¹ Benjamin, Walter, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” in Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London:New Left Books, 1973), 107–54, at 113.Google Scholar

² Bataidlle, Georges, “The Notion of Expenditure,” in Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939, Stoekel, Alan, ed. (Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 116–29, at 118 (first published in La Critique Sociale 7, [01 1933]).Google Scholar

³ Bataille, Georges, The Accursed Share, vol. 1, Hurley, Robert, trans. (New York:Zone Books, 1988; first published; Paris, Les Editions de Minuit, 1967).Google Scholar

⁴ A more detailed description with requisite bibliographic information can be found in Taussig, M., The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill:University of North Carolina Press, 1980).Google Scholar

⁵ Benjamin, Walter, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 141.Google Scholar

⁶ Benjamin, Walter, “Theoretics of Knowledge, Theory of Progress,” in The Philosophical Forum, XV (Fall-Winter, 1983–84), 1–40, at 6 (Konvolut N in Das Passagen-Werk, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982, Band 2, 571–611).Google Scholar

⁷ Compare with Mehlman's, Jeffrey recent work, Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1993), 28–30, in which Mehlman draws attention to Benjamin's radio story for children concerning the 1755 earthquake of Lisbon-Benjamin's point being that he disputed the older theory that earthquakes are due to pressure from the earth's fiery core and favored the theory that the earth's surface is constantly shifting, the result of tension from the permanently unstable tectonic plates.Google Scholar

⁸ Benjamin, , “Theses On The Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (New York:Schocken, 1968), 253–64, at 255.Google Scholar

⁹ Benjamin, , “Theses,” 262–3.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Bataille, G., Consumption, vol. 1 of The Accursed Share, 21.Google Scholar

¹¹ A liter in 1992 there cost 5,000 pesos (around six United States dollars) and covered around one and a half acres in two days of labor costing around 6,000 pesos, whereas working the same land and area with a machete or pala could take 20 days of labor at cost of around 60,000 pesos-ten times as much!

¹² Benjamin, Walter, “Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” 107–54, at 139–40.Google Scholar

¹³ Taussig, Michael, “Coming Home: Ritual and Labor Migration in a Colombian Town” (Working Paper Series Number 30, Centre for Developing Area Studies, McGill University, Montreal, 1982).Google Scholar

¹⁴ Taussig, Michael, “La magia del estado,: Maria Lionza y Simón Bolívar en la Venezuela contemporanea,” in Maniolo Guttiérez Éstévez etal, eds, De palabra y obra en el nuevo mundo, Vol 2:encuentros interetnicos (Madrid:Siglo XXI, 1992).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Taussig, Michael, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁶ Thanks to the hospitality of the Mfete family and Adam Ashforth.

¹⁷ See the unnumbered footnote at the beginning of this article.

¹⁸ Bataille, , Nietzsche and Communism, in Sovereignty, vol. 3, 365–71,Google Scholar at 367, of The Accursed Share. Nietzsche, Friederich, Twilight of the Idols (or How to Philosophise with a Hammer), Hollingdale, R. J., trans. (Middlesex:Penguin, 1990), 86.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Nietzsche, Friederich, The Gay Science, Kaufmann, Walter, trans. (New York:Vintage, 1974), 274.Google Scholar On the concept of “the eternal return,” Bataille wrote early on in his life, in 1937: “Of all the dramatic representations that have given Nietzsche's life the character of a laceration and of the breathless combat of human existence, the idea of the eternal return is certainly the most inaccessible.” This passage is in “Nietzsche and the Fascists,” in Visions of Excess, Stockel, Alan, ed. (Minnesota:University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 182–96, at 191.Google Scholar

²⁰ Bataille, G., “The Notion of Expenditure,” 118.Google Scholar

²¹ Bataille, , in Consumption, vol. 1 of The Accursed Share, 106.Google Scholar

²² Bataille, , in Consumption, vol. 1 of The Accursed Share, 9.Google Scholar

²³ When I write “economic,” I have, of course, in mind the way that with modern capitalism economic has come to stand not simply for goods and prices, production, distribution, and exchange but for a totalizing way of thinking reasonably, as Lionel Robbins put it, defining economics as the science of the logical apportioning of scarce means to alternate ends—hence a definition of reason, no less than of efficiency. Bataille is fascinating because he, too, creates a totalizing definition of economics as a logic, only in this case the logic—to employ the treacherous language of Lord Robbins et al.—is of ends, not means, and is therefore drastically opposed to the economic reason of capitalist schemata of means and ends. Here one sees, therefore, the radical possibilities opened up by a science of consumption that is true to consumption proper.

