...Sustainability by Bataille...

Stoekl, Allan.  Bataille's peak: energy, religion, and postsustainability. — Minneapolis; London: Univ. of Minnesota press, cop. 2007. — 247 с.

Bruno, Sade, Bataille

• For Bruno, Nature as matter is everywhere.  God is indispensable tribute of the matter (although it is not put in this way) and thus reason of all the material changes, destructions and rebirth.
• For Sade, matter is summarised in the energy that animates it and transforms it.  Contrary to Bruno's vertical move of nature and matter, Sade's energy is lateral, non-hierarchical.  And this energy is violent, destructive to the point that human is also destroyed.  The law, and any law attempt to restrict arbitrarily and unjustly the fundamental and natural movement of energy and pleasure.  "God for Sade is the ultimate instance of an innocence that can only be preserved through a repressive and unjust "cold" law" (16).
• For both morality may not be ground in the matter and thus no ground for morality at all.
• Sade's is "a vision of sovereign energy that in a sense transcends everyday selfishness, since its highest point is extreme apathy; can a sovereign, steeped in murderous disinterest, dependent on nothing and no one's till be said to be selfish?  Does a sovereign self-sacrifice, in which even the self is immolated to maximise energy, entail an extreme self-centredness, or its opposite?  Bataille, in fact, will imagine a generosity derived from Sadean apathy…"
• It should however be said that this same energy is conscious of the complete renunciation of feeling, pleasure, the sovereign is still aware of the process of energy flow.  "This paradoxical awareness — of that which is the experience of death and the formless continuity of all (necessarily dying) beings in sheer movement, as energy expenditure" is a race of humanity in this monstrous material world.  Sade needs this directing consciousness of human.  He needs a dead or dying God, God that gives himself to be murdered, "as internal limit that throws up meaning. Law, sense, virtue, only to access to his own distraction".
• Bataille deals with the matter which is not and may not be assimilated, governed by the laws and thus by the science.  This is "charged" matter, kind of shit dejected by the healthy science's body.  This matter is charged with energy and violence.  It circulates "spreading its violence" (20).  This project is opposite to Durkheim's.  The latter is seeking to discover rational basis for collective enthusiasm (collective being, mana, solidarity).  Bataille studies excluded heterogeneous matter, unjustly excluded but which however makes possible "the coherence of rigorous, hierarchical system of classification and thought" (21).  It is a matter that is "an end in itself, leading nowhere".
• In this Marx is involved.  Proletariat is in the modern world the privileged vehicle of heterogeneous matter.  It only keeps contact with profound, base experiences: "a worker works in order to obtain the violent pleasures of coitus (in other words, he accumulates in order to spend)" (23).  And this notion of revolutionary expenditure linked to abject class stayed with Bataille always.
• Twisting Sade Bataille recognises the death of God as necessary expenditure, it is recognition of God's necessity, his central and overwhelming presence as heterogeneous force of the sacred in the society — precisely in his radical absence.
• Energy expenditure is linked to the notion of lost of self as generosity.
• Claim importance of this reading not for understanding of Bataille but for thinking about energy in and as the future.

