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 Divine Delivered Over to the Operation The paradox of a mediation that
should not have been does not rest merely on an internal contradiction . In a
general way , it controls the contradiction involved in the lifting and maintenance
of the ...
the principle of the productive operation generally dominated consciousness .
Consequently , merely by disputing the value of the operation insofar as its effect
was supposed to be exerted in the divine order , one arrived at the reign of the ...
( We don ' t know anything concerning anguish except insofar as it is implied in
the fact of the impossible operation . ) Self - consciousness thus escapes the
dilemma of the simultaneous requirement of immediacy and of the operation .