Bataille

"As the class that possesses the wealth - having received with wealth the obligation of functional expenditure - the modern bourgeoisie is characterized by the refusal in principle of this obligation.  It has distinguished itself from the aristocracy through the fact that it has consented only to spend for itself, and within itself - in other words, by hiding its expenditures as much as possible from the eyes of the other classes."

Bataille's assertion that perhaps human acquisition is rooted not in the need to amass wealth but in "the need to destroy and to lose" is very interesting; his subsequent reading of how the modern bourgeoisie has denied this need as expressed in the quotation above is quite different from any other (even quasi-Marxist) hypotheses I've ever encountered about what's wrong with modern humanity, but it does seem to have a bit of truth in it.  One could see his complaint stemming, especially at the time he was writing this, from the vaguely Puritanical, publicly demure main-line American wealthy (those who might use "summer" as a verb to be performed on private islands off the coast of New England.)  While this form of bourgeois culture is waning, the ethic of maintaining privacy surrounding one's wealth remains, in gated communities in distant suburbs and the general sense that to publicly dissipate one's wealth is highly improper.  But our fascination with the very public downfalls of larger-than-life wealthy celebrities - Tiger Woods, Lindsay Lohan - suggests that we do have a need for the democratizing effect of public and utter "unproductive expenditure" on the part of those who have acquired obscene amounts of money, fame, cultural capital, etc.      It's a sort of media-age potlatch, less focused on the shaming loss of material goods, but on the shaming loss of positive press and public goodwill.  Taking this reading to its logical extent, by giving a celebrity these things in the first place, the media and the public "obligate" that celebrity to somehow return the favor.  There are two ways they can do this that seem to suffice in our eyes: they can humanize themselves by providing something genuinely useful for the public - i.e. Brad Pitt regularly working with his own hands and money to rebuild New Orleans post-Katrina - or they can engage in "unproductive expenditure," fall apart on national television, and return our gifts by allowing us to feel morally superior.

I won't pretend to completely understand what Bataille is getting at in "The Pineal Eye," and it's pretty difficult to pick just one passage of this that seems ridiculous to me.  What I want to critique most is his assignation of gender to the characters in the piece's multiple illustrative scenarios: they're mostly female.  We have the "satanic...nude bottom a young sorceress raises to the black sky," a highly fetishized "Englishwoman" leading the disgusting sacrifice of the "giant female gibbon," and finally, "the little girls who surround the animal cages in zoos" contemplating ape butts.  Yes, there's a lot of phallic imagery as well, but it's more figurative and metaphoric; the actual people (and the poor gibbon) he uses to make his points are female.  He seems incredibly concerned with the inherent unnaturalness of humans (we exist along the wrong axis!  We over-privilege the mouth end of our bodies!) but his positioning of female characters as somehow best able to access the natural (through erotic ritual and child-like thinking) really doesn't seem like a positive to me.  Women are bestial, closer to apes than men - diagnoses of hysteria and sexual exploitation do not lie far from this implication.  Bataille may see this feminine erotic connection to nature as a positive, but to me it seems like he's using a received semiotics of misogyny to get people's attention through titillation.