Abstract
Bataille introduces the “accursed share” in his theory of the general economy, asserting that all living systems produce surplus energy that must be expended through non‑productive acts such as sacrifice, luxury, ritual, or war, which then shape social forms. Drawing on former philosophers Bataille emphasises “dépense” (pointless expenditure) as a fundamental human drive that reveals the limits of rational, utilitarian frameworks and underlies transgressive experiences.
He argues that modern industrial capitalism masks this necessary waste by endless productive accumulation, creating crises that are ultimately discharged through militaristic, religious, or other extravagant expenditures.
Philosophical Context
Hegel
Georges Bataille (1897-1962) reads Hegel by focusing on what Hegel's system leaves out. He agrees that Hegel aims for a total, rational explanation of reality, but Bataille argues that this goal hides things that can't be folded into a neat, logical whole: waste, excess, erotic force and destructive loss.
Where Hegel sees negation (antithesis) as the engine that moves things forward into higher unity, Bataille finds it a breaking point. Negation can fail to produce a new, stable identity and instead bring ruin, dissolution, or mystical loss. Hegel’s method tends to erase or ignore these experiences.
Bataille rethinks freedom and Spirit by emphasising “dépense” (expenditure), that is, pointless, nonproductive acts like sacrifice, waste, or erotic excess. These acts don’t build Spirit through useful labour, they contradict utility and resist being absorbed into Hegel’s system.
Eroticism, for Bataille, is especially important because it breaks down the boundary between subject and object. In Hegelian terms it’s a failure of the process that makes self-consciousness whole. For Bataille that failure reveals a real, overlooked dimension of human life.
Bataille retains Hegel’s idea of dialectical movement but insists there’s always an irreducible remainder, impersonal, excessive forces that destabilise systems and show the limits of rational totality.
Le Marquis de Sade
Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade both focus on going beyond normal limits. Sade’s stories push liberty and reason to extremes, especially through cruel and sexual acts. Bataille sees these extremes as showing how people waste energy and value, instead of saving or using them productively. He calls this idea dépense (expenditure). People deliberately destroy or give away what they have in order to show that not everything fits into usefulness.
Both thinkers worry about what happens to the self at its edges. Sade’s characters try to be totally free by harming others and breaking rules, aiming for absolute control. Bataille looks at similar acts as moments when the self falls apart and faces pain, death, or meaninglessness. Those moments can feel like an experience beyond the everyday self, even a kind of ecstatic loss of identity.
The writers differ in tone and aim. Sade often shows domination and cruelty as a way to assert power and to shock religion and morals. Bataille doesn’t praise those acts. Instead he treats them as signs of deeper human needs, an urge to exceed limits, to sacrifice, or to touch the “sacred” in a chaotic, material way. For him, Sadean excess points to how societies hide their true economic and emotional rules.
Sade dramatises extreme freedom through violence and domination; Bataille reads those dramas as revealing the human drive toward waste, loss, and experiences that break ordinary meaning. Bataille is interpreting, not endorsing. He wants philosophy to reckon with these limit experiences rather than simply condemn them.
Nietzsche
Georges Bataille’s thought is deeply shaped by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s attack on conventional morality and his call to reassess values gave Bataille permission to treat taboo and the sacred not as leftovers to reject, but as central forces in human life. Both reject rationalist, utilitarian frameworks. Bataille takes this further by focusing less on power in the productive, success-orientated sense, and more on waste, expenditure and energies that resist economising logic.
Nietzsche’s idea of the Dionysian intensity, excess, and breakdown of order informs Bataille’s interest in moments that supersede calculation: sacrifice, eroticism and communal rites. These events reveal the sacred through excess rather than through measured meaning. They echo Nietzsche’s critique of Apollonian restraint but redirect the focus from individual greatness to collective, often destructive, intensity.
Nietzsche’s perspectivism and distrust of stable truths also shape Bataille’s style and method. Like Nietzsche, Bataille avoids systematic metaphysics and favours aphorism, paradox, and destabilising rhetoric. Both value intensities that exceed norms, but Bataille shifts the emphasis away from Nietzsche’s ideal of the exceptional Overman toward experiences that dissolve the subject: erotic excess, base materiality, and even pathological eruptions.
