UAnd suddenly yesterday’s classics are today’s curiosities. At least that is the case for the self-wasting thinker, Georges Bataille (1897-1962). Who remembers that Bataille was once the indispensable point of reference for authors such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida or Jean Baudrillard? Past. By now one may wonder what to do with someone who wrote earnestly at the end of World War II: “Given that you have all the resources of the earth at your disposal, you should actively spend them, for no other reason than the desire you have following that”, not without adding: “This language is clearly the only serious one.” Sentences like foreign bodies in a present that is all regarding sustainability.
They might be dismissed a little more easily if one really only had to see in their author the contrasting figure to all current ambitions. However, at a key point in his most famous book, “The Femdom Part”, Bataille uses the ultimate sustainability term “Limits to Growth”, of all things, as early as 1949, more than twenty years before the Club of Rome report of the same name. But “limits to growth” does not refer to a shortage of resources that will one day occur, but to an excess of energy that has always occurred. This is at least as worrying as the excessive consumption of resources from today’s perspective.
Too much energy
If there are problems, according to Bataille, they never result from too little, but from too much energy: “Thanks to the dynamics of energy on the surface of the earth, the living organism basically receives more energy than is necessary to sustain life. [. . .] However, when the system stops growing and the excess energy cannot be entirely absorbed by growth, it must necessarily be lost and wasted without gain.”
So the problem would not be the waste of finite resources, but the finiteness of the productive use of resources. The limits of growth would not be reached by those whose resources are exhausted, but by those who see themselves unable to exhaust them. And this would not happen in the near or distant future when the last hundredweight of fossil fuel burned up. It happens all the time: “It is only through the impossibility of continuing to grow that waste finally takes precedence. The actual excess always begins when the growth of the individual or the group reaches its limits.” The limits of growth would not end waste once and for all – they would rather be the starting signal for it.
From Bataille’s point of view, you can’t not waste, but you can, at least, choose how you do it. And one should even squander extra, because those who live ignorant of the need to exert themselves are even more destructively afflicted by it. He who does not squander voluntarily will be squandered involuntarily: “For unless we have the strength to destroy ourselves the excess energy which cannot be used elsewhere, it destroys us like an untameable animal, and we ourselves are the victims of it inevitable explosion.”
