Théorie de la religion

by Georges Bataille, Thadée Klossowski de Rola (Editor)

Bataille hardi, Bataille novateur, Bataille éloquent. Où classer Georges Bataille? Sartre et Malraux furent fascinés par les excès de ce «mystique sans dieu». Rédigée en 1948, cette Théorie de la religion nous plonge, entre Éros et Thanatos, dans l'univers paradoxal d'un philosophe-artiste pour qui un concept vaut un cri.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Nonfiction, Theory, Anthropology, Theology, France

159 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

Reviews

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

10/27/2010

Bataille, Kojève, Nietzsche

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. 52)"

Bataille is claiming that the intimate order is an anthropological category that will subsist so long as Man, desiring Man, exists. But we no longer Sacrifice; is the intimate order now only encountered in death?

No, Sacrifice is violence; carried to its extreme, which is where violence always tends, it is the end of our humanity. "But if man surrendered unreservedly to immanence, he would fall short of humanity; he would achieve it only to lose it and eventually life would return to the unconscious intimacy of animals. The constant problem posed by the impossibility of being human without being a thing and of escaping the limits of things without returning to animal slumber receives the limited solution of the festival. (p. 53)"

You see, the Sacred is dangerous: "The sacred is exactly comparable to the flame that destroys the wood by consuming it. (p. 53)" The Festival, however, is a 'controlled burn': "there is an aspiration for destruction that breaks out in the festival, but there is a conservative prudence that limits and regulates it. (p. 54)" The festival is thus a (partially) unintelligible Joy that does not destroy us. That is to say, it is both useful and useless. "The festival is tolerated to the extent that it reserves the necessities of the profane world. (p. 54)" Now, the festival is not a recovery of our lost intimacy, it is a compromise between 'the sacred' and 'the profane'; and, according to our author, it is upon the compromise between these two that all History has been built.

We have now traversed almost half of this book. I will stop here and leave it to the interested reader to pursue it further. (I believe Amazon still limits review length.) Bataille at this point now turns from primitive history to our 'civilized' history of War, Empire, States and Capital. It is the history of how the profane has 'overcome' the sacred: "The millenial quest for lost intimacy was abandoned by productive mankind" (p. 92). And it is a signpost pointing to the way we might regain this lost intimacy. All this is, I thought, the more interesting part of the book but this review is already longer than I intended it to be. - And I still want to digress and speak a bit more of the relation between Kojève and Bataille.

Now, regarding that, I believe that the internal war that Bataille fought was between Kojève's sui generis Marxism and Nietzsche.
"Nietzsche's position is the only one apart from communism", (Bataille, Accursed Share, p 373).
Indeed, I would argue that many of these books of Bataille can be seen as one long meditation on the possibility, a possibility that perhaps Bataille never himself fully believed, that both Kojève and Nietzsche were somehow right! Now, one of the things that makes the "Theory of Religion" so difficult to understand is that Bataiile is doing a sort of 'double accounting'. He wants to explain the sacred and secular history in a manner that will be both Nietzschean and Kojèvean (i.e., Hegelian) at the same time. Its occasional opacity testifies to the difficulty... Briefly, Bataille thinks of the profane world as Kojève did, and he thinks of the Sacred (i.e., the intimate order) in his own uniquely Nietzschean manner. I suspect that this is why no reviewer before me here on Amazon even mentioned Kojève. They were interested in what Bataille had to say regarding the 'intimate order'.

Kojève basically tells Bataille that even if one does not find (his Hegelian) Truth satisfying this is not sufficient cause to be satisfied with dreams or lies. Kojève is always speaking of Reality, of what is actually being done in our secular world. Kojève worked after the War, if I remember correctly, in the French Ministry of Economic Affairs; he was a very practical person. To him, Bataille is but another Hegelian 'Beautiful Soul', chattering on endlessly about nothing at all.
(For the origin of the term 'beautiful soul' look to Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind:
"Its activity consists in yearning, which merely loses itself in becoming an unsubstantial shadowy object, and, rising above this loss and falling back on itself, finds itself merely as lost. In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes a sorrow-laden 'beautiful soul', as it is called; its light dims and dies within it, and it vanishes as a shapeless vapour dissolving into thin air." (From the old J.B. Baillie translation, pps. 666-667. Also see pages 675-676.)

Bataille never really found an answer (I mean to say he never found an answer the profane world would acknowledge) to that rebuke. But I believe (and the following is not Bataille's point, it is mine) that Nietzsche did. His genealogical method demonstrates that our understanding of History, of any particular history, can change; that is to say, past events can (eventually, but only in certain circumstances) be given different meanings. Granting this means that the Hegelian Circle of Absolute Knowledge can never actually be closed. Why? Well, the Hegelian Philosopher can never know where History has (or will) lead us because he can never be certain that our interpretation of that History will not change, or has not (unknown even by him) already changed. Thus the Hegelo-Kojèvean Sage, who wishes to recount the phenomenological History, those dialectical steps that inevitably led to himself and his Absolute Knowledge, will eventually find himself incapable of doing so because that History (the specific past he recounts) is forever changing too. This (occasionally actual but always potential) Nietzschean genealogical reduction means that the historical ground (known dialectically and phenomenologically) is forever crumbling away beneath our feet...

