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 Spirits and the Gods The equality and inequality of these various existences ,
all opposed to the things that pure objects are , resolves into a hierarchy of spirits
. Men and the supreme being , but also , in a first representation , animals ...
The major weakness of dualism is that it offers no legitimate place for violence
except in the moment of pure transcendence , of rational exclusion of the
sensuous world . But the divinity of the good cannot be maintained at that degree
of purity ...
... antitheses , and syntheses of Georges Dumézil set forth the opposition of pure
violence ( on the dark and malefic side of the divine world – Varuna and the
Gandharva , Romulus and the Luperci ) to the divine order that accords with
profane ...