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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But , if animal Desire is the necessary condition of self - consciousness , it is not
the sufficient condition . By itself , this Desire constitutes only the Sentiment of self
. In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude , Desire dis ...
... the incompletion is not restricted to the lacunae of thought ; at every point , at
each point , there is the impossibility of the final state . This condition of
impossibility is not the excuse for undeniable deficiencies ; it limits all real
philosophy .
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 reduction to thinghood . Only in a world where the thing has reduced ...