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 I Animality Immanence of the Eater and the Eaten I consider animality
from a narrow viewpoint that seems questionable to me , but its value will
become clear in the course of the exposition . From this viewpoint , animality ra is
...
The immanence of a living organism in the world is very different : an organism
seeks elements around it ( or outside it ) which are immanent to it and with which
it must establish ( relatively stabilize ) relations of immanence . Already it is no ...
As drunkenness , chaos , sexual orgy , that which it tends to be , it drowns
everything in immanence in a sense ; it then even exceeds the limits of the hybrid
world of spirits , but its ritual movements slip into the world of immanence only
through ...