful or significant or quantifiable shape; all energy can
be refined and concentrated so that it can do “work.”The universe wears a frock coat, as Bataille put it in “Formless”:
What [the word “formless”] designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an
earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal:
it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is a mathematical frock coat. (OC, 1:217; yE, 31) I suppose if I were given a
choice between the two versions of the world picture, I would pick the sustainable one because it is, well, sort of sustainable
—in principle, anyway. In an era of fossil fuel depletion, in any case, we will get sustainability, voluntarily or
involuntarily. And certainly planning sustainability in the mode of “powerdown” (Heinberg 2004) is preferable to resource
wars and unevenly distributed depletion. Believing in a completely sustainable (unchanging) world is, however, akin to
believing in a coherent God. But unless one derives grim satisfaction from renouncing things and contentment with a
sense of how much one has had to give up, sustainability as conceived by Newton, for example, is always bound to come
out second best. That is why, as long as refined fossil fuels are cheap and no one has to think too much about the
future, the suburbs will always win out over, say, sustainable cohousing.” An environmentalism that promises only a
beautiful smallness, or a “prosperous way down,” is bound to have little appeal in a culture—and not just the American
culture—that values space, movement, and a personal narrative of continuous improvement and freedom (financial, sexual,
experiential)—even if those versions of the “tendency to expend” remain in thrall to the self as ultimate signified. Where
does that leave Bataille’s future? Recall our analysis of The Accursed Share in chapter 2: the Marshall Plan would save
the world from nuclear war not because it was the goal of the plan to do so, but because the aftereffect of “spending
without return” is the affirmation of a world in which resources can be squandered differently: the alternative is
World War III. The world is inadvertently sustained, so to speak, and the glory of spending can go on: this is what
constitutes the ethics of “good expenditure.” Now of course we can say, from today’s perspective, that Bataille was naive,
that the “gift-giving” engaged in by the United States under Harry Truman was a cynical attempt to create a bloc favorable to
its own economic interests, thereby saving Europe for capitalism and aligning it against the Soviet Union in any future war—
and that was probably the case. But Bataille himself was perfectly aware of the really important question: after all, as he
himself puts it, “Today Truman would appear to be blindly preparing for the final—and secret—apotheosis”(OC, 7: 179; AS,
190). Blindly. Even if Bataille may have been mistaken about Truman, who after all was giving the gift of oil-powered
technological superiority, the larger point he is making remains valid: giving escapes the intentions of its “author.” What is
important is gift-giving itself, and the good or bad (or selfish) intentions of the giver are virtually irrelevant. What counts,
in other words, is how one spends, not what one hopes to accomplish by it. Intentionality, with its goals proposed by a
limited and biased self; reveals its limits. Derrida noted in his famous controversy with Jean-Luc Marion about gifting that
there can never be a real gift because the intentions of the giver can never be completely unselfish.12 Thus the very idea of
the gift is incoherent: a completely unselfish gift could not be given, because it would be entirely without motive. It could not
even be designated as a gift. To give is to intentionally hand something over, and as soon as there is intention there is motive.
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One always hopes to get or accomplish something. But, as Marion would counter, there is a gifting that escapes the
(inevitable) intentions of the giver and opens another economy and another ethics. This is a gift that, past a certain
point, always defies the giver. Of course, one “knows” what one is giving, there are criteria for the evaluation of the gift—
but then that knowledge is lost in non-knowledge. The left hand never really knows what the right is doing. Nor does the
right necessarily know what it is doing, for that matter. The ethics of The Accursed Share: by giving, instead of spending
for war, we inadvertently spare the world and thus make possible ever more giving. Energy is squandered in the
production of wealth rather than in nuclear destruction. As we have seen, however, Bataille never adequately
distinguishes between modes of spending and modes of energy. Heidegger does: quantified, stockpiled energy has as its
corollary a certain objectified subjectivity, a certain model of utility associated both with the object and with the self
Another spending, another “bringing-forth” is that of the ritual object, which (even though Heidegger does not stress it)
entails another energy regime: not the hoarding and then the programmed burning-off of quantified energy, but
energy release in a ritual that entails the ecstatic and anguished movements of the mortal, material body. If we read Bataille
from a Heideggerian perspective, we can therefore propose another giving, another expenditure. This one too will not,
cannot, know what it is doing, but it will be consonant with the post-Sadean conceptions of matter and energy that Bataille
develops in his early writings. Bataille’s alternative to the standing reserve is virulent, unlike Heidegger’s, no doubt
because Bataille, following Sade, emphasizes the violence of the energy at play in ritual. Bataille’s world is intimate, and
through this intimacy it gains a ferocity lacking in Heidegger’s cool and calm chalice or windmill (though both represent, in
different ways, the lavish expenditure of unproductive energy). Bataille’s matter now is certainly not quantified, stockpilable;
it is a “circular agitation” that risks, rather than preserves, the self. Through contact with this energy-charged matter, and the
non- knowledge inseparable from it, the dominion of the head, of reason, of man’s self-certainty, is overthrown: God doubts
himself, reveals his truth to be that of atheism; the human opens him- or herself to the other, communicates in eroticism, in
the agony of death, of atheistic sacrifice. Just as in The Accursed Share, where the survival of the planet will be the
unforeseen, unintended consequence of a gift-giving (energy expenditure) oriented not around a weapons buildup but
around a squandering (giveaway) of wealth, so too in the future we can posit sustainability as an unintended
aftereffect of a politics of giving. Such a politics would entail not a cult of resource conservation and austere selfhood but,
instead, a sacrificial practice of exalted expenditure and irresistible glory Energy expenditure, fundamental to the human
(the human as the greatest burner of energy of all the animals), would be flaunted on the intimate level, that of the body,
that of charged filth. The object would not be paraded as something useful, something that fulfills our needs; its
virulence would give the lie to all attempts at establishing and guaranteeing the dominion of the imperial self.

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The core principle of economics is consumption and expenditure, not production. The endpoint of
an economics that instead bases itself on scarcity is massive thermonuclear war because it fails to
recognize the proper role of expenditure – the burn-off of surplus energy to avoid an accumulation
to critical mass. Survival is the unintended consequence of our expenditure without regard for
conservation or utility.
Bataille does, then, implicitly face the question of carrying capacity. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is nuclear war.
The modern economy, according to Bataille, does not recognize the possibility of excess and therefore limits; the
Protestant, and then the Marxist, ideal is to reinvest all excess back into the productive process, always augmenting output in
this way. “Utility” in this model ends up being perfectly impractical: only so much output can be reabsorbed into the
ever-more-efficient productive process. As in the case with Tibet, ultimately the excess will have to be burned off. This
can happen either peacefully, through various postcapitalist mechanisms that Bataille recommends, such as the
Marshall Plan, which will shift growth to other parts of the world, or violently and apocalyptically through the
ultimate in war: nuclear holocaust. One can see that, in the end, the world itself will be en vase clos, fully developed, with
no place for the excess to go. The bad alternative—nuclear holocaust—will result in the ultimate reduction in carrying
capacity: a burned-out, depopulated earth. Humanity is, at the same time, through industry, which uses energy for the
development of the forces of production, both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the infinite faculty for
burnoff in pure loss (facilite infinie de consumation en pure perte]. (OC. 7: 170; AS, 181) Modern war is first of all a
renunciation: one produces and amasses wealth in order to overcome a foe. War is an adjunct to economic expansion;
it is a practical use of excessive forces. And this perhaps is the ultimate danger of the present-day (1949) buildup of
nuclear arms: armament, seemingly a practical way of defending one’s own country or spreading one’s own values, in
other words, of growing, ultimately leads to the risk of a “pure destruction” of excess—and even of carrying capacity In
the case of warfare, destructiveness is masked, made unrecognizable, by the appearance of an ultimate utility: in this case the
spread of the American economy and the American way of life around the globe. Paradoxically, there is a kind of self-
consciousness concerning excess, in the “naïve” society—which recognizes expenditure for what it is (in the form of
unproductive glory in primitive warfare)— and a thorough ignorance of it in the modem one, which would always attempt
to put waste to work (“useful” armaments) even at the cost of wholesale destruction. Bataille, then, like Le Blanc, can be
characterized as a thinker of society who situates his theory in the context of ecological limits. From Bataille’s perspective,
however, there is always too much rather than too little, given the existence of ecological (“natural”) and social (“cultural”)
limits. The “end” of humankind, its ultimate goal, is thus the destruction of this surplus. While Le Blanc stresses war and
sacrifice as a means of obtaining or maintaining what is essential to bare human (personal, social) survival, Bataille
emphasizes the maintenance of limits and survival as mere preconditions for engaging in the glorious destruction of excess.
The meaning of the limit and its affirmation is inseparable from the senselessness of its transgression in expenditure (la
dépense). By seeing warfare as a mere (group) survival mechanism, Le Blanc makes the same mistake as that made by the
supporters of a nuclear buildup; he, like they, sees warfare as practical, serving a purpose, and not as the sheer burn-off it
really is. If, however, our most fundamental gesture is the destruction of a surplus, the production of that surplus must
be seen as subsidiary. Once we recognize that everything cannot be saved and reinvested, the ultimate end (and most
crucial problem) of our existence becomes the disposal of excess wealth (concentrated, nonusable energy). All other
activity leads to something else, is a means to some other end; the only end that leads nowhere is the act of destruction by
which we may—or may not—assure our (personal) survival (there is nothing to guarantee that radical destruction—
consumation—does not turn on its author). We work in order to spend. We strive to produce sacred (charged) things, not
practical things. Survival and reproduction alone are not the ultimate ends of human existence. We could characterize
Bataille for this reason as a thinker of ecology who nevertheless emphasizes the primacy of an ecstatic social act (destruct
ion). By characterizing survival as a means not an end (the most fundamental idea in “general economy”), expenditure
for Bataille becomes a limitless, insubordinate act—a real end (that which does not lead outside itself). I follow Bataille
in this primacy of the delirium of expenditure over the simple exigency of personal or even social survival (Le Blanc). This
does not preclude, however, a kind of ethical aftereffect of Bataille’s expenditure: survival for this reason can be read
as the fundamentally unintentional consequence of expenditure rather than its purpose. Seeing a nuclear buildup as

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the wrong kind of expenditure—because it is seen as a means not an end—can lead, in Bataille’s view, to a rethinking
of the role of expenditure in the modern world and hence, perhaps, the world’s (but not modernity’s) survival.

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Thus we affirm: The United States federal government should substantially increase alternative
energy incentives in the United States.

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Energy is at the basis of all human activity. In the face of consumer culture in which energy from
fossil fuels is wastefully consumed, our answer is not austere conservation. Instead we advocate
profligate expenditure, but a different form of expenditure that refigures the scale of society,
opening the possibility of a civilization that doesn’t rely on the constant technological exploitation
of the Earth that seeks ever new sources of “alternative” energy. Our expenditure is of energy that
has no utility, serves no useful purpose to consumer society.
and Postsustainability, Pg xiii – xvi) JXu
The French writer Georges Bataille (1897 – 1962) put forward a social model that sees religion and human existence as
inextricable, and the religious experience – sacrifice – as entailing the profligate wastage of energy. But therein lie the
central questions: Which religion? And which energy? This book is about Bataille’s take on these issues and my version of
what Bataille’s take would be if it were extrapolated to the twenty-first century. Bataille died a long time ago, ages ago it
seems, but one can perhaps rewrite him, all the while recognizing certain limitations of his approach, in an attempt to
understand the possibilities of the future in a post-fossil fuel era. That’s what I try to do in this book. Bataille is hardly the last
word on anything, but he is rare – in fact, unique – among twentieth-century thinkers in that he put energy at the forefront of
his thinking of society: we are energy, our very being consists of the expenditure of quantities of energy. In this Bataille
anticipates scientists like Howard Odum, who in a very precise way calculate the amounts of energy that go into a given
product, a given lifestyle, and so on (and calculate as well how we can work to make the processes of production and
consumption more efficient, given the scarcity of recoverable fuels). But Bataille is about more than simply quantifying
energy; indeed, his approach both sees energy at the basis of all human activity, of the human, and puts into question
the dominion of quantifiable, usable energy. That is precisely where religion comes in, since God, or religious
“experience,” entails not purposive activity – the kind that would involve energy supplies quantified then used with a goal in
mind – but rather activity of the instant that leads nowhere, has no use, and is unconditioned by the demands of anyone or
anything else: sovereign, in Bataille’s sense. Such sovereign activity involves an energy resistant to easy use – the
unleashing of an energy that is characterized (if that is the word) by its insubordination to human purposes, its defiance
of the very human tendency to refine its easy use. My consideration of Bataille, then, will necessarily involve a critique of
the notions of energy and religion that characterize our epoch – an epoch in for some interesting times as cheaply
available energy from fossil fuels grows scarcer and scarcer. It will attempt to imagine how other notions of energy and
religion will provide an alternative means of living in an era in which the truth of fossil fuel, and revealed religion,
comes into question. Another model of spending, based on what Bataille called an “economy on the scale of the
universe,” seems appropriate at a time when a certain human profligacy has revealed itself to be an ecological and
cultural dead end. Bataille’s importance, however, stems from the fact that he puts forward a model of society that does
not renounce profligate spending, but affirms it. What is affirmed, however, is a different spending – a different
energy, a different religion – and that difference perhaps means the difference between the simple meltdown of
civilization and its possible continuation, but on a very different “scale.” On the other hand, an ever more
counterproductive orientation will assert itself in the years ahead. Such an orientation sees energy as an adjunct of, at
best, a certain humanism: we spend to establish and maintain our independent, purpose-driven selves, our freedom as
consumers, spenders of certain (rather lavish, given available reserves) quantities of refined energy. This model is doubly
humanistic in that not only is the beneficiary the “free” self of Man; the human spirit itself is incessantly invoked to get us
out of the jam. We are told over and over again that the human mind alone produces energy: when reserves are short,
there is always a genius who comes along and devises some technology that turns things around, makes even more
energy available, and so on. Technology transcends energy, in other words, and reflects the human mind’s infinite ability to
derive energy from virtually nothing. We always find more efficient ways to derive energy from available fuels, and in doing
so, we always are able to produce more fuel to produce more and higher quality energy. James Watt’s steam engine was first
used to drain coal mines, producing more goal, which in turn could be used by more (and more efficient) steam engines to
produce transportation (steam trains), electricity, and so on. And petroleum, an even more productive and efficient source of
energy, replaced coal, and it will no doubt soon be replaced by something else, yet to be discovered. At this point, we move
from a historical account to a kind of uncritical faith in the capacity of human genius. Fossil fuels, then, entail a double
humanism: they are burned to serve, to magnify, to glorify the human or (what amounts to the same thing) the human in the
automobile (“freedom,” “happiness,” etc.) as transcendental referent, and they are produced solely through the free exercise
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of the mind and will. One can argue that the religion that confronts the fossil-fuel driven civilization of Man is equally
grounded in the demands of a human subjectivity. People demand salvation, an ultimate purpose for which they are
consuming so much fuel: I spend, or waste, so that I will ultimately be saved. Conversely, energy inputs are available
because God has blessed me with them; the faithful are rewarded with a healthy, fertile, and energy-rich environment. God is
the ultimate meaning of all that I think and do. There is no distinction between my personal belief and belief sanctioned by
society, derived from a literal reading of a holy Book. In order to give this version of religious belief even more authority, law
is grounded not in man but in God himself; literalism serves as a satisfying alternative to humanism. Against this energetic-
theological model is arrayed an ecoreligion, one that would defy the “comfortable” or “free” (and nonnegotiable)
lifestyle of consumerist humanism, not through a recognition of the literal truth of the divine Word but through a
religiously inspired cult of austerity, simplicity, and personal virtue. Such a cult refuses certain basic human urges to
consume or destroy, and in the process involves the affirmation of yet another humanism (the self as virtuous in its
austerity) and, after consumer profligacy, yet another model of nature as a standing reserve to be protected largely for its
value to Man. Fossil fuel civilization, then, and its antitheses or antidotes. Man and/or God as ultimate referent: a couple
we can expect to hear more from in the coming years. Bataille poses a very different model of the interrelation of energy
and religion. This is not to say, however, that the spending Bataille examines somehow replaces or is more fundamental,
more originary, than the consumerist or religious models it confronts. Instead we might say that Bataille’s vision is the
underside, the ungraspable double that has been there from the first effort of the human, that it asserts itself precisely at the
moment in which the finitude of the human manifests itself through the recognition of the limits of fossil fuel energy itself.
Bataille’s energy and religion are not an alternative; they promise nothing for the future, certainly no salvation,
although their aftereffect may entail a future more livable—by whom?—than that promised under the signs of God or Man.

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The affirmative is a map for a postsustainable future, a guide for a new politics that embraces the
proper role of energy – energy a necessarily expended surplus playing no purposeful, useful role. A
revolution in thinking about energy is critical to shape the future path of globalization to
transform economies of finitude into economies of expenditure without reserve.
Ruckh 04 ( Eric W. Prof. Southern Illinois University Ph.D., University of California) "Theorizing Globalization: at the
intersection of Bataille 's Solar Economy , DeLillo 's Underworld, and Hardt 's and Negri 's Empire "pg. 117 - 132
One consequence of this application of Bataille to the issue of globalization is that globalization is not to be summarily
resisted. Globalization creates opportunities for new experiences of identity and social formation; it does so by
changing the ways in which energy is wasted. Recall that for Bataille, humanity is a consequence of solar excess. Human
activity puts energy, stored and restricted on the globe, back into motion. Bataille writes, "The energy freed in him blossoms
and is shown without end in useless splendor" (Bataille VII, 14). One must see the new hierarchies and restrictions created by
globalization as opportunities for even greater expenditure. "The excess of energy," Bataille argues, "could not be freed it it
had itself first not been seized" (Bataille VI, 14). Globalization is both a change in production and expenditure. If
Bataille beckons us to see the new global concentrations of wealth as opportunities for waste, then he also challenges
us to make manifold new ways in which to waste. We must waste in a glorious, splendid fashion, according to Bataille.
In other words, Bataille forces us to see the problem of globalization in a new way: we must resist and struggle against
servile, unconscious manners of wasting energy and attempt to reactivate communal, conscious and sovereign
operations of waste. "Essentially," Bataille claims. "Human being is charged here to expend in glory that which the
earth accumulated, what the sun produced' (Bataille VII. 16). While our attention is diverted to questions of
production and labor, work and necessity. Bataille's gaze shifts to "practices of glorious expenditure, for there, tragically,
lay the grandeur and the sense of human being" (Bataille VII. 16). Such a "Copernican revolution" in viewing and
talking about globalization will have consequences across a domain of registers: from the philosophical through the
historical and political and on to the pedagogic. Bataille can help us develop some of those consequences, particularly as it concerns the
political and historical consequences of globalization. In his essay, "The Psychological Structure of Fascism"(1933), Bataille employs the terms
heterogeneous to refer to practices of expenditure- to the zone of experience which has no end other than itself—and homogeneous to refer to practices of
production—to the zone of experience governed by exchanged, to all things that can be a means to something else. The heterogeneous is roughly
synonymous with the realms of excess and expenditure and the homogeneous is roughly equivalent to the realms of production and utility. Human existence
is stretched across both zones. Of the homogeneous, Bataille writes The common denominator, the foundation of social homogeneity and the .activity
arising from it is money, namely, the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves to measure all work and
makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogeneous society, each man is worth
what he produces; in other words he stops being an existence for itself: he is no more than a function. (Bataille I. 340:
Visions of Fxt. 338, italics mine) To be a function- —this, for Bataille, is the essence of servility. Human beings, reduced
to servility, are incapable of generating the meaning and sense of their own lives. The homogenous stands in opposition to the
heterogeneous: "The [...] heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate" Bataille 1. 344: Visions, 1401. Because the
heterogeneous realm cannot be reduced or used as a means it exists for itself: this quality allows these practices to become the grounds of meaning and
values. Heterogeneous existence is directive according to Bataille. So during a time of economic crisis, during a period of transition in (he productive or
homogeneous sphere. the outcome of that crisis will be determined by the heterogeneous. Bataille writes: T he mode of resolving acute economic
contradictions depends upon both the historical state and the general laws of the heterogeneous social region in which effervescence acquires its positive
form: it depends in particular upon the relations established between the various formations of this region I The heterogeneous l when homogeneous society
finds itself materially dissociated. The study of homogeneity and of the conditions of its existence thus necessarily leads to the essential study of
heterogeneity. The history of economic transformation, the history of homogeneous social existence is determined then by a shadow world, by a series of
relationships, struggles and operations that untold in an "underworld." The history we know (Marxist or liberal) is but an illusion, a veil of Maya. drawn over
our eyes, for a secret history is determining our fate. That history is a history of waste: of everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred things
themselves form part of this whole) (... I included arc the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash. vermin. etc.): the parts of
the human body: persons, words or acts having a suggestive erotic value: the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses: the numerous
elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of
violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.) (Bataille 1. 346: Visions, 142). Relations established and unfolding
amongst these heterogeneous zones of human experience shape our lives, even if we tend to think that they arc of secondary importance. What we are
experiencing then as globalization is the result of the preponderance of certain forms of heterogeneity. If we are to change the shape of
globalization, if we are to intersect and redirect the transformation of economic and social life, then we must
reactivate different modes of experience of the heterogeneous. We must delve into "the underworld." In order to
understand the currents of our contemporary political situation then we must have sonic familiarity with the conflicts within
the realm of the heterogeneous. We must base a "map" of the positions and (he strengths of heterogeneous practices:
this map must be temporal. we must a have sense of the growth and diminution, of the struggles and alliances,

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amongst the heterogeneous. Few formal. disciplinary histories will give us access to the strategic situation within the heterogeneous realm. When
history fails us. There are other resources available. Don DeLillo's novel. Underworld (1997). presents a history of the underworld of the United States
during the second half of the Twentieth Century. I consider it to be an alternative history of the Cold War, in which DeLillo shows that the course of
American history is played out between two poles of the heterogeneous: between waste and war, between refuse and the hydrogen bomb. Between these two
ends of the heterogeneous, other heterogeneous forms emerge, most spectacularly in the form of the game, represented in the novel by the famous baseball
that Bobby Thompson hit out the park to give the game to the Giants over the Dodgers. In a way, everyone in the novel is seeking an alternative to war and
destruction on the one hand and hidden, privatized and forgotten refuse on the other: that quest for a balance. for a response to the fundamental demands of
waste and excess is symbolized by the quest for Hobby Thompson's homerun ball. Everyone's lives are determined by the interplay of
these heterogeneous forces: what to do with the waste of consumer culture, what to do about the bomb, and what to do
about the game. DeLillo shows that much of American history turns around these poles. This literary account of recent American history gives us a first
approximation of the tendencies and strengths of various heterogeneous elements in American life. DeLillo's account of history closely parallels Bataille’s.
Both argue that expenditure is the primary motivation of human existence. Del.illo writes. Cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the
decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges [...] But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into
every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual [... ] People were compelled to develop an organized response. This
meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers.

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It is ultimately impossible to know what the post-fossil fuel world holds in store for us. However,
this unknowability isn’t an excuse to do nothing. We should affirm the future and will a world of
unreserved expenditure and deny the predictions of massive die-off and a return to feudal
economies.
What can we know of the future? Some would argue that, inevitably, the return to a solar economy is a return to a
feudal economy, with all the exploitation and horror that that implies (Perelman 1981). The sun’s energy harvested on
Earth in its intensity can never match that concentrated in fossil fuel; since the energy provided by the sun is so much less, we
can ultimately foresee the replacement of energy slaves by real slaves. Traditional slavery was merely a crude but effective
way of appropriating an energy output from biomass (crops, wood), in order to free small numbers of people from the
necessity of the expenditure of their own muscular energy: without engines, without appliances and the electricity that runs
them, other people will again provide the energy. And most people, no doubt, will provide their own energy: this is called
grinding poverty.35 Many predict, as fossil fuel production declines, the breakdown of society, population die-off, the
return of earlier social modes (Price 1995). And a number of authors recently have been concerned with the methods
we might use to avoid, forestall, or prevent this decline. (Odum and Odum 2001; Heinberg 2004). But others see a
decline, a downfall, as inevitable (Kunstier 2005b). No matter how we prepare, how we attempt to anticipate a time
when there is little energy at the easy disposal of each citizen, we may very well face an intolerable decline in our
civilization. I would argue that while cheap energy is not the sole cause of the fabulous increase in population and wealth
that the world has seen in the last century and a half, it is nevertheless inseparable from it. Bataille, in The Accursed Share,
has indicated, correctly I think, the centrality of energy and its “uses” (or wastage) to the establishment and maintenance
of any cultural formation. Likewise, the depletion of cheap energy will be inseparable from a return to a “sensation of
time,” to bodily expenditure (not least as “work”), and a charged, insubordinate matter. But at the same time it is the very
“cursedness,” the unknowability, of this matter that prevents its incorporation in a simple reverse dialectic. We cannot
simply flip over the dialectic and predict a decline where previously there had been an advance. Our right hands don’t
know. The death of Man, of the certainties of Law and hierarchy, the atheism of God himself, the known finitude of
“useful” energy, indicate that the unknowable future will not be conceivable as the simple downside of a bell curve, the
simple disarticulation of a social dialectic, moving us backward from globalization to monopoly capital, from there to
robber baron exploitation, from there to feudalism, centrally organized agriculture (employing slaves), and then
maybe even back further, to a hunter-gatherer society. We cannot assume that we will be forced into any given social
regime by any given energy regime. The moment of depletion is the fall of knowledge, of utility of meaning “built up”
through successive certainties. It will not necessarily entail a fundamentalist unity of God and creation (as I have tried to
show), or a rationalist governance in which every “tendency to expend” is analyzed, known, and controlled for the benefit of
Man. What separates the downside of the bell curve from the upside, then, is not only the refusal of any easy
prediction, but also the fact of knowledge. Non-knowledge is not simple ignorance, but the following-through of the
consequences of attained knowledge; in our case, this implies a full understanding of the energy regime of modernity,
the benefits and pitfalls of rationalism and humanism. Reason, as applied to the understanding and governance of society,
will not simply be forgotten. As we saw in The Accursed Share, the highest knowledge of society is the consequence of
following through a reasoned analysis and understanding of societal drives, both rational and profoundly irrational, to their
end. By the same token, however, non-knowledge means the impossibility of predicting a practical future whose sole
beneficiary or victim is Man. A society that recognizes that the ultimate signified (God, Man) is heterogeneous in the most
basic sense of the term is one that recognizes that its own impulses are both inescapable and profoundly gratuitous.
Following Bataille, we can argue that the future, the fall into the void of certainties (God, Man, quantifiable and usable
energy) may lead to another kind of spending, “on the scale of the universe,” which, in spite of itself, would entail what
I have called postsustainability. We do not know; what is clear is that one kind of matter, one energy, one plenitude, is
dying, another, monstrous, already here, already burning, announces itself. Hubbert’s peak announces it, yet betrays it, for
Hubbert envisaged only one version of energy. Up until now the development of thought, of philosophy, has been inseparable
from the fossil fuel—powered growth curve, from “civilization.” The downside of the bell curve is non-knowledge
because the event of the decline of knowledge, the disengagement of philosophy from economic and social growth,
cannot be thought from within the space of knowledge growth (the perfection of modern truth) or its concomitant

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absence. We are in unknowable, unthinkable territory—an era of disproportion, as Pascal might call it. The era of
Bataille’s peak. “I love the ignorance concerning the future,” wrote Nietzsche, and Bataille seconded him. For Bataille,
any assurances concerning the future, either good or bad, were beside the point, even silly; instead, there was the play
of chance, the affirmation of what has happened, what will happen. The left hand spends, in gay blindness as well as
science, and the future is affirmed, in the night of non-knowledge.36 Does this mean that we should despair, and use
this “ignorance” as an excuse to do nothing? Not at all; we know the difference between sustainability and
catastrophic destruction; we know the difference between global warming and a chance for some, even limited, species
survival. But we also recognize, with Bataille, the inseparability of knowledge and non-knowledge, the tilt point at
which, rather than cowering in fear, we throw ourselves gaily into the future, accepting whatever happens, embracing
everything, laughing at and with death. We will a return of recalcitrant bodily and celestial energy of the sacrifice of the
logic of the standing reserve; we bet against the vain effort to will an endless autonomist freedom. We know that
sustainability, if such a thing ever were to come about, would be inseparable not from simple calculation and planning
but from the blowback of the movement of an embrace of the transgressed limit, the intimacy of the world willed to
ritual consumation, the embrace of death-bound bodies: posts ustainabffity37 In other words, after Bataille, we refuse to
take the downside of the bell curve as a simple and inevitable decline into feudalism, fundamentalism, extinction. We
understand all that depletion implies, and we embrace it, affirming the movement of expenditure at its Varda-esque
heart.38 Who is this “we”? Not the self-satisfied “we” of a closed community or multitude, jealous of its rights and serene in
its self-reflection. Rather, a not- we, emptied of meaning, unjustified—a community of those with nothing in common (Lingis
1994).

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Disads 2AC
1. Extend Stoekl - The disad is expenditure with reserve – the negative expects every policy
option to give us a productive return – means our politics is dominated by models of self-
interest and accumulation of advantageous resources that make nuclear war inevitable.
2. Inevitability – the commitment to a version of scarcity is the core logic that authorizes the
DA impact because it sees the necessity of directed expenditure of energy in warfare to
secure supplies of commodities. The 1AC’s shift to an economy that rejects finitude and
affirms expenditure without reserve solves their DA through the burn-off of excess energy
in society in forms that make warfare unnecessary and impossible.
3. Case outweighs – the negative’s impact scenarios never happen absent their simulation of
the policy realm. The only reason it’s significant is that is relies on some assumption that
this simulation has indirect effects on the politics of the world beyond debate. The 1AC has
direct implications for that world and better accesses a world that solves extinction through
nuclear conflict by generating a map to reach a world of postsustainability.
4. Distrust the epistemology of their authors – they base their logic on the notion that
production and scarcity are the foundation of economics. Absent these assumptions of
scarcity, their disad’s logic makes no sense.
5. Extend Stoekl. The negative’s predictions fail – no matter whatever analysis we use, we
cannot know what the post-fossil-fuel future has in store for us. Moving away from a
society of finitude means that all our current models of prediction fail and the very
possibility of predicting the future is threatened.

