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 24
mov 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 ...
and the divine splendors is even more painful than in the moral work , justified by
reason . The effect of works is eventually to reduce divinity - and the desire for
divinity – once again to thinghood . The basic opposition between the divine and
...
Theoretically , the use of production was subordinated to morality , but morality
and the divine world were profoundly interdependent . The divine world drew its
strength from a violent negation which it condemned , and remained divine in
spite ...