Roger Caillois, who along with Bataille and others formed the so-called 'College of Sociology', recalls that it, "was at Bataille's on the rue de Rennes that we explained our project to Kojève ... Kojève listened to us, but he dismissed our idea. In his eyes we were putting ourselves in the position of a conjurer who wanted his magic tricks to make him believe in magic." (This vignette is recounted in Bataille, "The College of Sociology", p. 86) So yes, from the view of the profane world Kojève is right; a stage magician that believes in his own magic tricks is genuinely insane. However, we should note, again from the very same practical profane position, that if a stage magician were to believe that the audience wants to believe in magic he would not be insane at all...

But how could the profane Kojèvean world ever accept Bataille's Sacred? "As long as History continues, or as long as the perfect State is not realized [...] the opposition of these two points of view (the 'philosophical' and the religious or theological) is inevitable." (Kojève, "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", p. 72) Kojève knew full well that if his UHS did not rise then religion is, and must be, a permanent constituent of human social reality. You will of course note that the Universal Homogenous State, the State in which "liberté, égalité, fraternité" have all been fully realized and universal satisfaction has been achieved, has yet to arise. So long as it doesn't one could thus argue, on perfectly secular Kojèvean grounds, that one could expect to always encounter some type of religion.

Did Kojève ever take Bataille seriously? Well, perhaps. In answer to Bataille, or so I've heard it maintained, Kojève, in the enigmatic "Note to the Second Edition" (Kojève, "Introduction to the Reading of Hegel", p. 159ff), announces that even after the UHS rises something that could be thought of as 'religious sentiment' could survive. Kojève rather dismissively refers to these behaviors as Snobbery! This is because, by definition, in the UHS there can no longer be any (properly speaking) historical action. Snobbish behavior has no historical import, thus it too, like Sacrifice, can be considered an 'unintelligible caprice'. But so long as there is Desire there will be Action. This is why Bataille included this specific Kojèvean quote (mentioned above, "Born of Desire, action...") as the epigraph to his book. I should, in fairness, also mention that others say that this Note on snobbery, far from being a concession to Bataille, was little more than a joke that Kojève found amusing to tell...

There is included in the material collected in "The College of Sociology (CS), (pps. 89-93)" a letter Bataille wrote Kojève in 1937. In this letter Bataille introduces his notion of 'unemployed negativity'. If to be Human is to Act, and if Action ceases in the UHS, then what happens to activity? (Recall that all action is 'negating' according to Kojève.) It becomes 'unemployed'. "Most often, negativity, being impotent, makes itself into a work of art. (CS, p. 90)" So what exactly has changed? There has always been Art. Ah, but in the UHS we know that historical action is impossible. (And we should add, that in our current post-history, historical action is becoming increasingly impossible.) That is new; "the man of 'unemployed negativity' [,,,] become(s) the man of 'recognized negativity'. (CS, p. 91)" Man now knows that "his need to act no longer has any use. [... he is] a negativity empty of content." What does the Man of 'recognized negativity' do? He transgresses! His 'science' now "brings into play representations extremely charged with emotive value (such as physical destruction or erotic obscenity, an object of laughter, of physical excitation, of fear and of tears.)" But why?

Not enough room, continued as a comment...

[Nathaniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is possibly my favorite book of philosophy, or, in the very least, the most influential piece of philosophical writing, that I have read to date, in regards to my own views about the world. Bataille is not writing about religion specifically in "Theory of Religion" but is instead examining the human condition within the world. To Bataille that condition is one of lost intimacy. As he says we are no longer like the animal which moves through the world "like water through water." Nothing that I've read by Bataille has been easy, all his works are dense (perhaps not in pages - thought often - but certainly in language and thought), and yet, putting aside the difficulty of some of his wordings and the tendancies to go off on long, almost convoluted, thoughts, it seems apparent that Bataille truly wrote with deep consideration of what it meant to be a memeber of humankind. There is beauty in his writing which seems to touch an almost poetic chord (indeed Bataille wrote poetry of his own) but even further there is a sense of tragedy. While the piece must clearly be deemed as non-fiction, the philosophical thought it presents and the stirring of minds that it is capable of causing may very well lead to a sense of melancoly that is more close to that caused by the Greek tragedies. Still, perhaps in touching the tragedy, we are given the option to transcend it, by allowing ourselves to be free of the thingness of our world.