Bataille adapts Nietzsche’s genealogical critique into what might be called a sacrificial anthropology. He traces how systems of value and taboo create social cohesion and exclusion and argues that transgression and sacred excess are structural necessities. This keeps Nietzsche’s historicising suspicion about moral origins but radicalises it into an ethics and aesthetics centred on expenditure, waste, and formless excess.
Freud
Sigmund Freud influenced Georges Bataille in several ways. Bataille read Freud early and often, especially Totem and Taboo, and adopted Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, drives, ambivalence, and the central role of sexuality in shaping human life. Freud’s notion that prohibitions (taboos) structure both social and psychic life became the starting point for Bataille’s interest in transgression. Where Freud described how prohibitions regulate desire and produce repression, Bataille asked what happens when those bans are deliberately broken and what kinds of excess experience such transgression reveals.
Bataille broadened Freud’s clinical categories into a cultural and metaphysical programme. He accepted Freud’s ideas about the death drive and ambivalence but pushed them further. For Bataille, eroticism, sacrifice, and transgression were not merely symptoms of neurosis but ways to reach limit-experiences, moments that dissolve the ordinary continuity of the subject and open onto something beyond everyday life. Freud’s links among sexuality, taboo, and guilt gave Bataille the framework to argue that erotic excess and sacred transgression expose the limits of the profane, consistent world and point toward a disruptive, erratic core of existence.
At the same time, Bataille critiqued and departed from Freud. Freud aimed at therapeutic explanations tied to social norms and psychical economy. Bataille treated the irrational, ecstatic, and sometimes violent eruptions Freud described as philosophically and politically significant. For Bataille, transgression is not a pathology to be cured but a path to knowledge of the sacred, a refusal of utilitarian exchange, and an exposure of the limits of representation. Freud supplied key concepts like taboo, repression, drives and ambivalence, that Bataille reworked into an aesthetics and ontology of transgression and limit-experience.
Surrealism
Georges Bataille’s relationship with André Breton and Surrealism began with shared interests such as eroticism, transgression and a critique of bourgeois rationality, but quickly turned fraught. Bataille took part in Surrealist activities early on and drew on some of its energies, yet he rejected Breton’s faith in automatic writing and the movement’s often utopian political rhetoric.
Rather than Breton’s idea of liberatory fusion with the unconscious, Bataille pushed Surrealist concerns into darker territory: eroticism became a path to confront death, sacrifice, and the sacred; transgression, a way to test and affirm limits, not dissolve them into collective revolution. He chose to emphasise extreme, singular experiences, base materialism, and heterodox religious forms.
Marxism
Georges Bataille argued that humans need moments that break ordinary utility and rationality (like festivals, rituals, or transgressive acts) to experience intensity and freedom. He advocated that societies and individuals sometimes spend resources or energy in non-productive ways (luxury, sacrifice, art) that can't be measured by strict economic usefulness.
Bataille shared Marx's critique of capitalism's injustices but rejected Marxist economic determinism and the idea that history follows a single scientific law. Unlike Marxism, which focuses on labour, production, and class struggle as drivers of societal change, Bataille was more interested in sovereignty, taboo, and the non-economic forces that shape human behaviour. He criticised Marxists for ignoring eroticism, religion, and the irrational impulses that also drive politics and culture.
Bataille offered an alternative vocabulary to think about social life: concepts like waste, transgression and the sacred show how people create meaning outside productive work. Some Marxist thinkers later engaged with Bataille, borrowing his ideas about consumption, spectacle, or the role of non-productive practices, but he remained politically ambiguous, sceptical of both orthodox Marxism and conventional bourgeois liberalism. Bataille complements Marxist critiques by highlighting aspects of human life and social practice that economic-centred Marxism tends to overlook.
Commentary
Prologue
In the prologue to La Part Maudite (The Accursed Share) (1949), Bataille introduces the problem: conventional economic theory ignores the necessity of expenditure beyond useful needs. He then presents the idea that excess must be spent.
The author argues that life produces surplus energy. A general economy must explain where surplus goes, not just production and scarcity. He defines “accursed share” as the unavoidable surplus that must be wasted or expended and frames it as a problem that societies handle differently.
Bataille then contrasts productive (restricted) economies with his idea of 'general economy'. Restricted economies try to conserve and reinvest, masking the general economy’s need to waste. Examples of non-productive expenditures are potlatch, luxury and temple-building as socially organised outlets for surplus.
