filamentosmovimentos

"The goal of material utility is, theoretically, pleasure - but only in a moderate form, since violent pleasure is seen as pathological. On the one hand, this material utility is limited to acquisition (in practice, to production) and to the conservation of goods; on the other, it is limited to reproduction and to the conservation of human life (to which is added, it is true, the struggle against pain, whose importance itself suffices to indicate the negative character of the pleasure principle instituted, in theory, as the basis of utility).
(...)
But on the whole, any general judgement of social activity implies the principle that all individual effort, in order to be valid, must be reducible to the fundamental necessities of production and conservation.
(...)
Pleasure, whether art, or play, is definitively reduced, in the intellectual representations in circulation, to a concession; in other words it is reduced to a diversion whose role is subsidiary."


Georges Bataille, chapter The Notion of Expenditure in Visions of Excess, p.116_117