La politique à la mesure de l’univers La notion de dépense et les relations internationales

In the 1940s and 1950s, Georges Bataille applies philosophical notions of immanence and ranscendence to the international politics. The political behavior of great powers – the military expansion of the Nazi Germany, the Marshall plan of the United States, the paradoxically beneficial threat of the USSR – is described as a research either of ranscendence or of immanence, the latter taking the shape of unproductive expenditure (military or peaceful) at the scale of the world.