ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Bataille's thought before the war and on different engagements with it, charts the ways in which Bataille attempts to elaborate a theory of human affectivity and its potential uses. The unconscious is the domain of representations; the domain of affect is that of discharge, which takes the form either of motility, enervation or secretory activity. Freud therefore conceives of the psyche on the basis of a mechanism which is charged with instinctual impulses, and which discharges these impulses. In terms of the relation between art and politics, before he develops his own frame of reference, the field in which Bataille's interventions of the early 1930s are made is mapped out in terms of an opposition between the arena of political and affective immediacy and that of inconsequential aesthetic or literary revolt. Bataille's strategy is determined by the apparent opposition of action and literature, and the scales are weighted heavily in favour of the former.
