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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The sense of continuity that we must attribute to animals no longer impressed
itself on the mind unequivocally ( the positing of distinct objects was in fact its
negation ) . But it had derived a new significance from the contrast it formed to the
...
Within the limits of continuity , everything is spiritual ; there is no opposition of the
mind and the body . But the positing of a world of mythical spirits and the
supreme value it receives are naturally linked to the definition of the mortal body
as ...
But the different forms of the dualistic attitude never offer anything but a slippery
possibility to the mind ( which must always answer at the same time to two
irreconcilable demands : lift and preserve the order of things ) . A richer possibility
...