Bataille establishes links between sovereignty and religion: institutions that legitimate and direct expenditure, often via sacrifice or ceremonial waste. He connects eroticism and transgression to expenditure: acts that destroy utility or cross taboos reveal the logic of the accursed share. He then extends the thesis to biological and cosmic scales: organisms and civilisations must expend surplus energy. Failure to do so risks collapse or violent discharge.
The author discusses moral ambivalence: expenditure can be constructive (festivals, art) or destructive (war). The “accursed” quality stems from the compulsion toward potentially ruinous waste.
In a summary of the prologue’s aim he affirms that it aims to establish the general-economy framework for analysing institutions and cultural practices in the rest of the book.
Part One : The General Economy
Georges Bataille argues that traditional economic theory — focused on scarcity and efficient allocation — misses a fundamental reality: societies must spend surplus energy and resources. Bataille calls this excess "the accursed share". Because organisms (and societies) generate more energy than needed for survival and reproduction, that surplus must be dissipated. How a society disposes of excess shapes its structures, rituals, and institutions.
He contrasts two economic models. The "restricted economy" is the framework of classical economics, built on scarcity, accumulation, exchange, and utility. His "general economy," by contrast, centres on the inevitable expenditure of surplus. In the general economy, production is not solely aimed at meeting needs but also produces an excess that must be consumed, destroyed, or transformed.
Surplus cannot be reinvested indefinitely. Attempts at endless accumulation generate crises. Societies therefore develop channels for expenditure: luxury, art, monumental architecture, potlatch-like gift rituals, and war, that function as socially sanctioned means to dissipate excess energy. Such expenditure is not merely wasteful but formative because it redistributes resources, creates social bonds, and establishes or dissolves hierarchies.
Ritualised destruction and lavish gift-giving, exemplified by the potlatch, serve as mechanisms to manage surplus. These practices can legitimise authority, display prestige, and reaffirm communal ties by converting wealth into symbolic acts. Bataille also emphasises the role of sovereignty. Rulers or elites manage surplus through extravagant consumption, sponsorship of spectacle, or sacrificial acts, and their power depends on controlling forms of expenditure rather than only productive accumulation.
Eroticism, laughter, and taboo transgression are linked to expenditure as well. For Bataille, eroticism enacts a release of excess beyond utilitarian ends and participates in the same logic as ritual waste, intensifying experience and challenging normative limits. This psychological and social dimension shows how nonproductive expenditure is embedded in human life beyond economics.
Finally, Bataille situates human economies within a broader cosmological process of energy dissipation. Life generates surplus energy that ultimately must return to nonproductive channels. Decay, death, and sacrifice are integral to this cycle. By challenging utilitarian morality that valorises thrift and production, the notion of the accursed share reframes ethics and politics around the necessity and legitimacy of waste, revealing expenditure as central to social life and historical change.
Part II: The Sovereign Form
Part II develops Bataille’s central economic concept of the accursed share by exploring how societies organise the necessary excess that cannot be productively consumed. Bataille argues that biological and productive systems necessarily produce surplus energy and the way it is expended shapes social forms. Where classical economics treats scarcity and utility as primary, Bataille flips the perspective: abundance and waste (ritual, sacrifice, potlatch, luxury, war) are foundational phenomena that reveal a society’s structure and values.
Bataille insists that surplus cannot be indefinitely reinvested for growth without destabilising effects. Instead, surplus compels nonproductive expenditures that affirm social cohesion, hierarchy, or dissolution. These expenditures take many forms (temporary festivals and permanent institutions) and are governed by what he calls the sovereign form: practices that transcend utilitarian exchange and express a community’s relation to excess.
Bataille examines historical and anthropological examples (religious sacrifice, royal extravagance, monumental architecture, and war) to show how sovereign expenditures legitimise power and integrate communities around collective expenditure. Sovereignty, in his sense, is not merely political rule but the capacity to waste or give away without calculation. This sovereign waste is both creative (it can produce art, ritual, and social bonds) and destructive (it can lead to catastrophic war or systemic collapse). Bataille therefore treats sovereignty ambivalently: as the place where transgression, expenditure, and excess meet, producing both meaning and danger.
Philosophically, Part II situates the accursed share within the study of being and ethics: humans are not merely maximisers of utility but creatures compelled to overflow. Ethical and aesthetic life arises from how societies ritualise or institutionalise that overflow. Bataille criticises modern capitalist attempts to absorb or monetise all excess, arguing such absorption obscures the need for genuine nonproductive expenditure and strips social life of its sacred and transgressive dimensions. He closes by insisting that understanding the sovereign form and the required expenditure it channels is essential to grasping human history, culture, and the limits of economic reasoning.