[m]

to be honest so much of this is beyond me, I read this knowing I wouldn’t be able to understand most of it but with hopes that I’d get something out of it, even the littlest idea, which I did! but the rest is like reading hieroglyphics, almost. so, as I say with many other books like this that I attempt to read with little to no background knowledge, I will definitely be rereading this when I have the tools to understand it properly. I’m so excited for when I can finally come out understanding at the very least 60-85% of this and other books like this, hopefully that’ll be sometime in the next year or so !! I’m self teaching myself philosophy right now sort of from the ground up and I’m trying to enjoy the process but I can’t help reading books that are veryyyy far ahead of where I am lol

[Deep · Rating 4 out of 5]

What is Theory of Religion? Theory of Religion is, more than anything, a Nietzschean reading of Marx. It's a text that places the Nitzechean immanence and 'chaos of sensation' at the centre in contrast to Marx's (apparent) fealty to reason. It undermines his Feurbachian theory of religion by reaching back into the prehistoric through the sacrifice - revealing the creation of a logic, the order of things, that reorganizes society, the divine, and human according to an logic of production and universalism. Not religion as human estrangement, but as subsumed into an estranged logic.

Bataille argues for an attack on this logic by it's own tools, against a science that produces knowledge - a science that produces "non-knowledge", a self-consciousness of the obscurity of the intimate. Rather than the 'clear' and reduced false-immanence produced by the estranged logic of the order of things.

In Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion we see the seeds that would blossom in Foucault, Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy etc. It's a work that bridges the old world of Hegel's science and the enlightenment project, with it's contemporary critique. While this also means that Bataille suffers from presenting a less sophisticated analysis than his students, I believe that this text still offers a wealth of insight through passages that beg for exposition through Heidegger or said students.

I now look forward even more to reading The Accursed Share.

[Aung Sett Kyaw Min · Rating 3 out of 5]

In one speculative stroke, Bataille lays out the drama that successively plays out between immanence and transcendence--between the continuity with the rest of the world that the consciousness/subject is immersed in and the discontinuity introduced first by the positing of the tool as an object bestowed with a purpose. This more or less inaugurates a process whereby the wretched consciousness increasingly becomes alienated from itself, being "reduced" to the world of things/calculation/rationality/morality/accumulation. Thus man longs for a long lost intimacy, of violence rupture (For Bataille what is sacred/divine is necessarily violent, extra-moral, gut-wrenching, wasteful, glorious). Sacrifice then, which is always a sacrifice of useful things, is a precarious precedure that momentarily restores the thing to its SACRED plateau, and momentarily opens man up to the divine, by denying its objective reality as a thing, i.e. destruction. Festivals in this case are half-way compromises between production and nonproductive expenditure. But what happens when the scission between immanence and transcendence reaches its apogee in the dualism of "good" sacred and the "evil" sacred (whereas previously there was only violence without violence being split into violence enacted for the purpose of upholding the real social/moral order and unrestrained violence), once production, unhinged from scandalous consumption, is at liberty to develop its own productive forces for who knows what ends? The consequences can only be dire. According to Bataille, this reduction of the sacred itself to the status of THINGHOOD (into a thing whose violence sustains the world of things instead of something sovereign, an end in itself ) actually blots out all possibility of regaining the intimate experience of the sacred. However, not all is lost, as the onanistic development of productive forces also drives the development of science, which can become a vessel of a CLEAR, SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS. The annihilation of the surplus or the excess must be carried out on our own terms and without a clear self consciousness accompanying it we will end up ruining ourselves in the process (e.g. warfare).

[Theresa · Rating 3 out of 5]

My mom borrowed this book from me because she would like to read it, for fun. To my surprise in her interest, I let her read it. A week later, she returned it to me and say "what have you been reading???". Haha.

This book is nothing about religion but about human development of thinking that may rises to idea of having a religion. Bataille's argument can be debatable regarding human nature and our psychology, and as to what makes us superior than other living creatures. Nonetheless, it's a compelling book.

[Baraa Qudah · Rating 2 out of 5]

لم افهم منه الا نقاط قليلة ..
سأعود لقرأته لاحقا بعد ان اقرأ لجورج باتاب بعض اعماله الاخرى و بعد أن اعرف قليلا عن هيجل و الدياليكتك ...

المترجم جيد جدا ، اليوسفي مترجم متمكن من الفرنسية و العربية ... لذا العيب ليس منه بلا شك ،، فلذلك لي عودة له لاحقا او ربما اقرأ لجورج باتاي كتب اخرى كتبت باسلوب اسهل من هذا

[Michael A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty cool.... i still didn't understand most of it. should re-read again at a later date.

