Non-fiction: The Accursed Share. Volume II

Scope and purpose

The Accursed Share. Volume II advances the general-economy project by tracing how societies organize inevitable surplus through rituals of expenditure. It rejects the narrow model of scarcity-driven economic rationality and insists that life produces an excess that must be spent rather than saved. The volume concentrates on sovereignty and sacrifice as institutional forms that channel surplus into social and symbolic order.

General economy and excess

Bataille frames human economies within a "general economy" in which production is ultimately bound to dissipate energy. The "accursed share" denotes the surplus that cannot be reinvested productively and therefore becomes the site of social tension. Rather than insisting on accumulation, the argument insists that societies develop cultural mechanisms, rituals, feasts, wars, monumental works, to give that surplus meaning through expenditure.

Sovereignty as wasteful power

Sovereignty emerges as a key mechanism for managing excess. The sovereign is defined not by legal command alone but by a capacity for nonutility: a willingness to spend, destroy, and transgress value norms. Power rooted in sacrifice and waste distinguishes sovereign authority from instrumental administration; rulers and sacred figures legitimate themselves precisely by performing gratuitous acts of expenditure that redistribute prestige and absorb surplus.

Sacrifice and ritual economy

Sacrifice receives a detailed theoretical treatment as the ritual solution to surplus. Ritual destruction, whether through offerings, festivals, or violent spectacle, functions to dissipate collective excess while simultaneously organizing social cohesion. Bataille explores how rites of destruction reverse ordinary economy by privileging loss and destruction over utility, making waste into a source of sacred intensity and communal reaffirmation.

Historical and anthropological readings

The text reads widely across ethnography, ancient history and comparative religion to show recurring forms of expenditurial politics: potlatch, public games, tributary display, monumental architecture, and human sacrifice. These practices are not anomalies but structural responses to the accursed share, and they illuminate how prestige, sovereignty, and social hierarchies are sustained through conspicuous ruin. Bataille reinterprets key institutions of antiquity and premodern societies as economies of excess where destruction and lavishness secure order.

Destruction, transgression and sovereignty's limits

Destruction in Bataille's account is paradoxical: it both limits and legitimates power. Sovereign acts that consume surplus create moments of communal intensity and a sense of continuity with the sacred, but they also expose the fragility of order by rooting authority in destructive spectacle. Transgression, erotic, sacrificial, or profane, operates as a mode of expenditure that tests the boundaries of law, revealing that the sacred and the political depend on regulated ruin.

Theoretical tools and implications

Volume II develops conceptual tools, waste, nonutility, the accursed share, sovereignty, to challenge economistic readings of culture and politics. It reframes rituals and political spectacles as economic devices for necessary expenditure, encouraging a rethink of value, history, and power. The argument has implications beyond anthropology, inviting a revaluation of how social life absorbs excess and why destructive displays remain central to legitimacy.
Style and impact Bataille writes in a provocative, aphoristic mode that blends philosophy, anthropology and comparative history. The volume pressures habitual assumptions about thrift, growth and utility, insisting that the costly, the extravagant and the destructive are not marginal but constitutive of civilization. The analysis reshapes how ritual, power and waste are understood, making the accursed share a foundational idea for thinking about sovereignty and social expenditure.