Marx
and the Sacred
James Luchte
Contents
Introduction: Marx and the Sacred
Chapter 1: Into the Breach – the Meaning of Marx
Chapter 2: Marx’s Criticism of Religion
Chapter 3: From Religion to the Sacred
Chapter 4: Sacred Rebellion and Marx
Chapter 5: Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology
Chapter 6: Marx, Heidegger and “eigenlichkeit”
Chapter 7: A Violent Sacred? – Marx and Bataille
Chapter 8: A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx
Conclusion: The Sacred After Marx
Introduction: Marx and the Sacred
Religious suffering is at one and the same time
the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the
soul of soulless conditions.[i]
Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic
compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur,
its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source
of consolation and justification. It is
the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no
true reality. The struggle against
religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is
the spiritual aroma.[ii]
Perhaps the most formidable obstacle in the task of retrieving a sense of the sacred in Marx consists in his repeated, and often polemical, statements against religion. Indeed, such an obstacle may in the end be one of our own making, as we are trapped within the labyrinth of our own historical understanding.[iii] Yet, assuming, for the moment, that religion and the sacred are the same phenomena, if we take his pronouncement that religion is the opium of the people in isolation, we may be lead to believe that Marx felt that at best religion - and thus the "sacred" - is a narcotic, which while it may be utilized to alleviate pain, remains an illusory amelioration for a situation of despair. Religion as an opiate not only implies sedation from the pain of a life of exploitation, but also suggests a systematic and strategic attempt to deaden or absorb any critical impulse to liberation. In this sense, Marx’s characterization of religion as an opiate is a forerunner to many of the most radical criticisms of religion in Twentieth Century theology and philosophy – Gutierrez, Miranda, Bultmann, Heidegger and Bataille. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, articulated a sense of the sacred in the wake of Marx and his deconstruction of religion as an ideology.
The kinship which is shared by each of these thinkers is a
disdain for mere religion in favour of the “sacred”.[iv]
Religion simultaneously constructs a “picture” (Bild)
for contemplation (Anschauung) and an
organization that cultivates our captivity to that “picture”. The sacred, on the contrary, indicates
obligation and commitment, and an engaged, affirmative eruption of liberation
amidst finite existence. Religion
constructs its eternal church as an everlasting perpetuation of the “picture”,
of an idol, while the sacred exults in this moment of lived existence,[v]
in the haeccitas of Duns Scotus. If religion is a “rational” and ‘systematic’
orchestration of feeling and phenomena, the sacred is an attempt to seek access
to a phenomenon beyond the array of objectification towards traces of the numen.
Indeed, for Otto, one need merely begin amidst this singular event.
In light of this preliminary
distinction between religion and the sacred, it will be the task of Marx and the Sacred to excavate and disclose
in the writings and historical activism of Marx an affirmative sense of the
sacred which is alterior to his inherently negative conception of
religion. Amid Marx’s empathy with the
"sigh of the oppressed creature", we can glimpse a sense of the
sacred dissociated from a religious leviathan that merely serves
to perpetuate suffering - a sacred that exists as a radical commitment to
liberation. In this way, I will contend
that Marx’s criticism of religion as an ideology of oppression and sedation in
no way forecloses on a possible relationship with Twentieth Century attempts to
articulate a sense of the sacred. There
emerges in these latter attempts the possibility of an openness which
lays out a space for a personal encounter with a sense of a sacred not mediated
by ideology.
In this way, that which will be
disclosed as the “unity” and coherence in these encounters of Marx with
different strands of Twentieth century theology and philosophy is the inner
kernel of “obligation” and “commitment”, of affirmation, against nihilism and
oppression - this "inner kernel" is an openness to the Sacred. That which is sought is an indication in
Marx’s writings and advocacy of a personal expression and articulation of the
Sacred which transcends both scientific prognostication and political advocacy. What we seek is the deeper ground of the
Sacred in Marx.
Otto suggests in the first part of
his seminal work The Idea of the Holy[vi]
that there is a non-rational, non-moralistic, and obscure feeling, a
fascination and dread, in the wake of the numinous,
the Mysterium Tremendum,
the Augustus, which intimates to the
mortal self a radically overwhelming and power of the holy, of the Sacred. Such an apprehension stands outside of the
rationalist, moralistic program of mere
religion as ideology, of the merely
Apollonian. It is that which stimulates, arouses the mortal being to affirm the
sacred – in the well of feeling, amidst this Dionysian eruption of the
event. Such an incitement enacts and
intimates a sense of the sacred amid the world – expressed in poetry, the work
of art, and praxiς. It is a call to a radical phenomenology of the sacred – not of rationalist
morality or dogma – of mere religion
- but of a sacred affirmation, one which is situated, for Marx, amidst the
historical topos of Capital.
Ideology is a picture which,
problematically, indicates the truth of the world. A picture is untimely – de-temporalized - and thus, the notions, pictures of the
“natural” – of species, population, nation, race, and humanity are merely
idealizations (and erasures) of the concrete situations of lived existence…
this place of strife, conflict and love.
An “ideal unity” and ultimate meaning, picture, of “life” is an ideology
which operates as an erasure of a temporality of liberation amid this fractured existence of an alleged “humanity” – another ideology.
For Marx, there exists a temporal and existential dialectic of action amidst a
discordant and coercive matrix of terrestrial power. This dialectic indicates the actuality of
freedom, of a free existence. Yet,
Marx’s commitment to such an emerging actuality of freedom comes into conflict
with religion as a disciplinary matrix of the individual soul. However, if we can agree that mere religion plays a negative or
sedative role in the thought of Marx, this does not preclude the possibility of
an existential or ethical openness to an affirmation of the sacred. Indeed, as I will seek to show, the very
criticism of religion by Marx is, in the context of his writings and actions,
indicates an affirmation of the sacred. That which is essential is an openness
which, following Otto, Bonhoeffer, Eliade, Altizer and others,
enacts a personal commitment which transcends, overwhelms, the self –
existentially prior to the posited ‘stems’ of “theory” and “practice” – this
moment of an ecstatic ‘event’ beyond, but as, existence.[vii]
The texts that bring me directly to
the sacred in Marx are his early poetry (and the traces of his poiηsiς
which emerge throughout his life and later works). I will attempt to enact a retrieval of the sacred in
his early poetry and writings which explicitly affirm a personal, existential
obligation and commitment to revolution.
We can find a beginning of his lifelong commitment in his
early poetic writings - before philosophy.
I refuse to simply dismiss these
works as merely immature eruptions of "enthusiasm" (that would be to
rubber-stamp the notion of linear temporal development of a thinker – into
periods - which I think is suspect).
Marx may have supplemented his early writing of poetry with the concrete
texts of the epigramist
and social theorist, but the traces
of the poetic opening which signal his affirmation, his obligation, intersect
his entire so-called mature work, from the literary and rhetorically dramatic
works such as The Communist Manifesto,
the Eighteenth Brumaire,
The Holy Family to the traces of his
early poetic awareness in his many key references to Shakespeare in Capital and his earlier Contribution and Grundrisse. His opening, and
beginning, in poiηsiς
stands in contrast, but is ultimately complementary to, his notion of praxiς . His poetry marks the breach in the usual depiction of
his work as merely scientific, or as, Miranda[viii]
writes, “Western”. Marx’s poetry guides
and envelops his “scientific” prose. As
Heraclitus writes, “An unapparent connexion is stronger than an apparent one.”[ix] Marx’s “analysis” is not that of a distinterested observer, abiding safe on the island of
knowledge. He writes amidst the act, in
the trajectory of obligation, commitment and praxiς. His
writings, in this way, could be described as a poetry of existence.[x]
In this light, I am trying to
excavate the sacred impulse expressed in Marx’s poetry, which continues to
underscore and find expression in his works and life. Indeed, beyond the texts and the allusion to
the [un]said, there is the unmistakable affirmation in the life of Marx -
especially in his political advocacy and in his difficult fatherhood. I do not believe we should see Marx as a mere political reductionist,
junky – or as a one-dimensional man[xi]
- he may have been an "atheist"[xii]
with regards the Judeo-Christian or Islamic traditions, but that does not mean
he must stand outside the sacred.[xiii]
In the following, I will begin with
the question of the meaning of Marx in the controversy surrounding the
“continuity” or “discontinuity” of the works of Marx. In Into the Breach: the Meaning of Marx,
I will examine the theory of the “epistemological break” of Althusser and set
forth a criticism which calls for a complete openness to the various works of
Marx. I will next lay out an
interpretation of the extant statements made by Marx concerning religion as
such in Marx's Criticism of Religion,
providing a critique of ideology as Weltanschauung
(World-view, contemplation) which seeks to forbid a strategy of interpretation
which is oriented to praxiς. I will follow this with the development of a
distinction between religion and the Sacred in From Religion to the Sacred.
I will contrast the terrestrial requirements of religious production and
reproduction with the dysteleological (Otto and Urpeth) affirmation of the Sacred in the moment. In light of this distinction and its
relationship to Marx’s criticism of religion, I will next consider the
relationship of revolutionary thought to the Sacred in Sacred Rebellion and Marx. I
will consider the role of the sacred in the works of Gustavo Gutierrez and Jose
Miranda in light of their commitment to liberation of the poor. In the wake of their explicit affirmation of
Marx’s criticism of capitalist exploitation, I will question the purist
interpretation of Marx’s critique of ideology in light of an explicit capacity
for resistance in a radicalised – Miranda would say “true” - Christianity. I will next turn to a consideration of the
relationship of Marx to 20th Century Theology in Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology. Rudolph Bultmann will serve as the exemplar
of this historical movement in theology.
I will be examining the affinities and differences between Bultmann’s
project of de-mythologization and Marx’s criticism of
ideology in light of the notions of ‘obligation’ and ‘commitment’. In a specification of the sense of Marx’s
commitment, I will next consider the Heidegger’s radical criticism of Marx as a
mere “man of action”. Marx, Heidegger and ‘eigentlichkeit’
will raise the question the sense of the sacred (or lack thereof) with respect
to the existential decision of commitment and action. I will disagree with Heidegger’s contention
that Marx failed to articulate a pre-theoretical understanding of existence and
world. I will contend that Heidegger’s
portrayal of Marx as a mere “man of
action” fails to appreciate the depth of Marx’s personal obligation and
commitment to a radical historical transformation of the world. It is Marx’s poetry which allows us a
plausible dismissal of Heidegger. Amid
the horizon of the same question, I will explore the intercourse betwixt Marx
and the post-structuralist thinker, writer, and
activist Georges Bataille in A Violent Sacred: Marx and Bataille. I
will explore the various pathways for such a commitment, the most significant
of which is Marx’s advocacy of violent (“on the outside, trying to get inside”)
revolution as perhaps the most explicit indication of a sacred affirmation in
Marx – but in a negative, actively nihilist, sense.
Without downplaying the necessity
of Marx’s commitment to a revolutionary social transformation of the world, I
will explore the possibility of an affirmative
sense of the sacred in Marx, beyond the sacrificial logic of mere political and social violence. The event
of dialectical praxiς, of
revolution, as an intimacy of thought and action, forecloses on a merely voluntarist (or,
on the contrary, “scientific”) interpretation of Marx. Seeking a more thoughtful and poetic Marx, I
will begin to delve into the inner kernel of his thought in A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx, a
hermeneutical examination of his early poetry in which he allows himself to
express an explicit affirmation of the Sacred.
I will investigate the poems Transformation,
Creation and Awakening. This
consideration of Marx’s early poems will also provide the avenue for
re-thinking the meaning of his later works.
In this sense, we can, in the
spirit of Reiner Schürmann[xiv]
read Marx backward in a desire to come to grips with the root of his
affirmation. Yet, differing from the
reading the works of Heidegger, we must read Marx forwards, and then
backwards, in a circle, as it were, so as to attempt to cast into relief not only
Marx's own consistent existential and social eqos,
but also his affirmation of revolution
as an event amidst this finite moment.
Chapter 1:
Into the Breach – the Meaning of “Marx”
Before we can begin to grapple with our question of the
“relation” of Marx and the sacred, we must undertake a more preliminary
investigation of the meaning of Marx. This philological problem
that stands in our face is the question of the various – and often mutually
exclusive - interpretations of the very topoς of Marx. On its face, such diversity of interpretation
should indeed be encouraged. Yet, in
many instances, interpretation has been over-determined by “political”
exigency. Like a contortionist, Marx has
been forced into one posture after another in order to justify a specific
political program. Of course, this is no
surprise as Marx himself was a highly political and politicised thinker. However, as “politics” concerns not necessarily
truth, but mere power and strategy, we will be careful not to allow
“Marx” to be manufactured as just another ideology. There must be an attempt to remain faithful
to the texts and life of Marx so as to disclose the meaning of his work beyond
the fleeting projections of political expediency.[xv] There is no “Marx” an sich, there for
our immediate reckoning – there is no “agreed framework”. Amidst a vast topography of interpretation,
we can apprehend many variants of the formal indicator “Marx”. Yet, it would seem possible to allow the
texts to speak for themselves – in the first instance, through a consideration
of all of Marx’s corpus as a whole.
Such contortions and renderings took place in Marx’s own
lifetime. One need only recall the
well-known anecdote of his dissension at a meeting of the Second International,
in which he declared, in response to a particular interpretation of his
political economic theories, that he was not a Marxist. The question of the meaning of Marx continued
in the theoretical controversies – especially those concerning Capital –
in the formation of the Third International between Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg,
Hilferding and others. A more recent
controversy concerns the status of his early writings, such as the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844).
This controversy however is unique.[xvi]
Unlike the earlier theoretico-political disputations which concerned the
interpretation of available texts, such as the drafts of Capital, this
controversy is a contestation over the very texts which may be included
in the relevant opus of Marx. This
dispute is a struggle between two of the most dominant tendencies in Marx
interpretation since 1932. It concerns a
decision on the part of the interpreter upon the relevance of Marx’s earlier
works, many of which were unpublished.
It was not until this year that Marx’s early writings began to be
published, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, his
Dissertation on the differences between Epicurus and
Democritus, his critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the state, his poetry,
etc. All of these texts are forcefully
suppressed by Althusser. Yet, we ask -
why?
It may be significant that none of the earliest Communist
thinkers ever read these earlier texts – although it will be argued that no
book is a prerequisite for the event of revolutionary praxiς. Yet, it is certain that, with the publication
of these works, many party-affiliated “communist” intellectuals dismissed the
libertarian sentiments and philosophical concerns of these works as
pre-scientific and idealist. Indeed,
such an opinion held sway as later interpreters such as Althusser declared
Marx’s early writings irrelevant to that which should be deemed as his true
achievement – a science of history. For
Althusser, the early writings are too close in affiliation with Hegelian and
post-Hegelian idealism and thus do not achieve the level of science. For Althusser, and the many who follow this
view,[xvii]
Marx had undertaken an “epistemological break” in his displacement of
philosophy by scientific materialism. In
this way, Althusser represents the variant of “Marx” interpretation which
posits a discontinuity in his work – he is a “discontinuity theorist”. On the other side of this great divide are
those who have emphasized the significance of Marx’s early studies of
alienation and his libertarian vision of communist revolution. Such thinkers, such as Ollman,[xviii]
wish to envision Marx’s work as in continuity, as a network of internal
relations, in becoming, and as a result, have to a great extent re-cast the
interpretation of Marx’s later works in the light cast by the earlier
philosophical works. In this context,
such thinkers could be described as “continuity theorists”.
In the absence of any explicit repudiation by Marx of his
earlier work, it is the contention of this strand of Marx interpretation that
there is no need to censor or suppress the reading and interpretation of
these texts. In other words, there is no
need to accept the meaning of Marx which has been handed to us by
Althusser et. al.. Indeed, it will be
argued below that all of Marx’s later insights were originally developed in his
early works. Capital did not
simply fall from the sky, and this text exhibits traces of these early
works.
In the following, I will argue for the significance of Marx’s
earlier works. While there is never a
total continuity in any life, witnessed as a coherent field of discontinuous
events, I feel there is no essential incompatibility between the early and
later works. Yet, not only will I argue for
the necessity of investigating Marx’s early philosophical work, but I will also
argue that Marx’s poetry must be included in the “Canon”. Indeed, I will contend that Marx perhaps
undertook a break, but one differing in character from that proposed by Althusser. That which erupts in Marx is a poetic space
in which he began to explore the sense and contours of obligation and
commitment, of the sacred, a space, as with dasein in Heidegger or the
ethical in Levinas, where an alterior sensibility is disclosed which is not
articulated via the theoretical and practical ‘logics’ of rational
organization. There has been no
significant treatment of Marx’s poetry which is usually described, as with
Nietzsche and his poetic and musical works, as early enthusiasms – at the worst
embarrassing, at the best, irrelevant.
In the following, I will begin with an examination and criticism of
Althusser’s interpretation of the meaning of Marx and of his suppression of the
latter’s earlier works. On the basis of
this examination and criticism, I will articulate an argument for the inclusion
of the early works in the corpus of texts which will be the topos for an interpretation of
the meaning of Marx. I will contend
that this inclusivity is necessary in order to ask what have become forbidden
questions.
Althusser:
Marxism as a New Science
Althusser allows for no ambiguity in
the question of the meaning of Marx.
Indeed, he is very clear that it is not even a matter of
interpretation. The question of an interpretation of Marx is not even
raised. In fact, such a possibility is
suppressed. In his lecture, “Lenin and
Philosophy”, given to the French Society of Philosophy in February 1968,
Althusser sets forth a rhetorically “scientific” picture of Marx. This picture indicates a situation in which a
reduction is being offered as a new continent, a new episteme, as that which destroys
that which is there in the initiation of a discursive formation, a new
science. And for him, this is the only
picture which ultimately matters. He simply
states that Marx’s early works deserve no consideration – perhaps, in that they
are children of their times – they are “philosophical” in the worse sense of
the word – a “false path”.[xix] Philosophy becomes a mere rumination upon
itself and its own questions – divorced from historical considerations,
questions of its own implication in the materialist regime and dissemination of
capitalist power. Althusser states that
philosophy – even critical or post-critical – remains implicated in a regime of
indoctrination in an educational system which is part and parcel of the
ideological state apparatus. No matter
what, philosophy, as orchestrated in a system of education amid a class
society, serves to propagate capitalist ideology in those who are forced into
the indenture servitude of the student.
Philosophy, as it is, cannot escape its status as ideology, on
its own. It needs an intervention from
the outside - a theory of philosophy as a “false path”.
For Althusser, such an “outside” is
intimated and demonstrated in some works of Marx. He points to two traces in the works of the
Marx, the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach and the statement in the German
Ideology that this latter work is written to “settle accounts with an
erstwhile philosophical consciousness”.
Althusser casts the Eleventh Thesis as a premonition of a breach
with philosophy in an attempt to articulate a new science of material
history. The German Ideology,
which was also unpublished, is also interpreted as a displacement of philosophy
via a materialist science of history. Of
all the early works, Althusser focuses only upon the Eleventh Thesis,
and he is only concerned with the first phrase, “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world”. Philosophy in
this way is only ideology – ‘interpretation’ is ideology. For Althusser, the “authentic” significance
of Marx is that he is concerned with a science of the world. This science is articulated not only in the German
Ideology but also in Capital and other political economic
works.
Despite his earlier criticism of philosophy as being a mere
indoctrination system, Althusser states that there is, in the current period,
no exit from the categories and labels which will serve to orient the meaning
of Marx with respect to the division of concepts into science, philosophy,
sociology, etc. In this way, Althusser
seems to accept the academic division of labour of capitalist indoctrination,
despite his resistance to this regime.
Indeed, he projects this division upon Marx in the distinction between
philosophy and science. Upon the basis
of this projection, Althusser suppresses the early philosophy work of Marx in
order to orchestrate a particular meaning for the later, so-called scientific
works. With the early works excised, the
later works can be pictured as pursuits of “objective knowledge”, of science,
intellectual praxiς - within the limits of reason alone. Indeed, it could be argued, against
Althusser, that in such a divorcement of context, these works could in the end
be interpreted according to whatever paradigm or ideological context that one
may choose.
That which is significant for
Althusser is the explication of the “operation” of philosophy, one which gives
off the reek of ideology. It is amidst
this realisation that philosophy is a regime of ideology that it becomes
possible to elaborate a theory and a description of philosophy as a “false
path”. With this realization, it becomes
possible not only to understand the implication of philosophy in a regime of
indoctrination but also to articulate the possibility of a theoretical
intervention which displaces the stratagems of ideology in favour of an
unveiled disclosure of concrete “reality”.
In this way, we can see Althusser’s address on Lenin as such an
intervention.
Althusser purports a scenario in
which Marx breaks from philosophy. His
evidence is, on one hand, the “philosophical emptiness” that is allegedly
exhibited in the wake of the “epistemological break” announced in The German
Ideology. Althusser seems to merely
accept the academic definitions or pictures of philosophy – not only as a
separate discipline, distinct from the others, but also as specific portrait of
philosophy as an ontological discourse akin to religion and ethics, each
conceived in an idealist sense. Althusser
declares that, even if we can accept his definition, Marx never again, after
the break, wrote philosophy, he was no longer engaged in “interpretation” but
emerged into the Real, the Science of Concrete Historical
What was announced
in the Theses on Feuerbach was, in the necessarily philosophical
language, of a declaration of rupture with all ‘interpretive’ philosophy,
something quite different from a new philosophy: a new science, the science of
history, whose first, still infinitely fragile foundations Marx was to lay in
The German Ideology.[xx]
Althusser
characterizes Marx’s “philosophical emptiness” as the proclamation of the
“radical suppression of all existing philosophy…”[xxi] The emptiness is the awakening of the
“fullness of a science.”[xxii] Althusser attributes to Marx a suppression of
philosophy as it is a “hallucination”, “mystification”, and a “dream” – as it,
in other words, abides some relation with the imagination, poetry, or art.[xxiii] Althusser asserts,
Philosophy, like
religion and ethics, is only ideology, it has no history, everything which
seems to happen in it really happens outside it, in the only real history, the
history of the natural life of men, known by the action which reveals it by
destroying the ideologies that veil it: foremost among these ideologies is
philosophy.[xxiv]
The
veil of philosophy must be torn asunder as it is merely a manufactured article
of a capitalist imagination. The new
science will suppress and destroy philosophy as an imaginative artefact (poiηsiς) in order to allow the
World of the Real – Science – to emerge as a new source for knowledge. The character of this new episteme, the new science (scientia) is a system of concepts, a nexus which
displaces a mere play among “ideological notions.”[xxv]
In order to cast his theory, his
interpretation of “Marx”, into relief, Althusser sets out a topographical
metaphor of the sciences as regional formations, as continents, of the World of
Science. The formation of each continent
occurs in an epistemological break. We
can imagine the breaking off of continents in the terrestrial drift of plate
tectonics. The break is destructive, but
also creative or formative of novelty, in this case, of a new “real” – science
– a new episteme. Among the continents
Althusser identifies are Mathematics (including its sub-grouping Logic),
Physics (including Chemistry and Biology), and perhaps, Althusser muses, a
continent that has been opened up by Freud.
