Wars of excess: Georges Bataille,solar economy,and the accident in the age of precision war

Introduction

The relationship between war and excess is a common theme in the literature on armed conflict. For Clausewitz (1982: 29–39), war becomes excessive in the ‘tendency of the extreme’. For traditional international relations, the anarchical character of the international system results from the fact that war is an activity in excess of legal and political constraints (Waltz, 1986: 90–92). International humanitarian law and the laws of war likewise interpret war as excessive and seek to regulate this excess in order to create more humane forms of conflict (Kennedy, 2006; Kinsella, 2011). Whatever the explanation, there is a consistent articulation of a connection between war and excess. In most cases, descriptions of excess and war mark a point or threshold where war transitions from legitimate to problematic activity. This model implicitly presupposes the existence of an unproblematic or non-excessive form of war.

Over the past three decades, critical scholars of war and security have challenged this image of war by turning to thinkers in the continental tradition. In these studies, the concept of excess makes frequent appearances. Excess allegedly plays a key role in the drive to securitize otherness; in colonial encounters; in the regulation of gender, sex, and other identities; and in the global interconnections fostered by armed conflict (Barkawi, 2006: 91–126; Debrix, 2017: 6–8; Wilcox, 2015: 202–204). In these studies, the notion of excess is typically developed in reference to the writings of Michel Foucault, Paul Virilio, Gilles Deleuze, and others, and is used to help theorize different dimensions of biopolitical or technocratic warfare (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2009; Amoore, 2014; Bilgin, 2010; Chamayou, 2015; Debrix and Barder, 2012; Dillon, 1996; Evans and Reid, 2014; Glezos, 2013; Howell, 2014; Larrinaga and Doucet, 2008). To be clear, this scholarship crucially opened up war as an arena of discourse and practice, enhanced the sensitivity of the discipline to speeds and intensities, introduced new models of power, and offered more expansive critiques of the gendered, raced, colonized, and sexed character of global politics (Anievas et al., 2014; Hobson, 2012; Weber, 2016). However, excess is never an issue of significance or serious object of critical scrutiny, nor do critical security scholars posit excess as having any distinctive relationship to war. Thus, while the purpose for which critical scholarship invokes the notion of excess – namely, to deconstruct the distinction between problematic and unproblematic forms of warfare – differs from that of more classical studies of armed conflict, excess is never the focal point of analysis. In security studies, excess is a motif in the dialogues about war, but not one subject to rigorous analysis, descriptive consistency, or critical investigation.

This article, in contrast, focuses directly on the concept of excess and its relationship with war. It explores the theoretical significance of this relationship by turning to the long-neglected writings of Georges Bataille. Specifically, the article argues that Bataille’s vision of excess offers valuable insights into the becoming, mobilization, and encounter of armed conflict (Bousquet et al., 2020). In general, Bataille’s oeuvre offers a multiplicity of interventions into literature, art criticism, economics, eroticism, anthropology, politics, and warfare. The author of Story of the Eye and creator of the secret society Acephalé, Bataille’s explorations in fiction, theology, and transgression powerfully influenced the generation of Foucault, Virilio, and Deleuze (Kendall, 2007; Noys, 2000; Surya, 2002). However, Bataille’s thought has been largely ignored in the context of political science and security studies, only rarely appearing in connection to discussions of sovereignty or religion (Debrix, 2017; Lautsen and Wæver, 2000: 710; Mbembe, 2003, 37–38; Meiches, 2013). In part, this oversight is a result of explicit attacks on Bataille’s work as fascist despite his well-documented hostility toward fascism (for critiques, see Habermas, 1984; Wolin, 1996; for Bataille’s relation to fascism, see Surya, 2002: 359–362). The omission of Bataille’s oeuvre from critical security and war studies is problematic partly because Bataille offers a highly original discussion of sociality, one that makes excess a foundational problem for human societies and a generative condition for armed conflict. Indeed, unlike existing critical accounts, Bataille views excess as an ontological feature of living on the planet and one that has a genetic relationship with the development of armed conflict in human societies. Bataille’s thought thus provides both a provocative account for the dynamics of armed conflict and an interesting explanation for why so many orthodox and critical accounts of war speak of a connection between excess and war.

In brief, Bataille views excess as a problem that originates from a condition that he terms ‘solar economy’. Solar economy is best understood as a planetary predicament characterized by the ceaseless movement of energy from the sun to the earth. This flow of energy produces a situation of perpetual energetic excess, which all living organisms and ecosystems, from microbes to massive social systems, confront. War, Bataille argues, emerges as one of several mechanisms of what he calls ‘expenditure’ or the consumption of excess for human societies. However, Bataille contends that the rise of modern industrial modes of social organization introduced new principles based on rationality, accumulation, and utility that eliminated many practices of expenditure. In the context of armed conflict, this process altered martial practices by making a primary mode of expenditure, warfare, into a source of accumulation and conservation. For Bataille, the shift to industrial warfare transformed armed conflict from an intense, emotive exercise into a dispassionate, utilitarian cruelty, one more interested in survival than in the value of life. Writing in the aftermath of Hiroshima, Bataille (1991b: 507) describes this period as one where ‘the need to make life secure wins out over the need to live’.

