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" But the reduction of "that which is" to the order of things is
not limited to slavery. Slavery is abolished, but we ourselves are
aware of the aspects of social life in which man is ):~legated to
the level of things, and we should know that this relegation did
not await slavery. From the start, the introduction of labor into
the world replaced intimacy, the depth of desire and its free outbreaks, with rational progression, where what matters is no longer the truth of the present moment, but, rather, the subsequent
results of operations. The first labor established the world ofthings,
to which the profane world of the Ancients generally corresponds.
Once the world of things was posited, man himself became one
of the things of this world, at least for the time in which he
labored. It is this degradation that man has always tried to escape.
In his strange myths, in his cruel rites, man is in search of a lost
intimacy from the first. "
― Georges Bataille , The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption
