Abstract: Bataille and Mauss have in common the idea that man’s fate is not to become homo œconomicus. If expenditure is possible it is because there is first of all excess. Excess is the primary given for Bataille, and it is indistinguishable from the sacred and from Evil. His texts from the end of the 1920s and the early 1930s prefigure “The notion of expenditure” (1933). The sun considered as what “gives without ever receiving” is presented by them as the ideal model for human forms of expenditure.