Yet, Althusser is more certain about the new continent opened by Marx,
although, in the manner of a good scientist, he sets forth this theory as a
hypothesis, as a proposition, one that is to be put to the test. Althusser proposes,
Marx has opened up
to scientific knowledge a new third scientific continent, the continent of
History, by an epistemological break whose first still uncertain strokes are
inscribed in The German Ideology, after having been announced in the Theses
on Feuerbach.[xxvi]
Althusser
reassures us that he is only testing the possibility of this new
continent. We are to judge along with
him. Indeed, this break, this event, is
not, as he warns, instantaneous. Such an
event becomes apparent in the midst of a historical re-organization of concrete
existence, occurring in the wake of such a breach. Indeed, that which we consider to be an
instantaneous novelty could be the fruit or recurrence of an ancient
longing. Yet, even in its subtlety and
its requirement of patience, Althusser wishes to apply his theory of an
epistemological break to the question of the meaning of Marx. He states,
In fact, the
operation of these reorganizations, which affect essential concepts and their
theoretical components, can be observed empirically in the sequence of Marx’s
writings: in the Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy of 1847,
in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy of 1859, in Wages,
Prices and Profits of 1865, in the first volume of Capital in 1867,
etc.[xxvii]
As
we have heard, the break is announced in the Theses on Feuerbach and
given a few preliminary strokes in The German Ideology. In an uncritical positivist vein, Althusser
states that the subsequent texts exhibit empirical evidence of a
re-organization in the wake of the breach.
Moreover, this is a scientific break, a declaration of
independence of Scientia from Sophia. The implications of this break are radical
and manifold. In the midst of this
event, philosophy must remain silent, it must be suppressed as it is. Working from a rather academic and political,
or, in other words, Platonic, definition of philosophy, Althusser states, in
reference to Lenin,
Lenin began his book
State and Revolution with this simple empirical comment: the State has
not always existed; the existence of the State is only observable in class
societies. In the same way, I shall say:
philosophy has not always existed; the existence of philosophy is only
observable in a world which contains what is called a science or a number of
sciences. A science in the strict sense:
a theoretical, i.e. ideal (idéelle) and
demonstrative discipline, not an aggregate of empirical results.[xxviii]
Althusser
draws a broad conclusion from this observation, indicated, we will recall, in
the context of a discussion of the emergence into the Light of a new episteme, a new science of
History. In order to clarify the
relation between philosophy and science in this context, Althusser invokes
Hegel’s myth of the Owl of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom who only flies at
dusk. Minerva/Athena born from the head
of Jupiter/Zeus evokes a philosophy of evening and Night. Yet, as Althusser is not open to the
influence of such a Night upon the contours of the new day, he focuses merely
upon that which he calls the dawn – science - that which could, in the end, if
he is mistaken, be the longest and darkest of nights. Althusser enters a mythological topoς, but retains the
posture of an ‘objective scientist’.
Philosophy is not yet, it is a possible recurrence under certain
specific conditions. He states,
Philosophy is this
always a long day behind the science which induces the birth of its first form
and the rebirth of its revolutions, a long day which may last years, decades, a
half-century or a century.[xxix]
Althusser
thus offers us, at a lag, the possibility of a new philosophy. The pre-scientific philosophy will be
suppressed either directly or indirectly in the wake of the scientific epoce. Indeed, any new
philosophy must be born from the scientific inducement of an epistemological
break. Succumbing, perhaps, to this warmed-over Hegelian myth, Althusser states
that a Marxist philosophy will arise only in the newly founded neighbourhood of
a Marxist science of History. In a very
poetic, though bastardised, vein, Althusser states,
The day is always
long, but as luck would have it, it is already far advanced, look: dusk will
soon fall. Marxist philosophy will take
wing.[xxx]
It
is in this way that Althusser bids farewell to philosophy as it has and does
exist – he welcomes an eclipse, a new dark age.
He embraces the philosophical primitivism of Lenin (and of Engels) as
this is interpreted as a sign of an emergence of a primitive consciousness of
the “concrete” from behind the veil of ideology. The day is long, it is not yet dusk. A new philosophy is to be reborn, recur, amid
complex re-organizations of philosophy in the wake of the “epistemological
break”. Perhaps, it smoulders as the
“unknown continent” of Freud, a student of Nietzsche. Yet, despite the rhetorical tentativeness of
his “proposition” of Marxist history as a new continent, Althusser reiterates
his disdain for Marx’s early writings in criticisms of Lukacs
and Gramsci.
Those who cannot wait out the “long day” proclaim a “philosophy of
praxis”, take their point of departure from “Marx”, in proximity to Hegel - not
in the Real of Science.
The topoς of Revolution: a Criticism of Althusser
The meaning of Marx for
Althusser consists in a theory of an “epistemological break” from the false
path, ideology, of philosophy, to the science of History. As stated, this is not a shift from one
philosophy to another, but of one episteme to another. In the wake of this break, all existing
philosophy becomes silent in the wake of a new dispensation of truth. Only after this dawn, after a long day, can
philosophy, at dusk, take flight. In the
context of this narrative, we must forget Marx’s pre-scientific, philosophical
works as these are creatures of a Night that had never known a dawn, have never
set foot upon the ground of a new science.
Althusser never explicitly mentions Marx’s poetry, but in light of his
dismissive reference to “God-builders” among some of the members of Mach’s
circle, it is not difficult to fathom his line on this issue.[xxxi]
It is clear that publication was not
a criterion for Althusser. He had the
benefit to live in the post-1932 generation in which all of Marx’s texts were
available. Yet, on the basis of his
theory of a “Marxist science”, he unflinchingly suppresses all of the texts
which pre-date the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach. This is a strange decision, especially in
light of his reliance on Hegelian metaphors, but one that operated according to
a quite straight forward logic. From the
latter text, Althusser deduces that it is interpretation that is illusory, and
in The German Ideology, he points out that Marx wishes to “settle
accounts” with philosophy. From these
facts, Althusser alleges a radical break from “all existing philosophy”. His supporting evidence for this
interpretation is the “philosophical emptiness” which followed the announcement
of the break. Since philosophy is
criticised by Marx and since it is alleged that Marx no longer wrote
philosophy, an epistemological break is certain enough for Althusser that he
will effectively and overtly reject Marx’s earlier works. For him, the theory is proven.
An initial point of contention for Althusser’s picture of
Marx is this preliminary scenario in which Althusser defines his terms. Indeed, Althusser’s theory of an
“epistemological break”, as it is applied to “Marx”, remains parasitic upon the
academic division of labour in its definition, planning, orchestration, and
assessment of the boundaries of several disciplines. Foucault, a fallen student of Althusser, will
designate these disciplines as “truth regimes”.
While it may be argued that amidst such a system there is no exit from
its historical limits and horizons, in this case the division of labour, such a
perspective remains blind to other phenomena and possibilities. From an existential perspective, it could be
argued that Marx was not an academic, even though he received his doctorate in
philosophy with a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus. As his thought is of the “outside”, it is not
clear whether we can understand Marx from the perspective of the academic
division of labour, of its “pictures” and formal specifications of philosophy
and science. It is certainly possible to
conceive of the so-called “scientific works” as explications of truth in a
deeply philosophical sense. Indeed, one
can point out enormous philosophical continuities between Capital for
instance and the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. One could also find a marked similarity
between the German Ideology and Marx’s early poems Transformation,
Creation and The Awakening.
Yet, it is upon this political-academic division that Althusser sets his
application of the theory of the epistemological break (although this is not
necessary, but a different sense of such a breach could alter the limits of
“canonical” texts). In a rather crude
way, Althusser lays out his theory of a “philosophical emptiness” on the basis
of these academic demarcations. In his
indication of the signs of a re-organization in philosophy, he lists the works
on political economy which followed The German Ideology and the Theses
on Feuerbach. Althusser seems to
naively accept the disciplinary division between philosophy and political
economy and of history without question.
Since Marx is centered on political economics, he is not focussed upon
philosophy. And thus, he has broken with
philosophy… Althusser cannot let himself
conceive of Capital as a philosophical work, as a pathway of
articulation which discloses of logoς of truth.
Even if we, just for an instant,
submit to this logic of identity and discipline to which Althusser seems to
have already acquiesced, we may question the “identity” projected upon Marx’s
texts (and the blind violence to the eqoς and poihsiς of Marx’s life).
Indeed, it would seem that Althusser reifies the academic division of
labour into a historical necessity and forgets the bios of the street. Within the same parameters of evidence, of
the Eleventh Thesis and The German Ideology, and the later string
of works on political economy, we could give a radically different
interpretation than that proposed by Althusser.
In the first instance, as already suggested, these works are
explications of the conditions and limits of truth in a philosophical sense. Indeed, Marx shares with Althusser a
criticism of idealist philosophies in all of the texts which precede The
German Ideology. Yet, his so-called
scientific works are not only seeking truth, but are orchestrated conceptually
according to familiar philosophical patterns.
For instance, the analysis of money in the Contribution to a Critique
of Political Economy is hardly the articulation of a simple empirical
fact. It is a highly orchestrated and
post-Hegelian analysis of the dialectical conditions for the emergence of the
social relationship of money. The significance
of Marx’s transformative appropriation of Hegelian dialectics with respect to
his portrayal of the myriad social relationships amid the capitalist era, a
philosophical strategy that is shared by the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State
and the Contribution, and indeed, Capital, is Marx’s concern to
intimate the existential situation of concrete estrangement in the capitalist
era.
Moreover, as Marx is not merely a “scientist” or an “epistemologist”,
but a revolutionary and a finite human being, his emphasis upon the
estrangement of human existence also abides an indication of pathways, of praxiς, which may
transform this temporal situation.
Perhaps, if we were working from that reductionistic agenda as
Althusser, we could consent to the picture of Marx as a “scientist.” Yet, this would be blind to not only a much
broader and richer expression of the desire for truth that is philosophy, but
also the deep philosophical and ‘categorial’ background
to any alleged scientific “fact”.
Moreover, as I will argue below, it is not even a question of whether or
not Marx wrote philosophy, but that he wrote at all, and in many voices
throughout his life. This pluri-vocity[xxxii]
exhibits a continuity and maturation of insights that emerged quite early, as
we will see. Perhaps we could assent to
Althusser’s epistemological break, but understood as an existential breach, we
would wish to resituate the “event” not merely in the early philosophy, but in
Marx’s poetry, an expression which indicates the emergence of a profound
questioning which took placed amid his first readings of Hegel and
Schelling. Without such considerations,
Althusser’s picture of Marx is, to invoke Rosa Luxemburg, quite “bloodless”.
Indeed, Althusser himself descends
from the pedestal of positive science to that of metaphor, of poeisis, on three significant
occasions. His first excursion into
poetry is his attribution of “philosophical emptiness” to Marx in the wake of
the birth of the new science of History.
This formulation has an existentialist ring in its statement that Marx
is nothing that is philosophical, he is empty of philosophy. Yet, as we will see in Althusser’s other uses
of metaphor, his attempts ultimately fail as he seems to be unable to see the
internal relations of the metaphor amid the nexus of concrete existence and
thus the possibility of differing and myriad interpretations of a
metaphor. For instance, perhaps Marx’s
“emptiness” could imply that “Marx” is in need of philosophy or of a
existential “interpretation” which explicates the philosophical continuity in
the later works, or, to throw out another metaphor, that he is an empty vessel
longing for a philosophy. While Althusser
may chose the latter version, it is clear that not only are there many possible
readings of this situation, but also that, as I have indicated, there is a
manifest kinship between Marx’s “early” and “later” works.
Althusser’s second significant
metaphor, that of epistemic continents, is applied to Marx to show that there
is an epistemological break between the early and later works – indeed, it is
this theory which sets up this distinction in its agenda of constituting a
“science” of History. I have conceded
that the meaning of Marx could be, in a significant way, associated with a
breach, but not one which could be described in terms of the academic and
political nomenclature of the day.
Marx’s radical criticism, his breach, I will argue, begins in his poetry
and unfolds throughout the trajectory of his works, as a literary praxis. It should be said that Althusser’s topography
points to a topos of expression that is the finite existence of “Marx”. A sensitivity to phenomena and existence may allow
us to take a step back into the deeper ground of Marx’s breach from the
labyrinth of ideological indoctrination and of his creative transformation of
the intimate kinship of truth and praxiς - an ‘outside’ which seeps in,
as in the Masque of the Red Death of Poe. Perhaps, Althusser would
simply dismiss such considerations as a descent into psychology, biography,
anthropology – or, god forbid, the “existentialisms” of Heidegger and
Sartre. Such notions still persist in
the Night before the dawn.
Indeed, such a relationship between
Night and the dawn is prominent in Althusser’s use of Hegel’s myth to the Owl
of Minerva. As we have seen, Althusser
places his emphasis upon the dawn as the “epistemological break” which founds a
new continent, a new science. It is only
after the dawn, after a long day, that dusk will descend upon the world. At such a time, [Marxist] philosophy will
take wing. However, such a hyper-linear
formulation forces philosophy into the role of the vulture which ‘sucks blood
from dead corpse’. Indeed, despite
Althusser’s appeals to the “natural man”, he fails to apprehend the cyclical
implications of his metaphor of dawn, dusk, Night and twilight. Indeed, he projects his linear
“Enlightenment” agenda upon a phenomena which displays itself as akin to a
circle, a recurrence of the same. In
this way, if considered in a circular fashion, it is the Night and the twilight
before the dawn which give birth to this Twilight and Light. Perhaps the dawn is only one moment in a
circle, in which each possessed ultimate significance. It is clear that Althusser’s metaphors bring
with them more questions than answers.
In fact, it is quite simple to subvert his meaning into a differing
interpretation.
Yet, that which is most perplexing
about Althusser’s address on Lenin is the Janus-faced character of his
discourse. On the one hand, he specifies
a reduced terrain of textual relevance in his constitution of the meaning of
“Marx”. On the other, he slips into
metaphors which serve in the end to subvert his initial proposition.[xxxiii] For instance, how can Althusser reject Marx’s
early works due to their “Hegelianism”, and simultaneously justify his
significant reliance on the Hegelian schema of the Owl of Minerva? In light of his own use of metaphor and
poetry, how can Althusser reject Marx’s poetry as the spark of the breach which
announces a different meaning of Marx?
Indeed, a powerful meaning of the Myth of the Owl of Minerva is the deep
gestation of the thought, of lightening from the dark cloud, the birth of
Athena from the head of Zeus, or Apollo from Dionysus. One can neither destroy the kinship of these
powers of existence, nor assert a priority betwixt them. In this way, the poetry and early
philosophical writings of Marx, even on Althusser’s terms, would be the
gestation, the topoς of formulation for the insight of Marx, and are thus
worthy of better treatment than suppression, rejection, and libel. It is this topos which opens a ‘place’ for
an authentic revolutionary praxiς.
As “evidence” for this alternative
interpretation, one which emphasizes the “continuity” amidst the works of Marx,
we can highlight that which is missed in a merely scientific – or
epistemological - interpretation of “Marx”.
As suggested, the kinship between the early and later works, indeed, the
flow amidst differing topographies of expression, from poetry, to philosophy,
political pamphlets and programs plays itself out an a still unfinished legacy
of political economic, philosophical, sociological, and ideological analysis
and deconstruction. “Marx” therefore is
a topoς
of indication and expression, the truth of which would be destroyed if there
was an imposition of a monologicity of meaning, an interpretation, which
in the end forbids all subsequent interpretation. Philosophy as the desire for truth is not
enough for Althusser. He must possess
her, his new episteme. Althusser’s
presumption of concrete historical truth, free of interpretation, is similar to
Hegel’s Absolute Idea. The latter
described his Logic as the “thoughts of god before creation.” It is also significant that Marx placed a
copy of this book upon his desk as he wrote Capital. He also had a physiology textbook on his
desk. These “simple empirical facts”
show the ambiguity which is introduced if we seek to deconstruct the rigid
portrayals of the meaning of a work.
Indeed, it may be suggested that with his consent to the symbolic
division of labour of the academic ideological apparatus, Althusser’s
interpretation of “Marx” as a new science is a commodification
of Marx and is perhaps one of the vanguard of capitalist ideologies. That to which Althusser is blind is the sense
of estrangement and alienation that exists amidst capitalist hegemony. As he does not see the surreal up-side-down world
of the capitalist eqos and bioς, but consents to it
in his adoption of the Hegelian schema, Althusser’s theory becomes a “case
study” of alienation. Not only does it
drift into seemingly non-scientific regions such as metaphor and poetry, but it
also blindly acquiesces to the stratagems of otherwise condemned
philosophers. Yet, amidst the detours
into pictures, a linear reason is preserved as it runs roughshod over the
cyclical or lateral metaphorical topographies.
Althusser suppresses that which does not fit into his schema. However, as we have seen even his break is
problematic as continuities are readily in evidence throughout the works of
Marx. It is in this way that we can ask
questions, such as the sacred, that have been forbidden by the architectonic
rhetoric of Althusser, questions which involve the internal relations between
each and all of the texts – and of life, etc….
Chapter 2:
Marx’s Criticism of Religion
Marx sets forth his first philosophical criticism of religion in
his appropriation of the Feuerbachian humanist criticism and inversion of not
only Hegel, but also of Christianity.
Returning to the poetry of Theognis, such a
sensuous inversion of religion forces us to become, as Bataille has written, disintoxicated[xxxiv]
- no longer to stand upon our heads – but, to see religion as that which it is,
as an abstraction of “real man” into “ideal man”. Such an idealization constitutes alienation
in the loss of agency vis-à-vis this all-too-human artifice which occurs, for
Feuerbach, in the forgetfulness of the concrete origin of the work of art – in
human sensuousness. For Feuerbach, it was simply enough to realise such a loss
and alienation to regain the essence of humanity once and for all – for Marx,
Feuerbach remains an idealist, a contemplative.
The simplicity and genius of
Feuerbach's insight, that God is the ideal representation of the aspiration of the human species, was not
enough for Marx. While he would not
ultimately deny the possibility of flights of desire, of thought and being on
the “outside”, as in a moment of revolutionary aporia, Marx also demanded a
materialist deconstruction of the real
interests of religion, in word, thought and deed. Mere insight, mere thought, could never undo
this material substratum, that configuration of terrestrial power, which
originally sets the hegemonic parameters, horizons for thought – which deny
this eqos of existence. There must be, as the root of any theoretical
activity, on the contrary, a radical dialectical
transfiguration of the real conditions of existence for there to be a
transmutation and alternative disclosure in the ideal reflection or thought of
being.
Marx contends that a criticism of
religion is the pre-requisite for any concrete analysis of the actual social
relationships of human existence.[xxxv] Indeed, a criticism of religion is not merely
an exercise of thought. It requires
resistance to and refusal of its rituals of outward effect. It requires existential praxis.
Religion - as distinct from the sacred - becomes ideology, as it is, for
Marx, an alienated product of an alienated existence. As an alienated activity, amidst a matrix of
systematic alienation, its own self-interpretation is divorced from any
immediate awareness of the conditions of its emergence and maintenance – one
that, with Nietzsche and Bataille, hides its own dark roots. It therefore cannot be anything but a mask
that shrouds the concrete truth of human existence. In this chapter, I will set forth Marx's
criticisms of religion as mere ideology.
While I will argue below that Marx's criticism of religion is already
expressed in his poetry, his initial philosophical
criticism of religion is greatly influenced by Feuerbach, and the humanist
criticism of absolutist idealism. Marx’s
step beyond, towards a materialist criticism of religion, is a
specification and concretization of the insight of Feuerbach. Yet, despite the significant traces of
Feuerbach in the later Marx, as in the notion of fetishism of commodities articulated
in Capital, Marx’s deconstruction of
religion abides the implicit possibility of a retrieval of a non-alienated
sense of the sacred as a concrete human activity and reflexivity via praxiς. While Marx departs from Feuerbach, it is
crucial to the following inquiry that there be a deep continuity in the
writings of Marx. It is this continuity
which must put to rest a greatly misunderstood “epistemological break”. I will
attempt to disclose the contours of this continuity and argue that it is only
from this perspective that we can glimpse, most clearly, the distinction in
Marx between religion and the sacred.
Let us begin with one of Marx’s
most direct statements on mere religion,
Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium,
its logic in a popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its
enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, its universal source of
consolation and justification. It is the
fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no
true reality. The struggle against
religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is
the spiritual aroma.[xxxvi]
As long as "analysis" is
embedded in the grand narratives of idealistic religious instruction, however,
there exists no avenue to explore the intimate trajectories of the way or
manner of temporal irruption of the sacred.