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Framework 2AC
1. Turn – their model of debate is expenditure with reserve. It embodies the idea that all
debates must recoup some benefit in the form of education or positive policy return. A
commitment to this form of debate embodies the logic that causes nuclear war.
2. We meet – we defend that the USFG should implement incentives for alternative energy.
There’s no distinction between pre and post fiat; it all comes down to defending a form of
simulation of the 1AC.
[c/i – resolve – to reduce by mental analysis – dictionary.com]
3. Our model of simulation is better – Stoekl says in the context of alternative energy, the
most important question is how expenditure is imagined and practiced. Ruckh says that
providing a map of this politics, not the simulation of pragmatic actions, best addresses this
question. The negative’s model of simulation presumes a social value from the presentation
of that simulation – we impact turn with the affirmative because it’s the best strategy to
present debaters and society with the framework of mind necessary to avert nuclear
catastrophe following fossil fuel collapse – outweighs their framework arguments.
4. In a world of Bush’s War on Terror, we should embrace Bataille’s expenditure as a way to

create a new framework for politics today that escapes endless warfare.
Hutnyk 03 (John, Professor of Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths University of London, Bataille's Wars: Surrealism,
Marxism, Fascism, Critique of Anthropology 2003; 23; 264) JXu
How useful an experiment would it be to try to ‘apply’ Bataille’s notion of expenditure to politics today?
Klaus-Peter Köpping asks questions about ‘modernity’ which arise explicitly from his reading of Bataille as a
theorist of transgression, addressing political examples such as Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Indonesia (Köpping,
2002: 243). A more extravagant general economy framework for such questions might take up the massive
accumulation that is the excess of an arms trade promoting regional conflicts as integral to sales figures on
the one side, with the performative futility of massed anti-capitalism rallies and May Day marches that fall on
the nearest Sunday so as not to disrupt the city on the other. Expenditure and squandering today, in Bataille’s
sense, might be seen in both the planned obsolescence of cars, computers and nearly all merchandise, as well as in
the waste production and fast-food service industry cults and fashionista style wars, tamogochi and Beckham
haircuts that currently sweep the planet. No doubt it would be too mechanical to rest with such applications, too
utilitarian, but the relevance is clear. The use-value of Georges Bataille is somewhat eccentric and the deployment of
pre-Second World War circumstances as a comparative register for today is of course merely speculative. No return
to the 1930s (colourize films now). Yet, taking account of a long list of circumstantial differences – no Hitler, no
Moscow, no Trotskyite opposition, etc. – is also unnecessary since it is only in the interests of thinking through the
current conjuncture so as to understand it, and change it, that any return should ever be contemplated. The
importance of French anthropology – Mauss – as well as psychoanalysis and phenomenology, cannot be
underestimated and all are crucial in Bataille’s comprehension of the rise of fascism. Can these matters help us to
make sense of political debates in the midst of a new world war today? That the intellectual currents which
shaped Bataille’s analysis were post- Marxist did not, then, replace the importance of Marx. Today the
comprehension of Bush’s planetary terror machine still requires such an analysis, but one that can also be
informed by the reading of Bataille’s thought as shaped by the intellectual currents mentioned above. In a period
of capitalist slump, crisis of credit, overextended market, defaulted debt and threatening collapse, the strategy of war
looms large. Even before the events of 11 September 2001 in New York, Bush was clearly on the warpath with
missile defence systems, withdrawal from various international treaties and covenants, and massive appropriations
for military and surveillance systems. The imperial element is clear and sustained – the aggression against the
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Palestinians, the adventure in Afghanistan and the war on Iraq (to defend papa Bush’s legacy) obviously have
their roots in the imperialist mercantile tradition – plunder and war in pursuit of resources, primarily oil,
secondarily armaments sales. If this is potlatch, it is of the destructive kind that Bataille feared. The possibility
of a geo-political solution other than war should be evaluated. But it is a matter of record that, under the Bush family
regime, the US–Europe alliance has not been interested in pursuing any programme of reduction of disparity, a few
suspensions of Third World debt and UN summits notwithstanding. When Bataille searches for an alternative to
war in some ‘vast economic competition’ through which costly sacrifices, comparable to war, would yet give the
competitor with initiative the advantage (Bataille, 1949/1988: 172), he holds out hope for a kind of gift without
return. That he showed some enthusiasm for the Marshall Plan after the Second World War as a possible model for
this might need to be ascribed to the exhausted condition of post-war France, but he soon revised his assessment.
The Marshall Plan was not as disinterested as Bataille implied; it facilitated circulation and recoupment of surplus
value as profit. The Cold War and nuclear proliferation turned out to be the preferred examples of reckless waste in
actuality – as recognized in volume two of The Accursed Share (Bataille, 1991: 188). Today, redistribution is not
considered an option, the threat of Asian capitalism – after the slaughter of millions – can be ignored, and the war on
Islam (known variously as the Gulf War, Zionism, and the War on Terror) appears as the primary strategy (combined
with a war on South America, mistakenly named as a war on drugs, and a war on immigration disguised as a
security concern). The secondary strategy is a newly hollowed out version of liberal welfare. In 1933 Bataille had
written of the bourgeois tendency to declare ‘equality’ and make it their watchword, all the time showing they do not
share the lot of the workers (Bataille, 1997: 177). In the 21st century, Prime Minister Blair of England has made
some gestures towards a similar pseudoalternative. At a Labour Party congress in the millennium year he spoke of
the need to address poverty and famine in Africa, and no doubt still congratulates himself on his pursuit of this
happy agenda; as I write a large entourage of delegates and diplomats are flying to Johannesburg for another
conference junket – the Earth Summit. The party accompanying Blair and Deputy Prescott includes multinational
mining corporation Rio Tinto Executive Director Sir Richard Wilson (The Guardian, 12 August 2002). Rio Tinto is
hardly well known for its desire to redistribute the global share of surplus expenditure for the welfare of all. If there
are no gifts, only competitions of expenditure, what then of the effort of Bataille to oppose fascism? It is not
altruistic, and yet it is the most necessary and urgent aspect of his work that is given to us to read for today. Is
fascism a charity-type trick? A deceit of double dealing which offers the illusion of more while giving less?
Something like this psycho-social structure of fascism appears to be enacted in the potlatch appeasements of the
propaganda spinsters surrounding Blair. The New Labour and Third Way public offering is ostentatiously to be
about more healthcare, more police, more schools, but Blair spins and rules over a deception that demands
allegiance to a privatization programme that cares only about reducing the costs (fixed capital costs) of providing
healthy, orderly, trained employees for industry, of short-term profit and arms sales to Israel, of racist scare-
mongering and scapegoating of asylum seekers, refugees and migrants, of opportunist short-term gain head-in-the-
sand business-as-usual. Similarly, the gestures of multi-millionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates in establishing
charity ‘foundations’ to ease their guilt is not just a matter of philanthropy, it is a necessary gambit of containment
(and these two in particular bringing their cyber-evangelism to the markets of Eastern Europe, South and South-East
Asia). The liberal rhetoric of charity and the militant drums of war are the two strategies of the same
rampant restrictive economy. Carrot and stick. Team A and team B of capitalist hegemony – the critique of the
gift is clear, a gift is not a gift but a debt of time – and this is not really generosity or hospitality. The same can be
said perhaps of war – it is not war but profit, just as the gift reassures the giver of their superior status, the war on
terror unleashes a terror of its own; war does not produce victories but rather defeat for all. Bataille shows us a
world in ruins. September 11 has been made into the kind of event that transforms an unpopular (even
unelected) figure into a leader under whom the nation coheres in a new unity – much as Bataille saw Nuremburg
achieve for the National Socialists. Of course I am not suggesting Bush is a Nazi – he hasn’t got the dress sense –
but people were betrayed by the trick of a ‘democracy’ that offers pseudo-participation once every four years, and
this time in a way that has consequences leading inexorably to a massive fight. The kowtowing to big business with
a rhetoric of social security has been heard before – it was called the New Deal (or welfare state) and was a
deception almost from the start. Where there was perhaps some contractual obligation of aid in the earlier forms,
today the trick of the buy-off bribery of service provision is contingent and calculated according only to corporate
strategic gain. While we lurch towards endless war, governments reassure us with the watchwords of security
that really mean death and despair to those on the wrong side of the wire. The largest prison population ever
(under democracy or any other form of government), mass confinement for minor offences (three strikes), colour
overcoded death row (Mumia Abu-Jamal etc.), arrest and detention without trial or charge, celebratory
executionism, etc. The incarcerated souls in the concentration camps of Sangatte,10 Woomera,11 Kamunting12 or
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Guantanamo13 are wired in and offered up as sacrificial gifts to the rule of new judicial-administrative fascism. A
new toothy-smiling Christian cult of death and technology, spun carefully via press conferences and TV sitcoms –
television has given up any pretence of journalism in favour of infotainment. Does the US administration dream of a
new post-war era where, once again like Marshall, they could come with a plan to rebuild upon ruins? This would
indicate the exhaustion of the current mode of production, which, with ‘information’ promised renewal but quickly
stalled. Whatever the case, the enclosure of the US and Europe behind fortress walls does not – experience now
shows – ensure prophylactic protection, and ruin may be visited upon all. It was Bataille who said that perhaps only
the ‘methods of the USSR would . . . be equal to a ruined immensity’ (Bataille, 1949/1988: 167–8). Polite critiques
and protest have no purchase – orderly rallies against the aggression in Afghanistan, against asylum and immigration
law, against the destruction of Palestine, etc., get no ‘airtime’ (instead, ‘political’ soap opera like The West Wing, as
the current equivalent in ideological terms to the Cold War’s Bomber Command). Every leader that accedes to the
‘War on Terror’ programme and its excesses (civilian deaths, curtailment of civil liberty, global bombing) is an
appeaser. This is like the dithering of Chamberlain, only this time the opposition activists are fighting in a ‘post-
national’ arena and Stalin’s slumber will not be broken, the Red Army cannot run interference, there is no Churchill
rumbling in the wings, the fascist empire will prevail without militant mobilization across the board. This is the
appeaser’s gift – betrayal into the ‘ranks assigned to us by generals and industrial magnates’ (Bataille, 1985: 164).
The unravelling of the tricks of social welfare, of ‘asylum’ and ‘aid’ programmes, of ‘interest’ even (the narrowing
of news broadcasts to domestic affairs) or respect, of the demonization of others, of tolerance, the hypocrisy of
prejudice – all this prepares us for a war manufactured elsewhere. After the breakdown of the gift’s tricks, fascism is
the strategy, the obverse side of capital’s coin. In this context, the geo-politics that enables, or demands,
appeasement of the imperious corporate/US power is the restricted destruction we should fear, and we should fight
in a struggle that goes beyond national defence, wage claims or solidarity. The discipline of the Soviets and of
Bataille could be our tools. Bataille reads on in his library. We are left speculating with him, rashly charging
in with ideas that are less excessive, less exuberant, that moderation might withhold. But there is no more
important time to consider the efforts in the arts to fight militarism out of control, and, as Bush drags the
world into permanent war, it is worth asking why Bataille’s surrealistic opposition to Hitler was inadequate.
Is it because there are no more thinkers in the Party? Is it that subversion is uninformed and its spirit quiet? Chained
to the shelves, it is not enough to know that appeasement of the military-industrial machine is the obverse side of
liberal charity. Why are we still unable to acknowledge this is the path to war? What would be adequate to move
away from appeasement to containment and more? What kind of sovereign destruction would Bataille enact today?
Against the ‘immense hypocrisy of the world of accumulation’ (Bataille, 1991: 424), the answer is clear: we
should ‘condemn this mouldy society to revolutionary destruction’ (Bataille, 1997: 175). The Bataille of La
Critique Sociale might argue for a glorious expenditure as that which connects people together in the social
and recognizes their joint labour to produce themselves, and this must be redeemed from the restricted
economy that insists on expenditure for the maintenance of hierarchy. If he were leaving the library today, the
Bataille of anti-war Surrealism might say it is time for a wake-up knock-down critique of the barking dogs. The
castrating lions of appeasement must be hounded out of town. Back in your kennels, yelping pups of doom. Fair
call, Georges Bataille.

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AT Framework
The negative’s interpretation of simulation is paralyzing – debate should not isolate itself from
politics by adopting a singular focus on governmental implementation. That engages in a form of
mental deputy politics where we lose all personal agency.
Kappeler 95 (Susanne, associate professor at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Al-Akhawayn University,
The Will to Violence: The politics of personal behavior, Pg. 10-11)
Yet our insight that indeed we are not responsible for the decisions of a Serbian general or a Croatian president tends to
mislead us into thinking that therefore we have no responsibility at all, not even for forming our own judgment, and
thus into underrating the responsibility we do have within our own sphere of action. In particular, it seems to absolve us
from having to try to see any relation between our own actions and those events, or to recognize the connections
between those political decisions and our own personal decisions. It not only shows that we participate in what Beck calls
'organized irresponsibility', upholding the apparent lack of connection between bureaucratically, institutionally, nationally,
and also individually organized separate competences. It also proves the phenomenal and unquestioned alliance of our
personal thinking with the thinking of the major power mongers, For we tend to think that we cannot 'do' anything, say,
about a war because we deem ourselves to be in the wrong situation because we are not where the major decisions are
made. Which is why many of those not yet entirely disillusioned with politics tend to engage in a form of mental deputy
politics, in the style of 'what would I do if I were the general, the prime minister, the president, the foreign minister or the
minister of defense?' Since we seem to regard their mega spheres of action as the only worthwhile and truly effective
ones, and since our political analyses tend to dwell there first of all; any question of what I would do if I were indeed
myself tends to peter out in the comparative insignificance of having what is perceived as 'virtually no possibilities':
what I could do seems petty and futile. For my own action I obviously desire the range of action of a general, a prime
minister, or a General Secretary of the UN - finding expression in ever more prevalent formulations like 'I want to stop this
war', 'I want military intervention', 'I want to stop this backlash', or 'I want a moral revolution. 'We are this war', however,
even if we do not command the troops or participate in co-called peace talks, namely as Drakulic says, in our non-
comprehension': our willed refusal to feel responsible for our own thinking and for working out our own understanding,
preferring innocently to drift along the ideological current of prefabricated arguments or less than innocently taking
advantage of the advantages these offer. And we 'are' the war in our 'unconscious cruelty towards you', our tolerance of the
'fact that you have a yellow form for refugees and I don't'- our readiness, in other words, to build identities, one for ourselves
and one for refugees, one of our own and one for the 'others.' We share in the responsibility for this war and its violence in
the way we let them grow inside us, that is, in the way we shape 'our feelings, our relationships, our values' according: to
the structures and the values of war and violence.

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T – Alternative Energy 2AC

Engaging in debate in the hope of obtaining a specific outcome is expenditure with reserve. This
logic fuels the nuclear wars our 1AC Stoekl evidence indicts.
Extend Stoekl – we should reconceive of work as energy. This is key to move away from a model of
scarcity economics that makes nuclear war inevitable. Any interpretation they have that doesn’t
take into account the entirety of social processes that produce energy tie us to a society in which
nuclear war is inevitable.
C/I- Humanity is and must be considered as energy-.

Merriam Webster Online 08 http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?book=Dictionary&va=energy
Main Entry: energy Pronunciation: \ˈe-nər-jē\ Function: noun Inflected Form(s): plural en·er·gies Etymology: Late Latin
energia, from Greek energeia activity, from energos active, from en in + ergon work — more at work Date: 1599 1 a:
dynamic quality <narrative energy> b: the capacity of acting or being active <intellectual energy> c: a usually positive
spiritual force <the energy flowing through all people> 2: vigorous exertion of power : effort <investing time and energy>
Only by redefining our relationship to the environment as operating on the same level can we deal with improving the
politics of energy consumption. Extinction is inevitable absent a change in our approach toward energy and the
environment.
McCluney (R., Program Director, Florida Solar Energy Center, State University System) “Ethical dimensions Of Our
Energy and Environmental Crisis” December 1989 Health Goods.com
http://www.healthgoods.com/education/energy_information/General_Energy_Information/ethical_dimensions_of_our_energy
.htm
The above discussion may appear to have departed considerably from the research and promotion of widespread conversion
from nonrenewable energy sources to renewables and conservation. I would like to try and bring these back together, to show
how energy and ethics are connected, to make the connection more understandable. The motivation for most mainstream
energy resource work is utilitarian, it results from knowledge that nonrenewables cannot last indefinitely and that they tend to pollute more than
most renewables. Both the resource depletion and the pollution are bad for humans. Thus, so the argument goes, humans should reduce their dependence
upon nonrenewable energy sources. This is a purely anthropocentric argument. The work is done solely for the benefit of humans. Some narrow the
argument even further, into a nationalistic justification: it would free a given country from dependence upon resources from outside that country's border,
without any reference to the environmental issues involved. One result of this perspective is that funding for energy research drops when there are short-term
increases in nonrenewable energy availability. To individuals with a more global and long-term view, this is inappropriate. Of course there is more to it than
this. We are beginning to realize that large per capita nonrenewable energy (and energy-based material) consumption patterns are
generally injurious to the earth's life-support system. Ozone depletion and global warming are two currently prominent
examples. The connection between nonrenewable energy use and the destruction of nature is beginning to be understood. Now we need to take this
understanding a bit further. The processes of providing energy and energy-intensive products all have adverse environmental
impacts, even when renewable energy sources are being used. The renewable sources are thought to generally have less impacts, but the
impacts are there. So, in addition to switching from nonrenewables to renewables, we need to reduce the impacts of the new sources and to reduce human
dependence on them. Many people believe that we must go still further and reduce our per capita energy consumption patterns (or greatly reduce the human
population) to insure a viable life-support system for future generations. Some of these changes can be accomplished by purely technological means, and
Amory Lovins has extensive and detailed information that shows how to go about it. Implementation of the Lovins recommendations will
require some changes in beliefs and societal structures, but most of his recommendations are justified on purely conventional
economic bases. These are inherently anthropocentric arguments. It is becoming clearer, however, that purely technological changes will be
insufficient. Human behavior changes will be needed, not only to implement the proposed technological changes but to
achieve needed changes that technology and economics alone cannot accomplish. We can try and make more energy-efficient houses
and offices, but if we keep building them farther and farther apart, transportation energy costs will eat up building energy savings. We can switch to
biodegradable plastics, to minimize the environmental impacts of their disposal, but we will still be using energy-intensive nonrenewable raw materials to
manufacture them. Thus, human behaviors, and the corresponding value systems, are necessary components of an effective
energy policy. It is important to examine how inappropriate belief systems, in the individual, and in the society at large,
produce behaviors that are inconsistent with an earth-sustaining energy policy. Then the beliefs that lead to these behaviors can be
addressed by the means indicated previously. Central to this work is a need to avoid narrowly-based anthropocentrism. We must do what we do for
the whole earth's ecological system, not necessarily because non-human species have rights, but because human interests are

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also at stake. Finally, energy planners, economists, researchers, and businessmen are already embarked upon a massive
program of social engineering, attempting to make drastic changes in the ways humans obtain and use energy. Denying this
fact, or denying that there are ethical considerations to be made in the process, is clearly irresponsible. Paraphrasing Strong
and Rosenfield, we have two choices before us, to begin now to seek guidelines for meeting the fundamental problem of how
to protect the world's physical resources from ultimate exhaustion, or wait until drastic change is forced upon us by the
severity of the problems we have helped to create. "We can adopt new social and environmental ethics now or wait until
human degradation and environmental deterioration threaten our very existence. Whichever path we elect to follow, we
must recognize that the future depends upon our present decisions, and that neither as individuals nor as a society can we
escape responsibility for them."
Overlimits- Their interpretation intellectually confines us to technological means of energy production,

accelerating the energy crisis. Their approach to alternative energy necessitates negative net energy values,
creating a divide between the north and south, dragging thousands into poverty and exploitation.
Willem H. Vanderburg April 2008 (Director of the Centre for Technology and Social Development at the University of
Toronto, one of 25 leading innovators recognized by the Canada Foundation for Innovation in 2002, editor-in-chief of
Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, and president of the International Association for Science, Technology and
Society. Author. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society. “The Most Economic, Socially Viable, and Environmentally
Sustainable Alternative Energy” <http://www.sagepublications.com>Almost a century of this energy planning has ignored its
primary implications for society and the biosphere. First, the investment capital required to sustain such a global strategy
would soon be so large as to make less and less capital available for everything else. Investments in power plants and
distribution grids created comparatively few jobs and thus would increasingly contribute to underemployment and
unemployment. An exponential growth of electricity production would accelerate the depletion of fossil fuel reserves,
thereby accelerating the world toward an energy crisis as well as a materials crisis (since many of our materials are derived
from fossil fuels), besides enormously intensifying the environmental crisis. The extraction, refining, and processing, as well as the
distribution of fossil fuels, have received enormous subsidies, thus leading to artificially inexpensive commodities that have completely distorted their
energy markets. This distortion has been transferred into almost any system that heavily depends on fossil fuels, such as an overly concentrated global
production system, an urban habitat that is too spread out, an energy-intense and environmentally unsustainable global food system, and, in general,
economies that over-consume materials and energy and under-“consume” people. The resulting energy addiction was transferred to the South,
where paying for oil imports substantially contributed to debt loads, particularly during times of high oil prices and/or interest
rates. Bail outs led to drastic measures that disproportionately affected the poorest and most vulnerable people on the
planet. Attempts at reaching energy self-sufficiency frequently relied on nuclear power, which, as an incompletely designed
system, still lacks a satisfactory method of handling radioactive waste disposal. The promise that it would produce electricity
that would soon be too cheap to meter has instead turned into the most uneconomic energy option which, without artificial
protection from liability, would never have seen the light of day. In addition, nuclear power has led to the proliferation of
nuclear arms and has added another threat to peace and global security. This threat was superimposed on the need for the
industrially advanced nations to protect their umbilical cords to Middle East oil by military means. The rise of global
terrorism has further intensified the threats to peace and security. In sum, the ratio of desired to undesired effects of
traditional energy strategies (currently intensified by deregulation) continues to decline, despite some temporary blips related
to developments such as integrated resource planning and strategies for improving energy end-use efficiency. In terms of
what is taken into account, these strategies mark the victory of efficiency (including profitability as the “efficiency” of
capital) over human values such as equity and justice
Ground- Their interpretation guarantees stale arguments at the expense of aff which is key to empowering citizens
because of expenditure without reserve. Stoekl says only our approach to resolution can free us from the tyranny of
energy as technology.
Patrick Eytchison, 2003 Redwood Coast Greens “Implications of Industrial Collapse for Green
Politics”http://www.greens.org/s-r/30/30-18.html
4. During an actual collapse, there can be no real sustainable mode of production. What there will be, and necessarily so in the
view of the powers that be, are various temporary new forms of technological exploitation which “ratchet down” the slide.
Already, major corporations such as British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell are moving aggressively into the “renewable
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energy” field. Whether solar, wind, hydroelectric or whatever, all of these green technologies are also simply new material
modes for labor exploitation. Since all of the new alternate energy systems are either “environmental sinks” (i.e., they
require more energy input than their output), or are much smaller in total output than petroleum, or are highly polluting
as in the cases of nuclear power and coal, the overall effect of their implementation will not be a “Green Age,” but a
spread of mass poverty and an intensification of labor exploitation. Renewable energy has been a keystone of the Green program from the
beginning. A question which has hardly been explored, however, is that of the relationship between labor and mass affluence and a mass transition to renewable energy sources. As
Leslie White pointed out decades ago, the overall affluence of any society is determined by per capita energy use. The affluence of the modern age, particularly since World War II
and in the West, has been largely a result of the massive input of fossil fuel energy into production. Maintenance of 20th century affluence without fossil fuels will depend entirely
upon the availability of alternative energy in sufficient amounts. So far, no substitute or combination of substitutes able to do this has been found. The affluence-
generating and labor-saving power of fossil fuels derives from their concentrated nature. Renewables, such as solar and wind power, represent
the collection of dispersed rather than concentrated energy.

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AT Limits
We should transgress the prohibitive demands of the negative’s topicality violation. This
transgression of the norms of debate community achieves a form of expenditure without reserve.
Itzkowitz 99 (Kenneth, professor of philosophy at Marietta College, To witness spectacles of pain: The hypermorality of
Georges Bataille, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_199901/ai_n8846380) JXu
It would be pointless to deny that most illegal violence is abhorrent or immoral. At the same time, however, given the
violence of the life of our culture, we need to understand immoral violence more deeply than any blanket condemnation of it
will allow. Beyond our condemnations, we need to recognize that the acts we most prohibit are paradoxically also the
very ones we most celebrate. A foremost proponent of this need is the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille.
Relying on a notion of excess energy and the problem of its expenditure, Bataille argues that the transgression of law is
what he calls an accursed yet ineluctable part of our lives. We make laws in the name of prohibiting acts of violence,
yet the problem of the expenditure of an excess of energy requires behaviors that violate the very same rules we
cherish and intend to uphold. The commentator Jean Piel took note of how Bataille managed "to view the world as if it were
animated by a turmoil in accord with the one that never ceased to dominate his personal life" (1995, 99). Here, the fact of an
individual in-turmoil reflects the surplus of energy disturbing life in general, rather than a moral deficiency for which an
individual can be held accountable. For Bataille, an individual's wasteful behaviors are ultimately reflections of the problem
of the surplus of solar energy. Piel put it this way: "The whole problem is to know how, at the heart of this general economy,
the surplus is used" (1995, 103). How should the surplus of solar energy be used? Bataille contends that this surplus is
never extinguished and that its expenditure always leads towards the commission of violence. The surplus of energy is
accursed and finally cannot serve us productively. The accursed excess confronts us with the problem of how to
expend energy when this results in usages that cannot made be useful. Thus the production of violence has a value for us
as those condemned to the realm of non-productive expenditures. We undoubtedly deny this value, as Bataille notes, when
"Under present conditions, everything conspires to obscure the basic movement that tends to restore wealth to its
function, to gift giving, to squandering without reciprocations" (1988, 38). Nonetheless, as Bataille puts it, "the
impossibility of continuing growth makes way for squander" (1988, 29). When this impossibility of useful expenditure
is ignored, then we fail to recognize ourselves on the deepest level, as who we most fundamentally are. Against this
failure and in the name of a kind of inverted Hegelian self recognition, Bataille calls for the transgression of our
prohibitionist moral values. We need an ethics of squandering goods, of squandering what is good, in recognition of an
overabundance over and beyond all others, i.e. an overabundance that can only, at best, be squandered. He writes, life
suffocates within limits that are too close; it aspires in manifold ways to an impossible growth; it releases a steady flow of
excess resources, possibly involving large squanderings of energy. The limit of growth being reached, life . . . enters into
ebullition: Without exploding, its extreme exuberance pours out in a movement always bordering on explosion. (Bataille
1988, 30) As living lives that must enter into ebullition, we find ourselves fundamentally committed no more to moral
righteousness than to immoral outpourings of energy, to sudden and violent outbursts exceeding all rational
considerations. The protests of moralism are secondary and never responsive to Bataille's questioning of morality:
"Supposing there is no longer any growth possible, what is to be done with the seething energy that remains?" (1988, 31). We
are told by reason and morality to do what is best, which is to prohibit behaviors that are nonproductive or harmful. Our
morality identifies the right with the useful and productive, with whatever makes us better. Bataille, however, argues against
this morality and for the requirement of useless, nonproductive, violent outpourings of energy-a requirement for what he calls
"a draining-away, a pure and simple loss, which occurs in any case" (1988, 31). These violent, nonproductive outpourings,
according to Bataille, are required of us all as living beings regardless of whether or not we take the responsibility to manage
and arrange their occurrence in our lives. At issue, for Bataille, is energy in excess, energy as an excess. As an excess, such
energy must be discharged explosively in outpourings that, in the end, are inevitable.

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Technology  Anthro
Only by redefining our relationship to the environment as operating on the same level can we deal
with improving the politics of energy consumption. Extinction is inevitable absent a change in our
approach toward energy and the environment.
.htm
achieve needed changes that technology and economics alone cannot accomplish. We can try and make more energy-efficient
houses and offices, but if we keep building them farther and farther apart, transportation energy costs will eat up building energy savings. We can switch to

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Technology Prevents Net Energy

Alternative energy crisis requires that we look beyond questions of efficiency to those of the
human culture and experience.
Sustainable Alternative Energy” http://www.sagepublications.com
The histories of our current energy systems, including their successes and failures, can be understood in terms of the extent to
which their essential contexts were taken into account by the energy strategies that produced them. I will briefly illustrate this
thesis for the sub-portion of the network of flows of energy corresponding to the way of life of a society that “produces” and
“uses” electricity (Vanderburg, 2000). Despite Edison’s intention to sell illumination services, electricity was treated like any
other commodity, except that you had to be “hooked up” for its supply. To avoid multiple independent supply networks, the
production and distribution of electricity was placed in the hands of publicly regulated monopolies. These monopolies could
be justified as long as customers did not face brownouts or blackouts, and the price was reasonable relative to the cost of
production and distribution. The financial soundness of such publicly regulated monopolies depended on maximizing
throughput, which in turn was enhanced by inefficient energy end-use. Within this narrow context, energy strategies
amounted to little more than forecasting what were considered to be non-negotiable future energy demands by extrapolating
current trends and building power stations and distribution grids to meet these demands. As a result, the production and
distribution portions of the network of flows of energy corresponding to electricity reflected technical excellence and
economic soundness, until utilities were compelled to use nuclear power stations (Perrow, 1984). The remainder of the
network was economically unsound, socially non-viable, and environmentally unsustainable. In other words, the undesired
consequences can be directly attributed to the narrow technical and economic contexts of these energy strategies. However, it
was not until the late 1970s that the aggregation of the demand for the entire planet and the projection of this global demand
into the future gradually led to an awareness that the resulting scenarios were technically and economically absurd, and that
the damage to be inflicted on human life, society, and the biosphere would not only be substantial but, for a large part,
preventable.

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Technology  Exploitation
Technological approaches to alternative energy ignore human labor and energy, resulting in a net
power sink which feeds on the labor of exploited human life and energy. Instead, our plan must
involve reshaping the intellectual and professional level of labor. Only by considering such
questions can we escape this deadly cycle.
Sustainable Alternative Energy” <http://www.sagepublications.com
Net Energy Availability The proposed approach to developing energy strategies must overcome a fundamental flaw in what
little energy bookkeeping we undertake. In fact, we make the same mistake in our financial bookkeeping of a nation’s
economy. It is now increasingly recognized that the gross domestic product (GDP), which represents the total value of goods
and services delivered by an economy, is a flawed measure of economic performance (Daly & Cobb, 1989). Instead of adding
the costs incurred in the production of these goods and services to the GDP, they should be subtracted in order to measure net
wealth. For example, the industrially advanced nations have enormously increased the productivity of labor, but it has come
at a heavy price. Socio-epidemiology has firmly established that workplaces are one of the primary sources of physical and
mental illness (Karasek & Theorell, 1990). Had we subtracted the costs from the benefits, net wealth production would at
some point have become negatively affected by attempts to further improve labor productivity. Armed with this information,
engineers and managers might have been persuaded to adopt preventive approaches that can lead to workplaces with a much
better ratio of desired to undesired effects (Vanderburg, 2000). Unfortunately, the way we currently organize work is a
microcosm of how we technically and economically deal with problems created through the application of highly specialized
knowledge The same mistakes continue to be made in the development of current energy strategies. Even during the
relatively brief period prior to deregulation, when integrated resource planning and energy end-use efficiency approaches
were taken somewhat seriously, the focus was on gross energy production, which failed to subtract the energy investment that
had to be made from primary sources to produce this energy. The implications could be enormous. For example, at one
point it was claimed that the total energy investment a society must make to build, operate, and decommission a nuclear
power plant added up to something close to what the plant would produce during its expected time of operation. If this is the
case, then building nuclear power plants does not effectively increase the net energy available to a society. Similarly, if the
energy investment that must be made to put into service a renewable energy technology represents the major share of the
energy it will deliver during its life span, such a technology may well be renewable but may not significantly increase the net
energy available to a society either. Choices between competing energy technologies must also carefully consider net energy
availability. When comparing demand-side and supply-side options, these considerations could change the entire picture. In
passing, I wish to note that these kinds of considerations lead me to hypothesize that the very best source of alternative
energy can come from overcoming the huge blind spots in the present intellectual and professional division of labor,
which makes it impossible for specialists to know the undesired consequences of their design and decision making that fall
beyond their domains of competence. Hence, these must be dealt with by other specialists in whose domains they fall.
Aggregating such end-of-pipe approaches over the entire knowledge system shows why we manufacture problems at an
enormous rate and why we are incapable of preventing them. The energy implications are obvious. The end-of-pipe social,
health, and environmental services that mitigate some of these problems involve substantial energy investments that can be
prevented to a great extent by introducing a preventive orientation into the knowledge system (Vanderburg, 2005, 2006b).

