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 13
true end , which would serve no purpose . What a " true end ” reintroduces is the
continuous being , lost in the world like water is lost in water : or else , if it were a
being as distinct as a tool , its meaning would have to be sought on the plane of ...
But if it is true that an exceptional violence is released in transcendence at the
moment of its movement , if it is true that it is the very awakening of possibility –
precisely because so complete a violence cannot be maintained for long – the ...
While it is true that a cohesion must necessarily distance itself from the capricious
data of the historical world , there is not one of these data that one should not try
to reduce to the whole and only insofar as the whole has been polished by ...