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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Although he remains dimly aware of a calling that rules out the self - seeking
behavior of work , the warrior reduces his fellow men to servitude . He thus
subordinates violence to the most complete reduction of mankind to the order of
things .
Doubtless this majority has let itself be reduced to the order of things . But this
generalized reduction , this perfect fulfillment of the thing , is the necessary
condition for the conscious and fully developed posing of the problem of man ' s ...
But this real world having reached the apex of its development can be destroyed ,
in the sense that it can be reduced to intimacy . Strictly speaking , consciousness
cannot make intimacy reducible to it , but it can reclaim its own operations ...