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Goal-Directed Technology  Expenditure With Reserve

Both the fossil fuel economy and the utopia envisaged by alternative energy proponents are
ultimately technological societies characterized by a conception of energy as the power to direct
work to specific goals. Instead we affirm an energy that is not stockpiled, is heterogenous and
expended without use or purpose.
This makes clear, I think, a weakness in Heidegger’s argument. While his analysis is eminently valid when he notes the ties
between fossil fuel consumption, stockpiling, and the production and destruction of “human” subjectivity, he loses sight of
the difference between the stockpiling effort that would gloriously destroy the (momentarily) preserved wealth in order
to achieve the subjectivity effect, and the stockpiling that would spend in only the most restrictive, self-denying way: the
least glorious, in other words. Both favor a subject/object model that takes for granted a stable and overweening subjectivity,
but one that at least allows for a vestigial exercise of the old, exuberant “tendency to expend.”This is the very same difference
noted by Bataille in The Accursed Share between the capitalism of the classic Protestant ethic types (Ben Franklin, the
Calvinists, etc., examined in section 4 of his book)—those who saw, like the sustainability proponents, salvation in their
economizing, their constant reinvestment— and the more modern capitalists, whose relatively exuberant expenditure stood
out against the dreary and phantasmic reinvestment ethic of the Communists. The strength of Heidegger’s argument is
that it shows us the connection between extravagant expenditure in a mechanized, technological economy and
restrained, parsimonious spending in a sustainable one. Both economies are fundamentally technological, involving
the standing reserve and the basic role of the subject-object opposition, in which the integrity of the subject, the self, is
guaranteed through the mechanization of nature and the preservation and quantification of energy resources. Both are
dependent exclusively on a conception of energy as a “power to do work,” what we might call a “homogeneous”
energy whose very identity is inseparable from (apparently) useful labor. Bataille in effect makes possible the revision
of Heidegger in one very important way. Heidegger’s silver chalice is seemingly unconnected with the stockpiling of
ore and the use of concentrated energy in fuel. (Ritual for Heidegger appears to be somehow radically distinct from all the
material processes of energy expenditure.) Bataille, on the other hand, understands that conservation and expenditure
are an inherent part of “ritual” product ion as well as production associated with the cult of Man and the mechanized
standing reserve; what for Heidegger was a bringing-forth that seemed only in a minor way to involve pristine,
unstockpiled energy (wind, in fact), in Bataille becomes an expenditure that counters the selfish movement of
acquisition. This does not mean, of course, that Bataille is somehow against the reuse of materials, any more than Heidegger
is against the use and reuse of silver in the production of the chalice. But Bataille is interested in the economy of the
excessive part, the ritual or sacred part, nonrecuperable matter or energy, in and through which the self is opened out in
“communication.” There is, in other words, an economy of the excessive part for Bataille; ritual is always already a matter of
the concentration of energy in an object and the expenditure of that energy The chalice for Bataille is an object that defeats
utility and its own object-hood In and through its (mis)use in an intimate moment (sacrificial ritual). Both the fabrication of
the chalice (as well as the carrying out of the ritual with which it is associated) and the quantification and storage of energy
from the Rhine would be, for Bataille, instances of the use and expenditure of energy The chalice provides an instance of a
lavish expenditure of energy (mining silver takes a lot of work; the chalice is uselessly decorated and finished), as does the
use of Rhine energy (electricity used to power a wasteful consumer society lifes tyle). Heidegger ultimately loses sight of this
connection, and difference, by largely ignoring the relation between energy expenditure and ritual. But seeing the connection
between chalice and Rhine power (both entailing energy conservation and expenditure) also helps us see the difference, one
that can be derived from Heidegger and that brings a useful correction to Bataille. Ritual—sacrifice—entails a production
and consumption of energy that is not stockpiled or quantified in the same way as are raw materials or energy
resources used in industrial society. This energy is not and cannot be simply quantified, measured, and doled out in a
Marshall Plan; like the “formless” matter it animates, it does not go to the production of a coherent and meaningful (ideal)
universe, be it a universe of God or science. We might call this energy “heterogeneous,” in opposition to the energy that
is merely the power to do work and generate (apparent) order. This “other” energy is energy of the body, of useless
body motion in deleterious time; it is inseparable from the putting into question of the coherency of the body, of the self and
of God, that supreme self. It is energy as the flow of generosity, of the revelation of the void at the peak. It is the energy of
celestial bodies, matter beyond or below appropriation by the human. The energy of the Rhine, on the other hand, as
discussed by Heidegger, is quantifiable, and hence can be harvested by a scientific-technical grasping of nature. This
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latter energy involves an objectification of nature but also an objectification of subjectivity itself (stockpiled subjects as just
another standing reserve). This energy is “useful,” it “serves a purpose,” it enables us to be free by strengthening our
autonomous (autonomist) subjectivity. Our self, selfhood, selfishness. Ultimately, the sacred (or cursed) share of energy is
not quantifiable because the “inner experience” tied to it does not entail representation; indeed, as we have seen, it entails the
expenditure of a language (in Bataille’s counter-Book) that would simply represent a stable (phantasmically eternal) world.
Thus “communication” of the self; its opening out to death or to the other, is doubled by the monstrous movements of the
body and the disgusting dualism of matter to which the body in turn reacts in and as communication (vomiting, sexual
arousal, horror, etc.).

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Alternative Energy  Labor Exploitation

Renewable alternative energy systems are environmental sinks. Implementation of these systems
result in mass poverty and exploitation of labor.
Patrick Eytchison, 2003 Redwood Coast Greens “Implications of Industrial Collapse for Green Politics”
http://www.greens.org/s-r/30/30-18.html
Of course, the point I am leading to is that the Greens can, if we have the political skill and courage, become the guiding
council Bahro called for; not, however, as a spiritual elite, but as a tough, democratic, radical party ready to articulate the
disaster and offer leadership through it. This would mean a Party that plans, strategically and tactically, not year by year, or
even by decades, but for a century. More specifically, much of this planning would necessarily center on what Immanuel
Wallerstein has recently spoken of as “defensive politics:” fighting as best one can to limit economic, environmental, and
governmental abuses which will necessarily intensify as the world crisis advances. Also, however, such a guiding Party
would provide leadership in organizing for the future. a point of opportunity as a certain bottom is reached. Finally, one word
of warning: We must be wary of accepting sustainability as a substitute for real Green leadership. During an actual collapse,
there can be no real sustainable mode of production. What there will be, and necessarily so in the view of the powers that be,
are various temporary new forms of technological exploitation which “ratchet down” the slide. Already, major corporations
such as British Petroleum and Royal Dutch Shell are moving aggressively into the “renewable energy” field. Whether solar,
wind, hydroelectric or whatever, all of these green technologies are also simply new material modes for labor
exploitation. Since all of the new alternate energy systems are either “environmental sinks” (i.e., they require more
energy input than their output), or are much smaller in total output than petroleum, or are highly polluting as in the cases
of nuclear power and coal, the overall effect of their implementation will not be a “Green Age,” but a spread of mass
poverty and an intensification of labor exploitation. Renewable energy has been a keystone of the Green program from the
beginning. A question which has hardly been explored, however, is that of the relationship between labor and mass affluence
and a mass transition to renewable energy sources. As Leslie White pointed out decades ago, the overall affluence of any
society is determined by per capita energy use. The affluence of the modern age, particularly since World War II and in the
West, has been largely a result of the massive input of fossil fuel energy into production. Maintenance of 20th century
affluence without fossil fuels will depend entirely upon the availability of alternative energy in sufficient amounts. So far, no
substitute or combination of substitutes able to do this has been found. The affluence-generating and labor-saving power of
fossil fuels derives from their concentrated nature. Renewables, such as solar and wind power, represent the collection of
dispersed rather than concentrated energy. Although a full argument backing the statement is more lengthy than I can go into
here, I would hold that any mass shift from reliance on concentrated to dispersed energy must imply an increase in per capita
labor or a drop in material well-being. The only alternative to this dilemma that has been suggested is a drastic reduction in
world population, thereby decreasing overall energy need by a truly significant global figure. [2] Greens, however, tend to be
reticent on this point. It is important that a Green party not fall into a trap of false greenness that is not honest about these
difficult issues; that is essentially a co-optation to ruling elites. [3]

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Traditional Alternative Energy  Exploitation

Not considering questions of human capitol results in violence as thousands of lives and human
rights are violated and lost in the name of investment in renewable energy.
Earthrights International April 2008 “The Human Cost Of Energy”

http://www.earthrights.org/files/Reports/HCoE_final.pdf
On September 28, 2007, Chevron Corporation unveiled its vast new “Human Energy” advertising
campaign, with a spokesperson stating that “‘human energy’ captures our positive spirit in delivering
energy to a rapidly changing world.”1 Two days earlier, in Burma (Myanmar), the military regime’s sol-
diers began shooting, beating and arresting thousands of Buddhist monks and others who were
peacefully protesting in nationwide mass demonstrations against the regime. Chevron, the largest U.S.
investor in Burma and the military junta’s direct business partner, remained completely silent for another
week, and has still not condemned the violence. Chevron’s silence was not surprising, given its history in
Burma. This report describes Chevron’s complicity in human rights abuses in Burma through its
involvement in the Yadana Project, a major natural gas development project. Human rights abuses
connected to the Yadana pipeline began around 1991, when the companies that originally developed the
project began negotiating contracts.2 EarthRights International (ERI) began documenting the human rights conditions
in the Yadana pipeline region in 1994 by traveling clandestinely to the region and interviewing hundreds of victims and
witnesses of human rights abuses connected to the project. Based on our extensive investigations, ERI published three
reports and filed a groundbreaking human rights lawsuit in U.S. courts, all of which catalogued the corporations’ direct
complicity in the human exploitation in Burma. In spite of the intense scrutiny generated by evidence in these
and other reports and legal actions, the abuses connected to the pipeline project continue, seventeen
years after they began. Residents and refugees from fourteen villages throughout the pipeline region,
with whom ERI conducted over 70 formal interviews in the past five years as well as made additional
corroborative contacts, confirm that, for the people of Burma, “human energy” means human
exploitation. Chevron and its consortium partners continue to rely on the Burmese army for
pipeline security, and those forces continue to conscript thousands of villagers for forced
labor, and to commit torture, rape, murder and other serious abuses in the course of their
operations. Due to its involvement in the Yadana Project, Chevron remains vulnerable to liability in U.S. courts for the
abuses committed by these security forces. Yadana, which means “treasure” in Burmese, is the largest source of income for
the Burmese military regime, widely known for its brutal oppression and systematic human rights violations. Run by a
consortium including Chevron, Total, and the Thai company PTTEP, the project does little to benefit the Burmese economy;
while the oil companies have trumpeted their socio-economic programs in the region, the benefits of these programs accrue
only to a small portion of the people affected by the Yadana Project. The programs do not appear to work as intended, and
conditions of life in the pipeline region are still so dire that people continue to flee their homeland for the uncertain safety of
the Thai-Burma border. Chevron’s net income in 2007 was $18.7 billion,3 which amounts to more than the
GDP of at least 98 countries in the world today,4 and more than double Burma’s entire GDP in 2006.
Stepping Into Unocal’s ShoesChevron’s partnership with a repressive regime in the Yadana Project
Burma’s brutal generals
Burma (Myanmar) has been ruled by dictators since 1962 and by an especially brutal military regime since 1988, when the
generals took power amidst a bloody crackdown on nonviolent pro-democracy protestors. The current regime is known as the
“State Peace and Development Council” (SPDC).The Burmese military regime regularly commits a host of egregious viola-
tions of universally recognized human rights. The U.S. State Department’s latest report on human rights in Burma notes that
the junta’s human rights record is worsening, and that forced labor is a “widespread and serious problem, particularly
targeting members of ethnic minority groups,” and that “forced labor by children continued to be a serious problem.” The
report condemns the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in September 2007 and the thousands of arrests that
followed, as well as “custodial deaths…extrajudicial killings, disappearances, rape, and tor ture,” “attacks on ethnic minority
villagers,” “forced relocations,” and “forced recruitment of child soldiers.”6 The United Nations Human Rights Council
called a special session to condemn the 2007 crackdown, issuing a resolution “[d]eplor[ing]” the “beatings, killings, arbitrary
detentions and enforced disappearances” caused by the Burmese military,7 and the Council’s predecessor, the humanRights
Commission, issued a resolution condemning abuses by the regime every year since at least 1992.8 The General Assembly
itself adopted a resolution in 2006 expressing “grave concern” at the military’s “ongoing systematic violation of the human
rights, including civil, political, economic, social “and cultural rights”; other violations included, “extrajudicial”, rape and
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other forms of sexual violence persistently carried out by members of the armed forces, continuing use of torture, deaths in
custody, political arrests and continuing imprisonment,” “forced relocation,” and “forced labour, including
Photo: Stephen Brookes Burmese soldiers marching in formation.

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Traditional Alternative Energy  Genocide

Our unquestionable pursuit of technological means for alternative energy culminates in slavery,
murder, and human rights violations in order to fulfill the public’s technological renewable energy
fetish with human life.

A particularly bizarre new form of oppression is the military junta’s recent fixation with jatropha or castor oil179 as a
rural biofuel. In 2006, the SPDC announced a massive national program to produce castor oil.180 More recently, the regime
announced that each of Burma’s 14 states and divisions was “expected to plant 500,000 acres” with jatro¬pha.181 This has
translated to a forced- planting program in the pipeline region, in which villagers are not only required to buy the
seeds for the plants from the local authorities, but also to use their time and land to cultivate the crop.182 One woman
from the “pipeline village” of Eindayaza recently explained that the villagers “have to buy the seeds and plant this for the
SPDC. The SPDC does not pay any wages. We had to plant it last year and this year. My husband had to clear the plantation
place so we could plant it. One time it took two weeks to finish planting.”183Soldiers in the pipeline region also confiscate
residents’ goods and extort money from them. Although most of the residents are poor, with few belongings, villagers with
means of private transportation are forced to transport soldiers or their cargo. A villager with a boat was forced to ferry
soldiers across the river: “I never dared to ask for money. They have the guns.”184 Villagers with bullock carts are
forced to transports logs from the forest to the military camp; the journey takes nearly a full day and the soldiers
require two trips per week, again without payment.185 Soldiers similarly requisition goods and food from the villagers;
several villagers confirmed that soldiers simply “take whatever they want from the village shops,”186 and then tell the
shop owners to seek reimbursement from the village head—who in turn taxes the whole village to cover the expenses.187
Sometimes the military comes up with schemes to cheat the villagers out of money; they ask for donations to a “mother and
children’s fund,” or the “military fund,” or sometimes even sell tickets to an event that no one can attend.188 They “extort
money from the villagers,” said one refugee. 189 And in many cases the soldiers drop all pretense of requisitioning supplies,
and simply demand money: “We all had to pay them, as they demanded,” said a resident of the “pipeline village” of
Kaleinaung;190 “We have to pay money every time the solders come into the village,” said another from the village of
Kanbauk.191 “It becomes a habit,” remarked one refugee, “of welcoming the Burmese soldiers.”192

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Technology Doesn’t Solve

We must fundamentally reorganize society – a mere shift to alternative energy sources will fail.
Hornberg 01 (Alf, anthropologist and professor of human ecology at Lund University, Sweden, The power of the
machine: global inequalities of economy, technology, and environment, 2001, p. 17-18) JXu
Much recent literature suggests that ecology and economics study related and ideally congruent phenomena. Indeed, both
biomass and “technomass” represent positive feedback processes of self-organization, where the system’s use of harvested
resources is “rewarded” with new resources in a continuing cycle. Both are dissipative structures, requiring inputs higher than
outputs and subsisting on the difference. A crucial difference is that biomass is a sustainable process whereas technomass is
not. For biomass, energy resources are virtually unlimited, and entropy—in the form of heat—is sent out into space. For
technomass, resources are ultimately limited, and we are left with much of the entropy in the form of pollution. For biomass,
growth is a morally neutral reward granted by nature itself, whereas for technomass it is a reward resulting from human
ideologies and generating unequal, global relations of exchange. Considering also the fact that technomass competes with
biomass for living space on our planet, it is essential that we reach a more profound understanding of the cultural
concepts through which we intervene in nature, so as perhaps to be able to consciously generate less destructive ideas with
which to replace them. Such a reconceptualization of technology may also have to imply acceptance of the dependency of
the global technomass on the combustion of fossil fuels (which presently accounts for 90% of world energy use) and
abandonment of the vision of a technical means of harvesting solar energy more efficient than photosynthesis. If
modern technologies for gene rating electricity from renewable sources (sun, water, and wind) were not in fact extensions of
the mainstream infrastructure and thus subsidized by the global appropriation of fossil fuels, what do we mean by saying that
the “underdeveloped” countries cannot “afford” these technologies? And what makes them so “unprofitable” even in
“developed” countries? When the destructive nature of our economic system is emphasized, economists will often reply by
expressing confidence in better technologies, but when technologists are asked why these have not yet been introduced, they
tend to refer to faulty economics. These mystifications are founded on a conceptual dichotomy between “technology” and
“economy,” that permits us to shift back and forth between two presumably independent levels of reality, without grasping
the techno-economic logic through which they are connected. New, environmentally benign technologies that are more
expensive than conventional ones will automatically be the prerogative of a global minority, and thus also a means of
generating an unequal distribution of environmental quality, drawing on resources in the periphery to keep the center
clean and “green.” In fact, any discussion of how to make the economy sensitive to ecological requirements is severely
constrained as long as it is couched in conventional, monetary terms such as the “costs” of environmental protection
or revenue gamed from emission permits. “Costs” and “gains” are relations between people, not between people and
nature. They are ultimately a matter of relaxed or intensified claims on the periphery by the center or on the center by the
periphery. Unless we are prepared to reorganize society in a much more fundamental way, it seems that any “green
taxes” or other brakes on the system substantial enough to have a real impact on consumption would lead to economic
decline, the most obvious sign of which would be rising unemployment rates, in the face of which any government
would very quickly retract its “green taxes.” More likely, the “green taxes” would never reach the magnitude at which
such effects would follow, in which case they would remain symbolic and pointless. Mainstream economists are right in
that industry cannot be burdened with too heavy a tax burden if it is to survive, but for reasons of which they are not
themselves quite aware. There is a determinacy in the logic of money itself that outrules the conventional recipes, no matter
how high we raise our voices. Neoclassical economics may have completely misunderstood ecology and thermodynamics,
but it understands money. As long as the system is challenged on its own terms, the logic of money will be invincible. Our
only hope is to replace that logic with a new systemic orientation, which requires a transformation of money itself. This
certainly also requires a transformation of economic science. In closing itself to the realities of physical processes, the
peculiarly self-referential, neoclassical paradigm outrules the very idea of unequal exchange. Its axiom of intersubstitutability
conceals the irreversibility and inequity of the industrial process. If technology is the science of managing accumulated
natural resources, economics can thus be seen as the science of accumulation itself.

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AT Consumerism Solves Expenditure

Status quo consumerism is not the expenditure Bataille envisions. Bataille’s expenditure affirms a
burn-off of excess energies while mechanized consumerism exploits the Earth to meet specific
goals. We are choking on our own waste, produced by gas guzzling SUVs and a lifestyle that
ultimately threatens the Earth.
Here is the ultimate immorality of consumerism: there is irrational ecstasy out there, something that verges on the
erotic, even foreplay and orgasm (the “anticipation,” “the climax”). The “service” of the thing, its rationality, its use value,
are shamelessly left in the dust. An obvious question arises at this point. Maybe there is something profound, something
archaic and fundamental in spending. The consumer who constantly refashions him- or herself might be responding to a
desire more fundamental than for simplicity or authenticity. Not that it is necessarily authentic—how can it be when the self
is lost in a plethora of masks and mirrors? But the demand that sustainability entails a kind of noble renunciation, that it
be a castor oil for the soul or that it provide a kind of secular version of the monastic, clearly raises a number of
questions. If this is all sustainability can offer, will a significant percentage of the public be willing to embrace it? And
if they don’t? Does that mean the (self-) condemnation of human society to the hellfire of ecosystem collapse? Here we
could certainly argue that while the waste of contemporary mechanized consumerism (la consommation) is not the
expenditure (la depense) and burn-off (la consumation) affirmed by Bataille, there nevertheless is an obvious connection.
Bataille himself notes this toward the end of The Accursed Share when he argues that there are archaic remaind rs of
expenditure in bourgeois life that have in principle been rigorously extirpated from communism. Here we could argue that
while the “intimate world” of Bataille is radically different from a consumerist utopia, nevertheless the latter, in its
profligacy, retains a vestige of a more profound expenditure, one that cannot simply be done away with. Waste is, we could
argue, a deluded, minor version of expenditure, analogous perhaps to the right-hand sacred as it is opposed, yet tied, to the
sacred of the left hand. To argue that the affirmation of sustainability means the renunciation of all sacrificial,
atheological, or erotic (in Bataille’s sense) urges is to call for a “closed economy” even more rigorous than anything
concocted among theorists in Moscow in the 1930s. What this affirmation does mean, however, is recognizing the
“tendency to expend” in social life and the difference—and also minor connection—between waste and expenditure. At
least in the Middle Ages the simple life, the accession to authenticity through the renunciation of mirage-like pleasures, was
reserved for a noble minority; it was necessarily a minority because most people obviously tended to choose another kind of
life. The saint was a saint precisely because her choices were not banal. Now, it seems, we must all don the hair shirt, all
renounce the guilty pleasure of waste, in order to save ourselves and the planet. We renounce, we embrace radical
austerity, the fantasy of the closed economy—not for the pleasure of another, infinite life but merely in order to
prolong slightly, and make a bit less destructive, this one. At least the medieval saints recognized the end of this earth, the final judgment,
and a deliverance to a higher, presumably ecstatic, existence. The secular ecological saint renounces only in order to keep on keeping on, and for the earth to
do the same. Even the church fathers, then, the founders of orders whom Newton admires (91), would have recognized the limitation of this vision.
Everyone a saint? Not likely. A religion that offers only the thrill of ressentiment (“those damned SUV drivers”) and the
simple pleasure of—let’s be honest—the sense of superiority of the authentic self, can hope to have but few converts.
People want profligacy, which they identify with freedom, precisely because it is a nevertheless minor, deluded version of
a more profound “tendency to expend.” Newton’s book is only an extreme form of most writings on sustainability Virtually
all of them preach austerity, warn us that we—the planet— will survive only if we forgo our guilty pleasures, stop wasting so
much, and embrace a humble, charitable, “small” life. Charity is certainly a virtue few could argue with, but it seems a bit
hard to believe that many will want to renounce so simply and easily the pleasures of consuming and wasting on the grand
scale that we associate with life in the developed” countries. But we must admit: on one level the advocates of
sustainability are absolutely right. We are choking on our own waste, we are destroying the environment just so we
can drive those gas guzzlers on six-lane highways to the strip mall. We are thus facing a different, but complementary,
version of the “bad expenditure” that Bataille saw threatening the earth in 1949. Any decent work on the current ecological crisis
tallies up the numbers: the quantities of unrecycled waste produced, the square miles of land paved over or rendered infertile, the number of species pushed
into extinct ion. The imminent doom. Given all this, even if we assume for a moment the legitimacy of the morality of authenticity that will tempt only a few
of us, what does hyperconsumption offer us? What is the freedom it delivers, which we (evidently) find so irresistible? And how can we even hope to resist,
or reconfigure, this freedom?

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Mass produced technological spending provides a mere simulacrum of Bataille’s expenditure. We
should resist its focus on utility and quantification and instead affirm an unplanned future where
the principles of reuse and sustainability inadvertently become integrated with our most basic
ways of living. Sustainability refuses energy management; our task in a world of Hubert’s peak is
to envision a radically different energy regime.
For Bataille, in 1949, peace was the unforeseen, unplanned aftereffect of spending without return on a national scale.
By expending excess energy through the Marshall Plan, the world was (according to Bataille) spared yet another buildup of
weapons. But—and this perhaps was the weakness of Bataille’s argument—the Marshall Plan distributed money, the ability
to buy manufactured goods, energy stored in products and things. For us today, expenditure entails the eroticized,
fragmented object, the monstrous body that moves and contorts and burns off energy in its death-driven dance.
Expenditure cannot be mass-produced because in the end it cannot be confused with mechanisms of utility: mass
production, mass marketing, mass destruction. All of these involve, are dependent on, and therefore can be identified
with a calculation, a planning, a goal orientation that is foreign to expenditure as analyzed by Bataille. At best they afford
us a simulacrum of the dangerous pleasure of sacred expenditure (and thus their inevitable triumph over sustainability as
austere renunciation). If then we affirm Bataille’s expenditure, we affirm an energy regime that burns the body’s forces, that
contorts, distorts, mutilates the body, and we affirm as well the forces that are undergone rather than controlled and mastered.
The energy of these forces spreads by contagion; it cannot be quantified and studied “objectively.”4 Which is not to say that it
does not make its effects felt quite literally; the blood-covered voodoo priest in a trance (a photograph reproduced in Erotism)
, L’Abbe C. squirming in agony, and Dirty retching violently (in Blue of Noon [19781) bear witness to this shuddering
force.15 This energy, however, has little to do with that put to use in a modern industrial economy. This is not to deny that
some rational instrumentality is necessary to survival; in order to live, spend, and reproduce, all creatures, • and humans
above all (because they are conscious of it), marshal their physical forces and spend judiciously. But, as Bataille would
remind us, there is always something left over, some excessive disgusting or arousing element, some energy, and it is this
that is burned off and that sets us afire. By separating this loss from industrial postconsumer waste, we inadvertently
open the space of a postsustainable world. We no longer associate sustainability with a closed economy of production-
consumption; rather, the economy of the world may be rendered sustainable so that the glory of expenditure can be
projected into the indefinite future. What is sustained, or hopefully sustained (since absolute sustainability makes no
sense), is not a permanent subjectivity that slices and dices and doles out an inert and dangerously depletable (but
necessarily static, posthistorical) world; instead, the world is sustained as a fundamentally unplanned aftereffect of the
tendency to expend. Unplanned not in the sense that recycling, reuse, and so on, arc to be ignored, but in that they are an
integral part, inseparable from and a consequence of, a blind spending of the intimate world. The logic of conservation, in
other words, is inseparable from expenditure: we conserve in order to spend, gloriously, just as the worker (according to
Bataille), unlike the bourgeois, works in order to have money to blow. Thus postsustainability: sustainability not as a
definitive knowledge in and as a final, unalterable historical moment, but rather a knowledge as non- knowledge,
practice as the end of practice, the affirmation of “nature”— including its fossil fuel energy reserves—that refuses to see
it simply as a thing, as a concatenation of energy inputs that need only be managed. Rather, nature is what sustains itself
when we sustain ourselves not as con- servers but as profligate spenders—not of stockpiled energy, but of the energy of the
universe (as Bataille would put it) that courses through our bodies, above us, below us, and hurls us, in anguish, into
communication with the violence, the limit, of time. The postsustainable economy is a general economy; beyond the
desires and needs of the human “particle,” it entails the affirmation of resources conserved and energy spent on a
completely different scale. Rejecting mechanized waste, the world offers itself as sacred victim. The world we face, the
world of “Hubbert’s peak” (see Deffeyes 2001) and the rapid decline of inert energy resources, is thus, paradoxically, a
world full of expendable energy—just as Bataille’s austere postwar era was wealthy in a way his contemporaries could not
comprehend. The peak of consumption and the revelation of the finitude, the depletion, of the calculable world is the opening
of another world of energy expenditure and the opening of a wholly different energy regime. And it is the blowout at the
summit of a reason through which society has tried to organize itself. The available energy that allows itself to be
“perfected,” refined, and that therefore makes possible the performance of the maximum amount of work, in service to the
ghostly identity of Man, gives way to another energy, one that cannot simply be retrieved and refined, that defies any
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EROEI, that does work only by questioning work, that traverses our bodies, transfiguring and “transporting” them. We
just need to understand fully what energy expenditure means. Wealth is there to be grasped, recycled, burned, in and on
the body, in and through the body’s death drive, as a mode of energy inefficiency in the squandering of time, of effort, of
focus.

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Consumerism doesn’t solve our politics because it holds as its end-point the growth of the
economy, not the loss of sacrificial expenditure.
Yang 2K (Mayfair Mei-hui, teaches in the anthropology and religious studies departments at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure, Current
Anthropology Volume 41, Number 4, August/October 2000) JXu
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 décor 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.

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AT Incentives Bad
The intentionality of incentives is irrelevant – how we give and expend is what is important to
reach a postsustainable future.
and Postsustainability, Pg 141) JXu
Where does that leave Bataille’s future? Recall our analysis of The Accursed Share in chapter 2: the Marshall Plan would
save the world from nuclear war nor because it was the goal of the plan to do so, but because the aftereffect of
“spending without return” is the affirmation of a world in which resources can be squandered differently: the
alternative is World War III. The world is inadvertently sustained, so to speak, and the glory of spending can go on: this
is what constitutes the ethics of “good expenditure.” Now of course we can say, from today’s perspective, that Bataille
was naive, that the “gift-giving” engaged in by the United States under Harry Truman was a cynical attempt to create
a bloc favorable to its own economic interests, thereby saving Europe for capitalism and aligning it against the Soviet
Union in any future war—and that was probably the case. But Bataille himself was perfectly aware of the really
important question: after all, as he himself puts it, “Today Truman would appear to be blindly preparing for the final
—and secret—apotheosis”(OC, 7: 179; AS, 190). Blindly. Even if Bataille may have been mistaken about Truman, who
after all was giving the gift of oil-powered technological superiority, the larger point he is making remains valid:
giving escapes the intentions of its “author.” What is important is gift-giving itself, and the good or bad (or selfish)
intentions of the giver are virtually irrelevant. What counts, in other words, is how one spends, not what one hopes to
accomplish by it. Intentionality, with its goals proposed by a limited and biased self; reveals its limits. Derrida noted in his
famous controversy with Jean-Luc Marion about gifting that there can never be a real gift because the intentions of the giver
can never be completely unselfish.12 Thus the very idea of the gift is incoherent: a completely unselfish gift could not be
given, because it would be entirely without motive. It could not even be designated as a gift. To give is to intentionally hand
something over, and as soon as there is intention there is motive. One always hopes to get or accomplish something. But, as
Marion would counter, there is a gifting that escapes the (inevitable) intentions of the giver and opens another economy
and another ethics. This is a gift that, past a certain point, always defies the giver. Of course, one “knows” what one is
giving, there are criteria for the evaluation of the gift—but then that knowledge is lost in non-knowledge. The left hand never
really knows what the right is doing. Nor does the right necessarily know what it is doing, for that matter. The ethics of The
Accursed Share: by giving, instead of spending for war, we inadvertently spare the world and thus make possible ever
more giving. Energy is squandered in the production of wealth rather than in nuclear destruction. As we have seen,
however, Bataille never adequately distinguishes between modes of spending and modes of energy. Heidegger does:
quantified, stockpiled energy has as its corollary a certain objectified subjectivity, a certain model of utility associated both
with the object and with the self Another spending, another “bringing-forth” is that of the ritual object, which (even though
Heidegger does not stress it) entails another energy regime: not the hoarding and then the programmed burning-off of
quantified energy, but energy release in a ritual that entails the ecstatic and anguished movements of the mortal, material
body.

