Georges Bataille
1897–1962 · Postmodernism · Prominent
Bataille was a French philosopher who worked as a librarian and built an economics of useless expenditure on the model of the sun, which pours out its energy and gets nothing back. What matters about a society is how it burns off its surplus: festival, potlatch, sacrifice, erotic transgression. In that deliberate loss a person breaks the shell of the separate self and touches something continuous.
Signature
The position Bataille is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Opposition
- strongly leans Sublation
- Paradox
- Productive Tension
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- The Divine
- leans Indescribable (75 on a 0–100 scale from Describable to Indescribable)
- Meaning
- leans Constructed (25 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Order
- leans Horizontal (75 on a 0–100 scale from Vertical to Horizontal)
- Opposition
- strongly leans Sublation (4 on a 0–100 scale from Sublation to Concurrence)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Bataille refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Agency
- Radical Freedom
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Primordial Chaos / Indistinct from Present
What is the origin of reality? - Time
- Eternal Present
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- Gift Economy
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Authority
- Self-Sovereignty
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Paradox
- Productive Tension
What is the status of paradox?