ToR 7: Conclusion

Part 6

Bataille references the idea of salvation by faith alone - attaining the sacred by destroying the value of these works. This is an improvement over the utilitarian mediation, but only a marginal one. Salvation by faith alone pushes off intimacy into the next world It is this deferral to the next world that the final separation between the divine world, the beyond, and the real world, the here below, occurs. The divine order can never be brought into a world that is entirely thing-ish, as it once was with festivals.

With the radical separation of the real world from the divine, the reign of autonomous things begins - industry. Non-productive destruction has long been subordinated to production by the military order, so production grows more and more - kind of a snowball effect. Everything is given over to production, including man. And, of course, large quantities of consumption.

The reduction of all things to thing hood actually allows intimacy to affirm itself in this vast expenditure; the macro development of the means of production reveals the meaning of production - that is, the non-productive consumption of wealth. That revelation is the fulfillment of self consciousness in outbursts of the intimate order. When consciousness reflects back on itself, reveals itself to itself in that self-consciousness and sees production as something to be consumed is the point at which the world of production no longer knows what to do with itself.

The condition for achieving this self consciousness - that is, consciousness that can reflect back on itself - is science - that is, a clear consciousness of the real world of objects. As science developed itself, it was turned onto the intimate order - but of course the sacred is unreal, and in order to translate it into scientifically understandable terms, it had to be calculated into the real.

If the intimate order is to be restored, it must be restored by clear consciousness; intimacy will appear to be given in that distinct knowledge discussed at the beginning of the book. The problem with the seeming appearance of the intimate in knowledge is that knowledge and intimacy have different temporal modes. As we said all the way back at the beginning, knowledge is always incomplete and differed into the future, while intimacy is immediate.

So, we may only speak of non-knowledge. If clear consciousness is going to be involved in this at all, there must be a recognition of the obscure nature of divine life. Intimacy is then the limit of clear consciousness; we cannot know anything distinct about intimacy except for the modifications of things that are linked to it. Intimacy is the shore we must stop at lest we drown in the ocean. And it is, of course, the weakness of traditional religion that it attempts to make intimacy a matter of knowledge.

Self consciousness doesn’t really need to destroy things; that would be futile anyways. Neither order can destroy the other. What consciousness can do is “reclaim its own operations,” placing them into reverse, cancelling out these operations and discursive thought with them; ultimately encountering intimacy in a kind of darkness.

The finale of the book proper is just such a reversal of operations. Clear consciousness of objects makes their destruction possible, and overflowing production makes that destruction necessary.

Bataille sits in his room, and looks around at the tools there which are a result of labor. Labor is an act that exists for the future; all work is done for a future goal. The tools Bataille has are used for his own labor. Labor produced his tools, and he will use the tools for further labor.

BUT! The booze, it ruins the productive value of the table/tool. It negates the productive value of the table *and* the labor that created the table. This negation is quite temporal, quite retro-active. All the work leading up to the moment is negated, in that brief moment.

This negation of past work and production offers a basis of self consciousness; it is a return to the state of the animal that eats another. Insofar as the productive tool is destroyed in consciousness, the tool and the profane world dissolves around me. The tool can’t be destroyed in consciousness unless there are consequences in the real order; the real reduction of the real order is a fundamental reversal of the economic order. There will always be a point in any economy when production will be negated, that is, it will flow outside. This could be done without any human thought at all, but then the expenditure turns to war; this is not inevitable. War is not the conscious, human form of expenditure.

*****

And there you have it, a seven part summary of Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion.

ToR 6: Morality, Mediation, Untrammeled Divine Violence

Part 5

In the world of spirits, the good elements were opposed to the bad elements; both groups were distant from the profane. But when the world becomes a rational, calculated place, and consciousness reflects upon this, the divine immanence that threatens the order becomes dangerous; the sacred becomes a fearful thing. Spirits, the remnants of the animated world, become mediators between the profane world and the fearful sacred world.

Another major change is at hand. Reflective thought articulates moral rules; like the law, these are obligatory relations. Whatever source is used, these moral rules are grounded in reason - reason dedicated to the duration of the profane world. Because these rules are dedicated to duration, they are necessarily opposed to the disruptive effects of expenditure or sacrifice. Because of the priority given to the real order, the divine is finally installed as protector of the real; in giving the divine “power” over the real, the divine is actually subordinated to the real’s interest. All the divine does is ratify the status quo.

