"Bataille does not cease to interrogate the advent of a society, ours, that totally liberated the production of things from its archaic finality, which was the unproductive destruction of the surplus, a destruction mostly realized in religious sacrifices. These sacrifices had a fundamental function: they operated, according to Bataille, as a return to intimacy, a reaffirmation of the immanence between man and the world, through the death of the sacrificed animal.
It is this return to intimacy, to the immanence where the opposition between world and mankind, life and death, the subject and the object, was cancelled during the time of sacrifice, that does not take place anymore in the societies that favor industrial growth over all other goals. Taking into account industrial development and its tendency to separate completely the “divine intimacy” and the “order of the real,” Bataille tries to think of the place, the state, and the residual role of religion in an industrial and productive society that pushed to the limits“the reign of things” and radically renounced the quest of intimacy and of immanence, an immemorial quest that, through the always returning sacrificial cult, has produced the meaning of all the religions of the past."
Jean Joseph Goux Georges Bataille and the Religion of Capitalism in
Negative Ecstasies edited by Jeremy Biles & Kent L. Britnall (2015) p.106 (link)