Part III: The military and religious businesses
Bataille describes the military-enterprise society as one organised around continuous expansion, conquest, and the channelling of excess energy into collective institutions of war. In such societies, the ruling power legitimises extensive expenditures on armies, fortifications, and heroic ceremonies by framing them as necessary for honour, survival, or glory. War functions as a socially useful outlet for surplus that would otherwise destabilise the social order. The state’s prestige and cohesion depend on ritualised sacrifice and public demonstrations of expenditure. Economic activity and production are subordinated to martial ends. Artisans, resources, and labour are directed toward armament and logistical support, and social hierarchy is reinforced through martial values. Bataille emphasises that this orientation institutionalises wasteful expenditure while providing the society with a clear purpose and a moral justification for lavish losses.
The religious-enterprise society channels excess through sacred expenditure, ritual, and institutions devoted to the divine. Here, surplus is dissipated via offerings, temples, priestly hierarchies and festivals that sacralise consumption and destruction as expressions of devotion. The religious order legitimates redistribution and lavish spending by embedding them in a cosmology that predicates social order on sacrifice and the maintenance of the sacred. Priests and religious institutions manage surplus by prescribing rituals, almsgiving and monumental construction, acts that transform waste into meaning and social cohesion. Bataille shows that religious societies convert economic excess into symbolic expenditure, thereby avoiding internal economic collapse while reinforcing authority through spiritual justification.
Bataille contrasts both the military and the religious forms as mechanisms for the compulsory outflow of surplus that prevent disruptive internal accumulation. The military model expends surplus outwardly in violent, glorified destruction, binding people through loyalty and honour; the religious model expends surplus inwardly through consecrated waste, binding people through shared belief and sacred practice. Both systems valorise loss and consumption, but they differ in actors and legitimations (soldiers and state ritual versus priests and sacred rites), and in whether the expenditure is framed primarily as service to the polity or to the divine. In each case, extravagant, non-productive spending sustains social equilibrium by absorbing the accursed share.
Part IV: “Los Datos Históricos: La Sociedad Industrial”
Part IV examines how industrial society channels, organises, and obscures the expenditure of excess energy and wealth (the “accursed share”). Bataille treats industrialisation not merely as economic growth but as a civilisation’s systematic attempt to control, optimise, and redirect surplus through production, accumulation, and utility, thereby hiding the necessity and inevitability of unproductive expenditure.
The author contrasts a utilitarian-industrial ethic with earlier societies where excess was often dissipated publicly, through potlatch, sacrifice, monumental building, or ceremonial waste. In modern industrial society the dominant response is to rationalise surplus into endless production, reinvestment, and social planning. The surplus becomes a resource to increase future productive capacity, rather than something to be consumed or destroyed. This produces a cultural illusion that all surplus can be made “useful,” masking the irreducible, destructive, or extravagant aspect of expenditure that Bataille insists is fundamental to life and social cohesion.
The section traces historical shifts in social forms and institutions such as religion, monarchy, aristocracy, and capitalist-industrial structures, showing how each organises expenditure differently. Industrial capitalism transforms traditional public and ritual channels of loss into private accumulation and technical reinvestment, creating new mechanisms (credit, capital markets, large-scale public work, consumer industries) that absorb surplus into expanded productive cycles. At the same time these mechanisms generate new forms of waste: arms races, planned obsolescence, luxury consumption, and ultimately large-scale destruction (war, technocratic catastrophe) when the system cannot accommodate excess.
Bataille notes political consequences: industrial society’s drive to economise expenditure fosters social hierarchies and normative structures that valorise productivity, thrift, and utility while stigmatising gratuitous waste. This moralisation suppresses collective, festive, or sacred forms of expenditure, pushing the tension toward crises in revolutionary eruptions, state-organised spectacles, or catastrophic dissipations. These reveal the underlying need for the accursed share to be discharged.
In conclusion, Part IV reads industrial society as historically particular in how it handles the accursed share. By converting necessary expenditure into endless production and accumulation, it both temporarily increases control and creates deeper pressures that eventually demand more radical, often violent, forms of discharge. Bataille’s diagnosis implies that acknowledging and institutionally permitting nonproductive, even extravagant expenditure, is crucial to prevent the destructive discharges that industrial rationality ultimately produces.
