Perversion, religion, and libidinal economy: The origin of "The Notion of Expenditure"

Most commentaries on Georges Bataille's famous article, "The Notion of Expenditure," emphasize the direct influence of Marcel Mauss's theory of the gift. This article returns to the "origin" of Bataille's text, namely, the intellectual debates around the Communist journal La Critique sociale (1931-1934), in order to understand its various sources. We insist in particular on the impact of Richard von Krafft-Ebing's psychopathological developments and of Freud's first libidinal theories. Bataille's understanding of reality in the early 1930s, despite his initiation to Marxian premises, is hardly based on "historical materialism." It corresponds more to "a succession of vicious excessive research" opposing all laws and conventions of humanity. How does Bataille's interest in Krafft-Ebing's writing on perversion and religion create immediately a controversy among his Marxist colleagues? How do Freud's discoveries of infantile sexuality and a pleasure "without purpose" help Bataille in turn to construct a positive pole of asocial impulses, that he would later call the "unproductive expenditure"? This article gives an overview of these exchanges and debates.