In mere thought, we cannot smell the spiritual aroma of the religious
cult. In this way, religion, as a
concrete indication of existence, is a symptom of an actuality in which
humanity is alienated from its own self-understanding. A desire for a truth of the sacred must
overcome mere thought and the practical, utilitarian stratagems of religion. As I will argue below, such a situation of
alienation indicates a severance of humanity from an authentic sense of the
sacred. Religion as ideology prevents an
awakening to an intimate and authentic sense of the sacred, just as is the case
with those other ideological forms such as mere politics, art and
philosophy. Indeed, if it is possible,
as Marx suggests in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts, to achieve via a revolution a non-alienated
sense of social being and social praxiς,
it would seem possible to be able to achieve a non-alienated sense of the
sacred. This would be to indicate a
sense of the sacred which is not merely a phantasmogorical product of mere
thought and ideology, but an authentic singular and social praxis which is liberated from the snares
of a condition of alienation.
Beginning with the Feuerbachian
inversion and transformation of the Hegelian dialectic, Marx insists in the Theses on Feuerbach, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
and in the Introduction to a Critique of
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, that the authentic interests of a
"universal humanism" remained enshrouded within an a-historical
regime of consciousness in the matrix of religious ideology. In this interpretation, the traditional grand
referent "God" and the theological infrastructure articulated on the
basis of such a conjecture persists as a lost work of art[xxxvii]
- ultimately of human origin, but forgotten in
its genealogy. Marx writes that
religion is the “self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not
yet found himself or has already lost himself again.”[xxxviii]
That which was created by human beings has attained an abstract agency over
humans in that the origin of the work of art has been erased. Amidst the narrative of consciousness, our
own creations have been given agency over and against us. An alienated
social existence gives rise to an alienated consciousness.[xxxix] We can no longer see or hear these contours
of our existence as we only apprehend that which is indicated in a
free-floating matrix of an imposed interpretation. As Miranda suggests, we do not question the
legitimacy of the ownership of capital or of the apparent justice of the wage
system, for as Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical
Investigations, “A picture held us captive, and we could not free ourselves
from it as it is inexorably repeated in our language.” For Miranda, the picture must be destroyed
amidst the birth of the kingdom of god amidst the invasion of Yahweh. In different language, the “death of God”
meant, for Altizer, the fulfilment of love in the
moment of existence. We are here
together now, and we can do whatever we must do amid this temporal
opening. Amidst existence, possibility
expresses the meaning of this phenomena, of my own self.
Yet, the language of ideology is a
“phenomenalism” all its own. It points out, indicates, that which will
specify the “facts” which will serve to reproduce its own existence, its theory
or morality. We are talked to death. We are given a world through these
words. But, these words serve merely to
cover over that which exists – at least from the concrete perspective of a
contestation of “which” facts. We are
told everything, but shown nothing. And,
as with Miranda and others who challenge the entire edifice of religion and
cult, Marx hit upon a struggle for truth in the wake of a systematic
falsification of existence by “religion”, by a “cult of sacrifice”. This raises the question of the relation of
the sacred and revolution (Cf. Chapter 6).
In Marx’s works written under the
influence of Feuerbach, one senses a
transition away from the merely religious - albeit negative (“the against”) -
sensibility one finds, for instance, in Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity.
The famous Eleventh Thesis,[xl]
which exhorts action over interpretation, serves as a transition from mere thought to a praxiς amidst this everyday and
existence. Yet, it does not operate
amidst any new epistemic event – the Eleventh Thesis is akin to all of
Marx’s early works. Already in his poem,
The Epigramist,
Marx expresses a preference for concrete action against the religiosity and ideologi-osity of moral demagogues, even such as the
contemplative poetry of Schiller.
Indeed, concrete action or the praxis
of human existence takes center stage in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
or Paris Manuscripts of 1844, texts
written, as with the Introduction to a
Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1845), under the
shadow of the fiery brook… Feuerbach.
However, the posture of the Eleventh Thesis does not mean that Marx
has merely abandoned, or will ever abandon, interpretation as criticism or even
the methodology of inversion which he orchestrated in his earlier
writings. Despite the many academic and
political dis-continuity theorists who seek to leave
Marx dissected upon the cutting table – in an epistemological break - Marx continued his life of writing and
political advocacy continually setting forth engaged interpretations, analyses,
and pictures and poems of the “situations” and “laws of motion” of the
“world”. For Marx, interpretation
undergoes a transformation of meaning – amidst praxiς.
A critical hermeneutic and strategy
of inversion continues to surface in Marx's writings, even in those in which he
collaborates with Engels, such as The Holy
Family, a radical and often comic criticism of the idealist philosophies of
the so-called young Hegelians and in the
German Ideology, a text not published in his own life time. In both of these texts, there is a
displacement of a Feuerbachian humanist fundament via a materialist analysis of
history. That which is consistent in
these critical works is a confrontation with an idealist and a-historical
"interpretation" of human existence, a camera obscura which remains parasitic on an abstraction of human essence which projects an eternal
exemplar deemed to possess exclusive access to a disclosure of “Nature”. From one side of the coin, such an image or
world-picture (Weltanschauung)
fails to acknowledge the radical historical character of human existence; from
the other, such a picture merely serves to reinforce a conception and eqos of human
existence which is portrayed as a natural, and therefore, unchangeable static
situation. Such a picture simply
obscures existence in its eruption amidst
struggle.
This is the essence of Marx's
criticism of religion - and "objective" science and “systematic”,
“rational” theology - it merely serves to pre-empt, ideologically, the ethical
intentionality, of an ethical significance of our lifeworld,
of the possibility of a radical disclosure and transformation of the situation
and contours of human existence. Marx's
disclosure is therefore more complex than a mere refusal of an interpretation
of human existence, which projects itself as an eternal exemplar. He never throws down the ladder. His motivations are also existential in the
sense that he deconstructs a metaphysics of interpretation which projects a typology of interpretation which not
only paints a static image of that which is, what existence is, but also, in accord with this depiction, serves
to consolidate a dominant ideology which considers change impossible.
Mere interpretation - the
"scientific method" - as it exists, in the context of Marx's
criticism, beyond the maelstroms of existential temporality and historicity,
gives the interpreter - the safe, eternal observer - a sense that he can create
the world in his own image. The
interpreter, in this sense, sets back
away from historical events and merely describes that which is - in a posture
of objectivity – as a transcendental subject
of modernity, as a contemplator of ideology, a Christian ego in a Secular
world. Marx writes that religion is the
“illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around
himself.”[xli] Such a gesture conjures the spirit of
Giordano Bruno, against the merely Copernican metaphysics of Kant, who opens up
the possibility of an intimate self-interpretation of human existence which
resists the “secure” stratagems of ideological falsification. Bruno wrote that the center
was everywhere, that each tenuous existence opens toward the Sacred. Such a notion of radical immanence subverts
the solid and safe architectonic of a subjectivity which could only rest upon a
structure of transcendence which was immune to a radical sense of the
sublime. The structure of transcendental
subjectivity, as it is immune from the overwhelming sublimity of the sacred
event, of the roots of the sublime, temporality, or as Otto suggests, of the numinous, posits a safe place where the
“subject” is protected from the radical makeshift
sense of existence. The sublime, in the
context of Kant's Third Critique,
becomes nothing but a spectacle
viewed from the safe distance of a protected exteriority, a transcendental
subject which is a safe, little island… very little, almost nothing.
For Marx such a comfortable station
was not an option. With his indication
of praxiς, and
with the serious visceral repercussions of his political advocacy (not to
mention the tenuous situations of his life of poverty in London), there was no
longer the possibility of an 18th or even 19th century scientific
(Enlightenment or Darwinist) objectivity to his inquiries, but an engaged praxis through which he learned as he
acted amidst his world. Once again, this
is not, however, to suggest that Marx merely refused interpretation as
such. It would be to set forth the
possibility of a radically different typology of interpretation - one
influenced at its core by the cry of the oppressed, even the cry of oneself as
he walked for thirty-five years to the Round Reading Room at the British
Library, as he aged in Levinas’ sense. For instance, one could contend
that Marx's Capital is a work of
interpretation, a hermeneutic poiesis. And, as one reads this work, one fathoms that
it is neither a merely mythological interpretation of the “beginning”, as with
the earlier political economists with the “natural state” (the myth of the
hunter and the fisherman), nor is it a work exhorting the pretence of a
scientific methodology of an objective, pan-optic or god's eye observer. It is an engaged
work, one of revolutionary advocacy, but also one infused with myriad
factual data and documentation of the actual situation of workers (cf. Chapter
10, On the Working Day) and of owners
of capitals amidst a novel matrix of historical existence – that which Marx
dubbed as the capitalist mode of production.
However, Marx's work is not therefore a work of positivism of empirical
descriptive generalization as with the inductive works of the working class
writer Dietzgen, who Marx called "our
philosopher". There resides a
strong interpretative and hermeneutic sophistication in Capital - and there is the legacy of Feuerbach in Capital in its historical and political
economic articulation.[xlii]
That which truly discloses Marx's
criticisms of religion is a consistent criticism of idealistic abstraction from
the perspective of lived existence. This perspective is underscored by Marx's
choice of words to describe this novel historical constellation - fetishism. It is in this light that we can fathom Marx's
Eleventh Thesis in a new light. It is not interpretation as historical
hermeneutics oriented to praxis (or poiesis
in the sacred sense) that Marx is criticising, but the idealized projections
which attempt to stand beyond the historicity of human existence – the always bad poetry which merely serves
power. While Marx sets forth his (and
Engels) grand narrative of historical materialism in The German Ideology (condemned to the criticism of rats and mice),
he, the old mole, is involved, from
the imminent perspective of praxiς,
in an intimate hermeneutic of human existence, articulated amidst the horizons
of a specific opening of historicity.
The commodity is the latest manifestation and modus operandi of Adam and Eve, of the inexorable narrative and
theatre of human impotence. The
commodity is our god - our fetish. Marx
no longer seems to need to speak of religion per se as all this idle chatter – pseudo-religion - is being
catastrophically eclipsed amidst the pseudo-renaissance of the 19th
century. But, it is a renaissance which
is also indicative of an eclipse of an authentic notion of the Sacred. Religion and the sacred become identified
into a matrix of the Same. Not only
that, but the new god, the commodity, as a fetish, exudes the resonance of that
which is utterly profane - intimating the other connotation of the term fetish
– in the sublime spirit of the Marquis de Sade who
was so admired by Georges Bataille.
Religion cowers in its concentration camp. It is the concentration camp. This sacred affirmation erupts amidst this
“life”.
Marx is playing here to Protestant
ideology as the novel spirit of capitalism and to Christianity as the “special
religion of capital”.[xliii] Not only does he suggest the possibility that
capitalism constitutes a retrogression to the so-called “savage” religions,
which would so offend the supremacist delusions of the newly-chosen Christian
elite, but that our very situation of affliction is a perverse desire - a
fetish. We are addicted to our
affliction, to our god and to our masochistic prostration to a mere “cultus”,
as Miranda suggests. Such prostration to
the “Grand Inquisitor”, of cultus, is
a renunciation, a displacement, of an affirmation and cultivation of the
sacred. The madman Nietzsche shouts out,
as the new Cassandra, that God is Dead
in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his
Gay Science. No one listens to him, but everyone feels the
wake of that which he speaks. But the
death of god does not mean - or was not intended to mean - that there is
nothing holy, that there is nothing divine.
A Sacred opening does not close with Marx's deconstruction of religion,
or of Nietzsche’s objections to a mere Platonic or Aristotelian “Christianity”. Indeed, the impetus for such cries in the
wilderness, as with any prophetic intervention, was and is that there exists a
sacred that has not been destroyed by the facile refusals of a scientific or
religious hegemony. The deconstruction
is the simultaneous prerequisite for an affirmation of the Sacred. Marx's criticism of religion consists in a
confrontation with an a-historical idealism and moralistic rationalism which,
through its inability to disclose the truth of human existence, serves merely
to mask a historical condition of self-deception and perverse
self-laceration. Religion, or, the
a-temporal, but successionistic ideology of power is
not concerned or existentially aware of an intimate affirmation of the
sacred.
Marx does not need to directly
articulate a doctrine of the sacred – or of the possibility of a non-alienated
sense of the Sacred after
communism. His affirmation is enough –
indeed, communism was only the means for that which would emerge - he is always
already on Sacred ground in his taking
sides with the weak and oppressed.
In deed, Miranda contends that the praxiς of earthly justice, of love, [is] the sacred
itself, which for him is envisioned as a god of liberation, justice and
love. Such a possibility and comportment
is evident in the said of a life of
confrontation and advocacy for a different world. As Kant writes in his Religion, the actions and life of a man indicate his
disposition. Marx’s poetry and his
poetic references in his later works and his actions serve as symptoms or
indications of a desire, an affirmation which is the concrete actualization of
an intentionality toward and amidst a sacred opening. Indeed, although it is unlikely that Marx is
working within the horizons of the Bible, he, in his affirmation, fulfils the
prophets’ injunction against speaking or setting forth an image of the
god. Such an image is a symptom of an
existence which had created masks to obscure and prohibit the possibility of
communication. That which lies beyond the image is an affirmation of a sacred praxiς.
Mere religion as an instruction, as
an ideological discipline, collaborates with the de-sacralisation
of the world - with the eclipse of the sacred.
There is nothing left but words which point to nothings, which disclose nothings. The refusal of these nothings - of the myriad chaos of beings entering and exiting
“THIS” world which are distinct from the No-thing of transcending in Heidegger - is a rejection of an eqos
and methodology which serves to either reduce the event of existence to either
an a-historical narrative, without phenomenological or existential relevance,
or, to a scientific narrative of descriptive everydayness. Marx is not interested in constituting a
Marxian Science or a Marxian politics - he confronts the abyss of commodity,
this mere being which determines our alienated, capitalist consciousness - one
which yawns between you and me. We
cannot pretend that this abyss is not
there - that we can ignore it. By
ignoring this situation, we more firmly affirm our situation of pathetic
incarceration. [Mankind] is afflicted by
its own alien projections and fabrications.
Marx incites us to apprehend our own concrete situations and
predicaments… it is not merely the workers with which he is concerned - ‘we’
are all alienated - each from each other.
There must be something deeper at
work here…
Religion, in a dialectical materialist analysis, is
not dismissed merely as an idealism or a phantom – as if a mere refutation of
ideas could lead to the evaporation of religion. Indeed, Marx uses the term ideology (weltanschauung), and this term does not indicate a
mere "reflection" of material conditions, as a logos is that which
issues forth as not only as an interpretation of existence (dasein), but
also as an expressive topos of a differentiated and conflictual matrix of power. Ideology is a camera obscura which masques power relationships by means of an
organization which orchestrates a regurgitation of spurious interpretations, or
pictures. As Foucault writes in Discipline
and Punish, ideology is not merely a repression of conscious
representation, but as discourse, indicates, in its intimacy amid the
disseminations of power, a proactive cultivation of a reproduction of
configurations of power. The medium is
the message, as McLuhan taught us. And vice versa. Miranda[xliv]
contends that religion, as the cultus,
is a falsification of the meaning of lived existence. From the radical perspective of Miranda’s
interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, the cultus of religion, as it has suppressed the authentic meaning of
the sacred as a pursuit of justice, serves to eradicate the breach which is a call for resistance against oppression. In this way, religion is not simply an idea,
but a medium of transmission and control, with its own organisations, networks,
and mnemnotechnic devices of indoctrination, of
"remembrance".
Yet, from amidst this exposure of religion, one sees, hears
and smells that a sense of the sacred does not depend on the latest concept or
image - all of these will be engulfed in the various modifications of the
spectacle, of the serial articulation of a profane gallery. That which clears the topos for an opening to a
sacred dimension is a temporal existence which overwhelms the finite self in
the moments of horror, terror, and to a lesser extent, in anxiety. In a radical phenomenological gesture, we can
cast the sacred into relief as not only this personal apprehension of finitude,
but also, as this possible awakening to the Other – or to, as Otto suggests,
the numinous, the mysterium tremendum, or, with the face, as indicated by
Levinas. In this way, an apprehension of the negativity of finitude may pass over
into a situation in which one may tune into one’s own ethos amid an
affirmation of the possibilities of ecstatic existence. For an isolated, alienated self – there
erupts the event of transcending – Ariadne’s thread descends amidst a labyrinth
of a merely “negative dialectics”. This
exit-less destination is transfigured into an affirmation of the sacred meaning
of existence.
It was perhaps with the Emperor Constatine that religion, specifically the Christian
religion, as it was made the legal and ideological orthodoxy of the Roman
state, began a process in which the ancient Pagan, and if we can agree with
Miranda, the authentic Biblical notion of the Sacred was erased from the public
lifeworld of existence (it is perhaps possible that
the Biblical notion of the sacred was eradicated at an even earlier date in the
redactionist interpretation of, for instance, Exodus). In the wake of the untimely death of Julian,
the so-called Apostate, who attempted to reverse the subversive and radical
edicts of the new religious hegemony of nascent Christendom,[xlv]
the myriad public and private cults of the gods, goddesses, and spirits began
to suffer inquisitorial interdiction amidst a totalitarian project which sought
the establishment of a unitary and political sense of the sacred. With the eventual establishment of the
The Reformation, in this way, is
aptly named, as it indicates a re-configuration of that which was already there. There was never any attempt to re-write the
bible – the Canon - or to re-insert the many documents which had been excluded
by the Roman Catholic Church, that whore of
However,
it is not merely the Christian religion which is subject to the
characterisation of ideology. It is well
known that
One could consider, as an example,
the situation of Akhenaten in his attempt to
eliminate the priesthood of Amun for an immediate
encounter with the Aten or Sun-Disc. The bureaucracy of the priesthood, for its
continuance, necessitated obedience towards it authority and an active
propagation and dissemination of its doctrines if it is to survive. The heretic Akhenaten
built his city in the desert, but within little more than a decade, was killed
and his son was re-named Tut-ankh-amun from Tut-ankh-aten. There is not merely a change of power in the
terrestrial sense, but also a transformation in the articulation of the
symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of the topoi of the phenomena of sacred meaning.
In this way, the Amun priests sought to erase
any artefact of Akhenaten.
This allusion may serve to explain
the timidity of the Reformation. Mere religion does not necessarily have
anything to do with the sacred. It has
its own interests and reasons, and as an organised bureaucracy, must
orchestrate its own procedures, its discipline,[xlvii]
its truth, in order to secure its own survival, its terrestrial
recurrence. A priest or a reverend has
different interests and “ideas” than his flock – or should have. Paul is
not Jesus (nor is Homer Odysseus).
He thinks beyond this or that mass or service to the future of the
church. He asks different questions: how
am I to make sure that this teaching will survive into the future? How will I ensure that the children of my
flock accept and perpetuate the doctrine of this teaching? The answer to his questions, for the
Judeo-Christian or for the Civil-Pagan, inexorably comes in the form of the
Bible or of a retroactive “hierarchy” (as opposed to hierophany,
first suggested by Eliade in The Sacred and the
Profane) projected upon doctrines of polytheism - these are extant texts
that can surf along amid the tides and waves of history. Yet, such a-historical life-rafts, as they
are merely mnemnotechnic artifices of
trans-generational continuance, may preclude, conceal an intimacy with the
sacred - with the divine. This intimacy
is an irruption amidst the homologous articulation and operation of profane
ideology of a radical power of horror, terror – of the overwhelming. This vertiginous encounter reveals to us that
we are, each of us, is radically vulnerable, not only existentially, but each
step along the path of ageing – as one makeshift resolution displaces the
last. At the gateway of such a
disclosure, the singular being exalts in surprise amidst its fatal and tenuous
predicament. If this being does not seek
to flee, to hide amidst the cult of security, of the Last Man, she or he may
seek to embrace this situation of uncertainty as an intimation of the sacred
significance of this opening of our being.
Of course, much of this mysterium is
sublimated and even eradicated from this terrain of utilitarian reproduction,
if, that is, we are to continue amidst this prevailing “order of things”. Yet, despite the sanitization and the
tranquillization of horror, death – abjection – via the profane world of
work and profane religion, sacred events, moments of vision, truth events break
in reminding us of the chaos which churns in ourselves. Of course, we do not wish to merely
disintegrate into animality from our suspension between consciousness and the
sacred. Yet, we neither wish to be absorbed
in a pantheistic reason which turns us into puppets and parrots. We wish, each of us, to have an autonomy
amidst our own personal and spiritual lives, a demand which breaks the chain of
homogeneity and irrupts this heterogeneity of the singular, mortal, being,
event. Yet, if such an intimacy has
always been or is always a possibility for each soul, what would be left for
the priest, the reverend, the mediator - the politician - the self -chosen
elect?
In
this present study of Marx, we are already forced to remove ourselves from the mediational, ideological reality of religious and political
assertion. Marx has already rejected -
in line with his understanding of the being of this historicality
of human existence, religion as an ideology, as a mere 'logic' of “ideas” – eidos, mere pictures, idols. Such a rejection implies a criticism of not
only the narrative idealism and mechanisms of perpetuation of the cloth, but
also the recognition of the politico-ideological discipline of an
organisational matrix of cultural perpetuation.
This discipline asserts itself as a religio-cultural
matrix. It is "consciousness"
in the free-floating vision of the idealists, but in the eyes of Marx, this
"consciousness" is determined by being, existence, and thus becomes -
as with any phenomenology of life - symptomatic and indicative – but not
therefore powerless. That which is implied in such a deconstruction of
"consciousness" becomes the sacred meaning of praxis.
We are not to live in the camera
obscura of the 'world picture', but are to act and be, and in this nunc, to think, to grasp after, and seek deep within
that which is glimpsed in this event of praxis. Marx is not a
Prostestant in that he exults action, but he is not a
Catholic or a Jew. He advocates
revolution, a transgression of the “Law” in all its concrete
manifestations. His indication of praxiς (especially in light of
Aristotle's distinction between praxis
and poeisis) shatters,
as we will see in Marx’s encounter with Bultmann, the world picture of
representation via events of transgression – the existential breaks which give
insight amid an the “de-ontological” event, a “slant of the eye” (augenblick), saturnalia, potlatch - this event of
sacrifice and the gift, as Mauss tells us.
