Separation and the General Economy

Abstract

The exuberant thematic and conceptual diversity of Georges Bataille’s thought is informed by several common denominators. Perhaps the most important of these is the concept of a differentiation which produces excess. The figure of closure or unicity in Bataille’s text has two basic predicates: its inadequation to identity or self-coincidence and, correlative to this inadequation, its density or excessive force. The “general economy” of differentiation and individuation meditated by Bataille, is an economy whose principle is not totalization, but communication. The intensity of closure as an economic instance is, on one hand, the disturbance produced by its excess over its own integrity (a movement Bataille will eventually name transgression), and on the other hand a fundamental vulnerability with regard to the exteriority with which closure is essentially intricated (and this contamination or inextrication will be the principle of what Bataille will call expérience). The interval of separation produced by the general economy is not negativity. The “weakness” or “failure” of the negative, in Bataille, is the principle of closure’s excess and vulnerability. The conation of interiority or closure, in the general economy, is a paradoxical spasm “toward the outside”: a simultaneous explosion toward and invasion by the exterior. This dual dispossession is not, however, a simple destruction or dispersion of interiority. It is rather the economic investment of unicity itself, in its excessive and incomplete closure. The contamination which inclines interiority toward the exterior is the production of interiority by communication in Bataille. This contamination is also the production of subjectivity as a properly economic instance which appears in being on the basis of differentiation, rather than as a moment of manifestation, in a philosophical inspiration. The description of this communicationally defined subjectivity is the basic tendency of Bataille’s discursive practice.