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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The Sacred All peoples have doubtless conceived this supreme being , but the
operation seems to have failed everywhere . The supreme being apparently did
not have any prestige comparable to that which the God of the Jews , and later
that ...
The intimate order would not reveal itself in the destruction and the sacred
anguish of the individual . Because man is not squarely within that order , but
only partakes of it through a thing that is threatened in its nature ( in the projects
that ...
The sacred is itself divided : the dark and malefic sacred is opposed to the white
and beneficent sacred and the deities that partake of the one or the other are
neither rational nor moral . By contrast , in the dualist evolution the divine
becomes ...