Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share

"Man’s disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way. Humanity exploits given material resources, but by restricting them as it does to a resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters (a revolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal), it assigns to the forces it employs an end which they cannot have. Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe.1
1. Of the materiality of the universe, which doubtless, in its proximate and remote aspects, is never anything but a beyond of thought. Fulfillment designates that which fulfills itself, not that which is fulfilled. Infinite is in opposition both to the limited determination and to the assigned end."
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share