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 10
But this relative precariousness matters less than the decisive possibility of a
viewpoint from which the immanent elements are perceived from the outside as
objects . In the end , we perceive each appearance – subject ( ourselves ) ,
animal ...
contagion that which it comes close to , that the beneficent spirits are mediators
between the profane world and the unleashing of divine forces – and seem less
sacred in comparison with the dark deities . This early shift sets the stage for a ...
1 , in excluding violence by violence ( and he is less so than the excluded
violence , which is the necessary mediation of his divinity ) , but he is divine only
insofar as he opposes reason and the good ; and if he is a pure rational morality ,
he ...