The world of the spirits, now, is no longer simply the remnants of the animated world; the world of the spirits is the intelligible world, the world of the idea. The world of things becomes subordinated to the intelligible world, and so it becomes all the more divine. God becomes utterly transcendent.

Bataille argues against the possibility of intimacy with the transcendence; this would be a given intimacy, and to be “given” is to be subordinated to an end; it is already to be a thing whose intimacy is separated from it. Pure transcendence is, from the perspective of the sensuous world, total destruction, a destruction that is too complete (destroys the possibility of intimacy) and too impotent (in that given intimacy is not possible.)

Archaic violence - that is, violence pre-existed the rational military order - would have had a different problem - the destruction of the thing was totally impersonal.

In the transcendent’s movement of negation, it is no less opposed to violence than it is to the thing the violence destroys. This movement both lifts and preserves the order of things; it lifts the order by negating it’s effects of reason and morality, but condemns this lifting the very moment the real order is affected.

The real order condemns violence that may affect the order, so sacrifice’s subordination to utility becomes permanent. The anguished state of free violence then only ever has a negative place. Because sacrificial violence is roundly condemned in the dualistic world of good and evil, the search for intimacy is increasingly crippled - it goes to sleep.

And now for the chapter with the best subject headings ever.

The development of good and evil when the divine became the ratifier of the real was an awakening, but this awakening was followed by the sleep of the search for intimacy. In the dualistic world, there is no legitimate place for violence except in the rational exclusion of the sensuous world. The divine good excludes violence, and is so only available for intimacy to the degree that it has the old, repudiated violence lingering in it. To the extent that this violence is accepted, God is not good; the extent it is rejected, God is not open to intimacy.

There is an indirect route to violence and the resultant intimacy - a mediation, between the real and the sacred. Bataille offers two examples, one of which he says has always existed. An evil force kills my friend; I enter a state of openness, a mournful revelation of death, and I condemn the cruel act. In this state, I’m in accord with good. After evil has killed my friend, violence is required to restore the order of things; the problem is that it was the crime that opened up the world of intimacy to me. To the extent that the avenging violence is not an immediate extension of the criminal act, the intimacy is closed off. “For,” as Bataille says, “only vengeance that is commanded by passion and a taste for untrammeled violence is divine.”

The second form of mediation is violence coming to God from the outside. The violence must be directed towards the divinity itself, not towards my friend. The problem with this is that the sacrificed - God or my friend - can only be a mediator insofar as they renounce themselves, meaning if they didn’t die voluntarily - otherwise the violence has not come from the outside. The idea of a God sacrificing itself has several paradoxes first. First, what is sacrificed is what serves. If God was sacrificed, than God serves and is not sovereign. Another problem is that the sacrifice of the divinity involves violence that the divinity would condemn.

The morality of the real order is what governs any attempted return of the intimate order; all such attempts are ultimately subordinated to the need for duration and utility. Even Christian salvation is a utilitarian matter.

This mediation approach - the approach involving work - reduces divinity and the desire for divinity to a thing. It places both in the realm of utility.

ToR 5: War and the Glorious Soldier

Here's Part 4.

A good solid pillage has something in common with a festival; the obvious violence and destruction. The difference lies in what the pillage and the festival produces; the festival is subordinated to the duration of the group, while warfare produces the glorious soldier. The glorious soldier is not exactly an individual, but rather a divine-ish individual, through the wagering of their life; they prove they are capable of risking death, of risking that return to intimacy - and so they become associated with the spirit world, with the divine. The destruction in war is a negation of duration, but the glorious soldier makes this negation of duration durable; that movement is a futility, a naivete. Thus an occasional will to stupidity.

A further problem for the solider is that his spirituality - that association with the divine - is never anything other than utility. The soldier makes people into slaves, into commodities to be bought and sold. Any notion of the sacred here is a false pretense.

So, the slave as object becomes a possible victim of sacrifice. These useful commodities, whose very existence is a degradation of the human order, are surrender to the “baleful intimacy of unfettered violence.” Human sacrifice is the greatest possible challenge to the real order of things and utility; it is also the greatest internal violence.

The development of human sacrifice could only happen hand in hand with the development of an excess of wealth, which needed to be spent in a spectacular way. The military order, once again, subordinates this excess of wealth to utility - that of ever increasing power. Rather than radical expenditure, wealth is used to project violence outside. Human sacrifice, Bataille said, has always been rejected by military kings.

