Bataille is the greatest. His philosophy of history is just a stroke of pure genius!!
👉 "Georges Bataille, in The Accursed Share I–III and the earlier essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” proposed that economies are not fundamentally organized by scarcity but by surplus. The decisive fact for him is excess energy on a planetary scale, supplied ultimately by the sun, that must be dissipated. What classical political economy treats as an aberration or a luxury, Bataille reads as primary law. Societies must spend their surpluses, either through growth and technical intensification or through nonproductive outlays that include luxury, sacrifice, festivals, erotic excess, and war. Sovereignty, in this frame, is not mastery over scarcity but the capacity to direct and assume the risk of expenditure. To think historically, therefore, is to map not only the circuits of production and utility but also the socially organized destinations of waste.
Placed beside Michel Foucault’s analysis of power and Vaclav Smil’s histories of energy, Bataille functions as a necessary third term. Smil tells us how energy is captured, stored, and converted across eras. Foucault shows how power arranges bodies, spaces, and times to render those conversions productive. Bataille asks where the inevitable surplus goes and under whose sign it is consumed. These lenses are complementary rather than competitive. Energetics names constraints and potentials. Power names the micro-mechanisms that harness them. General economy names the fate of the overflow.
In industrial modernity, coal and steam magnified productive force. Foucault’s disciplinary apparatus synchronized bodies to these rhythms. Yet even at the height of Taylorist efficiency, expenditure did not disappear. It migrated to wars of mass mobilization, to colonial spectacles, to the pageantry of nationalism, and to consumerist luxury."
https://socialecologies.wordpress.com/2025/09/22/the-planetary-machine-dividual-life-and-the-tyranny-of-techne/
#STS #PhilosophyOfTechnology #Algorithms #Bataille #Foucault #Anders #Materialism