[Eadweard · Rating 3 out of 5]

" Es una opinión ingenua la que une estrechamente la muerte a la tristeza. Las lágrimas de los vivos, que responden a su venida, están ellas mismas lejos de tener un sentido opuesto a la alegría. Lejos de ser dolorosas, las lágrimas son la expresión de una conciencia aguda de la vida común captada en su intimidad. "

[Searchingthemeaningoflife Greece · Rating 5 out of 5]

[...]Αυτό που η θυσία θέλει να καταστρέψει μέσα στο θύμα είναι το πράγμα, και μονο το πράγμα. Η θυσία καταστρέφει τους πραγματικούς δεσμούς υποτέλειας ενός αντικειμένου, αρπάζει το θύμα άπ' τον κόσμο της χρησιμότητας και το παραδίνει στον κόσμο της ακατανόητης ιδιοτροπίας. Όταν το προσφερόμενο ζώο μπαίνει μέσα στον κύκλο όπου θα το σφάξει ο ιερέας, περνάει απ' τον κόσμο των πραγμάτων - που είναι κλειστά στον άνθρωπο και που δεν του είναι τίποτα, που τα γνωρίζει απ' έξω - στον κόσμο που του είναι ενύπαρχτος, μύχιος, γνωστός όπως γνωστή είναι ή γυναίκα μέσα στη σαρκική ανάλωση. Αυτό υποθέτει πως έχει πάψει κι ο ίδιος, απ' τη δική του τη μεριά, να είναι διαχωρισμένος απ' τη δική του μυχίοτητα, όπως συμβαίνει μέσα στην υποτέλεια της δουλειάς.[...]

[michal k-c · Rating 4 out of 5]

what comes after the clarity of self consciousness? violence, sacrifice, in that order probably. Sartre’s critique of Bataille continues echo (reification of nothingness) but who cares. classical dialectical reasoning is exhausted and deserves a long nap

[Madeleine Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bataille is horribly confusing at first but once you get the hang of his thought process and language usage he's remarkably insightful

[Magda · Rating 5 out of 5]

με ξάφνιασε ακόμα και το τελικό σημείωμα του Μπατάιγ.
Μπορώ όμως να φανταστώ έναν πολιτισμό όπου ο άνθρωπος θα μιμείται την παροντική ύπαρξη της ζωικής ζωής και μόνο αυτή η προοπτική με ευχαριστεί.

[brenda · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A busca milenar da intimidade perdida foi abandonada pela humanidade produtiva, consciente de que eram vãos os caminhos operatórios, mas incapaz de procurar por mais tempo o que apenas pode ser buscado pelos caminhos que lhe pertencem.

[...]

Logo se percebe que, quando ele mesmo se transforma no homem da coisa autônoma, mais do que nunca o homem se afasta de si próprio. Essa completa cisão abandona decididamente sua vida a um movimento que ele não comanda mais, mas cujas conseqüências finais lhe metem medo. Logicamente esse movimento compromete uma parte importante da produção na instalação de novos equipamentos. Ele suprimiu a possibilidade de um consumo intenso (na medida do volume da produção) do excesso dos recursos produzidos: com efeito, os produtos só podem circular se na prática os consumidores aceitarem, para obter a moeda necessária, colaborar com a obra comum do desenvolvimento dos meios de produção. Essa obra é o grande negócio, e não há nada que lhe seja preferível. Certamente nada se pode fazer de melhor. Quando se faz alguma coisa, evidentemente isso significa participar dela, a menos que se lute para torná-la mais racional (mais eficaz no sentido do desenvolvimento) por meios revolucionários. Mas ninguém contesta o princípio dessa soberania da servidão."

li a edição da ática de 93

Bataille faz um percurso dos mundos – arcaico>militar>industrial – e como a transformação da religiosidade (antes de falar de religião de fato) sempre esteve intrínseca nesses movimentos – e quiçá também os conduz. a religiosidade está na carne, não dá pra se dissociar do divino, eterna imanência.

[Fariz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"There cannot be any philosophy of the individual and the exercise of thought cannot have any other outcome than the negation of individual perspectives. A basic problem is linked to the very idea of philosophy: how to get out of the human situation."

ok jadi saya ternyata harus baca Hegel (terutama dari penekanan teori dialektik sejarah dan materialisme yang dia dorong sampai ke titik penghancuran, perang dan pengurbanan) dan para pengikutnya yang lebih nyentrik macam Kojeve untuk mengerti lebih jauh argumen metafisisnya dan upayanya untuk ngekompress antropologi dan teori produksi dari kacamata tersebut yang mungkin juga diatributkan ke translasi yang menurut saya terlalu literal.

bakal jadi buku yang saya baca ulang, terus dan lagi setiap tahun sebelum ngasih pendapat yang lebih kohesif (dan menurut Bataille sendiri ini emang buku yang dia rancang untuk ngeklarifikasi tujuan pembacanya daripada pemberian pendapatnya, "open movement of reflection" seperti yang dia bilang)

[Minäpäminä · Rating 2 out of 5]

bataille yhtä aikaa kiemuraisimmillaan ja avoimimmillaan, molemmat huonossa mielessä. toki tämä on postuumisti julkaistu haudanryöstö.

