Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) trained as a medievalist archivist at the École Nationale des Chartes before spending most of his working life as a librarian at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, while founding a series of dissident literary and intellectual groups and journals — Documents, Acéphale, Critique — largely outside the era’s academic and Surrealist mainstreams. His three-volume The Accursed Share (begun 1949) proposes a “general economy” viewed from the standpoint of energy rather than scarcity: every system, from a single organism to the whole biosphere, generates more energy than it needs for bare survival, and that surplus must be expended — in luxury, art, ritual sacrifice, or war, if not deliberately in less destructive forms. Largely overlooked in his own lifetime, the book’s account of systems and their necessary excess later informed post-structuralist thought, including Michel Foucault’s.