This article contends that Bataille’s work on excess and solar economy offers a new lens for interpreting many of the developments in late warfare. Unlike other critical readings of armed conflict, Bataille views war as a crucial response to the predicament of solar economy. As such, Bataille predicts that human societies will maintain strong emotive, psychological, and political attachments to war in spite of the rise of dispassionate, calculative forms of armed conflict. In this sense, Bataille anticipates that desires and drives to commit violence will remain dominant in contemporary societies despite efforts to curtail, limit, or restrict the use of violence. Indeed, these later efforts paradoxically backfire by underlining the transgressive character of warfare and its function as a mode of expenditure. This observation, the article asserts, poses an important challenge to many of the practices of critique, desecuritization, and protest that critical security scholars deploy as a means of contesting securitization.

The purpose of this article is to introduce Bataille’s account of war and excess as a model of the origins and dynamics of armed conflict that differs from existing accounts of warfare and, in addition, to illustrate how this model produces new insights into the becoming, mobilization, and experience of war. Bataille’s writings do not provide a blueprint for escaping the violence of war, nor does invoking Bataille represent a complete break with the emerging paradigms of critical war and security studies. Nonetheless, Bataille outlines a unique vision of warfare, one that foregrounds the importance of armed conflict to human sociality. Like so many voices criticizing practices of war, Bataille shares a depressive response to the rise of the industrial armed conflict, but also believes that expenditure and violence play a profound role in human life (Bataille, 1985: 201, 2018: 235–236). Consequently, Bataille’s work must be recommended with some caution, and his writings have been criticized from a variety of angles (Graeber, 2014: 402; Marchak, 1990; Noys, 2000: 4; Surkis, 1996; Vanderwees, 2014). This cautionary response is difficult to maintain, because it tends to subvert the liminal character of Bataille’s thought, a feature that makes the latter valuable in the first place. Bataille, who raged against the notions of ‘use’ and ‘end’ and insisted on the pursuit of transgression beyond limits, would almost certainly blanch at cautionary appropriations of his writing (Foucault, 1977; McGoey, 2018). In this respect, the best elements of Bataille’s work may not be readily transformed into usable disciplinary insights (Biles, 2007). However, it is precisely at those moments where Bataille’s work pushes the limits of intelligibility that it also raises some of the most interesting questions about the experience and mobilization of warfare (Noys, 2000: 135–140). It is not a stretch to describe Bataille’s thought as wrestling with the limits of any descriptive, analytical, or ethical response to war.

The article develops these claims in three sections. The first section broadly introduces Bataille’s work and main themes before turning to his more specific comments regarding excess, solar economy, war, and sovereignty. This section argues that Bataille anticipates many later insights into armed conflict, such as the capacity for war to expand beyond the classical form of interstate conflict, while also outlining a theory of war as a formative, even enticing experience in both human evolution and personal experience. In this way, Bataille’s work provides an alternate explanation for the persistence of attachments to warfare as a dominant mode of sociality. The second section develops the case of accidents in the context of risk-transfer and precision warfare as an example to illustrate how Bataille’s thought could be fruitfully applied to many dimensions of late warfare. Here, the article reveals how Bataille’s understanding of the transformation of war from expenditure to accumulation provides a heuristic for reading war’s new emphasis on precision and accident-free modalities. The final section of the article describes multiple areas where Bataille’s voice would expand critical security and war scholarship: the experience and excitement in war; the new focus on death, dead bodies and the detritus of war; and the best methods of contesting securitization. In each area, Bataille poses important challenges to existing scholarship.

War, excess, and sovereignty

One of the reasons why Bataille’s writings have not become a focal point in security studies is their unusual character. Bataille’s thought engages a range of problems, including questions of economics, sexuality, religiosity, anthropology, art, and literature. He often changes terminology, shifts points of emphasis, and eschews traditional epistemology (Bataille, 2001). This section briefly describes the ambitions of Bataille’s work in relation to the concepts of excess, war, solar economy, and sovereignty. It introduces each term in order to flesh out Bataille’s reading of armed conflict.

The principal theme running through Bataille’s works concerns the incapacity of thought, representation, or sensation to apprehend the world. What Bataille interchangeably refers to as ‘base materialism’, ‘heterology’, or the ‘impossible’ describes the excluded element of any representation or experience. In general, Bataille argues that human consciousness has limits to what it perceives and senses. Bataille contends that any element that falls outside of these limits exists as a form of excess, imperceptibly exerting formative influence on the dynamics of human life. Bataille’s methods of demonstrating this position are controversial. He reads paleoart, interprets erotic practices, attests to the forces of ‘inner experience’, and composes transgressive literature on violence and sacrifice (Bataille, 1988b). In each context, he reveals how irreducible excesses condition the expression of thought, economics, politics, and life.

