Taboo, Truth, and Religion Selected Writings Book

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.