[ניקאָלע]

This shit wasn’t about religion even a little 🤨

[samantha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction
o In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes (hat there is no longer any room for him.
1. Animality
o Immanence of Eater and Eaten
o Animality is immediacy or immanence.
o The immanence of the animal with respect to its milieu is given in a precise situation
o The situation is given when one animal east another
o What is given when one animal eats another is always the fellow creature of the one that eats. It is in this sense that I speak of immanence
o There is no transcendence between eater and eaten; there is a difference, of course, but this animal that east the other cannot confront it in an affirmation of that difference
o The animal that another animal eats is not yet given as an object. Between the animal that is eaten and the one that eats, there is no relation of subordination like that connecting an object, a thing, to man, who refuses to be viewed as a thing
o Dependence and Independence of the animal
o The poetic fallacy of animality
o we can never imagine things without consciousness except arbitrarily, since we and imagine imply Consciousness, our conscious- ness, adhering indelibly to their presence.
o The animal opens before me a depth that attracts me and is familiar to me. In a sense, | know this depth: it is my own. It is also that which is farthest removed from me, that which deserves the name depth, which means precisely thar which is unfathomable to me. But this too is poetry... .
o The Animal is in the world like water in water
o I am able to sav that the animal world is that of immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is50 to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend itself. Such a truth is negative, and we will not be able to establish it absolutely. THESIS SO FAR
o Because it is only within the limits of the human that transcendence of things in relation to consciousness (or of consciousness in relation to things) is manifested.
o Indeed transcendence is nothing if it is not embryonic, if it is not constituted as solids are, which is to sav, immutably, under certain given conditions.
Chapter 2 Humanity and the Development of the Profane World
o The positing of the object: the tool
o The positing of the object, which is not given in animality, 1s in the human use of tools; that is, if the tools as middle terms are adapted to the intended result — if their users perfect them.
o Insofar as tools are developed with their end in view, consciousness posits them as objects, as interruptions in the indistinct continuity. The developed tool is the nascent form of the non-I.
o The tool brings exteriority into a world where the subject has a part in the elements it distinguishes, where it has a part in the world and remains like water in water.
o Tools are NOT transcendent
o Positing of Immanent Elements in the Sphere of Objects
o Men determines stable and simple things which it is possible to make (OBJECTS)
o And unto this PLANE OF OBJECTS man brings also elements of the same nature as the subject or even the subject itself.
o Language defines, from one plane to the other, the category of subject-object
o The Positing of Things as Subjects
o So we give the tool attributes of the subject and then place it next to animals
o Objects become continuous with respect to the world as a whole, and yet separate as it was in the mind of the one who made it
o The Supreme Being
o The world is REDUCED TO A THING in all of this
o We posit, in the world, a supreme being, distinct and limited like a thing. We do this because of a determination to define a value that is greater than any other.
o The Sacred
o All peoples have doubtless conceived this supreme being, but the operation seems to have failed everywhere.
o There is every indication that the first men were closer than we are to the animal world; they distinguished the animal from themselves perhaps, but not without a feeling of doubt mixed with terror and longing. They made gods too, but not with the same STICK as Judeo Christian god.
o The sense of the sacred obviously is not that of the animal lost in the mists of continuity where nothing is distinct
o The Spirits and the Gods
o the hierarchy of spirits tends to be based on a fundamental distinction between spirits that depend on a body, like those of men, and the autonomous spirits of the supreme being, of animals, of dead people, and so on, which tend to form a homogeneous world, a mythical world, within which the hierarchical differences are usually slight.
o The Positing of the World of Things and of the Body as a Thing
o the world in which men move about is still, in a fundamental way, a continuity from the subject’s point of view.
o mental way, a continuity from the subject’s point of view. But the unreal world of sovereign spirits or gods establishes reality, which it is not, as its contrary. The reality of a profane world, of a world of things and bodies, is established opposite a holy and mythical world,
o The Eaten Animal, the Corpse, and the Thing
o "The definition of the animal as a thing has become a basic human given. The animal has lost its status as man’s fellow creature, and man, perceiving the animality in him- self, regards it as a defect. There is undoubtedly a measure of falsity in the fact of regarding the animal as a thing. An animal exists for itself and in order to be a thing it must be dead or domesticated.
 Thus the eaten animal can be posited as an object only provided it is eaten dead.
 Man does not eat anything before he has made an object of it
 Man does not HAVE A PART in that which he eats
o Conversely, man’s corpse reveals the complete reduction of the animal body, and therefore the living animal, to thinghood. In theory the body is a strictly subordinate element, which is of no consequence for itself— a utility of the same nature as canvas, iron, or lumber.
o The Worker and the Tool
o The world of things is perceived as a fallen world. It entails the alienation of the one who created it (to subordinate is not only to alter the subordinated element but to be altered oneself)
Chapter 3 :Sacrifice, the Festival, and the Principles of the Sacred World
o The Need that is Met by Sacrifice and its Principle
o Sacrifice removes it from the world of things
o The principle of sacrifice is deconstruction, but though it sometimes goes so far as to destroy completely (as in a holocaust), the destruction that sacrifice is intended to bring about is not annihilation.
o The thing—only the thing—si what sacrifice means to destroy in the victim. 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. It is about a return to INTIMACY. It is a call back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is
o The unreality of the divine world
o Of course sacrifice is a monologue and the victim can neither understand nor reply. Sacrifice essentially turns its back on real relations.
o This is what gives the world of sacrifice an appearance of puerile gratuitousness. But one cannot at the same time destroy the values that found reality and accept their limits.
o Ordinary association of death and sacrifice
o Duration ceases to have any value,
o The Consummation of Sacrifice
o But death is not necessarily linked to it, and the most solemn sacrifice may not be bloody.
o To sacrifice is not to kill but to relinquish and to give. Killing is only the exhibition of a deep meaning.
o hat is important is to pass from a lasting order, in which al consumption of resources is subordinated to the need for duration, to the violence of an unconditional consumption; what is important is to leave a world of real things, whose reality derives from a long term operation and never resides in the moment — a world that creates and preserves (that creates for the benefit of a lasting reality).
o There could be no sacrifice if the offering were destroyed beforehand.
o The individual, Anguish, and Sacrifice
o Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively.
o The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that
o breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn’t know where it comes from or what it’s about; the fear that sings its head oft in the dark; the white-eved pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting -.. are so many evasions.
o Paradoxically, intimacy is violence, and it is destruction, because it 1s not compatible with the positing of the separate individual.
o The Festival
o from the outside, Thus the letting loose of the festival is finally, if not fet- tered, then at least confined to the limits of a reality of which it is the negation. The festival is tolerated to the extent that it reserves the necessities of the profane world.
o War: The illusions of the unleashing of violence to the outside

