Abstract

This work deals with the basic notions of "sovereignty" and "waste" in the thought of Georges Bataille. Sovereignty and waste can be easily drawn near the more classical notions of liberty and justice, but of course they are revisited by Bataille only in order to be transgressively distorted. Thus - on the base of a complete refusal of every ontology deliberately drawn to the point of a no-turning back absolute contradiction -, liberty becomes the power to give both birth and destruction arbitrarily exercised by the free will of an absolutely free individual. Justice, or better still equality, becomes the reversal of the bourgeois ideal of a never-ending storing up of richness: richness must be senselessly wasted, so that the sacred social order of the potlac can be re-created. The essay ends showing how these basic notions of Bataille's thought are, at last, deeply self-contradictory, his ideals impossible and, finally, anti-human