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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CHAPTER III Sacrifice , the Festival , and the Principles of the Sacred World The
Need That Is Met by Sacrifice and Its Principle The first fruits of the harvest or a
head of livestock are sacrificed in order to remove the plant and the animal ...
The principle of salvation that reserves the return of lost intimacy for the future
and for the world beyond this one misses the essence of the return , which is not
only that it can be subordinated to that which it is not , but that it can only be given
in ...
... order itself but the compromises that enable it to remain intimate while
submitting to the principles of the real order . ... the reality principle with the
principle of intimacy , but the good will that receives them is 96 RELIGION
WITHIN THE ...