Friday, January 23, 2004
(11:05 AM) | Anonymous:
Religion is only possible with innocence: A hasty review of Georges Bataille's hasty Theory of Religion
Georges Bataille is one of those crazy French thinkers who took Nietzsche and sex way too seriously and he is brilliant for it. In his Theory of Religion he, as usual, makes a very brief and still brilliant analysis of how religion works in human society. Basic premise, as stated on the back cover, Religion is an attempt to regain a lost intimacy but what the back leaves out is that Bataille also recognizes religion's usually sublimation into the status quo, the Real order. Of course there is a thousand voices going on at one and the same time in Bataille's book but the most fascinating voice to me is captured in this block quote (that I hope Adam will forgive me for using):
"Religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, comes down to the effort of clear consciousness which wants to be a complete self-consciousness: but this effort is futile, since consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is, at the level where clarity, which is the effect of the operation, is no longer given."
My reading, which is of course just a reading, is that religion, as a search for lost intimacy, is only possible when you don't think about it. The minute you begin to make conscious your search the search is lost, just as when the husband tries in vain to make his marriage whole after it has already died.
But now I have to go to work.
