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 20
the human that the transcendence of things in relation to consciousness ( or of
consciousness in relation to things ) is manifested . Indeed transcendence is
nothing if it is not embryonic , if it is not constituted as solids are , which is to say ...
The Negation of the Immanence of the Divine and Its Positing in the
Transcendence of Reason The moment of change is given in a passage : the
intelligible sphere is revealed in a transport , in a sudden movement of
transcendence , where ...
But in reality the world of things is not the world by itself and pure transcendence
toward a pure intelligibility ( which is also , glimpsed all at once , in the
awakening , a pure unintelligibility ) is , within the sensuous world , a destruction
at once ...