Theory 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.
Über den Autor Georges Bataille
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Georges Bataille wurde 1897 als Sohn reicher Bauern in der Auvergne geboren. Er studierte Bibliothekswissenschaften, seit 1922 Konservator an verschiedenen Bibliotheken. Im Umkreis der Surrealisten Zusammenarbeit mit Carl Einstein und Michel Leiris an der 1929 gegründeten Zeitschrift "Documents". 1935 schloß er sich der antifaschistischen Intellektuellen-Gruppe "Contre Attaque" an, 1936 gründete er mit Michel Leiris und Roger Caillois das College de Sociologie, 1946 die noch heute existierende Zeitschrift "Critique", die er bis zu seinem Tode im Juli 1962 herausgab. Auf deutsch erschienen zuletzt von Bataille "Die Tränen des Eros" (1981).
