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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... and the Shifting of the Borders of the Sacred and the Profane In a world
dominated by the military order , moving toward universal empire from the start ,
consciousness is distinctly determined in the measured reflection of the world of
things .
At the level of the dualistic conception , no vestige of the ancient festivals can
prevent reflective man , whom reflection constitutes , from being , at the moment
of his fulfillment , man of lost intimacy . Doubtless intimacy is not foreign to him ; it
...
When attention was focused on sacrifice , consciousness was at least separated
from reflection on the profane thing , on the intimacy of sacrifice , but it was then
entirely consumed by anguish , obsessed by the feeling of the sacred . Thus the ...