Yet, incessant action, excessive
transgressions dissipate the mortal self into a profane chaos of
existence. Mere action alone, having
dispensed itself of the necessity of interpretation, of thought, loses itself
in the everydayness of a busy flight from existence. We run after our commodities, our fetishes,
and thinking this is the ultimate being of the “real”, we suppress any
hermeneutic engagement with existence.
Mere action, assertion (but not, as we will see, praxis, in Marx’s sense), as it is
oriented only to the everyday, remains outside an authentic poeisis of existence. In Heidegger's conjuration, Marx’s Eleventh
Thesis is pictured in its seeming haste.
Even though Marx may have expressed himself under the influence of a
deeper affirmation, he in the end holds the fragments in his hands. Yet, seeing, feeling these chards of reality,
he does not reject action, but instead castigates the fragments. For Heidegger, Marx seeks action in a
displacement of his own finite existence.
Bataille intimates Marx’s ambiguous senses of the sacred and the
profane. Yet, Heidegger's literal
reading of the Eleventh Thesis cannot
stand as Marx is not simply embracing a superficial version of
"headlessness" or voluntarism.
We should keep in mind that Marx
himself engaged in a poeisis
of the sacred in his early poetry and in the genealogy of his work. Poetic expression is not annihilated in his
later works, but only emerges into the light amidst a phenomenology of Capital,
a disclosure of the cycles of profane reproduction. All throughout Capital Marx makes references to literature, poetry or throws in a
statement about the coming revolution
which will resolve the contradictions, oppression, and suffering of class
“society”. His vision is always that of
a radically transfigured situation via praxiς in which the direct producers - the workers -
own the means of production and self-manage a matrix of poiηsiς
at the point of production. This is the poetic and philosophical affirmation of
liberation, of the sacred – born amidst this deconstruction of the capitalist eqos. Perhaps, such a revolution, as envisioned by
Marx, will allow for a transfiguration of the mere poeisis of capitalist, utilitarian production to the sacred poiηsiς of the gift.
As he never repudiated his poetry, we
may not, in the usual manner, simply assert that such expression was of an
immature student, nor can we interpret Marx as one who designates all
linguistic, expression, indication as ideology.
While some language games subsist in themselves as idealistic
totalities, Marx's poetry indicates an awakening to alterity – and in this
awakening he apprehends, amidst his topoς, a sense of obligation and
commitment, of affirmation. Each of his
writings can be seen as a phenomenology of indication which seeks to disclose
the truth of the world, truth as a-leqea,
which must be dis-closed via a struggle for authentic
self-expression.
While the specific contours of
Marx's early poetic affirmation of the sacred may transfigure themselves amidst
a life of writing, the poeisis
of affirmation abides in his consistent advocacy of revolutionary
transformation. Marx is neither priest,
scientist, nor politician - he is engaged in the poetry of existence – he is,
as Arthur Miller wrote, a “white nigger”, a reluctant prophet. If we are, in our interpretation of Marx, to
give to the 'picture' a sense of the whole man, we must witness his acts as
symptoms or indicators, as Kant writes in his Religion, of a disposition, even if such a notion of character is,
with Heidegger and Bataille, and Marx, ultimately temporal[xlviii]
- and secret.
While the quip that religion is the opium of the people is
well known, the preceding lines are lesser so.
As we have seen at the head of this study, Marx had also written, "Religious
suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a
protest against real suffering. Religion
is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the
soul of soulless conditions…." This reference to opium goes beyond for Marx
his own contemporary resonances of lost souls, such
as Poe, who were mired in the clouds of the den. Indeed, this analogy of religion to opium has
been made by Kant and Nietzsche, among other philosophers. Religion as opium, as heart of a heartless
world, while implying that such a heart may ultimately be illusory, indicates a
space of difference and of a desire to be liberated from a profane hegemony of
objectification and commodification. Such a gesture toward difference, to the
“exit” indicates the desire and the possibility of a nascent movement of
resistance and solidarity, of refusal and, simultaneously, of affirmation amid
the prevailing situation of the world.
The primary criticism by Marx against religion consists in its operation as an ideological matrix, a panopticon of the soul, of the heart. This description displays a religion, which not only distorts the truth of the world, but also subverts the ethical obligations of members of this “tie” (religio). Religion systematically instills a con-fusion in the hearts of the many, spiritually coercing these to a behaviour which is against their own profane and sacred “interests”. In the wake of the classic Nietzschean criticism, religion breeds nihilism for and sickness in the world to legitimize its Janus-faced valorization of the other world of reward and repose – the carrot which disguises the stick. This picture of religion is well known. Yet, how can Marx respond to a movement of "materialist" Christians, indigenous religions, and even Neo-pagans, who in many cases have been and are being killed for their advocacies for liberation?
Marx cannot simply recoil into the posture of scientist - nor does he want to. Marx is engaged in praxiς and so are the Liberation Theologists. Moreover, Marx has a nuanced perspective of human freedom and of this existent capacity for resistance and affirmation, phenomena which the usual determinist or structuralist stereotypes will not allow. Such perspectives come to light in his early writings most explicitly, but continue to emerge throughout his further works. He cannot be regarded as merely a scientist. Perhaps “science” is one strand in the tapestry of his work, but it is not the sun around which the planets revolve. Such a view risks turning Marx into a “one-dimensional man”.[xlix] In this way, Marx could perhaps welcome this eruption of a free affirmation of the sacred from amid the ideological matrix itself. The affinity between Marx and Liberation theology consists in an obligation and a commitment to “justice”, beyond these myriad “grand narratives” of religio-political reduction. Both resist these narratives - and that which is indicated in these words - the topos and eqos of this hegemony.
Indeed, although the dominant religious interests have generally been those allied with the “ruling class”, there are many instances, prior to and contemporary to Marx - and in our own era - where "religious suffering" has facilitated resistance to conditions of oppression – or has sought intimacy amid the sacred. One need only think of the various historical rebellions, such as German Peasant's Rebellion, the Abolition movement against Slavery, the non-violent Ghandian civil disobedience to colonial and racial oppression, Nelson Mandela, Liberation Theology, the Civil Rights Movement - and, in a much more contemporary upsurgence, Islam - especially in it more militant expressions. In each of these instances, it is the preference for the poor as enunciated by the Zoroastrianism, the Jewish Old Testament, Buddha in the 6th century B.C., by Jesus and early Christianity and the Koran, among others - which serves as the exemplar for sacred resistance and as an exception to dominant religious interests and alliances with the ruling matrix. While “Marx” may not find such a contention satisfactory, it is clear that [religious] suffering need not merely serve the interests of power and wealth.
Liberation
Theology is a movement most relevant to our present concerns in
light of its explicit affirmation of much of Marx's analysis of the operational
matrix of capitalist exploitation.
Ghandi, on the contrary, never affirmed the Marxist explication of an
explicit opposition of labour and capital - his vision was much more wed to a theologico-corporatist strategy of reconciliation - as
Nelson Mandela describes his pursuit in an article The Sacred Warrior,[l]
as bringing the oppressors and oppressed into a common pursuit of Truth. Liberation
theology seems far less naïve as to the possibility of a moral
conversion of the exploiting class and their agents. As articulated by the dominant theorists of
this movement, such as Guttierrez and Miranda, there
is an explicit preference for the
poor - a taking sides in favor of the liberation of the poorest of the poor from a labyrinthine system of oppression and
exploitation. That which is significant
in this context is, as I have mentioned, an explicit affirmation of the work of
Marx. Yet, each of these Christian
thinkers have a differing perspective upon Marx. Gutierrez sees Marx as a scientist, while
Miranda discloses him as a prophet.
It may seem – from the usual picture of “Marx” as an “atheist
materialist” - inconceivable that there would explode a movement of Christians
- both Catholic and Protestant – and in some cases, Neo-Pagans and native
religionists, which would embrace his analysis of capitalist exploitation.[li] Yet, the very fact that such an embrace was
undertaken serves to place into question the unambiguous opposition “Marx”
seems to have held against that which he portrayed as the mystifying idealism
of religion.
That which is significant about Liberation Theology is its explicit
attempt to examine and confront material
conditions of oppression, not only as Jesus threw the money changers out of the
Temple, but also as a legacy of thought and reflection upon sacred action
amidst this eqoς of a profane capitalist
hegemony. Recognition of, and reflection
upon, these conditions of exploitation leads to a praxis oriented via a desire for “justice”, for the “kingdom
on earth”.
Theologies of
Liberation: Gutierrez and Miranda
Perhaps the most prominent member
of this group of thinkers is the Peruvian Catholic theologian and activist
Gustavo Gutierrez who published his Theology
of Liberation[lii]
in 1971. Guttierrez,
with his formula, see-reflect-act, has embraced the Marxian analysis of
capitalism, but as he sees Marx, following Althussere,
as merely a “scientist of history”, has integrated this analysis into an
already existing eqos of Christian leadership, activism
and scholarship.
The main concern of Gutierrez in
his work, A Theology of Liberation:
History, Politics, and Salvation, is upon an explication of the relation of
a critical, reflective theology to praxis
amidst a situation of economic exploitation and political domination. Indeed, action on behalf of the liberation of
the poor is not merely a supplemental aspect of his work, but exists as an
integral aspect of any authentic theology.
The incantation of see-reflect-act
incorporates an explicit recognition of Marxian social analysis. This latter recognition holds its most
significant place in the first moment of this triad - although it cannot be
excluded from the other two moments. To
see the world, to ascertain the conditions of exploitation amid existence, in
capitalist society, is not merely a naïve, empirical act of sense perception
(although in some cases, that may be sufficient). Gutierrez, writing under the shadow of Hegel
and Marx, writes:
For Marx, to know was something indissolubly linked to the
transformation of the world through work.
Basing his thought on these first intuitions, he went on to construct a
scientific understanding of historical reality.
He analysed capitalist society, in which he found concrete instances of
the exploitation of persons by their fellows and of one social class by
another. Pointing the way towards an era in history when humankind can live
humanly, Marx created categories which allowed for the elaboration of a science
of history.[liii]
As Marx had already articulated - and which is a
repetition of Hegel's criticism of sense-certainty in his Phenomenology of Spirit - to see
already involves a structure of categorical determination. In other words, to see is to ascertain the underlying conditions of a situation of
exploitation and oppression. Yet, the
significance of Marx extends far beyond a mere methodological procedure for
interpretation, conceived as mere contemplation of an external object. As Gutierrez intimates, the very meaning of
“science” undergoes a radical transformation in Marx, and this is a mutation
not lost on Gutierrez. In a discussion
of the eminent East German Marxian theorist Ernst Bloch, Gutierrez underscores
the importance for Bloch of Marx’s famous Eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach: The philosophers have only interpreted the
world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it. Yet, in an attempt to delineate the contours
of Marx’s radical re-casting of the meaning of interpretation, he emphasizes
the not-so-famous First Thesis on
Feuerbach. Gutierrez quotes Marx:
The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of
Feuerbach included – is that the thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is
conceived only in the form of the object
[Objekt] or of contemplation
[Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice,
not subjectively.[liv]
The significance of this reference is disclosed most
forcefully in light of the insertion by Gutierrez of the original German. The transformation of the meaning of
interpretation (and of materialism) by Marx and of its intimate connection to
action (praxiς) is
cast into relief through the distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand. While the former
implies an external thing thrown against, as a thing to be contemplated by an
external observer, inside the causal nexus of a merely phenomenal
consciousness, the latter stands against in an immediate intentional topos of existence. This is not merely a thing that is
distinct from the observer or knower, but a situation which stands here and
there, as intimacy in this breach, as this phenomena of existence, as the self
amidst its world.
In contrast to a merely contemplative,
theoretical orientation toward this sensuous life, there is
articulated a possibility of an emergence of a different topos, one of human praxis amidst this opening of
existence. Gutierrez writes,
Marx’s idea of praxis is different; it is based on a dialectical
conception of history – necessarily advancing, with eyes fixed on the future
and with real action in the present, towards a classless society based on new
relationships of production.[lv]
Yet, despite these several
references to the poetic vision of Marx and of the circumscription of
production and science within this vision, Gutierrez follows the line of
Althusser. Marx is merely a “scientist”,
and therefore, an instrument to be oriented into the broader fabric of an
eschatological project. The Marxian
analysis of capitalist exploitation, divorced from its own indigenous
ethical meaning, becomes a mere supplement to his theology. At the end of the day, there was no need to
depart from the explicit preference of the poor which is extant in the
canonical Gospels. The analysis is
merely to serve the overriding affirmative project of liberation of the
poor. Indeed, this points to the second
moment of the triad - with the recognition of the exploitation of the poor and
the material processes thereof - there is the reflective moment which reflects
upon the meaning of this exploitation
and oppression. And, despite the
traditional alliance of the Church hierarchy with the landowners and an urban
capitalist class, Gutierrez, a theologian, activist and priest - at a high
personal cost to himself - placed his focus upon the martyrdom of Jesus in his
celebration of the poor. To reflect upon
the material conditions of exploitation is thus, for him, to look upon the
spoken words and example of Jesus – and of those - Bonhoeffer,
Huber, and Benjamin – not to mention the countless faces of the oppressed - who
have been erased amidst this hegemony.[lvi] For Gutierrez, poverty is an explicit
challenge to the “Christian” - and a call which discloses the possible, sacred
significance of human existence. At the
same time, this was also the response of Marx in his own political advocacy,
one which intimates the connection between his own dialectical approach to the
historicity of existence to an affirmation characteristic of the sacred. But, that which is peculiar to Gutierrez, in
distinction from the usual caricature of Marx, is the explicit and primary
moment of reflection. In this
caricature, there is nothing equivalent to this reflective, existential moment
in the extant writings of Marx - there is nothing beyond the latter's early
affirmation of social or species being – which is thereby excluded since it is
not “scientific”. Yet, as I have
suggested, such a ground of affirmation and criticism can be found, not only
into his poetry, but also in his call for revolution – it is in this call that
one is invited to return to the existential depth of human existence. Amidst the wasteland of the 19th Century,
Marx could draw on no affirmative resources which obviated the horizons of
"scientific optimism". His
life of engaged praxis is enough
to indicate that there was, after all, something different about Marx.
The final moment of the triad –
see-reflect, act - is action or praxis
- once again, a decidely Marxist reference. Once one sees and reflects, one is confronted
by the necessity for action in the pursuit of the liberation of the poor. Marx is not merely a scientist of history as Althusser suggests. Instead, such a science
– as the analysis of historical – cannot be divorced from concrete praxis in the world, and from each of the
strands in the tapestry of the world.
Interpretation is not a self-subsistent endeavor
– it is necessary, but not sufficient.
There must be engagement amidst human
sensuous activity. In this way, we
must gather together the dissected strands of Marx’s work in order to fathom a
holistic existence. He is not merely a
theorist, but also an activist, father, etc, but also a singular mortal being,
engaged in a project of affirmation and commitment.
Marx enacts a radical phenomenology
of capital. In this light, we must indeed
draw from the decidedly sensuous content of these early works – especially
Marx's poetry. It is here where we can
find the affirmation for his commitment to and advocacy of a revolutionary
transformation and his affirmation of an engaged praxis. To do
otherwise is to miss the radical significance of Marx’s insight and elaboration
of a dialectical materialism. For, it is
in these early works that we can decipher the meaning of his persistent, though
understandably sublimated, commitment to a poeisis of existence, one which propels him into praxis.
In the same year as Gutierrez’s Theology
of Liberation, Miranda published Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the
Philosophy of Oppression. He
contends in this work that the authentic message of the Bible has been
displaced via the infiltration of Greek concepts into Christian theology. Yet, with closer reading, we discover that it
is not the “Greeks”, but instead, Plato and Aristotle – and their monsters,
Augustine and Aquinas. Even though he is
attuned with the Platonic Allegory of the Cave, Miranda objects not only to the
treatment of the poets, but also to the radical otherness of the doctrine of
forms which serve only to undervalue the present situation, this world. Miranda, as with Nietzsche, wishes to find
affirmation amidst “this”. His objection
to Aristotle is concerned with the notion of substance, ousia, or in its ancient Homeric
meaning, possessions, of the household.
His opposition to Aristotle and Plato amount to one thing – a revolution
against property and merely contemplative otherworldliness – escapism -for
these are two sides of the same coin.
Indeed, far from being anti-Greek, Miranda intimates the spirit of
Odysseus in his attempt to disclose an authentic Christianity. The suitors have taken over the very
possibility, the seeds of kingdom, turning it into grain for a household to be
consumed. Miranda seeks to deconstruct
the Thomist aristocracy of property and security so
as to clear a space for the eruption of an authentic biblical affirmation and
engagement amid this world. Yet, Miranda
does flirt with Augustine, yet, again, he is suspicious of Augustine’s
neo-platonic affiliations in that these are nihilistic. Miranda is not averse to the apocalyptic
sensibility of Augustine, but, in his opposition to the collateral damage of
“Greek” concepts of substance and political discipline, he seeks a notion of
“justice” which is not merely juridical, legal, amidst our current krisiς. Miranda seeks a “kingdom of god” beyond
Platonic Law, Aristotelian Substance and Augustinian polis.
Miranda, among others, points out
that there are differing interpretations of the Christian biblioς, from the perspective of the
Libertarian-Exodic interpretation of the Bible to
that of the Sinai redaction. He
emphasizes that the latter interpretation rests upon a redaction, or upon an
addition to the sacred text at a later date.
For Miranda, the “Bible” was originally a document of resistance. And, despite the redactions, it still is a
sacred text of revolution. In this
context, Marx is portrayed in two ways.
First, as a prophet, as one who echoed the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah,
Hosea, etc. Secondly, as a dialectical
philosopher, one whose poihsiς
engages amid a terrain of praxiς. It is clear that Miranda seeks to appropriate
Marx into his project of a “kingdom of god” upon the earth. His notion of the sacred, of the divine, and
of justice are the same. It is “love”. We must thus act amidst this “moment of love”
to eradicate suffering and oppression.
We must have a “preferential option for the poor”. The very struggle against suffering and
oppression is “the” divine, “the” sacred.
That which is significant about Marx is his thoughtful commitment amid a
struggle for liberation, of a poeisis
which abided an existence of praxiς.
In light of the third moment of
action, Marx's explicit emphasis upon praxiς
in his Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach
underlines the status of Liberation
theology as an exception to his overriding characterization of religion as
a narcotic, as a mystifying ideology which serves an explicit denunciation of
the oppressed in favour of the ruling elites.
The suppression – and often assassination, torture, and mutilation of
members of this movement – including Archbishop Romero and countless others,
via the religious hierarchy and the ruling landowning families in
Chapter 5: Marx and Twentieth Century
Radical Theology
It must
be stated again that religion is not identical with the sacred. Such a distinction has been made countless
times, from the deists of the Enlightenment to the radical theologians of the
Twentieth Century, such as Otto, Bultmann and Altizer,
who each in his own way, advocated a religion-less Christianity or a de-mythologization of religion. In this way, the idea of the holy, as Otto
dubbed the sense of the sacred, could plausibly be distinguished from not only
the rationalization of morality, but also the practice of Christianity in
particular or from organized politico-religion generally. One could also mention the forerunners of
these thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, hardly an
atheist, who distinguished the religion taught by Jesus and that which he
castigated as Christendom. Even
Nietzsche, the greatest enemy of Christianity, affirms a sense of the sacred or
eternal in his work Thus Spoke
Zarathustra, in his poetry and
prose. In this sense, Marx, a
contemporary of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, could be
considered a forerunner of Twentieth Century theology in light of his ethical
or moral critique of capitalist exploitation.
Yet, in tune with many contemporary criticisms of mere humanism and of
scientific optimism, Marx can be called to account as to the “root” for his
ethical and/or moral-political advocacies.
Marx is clearly on sacred, or at the very least, he is upon “ethical”
ground.
Revolutions are not instigated and waged merely as the result
of scientific analysis. They are
creatures of the heart which explode into the streets as rage takes hold of the
exploited, or the ambitious. After all,
it was the Marquis de Sade, hardly a cold
rationalist, who screamed through a drain pipe from his prison cell to the
French hordes, telling them that prisoners were being killed and invoking them
to storm the Bastille. Revolution is a
creature of commitment. In this chapter,
having ascertained that Marx shared with Liberation Theology a core of
practical commitment, we will sketch out the meaning of this commitment
in an interface betwixt Marx and radical, existentialist theology. Marx shares with this theology a criticism of
religion as Weltanschauung, and both project a
critical posture to the exoteric baggage of the cultus of religion. I will
first set forth the attempt by Rudolph Bultmann to articulate a de-mythologization of the Christian religion in his Jesus Christ and Mythology. I will next turn to his attempt to disclose a
non-objectified sense of the divine which is the expression of the sacred from
the concrete situation of the person – outside the scientific objectification
of the antithetical regime of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in his essay “What does it
mean to speak of God?.” In this light, I
will not only criticise the scientific variant of Marx and its attempt to speak
of existence from the “outside”. Drawing
on the full spectrum of Marx’s writings, I will next attempt to compare
Bultmann’s deconstruction of a scientific world-view (Weltanschauung) with Marx’s
critique of ideology. I will contend
that the only way for Marx to escape his own criticism of ideology (i.e., for
Bultmann, a scientific analysis of ideology remains a Weltanschauung and thus an
ideology) will be for him to take the “step back” from his criticism of
religion towards an affirmation of the sacred significance of existence. Such a “step back” from the constructed stems
of subjectivity and objectivity will disclose a non-alienated sense of the
sacred.
The current question is the character of Marx’s affirmation of the sacred, of his obligation and commitment amidst his criticism of religion as idealism. Indeed, Marx not only fails to answer the existential theology of the 20th century, but it remains possible that Marx may also be in accord with this theology in its critical posture to the exoteric cultus of religion.
