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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... of intimacy results from the complete negation of the given intimacy that
transcendence is . For the given intimacy is never anything but a contrary of
intimacy , because to be given is necessarily to be given in the way that a thing is
...
intimacy , but the good will that receives them is always mixed with
disappointment . How meek these voices seem . How defenseless their
equivocations leave us , faced with the clear expression of reality . Authority and
authenticity are ...
In the end , the reality principle triumphed over intimacy . What is required by self
- consciousness is not really the destruction of the order of things . The intimate
order cannot truly destroy the order of things ( just as the order of things has ...