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 tool changes nature and man at the same time : it subjugates nature to man ,
who makes and uses it , but it ties man to subjugated nature . Nature becomes
man ' s property but it ceases to be immanent to him . It is his on condition that it is
...
I withdraw you , victim , from the world in which you were and could only be
reduced to the condition of a thing , having a meaning that was foreign to your
intimate nature . I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world , of the
profound ...
The ambiguity of archaic society continued , but whereas in archaic society the
destruction of resources was supposed to favor production owing precisely to its
unproductive nature ( its divine nature ) , the society of mediation , claiming ...