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Life is Energy
We affirm the expenditure of surplus energy. This is the energy that resists utility, serving no
purpose in the economy. All life is energy.
For Bataille nature and society are one and the same because both are nothing more than instances of energy
concentration and waste. The refocus on energy production and use has profound implications: “Man” is not so much the
author of his own narrative, or the subject that experiences and acts, as “he” is the focal point of the intensification or
slackening of energy flows. For this reason human life on earth must be seen as just one instance of many energy events:
moments in which energy is absorbed from the sun lead to growth and reproduction but, just as important, energy is
also blown off. Humans in this sense are no different from any other animals, though their wastage of energy might be more
intense through its very self-consciousness. All social productions—all cultural product ions—are therefore seen as modes
of energy appropriation and squandering; their value or lack of value must be seen in the context of their role as
conduits in the flows of energy through humans outward to the void of the universe. These flows are gifts not
necessarily to other humans but to the emptiness of the sky. Gifts, or put another way, destroyed things, things whose end lies
in immediate consumption not utility and deferred pleasure. Bataille’s work anticipates much recent analysis, which sees
value— economic, cultural—deriving from energy inputs: humans may “produce,” but their productive activity is
dependent on the quantities of energy that they are capable of harnessing. Human evolution—physical and cultural— in
this view is a function of the channeling of energy: taking advantage of abundant energy (derived from agricultural inputs or,
later, from fossil fuels), humans reproduce and populate the earth; suffering, on the other hand, from a lack of energy, their
society contracts, and they find ways to cope with eternal shortage. Surplus and shortage are thus intimately linked; each is
always present in the other, and each must be recognized in its fundamental role in the preservation, extension,
intensification, and ruin of the communit2 There are, no doubt, many ways in which the centrality of energy for life can
be read. In the nineteenth century a kind of cultural pessimism was all-pervasive: since the second law of
thermodynamics postulated the entropy of any given field of energy, we could then infer that any society, any life form,
any planet would eventually lose the energy it had at its disposal and sink into quietude, feebleness, death. From the larger
argument about energy, and the eventual fate of the sun and all other stars, commentators were quick to see a similar effect in
society: the fadeout of energy led to weakness and cultural decadence. Society was on a death trip just like the sun; humans,
presented in this reactionary mode, could brood over their fate but could do little to prevent it.3 Bataille consciously points
in the opposite direction. In Bataille’s view, rather than entropy, the magnificent expenditure of energy, characterized
by the violence and brilliance of the sun, leads to the conclusion that energy is limitless and that the chief problem lies
not in its hoarding and in the warding off of the inevitable decline, but in the glorious burn-off of the sun’s surplus. In
effect, the problem becomes how best to expend rather than how best to envision the consequences of shortage. For all that,
Bataille is not an optimist in the conventional sense of the word because he does not link abundant energy and its glorious
throughput with the placid satisfactions and order of a middle-class existence.4 In the 1950s there was a lot of talk about
“energy too cheap to meter” the promise of the nuclear energy industry. That was good news, apparently, because it would
allow us to live happy lives with a maximum number of appliances; we could always own more, always spend more, with the
ultimate goal being human comfort. Growth was the name of the game— it still is—and growth in comfort was made
possible when more energy was produced than needed. If energy is nothing more than the power to do work, then an
unending surplus of energy meant nothing more than a continuous rise in productivity, a concomitant rise in the
number of objects citizens could look forward to possessing, and the personal satisfaction associated with those objects.
Bataille too envisages a constant surplus of energy, but his energy is very different from the metered or unmetered
kind. True, one can momentarily put some of Bataille’s energy “to work.” But there is always too much of it to be
simply controlled; it always exceeds the limits of what one would be capable of devoting to some end. Bataille’s energy is
therefore inseparable from the wildly careening atoms of Sade or even the profoundly formless matter envisaged by Bruno.
“Cursed matter,” be it the charged matter studied by Durkheim, or the “base matter” of Bataille’s gnosticism, or the mortal
meat of Sade’s “transmutation,” is not only matter that is left over and so can contribute its energy to further growth; it is also
matter that is burned off, which leads nowhere beyond itself; arid so is dangerous, powerful, sacred.5 Bataille’s energy shoots
through a charged matter that obtrudes in sacred ritual and erotic “wounds”: the “share” of energy is not a resulting order but
a base disorder. Such matter is in excess, not inert but virulent, threatening, turning as easily against the one who would wield
the power as against a supposed victim. But along with this, the excessive, material world is “intimate,” not a useful,
classifiable thing, but a moment of matter that does not lead outside itself; can serve no useful purpose, is not anchored in
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time in such a way that it becomes a means rather than an end. Of course no energy can be surplus in and of itself The
supposed surplus energy, too cheap to meter, of the 1950s was only surplus in relation to a power grid: there was to be so
much of it that it would pulse through the power grid, illuminating backyard patios and electrically heating split- level homes
for free. And the more split levels that would be built, the more available—domesticated—energy there would be to fuel the
world— and so on, presumably, to infinity. Bataille’s energy, however, is in surplus on another kind of grid—that of the
semiotic categories of a comprehensible social system. It is what is left over when a system completes itself, when a system
depends on energy in order to complete itself—but it only does so by excluding the very energy that makes its completion
possible. Put another way, we can say that a social system needs to exclude a surplus of energy (hence matter) in order to
constitute itself as coherent and complete. There are, in other words, limits to growth, be they external (as in an ecology)
or internal (as in a social philosophy or ideology).6 That surplus/ energy, in Bataille’s terminology, is “cursed,” always
already unusable, outside the categories of utility. It is thus not servile, not ordered or orderable. A banal example: if a
rural region can produce only so much food, then its “carrying capacity” is limited; the excess human population it produces
will have to be burned off in some way. A surplus of humans in a given locale will lead to contraception, warfare,
celibacy, sacrifice.7 A certain equilibrium, tentative and never truly stable, will result. Human energy, human population,
will have to be lost: effort that could be spent in nonsustainable growth—producing more things that could not be
absorbed—will be spent, spewed out, in other, nonproductive activities: again, war, the production of (left-hand and right-
hand) sacred artifacts, “useless” art, and so on. The inevitable limit of the system—economic, ecological, intellectual—
always entails a surplus that precisely defeats any practical appropriation. This uncontrollable and useless energy courses
through the body, is the body, animating it, convulsing it: this is a threatening energy that promises death rather than any
straightforward appropriation. “Excess” matter will therefore be different in kind from its double, the “share” that can be
reabsorbed into the system: the excess matter-energy will not be easily classifiable, knowable, within the parameters of the
grid. It will always pose itself as a profound challenge. Against the coherent oppositions and reliable significations found
operating within a given system of energy use, it constitutes a series of instances of energy in flux: never stable, never
predictable, but a matrix of free energy-symbolization at the ready, to open but also to undermine the coherency of the
system. Rendered docile, energy makes the system possible (society, philosophy, physics, technology); revealing itself as
excessive, unconditioned, at the moment the edifice achieves its fragile summit, energy opens the abyss into which the
system plunges.

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Finitude Economy Impact

Continued mindsets of the finitude fossil fuels culminates in a third world war, the likes of which
we have never seen.
Scheer 02 (Scheer: University studies in Heidelberg and Berlin (Economy, Social Science, Public Law)PhD at Free
University Berlin 1972 Dr. h.c. at Technical University Varna, Bulgaria Recipient of the Alternative Nobel Prize in Stockholm,
1999, granted for his worldwide commitment to energy) A Solar Economy pg 110-111
After long years of Western support for the apartheid regime, following a change of track by the then US President Carter, the
Western powers finally distanced themselves from their racist friends as the political fallout, in particular in terms of the
growing influence of the USSR in post-colonial Africa, threatened to grow too large. But it was not just the ideologically
charged East—West conflict which dominated US foreign policy in this period, as the majority of studies and commentaries
assert. A substantial, often even the dominant, role was always played by geostrategic resource interests, even in the East—
West conflict itself. This was openly debated in the USA, whereas the Europeans chose to close their eyes in post-colonial
shame. The term 'strategic resources' has a double meaning: any country with important resources buried in its soil is part of
the strategic sphere of interest of US foreign policy.'9 The political interest of the USA in the Caucasus and in central Asia
has until recently stemmed primarily from the same motivation. In Global Monopoly,2° Gernot Erler documents a new
'politics of containment' with a 'decidedly anti-Russian slant', the aim of which is to permanently exclude all Russian
influence from these regions. It is in these Eurasian territories, however, that the interests of Russia, the two most populous
and resource-hungry countries India and China, the Islamic hemisphere and the EU intersect. The danger is that they will
become the primary theatre in the battle for the world's dwindling resources21 In April 1999, on the occasion of the North
Atlantic Council meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of NATO. the strategy initiated in Rome in 1991 was reiterated with
the unambiguous intention of turning NATO into a hegemonic alliance for the safeguarding of Western values and interests,
whereby these latter two terms were taken as synonyms. Rapid reaction forces had in the meantime been established in
almost all NATO states, and these were to be further expanded. NATO now explicitly reserves the right to intervene militarily
in other regions. If necessary, it will do so even without a UN mandate. Above all, it is mounti ng a targeted campaign to
increase its membership. After Eastern Europe. Asia is the next target for NATO expansion. The oil- and gas-exporting
countries of the Caucasus and Transcaucasia have already become so-called 'NATO partner countries', from Azerbaijan to
Kazakhstan. Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan and Tadjikistan. None of these countries is democratic, all being ruled by
clans and oligarchies, yet they are nevertheless being treated as candid ates for NATO membership. In this, NATO's only
motive is the resources that these countries possess. These reserves lie both in the midst of former Soviet territory and on the
doorsteps of the emergent giants of China and India, whose burgeoning populations have the greatest need for additional
resources. An attempt by NATO to secure privileged access to the last substantial reserves of fossil fuels remaining untapped
would be a slap in the face to both Russia and to 2 billion Indian and Chinese citizens. Were these three states to take the
logical response of forming a triple alliance, the result would be a new East—West conflict — whose Asian focus would also
make it a North—South conflict — accompanied by a renewed conventional and nuclear arms race. The magnitude of the
risk shows up starkly against the backdrop of China's and India's growing thirst for energy.

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Without a shift away from fossil fuel economies of finitude, society will face unstoppable
catastrophes.
1999, granted for his worldwide commitment to energy) A Solar Economy pg 320-323
Wilhelm Ostwald, characterized energy as 'everything that comes from or can be converted back into work'.2 This
understanding of energy covers three different types of work: human labour, native energy and the work done by mechanical
devices and machinery. The question of the 'end of work'3 must theref ore also be seen in the context of energy and resource
structures. The transition to solar resources will have effects on the future of work as a social institution over and above the
new jobs it creates. In the industrialized countries, machines have replaced human labour. For a long time workers saw no
benefits from this, as the technology was primarily used to increase product ivity. not to make the remaining jobs easier for
people to do. The burden on workers was only ever lightened as the result of action by politicians or trade unions. The future
will be no different: technology may make improvements in living standards possible. but this is not guaranteed to happen
when I have other aims in mind. New computer and information technologies make it possible as never before for people to
let motors and machinery do the work for them: mental and technical skills are replacing physical skills faster and more
comprehensively than ever before. This brings a new edge to the dispute over how the product of labor should be distributed
across society so that everybody can make a living for themselves. If everybody has a sufficiently well-paid job, then the product of labour is distributed
through employment incomes — with all the squabbling over fair and adequate pay that inevitably ensues. If there is not enough work to go around or
growing numbers of people are excluded from the direct redistribution of income, then income must be redist ributed across society through shorter working
weeks and/or state minimum income guarantees. This is the new big issue for social policy. At the same time, there is the increasingly intere sting question
of how people spend their time outside work. Mathias Greffrath talks of a 'three-shift society', in which people spend a third of their time in paid work, a
third in unpaid voluntary activities and a third on their own needs.4 Johano Strasser emphasizes the indisputable need for a redistribution of work in his book
Cebe der Arbeitsgesellschaft die Arbeit aus' (When the Working Society Runs Out of Work).5 As long as this redistribution can be only imperfectly realized,
the guestion of how people with no income from paid work can make a living will be the key issue facing any community. In theory, the output from
energy and technology is so great that ever-decreasing numbers of workers are required. But the question that becomes more
urgent by the day is how political institutions can siphon off the necessary income from highly productive firms, which are
increasingly organized on a transnational basis and which effectively operate beyond the borders of a11 national
governments. It is sheer fantasy to suppose that international political institutions could impose taxes on excess profits to
redistribute on an individual basis. This makes it all the more necessary to take a close look at the energy component of work.
Industrial society has forgotten that the sun is the greatest and most versatile source of energy available to life on Earth, and
that the power of the sun can be used to save human labour. This is equally true of agriculture and forestry. Here, too, human
labor has been replaced by machinery and fossil energy. If the work done by fossil energy were to be done by the sun, then
agriculture would reach the quintessence of its actual economic potential. The same can be said of work in nonagricultural
sectors. The Industrial Revolution was reduced to replacing human with mechanical labour while also increasing the work
done by fossil energy. Replacing fossil fuel work with solar technology will radically reshape the work society. With the sun
doing the work formerly performed by fossil fuels, the total cost of work to society is reduced to the cost of human labour
and technology. Leveraging the sun will, as has been described, result in a more equitable distribution of jobs across the
regions. The concomitant regionalization of the economy will make it easier for governments to use taxes to finance public services. Individual living costs
will be permanently lowered, thereby making it easier to find a solution to the big question of how to provide everybody with the opportunity to live a
dignified life free of destitution, as the cost of state income guarantees falls. Renewable energy helps us to escape the environmental catastrophes of the
fossil industrial age, and brings with it lower energy costs. At the same time, it also reduces the risk of damage to human health — the costs of which are
borne not by the perpet rators but by society as a whoLe — and thereby reduces the cost of maintaining a health service. Without the shift to
renewable energy. disaster prevention and disaster relief will consume ever- greater proportions of public and private funds,
until increasingly frequent catastrophes overload our capacity to cope, and social and civil order can no longer be maintained
by even the best-equipped security forces. Society also foots the bill for the current bout of spending on military equipment to ensure the security
of the remaining fossil fuel reserves, and the public is led to believe that this is in their interest. Even if the proportion of work done by people continues to
fall in comparison to the proportion done by machines and by the sun, society will face this issue from a wholly different starting point than today. There will
be less potential for aggression, in part because the environmental dangers that now threaten us will have been averted. The only remaining question is how
people spend their free time — and the answer will come not from legislation, not from market rules, and not from energy systems or technology, but rather
from traditions, cultural norms, the human capacity for education and social interaction, and from the cultural achievements of society.

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Absent a rethinking of energy as an infinite product of solar energy, society will collapse in on
itself as we near the end of oil reserves.
1999, granted for his worldwide commitment to energy) A Solar Economy 323-324
From the bounty of the sun to global economic prosperity The Earth is rich, and it owes its wealth to the sun. That this wealth
is today more often burnt than used and preserved for the future is the greatest economic nonsense imaginable. And then to call this destruction of resources
'economic growth' makes a mockery of the phrase. This is not economic growth. but economic destruction, and it leads not to Adam Smith's 'wealth of
nations', but rather to Elmar Altvater's 'poverty of nations'.6 The fundamental problem with today's global economy is not globalization per Se, but that this
globalization is not based * on the sun — the only global force that is equally available to all and whose bounty is so great that it need never be fully tapped.
Only with solar in place of fossil energy can the world reach the pinnacle of its potential. As long as economic progress depends on
resources found only in a few regions, there will inevitably be increasingly bitter conflicts in which national interests
will come before the interests of the planet, national economies before the economy as a whole, short-term before long-
term interests and individuals and companies before society. The global hierarchies that have grown and continue to grow
out of fossil energy supplies stand in the way of a new era in which people can make as close to an independ ent living as can
be achieved, and in which people can make their contribution to global output according to the measure of their ability and
need. The existing hierarchies, however, are ironing out economic and cultural differences, depriving the world of its vibrant
diversity. Cultural destitution is following hard on the heels of its economic twin. 324 THE SOLAR ECONOMY It is
because the global flow of fossil resources has for a tong time been widening the scope of possibility and opportunity for
increasing numbers of people in the industrialized nations char people now fail to see that the same resource flow now has
the opposite effect, narrowing the range of opportun ities for increasing numbers of people. and ultimately for everybody.
Global resource conflict, environmental catastrop he, fossil energy prices that are unaflordable for most of the worlds
population, the economic crises to come as supplies dwindle — all these put the world in grave danger of turning back
the clock. Hard-won achievements of civilization may be lost: the UN and international law, international treaties, the
global economy itself. The most likely consequence of the struggle to control dwindling fossil reserves is a deep decline
in the global economy. leading ultimately to the fall of global civilization itself.

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Nuclear War Impact

Conservation is the wrong solution. Rather than bottle up energy and forces that are inevitably
released in nuclear war, we should constantly expend energy without reserve.
The basis for Bataille’s approach can be found in the second chapter of the work “Laws of General Economy.”The theory in
itself is quite straightforward: living organisms always, eventually, produce more than they need for simple survival and
reproduction. Up to a certain point, their excess energy is channeled into expansion: they fill all available space with
versions of themselves. But inevitably, the expansion of a species comes against limits: pressure will be exerted against
insurmountable barriers. At this point a species’ explosive force will be limited, and excess members will die. Bataille’s
theory is an ecological one because he realizes that the limits are internal to a system: the expansion of a species will find its
limit not only through a dearth of nourishment but also through the pressure brought to bear by other species.’° As one moves
up the food chain, each species destroys more to conserve itself. In other words, creatures higher on the food chain consume
more concentrated energy. It takes more energy to produce a calorie consumed by a (carnivorous) tiger than one consumed by
a (herbivorous) sheep. The ultimate consumers of energy are not so much ferocious carnivores as they are the ultimate
consumers of other animals and themselves: human beings. For Bataille, Man’s primary function is to expend prodigious
amounts of energy, not only through the consumption of other animals high on the food chain (including man himself)
but in rituals that involve the very fundamental forces of useless expenditure: sex and death.11 Man in that sense is in a
doubly privileged position: he not only expends the most, but alone of all the animals he is able to expend consciously. He
alone incarnates the principle by which excess energy is burned off: the universe, which is nothing other than the production
of excess energy (solar brilliance), is doubled by man, who alone is aware of the sun’s larger tendency and who therefore
squanders consciously in order to be in accord with the overall tendency of the universe. This for Bataille is religion: not the
individualistic concern with deliverance and personal salvation, but rather the collective and ritual identification with the
cosmic tendency to lose. Humans burn off not only the energy accumulated by other species but, just as important,
their own energy, because humans themselves soon hit the limits to growth. Human society cannot indefinitely
reproduce: soon enough what today is called the “carrying capacity” of an environment is reached.12 Only so many babies
can be born, homes built, forests harvested. Then limits are reached. Some excess can be used in the energy and population
required for military expansion (the case, according to Bataille, with Islam [OC, 7: 83—92; AS, 81—91]), but soon that too
screeches to a halt. A steady state can be attained by devoting large numbers of people and huge quantities of wealth and
labor to useless activity: thus the large numbers of unproductive Tibetan monks, nuns, and their lavish temples (OC, 7: 93—
108; AS, 93—110). Or most notably, one can waste wealth in military buildup and constant warfare: no doubt this
solution kept populations stable in the past (one thinks of the endless battles between South American Indian tribes), but
in the present (i.e., 1949) the huge amounts of wealth devoted to military armament, worldwide, can lead only to
nuclear holocaust (OC, 7: 159—60; AS, 169—71). This final point leads to Bataille’s version of a Hegelian “absolute
knowledge,” one based on the certainty of a higher destruction (hence an absolute knowledge that is also a non-knowledge).
The imminence of nuclear holocaust makes it clear that expenditure, improperly conceived, can threaten the
continued existence of society. Unrecuperable energy, if unrecognized or conceived as somehow useful, threatens to
return as simple destruction. Bataille’s theory, then, is a profoundly ethical one: we must somehow distinguish
between versions of excess that are “on the scale of the universe,” whose recognition-implementation guarantee the
survival of society (and human expenditure), and other versions that entail blindness to the real role of expenditure,
thereby threatening man’s, not to mention the planet’s, survival. This, in very rough outline, is the main thrust of
Bataille’s book. By viewing man as a spender rather than a conserver, Bataille manages to invert the usual order of
economics: the moral imperative, so to speak, is the furthering of a “good” expenditure, which we might lose sight of if
we stress an inevitably selfish model of conservation or utility For if conservation is put first, inevitably the bottled-up
forces will break loose but in unforeseen, uncontrollable, and, so to speak, untheorized ways. We should focus our
attention not on an illusory conservation, maintenance, and the steady state—which can lead only to mass destruction
and the ultimate wasting of the world—but instead on the modes of expenditure in which we, as human animals,
should engage.’3

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Nuclear War Impact

We should endorse expenditure without reserve, without regard for the future. Such expenditure
avoids the threat of nuclear war which permeates any spending for a useful contribution – to one’s
own standing or for one’s nation.
Bataille’s model in The Accursed Share ultimately depends on a distinction between types of expenditure and what we
might call the modes of being associated with each type. This is significant because much of Bataille’s analysis entails a
critique of the confusion between different types of expenditure and economy: the “restrained” and the general.” Indeed,
Bataille would argue that many of our current ills under capitalism derive from the confusion between the two realms; a
Bataillean ethics would work to separate them. First, “good” expenditure. Bataille associates it with an uncontrollable
“élan”: “riches prolong the burst of the sun and invoke passion”; “it’s the 1 return of the breadth of living to the truth of
exuberance”(OC, 7: 78;AS, 76). Here again we have the passions unleashed by a naive intimacy with the sun and the
profound workings of the universe. But this intimacy is inseparable from the violence of enthusiasm. Contrary to the world
of work, the world of expenditure entails spending without regard for the future, affirmation of ecstasy now, and the
refusal of things (les choses) that only serve a purpose and that contribute only to one’s own personal security and
satisfaction (profit). Thus Bataille’s theory is not only an economic one but an ethical one that criticizes the affirmation
of self. As we have seen, however, this affirmation does not serve to deny what is usually, and perhaps wrongly,
associated with the self: pleasure. For this reason Bataille proposes a subject, which, in its habitation of an intimate world,
refuses the stable and reasonable order of things in order to enter into a profound communication with others and with the
universe. This communication, this intimacy, this generosity, entails a kind of relation that is radically different from the use
of a seemingly stable thing to achieve a purpose. In The Accursed Share, Bataille writes: The intimate world is opposed to
the real as the measureless is to measure, as madness is to reason, as drunkenness is to lucidity. There is only measure in
the object, reason in the identity of the object with itself, lucidity in the direct knowledge of objects. The world of the subject
is night: this moving, infinitely suspect night, which, in the sleep of reason, engenders monsters. I propose. concerning the
free subject, which is not at all subordinate to the “real’ order and which is occupied only in the present, that in principle
madness itself can give us only an adulterated idea. (OC, 7: 63; AS, 58; italics Bataille’s) In spite of this emphasis on the
subject, it should be stressed that Bataille is attempting to put forward a concept of the instant and of experience—if
those words have any meaning at all—which exit from the personal, individual realm; the very notion of a general
economy means that individual, isolated interest is in principle left behind, and instead a larger perspective is embraced, one
in which the individual’s concerns and worries are no longer paramount. Replacing them are the larger energy flows of the
death-bound, erotic subject, of society in the grip of collective frenzy or revolt, and of the universe in the unrecoverable
energy of a myriad of stars. Having said all this, one should stress that this Bataillean ideal—for that’s what it is, really—is
itself already double, mixed with a recognition of the other reality. The angoisse— anguish, dread—before this “inner
experience” is a human cut of sense, meaning, and purpose with which one eng ages when one comes to “face death.” “Joy
before death” is not separable from a dread that serves to instill a human meaning in an otherwise cosmic, but limitless and
hence nonhuman, event. Without dread, in other words, the “subject” merely melds with the ambient surroundings, like an
animal. It is dread—which includes the very human knowledge of the limit, of death—that serves to demarcate the event and
thus give it meaning. A limit that is recognized, affirmed, at the instant of its transgression. Meaning? Does that mean it is
“significant”? For what? For some useful purpose? Not entirely. Dread entails a recognition of limits, of course, but also their
defiant overcoming; much like Mozart and Da Ponte’s unstoppable Don Giovanni, the “subject” recognizes and affirms the
limit only to overcome it, in defiance. In the same way, transgression inevitably entails an affirmation, along with an
overcoming, of interdiction. Sacrifice entails dread: it is “communication”—but communication of dread (OC, 7:518).
Bataille also makes it clear that dread is intimately tied to sense, even to reason. As he puts it in some unpublished notes to
The Limits of the Useful (written shortly before The Accursed Share): To anyone who wants glory, the inevitable dread must
first be shown. Dread distances only impertinence [outrecuidance]. The danger of ‘strong feelings’ is that one will speak of
them before experiencing them: one tries to provoke them by verbal violence, but one only ends up introducing violence
without force. (OC, 7: 512) Bataille goes on to speak of the ancient Mexicans, but their “reality” only underscores the need
for an “anguished [angoisse] and down to earth [terre a terre] research.” A “slow rigor” is required to “change our notion of
ours elves and of the Universe”(OC, 7:512). All this is ultimately important because it shows us the dual nature of Bataille’s
project. It is not just an affirmation of death, madness, wild destruction, and the leap into the void. These terms,

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associable with excess, expenditure, indicate “events” or “experiences” (for want of better words) moved toward— they
can never simply be grasped, attained—what would seem to be their contrary: interdiction, the limit, down-to-earth research.
Transgression would not be transgression without the human limit of meaning—of interdiction, of scarcity—against which it
incessantly moves. Bataille’s method is not that of the raving madman but of the patient economist, writing against a
“closed” economy, and of the Hegelian, writing against a narrow consciousness that would close off ecstatic expenditure,
and loss. Indeed, the final point Bataille wishes to reach is a higher “self-consciousness,” not of a stable and smug universal
awareness but of a knowledge facing, and impossibly grasping, a general economy of loss—in dread. Thus Bataille can
write of a self-consciousness that “humanity will finally achieve in the lucid vision of a linkage of its historical forms”
(OC, 7: 47;AS, 41). A very particular self-consciousness, then, linked to a very peculiar concept of history. A self-
consciousness, through a “slow rigor,” that grasps “humanity” not as a stable or even dynamic presence, but as a principle of
loss and destruction. A history not of peak moments of empire, democracy, or class struggle, but as exemplary instances of
expenditure. And a future not in absolute knowing, but in a finally utopian “non-knowledge,” “following the mystics of all
periods,” as Bataille puts it in the final footnote to The Accursed Share (OC, 7: 179;AS, 197). But he then goes on to add,
about himself: “but he is no less foreign to all the presuppositions of various mysticisms, to which he opposes only the
lucidity of self—consciousness” (italics Bataille’s). So there is, then, what we might call a good duality in Bataille. In
fact, the “accursed share” is itself, for want of a better term, doubled: it entails and presupposes limits, dread, self-
consciousness, language (OC, 7: 596— 98), along with madness, “pure loss,” death. The accursed share, in other words,
entails the duality of transgression, in anguish (l’angoisse), of the recognized and ultimately affirmed limits of self,
body, and world. But the same thing could be said, again for want of a better term, of the various ways this “part” is diluted
or betrayed: what we might call, to differentiate it, “bad duality” (in contradistinction to the “good” duality of the
transgression, in angoisse, of the recognized limits of self, body, and world). “Bad duality,” as I crudely put it, is the
indulgence in expenditure out of personal motives: to gain something for oneself (glory, social status) or for one’s social
group or nation (booty, territory, security). From the chief who engages in potlatch, all the way to the modern military
planners of nuclear war—all conceive of a brilliant, radical destruction of things as a useful contribution: to one’s own social
standing, to the position or long- term survival of one’s own society.

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Nuclear War Impact

The technological treatment of alternative energies as merely products of the Earth from which
energy is extracted entails a reduction of energy to a standing reserve directed to particular goals
then discarded. The endpoint of this mode of thinking is massive thermonuclear wars which can
be averted only by returning to a more intimate configuration of energy in human muscle power
and labor.
And yet, for all that, Bataille recognizes a kind of devolution in warfare: earlier (sacrificial) war and destructive gift-
giving still placed the emphasis on a spectacular and spectacularly useless destruction carried out on a human scale.
Later warfare, culminating in nuclear war, heightens the intensity of destructiveness while at the same time reducing
it to the status of simple implement: one carries out destructive acts (e.g., Hiroshima) to carry out certain useful policy
goals. “Primitive” war, then, was closer to what I have dubbed “good” duality. Implicit in Bataille’s discussion of war, from
the Aztecs to the Americans, is the loss of intimacy. Aztec war was thoroughly subordinated, both on the part of victor and
vanquished, to the exigencies of passion; as time went on, it seems that martial glory came to be associated more and more
with mere rank. Self-interest replaced the “intimate,” exciting destruction of goods and life. Modern nuclear war is
completely devoid of any element of transgression or dread; it is simply mechanized murder, linked to some vague
political or economic conception of necessity. Ultimately, for this reason, war in Bataille’s view must be replaced by a
modern version of potlatch in which one nation-state (the United States) gives without counting to others (the
Europeans, primarily). Modern war remains, for all that, an example of mankind’s tendency to expend. It is merely an
extreme example of an inability to recognize depense for what it is. It thereby constitutes a massive failure of self-
consciousness: “bad duality” as the melding of the “tendency to expend” with the demand for utility and self-interest.
Something, however, is missing in Bataille’s analysis. This steady progression in types of warfare, while signaling the
difference between what we might call “intimate” war (the Aztecs) and utilitarian war (the World Wars), nevertheless does
tend to conflate them, in a very specific way. They are all seen as moments in which humanity plays the role of the most
efficient destroyer, the being at the top of the food chain that consumes—in both senses of the word—the greatest
concentrations and the greatest quantities of energy. Ultimately the difference between Aztec war and American war is
exclusively one of self-consciousness; ironically, it was the Aztecs who, in their sacrificial/militaristic orgies, were in closer
touch with and had greater awareness of the nature of war. The Americans, quantitatively, might be the greater
consumers, but their knowledge of what they are doing is minimal (only the Marshall Plan, augmented through a reading
of Bataille, would solve that problem). What is not discussed is the nature of the destruction itself. Bataille never considers
that contemporary depense is not only greater in quantity but is different in quality. How is it that mankind has gone from
the relatively mild forms of destruction practiced by the Aztecs—mountains of skulls, to be sure, but still, relatively
speaking, fairly harmless—to the prospect of the total devastation of the earth? Why has destruction been amplified to
such a degree? Does it change the very nature of the expenditure carried out by modern societies? The answer, I think, is to
be found in the nature of the consumption itself. Bataille in effect makes the same mistake that traditional economists
make concerning the origin of value: that it is to be found primarily in human labor. If, however, we see the skyrocketing of
the creation of value in the last two centuries to be attributable not solely to inputs of human labor (muscle and brain
power) but above all to the energy derived from fossil fuels (as Beaudreau [1999] claims), we will come to understand
that the massive increase in mankind’s capacity to waste is attributable not only to, say, technical innovation, the more
efficient application of human labor, genius, and so on, but to the very energy source itself. The Aztecs, like many other
traditional societies, derived their energy from muscle power: that of animals, slaves, and, in warfare, nobles.
Destruction, like production, entailed an expenditure of energy derived from very modest sources: calories derived from
food (solar energy), transformed by muscle, and applied to a task. We might call this energy (to modify a Bataillean usage)
and its destruction intimate: that is, its production and expenditure are on a human scale, and are directly tied to a
close bodily relation with things. This relation implies a corporeal engagement with and through an energy that cannot be
put to use, that fundamentally defies all appropriation. Just as intimacy for Bataille implies a passionate involvement with
the thing—primarily its consumation, its burn-off, the intense relation with a thing that is not a thing (as opposed to
consommation, in the sense of everyday purchase, use, and wastage)—so in this case, having to do with the production and
destruction of value, my muscle power assures that my relation to what I make or destroy will be passionate. A hand tool’s
use will entail physical effort, pain, pleasure, satisfaction, or anguish. It will be up close and personal. The same will go for
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the destruction of the utility of that tool; there will be a profound connection between “me” and the destruction of the thing-
ness of the tool.27 By extension, the utility, “permanence,” and thus the servility of my self will be put in question through an
intimate connection (“communication”) with the universe via the destroyed or perverted object or tool. Just as there are
two energetic sources of economic value, then—muscle power and inanimate fuel power—so too there are two kinds of
expenditure. The stored and available energy derived from fossil or inanimate fuel expenditure, for production or
destruction, is different in quality, not merely in quantity, from muscular energy. The latter is profoundly more and
other than the mere “power to do work.” No intimacy (in the Bataillean sense) can be envisaged through the mechanized
expenditure of fossil fuels. The very use of fossil and nonorganic fuels—coal, oil, nuclear— implies the effort to
maximize production through quantification, the augmentation of the sheer quantity of things. Raw material becomes, as
Heidegger put it, a standing reserve, a measurable mass whose sole function is to be processed, used, and ultimately
discarded. It is useful, nothing more (or less), at least for the moment before it is discarded; it is related to the self only as a
way of aggrandizing the latter’s stability and position. There is no internal limit, no angoisse or pain before which we
shudder; we deplete the earth’s energy reserves as blandly and indifferently as the French revolutionaries (according to
Hegel) chopped off heads: as if one were cutting off a head of cabbage. “Good” duality has completely given way to “bad.”
As energy sources become more efficiently usable—oil produces a lot more energy than does coal, in relation to the amount
of energy needed to extract it, transport it, and dispose of waste (ash and slag)—more material can be treated, more people
and things produced, handled, and dumped. Consequently more food can be produced, more humans will be born to eat it,
and so on (the carrying capacity of the earth temporarily rises). And yet, under this inanimate fuels regime, the very nature of
production and above all destruction changes. Even when things today are expended, they are wasted under the sign of
efficiency, utility. This very abstract quantification is inseparable from the demand of an efficiency that bolsters the position
of a closed and demanding subjectivity We “need” cars and SUVs, we “need” to use up gas, waste landscapes, forests, and so
on: it is all done in the name of the personal lifestyle we cannot live without, which is clearly the best ever developed in
human history the one everyone necessarily wants, the one we will fight for and use our products (weapons) to protect. We no
longer destroy objects, render them intimate, in a very personal, confrontational potlatch; we simply leave items out for the
trash haulers to pick up or have them hauled to the junkyard. Consumption (la consommation) in the era of the standing
reserve, the framework (Ge-Stell), entails, in and through the stockpiling of energy, the stockpiling of the human: the self
itself becomes an element of the standing reserve, a thing among other things. There can hardly be any intimacy in the
contemporary cycle of production-consumption-destruction, the modern and degraded version of expenditure. As Bataille
put it, concerning intimacy: Intimacy is expressed only under one condition by the thing [la chose]: that this thing
fundamentally be the opposite of a thing, the opposite of a product, of merchandise: a burn-off [consummation] and a
sacrifice. Since intimate feeling is a burn-off, it is burning-off that expresses it, not the thing, which is its negation. (OC, 7:
126; AS 132: italics Bataille’s) War, too, reflects this nonintimacy of the thing: fossil fuel and nuclear- powered
explosives and delivery systems make possible the impersonal destruction of lives in great numbers and at a great
distance. Human beings are now simply quantities of material to be processed and destroyed in wars (whose purpose is
to assure the continued availability of fossil fuel resources). Killing in modern warfare is different in kind from that carried
out by the Aztecs. All the sacrificial elements, the elements by which the person has been transformed in and through death,
have disappeared. Bataille, then, should have distinguished more clearly between intimate and impersonal varieties of
useless squandries when it came to his discussion of the Marshall Plan. (In the same way, he should have distinguished
between energy that is stockpiled and put to use and energy that is fundamentally “cursed” not only in and through bodily
excess but in its ability to do “work”.) It is not merely a question of our attitude toward expenditure, our “self-
consciousness”: also fundamental is how it is carried out. Waste based on the consumption of fossil or inanimate
(nuclear) fuels cannot entail intimacy because it is dependent on the thing as thing, it is dependent on the energy
reserve, on the stockpiled, planned, and protected self “[This is) what we know from the outside, which is given to us as
physical reality (at the limit of the commodity, available without reserve). We cannot penetrate the thing and its only
meaning is its material qualities, appropriated or not for some use (utilite), understood in the productive sense of the term.
(OC, 7: 126; AS, 132; italics Bataille’s) The origin of this destruction is therefore to be found in the maximizing of the
efficiency of production; modern, industrialized waste is fundamentally only the most efficient way to eliminate what has
been over- produced. Hence the Marshall Plan, proposing a gift-giving on a vast, mechanized scale, is different in kind from,
say, aTlingit potlatch ceremony. “Growth” is the ever-increasing rhythm and quantity of the treatment of matter for some
unknown and unknowable human purpose and that matter’s subsequent disposal/destruction. One could never “self-
consciously” reconnect with intimacy through the affirmation of some form of industrial production-destruction. To
see consumer culture as in some way the fulfillment of Bataille’s dream of a modern-day potlatch is for this reason a
fundamental misreading of The Accursed Share.3’ Bataille’s critique is always an ethics; it entails the affirmation of a
“general economy” in which the particular claims of the closed subjectivity are left behind. The stockpiled self is countered,
in Bataille, by the generous and death-bound movement of an Amélie, of a Sadean heroine whose sacrifice puts at risk not
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only an object, a commodity, but the stability of the “me.”To affirm a consumption that, in spite of its seeming delirium of
waste, is simply a treatment of matter and wastage of fossil energy in immense quantities, lacking any sense of internal limits
(angoisse), and always with a particular and efficacious end in view (“growth,” “comfort,” “personal satisfaction,” “consumer
freedom”) is to misrepresent the main thrust of Bataille’s work. The point, after all, is to enable us to attain a greater “self-
consciousness,” based on the ability to choose between modes of expenditure. Which entails the greatest intimacy? Certainly
not nuclear devastation (1949) or the simple universal depletion of the earth’s resources and the wholesale destruction of
ecosystems (today). We face a situation through Bataille, then, in which, to paraphrase the Bible, “the left hand does not
know what the right is doing.”32 By affirming the generosity of the self that risks itself, the irony is that, as in 1949, an
economy of expenditure—one that affirms the bodily expenditure of sacrifice, of the orgy of the celebration of cursed
matter—will “save the world.”33 Instead of facing—and choosing an alternative to—nuclear war, as Bataille in his day did,
today we effectively, and perhaps inadvertently, choose an alternative to ecological disaster brought about by unwise
modes of consumption (consommation). Expenditure is double, and just as the affirmation of giving, according to Bataille,
could head off nuclear apocalypse, so too today we can envisage a model of expenditure that, involving not the expenditure
of a standing reserve of eighty million barrels a day of oil, but the wastage of human effort and time, will transform the cities
of the world, already facing imminent fossil fuel depletion (what I call postsustainability). What indeed would a city be like
whose chief mode of expenditure entailed not the burning of fossil fuel but the movement of bodies in transport, in
ecstasy, in despair? We have no model of such a city. It is up to us to imagine it, to practice it. Of course there have
been cities in the past, built around religious expenditure, sacrifice; Bataille examines them in The Accursed Share. But
modern cities devoted to a cult of the death of God? Nor do we have a model of a monotheist religion that tries to propose a
godhead who affirms the unconditioned, the void of his own death. (Perhaps no such model is literally conceivable.) All we
have are religions of the Book, religions of useful all-conquering violence, religions that limit expenditure and guarantee the
permanence of the self through the worship of a transcendent being.34 We have seen, so far, energy as inseparable from
(sacred) matter and intimacy, the production of and identification with this energy as generosity and risk. We must
now think of religion as energy charge: from expenditure as a fixed doctrine, entailing rank, exaltation, and social and
personal stability— if not routinized slaughter— to religion as the scattering of doctrine, to sacrifice as the putting in
question of the stockpiling of natural resources, of bodies, of victims. Religion, in other words, as the dispersal of any
possible codification of the sacred in a Book. And along with this counter- Book, the city as the non-place, the u-topos, of
scattering.