Bataille's Ethics

• Starts from the premises that for Bataille nature and society are the same: "both are nothing more than instances of energy concentration and waist" (32).  And "man" in this world is not author of his own narrative, more subj that experiences and acts: he is "the focal point of the intensification or slacking of energy flow" (32).
• Ideas came in the context of atom energy discovery and thus promise of ever growing energy production and consumption together with internal growth.  Bailie's energy is different.  And he sees limits of possibility of the society to manage the energy — therefore, need for spending it.  "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 ecology) or internal (as in social philosophy and ideology)" (35).
• Limitation for growth up to point of surplus is formed by nourishing limitations + rivalry from the spices.  This is vert much ecological theory.
• Energy chain is summoned to the nuclear Holocaust.  And this idea follow with "absolute knowledge" by Hegel — the one that is based on the certainty of higher destruction (hence an absolute knowledge that is also a non-knowledge) (37).  This destructive force is another side of the energy surplus — if it is mis-managed.
• Argues against marxists and general evaluation of the better productivity and energy growth as result of human efforts, labor and knowledge.  Shows rather than processing of the energy (sun-wood-coal-oil) produce more energy (energy concentration and thus possibly to extract grows).  And thus productivity of the society depends on the type of the fuel it uses.
• Limitation of the theory — ignoring the cost of the energy, without the theory of depletion , he thus could ignore conservation in all senses, not only of resources and energy, but also labor, wealth etc.  He could also ignore models of cultural decline.  For Bataille there will "always be a surplus of energy; the core problem of our civilisation is how we use up the excess.  We need never question the "energy slaves" inseparable from our seemly endless waste.  Nor will there need to be any consideration of the fact that these energy slaves may very well, in the not-so-distant future, have to be replaced by real, human slaves" (42).
• Expenditure of energy is for author affirmation of the limits imposed by the existing order of the society.  "Respect of limits through their transgression".
• Erotism is in the same logic a confirmation of the societal limits for sex, it is not possible without knowledge of human limits and interdiction.
• Destruction of an excess in an economy is meaningful if it maintain and respects limits.  More even, "maintenance of those limits, the carrying capacity in today's terminology, is only possible through the ritual, emotionally charged destruction of excess wealth (and not its indefinite, seemingly useful, but indifferent reproduction), just as interdictions are only meaningful, and therefore maintainable, when they are periodically transgressed" (48).
• "Bataille's method is not that of raving madman but of the patient economist, writing against "closed" economy, and of the Hegelian, writing against a narrow consciousness that would close off ecstasy, expenditure, and loss" (53).
• Analysis of the war, from Aztecs to Amricans, showing loss of spectacularity, intimacy, mechanisation of destruction. It does not mean that the war lost its significance as expenditure.  It is however "an extreme" example of "an inability to recognise deepens 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" (54).  This reference to self-consciousness as problem is problematic.  It avoids thus the notion of destruction itself: how we moved from hill of sculls to the planetary destruction…  This should be found — as acceleration of production in last 2 centuries — in the source of energy.  It used to muscular-based production of energy, and same destruction.. it m.b. called "intimate" destruction. Fossil energy lacking this intimacy, it is not a matter of quantity.  This fuel implies the effort to maximise production through quantification, the augmentation of sheer quantity of things, "there is no internal limit, no angoisse or paint before which we shudder" (56).
• New mode of expenditure at the era of ecological deserter (and recycling is not an answer following Bataille) should be inbuilt int he contemporary city and in new religion.  Religion of ante-book, and the city as non-place, the u-topos,of scattering.

Bataille's Religion

• Warn against mechanical, functional reading of Bataille.  A new economy of non-knowing, of future-planning is emerging through giving (ex. of Marshall Plan).  In nature there is know consciousness, no knowing, "humans, through religion, knowingly reestablish contact with nature real of expenditure tat is closed off from the human world of practical destructions and coherent knowledge" (61).
• By initial gesture B refuses all the existing religions as utilitarian appropriations of the non-known, of excess.  But the dilemma is language, any such event by mere fact of description becomes just another experience in the traditional religious doctrine.  But it should be described to be shared.  He thus does not refuse the Books.  But re-writes them, by kind of deconstruction avant la lettre.
• The description is in Bataille's connotes "immediate identification and projection rather than a progressive discursive contemplation that eventually leads to a larger, nondiscoursive, spiritual identification" (70).  Stress on the repetition of the immediate description of the experience.  It is marked as "ecstasy before the point", it is a "non mediated projection of a self that is not a coherent self (the ipse) into another, a double, which in turn projects back onto the ipse its violent dissolution.  This is the movement of "communication," as Bataille calls it, not a communication of information but instead… the immediate slippage of the ipse into the other ipse in an identical state of loss — and into "the dereason (la dereaison) of everything" (70).
• The book is a mutual read's and author's falling into hole: "I write for he who, entering my Book, will fall into it as into a hole, and won't get out" (73).  But Bataille falls into this hole as well.  "The Book, the writing, the discourse of the reader as Bataille, and bataille as the reader (who kills him) as a hole that has fallen into itself as into a hole".
• The "night" into which bother are projected is a kind of matter (as at Sade).  But also absolute-knowledge as put by Hegelian-Kojev.
• Bataille's reading (problematic of post-death living of the subject as result of end of history and realisation of absolute knowledge) stresses that life is not a particular point, isolated being.  It consists of "contentions of energy, of movement, of warmth, or transfer of elements, which constitutes on the inside the life of your organic being. Interstices of violent movements of energy, vetoers of force.  "Thus, where you would like to grasp your in temporal substance, you will find only a sliding, only badly coordinated workings of your perishable elements.  "A momentary conjunction of coordinated and competing forces, an intersection point, a contingent space of energetic communication.
• Bataille's project consists in mimicking, parodying the Absolute Knowledge Kojev.  And it is not for discrediting truth.  The project follows his structure and aims to affirm truth, get "a kick out of the energy released from the expenditure of truth (spent truth, emptied truth, recycled as the always again affirmed truth, truth with a simulated, parodic, toxic meaning, but [dead] truth nevertheless)".  "For Bataille, however, unlike Sade, this element of "transmutation," and of crime, was a way of attaining a "moral summit": blaspheming God nevertheless entails a miming of God, and as God, or as a parodic God, one could never escape the "summit" (86).
• Ref. to a discussion in March 1944 with catholic thinkers and existentialists.  It is a sign of how challenged they were by evil religion of Bataille.  It's been a war for the post-war generation and Bataille and Nietzsche were good candidates.  Important is the victory of Sartre.  Bataille's insistence on Jesus as figure of transgression, for him God is dead — "which does not mean that he or she simply does not exist" (87).
• Bataille writes on God but not to perfection him, to render him absolute and graspable.  He spends his energy (work, writing) on mimicking God, on describing him as unthinkable, absent, dead.
• The risk of writing on God is to render him cause and principle of energy spent.  This is very much God's reading in Genesis: he treats world, its only measure etc.  but in this reading God "would immediately cease being God" (90) because he becomes projection of human need for stability and permanence.  "God would no longer be unconditioned, sovereign, but instead a mere signifier, the desideratum of human weakness.  He would serve a purpose".
• This unstable, ungraspable God does not mean that he does not exists.  Such God is a proof "not of a scientific universe in which all things can be serenely understood, once and for all, but one in which all beings, miming the dead God, can open themselves out in a "communication," a self-sacrifice, that puts in question the very integrity of their own closed being and their well-oriented little universe" (91).  The death of man as much as each of God.  The man dos not corrupt the Book, it is God that hesitates, opens wounds…  "Bataille's atheistic Book is therefore closer to God than the Bible that would represent the Word of an eternal and unchanging Divinity" (92).