Perhaps the most significant Twentieth Century radical theologian in this context is Rudolf Bultmann. In the following, I will set forth the attempt by Bultmann to articulate a de-mythologization of the Christian religion in his Jesus Christ and Mythology. I will next turn to his attempt to disclose a non-objectified sense of the divine which is the expression of the sacred from the concrete situation of the person – outside the scientific objectification of the antithetical regime of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in his essay “What does it mean to speak of God?” In this light, I will not only criticise the scientific posture of “Marx” and an attempt to speak of existence from the “outside”, but will also attempt to compare Bultmann’s deconstruction of a scientific world-view (Weltanschauung) with Marx’s critique of ideology.
For Bultmann, the phenomenon of the sacred is disclosed in a personal way. In many ways anticipating and also echoing Heidegger, he points to "God" in radical despair. This is no idealist philosophy or logic of ideas, but a despair of a singular being amidst nothingness, "God". The significance of Bultmann lies not, as with Liberation Theology, in any explicit social analysis of the conditions of material exploitation, although he is not unaware of such contours of existence.[lviii] The importance of Bultmann lies instead in his attempt at a de-mythologization or, in the present context, at a de-ideologization of religion and a call for a thinking, and acting, which is an expression of the concrete situations of one’s existence.[lix] Not only did he call, in his works "The Crisis in Belief",[lx] "What does it mean to speak of God?"[lxi] and Jesus Christ and Mythology[lxii] for a de-mythologization of Christianity and of the impossibility of conceiving of "God" as an object (as opposed to a phenomena), but he affirmed the this-ness of a personal apprehension of the sacred. Religious dogmas and religious laws are merely detours, distractions, impediments. Bultmann indeed rejected systematic theologies and the ideological propagation of the Christian religion - in a way which would be and has been disturbing for most Christians. In this way, there is a special affinity between Bultmann and Marx - at least in their own respective attitudes to the idealistic distortions of a hegemonic religion. However, that which distinguishes Marx from Bultmann is (if we go along with the usual portrayal of Marx) the latter's explicit articulation of an existential dimension of the self which apprehends an un-certain - non-theoretical - sense of the sacred in a moment of existential despair. As with Otto, Bultmann apprehends the Holy as that which radically overwhelms this finite self.
Of course, one could point to the early poetry of Marx as an explicit affirmation of the divine. Or, one could also trace the places where such affirmations emerge throughout the latter texts of Marx. Yet, this would be insufficient as it would underplay the implicit criticism of the scientific Marx that is possibly offered by Bultmann. Bultmann does not mention Marx, as does Gutierrez. Yet, it would almost seem that Marx, or at least Nietzsche, somehow haunts Bultmann’s works, especially in his critique of scientific objectivity in “What does it mean to speak of God?” There seems to be an invitation for an engagement of the two thinkers. In the following, I will attempt to accept this invitation.
Jesus Christ and Mythology to a significant extent replays or repeats Bultmann’s earlier criticism of world-view (Weltanschauung) in his earlier writings and lectures, especially “What does it mean to speak of God?” which will be consider below. In Jesus Christ and Mythology, he is explicitly turning his critical arsenal toward the figure and person of Jesus of Nazareth. It would seem that his audience is the Christian community itself. He is neither simply seeking to dismiss mythology as such, as a “primitive science”, nor is he seeking to simply dismiss Jesus and the lore which surrounds his name as myth, muqoς. Instead, in an echo of Heidegger’s early radical phenomenology, he is seeking to see the stories of Jesus in the New Testament as indications of the possibility, but un-name-ability, of sacred existence.[lxiii] Bultmann writes:
This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing – an unsatisfactory word, to be sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a method of hermeneutics.[lxiv]
Bultmann, as with Heidegger, does not wish to simply dismiss mythology as untruth in the face of a judicious scientific objectivity which claims a pre-eminent enlightenment. As we will see below in Bultmann’s essay, “What does it mean to speak of God?”, such a posture of the “outside”, of enlightenment objectivity, is merely “fraud”, “posture”, as it loses, erases, that which it claims to name, to “identify”. On the contrary, mythology points to truth in an exoteric sense, but it is our task to disclose the esoteric meaning of the text. Bultmann writes:
Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. It believes that the world and human life have their ground and their limits in a power which is beyond all that we can calculate and control. Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly power.[lxv]
In this light, Bultmann is not interested in destroying mythology. He merely wishes to evade the ousiology of the said. He wishes to get back to this [de-ontological] event of saying. This distinguishes his work from the Critical Theory of Adorno and Horheimer, which orchestrates an objective mission to bring light to the world, to eliminate the superstitions of the masses, and the phenomena to which “they” point. Bultmann, on the contrary, is attempting a hermeneutic endaevor to disclose the meaning of the text, of the mythologies - without destroying them. There is an intimacy between myth and meaning, but Bultmann is seeking to go beyond the objectification inherent in the mythological procedure of ousiological, substantialist naming. He contends that names, the words of the myth, cannot be conceived as objects which can be viewed from the “outside”. The hermeneutic enterprise seeks to disclose that to which these names point, indicate. Bultmann writes:
We can understand the problem best when we remember that de-mythologizing is an hermeneutic method, that is, a method of interpretation, of exegesis. “Hermeneutics” is a method of exegesis.[lxvi]
But it should be stated that this is not a scientific or objectivist procedure, but as is most explicit in the earlier works of Bultmann, the “life-relation” to the sacred is an expression from the concrete existence of my finite being. Bultmann writes:
I call this relation the “life-relation”. In this relation you have a certain understanding of the matter in question, and from this understanding grow the conceptions of exegesis. From reading the texts you will learn, and your understanding will be enriched and corrected. Without such a relation and such previous understanding (Vorverstandnis) it is impossible to understand any text.[lxvii]
Such an understanding of a life-relation, as a personal expression of this concrete situation of existence, a pre-understanding, can neither provide a system of meaning, nor can it provide an ideal picture of that which should be or is. On the contrary, there is no stability or ground in such a relation. There is no attempt to flee from this situation of finitude into a paradise of the “outside”. In this situation in which there is “no exit”, we cannot simply dispense with mythology, but see it as indicative of the truth of a situation amidst a life-relation. Myth points to these various contours of personal existence. In this way, myth is not the same as the objectifying stratagems of a rational, everday, consciousness. We cannot dispense with myth in favour of mere regimes of consciousness, of a rationalist conceptuality which seeks to destroy the event of the numinous in an "order of things". Bultmann writes:
Mythological conceptions can be used as symbols and images which are perhaps necessary to the language of religion and therefore of the Christian faith. Thus it becomes evident that the use of mythological language, far from being an objection to de-mythologizing, positively demands it.[lxviii]
In anticipation of the engagement of Bultmann and Marx below, we could contend that what Bultmann is seeking to achieve is a non-alienated sense of the sacred. In a way similar to Marx’s own criticism of ideology and an uprooted consciousness, Bultmann is seeking the determining context of being or existence for his phenomenology of the sacred. Indeed, Bultmann could agree with Marx’s criticism of religion as an idealist falsification of thought which masques the concrete relations of existence. Yet, he would disagree with Marx, however, that the notion of the sacred - as opposed to his early advocacy of "social being" or the secular notion of the comrade - simply would disappear with the evaporation of religion. In the step back from ideology, there is a place from which one can undertake a hermeneutics of existence through which one can understand the radical finitude of my own being. Bultmann writes:
In my personal existence, I am isolated neither from my environment nor from my own past and future. When, for example, I achieve through love a self-understanding, what takes place is not an isolated psychological action of coming to consciousness; my whole situation is transformed. In understanding myself, I understand other people and at the same time the whole world takes on a new character. I see it, as we say, in a new light, and so it really is a new world. I achieve a new insight into my past and my future. I recognize new demands and am open to encounters in a new manner. My past and future become more than pure time as it is marked on a calendar or timetable. Now it is should be clear that I cannot possess this self-understanding as a timeless truth, a conviction accepted once and for all. For my new self-understanding, by it very nature, must be renewed day by day, so that I understand the imperative self which is included in it.[lxix]
Bultmann offers us a makeshift sense of self-understanding, a radical temporal hermeneutic of existence. He could contend against “Marx” that a non-alienated sense of the sacred would indeed be such a radical hermeneutic of existence, such a ceaselessly existence of new lights and new worlds. “Marx” does not himself explicitly speak of such possibilities - unless one looks to his poetry and his early works, and from this fresh perspective, his “later” works. Indeed, I will contend that Marx’s poetry expresses the so-called “scientific” insights of Capital, etc., although it also says a lot more.
In order to draw out this possibility in more detail, we must turn to Bultmann’s analysis of Weltanschauung in his essay “What does it mean to speak of God?” It is in this essay that we can find the most striking affinity with the work of Marx, but an affinity which will pose a challenge to Marx – despite his obvious reservations about religion – to consider the possibility of a non-alienated sense of the sacred.
In his 1925 essay, “What does it mean to speak of God?”, Bultmann goes to great lengths to explain to us that the very attempt to speak about God, in its event, serves only to erase God, to obliterate the Divine. The key phrase is italicised: to speak about. Obviously, Bultmann is speaking about God – he is deploying the word in a field of linguistic construction, a communication. Indeed, he admits this and closes his essay with the bald statement that this very essay is a work of sin. We do “speak about” God, but what does our speaking mean? What is the meaning of the activity of constructing and uttering propositions and sentences about God? Bultmann has already indicated that such speaking about is sin. Yet, what is sin, in a de-mythologized sense? For Bultmann, the speaking about God interjects the Divine into a discourse which is governed by a logic of objectification. God becomes an entity, an object (Objekt) - in our concepts, we become alienated from the divine. Not only, in this gesture, does God lose its capacity for a transcendental significance, but also God, beyond the picture it has become, is severed from the singular mortal being. Our “speaking about” is a symptom or indication of a fallenness from God. We speak about God for we do not apprehend God. The deeper significance of the objectification of God is that instead of an intimacy with a God which transcends the world - we have a worldly God, who as worldly, must die. We have killed God and our speaking about God is a symptom of our guilt – as with Nietzsche, we are the ugliest man. We are speaking about God, but not living God, amid a life of intimacy inside the sacred opening of existence. Such speaking becomes a picture of the world, it becomes a world-picture (Weltanschauung) – an ideology.
Bultmann contends that reality itself is a construct according to criteria laid down by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, these movements, as with Miranda, articulating themselves in the shadow of the world view of “Greek” philosophy. He says,
We consider something to be real if we can understand it in relation to the unified complex of the world. The relation may be thought of as determined causally or teleologically, its components and forces may be conceived as material or spiritual. The antithesis between idealism and materialism is irrelevant for the question with which we are concerned.[lxx]
The question is of our speaking of the sacred, of the divine, of God, the gods. With Idealism and Materialism, there is much to be said about God and gods or the lack thereof. But in our obsession with pictures, with our great artwork [Reality], we displace the intimacy of personal existence and the space for an encounter with the Divine, the Holy. Bultmann describes this act of displacement, and contends it is rooted in an anxiety in the face of existence, amidst the horizon of finitude. He says:
We ourselves are observed as an object among other objects and are put in our proper place in the structure of this picture of the world which has been fabricated without reference to the question of our own existence. When this picture of the world is completed by the inclusion of man, it is customary to call it a world-view (Weltanschauung). We strive to acquire such a world-view or, if it supposedly has been attained, to propagate it.[lxxi]
Such a construction is makeshift, although it is not recognized amidst the panic flight from the truth of existence. The world-picture is a cave in which to hide, but one composed of sand. Yet, they are secure enough and allow one to hide from themselves for many ticks of the clock. The flight from an authentic apprehension of the truth of finite existence is the construction of the world-picture - it is its modus operendi. As such, this abandonment of the truth, not only of death but also of the Divine, indicates an abandonment into the world, a fallenness into the world, a guilt to oneself. We have forgotten the truth of ourselves, we have abandoned ourselves in anonymity. Bultmann contends that the very attempt and operation to construct the truth regime of Reality is a flight from the “riddle of destiny and death”. We are confronted by the overwhelming, and as with Kant’s response to the sublime in his criticism of aesthetic judgment, we imagine that we are able to control the overwhelming, the sublime. We name it, classify it into a discursive formation, a "truth regime". Our subjectivity is satisfied that it is more powerful than the sublime itself, than the overwhelming. God becomes an object in our standing reserve of useful concepts. We imagine that we have found the truth. However, Bultmann contends that this picture is built at an extreme cost:
But that very view is the primary falsity (prvton yeudos) and its leads necessarily to mistaking the truth of our own existence, since we are viewing ourselves from outside as an object of scientific investigation. Nor is there any gain if we label ourselves ‘subject’ in distinction to the other objects with which we see ourselves in interaction. For man is seen from the outside even when he is designated ‘subject’. Therefore the distinction between subject and object must be kept separate from the question of our own existence.[lxxii]
We can speak about neither God or ourselves as objects. For as we do we at once set the latter up as the edifice of reality for the former. In such a cloud of falsity, we lose ourselves and God. Bultmann, in an anticipation of Heidegger, asks if indeed silence, Quietism, is our only recourse in this situation. However, he contends that this posture too is merely an act of the subject “with respect to” God. It is making a decision on how God is to be treated. This procedure, this silence, is also a species of objectification.
As Lenin once asked, “What is to be done?”[lxxiii] But, contrary to Lenin, Bultmann argues that there is a “middle course”. Existence is in-between and prior, it is the root of the stems, to echo Heidegger’s appropriation of the metaphor of the tree of life from Aristotle and Descartes, of the subject and object. For Bultmann, existence consists of the free act, and this act is that of obedience to God, a must that is freely undertaken. This free act is commitment to the divine amidst a sacred opening. The free act is resistance to the flight from existence; it is a free acceptance of the truth of finitude. Amidst this situation of complete dependence, the postures, masks, of the subject and object melts into air. Bultmann says:
For the free act which is truly the expression of our existence (in the proper sense we exist only in such action and not otherwise and such action is really nothing other than our existence itself), the truly free act can never be known in the sense of being objectively proven. It cannot be offered for investigation as something “to be proved” (probandum). For in that case we should be objectifying it and putting ourselves outside it. A free act can only be done and in so far as we speak of such doing, the possibility of it can only be believed.[lxxiv]
In the externality of mere discourse about God, there is not only a flight to an illusory ground outside of God, but there is also a fleeing from this free act which is the truth of one’s own existence. The free act is an openness to the intimacy of finite existence, the truth of which is God. The intimacy of this act cannot be conceived or integrated into a lawful system of objectified knowledge. It cannot be subjected to logical or argumentative proof. Such a displacement of the intimacy of the sacred would forbid that very object of our desire. Indeed, only in a surrender to God, to our own radical finitude do we paradoxically find the greatest surety. Bultmann says,
Only in the act is it sure. It is always sure as faith in the grace of God who forgives sin and who, if he pleases, justifies me who cannot speak from god, but can only speak about God. All our action and speech has meaning only under the grace of the forgiveness of sins. And that is not within our control. We can only have faith in it.[lxxv]
One may be perplexed about the possible relation of the foregoing explication and Marx,
especially this last affirmation of faith. Yet, if we consider the meaning of this indication
as a surrender to the sacred in a de-mythologised sense, we apprehend a situation of radical finitude, a world of care the limit of which is death, which is at once an openness to the sacred, a free act of binding commitment. In this light, and in tandem with Bultmann’s deconstruction of “objective” and “subjective” reality as an organized system of knowledge, we can glimpse the deeper significance of not only Marx’s affirmation of praxiς, but also of his dialectical materialism. Marx’s criticism of religion as an ideology is strikingly similar to Bultmann’s explication of the regime of the subject and object, of the world-picture which masks the “truth” of human existence. Yet, for Marx, as well as Bultmann, to escape from this antithetical regime of speaking about, each must find a place, a topos, from which to not only resist this “truth regime”, but also to retrieve an intimacy amid this truth of human existence. For Marx, it is praxis – beyond the sin of speaking about, from his early poetry on throughout his later analytical works – which beckons the truth event of one’s own existence, event. Yet, as with Bultmann, these words are not meant to re-enforce a self-similar regime of ideology, but to break through these words with counter-indications, threads, and acts which can possibly lead us out of this labyrinth of objectification. For Marx, it is a praxis which seeks to go beyond, to transform, the world – or to intimate a differing world. His dialectic indicates a space in-between in which an affirmation and a commitment, as a free act, can invoke the true to human existence. Bultmann’s de-mythologization of the sacred seeks an intimacy amidst a sacred praxis which resists the world-picture (Weltanschauung) of falsity for the truth of finitude.
That which Marx and Bultmann share is an affirmation of an obligation and commitment which seeks to go beyond this world, not in a Platonic sense, but as an awakening of a topos of existence exudes a non-alienated sense of the sacred, which Marx does intimate in his spacings,[lxxvi] in his surprises, his interjections of truths from the “outside”. It could be contended that the practical implications of such affirmations bore radically differing fruit in Marx and Bultmann. And the words each deployed were radically distinct – the classless society of non-alienated human existence or the free acceptance of finite existence as a surrender to God. Yet, there persists a striking similarity not only with respect to the regime of objectification, world-view and ideology, but also with respect to the inner kernel of an obligation and commitment which abides in the free act, in praxis. In each case, there is an affirmation and a commitment to the truth of human existence as the sacred.
It cannot be over-emphasized that Bultmann is
not the typical theologian - indeed, he is rejected by many theologians who
fear that his radical existential sense of the sacred falls merely into
"subjectivism". Yet, what this
criticism fails to comprehend is that Bultmann is invoking a hermeneutical
phenomenology of the sacred - amidst the “intentional structure of
consciousness", Bultmann is open to the phenomena of the holy, of the
sacred. "God" as a formal
indicator, [He] can never be an ousiological
object, a thing in the world - it is rather a "No-thing" as a
transcendental condition or limit for existence. But, such a Kantian gesture
would be too far for Bultmann. The
sacred is apprehended in the singular moment of vision - in this, my situation of openness to that which
overwhelms - this is not “subjectivism” as it concerns not "objects",
but phenomena, a sacred praxis amidst finite existence. In
other words, it is perhaps in prayer, in the moment of anticipation, or in
aiding the needy, where Bultmann meets God - perhaps as a
"Father" or a “friend”.
This attempt of a de-mythologization of the sacred, as with Liberation Theology, answers in a significant way Marx's critique
of religion as such and the Christian religion, in situ, as an ideology of oppression.
However, on the other hand, this attempt abides an openness toward the
sacred which is seemingly absent in
Marx - if that is we refuse to detect the traces of such affirmation in his
early work and his poetry. In this way,
an openness toward finitude and the possibility of the sacred invokes a
dimension of awareness which is not tainted by the facile slander of ideology
or mystification. Bultmann calls on us
to find the sacred for ourselves, amidst our own event - not to adhere to a
mythology, a morality or stable systematic theology in profane exoteric
repetition. In this way, he is not an
idealist or propagandist - but an existentialist who abides a sense of the
holy. While the question may be put to
Bultmann why he never spoke explicitly about the capitalist system, it could
just as easily be asked of Marx why he did not explicitly speak about a
non-alienated sense of the Sacred.
Between the two, there is a meeting place and a chance for dialogue.
It could be suggested that in his
attempt to decode the camera obscura
of capitalist ideology, “Marx” occluded from his own perspective the
possibility or necessity of a retrieval of not only a non-alienated sense of
the sacred, but also, a non-alienated meaning of existence, of
be-ing. “Marx” remains relatively
silent, in the “Canon”, of an affirmative sense of existence – or to, as
Heidegger indicates, an existence which is Eigentlichkeit. Heidegger paints a rather one-dimensional
portrait of Marx, playing his typical game.
Yet, even if it could be argued that Marx had a sense of “world”, it is
possible that his “pre-understanding” had not undergone the interrogation of
death and demise. We will have to
see. Through an encounter with
Heidegger, we will “step back” to an existential sense of the situation of the
finite self for Marx. Yet, this leads us
out of the Christian neighbourhood that we have been travelling – as instead of
God or Jesus, we will be entering “nothingness”. The question, therefore, is the noesis and ethos of the sacred that is opened up in Marx.
Heidegger specifies praxiς, Marx, is a mere creature of the deed. In this way, the latter has no access to a
primal “unity” of phenomena. That which
is crucial is the starting point. Heidegger
could ask: what is the character of the “unity” in the dialectic of dialectical
materialism? Amidst his own ecstatic
temporality, in which the meaning of being is disclosed as a projection upon
temporality, Heidegger does not apprehend a starting point in severed
positions, of a subject and object. Marx
does not seem to abandon unity either.
Yet, Marx continues to deploy the arsenal of modernist subjectivity in
his dialectical analysis of historical development. For Heidegger, Marx throws down the mask or
statue of “interpretation” only to deploy an uncritical array of concepts in an
attempt to change it, the world.
Marx fails to articulate a philosophy of existence which gives
appropriate respect to thinking and acting.
Such considerations are greatly shrouded by the tecne of the subject and object, phenomenon and noumenon,
and of the profane and sacred. For
Heidegger, to rework or destructure a dispensable and
problematic starting point, to question one’s own presupposition, or to be open
to the possibility of a new or different truth, is the essence of philosophy as
the love of the truth. The question
would simply be: is the Hegelian trace in Marx, amidst the “against”, of the aufhebung, instructive as to Marx’s theoretical
willingness to not only advocate a violent revolution, but also to assert that
such an event is the preservation and transcendence of the “order of
things”. What does Marx mean by
“revolution”?
Despite Heidegger’s notion that
Marx was not awake to an "analytic of dasein", it is easily shown
that Marx incessantly expressed his sensitivity to thought, imagination and
temporality – something lost in Heidegger’s focus on his own reading of the Eleventh
Thesis. Marx neither recoils in the
face of the overwhelming, nor flees into an anonymity of action. Marx, in his advocacy of a radical
transformation of the “world”, the praxiς
of revolution discloses his own existential world, his nexus of binding
commitments, expressed implicitly in his be-ing, and explicitly in his poetry
and writings. Such sensivities
intimates a life attuned an affirmation of and a desire for a sacred
existence.