In his most systematic effort to connect excess to politics, The Accursed Share, Bataille (1988a: 7–15) addresses the problem of solar economy (also described as ‘general economy’) as a background condition for all organic and political life. Instead of approaching economic and politics from the perspective of exchange, Bataille begins with the surplus energy of the sun, which ceaselessly descends to the planet’s surface. For Bataille, all ecologies, all organisms, and therefore all social systems are formed from this relentless production of solar excess. Classical studies of economics and politics only focus on the patterns of what he calls ‘restricted economies’ while neglecting the background conditions that give rise to their dynamics. ¹ Solar economy, Bataille contends, forces organized systems of any complexity to invent mechanisms for expending or ridding themselves of excess, since the sun continually produces surpluses of energy. ² Bataille applies this principle across multiple scales, from the reproduction of bacteria in the form of scissiparity (cell division), to the ecstatic, wasteful rituals of human sacrifice, to contemporary economic exchange. Each of these processes is a form of expenditure that consumes or gets rid of excess as a response to ‘the circulation of energy at this point in the universe’ (Bataille, 1988a: 20, emphasis added).

Bataille draws two lessons from this observation. First, any social system relies not only on processes of production, the classic Marxist emphasis, but also on elaborate methods of consuming or expending excesses. Second, because solar economy constitutes a base condition for life, the expenditure of excess also impacts questions of value. Indeed, Bataille views many traditional ideals and ideologies as antithetical to the condition of solar economy. Paradigms that privilege rationality, calculation, or utility, for instance, presume the power to measure and determine the ends of any given political or economic situation. While utility and rationality work in the limited context of restricted economies, solar economy has no limits since it is defined by excess; there is always some part of it that is beyond human comprehension or aspirations. Rationality, utility, and the preservation of the future are, at base, ambitions antithetical to the excessive character of solar economy.

In contrast to these paradigms, Bataille describes multiple societal mechanisms for expending or consuming excess. The Accursed Share traces these dynamics in historical contexts that include Aztec sacrifices, potlatch practices, the rise of Islam, the Protestant Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, communism, and modern warfare. Fully outlining each of these cases is beyond the scope of this article, but Bataille (1988a: 27) clarifies that all societies presuppose the solar economy ‘on which [they] depend, which [they] cannot limit, and whose laws [they] cannot ignore without consequences’. In each case, the organizing problem is the question of ‘how the wealth is to be squandered’ (Bataille, 1988a: 23). For Bataille, war constitutes a particularly important form of expenditure. He highlights multiple elements of armed conflict that facilitate expenditure at different historical moments. Military action presupposes movement, flight, and the catastrophic loss in the irrecuperable force of ballistics (Land, 1991: 40–42). Expenditures occur in the intensities and frenzy of combat, which involve not only physical volatility and waste but also the exposure of life to death without recovery. From the edge of a blade, to the fragmentation of a bullet, to the explosion of an intercontinental ballistic missile, the use of weapons involves non-recuperable expenditures of force that are excessive in relation to the body they strike (Lambert, 2013). While armies tend to produce hierarchical organizational structures and states often pursue war in order to accumulate, Bataille believes that, underlying these dynamics, war remains a mode of expenditure. Bataille’s position is not an attempt to naturalize warfare. Rather, he believes that excess is a precondition for the development and innovation of human societies. The existence of excess leads to contestations, excess human energy spent in disputes over how to organize social affairs, and this, in the extreme, also generates warfare. While war entails certain violence, Bataille views it more fundamentally as a creative process of expenditure in response to the pressures of solar economy. ³

Bataille views the rise of modern industrial warfare as reversing the relationship between war and the expenditure of excess by transforming armed conflict into a rational exercise structured by principles of utility and accumulation. Bataille interprets the conjunction of capitalism, economic rationalization, and the rise of the bureaucratic state as converting warfare into a means of accumulation. Here is Bataille (1985: 200): ‘national and military life are present in the world to try to deny death. . .. [N]ation and army profoundly separate man from a universe given over to lost expenditures and to the unconditional explosion of its parts’. Several arguments are implicit in this quote. First, the accumulation of martial forces during the early 20th century was bound to produce large-scale conflict because such processes of accumulation were inherently unstable since they were predicated on controlling a volatile excess that would eventually produce expenditure in the form of catastrophic loss of life. Second, during the rise of industrial warfare, armed conflict was slowly redefined to make every form of expenditure into an opportunity for accumulation. Third, this model of armed conflict loses something crucial relative to earlier forms of warfare: ‘dull war, such as that organized by modern economics, also teaches the meaning of the Earth, but it teaches it to renegades whose heads are full of calculations and plans for the short run; that is why it teaches it with a heartless and depressing rage’ (Bataille, 1985: 201). Put differently, Bataille argues that modern armed conflict, in spite of its efforts to preserve and accumulate, nonetheless remains dependent on solar economy. As such, modern armed conflict also produces expenditures. In the historical context of industrial warfare, Bataille contends that these expenditures manifested in the form of industrial detritus, massive loss of life, and unprecedented cruelty.

