Peut-on toujours vivre dans l’excès ?

The author focuses on the notion of excess and its corollaries. He also briefly considers Bataille’s public life as a publisher, author and leading thinker. He then turns to The Accursed Share and shows that it in order to understand the power of this book we must take account of three earlier texts, one of which is “The notion of expenditure”. Finally, he returns to the text of The Accursed Share and emphasise the essential differences between Marcel Mauss’s The Gift and the Gift considered as a pure wastefulness in Bataille.