Perhaps Heidegger felt that Marx’s
emphasis upon class struggle was a species of the warring stems and did not
give due honour to a more fundamental “unity” amidst ecstatic, singular
existence in Marx’s moment of the open.
This dangerous “perhaps” demands a disclosure of the moment of sacred
affirmation in Marx. An existence, one
which has not disclosed to itself, its own finitude, of this insurmountability
of death, is still alienated – the impetuous move to action forclosed,
for Heidegger, on the opportunity, the topoς, of finite questioning, makeshift
thinking. Marx, an enemy of religion,
still intimates a sense of the sacred, of obligation and commitment amidst a
world of horror and terror. Indeed, such
a sacred obligation and commitment seeks to invoke a non-alienated
existence. Yet, as Levinas and Bataille
ask, “what” is on the hither and thither side of such an ethical affirmation?
In the following, I will set forth
Heidegger's criticism in more detail, in reference to Heidegger’s only
references to Marx in his Letter on
Humanism, his Kant's Thesis on Being,
and his criticism of Marxism as a "productionist
metaphysics" in his 1935 Introduction
to Metaphysics. I will contend that
not only does Marx, in light of his poetic resolution, basically escape the
criticism of his Eleventh Thesis.
Moreover, with a richer interpretation of Marx’s thought and action – not
to mention the other ten Theses - we can answer the questions regarding Marx’s
“subjectivism” and “productionism”. In light of these answers, we will in many
ways detect a strong affinity between Heidegger and Marx. However, such an affinity is set upon tenuous
ground in the context of the question of death.
This question will be the destination of the following as this chapter
will lead up to an investigation of the phenomena of death in Heidegger and
Marx. Our discussion will focus upon one
of the rare indications of “personal” death in Marx from the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts. Indeed,
the great fault of this effort is its resignation with respect to a personal,
individual or singular sense of sensuous human existence. Yet, it is the poetry of Marx which evokes
the topos for a questioning of finitude and death. It is amidst such a topos that it is possible to question the deeper obligation
and commitment in Marx, shrouded in his other works.
The Meaning of
World
In addition to his brief reference
to "Marxism" as a productionist metaphysics
in his notorious Introduction to
Metaphysics (1935),
Heidegger intimates his criticism of Marx as a mere “man of action” in at least
two texts, the post-war essay Letter on
Humanism and in the 1962 lecture, Kant's
Thesis About Being. In both
instances, Heidegger circles in on Marx's Eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach, which I already cited above. In response to the contention that the philosopher has only interpreted the
world in various ways, but the point
is to change it, Heidegger contends that in order to act, one must already
have a sense of the meaning of world. Such a “having” for Heidegger implies much –
indeed, it implies that we can never have the “world”. One can only
objectify things.
For Heidegger, Marx seems to want
to throw all into the abyss in an orgasm of action in an effort to possess the
world. Heidegger is certain that Marx
has become a “positivist” and a mere “activist”.[lxxvii] Marx is blind to the world, existence, such
as that transcribed in Being and Time
– a necessary task of disclosing the world and the meaning of existence, the
truth of being from the perspective of being-there, existence (da-sein). As a
result, Marx is forced to adhere to a notion of the world conceived merely a
collection or system of objects. From
the perspective of Heidegger’s formal indication of the Goethean
tree of life in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Marx has never
left the derivative and constructed modalities of vorhanden
and zuhanden, translated as theoretical and
practical. Ironically, it could be
suggested that it is Heidegger who may give the best analysis of the tragically
continual litany in the Marxian paradigm of the question of the relationship of
theory and practice.
Heidegger insists that Marx, if he
were to descend from the stems to the root, would have to seek to disclose the
world in this singularity of being towards death as it climaxes in the event of
anticipatory resoluteness, in a disclosure of a sense of being, the meaning of
existence as a simultaneous projection of temporality upon Sein and the
excession, giving, of temporality by Sein. Marx speaks about history, but for Heidegger,
he does not realize that if he had a sense of the radical finitude of
existence, he would abandon his architectonic of subject and object, and thus,
of a dialectical reason. There is no
need of a dialectic between relata, if these latter
do indeed find there “unity” in a differing topos. Indeed,
despite the affinities between Bultmann and Marx, it is not clear whether the
persistence of the dialectic between subject and object, which is predominant
in the first volume of Capital allows Marx to escape the taint of
ideology. Moreover, it is further
unclear whether this distinction and dialectic is the only way to read the
works of Marx – not to mention the many texts which do not evoke these
terms.
Marx poetry has never been allowed
to enter the house of the “Canon”. His
“juvenile” poetry is, according to the pundits, mere enthusiasms of youth, and
therefore, deserve no “scientific” merit.
Yet, if poetry is excluded from the “Canon” of Marx, then we must merely
accept the Kantian idealist schema in which the imagination, temporality
itself, will be merely harnessed in order to provide the synthetic engine for
the fulfilment of the theoretical and practical ends of reason. If we can consider Marx’s poetry and the
light that is cast upon existence via this indication, we can trace a
circumvention of the “order of things”.
It is here where we find the seat of Marx’s affirmation of the
sacred.
For Heidegger, and I feel as
attested by Marx, human existence cannot be reduced to such a merely
theoretical or practical interpretation.
As Heidegger is attempting a radical phenomenology of existence, he is
seeking the finite horizons of sense, meaning, for the mortal being. Heidegger can charge Marx – in the absence of
a sensitivity to the latter’s poetic, interpretive hermeneutic - with not only
repeating the metaphysics of subjectivity, of humanism, as being is merely posited by the subject. Whether this is by the scientist of
dialectical materialism or by the proletariet as the subject of history, this revolution
violates his own rhetoric of having transcended “ideology”, the world-picture (Weltanschauung) in the call to action, or mere praxiς.
If we accept Heidegger's
interpretation of the Eleventh Thesis,
Marx never escapes an interpretative matrix in his impatient call to throw down
the ladder in action or praxis. Such a call merely repeats the process of
objectification which annihilates the unique character of human existence
indicated as a projection in the face of finitude. It is in this way that we should interpret
Heidegger's statement that "Marxism" operates on the level of a productionistic metaphysics. In such a scenario, social or species being,
despite it naturalistic or socialistic call for an annihilation of egoistic
individuality, remains, for Heidegger, in the ideology of the Anyone (Das Man). Yet, Marx neither
wishes to nor can escape interpretation.
He merely interprets the world - conceived as a system of objects - in
yet another way. Yet, it is not clear if
Marx is merely blind to “world” in Heidegger’s sense. Indeed, even if Marx is an atheist, such
questions such as finitude must have come up… More seriously, that which is essential
is not mere questions of “time” and “being”, but of the temporal disclosure of
truth amid this opening. As I have
stated, the entirety of Marx’s work could be seen as poetry of existence, with
an affinity to the original irruptions of a poetic opening. Such a perspective is disclosed in light of a
reading of Marx’s poetry and plays, and if one is attuned to literary
perspectives, in all of Marx’s work. We
must explore the significance of his hermeneutic of existence and its relation
to the sacred - even if much of it is disseminated in the form of scholarly
prose. Could the event of revolution and
decision to participate in such an event be an authentic expression of the
sacred? Or, is the affirmation located
at a deeper place of existence, before this ethical event, in the ethos of the
self, of the moment of vision (augenblick) in
singularis?
What would a post-Heideggerian Marx look like
- and what sense of the sacred would be evident in a Marx set free from
modernist subjectivity? Or, did Marx
already set himself free, as Schürmann suggests with respect to his
anti-humanism?
If we can find resources in Marx
which can fend off the most serious challenges from Heidegger’s Being and
Time, the most deadly criticism of Marx by Heidegger comes from his
emphatic turn to releasement, piety and
contemplation. Augmenting his own early
emphasis upon the finitude of existence, his thought, after the turn, in a
Taoist gesture, seems to have displaced that voluntarist
project of any subject, agent, whatever apparition it may take. But such a thinking which is a thanking is a
further transfiguration of the philosophy of the turn which gave to da-sein a destiny amidst this prevailing dispensation of
technological being. For that Heidegger,
there is a danger in this technological unfolding. Our role in this prevailing circumstance is
to not only be open to future possibilities, but, in the mean time, to resist
the hegemony of technological representation in its communication, command and
control of its assertion of the “truth” of existence and the world.
Yet, despite that Das Man are far
from being open to the truth of being, and are enthralled by the latest big
lie, Heidegger does not wish to loose a sense of Being in its dispensation
– in its withdrawal. Such a sentiment is
similar to his 1936 lecture course “What is a Thing?” in which he delineates
(in a quite late Heidegger manner) the various systematic projections of
mathesis in the context of the sciences.
He gives as an example a leaf.
One could see it amidst the botanical projection as a species from such
and such a region, requires this care, has this diseases, has a specific
physiology. Or, as a quantity of
chemicals and chemical configurations analysed into its constituent substances,
its component parts. Geometrically, the
leaf is of a certain shape and configuration.
Chaos theory steps up with its “medicine bag” of fractals. Calculus can compute the ultimately approximate
spatial dimensions of this leaf. Or, on
the other hand, we could see it as a religious or secular symbol, such as the
fig leaf and the laurel. Religion and
the Secular swarm at each other in a matrix of the Same. Yet, even in the Same, there is already a
plural voice, even amidst the projected mathesis. Yet, the only voice that is missing is that
of the leaf itself – to simply sense the leaf, in its Istigkeit[lxxviii],
to witness it in its this-ness, in its singular, authentic existence.
As Heidegger increasingly
apprehended, and was also noticed by Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida and others, there must a cultivation
of this space on the “outside”, amidst ek-sistence,
so as to shelter the phenomena in its openness to the truth of its own
existence. Such an “outside” is
indicated in poetry as poetic expression allows for the self-expression of the
phenomena in question. It is unclear how
Heidegger may have taken Marx’s poetry – yet, it is clear that he regarded the
poetic and philosophic works of major thinkers, such as Kant and Nietzsche, and
those by the poets themselves Holderlin, Rilke, Sophocles, as artistic
events which disclosed that which “was” there, “is” here. In the context of Heidegger’s 1920’s
phenomenology, such a formally indicative role is played by his elaborate
topology of phenomenological descriptions and existential categories, or existentials (Existentiale). In this light, it could be suggested that the
poetry of Marx can in fact be interpreted as an articulation of a
pre-philosophical, existential and ethical understanding of the world. Not only is such a world indicated and
disclosed, but the basic commitments of the poet are also disclosed.
In light of the prolific corpus of
Marx and the existential continuity between his various excusions
and detours, it could very well be contended that Heidegger’s objection to Marx
can be cast aside in light of his extant poetry and of the continuation of this
poetic trajectory throughout Marx’s writings and his political, social and
familial engagements. In the end, if we
take into account Marx’s poetry and his in-depth writings, we can dismiss
Heidegger’s claim that Marx is implicated in a vulgar sort of praxis.
Marx’s poetry deals directly with the phenomena of death and struggle in
its relation to the authentic commitments of the self - of his own self. Indeed, these poems are a precise objection
that has long been held against Marx with respect to his notion of the
personal, or of existence in Heidegger’s tumultuous sense.
Death and the
Sacred
For Heidegger, there is a deeper
region of being which is – in light of the formal indication of the Goethean tree - the root of these stems is existence (da-sein).
This root-being (Wurzel-sein)
and the morphology, contours of this existence is prior to the realm of
technical production, practical morality, politics or ethics, superficially
conceived. Marx is forced to posit
action or praxiς as
the link to the world, conceived, Heidegger would suggest, as a world view (Weltanschauung). In the absence of any apparent knowledge or
insight into the poetry of Marx by Heidegger, however, any analysis of Marx
remains in the superficiality of the stems, to continue with Heidegger’s long
standing metaphor of the tree. In such a
context, Marx fails to enact a self-interpretation of existence which would
explicate world as a projection of
binding commitments disclosed in the anticipatory resoluteness of
being-towards-death (Sein-zu-Tod). Such an
indication is relevant due to the paucity of references to death in the
writings of Marx of the post-Hegelian Marx.
Yet, many senses of death are articulated in the poetry of Marx, not to
mention in his later writings. There is
described a situation of finitude, desire, sorrow, joy and a thoughtfulness amidst
nihilism and commodification. Yet, in the post-“Canon”, Marx speaks only of
the deaths of revolutionaries, workers, and the death knell of capitalism.
Accepting into our discussion the post-Hegelian Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
Marx refers to death almost in passing in one sentence. He writes in “Private Property and
Communism”, giving his most explicit “analysis” of the self:
Man, much as he may
therefore be a particular individual
(and it is precisely his particularity which makes him an individual, and a
real individual social being), is
just as much the totality — the ideal
totality — the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for
itself; just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real
enjoyment of social existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of
life.
Thinking and being
are thus certainly distinct, but at
the same time they are in unity with each other.
Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual
and to contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and as such
mortal.
One gathers from this reference that singular death is subsumed within the category of existence conceived as a species event, as a great cycle which transcends the individual being, a particular. He or she is merely a leaf falling from the tree of life. Our relationship to the other is mediated by experience and imagination, but in the end, the particular being is merely a finite aspect of a deeper, non-subjective truth of being. For Heidegger, who never mentions the Paris Manuscripts, death - or the overwhelming existentiale of a being-towards-death, indicates the primal phenomena of which discloses the finitude of existence and the possibility of an authentic projection of the meaning of existence as temporal. Such a projection of binding commitments, as World, though temporal or ultimately makeshift, is the primal excession of meaning which discloses the horizon for any subsequent articulation of theory or practise.
Yet, beyond the apparent brevity of his reference to death, Marx contends that the individual is real, actual, a singular human being who must think and act to exist. That which is essential in this excerpt from the Paris Manuscripts is that Marx states that the individual conceives of his relationship to others in the context of an "ideal totality". It is obvious that he exists in a material, terrestrial adjacency with others. However, his conscious, thoughtful relationship to these others is mediated via the imagination, by language, art, and all other types of action, articulation and expression. In this way, thought and the possibility of self-interpretation still maintain a sense of freedom with respect to being – there is no determinism, whether by class or structure or place or blood. Marx reveals his imposture in his seeming resignation with respect to death. His poetry has already said so much more. Yet, leading to his thin statement about death as a surrender of the particular to the universal, he speaks of an "imaginary" relation with others as an “ideal totality” – Marx, in this Aristotelian schema, lays out a theological relationship between the mortal being and the everlasting. Worlds and ages roll. Yet, in this opening, amidst “real” social existence, Marx asserts, in this and in other places, the imaginative, temporal and singular character of existence. His poetic engagement with existence, amidst the “imaginary”, Temporality, history, etc. exposes his eqos of affirmation and commitment to spiritual transfiguration and world revolution.
In the projection of a temporally
binding horizon of commitments amidst the event of anticipatory resoluteness,
there is, for Heidegger, the disclosure of not only the insurmountable horizons
of finite singularity, but also, by implication, the possibility of an
apprehension of that which transcends this situation of finite existence –
toward its meaning. It could be argued
that such a situation of finitude would de
facto eliminate the possibility of a disclosure of the transcendens,
and this may well be the case. However,
in accordance with Heidegger's contention that Sein is the transcendens pure and simple, and that da-sein as ecstatic being-in-the-world (in-der-welt-sein) is
transcending in its projection of its
meaning upon temporality, it could be argued that with the deconstruction of
the edifice of transcendental subjectivity, there is an invasion of the finite
self by that which overwhelms it.
In this way, while a transcendent
conception of an ousiological
God-idea may be inaccessible to finite singularity, this does not preclude the
possibility of an apprehension of the sacred - even if Heidegger, in his early
radical phenomenology remains reticent to express Sein in terms of the
Divine or Sacred.[lxxix] Marx’s commitment to revolutionary praxis parts ways with later
Heidegger in that Marx seeks to further specify what Heidegger indicates as Das
Man as a topos of praxis.
Heidegger, once an advocate of praxis, seeks only the pious gift of
dispensation. Marx is not so
content.
For Bataille, as an event
of affirmation, release, the sacred erupts amidst terrestrial existence, an
intimacy amid terror, horror, ecstasy, and joy.
It would be instructive to investigate the contours of Marx’s sense of
obligation and commitment in this context, even as he purportedly maintained
his own focus upon the political economy of concrete
Bataille takes “Marx” to task in light of his contention that the fulfilment of reason is taking place through the socialization of production in the capitalist economy, within the limits of mere reason – via a profane reduction to thing-hood. For Bataille, such a rationalist, evolutionist theory of the “laws of motion of modern society”, stands in contradiction to Marx's own insistent affirmation of unlawful revolution. It also suppresses the question of a sacred characterized as a resistance amid oppression and poverty. Which is the real Marx? Is he, as Sayyid Qutb describes the “West”, “schizophrenic”? Or, is this question un-decidable? In this vein, we can cast into relief the character of Marx’s “revolution” and question if it merely repeats the “sacrificial” rationality of theoretical and political economic violence. In the bad neighborhood of Bataille, we will seek to disclose in “Marx” the possibility of a sense of the sacred which moves beyond the scenario of a "great night". After a portrayal of the sense of the sacred and revolution in Bataille, we will seek to move beyond a merely sacrificial sense of the sacred as formulated in Girard’s work, Violence and the Sacred to a topos of the gift. In light of Marx’s poetry, a possibility arises where we may move toward an affirmation of a sacred economy of the gift, of a community of sacred praxis. Can an affirmation of revolution be congruent with any notion of the sacred? And, if so, what type of revolution would fulfill the conditions of this sacred? Can such a revolutionary affirmation rest upon the profane rationality of political economy?
Bataille and revolutions
In one of his many incarnations - one of his many merely makeshift projects - Bataille initiated a politico-sacral group entitled the Democratic Communists. This temporary, ad hoc project, standing alongside his other attempts, such as the "secret society" Acephalae[lxxx] and his short-lived anti-fascist re-alliance with Breton in the guise of the Combat Group (not to mention his brief inclusion in the "official" Surrealist organization of the "Trotskyist" Breton), extolled the virtues of "headlessness" and "heterogeneity" as counter-thrusts to operative fascism.[lxxxi] From what one can gather from the paltry extant literature of these groups, Bataille attempted to incite the desire for a "Great Night" in which the capitalist class and it “organized” henchmen would be sacrificed on the altar of a sacred rebellion of a leader-less proletariet.[lxxxii] Bataille writes, in “Notion of Expenditure”,
As dreadful as it is, human poverty has never had a strong enough hold
on societies to cause the concern for conservation – which gives production the
appearance of an end – to dominate the concern for unproductive
expenditure. In order to maintain this
pre-eminence, since power is exercised by the classes that expend, poverty was
excluded from all social activity. And
the poor have no other way of re-entering the circle of power than through the
revolutionary destruction of the classes occupying that circle – in other
words, through a bloody and in no way limited social expenditure.[lxxxiii]
Such a desire intimates the
possibility of an eruption of radical intimacy, of the sacred instant of a differing
potlach amidst the terrestrial world. In an obvious way, this desire exemplifies
Marx's maxim that the liberation of the working classes must be performed by
the workers themselves – and it has to be done in the most radical manner –
through the destruction of the ruling classes.
The only other option for the bourgeosie
would be a renunciation of the rationalist propaganda that it used against the
exuberant nobility and to become noble itself.
That would mean, however, resuming the obligation of the gift in all of
its myriad transfigurations and rhythms.
Despite Bataille’s curious ambivalence with respect to aristocracy, he
announces the “headlessness” of existence, of the lack of a single power of
command, control and judgement – of a de facto paganism, polytheism –
many voices, pluri-vocity.
From a philosophical perspective,
"headlessness" would thus express the possibility of an excession of
a will (Willkür), which is not
determined and disciplined by a purist
reason, whether theoretical, practical, or aesthetical. In a tacit criticism of Kant’s valorization
of Christianity in his Religion Within
the Limits of Reason Alone and the former’s practical faith in the
substantial reality of God, Bataille writes, in his essay, “The Sacred”, that
the “grail” which haunts the reductive stability of the “modern spirit”
concerns not a “personal and transcendent being (or beings), but an impersonal
reality. Christianity has made the
sacred “substantial.”[lxxxiv]
For Bataille, on the contrary, the sacred erupts as a “privileged moment of
communal unity”, in an event which discloses a radical disjunction or breach
between the sacred and substance/profane.
Indeed, in light of the traditional meaning of substance, especially in
Aristotle, as possessions or property, one can clearly discern an intimate
connection between the sacred and anti-capitalist revolution – as an event of
“convulsive communication” of the suppressed and oppressed. For Bataille, however, this breach is not a
mere disintegration but a portal which opens up a field “perhaps of violence,
perhaps of death, but a field which may be entered – to the agitation that has
taken hold of the living human spirit.”[lxxxv] In fact, in the current era, after
Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of god, it is the radical breach between
a substantialist (or ousiological) god and the sacred which intimates
the event of revolution. Practical
Morality has become propaganda for theft, property - the sacred is suppressed,
controlled and diverted in the violence toward the outside. Bataille writes
The fact that “God is recognized to be dead” cannot lead to a less
decisive consequence; god represented the only obstacle to the human will, and
freed from God this will surrenders, nude, to the passion of giving the world
an intoxicating meaning.[lxxxvi]
The open field is this realm of intoxication and
headlessness of revolution before the trauma, prior to the attempt to
consciously control that which erupts from ecstasy. One embraces the open field and the risk of the
radically unknown. We are humbled, we
are nude – amidst the death of God, we do not proclaim
ourselves gods, but dance ourselves into intoxication, in Emma Goldman’s[lxxxvii]
sense. Bataille writes,
Whoever creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any
limitations on painting and writing; alone, he suddenly has at his disposal all
possible human convulsions, and he cannot flee from this heritage of divine
power – which belongs to him. Nor can he
try to know if this heritage will consume and destroy the one it consecrates. But he refuses now to surrender “what
possesses him” to the standards of salesman, to which art has conformed.[lxxxviii]
It is the “profoundly ambiguous” and “dangerous”
character of the sacred which erupts into the intoxication of the privileged
instant. Bataille has no illusions that
such an instant will become an enduring nunc stans, that we can somehow hold on to these as our
possessions. In a reversal of the hubris of the “modern spirit”, he
suggests that we are in fact the ones possessed by such moments. We seize hold of these makeshifts of a maze,
surrender to our possession – while the fleeting lasts – until we again return
to the “stability” of the dis-intoxicated. As is readily seen, such an explicit absence
of rational and moral determination of the will, the typology of morality, is
not meant to indicate a be-ing which is not open to the sacred. Quite the contrary.