Conquest, then, is contrary to sacrifice. It is a rational and methodical use of wealth to increase power. The group with Imperial ambitions submits to the real order from the beginning; the Empire subordinates itself to an end, and everything around the Empire is subordinated to the Empire. But it is in this way that it is not really true that the Empire is subordinated to the real order — the Empire becomes the real order.

In order to maintain the diversion of violence to the outside, the Empire must develop the law. The law lays out obligatory relations between different people and things. The law mirrors morality, and takes its obligatory force from it, but their connection lies really on the border between the outside and the inside of the Empire.

In this military, rational, calculated world, consciousness deals with, and is measured by, things. This results in a dualism.

ToR Part 4: Sacrifice and the Festival

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

The foregoing is was basically a description of the situation that forays into the sacred attempts to temper. The world has moved from total continuity to general discontinuity, and now we can begin speaking of attempts to return to continuity.

So, the sacrifice. The first fruits of any harvest or the best of the livestock are sacrificed in order to remove these objects — along with the producing humans — from the world of things.

The violence of sacrifice is not random, or complete; the aim of this violence is to destroy the thing in the victim. It destroys the utility of the livestock, and the stock raisers ceases to be just a stock raiser. The sacrificer in fact acts from sovereignty, the uncalculated, perhaps non-discursive world of the spirits; it is from this position that he calls the victim from out of the alienated world of utility.

That call is a monologue, of course, and this presents another tension. The victim neither understands nor replies; sacrifice has no real relations here. No reciprocity. If these relations were taken into account, it would destroy the nature of sacrifice, which is to disturb the world of things and therefore the relations; this is what makes sacrifice appear gratuitous. The sacrificer can’t both destroy value and utility while accepting their limits.

Sacrifice does not require killing per se, but the greatest overturning of the real, valued order is the one most favorable to the appearance of the mythical order.

In the immanent state introduced by the disruption of the real, life and death lose their common significance. In immanence, death is not a negation of life.

Why? Because the world of things has duration as its foundation. No thing has a separate existence unless it is in time. Death is a threat to this; but what the real order rejects is not so much a negation of life as the affirmation of intimate life, of the immanence found in death. This affirmation of intimate life is, of course, a threat to stability, a threat to production and utility.

Death and sacrifice are not synonymous. Sacrifice restores a lost value through a relinquishment of that value; it is not necessarily violent or destruction — it is a radical giving, which is why objects that have spirits are the primarily victims. It is the antithesis of production; the ideal of sacrifice is radically anti-utilitarian. Production is concerned with the future, with duration; sacrifice is something that happens only in the moment.

In sacrifice, the individual identifies with the victim; anguish is experienced. Anguish is the fear of the loss of individuality; work in the world of discontinuous objects and the fear of dying are interrelated. Anguish is the sign of individuality; a defensive reaction on its behalf.

Because the individual identifies with the victim, the individual is partly immersed in immanence - they experience the sacred, to whatever degree.

Now, the festival presents yet another tension. In the festival, with its crazy, insane overflowing of energy and drives, the real order is utterly threatened. Everything is drowned in immanence.

The real order, however, is impossible to destroy; humanity cannot stop being human. The sacrifice threatens it, but ultimately, the sacrifice finds itself put to useful ends. The community needs to endure; it exists in time. The sacrifice is placed in service of this, with the spirit world as a mediator. The sacrifice is said to be made to the spirits - for the sake of crops and whatnot. The sacrifice is a vital part of the creation of a community; it offers both the experience of the sacred and duration.

This is the tension: the festival is only possible for the community because it rejects what it is. The sacrifice and the return to immanence - the destruction of utility - can only be performed in a community if they themselves have a utility. This is because man is tied to clear consciousness - a consciousness that distinguishes between subjects and objects.

This is what Bataille diagnoses as the basic problem of religion — it fails to see that consciousness is searching for that intimacy; sacrifice is interpreted in other ways such as atonement. Religion, as a search for lost intimacy, is the effort of a clear subject/object consciousness wanting to be a complete self-consciousness; but this is futile because intimacy refuses the clarity of consciousness.

The festival is the internal sacrifice of a group. It is a violence that has utility at the margins; however, when utility moves to the focal point of a group, the violence must become external. Why blow your own stuff up when you can blow somebody elses’ up? Hence, the origin of war as externalized violence.

