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 16
The principle of sacrifice is destruction , but though it sometimes goes so far as to
destroy completely ( as in a holocaust ) , the destruction that sacrifice is intended
to bring about is not annihilation . The thing - only the thing - is what sacrifice ...
What is required by self - consciousness is not really the destruction of the order
of things . The intimate order cannot truly destroy the order of things ( just as the
order of things has never completely destroyed the intimate order ) . But this real
...
The destruction of the subject as an individual is in fact implied in the destruction
of the object as such , but war is not the inevitable form of the destruction : at any
rate , it is not the conscious form ( that is , if self - consciousness is to be , in the ...