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Capitalism Internal
Bataille’s economy of expenditure provides the best strategy for combating the ills of capitalism. A
focus on expenditure rather than production as the core of economics allows a vision in which
capitalism is not the eternal model of economics.
Noys 2K (Benjamin, Lecturer in English, School of Cultural Studies, University College, Chichester, Georges Bataille: A
Critical Introduction, pg 105 – 108) JXu
The first step to take is to go back to the essay which sets out the research programme Bataille would develop in The
Accursed Share, ?The Notion of Expenditure? (January 1933) (VE, 116? 29; BR, 167? 81). This precise summary of
Bataille?s economic thought is far more accessible than the sometimes clumsy search for intellectual foundations in The
Accursed Share. ?The Notion of Expenditure? is charged with the revolutionary fervour of the time and Bataille?s faith in
mass insurrection. So, rather than being a work of ?political economy?, as The Accursed Share claims to be, ?The Notion of
Expenditure? is a work of revolutionary critique. Perhaps Bataille?s energetic reflections on the crisis of value were
influenced as much by the 1929 Wall Street crash and the subsequent world depression as they were by the anthropological
data on which Bataille drew. When Bataille wrote ?A human society can have ? an interest in considerable losses, in
catastrophes that, while conforming to well-defined needs, provoke tumultuous depressions, crises of dread, and, in the
final analysis, a certain orgiastic state? (VE, 117; BR, 168) he could just as well have been describing the economic crises
of the 1920s and 1930s as the massive expenditures of so-called ?primitive? societies. Bataille wanted to take these crises
further and to encourage the transformation of the psychological states induced by these crises from dread to an ?
orgiastic state?. This was a political task because it involved the critique of a political and economic system in which a
financial crisis simply increased wealth for some and poverty for others. This is where the decisive difference lay
between modern societies and the so-called ?primitive? societies. In those ?primitive? societies a crisis leads to the ?
delirium of the festival? (VE, 122; BR, 173) where social divisions are affirmed but economic divisions shattered by
mass gift giving: potlatch. Wealth would be expended and lost in a round of exchanges where each giver had to give
more to demonstrate their superior status. By contrast the crises of the capitalist world simply spurred further
accumulation and increased economic divisions. As this economic division became sharper Bataille saw the possibility
of the working class using a modern potlatch as a political weapon. Deprived of economic wealth the working class
could only assert its social power by humiliating the bourgeoisie through the appropriation of its wealth and its
immediate expenditure. Unlike the bourgeoisie where ?wealth is now displayed behind closed doors, in accordance with
depressing and boring conventions? (VE, 124; BR, 175) the proletariat can restore the generosity and nobility which have
disappeared from modern life. Although this was consciously expressed in Marxist terms Bataille saw this seizing of the
means of production not as the prelude to a better and more productive socialist society but as the occasion for a festival of
expenditure: ?Class struggle, on the contrary, becomes the grandest form of social expenditure when it is taken up again
and developed, this time on the part of the workers, and on such a scale that it threatens the very existence of the
masters? (VE, 126; BR, 178). Bataille would have agreed with the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga (1889? 1970) that ?
One does not build communism?,2 as for him at that time communism was an experience of violent consumption. Instead of
exploring communism as accumulation Bataille chooses to examine it as a principle of loss; therefore communism is no
longer a better or more rationally organised economic form than capitalism (as so many Marxists have argued) but a more
irrational one. Marxism can no longer be reduced to being the mirror image of capitalism or restricted to being a new
form of political economy. Bataille?s communism is a heterogeneous communism of what is excluded by capitalism: ?
It excludes in principle non-productive expenditure? (VE, 117; BR, 168). Of course, non-productive expenditure can be
seen as another name for the accursed share, from which Bataille will try to lift the curse of exclusion in his later work.
Already in ?The Notion of Expenditure? Bataille tries to develop an initial characterisation of this excluded non-productive
expenditure by marking out its difference. The first distinction he draws is the one between production and
consumption, and, as we have seen, Bataille is already trying to displace the emphasis that both capitalism and
socialism place on production. However, it is not enough to move towards consumption because there are two forms of
consumption. There is productive consumption, broadly speaking consumption which serves the reproduction of the
system or the consumption necessary to survival rather than life. This form of consumption is actually directed
towards production, it is subject to the delay and detours necessary to reproduction. There is, however, another form
of consumption, unproductive expenditure which is an end in itself. Unproductive expenditure is the principle of loss
which is excluded by modern society but which still lives on within it, revealed in the traces and remnants of the great
exercises of expenditure of the past and of ?primitive? societies. Bataille gives a number of examples of the survival of

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processes of sumptuary expenditure, for instance in the continuing fascination we have with jewels. These functionally
useless items, except for decoration, lead to massive expenditures both in their recovery from the earth and in their sale. For
Bataille they have the profound unconscious meaning of ?cursed matter that flows from a wound? (VE, 119; BR, 170).
Jewels, especially the great diamonds, are often rumoured to be cursed or possessed of a malign power to excite greed and
violence. Wilkie Collins?s The Moonstone (1868) is the classic fictional exploration of this ?cursed matter? with its story of a
fabulous and uncanny diamond circulating through multiple acts of theft and betrayal before it finally returns to that locus of
fantasies of a ?primitive? Orient ? India. 3 Bataille?s other examples include games, both the expense of putting on sporting
events and the gambling and excessive consumption they provoke (a tendency which has increased since Bataille wrote), art
and sacrifice. In each example Bataille finds that we still remain attached to this principle of loss, of nonproductive
expenditures which remain more and more confined to the margins of existence. This marginal existence of the principle of
loss conceals the fact that in reality non-productive expenditures are not a minor economic phenomenon but the very origin
of economy. Bataille?s turn to ?primitive? societies is not a romantic projection of the ?noble savage? who exemplifies
unproductive expenditure but an act of what Goux calls ?ethnological decentring? (CR, 196). By returning to a different
possibility of economy Bataille dislodges our tendency to project capitalism as the eternal model of economy. Instead,
through examining the past economic institution of potlatch described by anthropologists we discover that ?The secondary
character of production and acquisition in relation to expenditure appears most clearly in primitive economic institutions,
since exchange is still treated as a sumptuary loss of ceded objects: thus at its base exchange presents itself as a process of
expenditure, over which a process of acquisition has developed? (VE, 121; BR, 172). For Bataille economy, and especially
modern restricted economics in its capitalist form, is secondary to the primacy of this process of expenditure and loss.
Economy originates not in accumulation but in loss, which is visible in ?the archaic form of exchange? (VE, 121; BR, 172),
potlatch. Drawing on the work of Marcel Mauss in The Gift4 Bataille describes potlatch as an act of gift-giving which is a
challenge and demands a greater gift in return. This practice, found among North-western Native American tribes, is a form
of exchange that is based on loss or as Bataille would claim ?limitless loss? (VE, 123; BR, 174). However, Bataille
recognises that while this competitive gift-giving may lead to material loss it is also organised around a gain in social
power: ?It is the constitution of a positive property of loss ? from which spring nobility, honour, and rank in a hierarchy ? that
gives the institution its significant value? (VE, 122; BR, 173). The chief or the tribe which gives the larger gift and outbids its
rival gains power over them, so loss already appears to exist within a dialectic of accumulation. Bataille resists this reading
by stressing that loss comes first and is primary to the process as its trigger. He also stresses that this social dominance based
on loss, the giving away of wealth, resists the accumulation of absolute economic power over others and their destitution.
Finally, Bataille is interested in how this process can always go out of control and lead to mass destruction, as when a tribe
destroys its entire village to place its rival in an inescapable debt to it. No matter how much the potlatch can lead to the
accumulation of status and wealth it is always inhabited by the ghost of absolute loss.

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Capitalism Internal
The movement to an economy of expenditure without reserve would halt capitalism’s
expansionary tendencies and create mechanisms that break down inequalities and exploitation.
Yang 2K (Mayfair Mei-hui, teaches in the anthropology and religious studies departments at the University of California,
Santa Barbara, Putting Global Capitalism in Its Place: Economic Hybridity, Bataille, and Ritual Expenditure, Current
Anthropology Volume 41, Number 4, August/October 2000) JXu
Baudrillard's 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 Kwakwk'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.
Bataille's 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 Bataille's 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 modernity's radical reduction of nonproductive
expenditure.14 Thus, Bataille wished to resuscitate an important dimension of the economy, nonproductive
expenditure, that has all but disappeared in both capitalist and state socialist modernity.

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Capitalism Impact
Capitalism makes war and extinction inevitable.
Brown, Charles May 13th 2005 (http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2005w15/msg00062.htm)
The capitalist class owns the factories, the banks, and transportation-the means of production and distribution. Workers sell
their ability to work in order to acquire the necessities of life. Capitalists buy the workers' labor, but only pay them back a
portion of the wealth they create. Because the capitalists own the means of production, they are able to keep the surplus
wealth created by workers above and beyond the cost of paying worker's wages and other costs of production. This surplus is
called "profit" and consists of unpaid labor that the capitalists appropriate and use to achieve ever-greater profits. These
profits are turned into capital which capitalists use to further exploit the producers of all wealth-the working class. Capitalists
are compelled by competition to seek to maximize profits. The capitalist class as a whole can do that only by extracting a
greater surplus from the unpaid labor of workers by increasing exploitation. Under capitalism, economic development
happens only if it is profitable to the individual capitalists, not for any social need or good. The profit drive is inherent in
capitalism, and underlies or exacerbates all major social ills of our times. With the rapid advance of technology and
productivity, new forms of capitalist ownership have developed to maximize profit. The working people of our country
confront serious, chronic problems because of capitalism. These chronic problems become part of the objective conditions
that confront each new generation of working people. The threat of nuclear war, which can destroy all humanity, grows with
the spread of nuclear weapons, space-based weaponry, and a military doctrine that justifies their use in preemptive wars and
wars without end. Ever since the end of World War II, the U.S. has been constantly involved in aggressive military actions
big and small. These wars have cost millions of lives and casualties, huge material losses, as well as trillions of U.S. taxpayer
dollars. Threats to the environment continue to spiral, threatening all life on our planet. Millions of workers are unemployed
or insecure in their jobs, even during economic upswings and periods of "recovery" from recessions. Most workers
experience long years of stagnant real wages, while health and education costs soar. Many workers are forced to work second
and third jobs to make ends meet. Most workers now average four different occupations during their lifetime, being
involuntarily moved from job to job and career to career. Often, retirement-age workers are forced to continue working just to
provide health care for themselves. With capitalist globalization, jobs move as capitalists export factories and even entire
industries to other countries. Millions of people continuously live below the poverty level; many suffer homelessness and
hunger. Public and private programs to alleviate poverty and hunger do not reach everyone, and are inadequate even for those
they do reach. Racism remains the most potent weapon to divide working people. Institutionalized racism provides billions
in extra profits for the capitalists every year due to the unequal pay racially oppressed workers receive for work of
comparable value. All workers receive lower wages when racism succeeds in dividing and disorganizing them. In every
aspect of economic and social life, African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans, Asian a
nd Pacific Islanders, Arabs and Middle Eastern peoples, and other nationally and racially oppressed people experience
conditions inferior to that of whites. Racist violence and the poison of racist ideas victimize all people of color no matter
which economic class they belong to. The attempts to suppress and undercount the vote of the African American and other
racially oppressed people are part of racism in the electoral process. Racism permeates the police, judicial and prison
systems, perpetuating unequal sentencing, racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement, and police brutality. The democratic,
civil and human rights of all working people are continually under attack. These attacks range from increasingly difficult
procedures for union recognition and attempts to prevent full union participation in elections, to the absence of the right to
strike for many public workers. They range from undercounting minority communities in the census to making it difficult for
working people to run for office because of the domination of corporate campaign funding and the high cost of advertising.
These attacks also include growing censorship and domination of the media by the ultra-right; growing restrictions and
surveillance of activist social movements and the Left; open denial of basic rights to immigrants; and, violations of the
Geneva Conventions up to and including torture for prisoners. These abuses all serve to maintain the grip of the capitalists on
government power. They use this power to ensure the economic and political dominance of their class. Women still face a
considerable differential in wages for work of equal or comparable value. They also confront barriers to promotion, physical
and sexual abuse, continuing unequal workload in home and family life, and male supremacist ideology perpetuating unequal
and often unsafe conditions. The constant attacks on social welfare programs severely impact single women, single mothers,
nationally and racially oppressed women, and all working class women. The reproductive rights of all women are continually
under attack ideologically and politically. Violence against women in the home and in society at large remains a shameful fact
of life in the U.S.

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Environment Internal
Bataille’s expenditure without reserve presents the best strategy for addressing today’s ecological
issues.
Clark and Stevenson 03 (Nigel and Nick, JOURNALOF HUMAN RIGHTS, VOL 2 NO 2 (JUNE 2003), 235–246)
JXu
By exploring the social and historical constitution of certain crucial concepts in this way, the sociological imagination is
usefully wielded against some of the strictures of the ecological imagination. There may, however, be ways of extracting
ourselves from a zero-sum game between human potentiality and the earth’s resourcefulness that have been less well
rehearsed. The ethical-aesthetic sensibilities of Foucault that inform Darier’s and Sandilands’s pronouncements, we should
recall, inherit a tradition of thinking through the rich potentiality of ‘life’ that can be traced back through the work of Bataille,
to Nietzsche and beyond. Besides reminding us that ‘nature’ can be construed by human beings in many ways, this line
of thought affirms the actual physical power of life – in all its guises – to produce new forms and expressions. Nietzsche,
putting his own spin on the lessons of thermodynamics, described the world as ‘a monster of energy, without beginning,
without end’ (1968: 550). Drawing together Nietzsche’s sense of an unceasing, energy-infused vitality of life with
insights from the Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky – who popularized the notion of the ‘biosphere’ – Bataille came up
with a vision of social and biological life that put excess and exuberance at centre stage. At the same time, however, he
gave full consideration to the significance of physical limits. For Bataille, the constant flow of solar energy bathing the
earth’s surface is ultimately surplus to the requirements of living matter: it may be expended in growth or proliferation
but eventually the limits of terrestrial space require that it must be ‘squandered’ in some way. The eventual necessity of
‘uselessly’ using up accumulated matter-energy presents a basic fact of life for all organisms, ourselves included. In this
way, death, catastrophe and extinction are all necessary manifestations of the ‘explosive’ force of life, for they ‘make room
for fresh beings coming into the cycle with renewed vigour’, and are thereby a vital part of the creative and generative
process (Bataille 1986: 59). While Bataille has largely been passed over in environmental discourses, his ‘exuberant’ vision
of life has found a warm reception in the ‘new biology’, a ‘non-traditional’ approach to the biological sciences which
emphasizes the composite nature of living bodies and the resilience of life in the face of disturbance (Margulis and Sagan
1995: 164–165, Sagan 1992: 375–376). What is revealing to note is that prior to the rise of the modern environmental
movement, and long before most of his fellow social scientists had begun to consider ecological issues, Bataille had a
clear sense that modern economies were contributing to a potentially devastating build-up of energy. ‘(U)nprecedent
accumulation’, he claimed, ‘. . . has turned the whole world into a colossal powder keg’ (1993: 428). In the context of global
warming, Bataille’s precept of a ‘global exuberance of energy’ (1991: 74) has begun to appear more prescient than
eccentric. Many of today’s ‘ecological issues’, from bioinvasion to emergent viruses, lake eutrophication to antibiotic
resistance, are less symptomatic of a retreat of life so much as its unremitting vitality. In this way, Bataille’s insights
chime with the conclusion of biologist Lynn Margulis, who highlights the ‘shocking prodigiousness’ of the living world, and
reminds us that life ‘has fed on disaster and destruction from the beginning’ (1998: 137, 151). The lesson we might draw
from Bataille, and from those who have taken his work seriously, is not that ecosystems are immune to human impact
but that limits and excess are irrevocably bound together in the workings of our biosphere. And that human social life
is unavoidably implicated in this interplay. In this way, the green ‘aesthetics of existence’ affirmed by Darier and others
might draw its energy not merely from a sense of discursive play but from the knowledge that human social life is inevitably
open to the greater play of life in general. A more ‘exuberant’ ecological imagination along such lines would not preclude an
exacting quest for justice or sustainability but it might add a vital complementary charge: that of ‘gratitude toward the rich
ambiguity of life’ that exceeds all calculation (see Connolly 1999: 139).

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Flows of energy are at the core of environmental and economic inequality.
Yet capital continues to generate obvious spatial patterns, as anyone can see on nightly satellite photos. Such images lend
concrete, visual support, for instance, to statistics which say that the average American consumes 330 times more
energy than the average Ethiopian. When new parts of the world system succeed in attracting capital—that is, when they
“develop”—it shows clearly in the satellite images, as in the strong contrast between the dark northern and luminous southern
half of the Korean peninsula. It must be of relevance to world system theory that the United States’ share of world
energy consumption is 25%, while 20% of the world’s people do not have access to enough energy to successfully
maintain their own body metabolism. This obviously also has an environmental dimension. The richest 20% of the world’s
population consume 86% of the aluminium, 81% of the paper, 80% of the iron, and 76% of the lumber (Brown 1995). Per
capita carbon dioxide emissions in 1990 were around five tons in the United States but only 0.1 tons in India.
(Remarkably, however, many people in the industrialized North continue to believe that it is their mission to educate
people in the South on how to live and produce sustainably, as if the North was setting a good example, and as if
environmental problems in the South were the result of ignorance rather than impoverishment.) If rates of energy
dissipation are an essential component in the inequitable dynamics of the world system, it must be a central
theoretical challenge to integrate perspectives from the social and natural sciences to achieve a more complete
understanding of capital accumulation. An explicit attempt to connect dependency theory and energy flows is Stephen
Bunker’s (1985) study of underdevelopment in the Amazon. He shows how the “extractive” economies of peripheral
Amazonia are at a systematic disadvantage in their exchange with the “productive” economies of industrialized sectors. The
flows of energy and materials from the former to the latter tend to reduce complexity and power in the hinterland
while augmenting complexity and power in the core. Extractive economies gene rally cannot count on a cumulative
development of infrastructure as can the productive economies in the core, because economic activities in the former are
dispersed and shifting according to the location of the extracted materials. As the stocks of natural resources become
increasingly difficult to extract as they are depleted, an intensification of extraction will tend also to increase costs per unit of
extracted resources, instead of yielding the economies of scale associated with intensification in the industrial core. Bunker’s
analysis suffers from his inclination to view energy as a measure of economic value (see next chapter), but in other respects
his underlying intuition is valid. The luminous agglomerations of industrial infrastructure in the satellite photos are the result
of uneven flows of energy and matter, and these processes of concentration are self- reinforcing, because the increasingly
advantageous economies of scale in the center progressively improve its terms of trade and thus its capacity to appropriate
the resources of the hinterland. Extractive economies are thus pressed to overexploit nature, while those parts of the
landscape in industrial nations that have not been urbanized can instead be liberated from the imperative to yield a profit and
rather become the object of conservation programs. Environmental quality is thus also an issue of inequitable global
distribution. “Environmental justice” is merely an aspect of the more general problem of justice within the framework
of world system theory.

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Expenditure Solves Social Inequality

Gift-giving speeds the breakdown of social inequalities and opens up the possibility of rebellion.
Noys 2K (Benjamin, Lecturer in English, School of Cultural Studies, University College, Chichester, Georges Bataille: A
Critical Introduction, pg 109 – 110) JXu
Adorno has explored this decline of the principle of gift-giving in very Bataillean terms in an entry called ?Articles may not
be exchanged? from Minima Moralia (1951). For Adorno the fact that ?We are forgetting how to give presents?5 can best be
seen in the invention of special gift items and more particularly in the right to exchange an unwanted gift, ?which signifies to
the recipient: take this, it?s all yours, do what you like with it; if you don?t want it, that?s all the same to me, get something
else instead?.6 This decline of gift-giving under modern capitalism is not a trivial matter because, when the capacity
for giving is lost in people, ?In them wither the irreplaceable faculties which cannot flourish in the isolated cell of pure
inwardness, but only in live contact with the warmth of things.? 7 Bataille would agree that the intimacy of a free
exchange based on loss, risk, and a challenge that involves the donor giving himself or herself with the gift, has been
lost. Writing after the experience of the Shoah and witnessing the rise of capitalist consumerism in the United States Adorno
was, understandably, pessimistic about any possibility of the rediscovery of this warmth. Bataille, writing in a time of
capitalist crisis and revolutionary fervour, was optimistic about the political possibility of restoring gift-giving. As we saw he
regarded potlatch as the very possibility of a new form of revolution, a revolution of festival and expenditure. Bataille
strongly believed that the process of the bourgeoisie spending for itself would lead to the increasing immiseration of the
proletariat and the necessity of revolution. Although he had already noted that the bourgeoisie was engaging in limited
processes of amelioration (?welfare?), Bataille thought that these attempts to limit and heal the social division of class
simply would lead to further humiliation and eventually an outburst of revolutionary expenditure. They remained
pathetic stopgap measures which refused to confront the proletariat in a game of agonistic exchange but instead
patronised it and left it dependent. This limited amelioration would also always leave an abject segment of the
population which could confront bourgeois dominance. Bataille argued that in the United States, where experiments in
welfare had gone furthest at the time, African-Americans were left in this abject position and so offered the best
possibility of political rebellion (VE, 102). Bataille?s political reading of the gift as a gesture of class struggle, as a gesture
that would resist the poverty of everyday life (in all its forms), exerted a subterranean political influence. Greil Marcus has
traced the influence of Bataille?s ?gnostic materialism? (VE, 45? 52; BR, 160? 4) through the radical groups, the Lettrist
International (LI) and the Situationist International (1957? 72). The LI would name its journal Potlatch and call for the sort of
total festival revolution of which Bataille had dreamed. Marcus suggests that ?Bataille was laying down a challenge; twenty-
one years later, the LI picked it up.? 8 Bataille?s revolutionary potlatch is also at work in the Situationist International, the
revolutionary group most renowned and reviled for its role in the May ?68 events in France. 9 The events are closest to
Bataille?s vision of the revolution as ?an outlet for collective impulses? (VE, 101), but Bataille?s influence on the
Situationists goes further.

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Expenditure Affirms Life

Bataille’s expenditure is the ultimate affirmation of life – the spending without regard for
conservation or fears of future scarcity. This is only possible if we relinquish concepts of energy as
directed, purposeful utility and instead embrace an expenditure of unmeasured energy.
and Postsustainability, Pg xvi – xviii) JXu
Bataille’s energy is inseparable from that which powers cars and raises elevators, but it is different as well. It is excess
energy, and in that sense it is left over when a job is done, when the limits of growth are reached, or, in the current
situation, when fossil fuels themselves reveal their profound limitations. Bataille’s energy is a transgression of the
limit, it is what is left over in excess of what can be used within a fundamentally limited human field. As such, it is quite
different from what can be used: it is not just left over in the sense of not being consumed; it is fundamentally unusable. At
the point at which quantification reveals its finitude, energy asserts itself as the movement that cannot be stockpiled or
quantified. It is the energy that by definition does not do work, that is insubordinate, that plays now rather than contributing
to some effort that may mean something at some later date and that is devoted to some transcendent goal or principle. It is, as
Bataille reminds us a number of times, the energy of the universe, the energy of stars and “celestial bodies” that do no work,
whose fire contributes to nothing. On earth, it is the energy that traverses our bodies, that moves them in useless and time-
consuming ways, that leads to nothing beyond death or pointless erotic expenditure, that defies quantification in measure:
elapsed moments, dollars per hour, indulgences saved up for quicker entry into heaven. Energy is expended in social ritual
that is pointless, that is tied not to the adhesion of a group or the security of the individual but to the loss of group and
individual identity—sacrifice. Bataille’s religion is thus inseparable from Bataille’s energy. Sacrifice is the movement of
the opening out, the “communication,” of self and community with death: the void of the universe, the dead God. These are
not entities that can be known or studied, but sovereign moments, moments of unconditional expenditure. This entails the
expenditure of certainties, of any attempt to establish a transcendent, unconditioned meaning that grounds all human activity,
a referent such as Man or God. Precisely because it really is unconditioned, this meaning—God, if you will—is sovereign,
dependent on nothing, and certainly not on Man and his petty desire or demands. Religion, in the orgiastic movement of the
body, is the loss of transcendent meaning, the death of God as virulent force, the traversing of the body by an energy that
overflows the limits it recognizes but does not affirm. If there is community it is the unplanned aftereffect and not the
essential meaning of this energy of this movement of the death or void of God. Thus ethics for Bataille, the community,
and its meaning and survival are aftereffects of the expenditure of the sacred. Bataille’s theory is profoundly ethical
but only in the sense that the instant of preservation, of meaning, of conservation, of knowledge, is the unforeseen
offshoot of another movement, that of the drive to spend without counting, without attempting to anticipate return. To
deny the ethical moment, the moment in which conservation and meaning are established only the better to affirm the
destruction of expenditure, is to relegate that destruction to the simple, homogeneous movement of the animal, unaware of
limit, meaning, and purposive act. Expenditure, in other words, is not the denial of the human, its repression, but
instead its affirmation to the point at which it falls: the sacrificial act, the recognition of an energy that does not do
“work” for the maintenance of the human, is the affirmation of a God who is not the slave of the human. It is the
impossible moment in which awareness doubles the unknowable loss of energy and the virulence of a God who disbelieves in
himself. The ethics of Bataille, then, entail a vision of the future in which the “left-hand sacred,” the sacred of impurity, of
eroticism, of the radically unconditioned God, spins off a community in and through which expenditure can be furthered (a
community of those with nothing in common). Not nuclear war, but the channeling of excess in ways that ensure survival
so that more excess can be thrown off. And (one can continue along these lines) not generalized ecocide, but an affirmation of
another energy, another religion, another waste, entailing not so much a steady state sustainability (with what stable
referent? Man?) but instead a postsustainable state in which we labor in order to expend, not conserve. Hence the
energy, and wealth, of the body—the energy of libidinous and divine recycling, not the stockpiled, exploited, and dissipated
energy of easily measured and used fossil fuels. This book has two goals: in the first part, to sketch out Bataille’s posit ions
on energy expenditure, religion of and against the Book, and the city in the second, to extrapolate from those positions and
consider current questions of energy use and depletion, religious literalism and fervor, and urban “life.” Urban space is a
crucial problem for Bataille in that for him the city is the privileged locus of the physical and geographical elaboration of the
sacred: either the right-hand sacred of concentration, hierarchy, and God as repressive force or the left-hand sacred of
dispersal, the fall of meaning and sense, and God as figure of the sovereign expenditure of authority8 The city is, finally, the
locus of concentration in and as the modern, and any consideration of a transition from an energy-religion complex of

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Man to one of the death of Man entails a reconsideration of the city as spatial and economic structure: a
reconsideration that proposes not just energy efficiency and sustainability, but those elements as aftereffects of a more
profound burn-off.