[Peisi Thanatos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book I've read so far this year. Nietzsche walked so Bataille could run (and Bataille is a complete psychopath)

[Nathan Price · Rating 2 out of 5]

I desperately want to like this book, I really like Bataille as an author, but I can't help but feel like everything said within has been articulated more clearly and rigourously elsewhere, even by Bataille himself. It honestly feels like if you just went and read some Feuerbach, some Marx, and The Accursed Share you'd get 99% of the best bits of this book while also having read a number of classics.

There is a sense in which the philosophy presented within is systematic, a definite attempt at an argument is made and key ideas proposed, but the definitions offered are so opaque it's hard to follow and Bataille has an awful habit of vaguely waving his hands at key junctures in the argument. The prose is oddly poetic too but in a way which only obfuscates the meaning.

Many of the base ideas too seem overly simplistic or have been outmoded by progress in anthropology or other fields. Like, okay, so we have an animal as existing in a form of immediacy, indistinguishable from the surrounding world in which it exists, and then tools are created by man which alienates him from the world and allows him to turn the whole world to his ends / impose his will upon the world, etc... Yet, of course many animals can use tools, are they yet alienated?

This objection is not too profound and easy enough to work around, but in the effort one has to put in to make the ideas relevant and applicable, is it really worth it? Well, you might say, psychoanalysis is useful in philosophy even if it is no longer backed up as empirical fact by modern psychology. And you'd be right, but psychoanalysis has been wildly useful as a theoretical tool for many prominent philosophers and so there's obvious value in studying it if you want to engage with the modern philosophy canon. meanwhile, who has ever thought to apply the ideas from this book? Who deems Bataille's framework here to be useful or insightful?

I want to like this book, but it feels like a waste of time.

[madiha · Rating 4 out of 5]

