ABSTRACT

The expansion of food production and the transplanting of populations not as a rationally guided process at all, but with Georges Bataille, as soaked with ambiguous desires and outbursts of destructive and self-destructive animosity. The early Dutch efforts to monopolize the spice trade in the eastern Indonesian archipelago should be seen as the quintessential example of such irrational mercantile usurpation. The sober rationality of the Dutch was ultimately rooted in the melancholy landscape of the Netherlands. For more than four centuries the Netherlands have been at the center of providing for the botanical desires of Europeans. This chapter considers the Marxist critiques, bringing into greater clarity the racializing repercussions of the utilitarian philosophy underpinning both Malthus and colonialism. Hegemonic thinking about food and space in rich countries is still heir to the very English pessimism of Thomas Malthus. Bataille's concept of war is closely aligned to how he understands eating and sex: they are all essentially violations of corporeal integrity.