I first encountered Georges Bataille when I read The Accursed Share in a Queer Political Theory seminar in college. The Accursed Share, which basically posits that surplus economic energy is channeled into either pleasure (i.e. art, sex, spectacles and celebrations) or destruction (violence, war, human sacrifice.) A society can choose how to expend its excess, “luxury,” energy, and we can learn what it values based on what if finds luxurious. This made perfect sense to me, a budding Marxist who was busy turning everything into dialectics, assessing their place in the base or the superstructure. I think it’s pretty easy today to see what the United States is up to when you stack our military budget– just shy of a trillion dollars– which is roughly four thousand times US arts spending.
My main memory of Bataille, though, came a few years later when I was reading his masterpiece, the novel The Story of The Eye, while I was lying on the grass at my brother’s college graduation from one of the top engineering schools in California. I was surrounded by productive people, the backbone of the US labor force. The commencement speaker, the “father of self-driving cars,” who had just started a “for-profit private education website,” and worked for the research arm of the US military, was telling my brother’s cohort of 200 engineers, almost all with extremely lucrative tech job offers, that they “should think outside of the box,” just like “Larry Page.” And there I was, sprawled out on the grass in the beautiful California sunshine reading about two French teenagers inserting soft-boiled eggs into each-others anuses, glancing up occasionally to nod along as the President said, “Given the increasing impact of technology in every aspect of society, the world needs graduates like those from Harvey Mudd more than it has ever needed them before.” My brother graduated. A French teenager stuck bull testicles up her vagina as a matador was impaled by the bull. My family ate a delicious Italian meal.
–Zoe Dubno