The Accursed Share

The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy (French: La Part maudite) is a 1949 work of political economy, philosophy and economic anthropology by the French writer and theorist Georges Bataille. The first edition was published by Les Éditions de Minuit as La Part maudite. Essai d'économie générale. Tome I: La Consumation, in the series L'Usage des richesses. In it Bataille proposes what he calls a "general economy": an account of economic and social life that begins not with scarcity, utility and the preservation of isolated entities, but with the circulation of energy through the biosphere, the limits of growth, and the unavoidable expenditure of surplus resources. Bataille calls the portion that can no longer be absorbed by maintenance or growth the "accursed share". According to his theory, this surplus must eventually be lost. It may be expended deliberately through gifts, festivals, luxury, art, monuments, religious institutions, erotic activity, leisure or improvements in living standards; or it may be discharged catastrophically through economic crisis, militarization and war. General economy does not deny that particular people or societies experience real scarcity. Rather, it changes the scale of analysis: restricted economic actors may lack resources even while the larger system produces an excess that it cannot indefinitely reinvest. The title is also conventionally applied in English to a larger, partly posthumous three-volume project. Volume I, translated as Consumption, concerns energy, surplus and the historical forms of expenditure. Volume II, The History of Eroticism, extends the argument to prohibition, transgression, sexuality, love and mysticism. Volume III, Sovereignty, examines non-instrumental experience, political authority, communism, knowledge and art. Only Volume I appeared as a book under Bataille's supervision. Manuscripts of the other two volumes were first published in 1976 in volume 8 of his Œuvres complètes and were reconstructed for the English-language Zone Books edition....