Theory of ReligionTheory of Religion brings to philosophy what Georges Bataille's earlier book The Accursed Share brought to anthropology and history, namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. No other work of Bataille's, and perhaps no other work anywhere since Weber's Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, has managed to draw so incisively the links between man's religious and economic activities. "Religion," according to Bataille, "is the search for a lost intimacy." In a brilliant and tightly reasoned argument, he proceeds to develop a "general economy" of man's relation to this intimacy: from the seamless immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and the partial, ritual recovery of the intimate order through the violence of the sacrifice. Bataille then reflects on the archaic festival, in which he sees not only the glorious affirmation of life through destructive consumption but also the seeds of another, more ominous order -- war. Bataille then traces the rise of the modern military order, in which production ceases to be oriented toward the destruction of a surplus and violence is no longer deployed inwardly but is turned to the outside. In these twin developments one can see the origins of modern capitalism. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-3 de 11
CHAPTER II Dualism and Morality The Positing of Dualism and the Shifting of the
Borders of the Sacred and the Profane In a world dominated by the military order
, moving toward universal empire from the start , consciousness is distinctly ...
The dualism of transcendence is succeeded by the sleepy positing ( which is
already given in the initial shifts and which only sleep helps one to tolerate ) of
the world ' s division between two principles , both included in this world , of
which ...
Simone Pétrement , whose moral position is that of the ancient gnostics ,
presents the question of the history of dualism with a remarkable clarity in this
little book . Starting from her data , I have analyzed the transition from archaic
dualism to ...