Bataille's City

• Why?  Because "in the figure of the city… all the problems that I have examined in the previous three chapters come together.  City life for Bataille implies extreme generosity, intimate expenditure, and the death (the fall) of God situated in the highest moment of modernity: the cult of Man" (93).
• His analysis owes much to Durkheim who searched for a revival of social enthusiasm through periodic social rituals, and was concerned by modern atomised society.  However, his urbanism does not translate the enthusiasm but also impose discipline to the man.  Not in a straightforward way but by back and forth movement: architecture is a completion of Man, ultimate elevation and making permanent of his stature; and then cast back, generating Man, erect, perfect, rational.
• Important shift from architecture to urbanism (97), as dramaturgy of experience: "the city is the space of he oxymoron, the dissemination of the sudden and violent rerouting of the human: the highest human is also the tumbling corpse".
• Circulation of human around big edifices — contrary to Durkheim's enthusiasm — is described as isolated, as nothing, "less than shadows, less than dust particles".  "But their attraction results in an agitation that is, apparently, their truly significant existence".  By gravitating it communicates with other particles around something.  "It gives itself by opening itself out".  But this something is not monument, it is nameless, it is "experience" that recall the "monstrosity".
• Transition from center as monstrous to monumental is problematic and it should explain how is urbanism of future would work.

Orgiastic Recycling

• Was wrong on previewing combination of western consumption and soviet egalitarian society.  Was right in suggesting that there will be abundance: "the larger problem would not be and endless sartorial scarcity (always in need of literary intellectuals to drive it further on in a never-ending quest for perfect redistribution), but a profusion of wealth that defied most attempts at understanding" (118). But he overlooked a pitfall.

An Unknowable Future?

• For Bataille intellectual as well as theological construction is made in spatial terms, "hierarchy implies not just a  ladder of concepts, but a physical ascension…  A coherent concept is never a simple abstraction" (180).  Any thing that Ione does always points to something else and thus indicates the way to go, "some higher goal or meaning that justifies them and the labor of which they are a part".
• Following by analysis of car as eponymous object of modern city.  They isolate the isolated individual beings.  They are kept however cinched in the city.  And ref. to "Walking in the City" by de Certeau. Modern city for him — as it is "instituted by the utopian and urbanist discourse" — has 3 aspects:
• The production of proper space: "rational organisation must thereof press all the physical, mental or political contamination that compromises it";
• Resistance to tradition, but "ungraspable" one;
• "Creation of a universal and anonymous subject who is the city itself".
• It is a picture of the car as well: "a homogenised space, viewed and navigated exclusively from the inside; the pure present of the self at any and all (identical) points not e map; and, finally, the empty universal self, in motion but perfectly still, as product and end of the automobile, and end of history" (186). 
• In this city walking is unreasonable energy expenditure.  Tactics of resistance.
• Followed by a hymn of post-sustainability.  With non-we as agents fo such post-sustainability.  Non-we as non-subjects on the wester tradition and society.