Bataille's Nature: On (Not) Having One's Feet on the Ground

In _The Accursed Share_, and in its various drafts which date back to the late 1930s, Bataille seeks to develop a systematic theory and history of what, in 1949, he calls the ‘general economy’. In a previous sketch of the project, published in _Constellation_ in 1946, we find an alternative formulation of the title: 'Economy at the Level of the Universe', an expression which gives a good indication of the general thrust of Bataillle’s argument. It is an argument for a reconfiguration of political economy based on a perspective which would be ‘at the level of’ the universe, in contrast to what Bataille sees as the traditional perspective of political economy, or the usual level of this perspective, the particular or limited. My focus in this chapter will in part be on the epistemological problems implied by this demand, particularly as concerns the general question of nature, although I will also move on from this to address more specific issues related to the question of the ground of the argument. A crucial step, and a recurrent appeal in Bataille’s various arguments is the demand for an account according to nature; Bataille seeks to think, and to write, according to nature, while aware of the logical, textual and existential problems posed by this demand. Indeed, a large part of his work consists in an anxious if not obsessive focus on the existential problems that such a demand imposes, to the extent that the main focus risks becoming deflected from the demand to think according to nature to the anxiety that this demand provokes, as a defining epistemological and psychological characteristic of the human condition. Another way of putting this would be to say that the starting point of Bataille’s thought is the radical contingency of the human subject in relation to the world and universe in which they exist, a contingency which human agents seek to reduce or resolve through the projection or invention of something like meaning. Bataille is acutely conscious of this effort to give meaning to contingency and is often extremely critical of it, but without avoiding it completely himself, a fact of which he is also acutely and sometimes painfully aware. The trajectory of _The Accursed Share_ moves accordingly from the demand that the principle of expenditure also affect the mode of attention that bears upon it, and the interiority of the subject who attends to it. It moves thus towards the affirmation of a ‘sovereignty without content’, in which the radical contingency of the universe and the absence of ground is lucidly acknowledged. An outline of this argument features in an earlier essay on the ‘Landscape’, published in the mid-1930s, in which Bataille attends to the question of nature and the human efforts to give sense to the landscape. The second half of the chapter will work through a close reading of this essay.