Bataille defines heterology as ‘the science of the heterogeneous . . . the science of the excluded part’ (Bataille, 2018: 31, emphasis added). While Bataille traditionally uses this term to discuss the relationship between the sacred and the profane, it also includes things out of place, waste, and otherness, which cannot be incorporated into a dominant social order. Put differently, Bataille (2018: 36) is asserting that the rational organization of warfare according to the logic of accumulation cannot account for the production of unruly, contingent violence. Since modern warfare cannot account for this form of violence, it disavowed the untold deaths in the world wars, the cruel rationalization of suffering, the violent production of the means of war, and the inability of these intensely violent episodes to shift the organizing principles of modern societies. Modern warfare thus did not eliminate expenditure. Instead, it displaces and disguises expenditure in the form of the destruction of disposable lives or the relegation of forms of life to the realm of the heterological. However, Bataille (2018: 36) also argues that things banished to the realm of the heterological, from waste to taboo erotic practices, incite new forms of desire by provoking ‘hypnotic attraction’. In this way, Bataille contends that modern societies recreate strong attachments to warfare because war continues to function as a limit experience, an encounter with the heterological, opened up by the expenditure of excess. To unpack this point, it is necessary to clarify Bataille’s interpretation of the relationship between sovereignty and excess and why, paradoxically, warfare engenders sovereign experience.

Bataille’s understanding of sovereignty is opposed to classical conceptions of the term. For Bataille, sovereignty is not associated with legal dictates, personal power, or the capacity to kill. Rather, sovereignty is an experience beyond ‘the anguish of death’. Bataille clarifies: ‘Sovereignty has many forms: it is only rarely condensed into a person and even then it is diffuse. The environment of the sovereign partakes of sovereignty, but sovereignty is essentially the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of death would have us respect in order to ensure, in a general way, the laboriously peaceful life of individuals’ (Bataille, 1991a: 222, emphasis added). Sovereignty surfaces in the incipient movements of expenditure, beyond utility or rationality, where the anguish of death no longer matters. In these moments, sovereignty emerges as an intensity that accompanies the exposure to the contingency of death. This experience results from the human encounter with ‘base matter’ that ‘is external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and [that] refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations’ (Bataille, 1991a: 31). For Bataille, sovereignty occurs when life is no longer subservient to the demands of an organized or ordered end. To underline this point, he emphasizes that ‘sovereignty cannot be the anticipated result of calculated effort. . . . [W]hat is sovereign can only come from the arbitrary, from chance’ (Bataille, 1991a: 226, emphasis added).

As a mode of expenditure, war involves regular exposure to chance or contingency and, accordingly, the experience of sovereignty. Bataille goes so far as to argue that only warfare, eroticism, and death push against that ‘practice of reason [through which] we might believe in the possibility of an ordering of all things, which would exclude risk and caprice and would ground authenticity on nothing more than prudence and the pursuit of usefulness’ (Bataille, 1991a: 225). It is important to note that this process is, in epistemological terms, qualitative. There is no formula for producing sovereignty, because to predetermine the emergence of sovereignty would be to erase the contingency that is a condition of possibility for such an experience. Bataille castigates modern societies for making exactly this mistake. In his reading, they seek to eliminate contingency, which ultimately produces a much crueler disposition (Bataille, 1986: 78). For Bataille, war’s cruelty is evident in the effort to manage, modify, and calculate the scope of violence:

Organized war withers efficient military operations based not the discipline which when all is said and done excludes the mass of combatants from the pleasure of transgressing the limits, has been caught up in a mechanism foreign to the impulsions which set it off in the first place; war today has only the remotest connection with war as I have described it; it is a dismal aberration geared to political ends. (Bataille, 1986: 80)

Modern industrial warfare reflects not only the abandonment but also the reversal of expenditure and, in doing so, the effort to eliminate sovereign experience. For Bataille, this process is both tragic and ultimately unsuccessful, because it merely displaces the drive to expend. Consequently, this drive reappears in the form of a desire for sovereign experience. For Bataille, this drive is evident in the rise of social fantasies about war and an almost covetous relationship between modern subjectivity and the contingencies of the battlefield. Moreover, contemporary warfare’s aesthetic obsession with cleanliness exhibits the qualities that Bataille detests: the removal of death, the erasure of expenditure as a part of solar economy, the sanitization of the aesthetics and practices of war, and the domestication of warfare and military organization in order to avoid any exposure to contingency. At the same time, modern warfare cannot erase contingency and, therefore, retains the possibility of generating sovereign experiences. This possibility, Bataille maintains, explains why war continues to generate strong social attachments as a space for transgression and expenditure. Such desires are not, for Bataille, intrinsically problematic; rather, the disaster of modern industrial warfare results from the move to govern war according to principles of utility and the attempt to regulate the excessive dynamics of solar economy. Modern warfare, informed by principles of accumulation and rationality, ultimately incites these desires as a form of resistance to the world of utility. These theoretical insights introduce new ways of reading multiple aspects of late warfare.

Excess, precision warfare, and the accident

Critical security scholars have frequently commented on the development of precision and risk-transfer warfare (Coker, 2009; Heng, 2006; Rasmussen, 2006; Shaw, 2005). These studies illustrate how new technologies, new rhetoric about technology and collateral damage, and other paradigmatic changes to armed conflict mask the scale, regularity, and intensity of violence in late warfare. Many of these arguments focus on the discursive separation between the objectives and practices of precision warfare, the reduction of lethal violence, and the outcomes, namely, the production of precarious lives (Butler, 2004; Weizman, 2012). This section applies many of the insights of Bataille’s work to the context of precision warfare and the accident. The goal is to illustrate how Bataille’s thought provides new insights into the development and dynamics of late warfare. In particular, Bataille’s understanding of war and excess expands these critiques in two ways. First, unlike existing literature, his theories rely less on the notion that a separate governing ideology recently changed the nature of armed conflict and, instead, focus on the reasons why the concepts of risklessness and precision become attractive principles of modern warfare in the first place. Second, Bataille reframes debates about precision warfare by interpreting them as symptoms of a larger problematic about excess, contingency, and sovereignty. To help illustrate these points, this section briefly evaluates the case of the ‘accident’ as a pivotal notion in the legitimation of injury and death in contemporary precision warfare.

