Spring 2001
Volume 27, Number 3

In other words, the tradition of what Marx called "bourgeois" economics had already been shifting from restricted to general models even before Bataille coined these terms as part of his own radical critique of capitalism. In the rest of this essay, I consider in more detail how Bataille's general economics seems to be always already implicated with the ideas it claims to question. I do this, however, so as finally to recuperate the theoretical achievements of Bataille's work that emerge precisely at the point of its intersection with Marxism. Throughout, I focus on something that appears to represent at once the theoretical achievement and potential weakness of general economics: the way it attempts to link material economies (the production of material goods) and theoretical economies (the production of knowledge). In this, I join Denis Hollier and others in arguing that "the major interest of Bataille's theory of expenditure might not be of an economic or anthropological order but, rather, of an epistemological one."11 Derrida, in particular, has read Bataille as suggesting that all classical philosophic systems must be considered restricted theoretical economies. Such systems, as Arkady Plotnitsky summarizes, "configure their objects and the relationships between those objects as always meaningful and claim that the systems that they present avoid the unproductive expenditure of energy, containing within their bounds multiplicity and indeterminacy."12 In other words, classical systems of theory construe the world as finally limited or restricted enough to be graspable by thought; and they assume that intellectual work will be rewarded with the wages of knowledge. Such systems thus might be understood as forms of epistemological capitalism, in which knowledge, like any other resource, is produced, accumulated, conserved and expanded. By contrast, using an ingenious French pun that opposes thought [la pensée] to expenditure [dépense], Bataille calls prophetically for a general theoretical economy that has subsequently emerged in what we now call the postmodern: theoretical systems in which there is always a surplus of signification and in which meaning is therefore open, infinitely disseminated, and ultimately uncontainable.13

See Also Jack Amariglio, Stephen Resnick, and Richard Wolff: Division and Difference in the 'Discipline' of Economics (Autumn 1990) Jacques Derrida: Given Time: The Time of the King (Winter 1992) E.P. Thompson: Agenda for a Radical History (Winter 1995) Susan Rubin Suleiman: Bataille in the Street: The Search for Virility in the 1930s (Autumn 1994)

I suggest that the theoretical coincidence on which Bataille insists--between the economic and the epistemological, between material and symbolic production--both makes possible the appropriation of general economics as an ideology of late capitalism and also points one toward a transcendence of that appropriation. Such an argument, moreover, highlights with peculiar clarity the vexed relationship between general economics and Marxism, a relationship characterized, here again, by a double motion of critique and convergence. For if capitalism--a system fundamentally grounded in economistic return--would be the obvious paradigm of a restricted material economy, Marxism--one of the last classical and totalizing philosophic systems--would seem no less a paradigm of a restricted theoretical economy. Thus general economics seems to locate itself in opposition both to capitalism itself and to its preeminent theoretical critique. At the same time, general economics joins with Marxism in a critique of that quite different alliance between epistemology and political economy that characterizes the ideologies of capitalism all the way from Adam Smith to the so-called neoclassical synthesis. This tradition of economics, as Althusser has argued, takes certain economic facts and a particular human subject as given. The conceptual "gift" at the heart of this whole problematic finally refers back, as it must, "to God as its founder, i.e. to the Given who himself gives himself, causa sui, God-Given" and thus at once grounds all subsequent disciplinary knowledge and figures an originary value transcending the cycle of economic exchange on which the discipline focuses as its empirical object.14 As has often been argued, economics, like all theoretical empiricisms, locates itself in a space of knowledge inhabited and informed by the gaze of an absolute subject who is everywhere and nowhere; at the same time it fundamentally divides social life between a sphere of "narrowly non-economic interests" (culture) and a sphere of acquisition defined, as Pierre Bourdieu has memorably expressed it, "by the fundamental tautology 'business is business.'"15

Such insights shadow the necessary convergence of Marxism and general economics, for which I will argue after a detour through some of the key theoretical texts of the latter.

11. Denis Hollier, "The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille" Yale French Studies, no. 78 (1990): 138; hereafter abbreviated "D."

12. Arkady Plotnitsky, Reconfigurations: Critical Theory and General Economy (Gainesville, Fla., 1993), p. 4.

13. Derrida has acknowledged that his influential early texts are all "situated explicitly in relation to Bataille" and that in them he pursues "a 'general economy,' a kind of general strategy of deconstruction." (Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago, 1981], pp. 106, 35n, 41).

14. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1970), pp. 162-63.

15. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), p. 177.

Scott Cutler Shershow, associate professor of English at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, is the author of Puppets and 'Popular' Culture (1996) and of articles on early modern drama, literary theory, and cultural studies. He is also the coeditor, with Jean E. Howard, of Marxist Shakespeares (2000).