Bataille and the
Sacred
In a way which evokes a strange
resemblance to Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena, Bataille lays
out a historical and philosophical distinction between the profane and the
sacred. In his much neglected work, Theory of Religion, Bataille traces the
genealogy of the phenomena of the sacred before and within the
limits of Reason (alone). Yet, that
which may seem strange to those versed in the nuances of the Kantian system of
pure, practical Reason, Bataille indicates that any rational determination of
the will (to use the language of Kant) abides – in an echo of Mauss - in the
domain of the profane. This does not
mean, however, that Bataille is merely inverting the Kantian schema in an
exhaltation of the “irrational”. Nor is
he repeating Kant’s maxim of limiting reason to “make room” for faith – and
thus, a pure, practical reason.
Heterogeneity, the “outside” of
mere representational consciousness (system) – as a primal remembrance of mere animality,
as Bataille begins his narrative, indicates a situation which is akin to
"water in water". Animality
describes a situation of radical immanence - there is no possibility of a
procedure of linguistic and bodily objectification - of the reification of
[consciousness]. However, human beings
have not, in becoming [conscious], merely thrown down the ladder of animality,
having attained an enlightened, unambiguous situation of clear and distinct
rationality. We cannot escape the domain
of objectification - of project - in a similar way in which we cannot escape
the modality of the everyday in the early Heidegger. Nor can we escape the entanglement of
animality. Yet, what must be
emphasized, there is no radical distinction between the domain of animality and
consciousness as with Kant's implausible distinction between phenomenon and
noumenon - or between the theoretical and the practical. Instead, the human situation is suspended in-between consciousness and animality,
the profane and the sacred in the archaic “general economy”. We cannot escape the ordinary - this strange
situation of suspension erupts as a chaotic dance of influences, events. Another version of this situation of
suspension is expressed in Bataille's work Inner
Experience as that between the wildness of ipse and the loss of self in a desired communion.
The message seems to be that there
is no simple, analytical distinction between well-defined regions of rational
determination. That which marks Bataille
off from Kant is his historical genealogy of the emergence of a regime of
rational determination - of religion without the limits of Reason. For Bataille, the possibility of the sacred
has its roots in the remembrance of animality – immanence - and the desire to
retrieve the radical intimacy or communion with the divine. Such a desire intimates a threat to the
profane realm of the conscious determination of everyday, practical ends – of
utility, of production and destruction of products, business as usual. The objectification of a profane
consciousness serves for the reproduction of a system of needs.
Yet, just as it is impossible to
mark a clear and distinct gulf between consciousness and pre-conscious
animality, it is also impossible to achieve a merely profane system of rational
organization and objectification – there must be an openness to a general
economy, to the economies, official and unofficial, the threads in the perverse
and decadent tapestry of existence. This
is not due to a lack of progress in our faculty of Reason, one to be remedied
by the further expansion of an enlightened reason - as is the case in Spinoza,
Hegel and their latter-day descendents.
It is due to our situation of suspension – of ambiguity. Yet, each makes his and her own decisions, as
the story goes.
The situation of “the” human being,
while being determined by the emergence of consciousness, cannot, as
historical, ever leave animality or the remembrance, recurrence thereof
completely behind. Indeed, such a
radical breach would not even be desirable - just as, for Nietzsche, a pure
Apollonian clarity would not be able to extinguish the radical ferment of a
Dionysian force of life. The Platonic
project to achieve the pure realm of the light - of the Good - is not only impossible,
but may not be desirable as it will provoke a radical implosion of a
system of enlightened objectification in a "Great Night". As Nietzsche suggests in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as one seeks the realm of pure light and
goodness, the roots of the self strive ever deeper into evil and darkness. Wild dogs bark in the cellar seeking release
from their cages. Just as the
surrealists refused to consent to the aesthetics of pure order, Bataille - in a
much more radical manner - contends that the very possibility of the sacred
abides in an affirmation of a radical non-knowing - in the abyss of the Night –
in the heterogeneous.[lxxxix]
For
Bataille, in his explication of the meaning of sacrifice, the sacred thrives in
the affirmation of the desire for radical immanence. However, as he warned in Inner Experience that the desire for total communion would - if
possible – would annihilate the wildness of ipse,
of the self, a situation of total sacrifice would not only destroy the profane
conditions of existence, but in such a destruction, would condemn the destroyer
to radical self-destruction. This - as
Marcel Mauss admirably outlines in his The
Gift - allows us to ascertain the incipient - sensuous - reason indicated
in sacrifice, specifically in the potlatch. The project for a pure reason or logic - of a
conscious regime of utilitarian objectification - is illusory and intimately
self-destructive. Such a recognition of
the truth of the human situation - as the Delphic Oracle counselled "Know
Thyself" and "Know Thy Limits" - affirms the constituent
significance of non-consciousness, non-knowing - of the virtue of uselessness, of a dysteleology. The enactment of sacrifice intimates such an
awareness of the surreal limits of human consciousness.
Sacrifice enacts a limited
destruction of the regime of conscious objectification in the annihilation of
an everyday object of use. The
destruction of the object is a partial return to the immanence of the animal -
but as it is a partial destruction of this regime, it indicates a sacred
awareness of the constituent ambiguity of the human situation. The gift to the gods or spirits implicit or
explicit in the sacrifice is the affirmation of an alterior dimension of
existence - beyond the mere calculative, rational domain of systemic
reproduction. But, it must be
emphasized, such a Saturnalia must be limited as there is the simultaneous
recognition of the historical, genealogical emergence of the human from the
intimacy of pure animality. We are
suspended between the domain of the animal and the illusory, de-ceptive goal of a noumenal
kingdom of ends. But, perhaps, there is
no Overman (Ubermensch)
which could provide an escape, from another, many detours. In such a place, Bataille can agree with
Sartre that there is "no exit" – that all is “nausea” and impossible
responsibility. However, amidst this
labyrinth of total mobilization, one, many can resist towards a “better”
expenditure.
This Saturnalia of radical
expenditure, implicit in the enactment of sacrifice, is a recognition of the
specific character of the human predicament - and an affirmation of the sacred
dimension which overwhelms the latter-day hubris
of a desire for a pure Enlightened subjectivity - of religion within the limits
of reason. As indicated above, there is
a superficial resemblance between Bataille's makeshift distinction between the sacred and the profane and the
Kantian statement that theoretical reason must be limited in order to make room
for the rational faith of practical reason.
And, despite the radical difference suggested by the apparently
a-historical character of the Kantian architectonic, the enactment of sacrifice
differs radically from such an illusory limitation of reason. Indeed, practical reason, in its blind
determination of the will (Willkur by Wille), has, in an unfavorable
contrast to even the Second Edition of the Critique
of Pure Reason, eliminated any trace of imagination or sensuality. This is beyond even the mere considerations
of an Epicurean concern for private happiness (heteronomy) - especially in
light of Heidegger's emphasis on the hidden - suppressed - operation of a
transcendental imagination in the Second
Critique. For Bataille, a Kantian autonomy stands - in light of his work Theory of Religion - necessarily in the
domain of the profane as it is still a function of reason - of a moral
consciousness albeit, as Kant reassures his theological, anti-Spinozist critics – “it is merely practical”.
Perhaps, there may be some affinity
between Bataille and the anti-rationists Jacobi and Hamann,[xc]
but it is clear that these latter would be uncomfortable with the former's
admiration for eroticism, transgression, and joy, each of which implies a
neo-pagan affirmation of the sacred. In
a radical refusal of a rationalist concept of autonomy, Bataille affirms a
sense of the sacred bound to the excession of heterogeneity. Such a volatile sense of the sacred traces
its roots to that which is before - a merely historical Reason, beyond a schizophrenic compartmentalization of
differing regions and sectors of a hegemonic rationality. For Bataille, beyond a rationalist autonomy,
there is - amidst the eruption of a sacred heterogeneity, a sovereignty for the
mortal self in its suspension between merely a calculative, utilitarian reason
and an immanent animality. Such a
situation of suspense indicates the
sacred possibility of human existence.
There is no escape from the surreal trace of the accursed share.
This
detour into the work of Bataille places an interpretation of a sense of the
sacred in Marx at a crossroads. For the
post-Hegelian Marx - for whom the real is rational and the rational is real, it
is capitalist articulation – socialization - which demonstrates the positive
enactment of reason in the world - it need only be consciously recognized and
controlled - disciplined - "Thus I willed it!" – the cheer of a
strategic planner. In this way, one
could simply state that Marx either left any relationship with the sacred
behind and walked into the realm of the profane, seeking to describe its laws
of motion, or considered the actualization of reason through history to be the
fulfillment of an eschaton. Or,
perhaps there is another spin, blah. Blah, etc.
After all, even if we keep within the post-Hegelian schema and
Nietzschean framework, it could be that the “I” is the saturnalia of the poor,
of the workers, etc... The every-second
intimacy of the poor in spirit and of a world which would be born of this
present world, is an affirmation of a sacred alternative. It is resistance amid, toward these “busy”
articulations of power.
Marx was not merely interested in
"science" and he is not a Hegelian theologian. His concern is thought and action, as evident
in his writing Capital and his affirmation and agitation of revolution,
an invocation of a breach in history.
For Marx, revolution would inaugurate true human history. We have little to go on – outside his poetry
- there is only the reference to social
or species being in the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts – and the traces of poeisis which surface here and there in his so-called mature
works. Upon this least trodden path, one
is left with many questions.
What is the basis of Marx's
affirmation of a social being? Is there
a sacred ground for his affirmation of praxis, of a conscious-material interaction which radically
transcends the animality of design witnessed in the labour, for instance, of
the spider? What is the sacred? What is the ground of Marx's attribution to Man the capacity to comprehend and
articulate in a universal manner all of the operations of mere animality. What is the basis and source of this
capacity, of this attunement with the Universal? Is it merely the ruse of a blind,
quasi-historical reason which is merely material - although dialectical? Against the background of the Platonic
dialectic - and in light of the Nietzschean criticism of the ressentiment of
all dialectic - what lies hidden - if anything - in this "dialectical
materialism"?
There
is after all the road less taken. Beyond
the questions pertaining to the mere basis of Marx's designation of social being and of his statements of
the necessity and inevitability of a worker's revolution - Workers of the World Unite! You
have nothing to lose but your chains! - all in the context of a ruse of
political economic reason, there is the affirmation of violent revolution, of
the "Great Night" of a radical breach against the calculative regime
of disciplinary control. Is violent
revolution an expression of Marx's aspiration for a Saturnalia, for an eruption
of the sacred amid the world of the profane?
Marx’s enduring affirmation of violent revolution indicates a wiillingness to step outside of the profane existence of
utilitarian calculation. His desire for radical change, his "No!", abididing a "Yes!" cannot merely be reduced to
the obsessions of a political junky. We
can and must return to the pre-Hegelian Marx - before philosophy - in order to retrieve a sense of the sacred
which is set free from the violence of the Hegelian aufhebung. In light of Bataille's sense of the sacred,
Marx discloses an intimacy with the sacred, indicated in his poetry. Bataille writes in “The Notion of
Expenditure”:
The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least
intellectualised forms of the expression of a state of loss, can be considered
synonymous with expenditure; it in fact signifies, in the most precise way,
creation by means of loss. Its meaning
is therefore close to that of sacrifice.
In the suspension, the gift can never be free of
sacrifice. Poetry, for Bataille, is/was
always, or almost always accompanied by a sigh of despair. Mere writing can never be a substitute, simulacrum,
for this eruption of cosmic affirmation.
Amidst such an eruption of a singularity, existence, poetry indicates,
evokes, and invokes. Yet, in the
postures of a life of writing, it is once removed. In this sense, the step beyond poetry transfigures
sacrifice and the sacrificial situation into a topos of the gift – it returns to poeisis, poetry.
Indeed, on this basis, one could set forth a different interpretation of
revolution in its relation to an affirmative sense of the sacred. Mere poetic revolutions intimate only the
impotence of loss, reluctant detachment.
It is a poetry of existence, of praxis, that, in its transgression of the limits of power,
discloses this truth of be-ing via its own actions and words amidst a horizon
of events and situations. Despite
Bataille’s pessimism with regard to poetry, there could be a more congenial and
fruitful path traversed in the awareness of an intimacy between poeisis and praxis, in tandem amid a comportment of openness,
affirmation.
There are not only
instances of “theological” thought which is not merely complementary to the
Marxian project - such as Liberation Theology, but there are also varieties of
“interpretation” which surpass the reflections of Marx, calling into question
his silence with regard to the possibility of a non-alienated sense of the
sacred. In light of those such as
Bultmann who abides his reflections upon the inner despair of existential
motivation, one could suggest, with Heidegger, that in his all-too-impatient
dismissal of “theology”, Marx has remained in the mode of alienation - while he
calls on “humanity” to reclaim its social being in a non-alienated form in
terms of the political economic artefacts of the direct producers, he fails to
provide a convincing affirmation of the sacred.
As we have detected in the philosophical criticisms of Heidegger and
Bataille, a mere determination of human existence in terms of species, class,
nation, etc. remains, to use Marcuse's phrase, one-dimensional. Such a determination remains susceptible to
an overriding neo-Spinozist liquidation of the
multi-dimensional character of human existence into a monological
reduction to mere animality and mere consciousness - or perhaps, to the
collective happiness of the Last Man, which fails to explicate the singular,
existential dimension of the mortal being.
Marx’s relative silence with respect to death has already
been indicated - the particular species being must merely accept the harsh
judgment of Nature. Such a fatal-ism fails to comprehend the specific character
of human existence - and thus, fails to affirm the true character of real human
beings in real social and individual situations - referring to the rhetorical
language of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. In light of Marx’s poetry and his openness to
the “imaginary”, to the Temporal, as a rejoinder to Heidegger’s limited
portrayal, such an emphasis upon the singular mortal being and upon its
disclosure cannot merely be dismissed as a retreat into or a repetition of
petty-bourgeois or bourgeois ideology – as a mere ideology. Such a dismissal based on our makeshift
theories about ourselves would not only trivialize the existential situation of
the mortal being, be also, would dismiss the poly-valent
depths of human existence. In this
light, bringing Marx’s poetry into play would provide the latter with the
resources to deal with so many questions.
However, this criticism of Marx and the present attempt to enact a retrieval of the sacred in Marx would stand at an impasse if the latter and his post-Marxists advocates would simply remain in a state of refusal - insisting that religion and all anti-Enlightenment mythology must simply be "put to sleep".[xci] In such a situation, one could merely insist, as Althusser[xcii] seems to have done, that Marx had attained a position outside idealism - that "Marxism" has achieved the standpoint of a "Science". In response to such an impasse, siege, one must not only make the claim that Marx, in this portrayal, has failed to disclose the true depth of human existence, but also that the absence that it detected in his extant project indicates an implicit failure to escape the parameters of a sacred logic.
This suggestion has already been made with respect to the question of the authentic ground of the Marxian advocacy of revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. Yet, even such a question, which in a significant way is based upon a reading of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, could be dismissed by such advocates of a “discontinuity” in the significance and theoretical intent in Marx's extant writings. Interpreters such as Althusser could merely state that the early philosophical works remain too close in their affiliation with Hegelian idealism and thus do not attain to the level of "Science" as for instance that articulated in Capital. In this way, all of Marx’s writings – before perhaps the German Ideology, are species of ideology – and can therefore be dismissed, except as historical antecedents and anecdotes (doxa).
However, it would be simple (and unnecessary if one merely picks up the works) to respond to such a blanket dismissal of Marx’s early works by pointing out continuities in the later work – for instance, the notion of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts with the notion of a “fetishism of commodities” in Chapter One of Capital – or, of the portrayal in Chapters 12-15 of the transformation of the artisan into the “appendage to the machine”. Or, one could merely point out the many ethical and advocational statements, his voluminous letters, or, in his later writings which obviously move beyond mere science. At the end of the day, one is left either with a very limited reduction of Marx to “Science” (with all the philosophical problems which that would entail), or one would be open to explore what Heidegger would call the “unsaid” in the work of Marx. In such a case, it is clear that much has been left unsaid – that much is absent in the work of Marx – especially with respect to the sacred. Yet, in his poetry, there is much that is said – not to mention the saying (Levinas).
In light of the possibility of a radical refusal in the wake of the question of the sacred on behalf of Marx or the Marxists, a stronger work of deconstruction emerges in the contention that the very “logic” of the Marxian attitude towards the sacred never abandons that which may be indicated as a “logic of the sacred”. Such a criticism comes from the topos of literary criticism in Cesareo Bandera’s work, The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction.[xciii] Bandera takes his point of departure from the work of Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, in which it is argued that the essence of the sacred, a function of the “unity” of a “community” consists in the radical expulsion of a sacrificial victim. In the destruction of the victim, often an innocent, that which is affirmed is an original position – every wrong of the collocation of singular beings is projected upon the sacrificial initiate. With the offering of the sacrificial being, there is a re-affirmation of the icons of the “community”.
In the case of Marx, it is, for Bandera, the notion of the sacred itself which is sacrificed on the altar of a Marxian “Science”. In tune with the reflections of Gerard, Heidegger asserts that Nietzsche’s “against”, in his polemic The Anti-Christ, incites a repetition of that which is opposed. There is no escape from the logic of the sacred if the very operation of the opposition and exclusion repeats or re-enacts the character or trauma of the attack, extermination, etc. Even if that which is affirmed is to be utterly distinct from that which is refused – as is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his temporal son for the a-temporal truth of the “Father” – or, of the eternal Son - the very methodology of opposition – even if the scapegoat is cast into the wilderness – forces a repetition of the deep logic of exclusion, in Girard’s view ala Bandera, of the sacred. In this way, as with Nietzsche in Heidegger’s view, Marx does not escape the logic of the sacred – even if he is left merely with the “empty hands” of an a-theology – which in this context is – as it was with the “death of God” mysticism of Bataille – still a theology.
While the raison d’etre of Bandera’s deconstruction of Marx consists in making the strong case that Marx – even in his radical refusal – could not extricate himself from the “logic of Sacred”, it would seem that this criticism – while dealing with the obstinate refusal of “Marxist Science” to even entertain the possibility of a non-alienated sense of the sacred, remains unsatisfactory with regards the question of a retrieval of an affirmative sense of the holy in Marx. What we are told is that Marx cannot escape the sacred. We are neither told what such a sacred may entail, nor are we able to pose the possibility of a radically different affirmation of the sacred in Marx. Yet, we could throw into question the very sense of the sacred set forth by Girard.[xciv] A merely sacrificial interpretation of the sacred – as it seems to rely all-too-heavily upon the etymology of the term “sacred” - fails to take into account the possibility of a positive apprehension of the polymorphous divine – even Bultmann seems, in his existential emphasis upon finitude, seems open to an affirmation of the holy, even if we – ultimately – must remain in the Nameless. Prayer, for instance, seems to be an act – non-apophantic, and thus, non-reductive – that, while one may be able to trace it to some genealogy of sacrifice, to have as its pre-eminent moment an affirmation of that which overwhelms – or transcends. Moreover, in the absence of an affirmative sense of the sacred, and therefore, of the divine, what would be the content of a “Marxian Sacred” – as it still would reside in the negative interpretation of the sacred? Are we to erect a violent revolution against the capitalist system in which there is an orchestration of a “Great Night” of sacrifice in which the capitalist class and its supporters are sacrificed on the altar of proletarian et al. revolution? Should we return to the Aztecs, as it were? Shall we eat the Rich?
While such a
possibility may be intriguing for some, we could question such a negative sense
of sacred action from several perspectives.
Firstly, one could simply question the ultimate effectiveness of such a meta-strategy. In light of that which we have indicated with
respect to the “against”, would not such a “meta-strategy” entangle a movement
of liberation in a scenario of violent repetition? Consider the ultimate failure of the
French Revolution. Did the guillotine
aid the cause of
In this light, we must attempt to excavate the radical, inner
kernel of affirmation in the work of Marx – beyond the mere sacrificial logic of revolutionary transformation. In a retrieval of the sacred in Marx, I will
excavate the radical, inner kernel of affirmation in its initial expression in
Marx’s poetry in which we can begin to discern an affirmative sense of the
sacred. Contrary to Heidegger’s procedure of sometimes forcing his
interlocuters to “say” the very words he has already placed in their mouths, I
believe that we can find such a saying affirmation – said - in
the early poetry of Marx. However, in
accord with Heidegger, we can enact a retrieval of Marx in light of his
phenomenology of formal indication. Each
is an artwork which discloses that which is there…
In his poetry, Marx expresses
a dazzling sense of the sacred, of the divine, to an extent that has been a
source of embarrassment to the dogmatic materialists. This poetry has often been dismissed as
juvenile work, as enthusiasm. Yet, I
will attempt to show that these poems express, in poetic form, his incessant
and “durable” radical insights. I have
chosen the poems Transformation, Creation, and Awakening to provide a rich tapestry for an exploration of the
sacrificial and affirmative senses of the sacred in Marx. I will contend that Marx’s poetry not only
pre-figures most of his later criticisms of idealism, ideology, and existence,
but also expresses an affirmative sense of the sacred in his commitment to a
meaningful and authentic existence amidst his concrete engagements of everyday
life.