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Human Expenditure Good

We should expend energy at an intimate level, that of the human body rather than the calculated
utility of technology. This expenditure without return affirms a general economy based on
expenditure, opposed to a closed economy based on austere conservation.
If we uncouple the “tendency to expend” characterizing humanity from the simple consumption of huge amounts of
fossil fuel—based energy—if, in other words, we posit a “good” duality in contradistinction to the current regime of the
“bad”—we then can continue to affirm excess, but excess, the destruction of the thing, as a movement of intimacy. From
the (current) “bad” duality of the automatic production of excess as a mode of utility (the gas guzzler and the “freedom” it
proffers are “necessary””useful,” etc.) we pass to a “good” duality: a possible utility—the survival of the species— as an
aftereffect of glorious loss.8 Energy now will be wasted on an intimate level, that of the human body. The expenditure
analyzed by Bataille, in the wake of Sade, is always on the level of corporeality: the arousal of sexual organs, the movement
of muscles, the distortions of words spewing from mouths. And, we could add, using de Certeau’s terminology, the
expenditure of the walker/cyclist is the tactical alternative to the strategic law imposed by social and city planners,
developers, disciples of autonomist Man: the vast arrayed forces of modernism in its era of imminent dissolution.9 There is
virtually no point any more in trying to work out a critique of modernity: depletion does it for us, relentlessly,
derisively, definitively. Perhaps the knowledge modernity has provided, both technical and theoretic al, has been necessary;
in this case the fossil fuel regime inseparable from modernity has been a necessary, if ephemeral, stage of human
development. But the fall, the die-off, looms. The larger problem (entailing a task never fully undertaken by Bataille) is to
think a “good” duality, the postmodern affirmation of sheer expenditure through dread and the recognition of limits
(interdiction, the mortality of reference) on the scale of human muscle power and the finitude of the body. A return to the
past? Not really, since the imminent depletion of fossil fuel resources will push us in that direction anyway: muscle
power, body power, will be a, if not the, major component in the energy mix of the future.1° But certainly what is
imperative is an awareness that any economy not based on the profligate waste of resources (commonly called a
“sustainable” economy) must recognize and affirm the tendency to expend, indeed be based on it. And inseparable from
that tendency, as we know, are the passions, as Bataille would call them: glory but also delirium, madness, sexual
obsession. Or, perhaps closer to home, a word rarely if ever used by Bataille: freedom. Not the freedom to consume, the
waste of fossil fuel inputs, but the freedom of the instant, from the task, freedom disengaged from the linkage of pleasure to
a long-term, ever- receding, and largely unjustified goal. An “intimate” freedom—but not the freedom of prestige, rank, not
the freedom of Man in and as security. “Expenditure without return” is a floating concept, defined in opposition to the
restrained economy whose possibility it opens but which it defies. As an end not leading outside itself, it could be anything;
but what is most important is that with it there is a movement of “communication,” of the breaking of the narrow limits of the
(ultimately illusory) self- interested individual, and no doubt as well some form of personal or collective transport,
enthusiasm. This concern with a mouvement hors de soi can no doubt be traced to Sade, but it also derives from the French
sociological tradition of Durkheim, where collective enthusiasm was seen to animate public life and give personal life a
larger meaning.’ As Bataille puts it in L’economie a la mesure de l’univers (Economy on the Scale of the Universe): “You
are only, and you must know it, an explosion of energy You can’t change it. All these human works around you are only an
overflow of vital energy … You can’t deny it the desire is in you, it’s intense; you could never separate it from mankind.
Essentially, the human being has the responsibility here (a la charge in] to spend, in glory what is accumulated on the
earth, what is scattered by the sun. Essentially, he’s a laugher, a dancer, a giver of festivals.”This is clearly the only serious
language. (OC 7: 15—16) Bataille’s future, derived from Durkheim as well as Sade, entails a community united through
common enthusiasm, effervescence, and in this sense there is some “good” glory—it is not a term that should be associated
exclusively with rank or prestige. Certainly the Durkheimian model, much more orthodox and (French) Republican, favored
an egalitarianism that would prevent, through its collective enthusiasm, the appearance of major social inequality. Bataille’s
community would continue that tradition while arguing for a “communication” much more radical in that it puts in question
stable human individuality and the subordination to it of all “resources.” On this score, at least, it is a radical
Durkheimianism: the fusion envisaged is so complete that the very boundaries of the individual, not only of his or her
personal interests but of the body as well, arc ruptured in a community that would communicate through “sexual wounds.”
De Certeau brings to any reading of Durkheim an awareness that the effervescence of a group, its potential for
“communication,” is not so much a mass phenomenon, an event of social conformity and acceptance, but a “tactics” not only

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of resistance but of intimate bum-off and of an ecstatic movement “out of oneself.” If we are to think a “communication”
in the post—fossil fuel era, it will be one of local incidents, ruptures, physical feints, evasions, and expulsions (of
matter, of energy, of enthusiasm, of desire) — not one of mass or collective events that only involve a resurrection of a
“higher” goal or justification and a concomitant subordination of expenditure. Yet there is nothing that is inherently
excessive. Because waste can very easily contribute to a sense of rank, or can be subsumed as necessary
investment/consumption, no empirical verification could ever take place. Heterogeneous matter—or energy—eludes the
scientific gaze without being “subjective.”This is the paradox of Bataille’s project: the very empiricism we would like to
guarantee a “self-consciousness” and a pure depense is itself a function of a closed economy of utility and conservation (the
study of a stable object for the benefit and progress of mankind, etc.). Expenditure, depense, intimacy (the terms are always
sliding, they are inherently unstable, for good reason) are instead functions of difference, of the inassimilable, but also, as we
have seen on a number of occasions, of ethical judgment. It is a Bataillean ethics that valorizes the Marshall Plan over
nuclear war and that determines that one is linked to sacrifice in all its forms, whereas the other is not. In the same way
we can propose an ethics of bodily, “tactical” effort and loss. We can go so far as to say that expenditure is the
determination of the social and energetic element that does not lead outside itself to some higher good or utility.
Paradoxically this determination itself is ethical, because an insubordinate expenditure is an affirmation of a certain version
of the posthuman as aftereffect, beyond the closed economy of the personal and beyond the social as guarantor of the
personal. But such a determination does not depend on an “in-itself,” on a definitive set of classifications, on a taxonomy that
will guarantee the status of a certain act or of a certain politics. Expenditure, then, plays against—and not through
ressentiment, but through a difference with and a recognition and transgression of the limits of the closed economy of
utility and the cult of personal satisfaction, of the personal tout court. If we return to our model of hyperwaste, with which
we are so familiar (to the point of its invisibility), we can say that loss can be framed as inefficiency in relation to the
apparent efficiency and universality of the commercial (fossil) fuels regime and the automobile that serves as its ultimate
metonym. Thus, to put it simply, walking or cycling is a gross waste of time and effort when one could just drive. The
expenditure of bodily energy is tied to an immediate pleasure, a jouissance, of spending in relation to the great closed
(“global”) economy of the world. Of course the “closed” economy is based on waste as well, but the cyclist knows her waste,
revels in it, and revels in all the things she defies (and defiles) in the current economic conjuncture: not only fossil fuel use,
but the logic of obesity, the regime of spectator sports (only hyperconsuming athletes are allowed physical exertion), the
segregation of society by physical space and social class, the degradation of the environment in support of the production,
use, and disposal of cars, and the economy of “growth” dependent on the use of ever greater quantities of depletable
resources.’2 This difference with the closed, global economy, subordinated to a universal autonomist Man in the ideality of
virtual time (the pure now)—this affirmation of anguish, physical pleasure/agony and “self-consciousness” in a Bataillean
sense is what we might call one version of a contemporary affirmation of the general economy. Walking and cycling year-
round, if judged by contemporary standards of comfort and well-being, are a ridiculous waste of time and effort; they
condemn one to a harrowing descent into “discomfort.”13 Arriving sweaty at one’s job at the Department of the Treasury,
after having cycled sixteen miles from Bethesda, Maryland, is the indication of a grossly inefficient expenditure of time and
effort that would be better invested in tending to the details of the American economy. The worker who does this sort of thing
is participating in another economy at the moment he or she works for the larger, inanimate fuel-fed economy headquartered
(one of its heads, in any case), in Washington, D.C. The expenditure of personal energy is nevertheless tied to an
immediate pleasure, a jouissance, of spending set against the great closed (“global”) economy of the world. The
cyclist’s body, from the perspective of triumphant autonomist culture, is little more than an open wound, screaming for a rich
energy input of fossil fuel and exposed to the contempt or aggression of the world. It is only if we see the renunciation or
necessary abandonment of the car and the affirmation of muscles, in and as an economy of difference and knowledge —
impossible knowledge—that this act can be put in perspective. Bodily movement as transportation, display, dance,
exhaustion, passion, “communication,” all together, in a labyrinthine urban space made dense and polysemic by the different
sensory modalities of ecstatic expendirure’4—all this entails the reinscription of “freedom,” its reassignment from the
sociotechnical frame15 previously associated with the regime of hyperconsumption, social standing, and fuel depletion.

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Human Expenditure Good

Affirmation of human labor is the pinnacle of Bataille’s expenditure. The inefficiency of human
muscle power compared to technological consumption provides one of the best avenues for
expending surplus energy.
The universal city, one of whose greatest moments would no doubt be the ville radieuse of Le Corbusier, is dependent on
cheap fossil fuel inputs, on the official segregation of social spaces, and on the universalized movement of the car.4 A city
with no street life whatsoever depends on the rapid movement of its idealized, derealized citizens through programmed routes
determined by experts in traffic safety. Hazards, chance encounters, moments of whimsy, friendship, surreal madness, all are
reduced to zero: protected from chance, the motorist is able to move along quickly, never experiencing anything other than
the now and the here. This is the beauty of de Certeau’s analysis, though he doesn’t seem to recognize it: by positing the
walker against this ideal city, he has struck upon a figure who consumes energy differently, who spends it gloriously.
No doubt de Certeau, when he proposed the walker, was thinking of the flaneur in Baudelaire or in Benjamin. But from an
early twenty-first-century perspective, there is more to this figure: he or she is moving physically, is out of a car. It is not
just that the walker’s movements are “under the radar,” microscopic, rhizomatic, and therefore unpredictable,
subversive, particular, peculiar. They are that, to be sure, but they are also the practice of a different kind of
expenditure of energy; they are of a different energy regime. To burn energy with one’s body is grossly inefficient if
one has a car at one’s disposal.5 If gas is cheap, as it always has been, and (from the perspective of the official energy
experts) evidently always will be, it is inefficient to walk. You needlessly expend time, you incur physical discomfort, you are
distracted by inessential things. Movement is choppy, disarticulated; you are constantly reminded of the passage of time and
the finitude of your own body: death. Unfortunate surprises suddenly arise. The world is full of base matter, matter
coursing with uncontrollable energy: you are confronted with disgusting smells, the vision of dirt, of rotting things in
gutters. You are needlessly spending bodily energy, and time, perilously in contact with matter that could just as easily
be entirely separated from the movement of a pure awareness, a pure present. Your “glad rags” get sweaty; limp, and
you risk somehow coming down in the world. People might think that you can’t afford to drive. Thus more is at stake
than simple strategies of resistance and complicity. The walker is using energy in a way that expends the easy
certainties and the enforced legal parameters of the autonomist, “strategic” city. By walking or cycling—another way of
confronting the city through the sacrificial expenditure of corporeal energy—you are passing through the car, through the
logic of the car, on the way to an a-logic of energy consumption: postsustainable transport in a spectacular waste of
body energy.6 The autonomist self has revealed its void: dependent on the car, that empty signifier,7 the self justifies and
generates a vast, coherent system of urban organization and energy consumption, a flat universe of blank walls and identical
off-ramps, an absolute knowledge of pedestrian crossings and rights of way. But the self at the peak of the system is literally
nothing: a simple now, an awareness, a vision, of a freeway guardrail. This self is ever changing, completely volatile, “free,”
but always the same particle: it can lead nowhere beyond itself; mean nothing other than itself. What is more, the self is the
awareness of the gas gauge on the dashboard, which can, often does, and most certainly will read “empty.” At the height of
the autonomist regime, the self is pitched into the finitude of energy depletion: walking, the spending of energy in and
of the body in transports of ecstasy and dread, is the moment of temporality and mortality the sense of the human in
non-sense. The empty self is torn from its ideality; it is pure separation: “Man,” enshrined in two tons of metal, is about to
emerge, to fall, violently “communicating” with the death of God. As in Mme Edwarda, the dead God is about to get into the
back seat. Every spark of combustion, the burning of every drop of gas, announces a radical finitude at the heart of seemingly
endless, quantified waste.

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NHSI 2008 SENIORS
AT Expenditure is Destructive
Our sacrifice and expenditure differs from senseless destruction. Sacrifice is merely our method of
expending without utility in mind that affirms the unknowability of the future.
The right hand does not always know what the left is doing: generosity in Bataille’s universe never can be pure; the gift—of
energy; of time, of life itself—is squandered within a grid of opposition, within a social matrix. Truman, presented at the
end of the Accursed Share, gives, most generously, to a Europe devastated by war: the Marshall Plan. The American
president thinks he is giving to further the interests of the United States: a prosperous Europe will buy American goods,
and capitalism will be saved. But in his very ignorance, he furthers the development of another economy, one that will
save the earth. The new economy of gift-giving will render war obsolete and usher in a new society, a new economy, of
the intimate world and its rituals—which is also the economy of the mystic, the “inner experience.” The ethics of gift-
giving always entails a non-knowledge, an impossibility of willing a specific future as goal or plan. The ethics of
expenditure are an ethics of human survival in an economy in which the future—planning, hoping, deferring—is repetitively
trumped by the intimate world, by the immanence of squandering in the here and now. The coming of the new economy
will usher in a new relation to excess energy. A cursory reading of The Accursed Share might give one the impression of a
mechanistic, functionalist view of society based on physiological or zoological models. Just as a given ecosystem can absorb
only so many animals of a given species—before the excess is destroyed, in one way or another—so too a given society can
only absorb so much energy, so much wealth, before the surplus is destroyed, in a beneficial or harmful way. Usable energy;
good for doing “work,” is replaced by another, tragic, and savage energy. The power to do evil, if not work. There is,
however, a radical difference: people are conscious. They are not merely terms in an organic system with a response
typical of all other organic systems. They know what is happening, at least in principle. For Bataille, as we’ve seen,
religious ritual—sacrifice—entails something related to this knowledge, but different from it.’ Sacrifice is the useless
expenditure of excess energy in society. It is bum-off rather than constructive labor; it is the intimate world (or
heterogeneous matter) rather than the useful thing. It is action now rather than with a later end in view. But sacrifice is quite
different from the destruction, say, by wolves of excess deer in a herd. Sacrifice is a way of knowing, consciously, that
one does not know—since utility and knowledge (planning, foresight, retrospection) are inseparable. If nature lacks
knowledge, if the destruction of surplus deer is a purely natural, unknowing event, then humans, through religion, knowingly
reestablish contact with a natural realm of expenditure that is closed off from the human world of practical distinctions and
coherent knowledge. This is a higher-level or lower-level (as the case may be) continuity with nature, a knowing, so to speak,
with the unknowing of nature. Such in any event is Bataille’s thesis in his work Theory of Religion.

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Predictions Bad
The point of our expenditure is that we are not sure what will happen. But our ignorance of the
future is not a flaw. This disregard for planning is what allows us to escape the intellectual traps of
conservation and technological fixes and imagine new concepts of human-powered energy.
and Postsustainability, Pg xix – xxi) JXu
I am above all concerned with strategies that will allow us to elaborate Bataille’s ethics. As I have noted, these ethics entail a
certain blindness: the left hand does not always know what the right is doing, or in a Nietzschean formulation, one
loves a profound ignorance concerning the future. The future, I argue, is fundamentally resistant to planning, blind
expenditure entails not an obsessive and centralized prognostication, authored by a head that is always the supreme
metonym and referent of social intelligence, but rather the playing out of aftereffects in which social practices may very
well “save the earth” in spite of themselves (save it not for conservation but for lavish consumption). An economy on the
scale of the universe implies an earth on the scale of the universe. Recycling, for example (as I try to show in chapter 5, in my
presentation of Agnes Varda’s film The Gleaners and I), is not merely a question of a new, slightly more benign form of
maintaining a standing reserve; on the contrary, it is the orgiastic movement of the parody of meaning, of the expenditure of
the energy of meanings and of physical and social bodies, an ethics (and aesthetics) of filth, of orgiastic recycling. Similarly,
a religion on the scale of the universe means one that rejects the inevitable: if renewable energy in the past has always
spawned some version of feudalism and fundamentalism, our profound ignorance of the future precludes this simple
and self-defeating certainty9 A critique of humanism or fundamentalism means the refusal to see God or Man as the
ultimate signified before which all (energy) slaves bow. The expenditure of Kojeve’s Hegel, after all, means the loss of all
certainty, all dialectical and labor-oriented modes of the establishment of (terminal) meaning, history and value. The future
for that reason is not necessarily a reverse replay of military-labor-philosophical history, in which a mass die-off is
accompanied by gradual cultural collapse. A future, renewable energy society— one based on the glorious expenditure
of unrefinable energy and not its obsessive and impossible conservation—means a muscle-based, human- powered, but
literally postmodern (and not premodern) understanding of energy as infinite force and profoundly limited available
resource. Thus we consider an ecological future not of Man or God but of the body and recalcitrant energy—not
quantifiable, not refinable or concentrated in ways that allow for maximal inefficiency in the consumption of resources.
Instead we posit an energy that traverses the body in ritual, in sacrifice, in its human-powered and unpredictable
movement through the city—an energy that brings together a disunited society only to open it out to an unconditioned
“night” that can offer no guarantees, a night in which the stars shine, heavenly bodies themselves radiating an energy too
diffuse, too vast, too disordered, ever to be simply recovered. In the coming years we will all become futurologists, whether
we want this or not. We will be forced to think about energy: how its availability, at least in usable form, is constantly
dwindling (amid the seemingly infinite quantities squandered in nature); and about religion: how it offers an alternative, a
consolation, in modes of psychic or cultural satisfaction or warfare. We will then be forced to think about alternatives:
energy alternatives, spiritual alternatives. We will be obliged to conserve and to recycle even as we recognize that
recycling cannot be on the scale of cautious planning alone. This book is a small effort that tries to suggest that there
are other ways of thinking about how we power our lives, with energy and with religion: these ways, these directions
have been there all along. These other ways are not so much opposed to sustainability (as it is conventionally conceived) as
they logically precede it and spin it off not as a goal but as an aftereffect. The energy of stars, always “lost” (nonrecoverable);
the energy of our bodies in pain or ecstatic movement; the energy of sacrifice or religious orgy; the energy of art or recycled
junk charged with insubordinate power—in and through all of this the “tendency to expend” may very well come to be
recognized, and “experienced”— as we plunge into the deep recesses of human and inhuman activity. If in a future (and
imminent) era of scarcity we rethink what it means to be happy—thereby recognizing that happiness is tied not to the mere
consumption and disposal of materials, but to their wise use—we will perhaps also realize that happiness means something
more, or other, than a meager conservation or a placid contentment grounded in a placid sociability.’° Now, in other
words, is the time to start thinking about how we will spend and expend in the twenty-first century.

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Predictions Bad
Our models of prediction fail – we see the patterns we want to see, not accurate causal relations.
In a book the translated title of which would be The True State of the World, Danish statistician Björn Lomborg (1998)
contradicts Worldwatch Institute, Greenpeace, and the World Wide Fund for Nature by suggesting that what have been
perceived as global problems of inequality and environmental deterioration are mostly illusions. One by one, he dismisses
all our worries about resource depletion, per capita food product ion, increasing gaps between rich and poor, deforestation,
acidification, species extinction, chemical pollution, and global warming. The conclusion that not just some of but all
these worries are illusory is indeed remarkable. It is obvious that both the compilation and the interpretation of
statistics to a large extent boil down to whether we wish to see this or that pattern. This is not a simple question of
manipulation, but of a fundamental human desire to see verified by data the patterns we imagine to exist in the world.
But how do we choose these patterns or interpretations to begin with? To the extent that we do choose our models, it is
evident that our considerations are not concerned solely with the criterion of credibility. We like to think that our
most fundamental criterion for “truth” is whether a specific interpretation of causal connections can explain the most
aspects of our global predicament, but the widespread paradigm shift that has occurred since the 1970s instead suggests
that a more crucial consideration is which interpretation we can live with. In the industrialized nations in the 1960s and
early 1970s, there was an existential space, so to speak, for radical criticism. Especially among younger people, there was a
widespread faith in the capacity of collective, social movements to transform fundamental structures in society. When faith in
the future and collective change withered in the mid-1970s, a great many people in the North probably found the idea that
their affluence was based on the impoverishment of the South and the global environment unbearable and thus impossible to
accept. An important factor underlying this shift was the increasing mobility of globalized capital. Faced with the threat
of unemployment, local populations everywhere grew more careful in their criticism of power (cf. Bauman 1998). To the
extent that some of the indignation over environmental problems and global inequality persisted, it was generally transformed
from revolutionary fervor to resignation. Globalization thus implied contradictory impulses that condemned both the
embittered in the South and the conscience-stricken in the North to a predicament of perpetual cognitive dissonance.
Through media they came into ever closer contact with global inequalities, while at the same time it seemed
increasingly evident to them that there was virtually nothing they could do about them.

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Traditional Economic Analysis Bad

The economics of finitude rely upon a set of assumptions and speculations without merit. The
inability to account for the proper role of excess means these analyses inevitably fail.
Pawlett 97 (William, Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies, University of Wolverhampton, Utility and excess: the
radical sociology of Bataille and Baudrillard, Economy and Society, 26:1, 92 — 125) JXu
The radical implications of the philosophies of Nietzsche and Bataille have, on numerous occasions, been drawn out in a
variety of ways in disciplines as diverse as literary and gender theory, theology and political ethics;26 however, specifically
sociological treatments are rare. This is surprising since both employed distinctly sociological terminology to draw
specifically sociological conclusions. Of particular concern here is the common ground shared by Nietzsche and Bataille in
methodological disposition. Nietzsche began the critical assault on the dominant tendencies of thought in his earliest
engagements with Socratic philosophy. Unlike the founders of sociology, particularly Marx, Nietzsche was scathing of
Darwin's On the Origin of Species. He opposed 'life', the active and dynamic play of human emotion, passion and will,
to mere 'knowledge', denoting that which is reactive in that it limits, measures, serves and then judges life. It was the
latter level that he took Darwinian, biological and natural sciences to be operating on. Knowledge becomes the ultimate end
of thought rather than being a means to facilitate human creativity. Thought and knowledge become the servants of humanity,
yet in this process they restrict its diversity; then in the service of this restricted configuration of humanity they wall it up
within their image. Thought must serve human interests, it must be utile, its potential to volatilize political and cultural
orthodoxies must be contained. For Nietzsche, 'life' could still be seen as existing in excess of knowledge practices. On
the Genealogy of Morality (orig. 1887) describes the process by which the excess - passions, creativity and will - is calcified
into the material from which the suppositions, concepts and metaphors of rational thought are shaped. Rationality and
utility appear as selective deformations of creative will, or as myths that have lost their binding power (Nietzsche 1994:
12-13,91-2). In the emergent scientific worldview the bodily excesses and instinctive impulsions (lust, violence,
excretory operations) become increasingly opposed to all that was deemed rational, reasonable, moderate and useful. In
scientific discourse they become the essence of error and confusion while in religion and morality, analogously, they are
related to sin and evil. The result for Nietzsche is a reactive, resentful and nihilistic culture: 'Science today is a hiding
place for every kind of discontent, disbelief, gnawing worm, despectio sui [contempt of self], bad conscience' (1994: 117).
However, it would be a grave error to conclude that Nietzsche was opposed to all science, that he was the enemy of rigorous
thought. He argued, in fact, that thought must aspire once more to the sensibilities of art, poetry and above all tragedy in
order that the tragic fullness, the 'eternal suffering', may once more become a part of human awareness (in Deleuze 1983: 18).
It is precisely these experiences that are absent from the restricted economies of 'Christian-moral' culture and that can only be
expressed within the fullness of a general economy. In this respect Nietzsche and Bataille were very close, as Bataille fully
acknowledged. The Nietzschean notion of grosse Okonornie, that is, 'great' or 'grand' economy (Nietzsche 1968: 164), is
remarkably similar to Bataille's notion of general economy, both etymologically and in content, though they should not be
seen as entirely coterminous. Plotnitsky (1993) has explored the multiplicities involved in the term general economy as they
occur in the writings of Nietzsche, Bataille and latterly Derrida. Plotnitsky, rightly, situates the notion of general economy in
relation to Bohr's principle of complementarity and Heisenberg's indeterminacy as well as the philosophical, historical and
literary sources of this powerful notion.28 General and restricted economies are necessarily woven together and take
differing forms both within the texts of Nietzsche and Bataille and, of course, between the two thinkers. The particular
examples of restricted economy that Nietzsche and Bataille took issue with are those of the enlightenment tradition,
especially Kant and Hegel, and the political and sociological systems of the nineteenth century, particularly utilitarianism
and Marxism. The crucial insight of the general economic approach is that any restricted economy will necessarily be
forced to draw upon a matrix of assumptions, speculations and conditions to which it has no right or competence
within the terms, limits and constructions of that restricted economy. That is, there will always be partially or
unacknowledged excesses or indeterminacies operating upon and throughout that particular system. It is my
contention here that the explanatory economies of classical and modern sociology are clearly restricted economies, some
far more restricted than others. In order to appreciate Bataille's application of a Nietzschean general economy of excess to the
specific field of sociological enquiry, it is crucial to grasp the influence of the anthropological work of Durkheim and Mauss.
Such a reading can reveal the manner in which Nietzsche's aspirational grosse Okonomie of the 'overman' (Uberrnensch)
became, in Bataille, an economy of expenditure, evil, destruction and death.

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Utility Epistemology Bad

The negative’s predictive evidence is based on an epistemology which privileges utility as an
unquestioned assumption over excess. Reject their arguments because dominant institutions shape
the kinds of knowledge that are produced within this worldview.
Pawlett 97 (William, Professor of Sociology and Cultural Studies, University of Wolverhampton, Utility and excess: the
radical sociology of Bataille and Baudrillard, Economy and Society, 26:1, 92 — 125) JXu
Within the dominant trends of contemporary sociology there is a widespread tendency to treat the principle of utility as
an unproblematic or even unquestioned assumption, and not only within work that still aims to serve the cause of
enlightenment rationality as it is classically conceived. l6 The corollary is that the notion of 'the excessive' is often treated
as something to be reduced, contained or 'secured'. Recently, excessive phenomena have been treated in terms of the
calculation of security and risk (Beck 1992), or relatedly as an affliction more or less peculiar to the technological and
knowledge practices of modernity (Bauman 1989, 1992). The merit of such work is undermined by, at times, excruciating
ahistorical supposition. T'he important and influential sociological system of Anthony Giddens manages to elide the notion
of excess altogether. By insisting on the centrality of rational meaning-creating actors in dual relationship with 'enabling'
social structures, Giddens constructs a prima facie expulsion of all that cannot be accorded rational meaning or purpose, that
is, all that could be regarded as excessive. In modern feminism there is a division or tension between work which pursues the
'goal' of a full equalization of human rights and which decries, far too simplistically and to the detriment of its own argument,
any material that does not serve this purpose, and that which, often drawing on psychoanalytic sources, does attempt to
comprehend forms of excess: violence, 'evil' and death.19 Some recent sociological work has viewed forms of excess as a
field of potentiality that may disrupt dominant power hierarchies. This is especially true of material that is influenced by
Foucault: for example, Boyne (1990) and Connolly (1993). However, such work tends to focus on that which is in excess of
any particular framework of rationality - medico-legal, theological or patriarchal - as if these forces were merely textual, not
material. Such a move tends to pre-structure and contain excess by removing it from the human and social world and
containing it within the idealist and transcendent realm of text,20 often facilitating progressivist or humanist prescriptions,
benefits or 'profits'. These stand in contrast with Bataille's and Baudrillard's thought which is not only materialist but 'base-
materialist' and which pursues forms of anti-humanist theory and method. Utility must be regarded as the historical,
political and economic 'reality principle' of the western capitalist nations, conditioning or pre-structuring practically
all knowledge and truth-claims, theoretical speculation and methodological design. A great deal of academic thought and
university-based knowledge is little other than search, discovery or creation of useful thought, knowledge that may be
applied, developed, circulated, utilized for greater human productivity, potentiality or, increasingly, security.22
Governmental and private institutions provide funding for useful, balanced and ordered research proposals, while
'useless', imbalanced or disordered proposals are systematically rejected.23 The principle of utility is so widespread,
so firmly entrenched, so taken-for-granted that it becomes almost imperceptible, invisible against the canvas of late
modern society. The notion of excess is much harder to explicate. Dictionary definitions offer a preliminary insight with the
following: 'going beyond what is usual, proper or right; intemperance; something which exceeds . . . immoderate; extreme'
(Chambers Dictionary, New Edition 1993). However, utility and excess must not be conceived as binary oppositions, as
mutually exclusive. Clearly, what might be in excess of the usual, right or proper in one age may be deemed perfectly
acceptable in an earlier or later one. For example, in early twentieth-century Europe, to have more than one sexual partner in
a lifetime may have been regarded as excessive, while today to restrict oneself to one partner may seem like excessive
fastidiousness. Although what is regarded as excessive is generally, implicitly or explicitly, coded negatively, the distinction
between utility and excess cannot be seen as merely analogous to that which resides between what is prescribed by
behavioural norms and what is proscribed by them, though this can be seen as a sub-component of the above. Excess does not
merely lie beyond the commonplace, residing in territory that might be annexed or incorporated, nor is it that which is
commonly represented by political pressure groups or institutionalized oppositional organizations vying for a degree of
policy change. Rather, excess refers to that which is dirty, pointless, terrifying, sickening, evil or even non-existent, yet still
somehow palpable or configurable outside the categories and concepts of mainstream society and thought.24 Throughout the
course of modernity, it has been believed or at least hoped that ever-increasing moral and educative guidance, coupled
latterly with enhanced lifestyle opportunities, will in time eradicate or greatly curtail human excesses, which are often
conceived as in some sense instinctive or archaic in origin.

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AT Heidegger
Link turn – current efforts at sustainability continue a regime of technological thinking that
reduces the Earth to mere implements from which energy is extracted. The Earth is preserved for
the purposes of exploitation and destruction. Only the aff can move away.
The vaunted subject of the autonomists is for that reason autonomous only in its slavery to a “monstrous” energy regime.
Energy is surely wasted in a challenging, but it is a wastage that goes hand in hand with the production and wastage of
a subjectivity that is closed in on itself, concerned with its own comfort, stability, and permanence. The freedom of car
culture, of the fossil fuel era, is the freedom of a subject whose imperial grasp is inseparable from its weakness as a
quantifiable “dust mote” (as Bataille would put it). Once we have seen the fundamental cult of subjectivity on the part of the
autonomists, we can return and consider the model of subjectivity of the sustainability partisans. For them too the chief raison
d’être of their model of the future is a subjectivity. Now, however, subjectivity entails not so much the lavish expenditure
of a stockpiled energy (cars, freeways, consumer waste) as it does an even more rigorously stockpiled resource base.
While Heidegger’s retro-grouch analysis implied a wanton destruction of the stockpiled energy base (the
concentration camp as extreme and no doubt self-exculpating example), the sustainability proponents imagine a
standing reserve that would somehow not deplete but rather conserve the resources that go into it. “Humanity” would
appropriate and store those resources in such a way that they would be perpetually ready to hand. But nature would
still consist of a reserve to be tapped and resources to be expended; the goal of the operation would still be the furthering
of the stable human subject, the master of its domain. Now the world is really to be useful, and nature is to be pristine
exactly to the extent that that untouched state furthers man’s permanence and comfort on Earth. The quantified,
mechanized destruction of Earth becomes the quantified, mechanized preservation of Earth. No doubt the sustainable
future as sketched out by moral critics such as Newman would be preferable to the dystopian future that would result from a
continent completely chewed up and covered with sprawl as celebrated by Lomasky and Brooks. But the sustainable vision is
to the autonomist vision what Calvinism is to High-Church Anglicanism. The autonomous, overweening self is consecrated
in its subjectivity not through a wild ride on the freeway—which might give the semblance of extravagance and freedom—
but through the virtuous sense of renunciation one gets from darning one’s socks or writing on the backs of envelopes. The
world is small, small is beautiful, it is a prosperous way down, and we will be content, we will be superior in our lowered
expectations. We will save the earth from the destruction mandated by the profligate autonomists only by a frugal
renunciation that will be sober, clear-headed, modest. The wildness, the irrationality, the aggressive ecstasy of James
Dean in his Porsche—heedless, death-driven, glorious—will be, thankfully, discarded.

