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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Theory of Religion

Theory of Religion

Bataille, Georges
Hurley, Robert

Paperback

PhilosophyReligion General

Publisher Price: $32.00

ISBN10: 0942299094
ISBN13: 9780942299090
Publisher: Zone Books
Published: Jan 9 1992
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.50 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

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.

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