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 14
was required for the rational organization of an empire , as concerns the use of
the resources produced , in the first phase the order of things maintained
ambiguous relations with the archaic society ; production remained subordinated
to ...
Logically this movement engages a large share of production in the installation of
new equipment . It has eliminated the possibility of an intense consumption (
commensurate with the volume of production ) of the excess resources produced
...
Only the gigantic development of the means of production is capable of fully
revealing the meaning of production , which is the nonproductive consumption of
wealth – the fulfillment of self - consciousness in the free outbursts of the intimate
...