ABSTRACT
In recent years the question of "general economy" has come to be associated with the primarily philosophical question of a general writing. 1 This was not at all the case in the immediate postwar period: the review Critique, founded in 1946 and in its early years edited by Georges Bataille, for example, was concerned to a great extent with questions of expenditure and conservation as these questions cut across the logic of capitalist and state socialist economies. Contributors such as Bataille, François Perroux, Georges Ambrosino, and Jean Piel all posed questions having to do with excess and loss in modern economies, societies, and even nature. Only later, in the 1960s, was the question of "general economy" reoriented away from society and the material effects of excess, most notably by Derrida. This aspect of the intellectual climate of the immediate postwar period, then, remains poorly understood, and yet Bataille's appropriation of the Maussian problematic of the gift, starting already in 1932 with "The Notion of Expenditure," has been widely noted. 2