Part V: Present-day data
In Part V Bataille notes that life and the biosphere produce an overabundance of energetic flows. Organisms and societies must discharge this excess to survive. The accursed share is that portion of wealth or energy that cannot be channelled into further production without destabilising systems. It must be destroyed, given away, or squandered. Failure to recognise and properly expend the surplus leads to destructive outlets or social stagnation.
Part V revisits cosmological and thermodynamic metaphors: the universe trends toward dissipation (entropy), and human economies mirror this by needing outlets for excess energy. Bataille insists that aesthetics, religion, and nonproductive practices are necessary economic functions since they are ways societies pay their accursed share. He warns that modern capitalist systems mask the accursed share through continuous productive expansion, but this merely postpones inevitable expenditures and concentrates destructive potentials. He calls for a recognition of the necessity of expenditure and for institutions that can channel excess creatively rather than catastrophically.
Finally, Bataille leaves open a paradoxical ethical and political proposition: embracing necessary waste and transgression could free human life from calculation and utility, but it also risks legitimising violence and domination under the guise of ritual. The task is to rethink political forms so that expenditure can be communal, liberating, and non-coercive, transforming the accursed share from a destructive blind spot into a conscious, sovereign practice that affirms life through controlled loss.
Epilogue: The Theory of Surplus Half a Century Later
In the Epilogue, looking half a century forward, Bataille predicts recurring cycles in which surpluses precipitate either creative cultural efflorescence or catastrophic violence. He cautions that modern industrial-capitalist systems, with their massive productive capacities, risk producing vast, unmanaged surpluses that political rationality may redirect into militarism, imperial expansion, or ecological devastation. Thus, he frames the problem as both economic and existential: how can societies ritualise or institutionalise non-destructive forms of expenditure so that surplus becomes a source of communal life rather than domination or annihilation?
The Epilogue is a call to rethink political economy through categories that include waste, sacrifice, and excess, alongside production and utility. Bataille urges theorists and societies to confront the paradox that abundance does not automatically equate to well‑being. Rather, the ways in which excess is expended determine whether abundance fosters creativity, solidarity, and the sacred, or fuels spectacle, oppression and ruin.
Themes
Surplus
Georges Bataille’s concept of surplus (dépense) describes the part of production or energy that exceeds immediate biological or practical needs and must be expended rather than conserved. Imagine a village harvests more food than required for survival. Instead of hoarding the extra, the community organises a communal feast that consumes the excess. The feast is not aimed at increasing productivity. Its value is social and ritual: waste becomes a means of reinforcing bonds and expressing a collective intensity that lies beyond mere subsistence.
A ruler commissioning an enormous temple is another example. The structure consumes vast resources, far beyond what is necessary for ordinary administrative or religious functions. The point is not efficiency but display. The extravagant expenditure manifests authority and creates symbolic value through what appears as waste. Similarly, in potlatch ceremonies chiefs deliberately give away or destroy wealth to signal status and redistribute resources. Prestige is produced through dissipative acts rather than accumulation.
On the individual level, buying an expensive decorative object with no practical use illustrates surplus as luxury consumption. The purchase is a gratuitous outlay that communicates social distinction by converting resources into symbolic meaning. In artistic production, an artist may devote disproportionate time and materials to a work with no commercial return. Here the effort itself is purposeless expenditure that generates intensity, meaning, and singular experience rather than tangible utility.
For Bataille, modern economies attempt to absorb surplus through saving and reinvestment, turning potential dépense into further production. Yet societies continually seek forms of expenditure (ritual sacrifice, spectacle, luxury, artistic excess) to release surplus energy. That release is not merely economic waste, it is constitutive of social and symbolic life, revealing how wasteful, nonproductive acts, sustain human communities and meaning.
The Absurd
Georges Bataille’s work intersects with the philosophy of the Absurd without aligning neatly with its more familiar exponents such as Camus or Beckett. Bataille rejected systematic rationalism and prized moments where lived experience ruptures meaning, as in ecstasy, eroticism, transgression, sacrificial violence, that expose the limits of coherent, purposive existence. For Bataille the human condition is marked by an excess that cannot be fully subsumed under utility or reason. This excess forces encounters with the formless, the discontinuous and death, producing experiences that dissolve ordinary significance and reveal an underlying indifference or meaninglessness similar to themes in Absurdist thought.
