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 supreme being , the sovereign deity , the god of heaven , is generally only a
more powerful god of the same nature as the others . The gods are simply
mythical spirits , without any substratum of reality . The spirit that is not
subordinated to ...
The violence thus lifts and preserves the order of things , irrespective of a
vengeance that may or may not be pursued . In death the divinity accepts the
sovereign truth of an unleashing that overturns the order of things , but it deflects
the ...
... effective from the standpoint of development ) by revolutionary means . But no
one disputes the principle of this sovereignty of servitude . Indeed , nothing can
be opposed to it that might destroy it . For none of the former sovereign entities is
...