‘Accident’ is a relatively recent term in political discourse. It emerged in the context of industrial development as a means of managing conflict between corporations and their workers. Specifically, the accident introduced a space of ‘agentless action’, such as a machine malfunction, that allowed corporations to dispute their responsibility for exposing workers to injury (Cooter and Luckin, 1997; Perrow, 1999). This legal application of the category was transplanted from engineering scholarship, where the concept of the accident was developed in order to explain how a contingent occurrence could take place within an otherwise stable system without appealing to transcendent or theological principles (Siegel, 2014: 1–12). In the context of engineering, the history of machine design was partly inspired by the effort to resolve particular accidents, but, in a socio-legal context, the accident birthed the possibility of an event without responsibility, without conditions (Siegel, 2014: 15–21).

With the rise of industrial warfare, accidents became a part of the discourse of armed conflict. In international relations literatures, this is perhaps most apparent in the case of accidental nuclear launch given the potential for nuclear use to cause planetary destruction (Sagan, 1995). However, the accident reappeared as a problem with the rise of precision warfare because of the explicit emphasis on exactness, the reduction of war’s lethality, and the deliberate, even careful, character of war. In short, the ability to govern war precisely existed in tension with the probability of so-called accidental deaths. Precision warfare was, by its nature, supposed to become accident free. Patricia Owens (2003) and Maja Zehfuss (2011) have both offered excellent analyses of the dangerous character of this logic. As Owens (2003: 599–600) opines, ‘at issue [in this form of warfare] is how civilian deaths are legitimated and under what guises this occurs’. According to Owens, the accident functions as a way of explicating and extending martial power and, more specifically, of discursively producing an event as accidental: ‘the events labelled “accidents” were not accidents until they had been narrated as such, contrary to the liberal state (and positivist) assumption that they must self-evidently be accidents’ (Owens, 2003: 616). Owens and Zehfuss explain how the category of the accident enables advocates of precision warfare to deny any relationship between supposed precise technologies and their capacity to injure and kill. In this way, Owens and Zehfuss also confirm the broader observation of Paul Virilio (2006) that the accident constitutes an integral part of any technology (martial or not). According to this model, the birth of a technology is also the birth of the accident, and, consequently, any perspective that treats the accident as derivative is engaging in a depoliticization of the dangers of technology and speed. This process of depoliticization guts the possibility of democratic politics in discussions of security and war (Glezos, 2013).

Bataille’s writings on war illuminate several additional elements of accidents and risk-transfer war. First, critical security studies literature chiefly approaches the accident through the lens of ideology, discourse, and narration. Here, the accident functions as a kind of discursive trick that separates legitimate and illegitimate violence and, therefore, legitimate and illegitimate modes of warfare. This point is an important rejoinder to the rhetoric of risk-transfer warfare. However, Bataille’s theories focus less on discursive or epistemological claims about the accident and more on its ontological status. As the previous section outlined, Bataille views warfare as a mode of expenditure that emerges from conditions of excess. For Bataille (1985), excesses emerge from a type of ‘base matter’ that is not subject to representation and can only be testified to through inner experience. This form of excess, which cannot be fully sensed or described, is thus ontologically contingent and cannot be known in advance. Put differently, for Bataille, contingencies are a constitutive part of armed conflict regardless of the terminology or discourse that surrounds them. Industrial warfare sought to eliminate these contingencies in order to function according to a model of rational accumulation. The recent rise of precision, risk, and the accident as frames for understanding contingency occurs as part of this much larger paradigmatic shift to reframe war as a problem of utility, rationality, and ends. The accident constitutes only the newest method not just of legitimizing war but also of governing and eliminating the problem of excess. Since warfare involves expenditures of excess, it is necessarily rife with contingencies and accidents. The accident thus operates as a liminal event in modern armed conflict, both as an epistemological invention to legitimate specific deaths and injuries, and as the resistance of base matter and solar economy to human efforts at rationalization and governance.

These theoretical observations make several interventions into debates about precision warfare. First, Bataille extends existing critiques of risk-transfer warfare by both situating them as part of a broader shift in modern warfare and establishing that the very terms of the discourse are antithetical to the conditions of solar economy. Bataille’s thought shows how the structure of rationality in riskless war relies on the accident as a discursive supplement in order to comprehend the excesses that will recur in a condition of solar economy even when armed conflict is defined by utility, rationality, and accumulation. The accident is not only an ideological trick designed to depoliticize, but also an epistemological supplement that insulates the precision paradigm from its inability to grapple with excess. This provides an alternative way of interpreting the concern for the accident since, following Bataille, precision legitimates modern warfare by seeking to eliminate the excesses that have continually reappeared in spite of the broader transformation of war into a rational exercise. Precision and the language of the accident constitute only the latest effort to govern the excessive character of war.