Yet Bataille’s response differs from Camus’s ethical revolt or Beckett’s bleak comedic inertia. Rather than proposing rebellion, ethical projects, or staged endurance, Bataille emphasises a mystical identification with what he calls “sovereignty”. These are moments when one abandons work-orientated, productive life for expenditure, loss, and taboo-breaking that affirm life through release rather than through rational meaning. His aesthetics treat horror, eroticism, and sacrament as avenues to confront contingency directly. These produce a paradoxical affirmation of life rooted in an embrace of mortality and formlessness rather than in constructing or asserting meaning. In that sense Bataille complements Absurdist insights about meaning’s fragility while insisting that the proper human response is not primarily philosophical revolt or comic resignation but transgressive expenditure that momentarily dissolves the boundaries that make meaning possible.
The Body
Georges Bataille sees the body as the place where people come to their limits, where words, identity and the line between human and animal break down. For him, erotic acts, pain, sacrifice and waste aren’t just private happenings but ways the body shows excess and breaks ordinary rules. Sexual ecstasy can make the self dissolve for a moment, linking people to others and to the idea of death. Rituals or acts of giving everything up (sacrifice, waste) challenge the usual focus on usefulness and control, showing a different logic where loss and spending are meaningful.
Bataille also points to bodily things society hides — fluids, decay, injury — to show how fragile our neat categories are. These “limit” experiences (intense pleasure, pain, or mystical feeling) can’t be fully described in words; they must be lived, and they make language fall silent. Though his focus on violence and transgression is controversial, Bataille’s main point is simple: the body, in its vulnerability and excess, reveals truths about our connection to others, to the nonhuman, and to mortality.
Sovereignty
“Sovereignty is the domain of expenditure where utility ceases to reign.”
Sovereignty for Georges Bataille means a way of living that refuses to treat everything as useful or valuable only for a purpose. For Bataille, being sovereign is about moments when people spend, give, or destroy without trying to gain something back. This kind of nonproductive spending—like a costly feast, a risky act, or self-sacrifice—shows life as excess rather than as a means to an end.
Bataille links sovereignty to transgression. Breaking rules and taboos can create an intense, shared experience that passes beyond ordinary, calculated behaviour. In those moments people feel connected to others and to the world in a direct, overwhelming way. Erotic encounters, rituals, and acts that risk death are examples he uses to show how limits can be crossed and how self-centred, instrumental thinking can be suspended.
Sovereignty is opposed to the ethic of work and usefulness. Modern life, Bataille argues, reduces people to producers and consumers who always measure things by their utility. Sovereignty is the opposite: it values waste, play, and devotion that do not serve a practical goal. This reveals a different side of human life, one focused on intensity, shared experience, and the acceptance of finitude.
Bataille also treats sovereignty as immanent rather than transcendent. It doesn’t depend on a higher moral law or external authority. Instead, it appears in lived, immediate experiences that dissolve ordinary distinctions between self and other. Critics worry that this emphasis on excess and destruction can be dangerous or romanticise harm. Supporters say it challenges narrow, utilitarian views and opens space for richer, more connected human experiences.
Influence
Georges Bataille had a profound impact on French postwar philosophy. Thinkers like Michel Foucault drew on Bataille’s ideas about transgression and limits to rethink power, sexuality, and the ways institutions regulate bodies and desires. Jacques Derrida engaged with Bataille’s writings on economy and excess when developing deconstruction, while Gilles Deleuze incorporated Bataillean themes of immanence and intensity into his work on desire and becoming.
In psychoanalysis and cultural theory, figures like Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva picked up Bataillean motifs such as abjection, eroticism, and the centrality of lack or excess, to expand understandings of subjectivity and language. Scholars in anthropology and sociology used his ideas about sacrifice and the sacred to interpret rituals and communal practices.
Artists and filmmakers responding to Bataille’s emphasis on shock, eroticism, and the sacred include Luis Buñuel and later experimental creators like Derek Jarman. Contemporary visual artists and avant-garde filmmakers continue to reference his work when exploring taboo imagery and ecstatic or violent experiences. Across Anglo-American and continental theory, Bataille’s concepts, especially the “accursed share”, transgression, and the sovereignty of the sacred, have shaped debates in critical theory, cultural studies, queer theory, and political philosophy.
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