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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... since the object of this vision is a movement that glides from things that have
no meaning by themselves to the world full of meaning implied by man giving
each thing his own . This is why we cannot describe such an object in a precise
way .
But this poetry is only a way by which a man goes from a world full of meaning to
the final dislocation of meanings , of all meaning , which soon proves to be
unavoidable . There is only one difference between the absurdity of things
envisaged ...
Killing is only the exhibition of a deep meaning . What is important is to pass from
a lasting order , in which all consumption of resources is subordinated to the
need for duration , to the violence of an unconditional consumption ; what is ...