يكتب جورج باتاي عن الوضع البشري ، و يميزه عن الحيوانية فهي وضع معطى،غير واع،غير قادر على التعالي الإنساني ،يستطلع الكاتب شروط هذه التجربة الإنسانية ،تحت رقابة النظام الواقعي من جهة، و تحت عذاب ذكرى الحميمية من جهة أخرى ،لقد تمتل الإنسان القديم هذه الحميمية بين العالم الإلهي و الواقعي من خلال العنف/الصراخ.. أما إنسان الحقبة الصناعية قد فشل في استحضارها فاندفع في مادية لا تستجيب لحنينه ، و لا تمنحه فرصة إدراك عنفه الداخلي(خارج المجدي(النظام العسكري مثلا و سؤال التضحية)) و لا تصريف إحساسات القلق لديه ، لا يكتب باتاي تحديدا عن الدين،لكنه يدرس بشكل من الأشكال شروط تكون الفكرة الدينية لدى الإنسان ، و علاقتها بما تدينه و تحرمه .يكتب باتاي بلغة فلسفية صعبة،فهو يختصر الأفكار و يركزها في بضع كلمات شاعرية ،لذلك فالكتاب يحتاج لأكثر من قراءة، و الأكيد، أن ما وسعني فهمه،أبهرني للغاية..
أقتبس من الكتاب التالي:
***لست أدري ما الشئء اللطيف الخفي و المؤلم الذي يطيل في تلك الظلمات الحيوانية حميمية الوميض المتبقي فينا و كل ما يسعني الإحتفاظ به في النهاية يكمن في أن ذلك المشهد الذي يلقي بي في الليل و يبهرني ،يدنيني من اللحظة التي(و لن أشك في ذلك مطلقا) يبعدني فيها وضوح الوعي المتميز في النهاية عن تلك الحقيقة الخفية التي من ذاتي إلى العالم تتراءى لي كي تتوارى.***

[Michael Greer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bataille explores the meaning of civilization in this work. In simple terms, civilization means the loss of intimacy. Intimacy is something enjoyed by animals, often called "immanence" or "what is given without distinction." The tool marks the shift from intimacy to objectivity. Now everyone is concerned with objectivity, being "model citizens." But the violence/the experience of being eaten is lost when the the world of intimacy becomes the world of things. Things call for managers and politicians. We all know how horrible these people are. Therefore, I call for more sacrifice and more intimacy. Not because these are peaceful activities; most certainly they will involve violence. Nothing is more intimate in nature than murder, but murder is the degraded expression of sacrifice. Sacrifice is a holy violence because it releases the individual from the economy of things and returns the victim to nature's first intimacy, death.

[Diane]

Difficult to rate because difficult to read--I kept at it because it is short, and I saw that he was headed toward a tie-in with religion and our present capitalist world economy. If I owned the book--and had lots of time--I might read it 2 or more times. I am not used to reading books so deeply steeped in abstract exposition; I am used to more concrete examples to elucidate the points being made. I'd rate it "interesting" and "good to know about."

[Fortuna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hubiera venido bien, más allá de la pura teoría, algún análisis histórico. Al final Bataille explica bien porque no incluye uno, pero el brevísimo ejemplo cual ofrece del Islam muestra sin lugar a dudas que hubiera sido altamente provechoso el que haya ofrecido ese giro también.

[Suellen Rubira · Rating 3 out of 5]

Parte 1: decodificação. Acho que vou precisar de umas três leituras pra sacar qual foi a do Bataille nesse livro.

[Gastjäle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bataille puts forth his own theory of the logical development (and devolution) of human consciousness as progressive galumphing from its speculative primordial immanence to the worlds of the object, the subject, the subject-object and, ultimately, the world of things and aimless production.

It is a beautifully written work, at times intoxicatingly relatable and occasionally succumbing into thick darkness, where thought finds it annoyingly difficult to follow. Before beginning his presentation, Bataille makes sure to undermine it: he points out that it's but a brick in the wall, and it cannot but be incomplete. After this, however, he begins a very logically advancing exposition, which at times is shaken by strange choices of words (like "festival", "violence" and "sovereignty") that differ considerably from their mundane meanings. Sometimes I can't help but feel like a cat, who is tantalised by a laser pointer... Yet like the cat, I do not despair but rather give chase with equal vigour.

The thing that is most difficult for me here is to keep myself from going: "O, animal immanence! may thou be my telos!". This is simply a haphazard expression of something in me that wants to pounce at new possibilities of inner transformation. Bataille does not state that people should aim for this immanence whenever possible, nor does he state that the world of aimless capitalist production is thoroughly rotten, so haphazard pounces are not warranted (same goes for "capitalism sucks").

One Bataille's main concerns was having a full-rounded experience in a world where the Apollonian has taken on a monstrous form, where the subject is not an existential end but a walled-out fortress, shrouding the vast infinity of the immanent moment; the other main concern was making sure that destructive wars, to him a result of rampant accumulation and a denial of inevitable consumption, would never happen again. By illuminating the lost consciousness of humans, Bataille thought we could set a point where the surplus of accumulation really is surplus, and must be destroyed unprofitably, like the sun squanders its energy gratuitously.

Interestingly, when Bataille speaks of destruction, he does not necessarily mean that, say, a table is hacked into bits: he means that something is extracted from the cycle of productivity, like when a table is used to hold his glass of wine solely intended for his inebriation. In this example, the destruction is but fleeting, but it counts. Thus the moments of unproductivity, even moments of attained immanence where one no longer considers oneself different from objects, is not something that only philosophers or mystics can attain. As Bataille puts it: "I have not meant to express my thought but to help you clarify what you yourself think." However, there is a danger that such moments could be considered merely extensions of the cycle of production: if you drink a glass of wine only to relax and gather strength for the upcoming productive work, you are still part of the cycle.

