“. . . The gift of time”
wealth in a society, a movement that sovereignty engages human beings: their relationship to the sacred through religion, mysticism, art, eroticism.37 Some of the themes in La Part Maudite had already been anticipated in “The Notion of Expenditure”: “Human activity is not entirely reducible to processes of production and conservation, and consumption must be divided into two distinct parts.” The first part, he writes, is represented by the minimum productive activity necessary for the conservation of life in a given society; the second part is represented “by so-called unproductive expenditure: luxury, mourning, war, cults, the construction of sumptuary monuments, games, spectacles, arts, perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality) – all these represent activities which, at least in primitive circumstances, have no end beyond themselves.”38 In part two of La Part Maudite, in the chapter “Sacrifice or Consumption,” the following passage was marked and underlined by Le Corbusier: Cette consumation inutile est ce qui m’agrée, aussitôt levé le souci du lendemain. Et si je consume ainsi sans mesure, je révèle à mes semblables ce que je suis intimement: la consumation est la voie par je où communiquent des êtres séparés. Tout transparaît, tout est ouvert et tout est infini, entre ceux qui consument intensément. Mais rien ne compt dès lors, la violence se libère et elle se déchaîne sans limites, dans la mesure où la chaleur s’accroît. [This useless consumption is what suits me, once my concern for the morrow is removed. And if I thus consume immoderately, I reveal to my fellow beings that which I am intimately: Consumption is the way in which separate beings communicate. Everything shows through, everything is open and infinite between those who consume intensely. But nothing counts then; violence is released and it breaks forth without limits, as the heat increases].39 In the left margin of this passage Le Corbusier wrote the word “fusion,” which I take to be a reference to the section, “fusion,” in “The Poem of the Right Angle.” In “The Marshall Plan,” Bataille returns to an affirmation of certain planisme that during the 1930s had associations with forms of authoritarianism, proto-fascism, and Marxism.40 Planisme was the very essence of 125