ToR Part 3: God, Alienation, Cannibalism

Part 1
Part 2

This animated world inevitably has a divine flavor to it, but it is still immanence. There is still the indistinct flow of being into being, water in water. The animated, divine world, however, coupled with objects, results in a particular object being elevated over all others. This is the supreme being, distinct from the flow and limited like a thing; the attempt is to create value, but it is actually a loss of value. A particular thing - which is inevitably a finite thing - is intended to be the repository of all value.

Now, Bataille puts forth a theory about why the Abrahamic God has attained so much prestige in the world; other attempts at developing a personal God occurred in places and times in which the sense of continuity was still too strong. The fact that there are degrees of continuity remains important, though, since it is in contrast with the discontinuous world that the continuous world becomes the fascinating sacred. It is a world that is closed off to us, and this creates both fascination and horror. Horror, because it is a threat to the profane, utilitarian world of work and subjects.

The partly continuous, partly discontinuous world of animated objects becomes a hierarchy of spirits. This hierarchy is based on how much a given spirit depends on a body, in other words, how much it depends on an object. God, being pure spirit, is highest. The spirits of dead humans, animals, plants, etc, all find their places in such a hierarchy.

So, we have a hierarchy of spirits, and a world of objects. It is at this point that two things happen. First, the mind is recognized as being connected to spirits, and so the body is relegated to being an object. The mind/body split. With this new emphasis on mind, objects that were previously seen as animated subject-like things, are also quickly reduced to objects. The animated world begins to give way to a more mechanical view, a world of objects that can be controlled. This is the emergence of the real world, the final fall from a world filled with the continuous.

With the loss of this animated world, the animated objects, like animals, simply become objects. This view of animals as objects cannot be complete, of course, because they need to be domesticated or dead in order to be eaten — animals in fact only become objects to be eaten and negated when the are cooked, when humans have performed work upon them, fashioning them. To kill and alter is not to change from an animated object to a simple object, but rather to assume an animal is an object in the first place. To kill and cook is to implicitly affirm that the food was never anything but an object; hence our trouble with cannibalism. It needs to be remember this is a world with spirits, and that man is partly body, partly spirit. When a human dies, their spirit is more present than ever before. We can’t take humans to be objects that easily. After all, who does cannibalism hurt? If your soccer team crashes in the Andes, what on earth is the problem with using a permanant marker to divide up cuts of meat on your pudgy coach like fattened cattle?

An additional consequence of this fall is an alienation from this world of things created by humans. To subordinate nature into tools and utility is not only to alter the subordinated element, but to change oneself. Nature becomes subordinated to man, but man is tied to nature; it becomes property, but only on the condition that it is closed off; it ceases to have any immanence at all. It can only be utility; the river is not a river but a power source to be manipulated. But in order to this positing to take place, in order for the world to be in man’s power this way, man must forget that he is a part of this world.

Objects are compelled to have a utility, a purpose that is alien to it. The utility of a plow has nothing to do with its reality. In order to eat a cow, it has to stop being a cow; it can’t be the thing that it is. There is a chain here, of things being what they are not; the cow is not a cow, it is a head of livestock, and the human involved is a stock raiser. The head of livestock is a thing, but so is the stock raiser, during the time that they are working. A thing, a person; alienated from what they are.

ToR Part 2: Animality

Bataille's Theory of Religion basically covers a series of themes in turn, so I'll divide up my presentation according to theme. The first is immanance and animality.

So, animality. This is the word for a state of pure immanence; no distinctions, no contrasts. It is the state of animals; they have no subject/object distinction. Because of this lack of distinction, animals are not capable of submission, domination, desire, recognition and hence not self consciousness. When two animals fight, one is killed and eaten. Neither the eater nor the eaten is recognized in this; there is no qualitative difference. Neither animal is a subject. Neither do animals exist in time; nothing is given in time for them. They only have duration; there is only the present. This will obviously be an important point in the book’s conclusion.

An apt metaphor for this state might be a single note continuously humming; no past notes, no future notes, no alternate notes to contrast with so that the constant note can find some kind of individual identity. Another apt metaphor, one you might have come across when you read the book, is “water in water.”

Now, the next development is the creation of the profane world, of the stirrings of consciousness and discontinuity. Remember, in the imminent animal world, there is total continuity; not contrast. A droning hum.

What initially disturbs this flow is the positing of the object. The developed tool is what is initially recognized as discontinuous. Unlike the eaten and eater, the tool is subordinate to the one who uses it.