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AT Empire
Hardt and Negri’s theories crucially misunderstand the role of energy. Energy is inseparable from
labor; all energy in society required the input of human labor for its extraction. In an age of
Empire, we must wonder what happens to the current order when the fossil fuel supplies it relies
upon collapse. In the face of the total breakdown of global trade and energy flows, what we have
now is the prime opportunity to return to local expenditure, intimate expenditure on the scale of
the human through labor.
One might respond to all this by remarking that the universal city proposed by Le Corbusier or criticized by de Certeau no
longer exists. The cars in Bataille’s version of the Place de la Concorde still circle, no doubt, but the emptiness of urban
space, the fail of statues and towers, no longer makes much difference either way. The city, after all, is no longer real, but
virtual. By this we mean that space is no longer a phenomenological given, an actual location where one finds oneself—even
in a speeding car. The city as locus of movement and commerce is now everywhere and nowhere. It is the locus of
Empire. This term, as used by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, indicates a movement of signs and capital that is quite
different from the old imperial space, which had its city, its center, and its outlying realm. Empire instead goes beyond
nation-states, beyond the inner-outer distinction so necessary to any definition of a city located in real space—be it a city of
squares and churches, or a city of speed and strip malls. Empire as universal city is the space of a world market, which has no
outside: “the entire globe is its domain” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 190). All is movement, contact, on a global scale. Goods
and services cross space in ‘real time,” or the closest possible simulation of it. There is no longer any private, as
opposed to public, space: all space has been privatized, but privatized in such a way that it is omnipresent, neither inside nor
outside. Without public space, ‘The place of modem liberal politics has disappeared, and thus from this perspective our
postmodern and imperial society is characterized by a deficit of the political” (Hardt and Negri 2000, 188). Terms such as
inner and outer, natural and artificial, real event and simulated spectacle no longer stand in opposition; working as a giant
deconstructor, Empire disarticulates these oppositions; it entails a realm in which their duality is no longer effective.
Binarism in itself no longer obtains, and lost along with it is all opposition to an Other, an enemy; ‘Today it is
increasingly difficult for the ideologues of the United States to name a single, unified enemy; rather there seem to be
minor and elusive enemies everywhere” (189). Simulation, spectacle, are everywhere in this global rhizome of connect ion
and articulation. Commerce, communication, crisis, everything operates on a micro level, nothing is clearly localizable in a
nation, a people, a soil, a city. The very dialectical operation (Marxism) by which such a movement could be analyzed
no longer obtains: any dialectics is itself subsumed and rendered inoperative by a movement that generates and
degenerates all play of oppositions. There are crises, indeed there are tiny movements of duality, of opposition, but these
‘minor and indefinite” crises add up only to an apparently inchoate ‘omni-crisis.” With the eclipse of dialectical
opposition comes the death of nature in a very specific sense: with no outside, there can be no “natural world” acting
on us, beyond our control. Hardt and Negri write: Certainly we continue to have forests and crickets and thunderstorms in
our world ,but we have no nature in the sense that these forces and phenomena arc no longer understood as outside, that is,
they are not seen as original and independent of the artifice of the civil order. In a postmodern world au phenomena and
forces are artificial, or, as some might say, part of history (187) This “postmodern” recognition of the end of nature throws us
up against the one limit of this seemingly limitless, global skein of communication, commerce, exploitation, and wealth. If all
is historical, all is, essentially, a function of labor. In this respect, Hardt and Negri remain fully in the tradition of dialectical
Marxism, nor to mention Kojève, for whom the death of Man really was the triumph of human labor in all domains:
industrial, philosophical, historical. As Hardt and Negri put it, From manufacturing to large-scale industry from finance
capital to transnational restructuring and the globalization of the market, it is always the initiatives of organized labor
power that determine the figure of capitalist development. Through this history the place of exploitation is a
dialectically determined site. Labor power is the most internal element, the very source of capital. (208) What is
remarkable in all this is the occlusion of energy as a source of value. If energy at least in a basic sense, is the power to
do work, it too must have a profound connection with capital. It must in some sense be linked to productivity, inseparable
from it. Yet Hardt and Negri never consider energy. Perhaps this is due to the fact that the source of energy, unlike the
source of human labor, is not human. There is a finite quantity of oil available. Human labor did not put it there; Man
was not involved. Humans extract it, to be sure—labor linked to machines that themselves consume fossil fuel energy
(pumps, transport devices, etc.)—but the energy itself is derived from the consumption of depletable fuels. As Beaudreau
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would put it, human labor plays largely a supervisory role. Energy could not be tapped without labor, it is necessary, but
it is hardly sufficient to the generation of capital. In this sense we could question whether labor is “the most internal
clement”—perhaps “one internal element” would be preferable (the other element being energy derived from inanimate
sources). I raise this issue of energy in order to resituate the argument of Empire. If for a moment we assume that the global
world of commerce, replete with electronic media, the Internet, virtual television, and whatnot, is the replacement for and the
simulacrum of the nonuniversal2t city, we can only conclude that it can be so only as long as “nature no longer exists.” But
the fact that nature no longer exists, or at least seems no longer to exist, depends, ironically, on a natural given: the
presence of fossil fuels in the earth—oil and coal, primarily. Labor power discovered these fuels, put them to work,
“harnessed” them, transformed their energy into something useful. But labor power did not put the fuels in the earth.
And perhaps more import ant from our perspective, it will be hard-pressed to replace them when they are gone. Nature-
produced energy—the “homogeneous” energy that lends itself to work and the other, “heterogeneous” energy that is
sovereign, not servile. If the very term “nature” is contestable, one thing that cannot be contested is that the primary sources
of energy come from natural sources: millions of years of algae accumulating in certain ecosystems, for example. Thus
pollution, dependent on this energy from natural sources, is ultimately natural; so too is global warming. So too is the
incomprehensible unharnessed energy of the universe, which our labor and knowledge can only betray. So too will be
massive die-off of humans and other organisms at the point of depletion. Man as the author of his own creation— homo faber
—is opened by the radical exteriority the finitude, the heterogeneity, but also the infinite richness of “nature.” Man, as Sade
would remind us, can never hope to have his reason domesticate a nature that “threatens the adequacy of rational
systematicity”24 or that defies the seeming necessity of all human activity. Nature deals death, and there is no way, finally, to
grasp it by simply exploiting it (“knowing” it) as a resource or analyzing away its threat as sublime difference. These
considerations lead us to a much larger question: if Empire is dependent on fossil fuel energy for its simulacral
effectiveness, what happens to it when energy becomes more expensive? When the “essence” of the human is no longer
gasoline (l’essence)? Without energy, there is no instantaneous communication, no movement of products and
commodities across oceans, no $15 Wal-Mart sneakers shipped in from China. What is the energy input needed for the
fabrication of a single computer workstation? For a single e-mail message? As energy inputs get tight, so Empire becomes
Imperial. It becomes, in other words, once again central: lack of instantaneous movement, the depletion of the sheer
now of virtual space, results in the reaffirmation of place, of the local. From fossil fuel Empire to the imperial realm of
solar power, the energy of the local.26 Things get a lot harder to move when only human labor power—along with
animal power, perhaps—does the moving. Things get harder to grow when humans have to pull the plow and have to
fertilize with their own excrement. The global was the city of the empty now, of space as a two-dimensional blur. The
automobile as universal and empty signifier. The statues fell, all was empty, instantaneous. There was a network of points, a
lateral spread, but no limit to the “now” or to the quantity of information that could move. To be able to write these sentences
in the past tense indicates the imminent return of time, history; change.

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AT Empire
Depletion drives Empire; it thus guaranteed its own destruction from the very start. The finitude
of fossil fuels defines for us the condition of modern society. What is left to us is the possibility of a
new order that affirms the expenditure of that energy that cannot be put to useful technological
processes.
Depletion was there from the outset: in the first lump of coal burned, there was energy derived from the destruction of
a resource. The fossil fuels, and the electricity, that drive Empire are depletion: if they could not be depleted, burned up,
they could not provide energy; Fossil fuel is the passage of time as decay, as petrifaction, the shift from life to death as living
things are transformed into valuable and exploitable reserves; it is also the ticking time of the loss of resources, of the limit.
Empire in its seeming posthistorical timelessness, in its adialectical spread, tends nevertheless toward depletion, toward death
as a wasting of the ideal figures of consumption, meaning, Man as speed. Empire necessarily, from the first, in its energy
profile, implies its own extinction. For the statues to fall requires massive energy inputs. Waste as “practical”— all
movement of Empire—depletes itself, reveals itself as the death, the emptiness at the heart of a fossil fuel globalization
and the technoscientific realization. Man caught in his timeless location in Empire is ejected at the moment the
economy fails: the moment of the exhaustion of resources, the point at which the growth economy falters because the ever
increasing accumulation of debt, based on the seemingly endless increase in the availability of human-friendly energy (the
power to “do work”), grinds to a halt.27 The logic of growth is inseparable from the logic of depletion: finitude at the heart of
the seemingly infinite. And this fall teaches us of another incarnation of God, another incarnation of Man, because like God
in the Middle Ages, or like Man in the twentieth century, the continued availability of fossil fuel energy today is an article of
faith. It is almost impossible to speak of Hubbert’s peak nowadays because people assume, for no good reason at all,
that “it will never happen.”28 In medieval times not everyone was a believer, but everyone in some way took God’s
existence for granted. And the existence and centrality of Man was equally evident in the twentieth century. So too today,
many of the experts and directors of our culture do not “believe in” fossil fuel energy—they know that it is finite, that
“other sources must be found.” But they cannot not believe in it either. So they go on, assuming its presence, that
useful energy will always be there, will always be invisible, making effective work possible, effacing itself before the all-
powerful Man, human labor, human creativity, the spirit of human invention, the human mind.29 Man is the ultimate avatar
of cheap energy. The death of Man—following its double, the death of God—is thus inseparable from the event of the
finitude of fossil fuel. And the transgression of that finitude is nothing more than the affirmation of an intimate world,
a world of the expenditure of, or “communication” with, another energy, one whose exile was necessary for the
establishment of the dominion of energy that “does work.” When we recognize that human labor is not the sole source of
value, and that energy slaves are indispensable to all the cultural, not to mention industrial, production we associate
with modernity; then we confront the fact that everything must be rethought. “Growth” is not a function of a certain
economy, of the borrowing and printing of ever more dollars, but of (for the time being) constantly increasing supplies
of fossil fuel resources. How do we think the corollary of growth, retraction, in an era of depletion? Are democracy and
liberalism separable from a rich fossil fuel mix? Women’s rights, gay rights? Can philosophy in its various stages of
development be directly linked to the fuel mix obtaining at different moments of history? What are the implications for
philosophy of, say, a constantly rising or shrinking number, per person, of “energy slaves”? (Shrinking, perhaps, to
the actual return of slavery.) What are the ethical implications of a massive die-off of billions of people?3° It is
tempting to assume a simple reverse dialectic: the return of the feudal. Thus one can anticipate the return of feudal (solar
and slave) energy, feudal oppression (think of the Incas), feudal religion (literalism, the Book). But there is more than an
energy blip that separates us from the Middle Ages: just as Bataille doubled Kojève, reenacting absolute knowledge,
definitive reason, and then miming it, we may take for granted the knowledge that has evolved in modernity—its utility,
its truth value, its radical limitations.3’ In that sense we need not assume that a downside of the culture curve will
exactly parallel the downside of the fuel production curve. Such determinism is inevitably defeated by non-knowledge.
The fossil fuel regime nevertheless “falls” into the material, the particular, its knowledge into non-knowledge: the cursed
matter of the body, the sacrifice of a comfortable particle enshrined in a fast personal vehicle. Negativity passes from an era
of its putative full employment to an era of fundamental unemployment—”negativity out of a job,” as Bataille dubbed it.32
The homogeneous energy of the standing reserve falls into the heterogeneous, recalcitrant energy of ritual
expenditure. Depletion and expenditure, Hubbert’s peak and Bataille’s peak, converge.33 Heterogeneous energy is

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insubordinate, not only as that which is “left over” and “unemployed” after the job is done, but above all as that
which is a priori unemployable, always situated just beyond the limits of sense and growth. In this sense it is inseparable
from the sort of “base matter” that cannot lend itself to constructive purposes or scientific edifice building, which Bataille
discusses in such early essays as “Formless,” “The Big Toe,” and “Base Materialism and Gnosticism.” Energy in Bataille is
therefore dual, as is matter. Perhaps it is in this sense, and this alone, that Bataille can state (in The Accursed Share) that there
are infinite quantities of energy in the universe. All that energy, however, is precisely not employable: it is energy that is
burned off, that accomplishes nothing on a mere practical human scale. It transgresses the limits of depletion. In this
sense one has to be wary of official definitions of energy that would hold that it is the “power to do work.” The very
use of the term “work,” albeit in this context a purely neutral, scientific term, nevertheless does tend to anthropomorphize
energy: its power not only, say, moves or hears: it accomplishes something in a purposeful, human sense. Similarly,
does the expenditure of energy, on a cosmic scale, necessarily entail the transformation of a more “ordered” energy into a
lesser “ordered” one? Ordered for whom? Without the presence of a (human) subjectivity demanding the highly “ordered”
energy can one speak or order? Can it even be said to exist? In speaking of the finitude of energy supplies, we are only
speaking of the limits to the human, the fundamentally limited availability of ordered energy capable of doing “work” for
Man. We are speaking, in other words, of death, of the incommensurability of intimate Nature. There is a limit to order:
establishing order, fueling it, so to speak, but necessarily excluded by it, the infinite energy of the universe is a kind of black
hole in which the ordered energy of creation is incessantly lost. The universe’s energy is that of celestial and orgiastic bodies.
“Heterogeneous” energy is nevertheless also the opening of the possibility of the distinction between useful and useless
energy; it thus opens the possibility of work, but it cannot be subordinated to this distinction, which itself is useful (in
opposing energy and entropy, utility and waste, sustainability and nonsustainability). It violates the limit of this distinction.
(Once again the right hand is ignorant of what the left hand does.) The “tendency to spend” on the part of people in society is
nothing more, as Bataille often reminds us, than the tendency to identiy,’ with the extravagance of the universe— the
extravagance, in other words, of energy not subordinate to the dictates and “needs” of Man (the energy of the death of God
and Man at the points of their greatest coherence). Energy is expended only in relation to Man: when Man is confounded
with the universe, energy is neither expended nor conserved; it spends itself, we might say, opening but indifferent to
the possibility of its use and waste. Indifference indeed: the indifference of ruins.

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AT Marxism
Marxism is grounded in a concept of economics based on utility and production. Its revolution
only does more to subordinate human energy to industry by applying it as useful consumption to
achieve a goal of communist society. Our politics of expenditure solves your critique.
Baudrillard 98 (Jean, prof of sociology at Université de Paris-IX Dauphine, When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical
Principle of Economy, Bataille: A Critical Reader, 1998) JXu
The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental
human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure. Bataille's thought goes, beyond proper political
economy(which in essence is regulated through exchange value), straight to the metaphysical principle of economy.
Batailles's target is utility, in its root. Utility is, of course, an apparently positive principle of capital: accumulation,
investment, depreciation, etc. But in fact it is, on Bataille's account, a principle of powerlessness, an utter inability to
expend. Given that all previous societies knew how to expend, this is, an unbelievable deficiency : it cuts the human being
off from all possible sovereignty. All economics are founded on that which no longer can, no longer knows how to
expend itself [se d6penser], on that which is incapable of becoming the stake of a sacrifice. It is therefore entirely residual, it
is a limited social fact; and it is against economy as a limited social fact that Bataille wants to raise expenditure, death, and
sacrifice as total social facts--such is the principle of general economy. Georges Bataille, Oeuvres Completes: vol. VII.
Paris: Gallimard. 618pp.' The principle of utility (use value) blends with the bourgeoisie, with this capitalist class
whose definition for Bataille (contrary to Marx) is negative: it no longer knows how to expend. Similarly, the crisis of
capital, its increasing mortality and its immanent death throes, are not bound, as in the work of Marx, to a history, to
dialectical reversals [p6rip6dies], but to this fundamental law of the inability to expend, which give capital over to the cancer
of production and unlimited reproduction . There is no principle of revolution in Bataille's work: "The terror of
revolutions has only done more and more (de mieux en mieux) to subordinate human energy to industry." There is
only a principle of sacrifice-the principle of sovereignty, whose diversion by the bourgeoisie and capital causes all human
history to pass from sacred tragedy to the comedy of utility. This critique is a non-Marxist critique, an aristocratic
critique; because it aims at utility, at economic finality as the axiom of capitalist society. The Marxist critique is only a
critique of capital, a critique coming from the heart of the middle and petit bourgeois classes, for which Marxism has
served for a century as a latent ideology: a critique of exchange value, but an exaltation of use value-and thus a
critique, at the same time, of what made the almost delirious greatness of capital, the secular remains of its religious
quality:3investment at any price, even at the cost of use value. The Marxist seeks a good use of economy. Marxism is
therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the "good use" of the
social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the
master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre or post-Marxist . At any rate, Marxism is
only the disenchanted horizon of capital-all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is.

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AT Marxism
Marxism retains the flaw of an economics of scarcity. The idea of a purposive development dooms
the communist project to failure, reproducing the economic ills it seeks to solve.
Wendling 07 (Amy E., Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University, Sovereign Consumption as a Species of
Communist Theory: Reconceptualizing Energy, Reading Bataille Now, pg 36 – 37) JXu
Pressing the insights of both Marxism and anthropology beyond the limited economies that produced them, Bataille
shows that the earth's energy is superabundant. Not only do relations of scarcity not obtain, but surplus resources are
both the reality and the source of strife. Fully continuous with organic life and its superabundant energy, human societies
operate in ways not simply foreign to bourgeois political economy, but also unthinkable in its terms. And just as Bataille's
nature is not scarce but profligate, his vision of the human being is not that of the embattled bourgeois - or proletarian -
struggling for survival. Rather, Bataille's human being does not have self-preservation as his or her most pressing task.
We will see in a moment how this critique bears on the most fundamental presuppositions of the philosophy of biology as
well as those of political economy. From the Kant of the third critique and the Hegel who follows him, Marx retains the
premise of productive, purposive development in the parallel vectors of history, political economy, and science. The
human being and human society are at the apex of all this culture. Marx also retains a focus on human beings and the
forms of human community and agency implied by this teleology. He poeticizes an all-too-human proletariat that
develops a political consciousness and gains ascendancy on the technological infrastructure spawned by the bourgeois world.
Marx forecasts that the contradictions and collapse of this world will produce the proletarian class as its most essential,
progressive product. Bataille questions the Marxian-Hegelian premise of productive, purposive development, and with
it the possibility that the Communist Revolution will be of a different genus than the preceding bourgeois revolutions.
Bataille challenges Marx both theoretically and historically. He sees that the theoretical presupposition of scarcity
continues to hold in Marx's visions of postrevolutionary life: for Marx, unlike socialist utopian Charles Fourier, people
continue to work against a miserly nature even after the revolution. And Bataille's The Accursed Share challenges the
construct of scarcity as the principle of human societies. Bataille shows scarcity to be merely symptomatic of the
bourgeois form by which surplus wealth is accumulated, superfluity being the real principle of organization. As for
Bataille's historical critique of Marxism, volume 3 of The Accursed Share is a commentary on the character of the Russian
Communist Revolution. The occasion for Bataille's meditations is Stalin's death in 1953 (1991b, 264-65; 1973, 308-309).
Bataille uses this occasion as an opportunity to mediate on the forms of consumption of surplus characteristic of the
bourgeois world, under which he classes both capitalist and communist societies. He thus continues the historical project of
The Accursed Share as a whole into his contemporary period, a period in which the dialectic between the accumulation of
resources and their use is especially acute. For in the bourgeois world, power and enjoyment are defined by exclusive
disjunction (1991b, 352).

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AT Nietzsche
Bataille’s economics of expenditure embodies Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. The call to expend
without reserve mirrors Nietzsche’s affirmation of life.
Land 92 (Nick, lecturer in Continental Philosophy at Warwick University, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille
and Virulent Nihilism, pg 17 – 18) JXu
Where accumulative reason has instituted ‘truth’ and ‘appearance’ as unsurpassable finalities or pure concepts, the artist
understands appearance as reality ‘once again’ (noch einmal). Reality returns in appearance like the ripple of a shock-wave;
opening wider and wider domains for migration. Since reality is itself the stimulus for such migrations they will become
progressively more devastating, as this stimulus becomes progressively ‘selected, strengthened, corrected’ or, to abbreviate,
‘intensified’. Here at last—where nothing is last—is the convulsion of zero, eternal recurrence, the libidinal motor of
Nietzsche’s economics. Nietzsche’s economy of the artistic process, or Dionysian economy, is built beneath the Vesuvian
antilogic of eternal recurrence. Such an economy is a perpetual reemergence of inhuman squandering; an
inappropriable excess messily exhibited in the transfiguration of negation into profligate zero. It is intrinsic to desire
that it always has fresh and—when unmutilated by repression—increasingly sophisticated constructions to waste. A
Dionysian economy is, indeed, a slash and burn agriculture of solar stock, in which the negative limit of each conceptual
dyad is reconstituted as an intensification of the positive; as an increasing virulence of difference. The delirium of
squandering flows from this inevitability that logical negation never arrives, even though zero impacts. In other
words, the thought of eternal recurrence is this: that the abolition of integrated being in the process of desire, or
unconstrained wastage, corresponds to an intensification of plague and not a (logically intelligible) negation of assets.
Epidemic difference is only enhanced by the spasmodic aberration from itself. A Dionysian economy is the flux of
impersonal desire, perpetually re-energized in the pulse of recurrence, in the upsurge of new realities. These resurgent
waves of intensity are situated at the ‘point’ which patriarchal productivism had reserved for its limit; at the end of each
becoming a woman (which are misconstrued as specific negations). Desire could thus be said to be nothing but becoming a
woman at different levels of intensity, although of course, it is always possible to become a pious woman, to begin a history,
love masculinity, and accumulate, because to become a woman is to depart from reality, and no one loves fables more than
the church. But reality drifts upon zero, and can be abandoned over and over again. In the lesbian depths of the unconscious,
desires for/as feminizing spasms of remigration are without limit.

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AT Lacan
Bataille’s dichotomy of homogeneity and heterogeneity accesses all their arguments about
symbolic exchanges and the real.
Zizek 07 (Slavoj, senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Ljubljana,
http://www.lacan.com/zizchemicalbeats.html) JXu
Even Lacan himself, in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, comes dangerously close to this standard version of the "passion of the
Real." [2] Do the unexpected echoes between this seminar and the thought of Georges Bataille, THE philosopher of the
passion of the Real, if there ever was one, not unambiguously point in this direction? Is Lacan's ethical maxim "do not
compromise your desire" (which, one should always bear in mind, was never used again by Lacan in his later work) not a
version of Bataille's injunction "to think everything to a point that makes people tremble," [3] to go as far as possible – to the
point at which the opposite coincide, at which infinite pain turns into the joy of the highest bliss (discernible on the photo of
the Chinese submitted to the terrifying torture of being slowly cut to pieces), at which the intensity of erotic enjoyment
encounters death, at which sainthood overlaps with extreme dissolution, at which God himself is revealed as a cruel Beast? Is
the temporal coincidence of Lacan's seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis and Bataille's Eroticism more than a mere
coincidence? Is Bataille's domain of the Sacred, of the "accursed part," not his version of what, apropos Antigone, Lacan
deployed as the domain of hate? Does Bataille's opposition of "homogeneity," the order of exchanges, and "heterogeneity,"
the order of limitless expenditure, not point towards Lacan's opposition of the order of symbolic exchanges and the excess of
the traumatic encounter of the Real? "Heterogeneous reality is that of a force or shock." [4] And how can Bataille's elevation
of the dissolute woman to the status of God not remind us of Lacan's claim that Woman is one of the names of God? Not to
mention Bataille's term for the experience of transgression – impossible – which is Lacan's qualification of the Real...

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Net Energy Bad

They have no excuse not to be topical. The current net energy debate ignores questions of
production and system costs, this card turns the case
John Michael Greer “Net Energy and Jevons' Paradox” April 2008 (BA in Comparative History of Ideas, Has written over
a dozen alternative energy books) The Archdruid Report http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/net-energy-and-
jevons-paradox.html
As last week’s Archdruid Report post suggested, a difficult paradox lies in wait for attempts to bail industrial society out of
its peak oil predicament by bringing new energy sources online. To build the infrastructure to produce a new energy source in meaningful
quantities, a great deal of energy will be needed. If the new source can’t be shipped via existing distribution networks, or used in existing end-use
technology, more energy will have to be investedtoprovidetheseaswell. Until much of the new infrastructure is in place, though, the
energy
needed to develop it will have to come from existing sources. This is where the jaws of the trap open wide, because in a
world already on the far side of Hubbert’s peak, existing energy resources are fully committed. Thus the immediate effect of
launching a project to make energy more available will be to make energy less available, driving up prices even faster than
they would rise under the pressure of resource depletion.
One conclusion worth drawing from what I’ve called the “paradox of production” is that some recent debates over net energy may need reassessment. Net
energy or EROEI (energy return on energy invested), for those who haven’t been following these debates, is the energy that can be obtained from a given
resource, minus the energy that has to go into providing that resource to users. Just as net receipts, rather than gross receipts, determine
whether a business prospers or goes bankrupt, it’s the net energy available to our society, rather than the total amount of
energy it consumes, that determines whether something like today’s industrial civilization can survive.
At the same time, as the paradox of production points out, the energy costs that have to be factored into net energy are not limited to those needed to produce
energy from a given source in the first place. The energy cost to get it to the end user and to convert it into useful work at that point also have to be taken into
account. Thus it’s important to distinguish production costs – the direct and indirect energy inputs needed to turn a natural resource into useful energy ready
for distribution – from system costs – the direct and indirect energy inputs needed to apply that energy to its end use, whatever that happens to be. Both have
to be accounted for, but each has its own distinctive features.
In particular, the production costs of a given energy resource depend almost entirely on the nature of the energy resource itself. The system costs of a given
resource, on the other hand, depend partly on the resource and partly on the nature of the end use, and the same energy source can have dramatically
different system costs depending on the form in which it’s distributed and the use to which it’s put.
Compare the net energy of photovoltaic cells used to power computers, for example, with the net energy of photovoltaic cells
used to power automobiles. The production costs are the same in either case, but the system costs are totally different. The
data center makes use of an existing distribution network (the electric power grid) and a mature technology (electronic
computers), so its system costs are identical to those involved in powering any other computer. Putting the same energy to
work powering automobiles requires the manufacture of millions of new cars (if the electricity is used directly in electric cars), or a
network of fuel plants, pipelines, and filling stations, in addition to millions of new cars (if the electricity is used indirectly, in a form
such as hydrogen).
Discussions of net energy in the peak oil community have generally tended to focus on production costs, to the neglect of system costs. There’s an interesting
irony here, because market forces and political pressures in the real world tend to focus on system costs, to the neglect of production costs. The recent
ethanol boom in America is the poster child for this oddity of contemporary economics.
In terms of production costs, ethanol made from American corn is a losing proposition. It takes more energy to provide the
fertilizers, pesticides, tractor fuel, and other energy inputs to grow the corn, and to ferment and distill it into fuel ethanol, than
you get back from burning the ethanol. The system costs of ethanol, on the other hand, are negligible: the US already has an
extensive transportation system for getting bulk grains from farms to factories, and existing liquid fuel distribution networks
are perfectly capable of handling fuel ethanol. All that has to be added to the mix are factories to turn corn into fuel, and
misguided government grants and tax writeoffs seem to be taking care of that nicely.
This same effect shapes less embarrassingly self-defeating choices as well. Look at the suite of alternative energy sources that
are getting significant funding these days – windpower comes to mind – and you’ll find that all of them use existing
infrastructure to distribute and use the resulting energy. Meanwhile, those alternatives that pose high system costs – the much-ballyhooed
hydrogen economy is the classic example – wither on the vine.
This is part of the blowback from the paradox of production, because system costs have another feature that sets them apart from production costs: if an
energy resource requires new distribution networks or end-use technologies, all the new items have to be in place before the energy resource can be used at
all. If you don’t have every piece of a hydrogen transport economy in place, for example – the electric power plants, the hydrogen factories, the pipelines,
the filling stations, the hydrogen-powered cars, and everything else associated with them – you can’t use any of it.
The more existing infrastructure you can use, by contrast, the more flexibility you have. Since windpower can use the existing electric grid to power existing
electric appliances, for example, you can add windpower capacity one windmill at a time, and upgrade as you go. In a world of depleted energy reserves and
rising prices, this is a viable option; sinking huge sums into new infrastructure for distributing and using a new energy resource
probably won’t be.
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There’s another dimension to system costs, though, that opens up an unexpected window of opportunity. Since total net energy includes system costs as well
as production costs, cutting system costs boosts net energy. One of the largest components of system costs for any energy resource is
inefficiency, and in many cases this can be reduced significantly without impacting the flow of energy through the system.
When this is done, the effective net energy of the resource goes up.
This is the logic behind Jevons’ paradox, first propounded by British economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1866 book The Coal Question. Jevons pointed out that when improvements in technology make it
possible to use an energy resource more efficiently, getting more output from less input, the use of the resource tends to go up, not down. His argument is impeccable: as the use of the resource becomes more
efficient, the cost per unit of the end result tends to go down, and so people can afford to use more of it; as efficiency goes up, it also becomes economically feasible to apply the energy resource to new uses,
and so people have reason to use more of it. Jevons’ paradox has been used more than once to argue against conservation, on the grounds that using energy more efficiently will simply lower the cost of energy
and encourage people to use more of it. The problem with this logic is that it assumes that the only thing constraining energy supply is price – and in a world already starting to skid down the far side of
Hubbert’s peak, this is no longer true. Now that geological realities rather than market forces are placing hard limits on the upper end of petroleum production, Jevons’ paradox becomes a counterweight to
rising energy prices.
Now it’s sometimes been suggested that all the easy gains from conservation were made in the 1970s, and that further gains will come at much higher cost. This would be true if the achievements of the
Seventies had been kept in place, as they should have been – but were not. Compare the poorly insulated McMansions and gas-guzzling SUVs that define the recent American lifestyle with the snug homes and
efficient compacts so common in 1979, and it takes an effort of will to avoid seeing the ground that has been lost.
This offers a bitter commentary on the missed opportunities of the last quarter century. From another perspective, though, this provides a certain amount of qualified hope, because it allows lifestyle changes and
simple upgrades perfected decades ago to be dusted off and put back to work. Those of my readers who recall the Seventies will remember just how simple and cost-effective many of these changes were. They
played a crucial part in dropping petroleum consumption worldwide by 15% between 1972 and 1985. That decrease could have been used to free up resources for the transition to sustainability, instead of being
blown off in a final 25-year orgy of conspicuous overconsumption. That didn’t happen, and the arrival of petroleum production declines means that it won’t happen again, but the same effect could be used now
to help cushion the otherwise rocky descent into the deindustrial age ahead of us.
The same insight can be put in another way. One crucial measure of our predicament is the steady decline in net energy available to industrial society, from the 200-to-1 surplus of light sweet crude flowing
under natural pressure to the single digits available from those renewable sources that manage to rise above the breakeven point at all. As we’ve seen, though, the whole picture of net energy includes systems
costs as well as production costs, and rising production costs can be countered to some extent by conservation and efficiency improvements that lower system costs. This won’t bring back the age of cheap
abundant energy, but it could make things easier for many people in the near future
If governments in the industrial world want to launch a crash program to do something about soaring energy prices and spiralling energy shortages, then, the obvious choice is the one that worked in the 1970s –
conservation. Just now, given the ideologies that dominate the political classes of the major industrial nations, this seems about as likely as a resumption of the Punic Wars, but attitudes and political climates
can change abruptly. In the meantime, the more people who learn, practice and prepare to teach the homely but valuable conservation skills that were part of everyday life in the Seventies, the easier the
transition will be when it arrives. Where the people lead, at least in this case, the leaders will eventually be obliged to follow.

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Expenditure Without Reserve Bad

Bataille’s argument of expenditure without reserve is totalitarian in nature refusing linearity, logic
and reason.
Boldt-Irons 95 (Leslie Anne “On Bataille: Critical Essays” pg.4)
A second early and noteworthy response may be found in Sartre’s article "Un Nouveau mystique." In the first section of this
text, Sartre accuses Bataille of putting forward a "totalitarian thought," one that is "syncretic" in approach. Sartre writes: "In
contrast to the analytic processes of philosophers, one might say that Bataille's book presents itself as the result of a
totalitarian thought" (149). According to Sartre, Bataille's thought "does not construct itself, does not progressively enrich
itself, but, indivisible and almost ineffable, it is level with the surface of each aphorism, such that each one of them presents
us with the same complex and formidable meaning seen from a particular light" (149). Sartre seems to be accusing Bataille
of not being systematic, of not elaborating a system beginning from founding principles. He appears to be dissatisfied with
the exposition of Bataille's thought because it refuses to be linear. One can suppose that Bataille's response to this accusation
would, in itself, issue from various points of departure, thus once again refusing linearity and system.