Second, this framing also illustrates why accidents often receive unprecedented attention in the context of modern armed conflict. Indeed, while critiques such as those of Owens and Zehfuss reveal how the accident legitimates liberal war, what might be called the affective dimensions of the accident receives comparatively little scrutiny (Bataille, 1991a: 203). Here, Bataille’s work extends existing critiques of precision war by shedding light on the formation of subjectivity in relation to the accident. Recall that, for Bataille, the experience of sovereignty develops in response to chance, the anguish of death, and expenditure without reserve. Bataille further contends that human desires are constituted by an ambivalent relationship to excess, transgression, and sovereign experience. On the one hand, humans seek to conserve their life against excess and, on the other hand, human societies emerge out of the excesses of solar economy. Bataille (1991a: 243) posits that this ambivalence generates an attachment to the possibility ‘always unexpected, [of being] relieved of the heaviness that the world of utility imposes on us, of the tasks in which the world of objects mires us down’. For Bataille, the accident, as a form of contingency, reveals a potential type of sovereign experience. The existence of this possibility helps to alleviate the sorrow and futility of a world defined by utility. Accidents function according to the model of the miracle, the unanticipated, the unpredictable, or the impossible, which nonetheless occurs (Bataille, 1991a: 242).

Following Bataille’s reading, the accident produces two reactions to sovereign experience in modern warfare. On the one hand, the exposure to the anguish of death incites the need to control, manage, and govern accidents, a process that has been well documented by critical security studies scholars (Bousquet, 2018; Campbell, 1998; Rasmussen, 2006). On the other hand is the possibility that accidents inspire affective attachments and fascinations as a form of exposure to sovereign experience. Put differently, accidents spark a form of excitement – either in the midst of warfare or in fantasies of war – that has received comparatively little attention. The accident becomes a site of desire because it ensures that warfare remains contingent, implicitly resisting efforts to govern, rationalize, or form, in Bataille’s words, ‘dull war’. This perspective provides a model to explain why the fantasies, imaginaries, and even experiences of martial accidents remain a point of intrigue, thrill, and draw for modern subjectivities. Within the accident is the budding potential of sovereign experience. Accidents thus support two complementary forms of subjectivity. The first responds to the inevitability of accident as a means of securitizing and governing contingency, while the second embraces the accident as a sovereign or limit-experience that breaks with the overt rationalization of war and social life.

This point has significant implications for resisting or contesting securitization regimes. In particular, if Bataille’s insight about the lure of sovereign experience is correct, then classical strategies of critique, delegitimization, and demasking power relations in precision warfare, and other contexts, are problematic strategies because they do not confront the underlying drive to embrace warfare’s contingencies as moments of sovereign experience. For Bataille, this desire for sovereign experience intensifies the need to transgress, to explore prohibited zones and probe limits. Consequently, delegitimizing the accident, emphasizing the transgressive character of violence (or other parallel acts), paradoxically strengthens the affective attachment to warfare by reinforcing the notion that war holds out the possibility of sovereign experience. Contesting security discourse on these lines would thus do little to engage the frame of the accident because it does not support new modes of expenditure, but simply re-emphasizes the transgressive character of specific practices of securitization and violence.

In this way, Bataille’s work shows the limits of existing critical studies of the accident. To illustrate this point, claims about accidents involve not only political questions about the meaning or significance of specific injuries, but also issues of equipment malfunction, logistical breakdowns, and encounters with surrounding ecology. Many of these dimensions of the accident, as sites of excess and contingency, lead to an enormous proliferation of new aesthetics, fantasies, and forms of securitization in modern warfare. To briefly examine a single example, a growing literature assesses the potential for ‘birdstrike’, collision between aircraft and birds, as a threat to military readiness and security (Richardson and West, 2000). In the birdstrike literature, a multiplicity of different bird species appear as a new type of security threat because of their possible interference with the mechanical operation of airplanes or other airlift operations. Birdstrikes are exceedingly rare events, which number in the dozens despite thousands of airlift operations since the invention of flight. Nonetheless, significant attention, monetary investment, major proposals to redesign airports, and even plans to disrupt the ecological habitats of bird species have all been framed as questions of security and military necessity (Heims, 2011; Kitowski, 2011; Zakrajsek and Bissonette, 2005). Accidents like birdstrikes exist far afield from the typical concern of critical security analysis, yet the writing on this subject reflects Bataille’s point since this literature treats the threat of the birdstrike as an event verging on the miraculous. As Bataille argues, the transformation of war into a practice of accumulation generates new excesses and expenditures – in this context, the contingent encounter between plane and bird. A martial paradigm defined by accumulation and rationality views these excesses and expenditures (the needless loss of a plane) as a threat to security. Hence, even statistically infrequent birdstrikes constitute an interruption of the dynamics of accumulation. These events attract incredible attention because they involve contingency and the possibility of sovereign experience and, accordingly, become the subject of intense, affective investment. The vivid fear for multiple bird species and the consistent concern for aircraft malfunction reveal a social imaginary drawn to the potential for excesses and contingencies no matter the form and no matter how statistically insignificant. Here, the birds become the object of a certain kind of martial horror. Bataille predicts exactly this shift at the level of desire and imaginary and goes so far as to suggest that, for moderns living under a paradigm of utility, only the ‘imagination has sovereign moments available to it’ (Bataille 1991a: 256). Bataille’s work points to these more liminal accidents as key places where excesses invite speculation about the potential for sovereign experience and, at the same time, incite new practices of securitization. In this way, the birds, as a partially aerial ecosystem, become a new source not just of anguish and threat, but also of sovereign experience, a new target in the expansion of armed conflict to new ecologies, and a relief from the onerous character of modern social life.

