In The Accursed Share, Georges Bataille details what he understands to be a universal theory in the general economy of energy, the driving operation of which is expenditure and waste. Most reflections on this ‘general economy’ since Bataille have primarily focussed on locating and describing the experience or object of that expenditure. However, it is unlocatable in relation to either the individual or the universal, because, as Bataille argues, sites of expenditure are temporally, materially and culturally specific, unable to be repeated without differentiation, and unable to be expressed fully after the fact. The object, experience or moment of expenditure, therefore, cannot be identified, as it is unique to each iteration of its occurrence. However, what can be described and mapped is the constitution and orientation of the operation through which nonproductive expenditure may be provoked.

The making and reproduction of culture requires novelty, creativity, and a sense of biological mortality by communicating an idea into an imagined future. Necessarily, cultural objects and forms also imply destruction, and the fragile energetic limitations of both humanity and objects created by it. The desire for an experience free from the utility of survival, through what Bataille terms the ‘nonproductive expenditure of energy’, appears in the impulse to represent a thought, idea or experience to other bodies and to make it manifest in the world, separate from one's own agency, in other words, the impulse to immortality, exists in the birth of art.