The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille                  sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end,                  then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The                  Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox                  in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that                  presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." This Zone                  edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction, based on the versions                  published in Bataille's posthumous collected works, of his intended continuation of                  The Accursed Share.In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and                  Sovereignty, Bataille explores the same paradox of utility, respectively from an                  anthropological and an ethical perspective. He first analyzes the fears and                  fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of                  eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just                  this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of                  independence relative to.useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads                  naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the                  sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond                  the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a philosopher and novelist sui generis, died                  in 1962.

The Accursed Share, Vols. 2 and 3: The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty PDF

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