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This test consists of 15 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer questions.

Multiple Choice Questions

1. What are the two classes Bataille divides consumption into?
(a) Productive consumption and wasteful consumption.
(b) Conspicuous consumption and invisible consumption.
(c) Conservation of life and productive activity.
(d) Sacrificial consumption and gift consumption.

2. What did Hegel claim about nature?
(a) That it contained the world-spirit.
(b) That it was the human soul externalized.
(c) That it was motivated by the Oversoul.
(d) That it was unreasonable.

3. What feeling does Bataille say grows in response to revolutionaries?
(a) Messianism.
(b) Faith.
(c) Disillusionment.
(d) Distrust.

4. What was the essay "Sacrifices" used as?
(a) A personal essay.
(b) A review.
(c) As a preface.
(d) A criticism.

5. How is the question of 'what exists compared to what appears' resolved, in "Sacrifices"?
(a) By answering what is required to exist for moral value.
(b) By accepting the duality of latent and manifest action.
(c) By unraveling the mystery of language.
(d) By moving beyond questions of present and past.

6. What does Bataille say about a man who knows his neighbors?
(a) He maintains his place in society by a network of lies and half-truths.
(b) He is larger than himself in his connection with an organic whole.
(c) He is a particle connected by instability to an entangled whole.
(d) He replaces his life with the life of the community.

7. What did Bataille and Andre Masson dream about as Bataille was writing "The Labyrinth"?
(a) A dream they were setting to music.
(b) An obscene dream they could never publish.
(c) A dream they were expressing in drawings.
(d) A dream they could not own.

8. How do men express their 'being', in "The Labyrinth"?
(a) By accepting the duality of their nature.
(b) By rebelling against themselves constantly.
(c) By attaining their goals.
(d) By struggling for unreachable satisfactions.

9. How did Andre Masson establish the tone of his book of drawings?
(a) With a drawing of a syphilis cell.
(b) With a drawing of God parting the clouds in judgment.
(c) With a drawing of a prostitute.
(d) With a drawing of an acephalic man.

10. What does Baumler call revolution?
(a) Awareness of the future.
(b) Renewal of the past.
(c) Social engineering.
(d) Rebellion against modernity.

11. Whom does Bataille say can never touch the reality of earth?
(a) Those who exploit the earth for profit.
(b) Those who do not understand it.
(c) Fascists.
(d) Capitalists.

12. What was Mussolini's relationship with Nietzsche?
(a) He named him as one of his inspirations.
(b) He refuted his arguments.
(c) He did not cite his influence on fascism.
(d) He claimed him as an ancestor.

13. What was Nietzsche's relationship with fascism, in Bataille's account?
(a) He claimed to be a prophet of a culture of power.
(b) He was active in support of it.
(c) He was opposed to political parties.
(d) He was active in opposition to it.

14. What happens when political action leads to nothing, in "The Sacred Conspiracy"?
(a) Enthusiasm meets a void.
(b) New political parties will form.
(c) The government will dissolve.
(d) The people will revolt.

15. What did Engels work for eight years to develop, but ultimately disavow?
(a) A dialectics of manufacturing.
(b) A dialectics of nature.
(c) A dialectics of religion.
(d) A dialectics of mathematics.

Short Answer Questions

1. How does bourgeois society enslave and degrade poor men, in Bataille's opinion?

2. What approaches to Hegel's philosophy did Nicolai Hartmann compare?

3. What does Bataille say the theory of conspicuous consumption is used for?

4. What does Bataille describe as the result of individuals asking critical questions, in "Nietzschean Chronicle"?

5. What does Bataille say democracy is based on?

(see the answer keys)

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