Theory of Religion [Paperback]

Georges Bataille (Author), Robert Hurley (Translator)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 29, 1992

Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Bataille's earlier book, The Accursed Share, brought to anthropology and history; namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. Bataille brilliantly defines religion as so many different attempts to respond to the universe's relentless generosity. Framed within his original theory of generalized economics and based on his masterly reading of archaic religious activity, Theory of Religion constitutes, along with The Accursed Share, the most important articulation of Bataille's work.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), founder of the French review Critique, wrote fiction and essays on a wide range of topics. His books in English translation include Story of the Eye, Blue of Noon, Literature and Evil, Manet and Erotism.Robert Hurley is the translator of The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Distributed for Zone Books.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"According to Bataille, religion is the search for a lost intimacy.' Bataille's discussion of this claim moves from the complete immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and then to the partial recovery of intimacy and immanence through sacrifice. More ominous, Bataille argues that not only was the archaic festival an affirmation of life through destructive consumption, but it also sowed the seeds of war. The book concludes with a discussion of the rise of the modern military order and the origins of modern capitalism. The argument here is wide-ranging and significant. Ethics

Language Notes

Text: English, French (translation) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: Zone (June 29, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0942299094
• ISBN-13: 978-0942299090
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #353,685 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. Bataille died in 1962.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bataille, Kojève, Nietzsche, October 27, 2010

By 

Joseph Martin "pomonomo2003" (NJ, USA) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Theory of Religion (Paperback)

It is remarkable that none of the previous reviews here on Amazon mention Alexandre Kojève. At the end of this book Bataille lists several authors who provided 'reference points' that guided his steps. The note for Kojève, and his "Introduction à la lecture de Hegel", is twice as long as the next longest entry. (Others here singled out by Bataille are: Georges Dumézil, Emile Durkheim, Sylvain Lévi, Marcel Mauss, Simone Pétrement, Bernardino De Sahagún, R. H. Tawney, and Max Weber.) Of Kojève's book Bataille says, "The ideas that I have developed here are substantially present in it." Now, even though their two positions are not reconcilable, and Bataille does not expect them to be reconciled, Bataille says of Kojève's "Introduction" that, "[n]o one today can claim to be educated without having assimilated its contents. (p. 124)"

Note also that the long Epigraph that Bataille places at the beginning of this book comes from Kojève. This epigraph ends thusly:
"In contrast to the knowledge that keeps man in a passive quietude, Desire dis-quiets him and moves him to action. Born of Desire, action tends to satisfy it, and can do so only by the 'negation,' the destruction or at least the transformation, of the desired object: to satisfy hunger, for example, the food must be destroyed or, in any case, transformed. Thus all action is 'negating'." (Kojève, "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", p. 4 of the English translation.)

Who exactly is Alexandre Kojève? Well, it is he, not Fukuyama, who is the originator of the so-called 'End of History' debate. In the lectures that became his "Introduction à la lecture de Hegel" Kojève interpreted Hegel to the cream of pre-WWII French intelligentsia in a dramatic manner that his auditors, Bataille included, found electrifying. These lectures on Hegel, which took both Marx's materialism and Heidegger's understanding of Death into account, mark the beginning of existential Marxism in France. The story he tells is of unrequited Desire fighting for Recognition while working its way through the world, and thus blindly (until Hegel) changing that world in a process that inevitably leads to the Universal State. According to Kojève, Hegel is the first one to see this. Technically, for Kojève, History 'ended' with Napoleon. There is nothing beyond the "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" of the French Revolution; what Napoleon was doing and what has been happening since Napoleon in our current 'post-history' is nothing more than the spreading of the ideals of the French Revolution throughout the world. For Kojève, there simply isn't anything else to do. And when this Work is finally Done? The "Universal Homogenous State" (UHS) rises, forever...

Now, for Bataille, Kojève's interpretation of Hegel is the only authoritative understanding of our real workaday historical world. However, for Bataille, this world was never, and could never be, enough. So then, what could be 'enough'? Bataille believed that the lost intimacy of (especially primitive) religion was once, long go, 'enough'; and, who knows, perhaps he thought it could be so again!

But first, I want to stress that Bataille is not calling for some sort of return to a pre-human 'animality'. Animalistic apathy, this immanent moving in the world as 'water within water' (as Bataille characterizes it, p. 23) is not at all what our author is after. He doesn't want to be merely 'one with nature', he wants to enjoy, fear and reflect on nature too!
"Moreover, the animal accepted this immanence that submerged it without apparent protest, whereas man feels a kind of impotent horror in the sense of the sacred. This horror is ambiguous. Undoubtedly, what is sacred attracts and possesses an incomparable value, but at the same time it appears vertiginously dangerous for that clear and profane world where mankind situates its privileged domain. (p. 36)"

It is this 'vertigo', at once joyful and fearsome and thought-provoking, that Bataille is pursuing in this book! There are two worlds:
"The reality of a profane world, of a world of things and bodies, is established opposite a holy and mythical world. (p. 37)"
"The real world remains as a residuum of the birth of the divine world: real animals and plants separated from their spiritual truth slowly rejoin the empty objectivity of tools, the mortal body is gradually assimilated to the mass of things. Insofar as it is spirit, the human reality is holy, but it is profane insofar as it is real. Animals, plants, tools, and other controllable things form a real world with the bodies that control them, a world subject to and traversed by divine forces, but fallen. (p. 38)"

In the profane world (this is Kojève's World) we tend to become the tools of our own tools, that is to say, the means of our own purposes. Take, for example, a farmer, "during the time when he is cultivating, the farmer's purpose is not his own purpose, and during the time when he is tending the stock, the purpose of the stock raiser is not his own purpose. The agricultural product and the livestock are things, and the farmer or the stock raiser, during the time they are working, are also things. (p. 42)" One suspects that for Bataille even our concerted action to bring "liberté, égalité, fraternité" to all the world also turns us into mere things...

