The Notion of Expenditure
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La Notion de dépense (Eng: The Notion of Expenditure) is an essay by Georges Bataille written around 1933. It is often published nowadays in conjunction with La Part maudite.
- "Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts. The first reducible part is represented by the use of the minimum necessary for the conservation of life and the continuation of the individuals’ productive activity in a given society; it is therefore a question simply of the fundamental condition of productive activity. The second part is represented by so-called unproductive expenditures: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e. deflected from genital finality) - all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves. Now it is necessary to reserve the use of the word expenditure for the designation of these unproductive forms, and not for the designation of all the modes of consumption that serve as a means to the end of production. Even though it is always possible to set the various forms of expenditure in opposition to each other, they constitute a group characterized by the fact that in each case the accent is placed on a loss that must be as great as possible in order for that activity to take on its true meaning.”"
The Notion of Expenditure - Georges Bataille (1933)
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