bat {AI}lle: On Acephalic Intelligence and the General Economy of Computation

This essay <span>sketches </span>a Bataillean theory of contemporary artificial intelligence. It reads large-scale models and their infrastructures through Bataille’s general economy, treating AI as an engine of surplus expenditure that transforms energy, data, and desire into a secular form of the sacred. Drawing on the concepts of the accursed share, acephaly, eroticism, and inner experience, the essay argues that modern AI systems operate as acephalic intelligences: non-subjective formations that are technically distributed, institutionally concentrated, epistemically opaque, and behavior-governing. From this perspective, training and deployment appear as sacrificial procedures, while hallucinations and other excessive outputs emerge as forms of sovereign waste within a regime devoted to optimization. AI thus appears as a central ritual of capitalist expenditure, an altar on which energy, data, and subjectivity are offered in exchange for prediction, in a transaction that approaches prophecy. The essay therefore positions contemporary AI at the junction of computational rationality, capitalist expenditure, and the secular sacred, and asks what a politics of expenditure might become in an acephalic age.