ABSTRACT
Georges Bataille could rightly be characterized as a marginal thinker. Georges Bataille explicitly challenged established conceptions of economy and society. Bataille's critique of this restricted perspective is that it is blind to the most appreciable aspects of life – that is pleasure – and that it cannot grasp the perhaps strongest motivating force of behaviour, that is passion. Bataille's claim of a general economy implies that inutility, irrationality and non-productivity are of greater importance to life than utility, rationality and productivity. During his lifetime, Georges Bataille operated in the margins of the dominating intellectual movements in France: ignored, derided or forgotten. The political economy of Georges Bataille is not based on market exchange and productivity. On the contrary, it deals with aspects that seem marginal to these classical core issues: passion, exuberance, generosity and communality, loss and waste, pleasure and anxiety. The sovereign in Bataille's perspective would be a passionate agent immersed in consumption.