²⁴ Bataille, , in Sovereignty, vol. 3 of The Accursed Share, 209.Google Scholar

²⁵ First in this very journal! See Taussig, M., “The Genesis of Capitalism Amongst A South American Peasantry,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 19:2 (1977), 130–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the wonderful essay by Edelman, Marc, “Landlords and the Devil: Class, Ethnic, and Gender Dimensions of Central American Peasant Narratives,” in Cultural Anthropology, 9:1 (1994), 58–93, and also M. Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America. The terminology of use value and exchange value hearkens back to Aristotle's discussion of oeconomia in The Politics. In building on this, Marx couples it to the very basis of Hegel's philosophy, the logical and historical problem of how the concrete particular can be coordinated with the universal (as with money and the modern state).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Mauss, Marcel, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (New York:Norton, 1967; first published as Essai sur le don, forme archaique de l'échange, Paris, 1925).Google Scholar

²⁷ Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston:Beacon, 1969).Google Scholar

²⁸ Derrida has recently expounded on this with great verve and insight. See Denida, Jacques, Counterfeit Money (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar

²⁹ Mauss, The Gift, 1.

³⁰ Kojeve, Alexandre, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit Assembled by Raymond Queneau (Ithaca:Cornell University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

³¹ Bataille, Sovereignty, vol. 3 of The Accursed Share, 347. Towards the end of his essay on the gift, Mauss makes two interesting moves in this respect. One is to point out that, except for the European middle ages, all his examples of the gift come from societies structured into symmetrical “segments” in which “individuals, even the most influential, were less serious, avaricious and selfish than we are; externally at least they were and are generous and more ready to give” (p. 79). The next move is to relate the “exaggerated generosity” to the fragility of peace in such societies, to see, in other words, the gift as that which is composed by a peace forever fragile in the shadow of imminent violence. From this Mauss draws the lesson for the naturalness, if not the need, for socialism in modern Europe: the socialism of a gift being “wealth amassed and redistributed in the mutual respect and reciprocal generosity that education can impart” (p. 81). Karl Polanyi's anthropologically informed distinction between reciprocity, redistribution, and markets as the three basic forms of economy comes to mind, especially since it regards Polanyi's equation of socialism with redistribution (the model for which are Trobriand chiefdoms!). See for example Polanyi, Karl, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston:Beacon Press, 1957),Google Scholar ch. 4, and also Sahlins, Marshal on the gift and war in Stoneage Economics (Chicago:Aldine Atherton, 1972). Like Mauss and Polanyi, Bataille saw the solution to the crucial problems of the world economic order as requiring the capitalist states to consider “the gift in a rational manner” (in Sovereignty, vol. 3 of Accursed Share, 429).Google Scholar

³² The political repressions involved come across strongly in Bataille's articles in the late 1930s on Nietzsche reprinted in Visions of Excess (see note 19).

³³ Bataille, Georges, The Impossible (1962, first published as The Hatred of Poetry).Google Scholar

³⁴ “Too-muchness” is a term I take from Brown's, Norman O. essay, “Dionysus in 1990,” in his Apocalypse and/or Metamorphoses (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1990), 179–200, at 183.Google Scholar

³⁵ Aristotle, The Politics.

³⁶ Franklin, Benjamin, Advice to a Young Tradesman, cited in Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York:Scribner's, 1958), 49.Google Scholar

³⁷ Financial Times Weekend, May 29/May 30, 1993.

³⁸ Berman, Marshall, All That 1s Solid Melts into Air (New York:Simon and Schuster, 1982).Google Scholar

³⁹ Bataille, , The History of Eroticism, vol. 2 of The Accursed Share, 94.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Hegel, G. W. F., The Phenomenology of Spirit.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Bataille, , The History of Eroticism, vol. 2 of Accursed Share, 101.Google Scholar

⁴² Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, no. 125, “The Madman,” 181.Google Scholar

⁴³ Nietzsche, , The Gay Science, no. 342, “Incipit Tragoedia,” 275 (end of Book Four, introduction to the concept of “the eternal return”).Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Caillois, Roger, “Mimicry and Legendary Psychaesthenia,” October, 31 (Winter 1984),Google Scholar 1732, at 30 (originally published in Paris as “Mimétisme et psychasthenie légendaire,” in Minotaure 7 [1935]). For a wide-ranging discussion of this, see Taussig, , Mimesis and Aletrity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York:Routledge, 1993).Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Nietzsche, , Twilight of the Idols, 84.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Nietzsche argues in Twilight of the Idols, 87, and throughout his works, that mimicry is no less the essential weapon of power throughout history than it is of thinking and the cultural construction of reality itself. Moreover, he sets up two kinds of mimicry: on the one hand, the Dionysian and, on the other, that of calculation, dissimulation, self-control, and lying. Thus is raised the fascinating problem: How do these two forms interrelate through history and what are the implications thereof for understanding the gift in relation to capitalism? This question can now be seen as what guides one of the most significant contributions to social theory in the twentieth century, namely Dialectic of Enlightenment by Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodore W. (New York:Continuum, 1987). As to the identity of the devil, Nietzsche had a swift response: that Christianity distilled the Evil One out of Dionysus—a point explored in The Anti-Christ, 123–99, at 129, in Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1990).Google Scholar

⁴⁷ Nietzsche, , “The Madman,” in The Gay Science, 181–2.Google Scholar