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. |
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CHAPTER II Humanity and the Development of the Profane World For the
moment , I will not try to give the foregoing a ... The Positing of the Object : The
Tool The positing of the object , which is not given in animality , is in the human
use of ...
It favors human life and not animality ; the resistance to immanence is what
regulates its resurgence , so poignant in ... But if man surrendered unreservedly
to immanence , he would fall short of humanity ; he would achieve it only to lose it
and ...
1 rate religious possibilities have revealed , and to make their shared content the
principle of a human life raised to universality , seems unassailable despite its
insipid results , but for anyone to whom human life is an experience to be carried
...