While birdstrikes represents only a single case, several studies have highlighted the importance of transgressive and liminal roles in contemporary warfare, such as crowdfunding as a new mode of martial organization or the insurgent potential of improvised explosive devices (Grove, 2016, 2019). These examples also reflect Bataille’s insights about how expenditure, excess, and the possibility of sovereign experience animate and shift practices of mobilization and violence in contemporary armed conflict. In a similar way, Bataille shows how the accident (along with other forms of contingency) is not anathema to risk-transfer warfare, but instead functions as a supplement, a moment of transgression amidst the overt rationalization of warfare. Modern discourses on precision rest on a form of knowledge that precludes Bataille’s sovereignty: ‘knowledge is never sovereign, to be sovereignty would have to occur in a moment. But the moment remains outside, short of or beyond, all knowledge. . .. [I]n short, we know nothing about what ultimately concerns us, what is supremely important to us’ (Bataille, 1991a: 202–203, emphasis in original). The paradigms of risk-transfer warfare, of the minimization of the accident, and of securitization more generally are not capable of thoughtfully generating new forms of expenditure. They derive, for Bataille, from a fearful response to finitude and solar economy: ‘we try to escape from this elementary horror, but, in the darkness and dead silence, it maintains the unpredictable and elusive movement of everything we have not been able to reduce to the reassuring order, a movement to which we know we shall later succumb’ (Bataille, 1991a: 217), a paradigm that incites not only risk-transfer warfare but arguably the broader pursuit of security. As a consequence, securitized subjectivities seek opportunities for expenditure in transgressions such as the accident. These desires, in turn, transform the structure of contemporary warfare.

Security studies after Bataille

Accidents offer a single example of how Bataille’s vision of excess, war, and sovereignty operates in relation to contemporary armed conflict. While war has long been understood in close proximity to chance (Clausewitz, 1982), Bataille illustrates how the anticipation of chance performs an imaginative and emotive role in the perpetuation of technocratic warfare. This article turned to the case of the accident in order to describe how Bataille’s work might be thoughtfully applied to a recent empirical problem for critical security and war scholars. In this section, the article transitions away from that case in order to address how Bataille’s work on excess also offers several broader observations about the role of experience, death, and resistance in contemporary warfare. These insights offer important challenges and resources for critical work on war and security.

First, experience. Bataille’s thought sheds light on the growing discussion of vulnerability and trauma that has become frequent in critical security studies (Butler, 2004; Hutchison, 2016; Wilcox, 2015). Despite his celebration of violent expenditure, Bataille’s position is not a crass embrace of the capacity of war to mar or injure. To the contrary, Bataille’s criticism of modern warfare is poignantly opposed to the neglect of these issues. At the same time, Bataille argues that precarity cannot be contested solely through a politics of recognition, since the experience of otherness involved in armed conflict is not necessarily connected to vulnerability per se, but also to a sense of sovereign experience that occurs in confrontation with contingency and excess. Becoming vulnerable involves an exposure to sovereignty in Bataille’s sense, but the corresponding recognition of a more universal vulnerability to violence does not, in Bataille’s work, necessarily create productive political responses to modern armed conflict. Rather, Bataille believes that expenditure is key to contesting the violence of modern warfare and argues that modern societies need more creative forms of expenditure as part of both armed conflict and larger political endeavors (Stoekl, 2007).

One of Bataille’s key intuitions is that experience is an important locus of expenditure. This is not a novel insight. Feminist scholars of armed conflict have turned to experience as a crucial epistemic, emotive, and analytical means of engaging practices of armed conflict. These analyses have long argued that evaluating war in the absence of attention to the lived realities of armed conflict amounts to a dangerous effacement of precarious life and a symptom of security studies’ terrifying capacity for violence (Sylvester, 2010). No account of experience fully captures war, just as no single subject position supplies a master narrative for describing it. War is consequently an irreducible set of experiences constituted at the intersection of violence and positionality. One key implication of this argument is that the casualness with which many scholars discuss war as an epistemic object is dubious and problematic (Sylvester, 2012). Julia Welland has also recently illuminated how war rests not just on the production of trauma, injury, and terror, but also on personal (and positioned) forms of pleasure. According to Welland (2018), war does not provide a univocal experience, but a multiplicity of textures that are productive, playful, and horrifying.