So then, how did our poor farmer long ago escape his fate? - Sacrifice! "Sacrifice destroys an object's real ties of subordination; it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice. (p. 43)" Readers of Bataille are not mistaken to find Nietzsche's 'Amor Fati', Chaos, and Dionysus precisely here:
"The sacrificer declares, 'Intimately, I belong to the sovereign world of the gods and myths, to the world of violent and uncalculated generosity, just as my wife belongs to my desires. I withdraw you, victim, from the world in which you were and could only be reduced to the condition of a thing, having a meaning that was foreign to your intimate nature. I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is.' (p. 44)"

In the profane world there is work and property, mine and yours, friends and enemies; in the intimate world of myth and sacrifice there is a violent, but blessed, unanimity. Now, in arguing that the real profane world isn't enough I don't think we should hear Bataille to be claiming that the 'intimate order' is Actual; rather, and this is perhaps even more profound, he believes it is Necessary! But the real profane order "does not so much reject the negation of life that is death as it rejects the affirmation of intimate life, whose measureless violence is a danger to the stability of things, an affirmation that is fully revealed only in death. The real order must annul - neutralize - that intimate life and replace it with the thing that the individual is in the society of labor. But it cannot prevent life's disappearance in death from revealing the invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing. (pps. 46-47)"

The 'invisible brilliance of life that is not a thing' - this is poetry! For Bataille, the profane world (and make no mistake upon this point, he means any profane world, whether capitalist or communist, ancient or modern) must turn us into things. But don't we love this ordinary life? After all, we cry at funerals. "Far from being sorrowful, the tears are an expression of a keen awareness of shared life grasped in its intimacy. (p. 48)" Death isn't only pain; it is a Revelation that there is something else besides this everyday life, and as such, it always borders on poetry. Many of these books of Bataille can be regarded as a first attempt at a new form of sacred poetry that speaks to our secular (and now postmodern) times.

In still another way Sacrifice breaks out of the profane world. "Sacrifice is the antithesis of production, which is accomplished with a view to the future; it is consumption that is concerned only with the moment. (49)" There is your opposition! Sacred vs. the Profane means the useful vs. the useless. Farther down this same page we read,
"[...] in sacrifice the offering is rescued from all utility.
This is so clearly the precise meaning of sacrifice, that one sacrifices what is useful; one does not sacrifice luxurious objects."

So, sacrifice is the antithesis of production. It is a prayer. The hope that there is something beyond production; something beyond being a cog in a wheel that is itself a cog in a larger wheel... and so on, forever.
"Sacrifice is made of objects that could have been spirits, such as animals or plant substances, but that have become things and that need to be restored to the immanence whence they come, to the vague sphere of lost intimacy. (p .50)"

This 'intimacy', what does that mean to our author? "Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it is not compatible with the positing of the separate individual. (p. 51)" So the intimate order is the end of both individuality and our profane existence. But how is it that both the intimate and the profane occur in human experience? Bataille explains that Man,
"is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things. Death disturbs the order of things and the order of things holds us. Man is afraid of the intimate order that is not reconcilable with the order of things. Otherwise there would be no sacrifice, and there would be no mankind either. The intimate order would not reveal itself in the destruction and the sacred anguish of the individual. (p... Read more ›

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A daring defense of religion's darker components, September 3, 2007

By 

Taylor Carr (www.guitar6.com) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Theory of Religion (Paperback)

Known by some as the "metaphysician of evil", Bataille's book on religion is what is basically a Nietzschean approach to theology - thus much of it illustrates the importance of the darker side of faith, such as the necessity of suffering, sacrifice, and even evil itself. However, there is a lot more going on here than a simple commentary on religion. There is discussion of man's relation to animality, the lost intimacy we seek, and Bataille challenges our perception of objects. This is much broader in the scope of subjects it covers than I thought it would be, and it certainly will be confusing to some who are unfamiliar with philosophy, especially those who have no introduction to Nietzsche's works.

One thing I disliked about this book (which seems to be a recurring theme in many philosophical writings), is the author's tendency to repeat things over and over. I understand the value of restating ideas many times to impress something upon one's memory, but this does get quite redundant in some arguments and concepts Bataille presents. As another reviewer mentioned, this is purposefully vague for the fact that it does try to be everything to all religions. If Nietzsche's thoughts and assertions have captured your interest, Bataille is the next logical step. It is a sort of "re-evaluation" of the values the author sees in religion.

12 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A purposely vague and thus misunderstood book, February 26, 2000

By 

Mike Fisher - See all my reviews

This review is from: Theory of Religion (Paperback)

George Bataille's "Theory of Religion" is an attempt to sum up religion in as succinct a manner as possible. To be all things to all religions, the book is very vague and difficult to understand. Bataille created a chart or table to explain what he was doing and to give body to the work. ALAS! The chart is not in the book, lost to time. Thus, as it exists, Bataille's book is a glimpse into the inner workings of a genius mind. It is a colorful attempt to understand "religion," whatever that is. Further, it is an off-the beaten path romp through the daisies of the study of religion, sweet flowers that often remain unromped.