Now, the end of the tool and the tool’s use are different things. The tool’s use is its “in order to” – the endless chain of references; if the tool’s use is confused with its end, this results in the idea of an end which itself could not serve another purpose. This “true end” would either reintroduce continuous being, or, if this true end was itself a distinct entity, this entity would have to be found in utility, and then would not be a true end anymore.

The tool’s end is for itself; this is why it breaks the flow. It is alien to the subject, even as the subject subordinates it. The tool is posited as a separate entity with its own way of being.

Because the object is external to the subject, the knowledge the subject has of the object is external. We have knowledge the objects characteristics, and can reproduce it; this reduces our distance from the object; these objects become what is nearest and most familiar to us, despite the irreducible difference.

So this object, known clearly from without, creates an entire world of objects and things; this also opens up the possibility of a type of being which cannot be known clearly from without. Here we have animals, plants, other humans, and the subject. We needed the alternate vantage point of the external world of externally known things in order to see ourselves as subjects.

Now, by putting onto the plane of things those beings that cannot be clearly and externally known - beings like the subject - is never complete. All of these beings, we perceive as both continuous with ourselves, and as objects - as appearance in consciousness, and as objects.

Language defines the category of subject/object; with language, the subject can be considered objectively, like something known from the outside, like a thing. But this kind of objectivity, that separates subject from object, remains inevitably confused. The object that is the tool is perceived as having an affinity with the subject The object can be perceived as something that acts and thinks; the world is an animated place. My pen falls not because of a mechanistic rule, but because of an action on the part of an object.

Georges Bataille's Theory of Religion Intro

This past Friday, I had to deliver a lecture on Georges Bataille's book Theory of Religion. This was an utterly fantastic book, perhaps the best I've ever read on the subject. I'm going to simply repost my lecture notes wholesale. If you haven't actually read the book, it might all come off as a bit obscure. This was all written for people that have already read the book, and who have a bit of familiarity with a few other authors.

The book deserves a great deal more commentary than appears in my notes, but I can't say as I have time to do it. I have a half finished post on ethics that has been sitting in my drafts section for two weeks now.

I'm going to divide my notes into ten parts, of roughly one typed page length each. This first part is just my opening remarks, framing how I would speak of the book.

So with no further ado, here's part one.

Here we have a book called Theory of Religion. I think both the title and the book leave open a certain ambiguity - is this a theory of the genetic, historical origin of religion? Or is it an ontological account? Is it the story of the development of human consciousness through history, a la Hegel, or a sort of explanatory myth like Freud’s murdered father? The way this question is answered will affect the way you critique it. Not that I’m offering a critique, but I think this question places the first two sections, especially, in perspective.

The first section begins an important theme - there is a boundary to cohesive knowledge; one who “reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him.” The second section is also related to the finitude of thought. Thought remains finite; never complete. It is always differed into the future. This inevitable incompleteness is not an excuse to throw up one’s hands and say “Vanity, vanity, all thought is vanity;” it is simply a critique all reason must submit to.

Discursive thought, then, never concludes; it is always projecting into the future. However - and this is what makes this an ontological musing rather than an epistemological one, Bataille notes the simple fact that no one can “be” independent of an understanding of being. We always already exist understandingly; this is not discursive knowledge that can be differed. Any and all research or accumulated knowledge may alter this understanding, but it can never be pretended that the understanding is not prior. Our perspective is limited, and therefore necessarily mobile. Knowledge of course needs to be formulated, but an end state - a final, exhaustive interpretation of being into discursive thought, is not possible. Several times through the book, he repeats this point; intimacy can only be approached poetically. It cannot be articulated... but of course we’ll all try anyways.

So I answered my own question there. This is a book of ontological, not a history of religion. This point is important to keep in mind later in the book, when Bataille comments on animal behavior; to bring up observational data from the animal or human world would be to miss the point; these are ontological issues, issues of being as such, not Discovery channel style ontic observations. This also indicated by the pains Bataille takes to show that we cannot engage in anything other than idle speculation about a world without human consciousness. To whatever degree that this book can be mapped onto an actual past is a contingent matter. Bataille uses temporal language, of course, and so does my presentation, and this makes it seem like a historical progression, but I still think the best way look at all of this is as a series of structural moments.

I'll begin post my summary of the book itself tommorow, with one part following each day thereafter.