Bataille’s writings exist in consonance with the argument that war should be understood in terms of experience. However, the model of the felt on which Bataille’s vision of experience is predicated is not the same as that of Sylvester, Welland, and others. Rather, Bataille argues that what he terms ‘inner experience’ constitutes an encounter between excess and the self that is produced by drives of solar economy. War, like eroticism, play, and sacrifice, registers inner experience because it exposes the subject to this constitutive excess. Bataille’s position is not that this form of inner experience is a point of commonality among human beings. Contra figures like Judith Butler (2004) or Adrianna Cavarero (2009), he is not interested in a politics of recognition that emerges from precarity per se. Instead, Bataille believes that war brings contrary sensations, beneath the level of articulation, into a peak or point of intensity. Inner experience names a mode of engaging war that cannot be explicated to another, but also maintains the capacity to profoundly transform the subject. As the case of the accident highlights, multiple expressions of contingency occur in risk-transfer war and generate attachments to particular intensities that, in turn, become a source of personal, communal, and political transformation. For Bataille, this exposure to the excess of war opens the possibility of reorienting the self. Following this point, inner experience is a site for dedicating life to particular martial memories, as intensities, that may commit a person to support state violence or monumentalize victory, but also compels a move to abandon arms, to advocate for more pacific modes of life, and to find modes of expenditure in art, poetry, and other means without end. In short, Bataille wants to read experience not at the level of conscious reflection on the trajectory of an individual life, but as a space for practices of expenditure that transform the self. These shifts, he believes, provide a path to dismantle systems of rational organization that facilitate violence. Here, Bataille’s argument underlines the importance of experience as both formative of and an important challenge to the organization of violence in modern warfare.

Second, relatedly, critical security studies literature has recently examined the role of death, the deceased, and necropolitics more carefully. Jessica Auchter (2016) has explored the scale of dead bodies and the management of corpses in global politics. Thomas Gregory (2015), Nisha Shah (2017), Kandida Purnell (2018), and others have called attention to different readings of the mutilated or damaged body in late warfare. The dead have also appeared in recent expositions on the more theoretical relationships between security and horror (Debrix, 2017). Even the metaphorical turn to zombies to explain different aspects of international relations reflects a renewed interest in the dead (Drezner, 2011). The dead, it seems, are on the rise in the study of war and security.

Bataille’s interest in excess again provides an avenue for expanding studies into the necropolitics of security and warfare. Bataille’s writings view death and corpses as key elements of excess and expenditure in modern warfare. The fascination with precision and cleanliness in war belies the fact that the dead persist as an excess of any form of armed conflict. Many current studies into the governance of dead bodies or into the aesthetic and political uses of corpse mutilation would benefit from engaging Bataille’s writings on this point since he views such acts as a resistance to the rationality imposed by modern industrial armed conflict that emerges in relation to the possibility of sovereign experience of death. To elaborate, Bataille views macabre violations of the body as a transgressive experience. These transgressions contrast with the rational, clean discourse surrounding modern warfare. As such, they work as a reminder of the contingencies of expenditure in war. Exposure to this sense of possibility lures subjects to scenes and practices of death as a means of confronting the sense of contingency that eludes but also constitutes modern warfare. The appearance of dead bodies, as a form of excess, also generates new paradigms and models of governance in order to ensure that such excess does not disrupt the broader paradigm of industrial warfare. The dead thus function as an excess that interferes with the seamless organization of rational warfare, but, as a site of sovereign experience, inspire new regimes of securitization. Bataille’s work on the close relationship between war, the production of death, eroticism, and attachment provides many paths for building on these connections and showing why the dead have paradoxically become important at a moment when war is allegedly becoming more peaceable, nonviolent, and non-transgressive.

Finally, Bataille’s work reveals that processes of expenditure, uselessness, and other new models of relation are crucial to resistance to war and security. His writing underscores the significances of thinking about aesthetics and eroticism as key methods of challenging the capture of security discourses (Bleiker, 2009; Weber, 2016). Moreover, Bataille describes how the constitutive influence of the solar economy structures not just the pursuit of security and hierarchy, but also, paradoxically, the need to transgress, to experience the world as insecure and filled with chance. This opens a new site for working against the practices and constraints of security discourses by targeting their reliance on the excesses they seek to police. For instance, in the context of precision warfare, the accident constitutes a liminal event or, put differently, a manifestation of excess. What Bataille reveals is that challenges to security and militarization do not occur solely through formal resistance. Rather, they also require the production of new modes of expenditure, new forms of creativity. Bataille’s work may thus contribute new insights about the importance of failure and futility in global politics, as well as a way of rethinking what makes specific modes of resistance to security practices (Heath-Kelly, 2015; Lisle, 2017).

Bataille’s work is important for contemporary scholars of war and security because it breaks with both dominant and critical vocabularies, terms, and explanations of martial life. Unlike Foucault’s (2003) attentiveness to practices of governmentality and biopolitics, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) reflections on the war machine, or Virilio’s (2006) descriptions of speed and integral accidents, Bataille unveils a different vision of war – one that is, to use his terms, heterological, refusing to function according to stable grammars, experiences, or understandings. It is an image where war remains a constitutive, if not fundamental, human experience in which dimensions of armed conflict and excess operate in ways that defy observation. Bataille’s project might best be described as deepening the powers of the ‘unknown against the known’. For contemporary scholars, Bataille’s work offers a resource to pose new questions, to rethink old dynamics, to sense war again as an activity that is largely unknown. In this sense, his writing represents a largely untapped tradition of thought about war, one that challenges the values, perspectives, and epistemologies that currently guide the study of armed conflict. Bataille’s ruinous vision creates a fortuitous, excessive encounter for critical scholars of war and security.