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 9
This clear revelation of a decline of the whole living religious world ( salient in
these synthetic forms that abandon the narrowness of a tradition ) was not given
so long as the archaic manifestations of religious feeling appeared to us ...
And in fact the completed work , if it is possible , should result from such
discussions . It is a common error of perspective to think that by contesting a
particular point one contests the solidity of the outlined whole . This whole is itself
the result of ...
While it is true that a cohesion must necessarily distance itself from the capricious
data of the historical world , there is not one of these data that one should not try
to reduce to the whole and only insofar as the whole has been polished by ...