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And Bataille’s notion of glorious expenditure destroys the environment in the name of producing
waste, hastening the energy crisis.
Boldt-Irons 95 (Leslie Anne “On Bataille: Critical Essays
Arkady Plotnitsky takes as his point of departure Bataille's notion of expenditure when he asks whether or not Bataille avoids
idealizing waste which he opposes to consumption for productive purposes. While Plotnitsky points to Bataille's tendency at
times to "subordinate the effect of exchange and consumption" (to a somewhat idealized insistence on the primordiality of
waste), he also underlines Bataille's awareness that to privilege expenditure unconditionally is just as untenable as to not
account for its loss. Plotnitsky argues that Bataille's "insistence on waste is saved by his labyrinthine complexity of
inscription of these theories." In writing of an exchange of expenditures, Bataille avoids reducing his view of economy to
either an exchange economy or to one that is entirely free of exchange, the exuberance of the sovereign operations which he
describes always involve more than mere waste or expenditure.

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Bataille’s expenditure without reserve posits human life as finite, destroying the hope necessary to
throw ourselves into the world of future alternative energy means.
Bataille and Blanchot posited itself as experience as experience of death (and in the element of death), or unthinkable thought
(and in its inaccessible presence), ... as experience of finitude (trapped in the opening and the tyranny of that finitude)" (383-
384). Foucault's book ends with his famous suggestion that the return of a preoccupation with language in literature and in
the human sciences heralds the disappearance of "man" as the epistemological figure that appeared at the beginning of the
nineteenth century when man first "constituted himself as a positive figure in the field of knowledge" (326). This figure of
man first emerged in the form of an "empirico-transcendental doublet" - the being in whom knowledge would be attained of
what makes knowledge possible (318). For Foucault, this new figure appeared only after a major epistemological shift, for in
the classical period, from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the end of the eighteenth century, knowledge was
ordered by representation, a system in which "the subject is kept at bay." In this classical period, the relationships between
things and their representations were articulated and understood in tabular form, but the knowing subject did not have a place
in this network of representation.

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The aff’s constant cycle of self realization creates a false framework for change. No moment of
production can withstand expenditure on Bataille’s level
Piel draws some very interesting and significant conclusions from the Bataillean notion of expenditure. He shows how
Bataille, "in a bold reversal alone capable of substituting dynamic overviews in harmony with the world for stagnation of
isolated ideas," puts forward a view of a general economy which, contrary to economic theories tied to political
considerations, is conceived not as a separate system, but as an economy of the "living masses" in their "entirety." The
limited notion of (politically determined) economy, like other notions in Bataille's work, is opened beyond itself until, in a
movement engaging it in the freedom of thought, it operates in a way that is finally consonant, in its freedom, with the
"movement of the world." This world - both open to and a product of chance - is bound in its "destiny" to expenditure, and
despite (or perhaps thanks to) a myriad of productive accomplishments which outstrip and at times annul one another, it can
only culminate in a "useless and infinite realization." Use-less because no moment of production can withstand the pressure
towards expenditure and thus maintain the integrity of its "use." Bataille, writes Piel, views man as a summit - attained
through his capacity and inevitable indulgence in the squandering of energy - energy that can never entirely be channeled for
productive ends.

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Capitalism Turn
Bataille’s Logic of expenditure without reserve reifies capitalism and maintains the system that
makes their impacts inevitable.
Shaviro, Steven (Professor of English At Wayne State. Capitalism, Consumerism, and Waste,
http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=651) May 21st 2008
Finally, this crazed consumerism is the way that the capitalist mode of production manages a loss that it incessantly
disavows, but that it cannot actually escape. Unproductive expenditure may well be the very point of the conjunctive
synthesis of consumption. For this synthesis continually exempts or extracts something from the otherwise infinite processes
of production and circulation. It provides a terminus for the otherwise aimless and limitless movement of the
valorization of capital. For the conjunctive synthesis marks the point at which the circuits of money and commodities
(C-M-C and M-C-M’) are broken, so that exchange comes to a momentary end. In the residual subject’s jouissance, the
commodity is withdrawn from circulation, in order to be used up or destroyed. The conjunctive synthesis thereby
deducts something from capital accumulation. And yet, without this synthesis and its deductions, the capitalist
economy could not function at all. As Marx and Engels tell us, even in the ‘normal’ situation of bourgeois society, “a great
part not only of the existing products, but also of the previously created productive forces, are periodically destroyed.”
Or, as David Harvey puts it, since capital is always in danger of being choked by overproduction and
overaccumulation, it must continually resort to “violent paroxysms” of “the devaluation, depreciation, and
destruction of capital.” Specifically, this is what happens on a major scale in moments of economic crisis. But on a
minor or “molecular” level, the conjunctive subject or consumer is itself always in crisis — and it can only alleviate
this situation by indulging in another round of shopping, purchasing, and consuming.

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Negative Bataille K
This is a shell for a Bataille K you can read on the negative. Most of the extensions for the
affirmative can be used while running this. Specifically, all the aff cards indicting alternative
energy can be used as links.

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The affirmative is the wrong solution – some form of sustainability is inevitable, but the
affirmative’s technological quest for alternative energy will not only fail to capture the attraction
of the public but also falls again into the same traps of an economy of scarcity. Instead, we should
affirm expenditure without reserve. The question is not how much energy is spent but how we
spend it. Our expenditure is an intimate one that affirms a life without austere restraint.
It should not be surprising that sustainability and autonomism are two versions of essentially the same mode of
“challenging” (in the Heideggerian sense). They are both technological solutions to the dread of human temporality and
mortality. Both entail an ideally stable subject that conceives of a natural world as a collection of resources at Man’s
disposal. The only difference is that the autonomist world is one that emphasizes speed, movement, consumption, and
destruction, while the sustainable one stresses consumption, conservation, and recycling. In both cases the standing reserve
is there, at the ready; raw materials are there to be used for Man’s survival and comfort. Both exist to procure for Man a
certain emotional state that is deemed to be morally superior: autonomism supposes a joy in the heedless exercise of
individual will (“freedom”), sustainability supposes a dogged contentment through renunciation and the sense of
superiority engendered by a virtuous feeling of restraint. In both cases the human self as overweening, protected,
permanent jewel is inextricably bound to the destiny of all matter. Bataillean generosity from this perspective is
unthinkable. All matter is capable of taking, and holding, beautiful or significant or quantifiable shape; all energy can
be refined and concentrated so that it can do “work.”The universe wears a frock coat, as Bataille put it in “Formless”:
What [the word “formless”] designates has no rights in any sense and gets itself squashed everywhere, like a spider or an
earthworm. In fact, for academic men to be happy the universe would have to take shape. All of philosophy has no other goal:
it is a matter of giving a frock coat to what is a mathematical frock coat. (OC, 1:217; yE, 31) I suppose if I were given a
choice between the two versions of the world picture, I would pick the sustainable one because it is, well, sort of sustainable
—in principle, anyway. In an era of fossil fuel depletion, in any case, we will get sustainability, voluntarily or
involuntarily. And certainly planning sustainability in the mode of “powerdown” (Heinberg 2004) is preferable to resource
wars and unevenly distributed depletion. Believing in a completely sustainable (unchanging) world is, however, akin to
believing in a coherent God. But unless one derives grim satisfaction from renouncing things and contentment with a
sense of how much one has had to give up, sustainability as conceived by Newton, for example, is always bound to come
out second best. That is why, as long as refined fossil fuels are cheap and no one has to think too much about the
future, the suburbs will always win out over, say, sustainable cohousing.” An environmentalism that promises only a
beautiful smallness, or a “prosperous way down,” is bound to have little appeal in a culture—and not just the American
culture—that values space, movement, and a personal narrative of continuous improvement and freedom (financial, sexual,
experiential)—even if those versions of the “tendency to expend” remain in thrall to the self as ultimate signified. Where
does that leave Bataille’s future? Recall our analysis of The Accursed Share in chapter 2: the Marshall Plan would save
the world from nuclear war not because it was the goal of the plan to do so, but because the aftereffect of “spending
without return” is the affirmation of a world in which resources can be squandered differently: the alternative is
World War III. The world is inadvertently sustained, so to speak, and the glory of spending can go on: this is what
constitutes the ethics of “good expenditure.” Now of course we can say, from today’s perspective, that Bataille was naive,
that the “gift-giving” engaged in by the United States under Harry Truman was a cynical attempt to create a bloc favorable to
its own economic interests, thereby saving Europe for capitalism and aligning it against the Soviet Union in any future war—
and that was probably the case. But Bataille himself was perfectly aware of the really important question: after all, as he
himself puts it, “Today Truman would appear to be blindly preparing for the final—and secret—apotheosis”(OC, 7: 179; AS,
190). Blindly. Even if Bataille may have been mistaken about Truman, who after all was giving the gift of oil-powered
technological superiority, the larger point he is making remains valid: giving escapes the intentions of its “author.” What is
important is gift-giving itself, and the good or bad (or selfish) intentions of the giver are virtually irrelevant. What counts,
in other words, is how one spends, not what one hopes to accomplish by it. Intentionality, with its goals proposed by a
limited and biased self; reveals its limits. Derrida noted in his famous controversy with Jean-Luc Marion about gifting that
there can never be a real gift because the intentions of the giver can never be completely unselfish.12 Thus the very idea of
the gift is incoherent: a completely unselfish gift could not be given, because it would be entirely without motive. It could not
even be designated as a gift. To give is to intentionally hand something over, and as soon as there is intention there is motive.
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One always hopes to get or accomplish something. But, as Marion would counter, there is a gifting that escapes the
(inevitable) intentions of the giver and opens another economy and another ethics. This is a gift that, past a certain
point, always defies the giver. Of course, one “knows” what one is giving, there are criteria for the evaluation of the gift—
but then that knowledge is lost in non-knowledge. The left hand never really knows what the right is doing. Nor does the
right necessarily know what it is doing, for that matter. The ethics of The Accursed Share: by giving, instead of spending
for war, we inadvertently spare the world and thus make possible ever more giving. Energy is squandered in the
production of wealth rather than in nuclear destruction. As we have seen, however, Bataille never adequately
distinguishes between modes of spending and modes of energy. Heidegger does: quantified, stockpiled energy has as its
corollary a certain objectified subjectivity, a certain model of utility associated both with the object and with the self
Another spending, another “bringing-forth” is that of the ritual object, which (even though Heidegger does not stress it)
entails another energy regime: not the hoarding and then the programmed burning-off of quantified energy, but
energy release in a ritual that entails the ecstatic and anguished movements of the mortal, material body. If we read Bataille
from a Heideggerian perspective, we can therefore propose another giving, another expenditure. This one too will not,
cannot, know what it is doing, but it will be consonant with the post-Sadean conceptions of matter and energy that Bataille
develops in his early writings. Bataille’s alternative to the standing reserve is virulent, unlike Heidegger’s, no doubt
because Bataille, following Sade, emphasizes the violence of the energy at play in ritual. Bataille’s world is intimate, and
through this intimacy it gains a ferocity lacking in Heidegger’s cool and calm chalice or windmill (though both represent, in
different ways, the lavish expenditure of unproductive energy). Bataille’s matter now is certainly not quantified, stockpilable;
it is a “circular agitation” that risks, rather than preserves, the self. Through contact with this energy-charged matter, and the
non- knowledge inseparable from it, the dominion of the head, of reason, of man’s self-certainty, is overthrown: God doubts
himself, reveals his truth to be that of atheism; the human opens him- or herself to the other, communicates in eroticism, in
the agony of death, of atheistic sacrifice. Just as in The Accursed Share, where the survival of the planet will be the
unforeseen, unintended consequence of a gift-giving (energy expenditure) oriented not around a weapons buildup but
around a squandering (giveaway) of wealth, so too in the future we can posit sustainability as an unintended
aftereffect of a politics of giving. Such a politics would entail not a cult of resource conservation and austere selfhood but,
instead, a sacrificial practice of exalted expenditure and irresistible glory Energy expenditure, fundamental to the human
(the human as the greatest burner of energy of all the animals), would be flaunted on the intimate level, that of the body,
that of charged filth. The object would not be paraded as something useful, something that fulfills our needs; its
virulence would give the lie to all attempts at establishing and guaranteeing the dominion of the imperial self.

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Their approach to alternative energy misreads the way social processes constitute energy, creating
a divide between the north and south, dragging thousands into poverty and exploitation.
Sustainable Alternative Energy” <http://www.sagepublications.com>
Almost a century of this energy planning has ignored its primary implications for society and the biosphere. First, the
investment capital required to sustain such a global strategy would soon be so large as to make less and less capital available for
everything else. Investments in power plants and distribution grids created comparatively few jobs and thus would increasingly
contribute to underemployment and unemployment. An exponential growth of electricity production would accelerate the
depletion of fossil fuel reserves, thereby accelerating the world toward an energy crisis as well as a materials crisis (since
many of our materials are derived from fossil fuels), besides enormously intensifying the environmental crisis. The extraction,
refining, and processing, as well as the distribution of fossil fuels, have received enormous subsidies, thus leading to artificially inexpensive commodities
that have completely distorted their energy markets. This distortion has been transferred into almost any system that heavily depends on fossil fuels, such as
an overly concentrated global production system, an urban habitat that is too spread out, an energy-intense and environmentally unsustainable global food
system, and, in general, economies that over-consume materials and energy and under-“consume” people. The resulting energy addiction was
transferred to the South, where paying for oil imports substantially contributed to debt loads, particularly during times of high
oil prices and/or interest rates. Bail outs led to drastic measures that disproportionately affected the poorest and most
vulnerable people on the planet. Attempts at reaching energy self-sufficiency frequently relied on nuclear power, which, as
an incompletely designed system, still lacks a satisfactory method of handling radioactive waste disposal. The promise that it
would produce electricity that would soon be too cheap to meter has instead turned into the most uneconomic energy option
which, without artificial protection from liability, would never have seen the light of day. In addition, nuclear power has led
to the proliferation of nuclear arms and has added another threat to peace and global security. This threat was superimposed
on the need for the industrially advanced nations to protect their umbilical cords to Middle East oil by military means. The
rise of global terrorism has further intensified the threats to peace and security. In sum, the ratio of desired to undesired
effects of traditional energy strategies (currently intensified by deregulation) continues to decline, despite some temporary
blips related to developments such as integrated resource planning and strategies for improving energy end-use efficiency. In
terms of what is taken into account, these strategies mark the victory of efficiency (including profitability as the
“efficiency” of capital) over human values such as equity and justice

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The endpoint of the affirmative’s economics of scarcity is massive thermonuclear war because it
fails to recognize the proper role of expenditure – the burn-off of surplus energy to avoid an
accumulation to critical mass. Survival is the unintended consequence of our expenditure without
regard for conservation or utility.
Bataille does, then, implicitly face the question of carrying capacity. Perhaps the ultimate example of this is nuclear war.
The modern economy, according to Bataille, does not recognize the possibility of excess and therefore limits; the
Protestant, and then the Marxist, ideal is to reinvest all excess back into the productive process, always augmenting output in
this way. “Utility” in this model ends up being perfectly impractical: only so much output can be reabsorbed into the
ever-more-efficient productive process. As in the case with Tibet, ultimately the excess will have to be burned off. This
can happen either peacefully, through various postcapitalist mechanisms that Bataille recommends, such as the
Marshall Plan, which will shift growth to other parts of the world, or violently and apocalyptically through the
ultimate in war: nuclear holocaust. One can see that, in the end, the world itself will be en vase clos, fully developed, with
no place for the excess to go. The bad alternative—nuclear holocaust—will result in the ultimate reduction in carrying
capacity: a burned-out, depopulated earth. Humanity is, at the same time, through industry, which uses energy for the development of the
forces of production, both a multiple opening of the possibilities of growth, and the infinite faculty for burnoff in pure loss (facilite infinie de consumation en
pure perte]. (OC. 7: 170; AS, 181) Modern war is first of all a renunciation: one produces and amasses wealth in order to
overcome a foe. War is an adjunct to economic expansion; it is a practical use of excessive forces. And this perhaps is
the ultimate danger of the present-day (1949) buildup of nuclear arms: armament, seemingly a practical way of
defending one’s own country or spreading one’s own values, in other words, of growing, ultimately leads to the risk of a
“pure destruction” of excess—and even of carrying capacity In the case of warfare, destructiveness is masked, made
unrecognizable, by the appearance of an ultimate utility: in this case the spread of the American economy and the American
way of life around the globe. Paradoxically, there is a kind of self-consciousness concerning excess, in the “naïve”
society—which recognizes expenditure for what it is (in the form of unproductive glory in primitive warfare)— and a
thorough ignorance of it in the modem one, which would always attempt to put waste to work (“useful” armaments) even
at the cost of wholesale destruction. Bataille, then, like Le Blanc, can be characterized as a thinker of society who situates his
theory in the context of ecological limits. From Bataille’s perspective, however, there is always too much rather than too
little, given the existence of ecological (“natural”) and social (“cultural”) limits. The “end” of humankind, its ultimate
goal, is thus the destruction of this surplus. While Le Blanc stresses war and sacrifice as a means of obtaining or maintaining what is essential
to bare human (personal, social) survival, Bataille emphasizes the maintenance of limits and survival as mere preconditions for engaging in the glorious
destruction of excess. The meaning of the limit and its affirmation is inseparable from the senselessness of its transgression in expenditure (la dépense). By
seeing warfare as a mere (group) survival mechanism, Le Blanc makes the same mistake as that made by the supporters of a nuclear buildup; he, like they,
sees warfare as practical, serving a purpose, and not as the sheer burn-off it really is. If, however, our most fundamental gesture is the
destruction of a surplus, the production of that surplus must be seen as subsidiary. Once we recognize that everything
cannot be saved and reinvested, the ultimate end (and most crucial problem) of our existence becomes the disposal of
excess wealth (concentrated, nonusable energy). All other activity leads to something else, is a means to some other end;
the only end that leads nowhere is the act of destruction by which we may—or may not—assure our (personal) survival (there
is nothing to guarantee that radical destruction—consumation—does not turn on its author). We work in order to spend. We
strive to produce sacred (charged) things, not practical things. Survival and reproduction alone are not the ultimate ends
of human existence. We could characterize Bataille for this reason as a thinker of ecology who nevertheless emphasizes the
primacy of an ecstatic social act (destruct ion). By characterizing survival as a means not an end (the most fundamental
idea in “general economy”), expenditure for Bataille becomes a limitless, insubordinate act—a real end (that which does
not lead outside itself). I follow Bataille in this primacy of the delirium of expenditure over the simple exigency of personal
or even social survival (Le Blanc). This does not preclude, however, a kind of ethical aftereffect of Bataille’s
expenditure: survival for this reason can be read as the fundamentally unintentional consequence of expenditure
rather than its purpose. Seeing a nuclear buildup as the wrong kind of expenditure—because it is seen as a means not
an end—can lead, in Bataille’s view, to a rethinking of the role of expenditure in the modern world and hence, perhaps,
the world’s (but not modernity’s) survival.

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Our alternative is to provide a map for a postsustainable future, a guide for a new politics that
embraces the proper role of energy – energy a necessarily expended surplus playing no
purposeful, useful role. A revolution in thinking about energy is critical to shape the future path of
globalization to transform economies of finitude into economies of expenditure without reserve.
Ruckh 04 ( Eric W. Prof. Southern Illinois University Ph.D., University of California) "Theorizing Globalization: at the
intersection of Bataille 's Solar Economy , DeLillo 's Underworld, and Hardt 's and Negri 's Empire "pg. 117 - 132
One consequence of this application of Bataille to the issue of globalization is that globalization is not to be summarily
resisted. Globalization creates opportunities for new experiences of identity and social formation; it does so by
changing the ways in which energy is wasted. Recall that for Bataille, humanity is a consequence of solar excess. Human
activity puts energy, stored and restricted on the globe, back into motion. Bataille writes, "The energy freed in him blossoms
and is shown without end in useless splendor" (Bataille VII, 14). One must see the new hierarchies and restrictions created by
globalization as opportunities for even greater expenditure. "The excess of energy," Bataille argues, "could not be freed it it
had itself first not been seized" (Bataille VI, 14). Globalization is both a change in production and expenditure. If
Bataille beckons us to see the new global concentrations of wealth as opportunities for waste, then he also challenges
us to make manifold new ways in which to waste. We must waste in a glorious, splendid fashion, according to Bataille.
In other words, Bataille forces us to see the problem of globalization in a new way: we must resist and struggle against
servile, unconscious manners of wasting energy and attempt to reactivate communal, conscious and sovereign
operations of waste. "Essentially," Bataille claims. "Human being is charged here to expend in glory that which the
earth accumulated, what the sun produced' (Bataille VII. 16). While our attention is diverted to questions of
production and labor, work and necessity. Bataille's gaze shifts to "practices of glorious expenditure, for there, tragically,
lay the grandeur and the sense of human being" (Bataille VII. 16). Such a "Copernican revolution" in viewing and
talking about globalization will have consequences across a domain of registers: from the philosophical through the
historical and political and on to the pedagogic. Bataille can help us develop some of those consequences, particularly as it concerns the
political and historical consequences of globalization. In his essay, "The Psychological Structure of Fascism"(1933), Bataille employs the terms
heterogeneous to refer to practices of expenditure- to the zone of experience which has no end other than itself—and homogeneous to refer to practices of
production—to the zone of experience governed by exchanged, to all things that can be a means to something else. The heterogeneous is roughly
synonymous with the realms of excess and expenditure and the homogeneous is roughly equivalent to the realms of production and utility. Human existence
is stretched across both zones. Of the homogeneous, Bataille writes The common denominator, the foundation of social homogeneity and the .activity
arising from it is money, namely, the calculable equivalent of the different products of collective activity. Money serves to measure all work and
makes man a function of measurable products. According to the judgment of homogeneous society, each man is worth
what he produces; in other words he stops being an existence for itself: he is no more than a function. (Bataille I. 340:
Visions of Fxt. 338, italics mine) To be a function- —this, for Bataille, is the essence of servility. Human beings, reduced
to servility, are incapable of generating the meaning and sense of their own lives. The homogenous stands in opposition to the
heterogeneous: "The [...] heterogeneous indicates that it concerns elements that are impossible to assimilate" Bataille 1. 344: Visions, 1401. Because the
heterogeneous realm cannot be reduced or used as a means it exists for itself: this quality allows these practices to become the grounds of meaning and
values. Heterogeneous existence is directive according to Bataille. So during a time of economic crisis, during a period of transition in (he productive or
homogeneous sphere. the outcome of that crisis will be determined by the heterogeneous. Bataille writes: T he mode of resolving acute economic
contradictions depends upon both the historical state and the general laws of the heterogeneous social region in which effervescence acquires its positive
form: it depends in particular upon the relations established between the various formations of this region I The heterogeneous l when homogeneous society
finds itself materially dissociated. The study of homogeneity and of the conditions of its existence thus necessarily leads to the essential study of
heterogeneity. The history of economic transformation, the history of homogeneous social existence is determined then by a shadow world, by a series of
relationships, struggles and operations that untold in an "underworld." The history we know (Marxist or liberal) is but an illusion, a veil of Maya. drawn over
our eyes, for a secret history is determining our fate. That history is a history of waste: of everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred things
themselves form part of this whole) (... I included arc the waste products of the human body and certain analogous matter (trash. vermin. etc.): the parts of
the human body: persons, words or acts having a suggestive erotic value: the various unconscious processes such as dreams or neuroses: the numerous
elements or social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate: mobs, the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of
violent individuals or at least those who refuse the rule (madmen, leaders, poets, etc.) (Bataille 1. 346: Visions, 142). Relations established and unfolding
amongst these heterogeneous zones of human experience shape our lives, even if we tend to think that they arc of secondary importance. What we are
experiencing then as globalization is the result of the preponderance of certain forms of heterogeneity. If we are to change the shape of
globalization, if we are to intersect and redirect the transformation of economic and social life, then we must
reactivate different modes of experience of the heterogeneous. We must delve into "the underworld." In order to
understand the currents of our contemporary political situation then we must have sonic familiarity with the conflicts within
the realm of the heterogeneous. We must base a "map" of the positions and (he strengths of heterogeneous practices:
this map must be temporal. we must a have sense of the growth and diminution, of the struggles and alliances,

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amongst the heterogeneous. Few formal. disciplinary histories will give us access to the strategic situation within the heterogeneous realm. When
history fails us. There are other resources available. Don DeLillo's novel. Underworld (1997). presents a history of the underworld of the United States
during the second half of the Twentieth Century. I consider it to be an alternative history of the Cold War, in which DeLillo shows that the course of
American history is played out between two poles of the heterogeneous: between waste and war, between refuse and the hydrogen bomb. Between these two
ends of the heterogeneous, other heterogeneous forms emerge, most spectacularly in the form of the game, represented in the novel by the famous baseball
that Bobby Thompson hit out the park to give the game to the Giants over the Dodgers. In a way, everyone in the novel is seeking an alternative to war and
destruction on the one hand and hidden, privatized and forgotten refuse on the other: that quest for a balance. for a response to the fundamental demands of
waste and excess is symbolized by the quest for Hobby Thompson's homerun ball. Everyone's lives are determined by the interplay of
these heterogeneous forces: what to do with the waste of consumer culture, what to do about the bomb, and what to do
about the game. DeLillo shows that much of American history turns around these poles. This literary account of recent American history gives us a first
approximation of the tendencies and strengths of various heterogeneous elements in American life. DeLillo's account of history closely parallels Bataille’s.
Both argue that expenditure is the primary motivation of human existence. Del.illo writes. Cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the
decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges [...] But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into
every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual [... ] People were compelled to develop an organized response. This
meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers.

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NHSI 2008 SENIORS
1NC Shell
Only by redefining our relationship to the environment as operating on the same level can we deal
with improving the politics of energy consumption. Extinction is inevitable absent a change in our
approach toward energy and the environment.
.htm
achieve needed changes that technology and economics alone cannot accomplish. We can try and make more energy-efficient houses
and offices, but if we keep building them farther and farther apart, transportation energy costs will eat up building energy savings. We can switch to

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NHSI 2008 SENIORS
AT Permutation
1. Extend Stoekl. Their attempt to incorporate our alternative into their politics is
expenditure with reserve – it attempts to derive a positive benefit from every political
formulation. This logic leads to nuclear war and extinction.
2. Permutation still links – Vanderburg is a direct link to the imposition of technological

solutions of alternative energy.
3. Renewable alternative energy systems are environmental sinks. Implementation of these

systems result in mass poverty and exploitation of labor.
Patrick Eytchison, 2003 Redwood Coast Greens “Implications of Industrial Collapse for Green Politics”
http://www.greens.org/s-r/30/30-18.html
Of course, the point I am leading to is that the Greens can, if we have the political skill and courage, become the
guiding council Bahro called for; not, however, as a spiritual elite, but as a tough, democratic, radical party ready to
articulate the disaster and offer leadership through it. This would mean a Party that plans, strategically and tactically,
not year by year, or even by decades, but for a century. More specifically, much of this planning would necessarily
center on what Immanuel Wallerstein has recently spoken of as “defensive politics:” fighting as best one can to limit
economic, environmental, and governmental abuses which will necessarily intensify as the world crisis advances.
Also, however, such a guiding Party would provide leadership in organizing for the future. a point of opportunity as
a certain bottom is reached. Finally, one word of warning: We must be wary of accepting sustainability as a
substitute for real Green leadership. During an actual collapse, there can be no real sustainable mode of production.
What there will be, and necessarily so in the view of the powers that be, are various temporary new forms of
technological exploitation which “ratchet down” the slide. Already, major corporations such as British Petroleum
and Royal Dutch Shell are moving aggressively into the “renewable energy” field. Whether solar, wind,
hydroelectric or whatever, all of these green technologies are also simply new material modes for labor
exploitation. Since all of the new alternate energy systems are either “environmental sinks” (i.e., they require
more energy input than their output), or are much smaller in total output than petroleum, or are highly polluting
as in the cases of nuclear power and coal, the overall effect of their implementation will not be a “Green Age,”
but a spread of mass poverty and an intensification of labor exploitation. Renewable energy has been a keystone
of the Green program from the beginning. A question which has hardly been explored, however, is that of the
relationship between labor and mass affluence and a mass transition to renewable energy sources. As Leslie White
pointed out decades ago, the overall affluence of any society is determined by per capita energy use. The affluence
of the modern age, particularly since World War II and in the West, has been largely a result of the massive input of
fossil fuel energy into production. Maintenance of 20th century affluence without fossil fuels will depend entirely
upon the availability of alternative energy in sufficient amounts. So far, no substitute or combination of substitutes
able to do this has been found. The affluence-generating and labor-saving power of fossil fuels derives from their
concentrated nature. Renewables, such as solar and wind power, represent the collection of dispersed rather than
concentrated energy. Although a full argument backing the statement is more lengthy than I can go into here, I
would hold that any mass shift from reliance on concentrated to dispersed energy must imply an increase in per
capita labor or a drop in material well-being. The only alternative to this dilemma that has been suggested is a
drastic reduction in world population, thereby decreasing overall energy need by a truly significant global figure. [2]
Greens, however, tend to be reticent on this point. It is important that a Green party not fall into a trap of false
greenness that is not honest about these difficult issues; that is essentially a co-optation to ruling elites. [3]

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NHSI 2008 SENIORS
4. Our unquestionable pursuit of technological means for alternative energy culminates in

slavery, murder, and human rights violations in order to fulfill the public’s technological
renewable energy fetish with human life.

A particularly bizarre new form of oppression is the military junta’s recent fixation with jatropha or castor
oil179 as a rural biofuel. In 2006, the SPDC announced a massive national program to produce castor oil.180 More
recently, the regime announced that each of Burma’s 14 states and divisions was “expected to plant 500,000 acres”
with jatro¬pha.181 This has translated to a forced- planting program in the pipeline region, in which villagers
are not only required to buy the seeds for the plants from the local authorities, but also to use their time and
land to cultivate the crop.182 One woman from the “pipeline village” of Eindayaza recently explained that the
villagers “have to buy the seeds and plant this for the SPDC. The SPDC does not pay any wages. We had to plant it
last year and this year. My husband had to clear the plantation place so we could plant it. One time it took two weeks
to finish planting.”183Soldiers in the pipeline region also confiscate residents’ goods and extort money from them.
Although most of the residents are poor, with few belongings, villagers with means of private transportation are
forced to transport soldiers or their cargo. A villager with a boat was forced to ferry soldiers across the river: “I
never dared to ask for money. They have the guns.”184 Villagers with bullock carts are forced to transports
logs from the forest to the military camp; the journey takes nearly a full day and the soldiers require two
trips per week, again without payment.185 Soldiers similarly requisition goods and food from the villagers;
several villagers confirmed that soldiers simply “take whatever they want from the village shops,”186 and then
tell the shop owners to seek reimbursement from the village head—who in turn taxes the whole village to cover the
expenses.187 Sometimes the military comes up with schemes to cheat the villagers out of money; they ask for
donations to a “mother and children’s fund,” or the “military fund,” or sometimes even sell tickets to an event that
no one can attend.188 They “extort money from the villagers,” said one refugee. 189 And in many cases the
soldiers drop all pretense of requisitioning supplies, and simply demand money: “We all had to pay them, as they
demanded,” said a resident of the “pipeline village” of Kaleinaung;190 “We have to pay money every time the
solders come into the village,” said another from the village of Kanbauk.191 “It becomes a habit,” remarked one
refugee, “of welcoming the Burmese soldiers.”192

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NHSI 2008 SENIORS

Bataille’s Peak Affirmative – Sam Gelb and Jeffrey Xu 1

Bataille’s Peak Affirmative

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Bataille’s Peak 1AC

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

[c/i – resolve – to reduce by mental analysis – dictionary.com]

4. In a world of Bush’s War on Terror, we should embrace Bataille’s expenditure as a way to

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

T – Alternative Energy 2AC

C/I- Humanity is and must be considered as energy-.

Northwestern University Debate Society

Overlimits- Their interpretation intellectually confines us to technological means of energy production,

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Technology Prevents Net Energy

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Goal-Directed Technology  Expenditure With Reserve

Northwestern University Debate Society

Alternative Energy  Labor Exploitation

Northwestern University Debate Society

Traditional Alternative Energy  Exploitation

Earthrights International April 2008 “The Human Cost Of Energy”

Northwestern University Debate Society

Traditional Alternative Energy  Genocide

Earthrights International April 2008 “The Human Cost Of Energy”

Northwestern University Debate Society

Technology Doesn’t Solve

Northwestern University Debate Society

AT Consumerism Solves Expenditure

Northwestern University Debate Society

AT Consumerism Solves Expenditure

Northwestern University Debate Society

AT Consumerism Solves Expenditure

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Northwestern University Debate Society

Finitude Economy Impact

Northwestern University Debate Society

Finitude Economy Impact

Northwestern University Debate Society

Finitude Economy Impact

Northwestern University Debate Society