This book was written or at least dedicated "to whom life is an experience to be carried as far as possible". A cliched yet true way of describing the aim of this work, then, would also be that it's for those who want to feel before they rot away. But what Bataille tries to point here and in his other works is that the world of thoughts, things and objects can actually stand in the way, because they reduce things to their own world, almost convincing us that no other worlds exist. For me, the biggest collation for thought was the questioning of the concept of subjectivity: as I mentioned at the beginning, subjectivity is a fortress that in Bataille's eyes differentiates itself perforce from its surroundings. It is a limit to experience.

Bataille ends his work by addressing the reader squarely. He bellows out his valedictory that echoes through worlds...

"You are not any more different from me than your right leg is from your left, but what joins us is THE SLEEP OF REASON–WHICH PRODUCES MONSTERS."

[Volbet · Rating 5 out of 5]

This could be considered an addendum to La Part maudite , but that might be selling it quite short.

As much as Georges Bataille's actually theory of religion is extremely interesting, essentially setting up a reverse of Max Weber's The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Seeing production as humans striving toward the divine through destruction/intimacy, as well as seeing rationality as an ultimately destructive force when coupled with the spiritual.

But I find this more interesting a methodological work.
This is arguably the most Hegalian that Bataille has been in his theoretical work, in no small part due to the admiration of Alexandre Kojève. Essentially, Bataille is creating a bridging point between the dialectic, structualism and what would become post-structualism.

[B. Rule · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an incredibly compressed blast of philosophical anthropology. Bataille purports to build up a picture of human interaction with the world, beginning in the formless intimacy of the divine realm (prior to or outside the distinctions of subject and object), and progressing through archaic religion, the violent waste of the festival, and into its sublimation in military conquest and ultimately the "progress" of ceaseless economic activity. One could read this text on many levels: as Hegelian dialectic pushed to its breaking point, as a theory of violence, as history, etc.

Myself, I see Bataille as a kind of atheological mystic -- he's trying to excavate to the root of Being's surfeit, then understand how human cultures seek participation in that divine excess by orgies of sacrifice and violence. It's necessarily amorphous because it's a schematic account. Bataille could find his pattern replicating across all levels of human endeavor in a fractalizing erotic desire for the destructive plenitude of The All. There were spots in this short text where that expressive compression degrades into abstruse incoherence, but overall it's a driving vision and a brilliant exercise of individual philosophical labor. Read it and think.

[Davis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second reading, and if I’m being honest with myself, I’ll admit that I understood it even less the second time around. But I fully intend to read it again, and again, and again, until I have absorbed its contents.

Bataille’s theoretical writing (I can’t comment on the novels, having never read any of them) has always struck me as comparable to an ugly tree that produces delicious fruit - at first glance the language is corse and often unpleasantly convoluted, but if one takes the time to sink into it one begins to find it revelatory, even delightful in its undulations.

Also, let me note that this theory of religion is not a “theory” in any ordinary sense - he has strong ideas about the topic, but he seems equally embarrassed by the possibility that he will be taken as elucidating a “position” for readers to adopt. This strikes me as incredibly brave and refreshing in a world over saturated with such positions, and the petty rivalries that inevitably result from these claims to individual or collective authority. You won’t find many academics with the hutzpah to write like this.

[Viktoria Chipova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review: 5/5 ⭐️
Theory of Religion – Georges Bataille

Theory of Religion is not a conventional academic treatise—it's a bold, poetic, and unsettling meditation on the sacred, excess, and the human condition. Georges Bataille dismantles traditional religious categories and instead offers a vision of religion rooted in loss, sacrifice, transgression, and the profound irrationality at the heart of the sacred.

Unlike systematic theologians or anthropologists, Bataille approaches religion as an existential experience—an eruption of the sacred that defies utility and escapes rational containment. He draws on anthropology, mysticism, Nietzschean philosophy, and his own surrealist background to present religion as a confrontation with the ineffable, the formless, the "other" of reason.

His core thesis—that early religion was tied to a cyclical, unproductive sacred economy (centered on waste, sacrifice, and dissolution)—stands in stark contrast to modern utilitarian views of human life. The book is dense, provocative, and at times abstract, but it's also visionary. Bataille's writing, hovering between philosophy and poetry, doesn’t aim to explain religion so much as evoke its terrifying beauty.

In summary:
Radical, haunting, and unlike anything else in the field, Theory of Religion is a must-read for anyone drawn to the darker, deeper edges of religious experience. It’s not just a theory — it’s a revelation. 5/5.