ABSTRACT
In reintroducing the experience of the divine at the centre of thought, philosophy has been well aware since Nietzsche ... that it questions an origin without positivity and an opening indifferent to the patience of the negative. (Michel Foucault)
For one strand of 'Continental philosophy' the main task for contemporary philosophy of religion lies in the formulation of a fully positive religious materialism. What for Kant, in the guise of 'hylozoism', was rejected summarily as the allegedly contradictory concept of 'living matter' (Kant, 1987, p. 276) is, given the 'death of God', conceived as the basis for a rethinking of the 'divine' by some of those who, following Nietzsche, undertake to complete the critique of metaphysics. This chapter will sketch some of the basic features of such a religious materialism based on the claim that, although not a term found in their texts, it is a key theme in the thought of Bataille and, more contentiously, Deleuze/Guattari.1
From this perspective the 'return of religion' which some have detected in contemporary 'Continental' thought concerns the disconcerting emergence of the sacredness of iate' capital.2