Without undertaking a didactic analysis of the poetry of Marx, it will be sufficient to indicate a few poems which express a positive affirmation of the sacred, of the divine. Indeed, it would seem that – even in his many love poems to Jenny – that Marx had abided an imaginative kosmos inhabited by a myriad of spirits, gods, goddesses and supernatural powers. In the following, I would like to cast light on some of these poetic references in order to begin to unearth a positive affirmation of the sacred at the “inner kernel” of Marx’s work. Such attempts are provisional, but ought to intimate the questions posed in the proceeding lines.
It could be stated that some of Marx’s poetry exalts the “diabolical”, as with his poem “My World”, where he proclaims his will higher than that of even the gods. Yet, even here, he states that “endless battle” is like a “Talisman”, and in this way, has not left the ground of the sacred. Indeed, his references could even be described as Faustian or at the least as pagan – such as High Magician and the like. Whatever the case, Marx is working from a topos of magical and surreal events.
For instance in his poem, “Feelings”, he writes,
All things I would strive to win
All the blessings Gods impart
Grasp all knowledge deep within
Plumbs the depths of Song and Art.
At the same time, a deep, existential passion resides in these poems (not to mention his many plays). Of course, there are references to spirits, gods, demons, etc., but that which is most prominent is a soul who is struggling, who is seeking, loving – a soul which expresses anguish, doubt, love – something which is mostly sublimated in his later work – even in his last poems which become merely those of, what he calls, an epigramist. In these, he merely comments on events – the inner depths of his soul – whether saved or damned – becomes a utility. This is the origin of the suppression of a sacred topography in Marx. One such poem is entitled “Epigrams” and concerns the external motif of the German public. He contents himself to dismissing the pretensions of the higher aspirations of poetry for the voice of the street (but the voices in the street can be an affirmation of the sacred). Yet, there are too many poems to mention which exalt in an ecstatic awareness of the divine and the sacred. Almost all of his pre-epigrammatic poems abide amid a terrain of supernatural beings, Homeric references, and affirmations of the divine source and significance of a magical world. He is also not adverse to articulating his own very personal and passionate existence.
In the following, I would like to indicate this sensitivity to a sacred, divine, world in Marx through a consideration of the poems “Transformation”, “Creation”, and “The Awakening” – there are certainly more, but these indications will suffice for a beginning. It should be noted that Marx – even in these early poems – was already radically sceptical of the hegemonic religion of the time, as expressed in his “The Last Judgement – A Jest” and in his other un-conventional (Spiritualist, pantheist, neo-pagan) and classical – mostly Homeric and Ovidian - references. Yet, that which is significant is his positive affirmation of a sacred and divine existence which in many ways is quite radical – even in comparison to his later, so-called “mature” works.
Yet, without further digression, let us read a few of his poems:
Transformation[xcv]
Mine eyes are so confused
My cheek it is so pale
My head is so bemused
A realm of fairy-tale.
I wanted, boldly daring
Sea-going ways to follow
Where a thousand crags rise
soaring
And floods flow bleak and
hollow.
I clung to Thought
high-soaring
On its two wings did ride,
And though storm winds were
roaring,
All danger I defied.
I did not falter there,
But ever did on press,
With the wild eagle’s stare
On journeys limitless.
And though the Siren spins
Her music so endearing
Whereby the heart she wins
–
I gave that sound no
hearing.
I turned away mine ear
From the sweet sounds I
heard,
My bosom did aspire
To a loftier reward.
Alas, the waves sped on,
At rest they would not be;
They swept by many a one,
Too swift for me to see.
With magic power and word,
I cast what spells I knew,
But forth the waves still
roared,
Till they were gone from
view.
And by the Flood sore
pressed,
And dizzy at the sight,
I tumbled from the host
Into the misty night.
And when I rose again
From fruitless toil at
last,
My powers all were gone,
And all the heart’s glow
lost.
And trembling pale, I long
Gazed into my own breast;
But no uplifting song
Was my affliction blessed.
My songs were flown, alack;
The sweetest art was gone –
No God would give it back
Nor Grace of Deathless One.
The Fortress had sunk down
That once so bold did
stand;
The fiery glow was drowned,
Void was the bosom’s land.
Then shone your radiance,
The purest light of soul,
Where in a changing dance,
Round Earth the Heavens
roll.
Then was I captive bound,
Then was my vision clear,
For I had truly found,
What my dark strivings
were.
Soul rang more strong, more
free,
Out of the deep-stirred
breast
In triumph heavenly
And in sheer happiness.
My spirits then and there
Soared, jubilant and gay,
And, like a sorcerer,
Their courses did I sway.
I left the waves that rush,
The floods that change and
flow.
On the high cliff to crash,
But saved the inner glow.
And what my Soul,
Fate-driven
Never in Flight o’ertook,
That to my heart was given
Was granted by your look.
Creation[xcvi]
Creator Spirit uncreated
Sails on fleet waves far away,
Worlds heave, lives are generated,
His eye spans Eternity,
All inspiring reigns his Contenance,
In its burning magic, forms condense.
Voids pulsate and ages roll,
Deep in prayer before his face;
Spheres resound and Sea-floods swell,
Golden stars ride on apace,
Fatherhead in blessing gives the sign,
And the All is bathed in Light divine.
In bounds self-perceived, the Eternal
Silent moves, reflectively,
Until holy thought primordial
Dons forms, Words of Poetry.
Then, like Thunder-lyres from far away
Like prescient Creation’s Jubilee:
“Gentler shine the floating stars,
Worlds in primal rock now rest;
O my Spirit’s images,
Be by Spirit new embraced;
When to you the heaving bosoms move,
Be revealed in piety and love.
“Be unlocked only to love;
Eternity’s eternal seat,
As to you I gently gave,
Hurl to you my soul’s lightning out.
‘Harmony alone its like may find,
Only Soul another Soul may bind.’
Out of me your Spirits burn
Into Forms of lofty meaning;
To the Maker you return,
Images no more remaining,
By Man’s look of Love ringed burningly,
You in him dissolved, and he in me.”
The
Awakening[xcvii]
When your beaming eye breaks
Enraptured and trembling,
Like straying string music
That brooded, that slumbered
Bound to the lyre,
Up through the veil
Of holiest night,
Then from above glitter
Eternal stars
Lovingly inwards.
Trembling you sink
With heaving breast,
You see unending
Eternal worlds
Above you, below you,
Unattainable, endless,
Floating in dance-trains,
Of restless eternity;
An atom, you fall
Through the Universe.
Your awakening
Is an endless rising,
Your rising,
An endless falling.
When the rippling flame
Of your soul strikes
In its own depths,
Back into the breast,
There emerges unbounded,
Uplifted by spirits,
Borne by sweet-smelling
Magical tones,
The secret of soul
Rising out of the soul’s
Daemonic abyss.
Your sinking down
Is an endless rising,
Your endless rising
Is with trembling lips –
The Aether-reddened,
Flaming, eternal
Lovekiss of the Godhead.
Before I undertake a reading of each of these poems, and of all of them amidst their various interactions, I will make a short comment on the significance of poetry to any philosophical or hermeneutic endeavor. Everyone is familiar with Plato's wishful desire in his Republic in which he casts the poets from the polis. Fewer are aware that Plato was himself a poet, but one who wished to convey, like Euripides, in his poetry, an array of philosophical conclusions. Plato failed as a tragic poet as his anguish in the face of the Dionysian – in the destruction of the “household”, of ‘substanse”. Plato became a philosopher and a very specific type of philosopher. It is certain that there is a measure of hypocrisy in Plato's refusal of the poets. He himself relied heavily upon poetic images to convey the sense of his ideas. For Plato, the imago was subservient to the project of a dissemination of the possibility of pure reason. Yet, there are other ways to look at images, pathway and ways of being which do not necessitate the banishment of poetry. Moreover, unlike the Renaissance moralists who wished to exterminate poetry, we can become open to language which indicates the myriad truths and expressive possibilities of the world and earth.
Whether we consider the methodology of formal indication in the radical phenomenology of the early Heidegger, or his reflections upon the origin of the work of art in the 1930's or of the Fourfold in his later work; or, if we listen to the surreal expressionism of Bataille in his ambiguous juxtaposition betwixt the sacred and Profane; or, again, if we witness the sacred refusals of Liberation Theology or the many other fighters of the good fight; or finally, if we heed the warnings of the Twentieth Century theologians who called us back to the immanence of the source - to an existential phenomenology of the moment – there are non-apophantic acts and contemplations would allow for the cultivation of a topos of opennness toward the sacred. There need be no rational control of the works of imagination and temporality, but only an openness to that which is resonating in the language of existence. Whether we conceive of language as expression or indication or in any other way, there is no ultimately secure position from which to radically exclude one expression from another.
We must seek to listen to Marx’s early poetry and to his “first” decisions and affirmations in these works, written in the late 1830's when he was in his late teens turning twenty. There is no reason to contend that this writing is not significant - look at the wide interest in Rimbaud, who retired at nineteen. Moreover, Marx never repudiated these works - he cultivated an interest in literature to the ends of his days. Yet, that which is most striking is the compatibility between his early expressions of the sacred and his later social revolutionary affirmation - even though no such connection was never explicitly made by Marx or by anyone else.
In the following, I will enact a reading of each of the selected poems in light of the question of Marx and the Sacred. This does not mean that I will conduct a poetic analysis of these poems, nor, will I not provide a line by line commentary of these poems. In the wake of a summary of each poem, I will excavate the sense or senses (or non-sense) of each of the poems in light of our questioning of the sacred in Marx. We will be looking for traces of a pre-philosophical, poetic, affirmation and disclosure of life, existence, and the sacred.
Transformation
Marx is left bloodless and confused by a sudden realization, his head is bemused by a realm of fairy tale. Casting himself as Odysseus, he expresses the sense of his confusion, pallor and bemusement as a drowning amidst a courageous, sea-going flight into thought. He did not falter, but pressed upon his journey. He resisted the seduction of the Siren in his pursuit of a higher goal. But the waves of Poseidon sped on, overwhelming him in a misty night. Marx rises again from his fruitless toil, but without power, his heart's glow lost. Song is gone and there is no God or Deathless one who can save him. The fortress has disintegrated, there is no home. Yet, in this nothingness, the light of the soul shines, a changing dance, that of the heavens rolling around earth. In this vision, Marx has found the fulfilment of his dark strivings. Soul rings freely in happiness out of a daring breast, his heart is reawakened. His spirits soar and are swayed by Marx himself - who becomes a sorcerer. Crashing waves of the sea are left behind, all trappings are lost, but an inner glow is preserved. The fate of existence has overwhelmed the flight of thought, but the inner glow of the heart has achieved, in the vista of the heavens, that which thought could not offer.
It would be tempting to set forth an interpretation of this poem as an early rehearsal of Marx’s later criticisms of idealist philosophies and religion. However, while such may be the case, such an interpretation erases any discontinuity within the corpus of Marx. Such attempts, already indicated above, to break up the work of Marx into periods fail to be sensitive to the existence of Marx as a poet, thinker, writer, political activist, father, husband and man. This poem serves as a landmark in the destination of Marx. In a way similar to Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, Marx has expressed a ‘limit-situation’ in which the world he knew has disintegrated, he is overwhelmed. Mere thought, whether religious, scientific or philosophical, proves insufficient in the wake of existence. Yet, though Marx has been laid bare, or perhaps he has experienced his own finitude, he is open to the sublimity of the cosmos, to the heavens. Heidegger has suggested, in tune with most Ancient Philosophy, that the sky is the face of the divine. Marx does deny that he can be saved by a God or Death-less one – but he speaks of an inner glow which remains in his re-awakened heart. And, he casts himself as a sorcerer in control of the spirits which overwhelm him. In his openness to the overwhelming excession of existence, an inner glow lives in his heart. He accepts his finitude and the inability of his thought to subject the this to rational control – yet, in this existential disclosure, Marx discovers his own openness to the sacred and the spiritual power of resistance and revolutionary agitation.
To a significant extent, Marx is in accord with Bultmann in his denial of the possibility of “God-talk”. Significant for Bultmann is the encounter with the sacred - perhaps, as the inner glow of Marx. While we cannot perhaps ignore the denial by Marx of a salvation via a God or Death-less one, Marx indeed has expressed the possibility of a sacred moment in his affirmation of soul, even if this could be described as another variant of the Plotinian world-soul. After all, such a soul is still an emanation from the divine. In this way, Transformation can be read as a deconstruction of the suffocating artifices of “religion”, of thought and ideology, but simultaneous to this radical criticism, as an opening to a deeper affirmation of the sacred.
Creation
An uncreated spirit sails upon the waves far way, an eternal spirit in whose magic forms condense, worlds are born and die. Golden stars ride on apace. In prayer in the face of the heavens, the Fatherhead gives the sign amidst the overwhelming pulsation and roll of voids and ages. The self-perceiving eternal gives forth forms of existence in the words of poetry. The heavens reveal and emanate piety and love, the only harmony which can bind a soul to a soul. The spirits of the eternal find expression in the voice of the poet, in images, but these are makeshift, inexorably returning to the creator. Man's look of love is encircled in a fire in which is dissolved this one and the All.
This poem, Creation, has a different character than Transformation. While the latter performs a critical deconstruction with a simultaneous affirmation of another possibility, the former is an explicit attempt to develop the affirmation of the Sacred which began as a mere openness. Having thrown off the ideological and idealist-philosophical baggage which prompted him to the impossible, he seeks in Creation, to express a rough sketch of the sacred world to which he has become open. There is no longer (not yet) a transcendental subjectivity or reason which disciplines and controls the sublimity of existence, but, an open-ness to an uncreated spirit – a transcendens pure and simple, in which forms condense and fade. Yet, beyond the myriad modulations and excessions of Being, the self-perceiving Eternal, the Fatherhead, communicates, gives a sign, expresses existence itself as the words of poetry. The cosmos itself, the heavens, is the poetry of the great spirit, and these heavens, as we saw in his affirmation in Transformation, communicate via their very disposition and life, piety and love – these are the only virtues, Marx says, which can bind a soul to a soul. Man himself is dissolved in and as a manifestation of this poetry of the heavens, in this world of love and piety. Each finite expression and image is, once again, dissolved into the soul of the great spirit.
It could be suggested that this poem indicates a mysticism which intimates a radical intimacy with the divine. All images will crash - does this not speak to Marx's longing for total revolution, his criticism of idealism and ideology? Each of these is one of the images that will shatter in its return to the source, to the sacred existence which originally spoke these words of poetry. In a way similar to Schopenhauer, poetry is an expression of the Will, it is an emanation of the divine. However, as Reiner Schürmann wrote in his Heidegger, these emanations, as they travel away from the source, have merely deficient similarity to the origin, to the one. In such deficiency, it is all too possible, as Heidegger warned in his 1928 lecture course, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, to get lost in a detour of an array of free-floating concepts which no longer indicate existence in an authentic manner. In this light, Marx's affirmation of an intimacy with the divine in its truth, as that which is beyond the word and image, continues to play itself out in his criticisms of religion, science, and philosophy as ideology. In a way which would make Luther blush, Marx aspires to the truth of the phenomena with a faith that the cosmos itself ceaselessly reminds us that all works are makeshifts. However, all is not vanity or futility simply due to this sacred affirmation of meaning. All words and images, ages and empires, can be washed away by the waves, but the inner glow remains, the glow of soul which aspires to and already possesses (beyond its camera obscura) an intimacy with the divine.
Awakening
Amidst the holiest night, your vision breaks, enraptured and trembling, your fingers on the lyre stray, brooding and slumbering, but through the veil, you see from your inner depths, this boundless sky, endless worlds dancing in the heavens. Amidst the eternity of existence, you fall through the universe as an atom. An awakening to this existence is an endless rising, the rising, an endless falling. The soul rises out of its own daemonic abyss - the secret of this rise erupts amidst the rippling fire of the soul and sweet smelling magical tones, lifted by the spirits. Marx evokes,
Your sinking down is an endless rising
Your endless rising is with trembling lips -
the Aether-reddened , Flaming, Eternal
Lovekiss of the Godhead.
Awakening expresses the most explicit encounter with the sacred in the poetry of Marx. Perhaps his best poem, Marx moves beyond both of the moments of vision expressed in Transformation and Creation. In this poem, the songs of the lyre, amidst the holiest night, as with the song in Transformation, breaks down – the fingers clumsily fall off of the strings – poetry itself is silenced in the wake of the boundless sky which is discovered in the inner depths. In the vortex of endless transmutation, one falls through the cosmos as an atom. Yet, in accord with his criticism of Democritus in his Doctoral Dissertation, The Difference between the Philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus, even amid a descent of the atom through the cosmos there is an ascent – a “wiggle” - indeed, the Cosmos is an endless rising and falling of which this atom or monad is a makeshift figuration. In the spirit of Giordano Bruno, there is something more than a mere endogenous system of atoms – each rises from its own daemonic abyss. The fire of the soul and the excession of magical tones intimate the secret of this rising. One falls - but in ascent, in this openness, each fears, and trembles before this overwhelming destination. Yet, at the apex this is, despite the fear and trembling, a kiss of love amidst the sacred.
I believe that this poem specifically answers the charge that Marx's poetry are works of immaturity. Indeed, Awakening sets forth a very sophisticated and mature indication of an eternal fluctuating cosmos in which there is an intimacy with the sacred dimension of the soul, or as Heidegger indicates, this abyss of ecstatic singularity. That which is significant is Marx's radical dismissal of the Democritean atomism and its latter day Newtonian survivals. The daemonic abyss is an Epicurean "wiggle" which is existence, the surreal openness to that which is not merely physical - whether this be pseudo-religion, science, or politics. Marx, more informed by the pre-Socratics and Homer, than post-Christian philosophies - which he calls idealist - expresses a sense of the sacred which implies a divine significance to a world, which while intimating the truth of the sacred, is merely another makeshift which will fall into the vortex of nothingness. In this sense, Marx's affirmation of death in its mystical significance, is not a fatalism, but an openness to the sacred, to the radical apprehension of that which overwhelms. As he writes in the Holy Family,
Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only as mechanical and mathematical but even more as impulse, vital spirit, tension, or – to use Jakob Bohme’s expression – the anguish and torment of matter.
Epilogue:
the sacred after Marx
It is clear that, even if we wanted to, we could establish some type of relationship between Marx and the Sacred, even if this were only a negative relationship. Marx is not the great atheist, nor is he the great authoritarian. Such interpretations result from either deliberate mis-representation or reductionistic and partitionistic readings which fail to disclose the most plausible ands profound readings of Marx. Lenin never read the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, nor the German Ideology – it is truly doubtful if he ever read Marx’s poetry. Be that as it may, such an example can serve as a warning for those who have become complacent in their theoretical stereotypes. There is more to Marx than the merely political or even historical significance to which he has been assigned. Even in the 2100 pages of Capital (excluding the text Theories of Surplus Value, rejected by Lenin as its editor, Karl Kautsky, did not support the policies of revolutionary defeatism and insurrectionary communism), Marx makes numerous advocacy and poetic statements. Often, he speaks of a communist society as a contrast to capitalist exploitation. His most explicit reference to the “moral” as that which must be affirmed is his reference in Capital, Vol. 1 of the moral character of the standard of living (similar to Sraffa’s “standard commodity”[xcviii]). There is a moral, practical criteria for the level of subsistence, based on the prevailing historical situation of class warfare and struggle. This concrete phenomenology of a temporal morality of material existence is in tune with his own sense of the overwhelming character of the Sacred and the inner glow that remained after the implosions of his own illusions. One could speculate, as legitimate as any of the interpretations of Marx, that he maintained his inner glow and sense of the Sacred even amidst his dull references to a scientific political economy. The implicit affirmation exhibited by his own statements and by his political advocacy and involvement (even to the extent that he was sought for arrest and was exiled numerous times) indicates that a merely secular or atheist interpretation of Marx is unsound.
I
have attempted, firstly, to show that the typical Marxian quip that religion is the opium of the people and
merely idealistic distortion is contradicted by historical example of sacred
rebellion such as Liberation Theology
and the Ghandian
rebellions in
Wittgenstein ends his "mystical" Tractatus with the words: What we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence.[xcix] Yet, even though the mystical lies at the limit of "world" - Die Welt ist als der Fall - the mystical stills exists. The mystical, or in the context of this present study, the sacred is not "the case", it is not a thing, an object or state of affairs in this world to which a convenient label can be tagged. It is “outside” – at the limit of the world, but it can and does erupt amidst existence, of which, a world is only one aspect. Marx has already said all of this in his early poetry. Marx can neither escape the sacred, nor can a merely negative sense of the sacred be defined for him. His poetic explorations are indeed the existential root of his latter work and thought. There is no discontinuity.
[i] Marx, Karl. Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford University Press, translated by Joseph O’Malley, 1970.
[ii] ibid. 3.175.
[iii] This point indicates the question of the various interpretations of Marx. Indeed, there is no “Marx” an sich, there for our immediate reckoning. Indeed, there are many variants of the formal indicator “Marx”. Yet, two of the most dominant tendencies in Marx interpretation concern a decision on the part of the interpreter as to the relevance of Marx’s earlier works, many of which were unpublished. It was not until 1932 that Marx’s early writings were published, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It is a significant fact that none of the earliest Communist thinkers had ever read these earlier tasks, although Lenin plowed through Hegel on his own in 1916, as evidenced by his Philosophical Notebooks. Yet, it is claimed by interpreters such as Althusser that Marx’s early writings are irrelevant to that which should be deemed as Marx’s true achievement – a science of history and society. For Althusser, the early writings are too close in affiliation with Hegelian idealism and thus do not achieve the level of science. For Althusser, and the many who follow his view, Marx had undertaken an “epistemological break” in his displacement of philosophy by scientific materialism. In this way, Althusser represents the variant of Marx interpretation which posits a discontinuity in his work – he is a “discontinuity theorist”. On the other side of the great divide are those who have emphasized the significance of Marx’s early studies of alienation and his libertarian vision of communist revolution. Such thinkers, such as Ollman, wish to envision Marx’s work as a continuity, and as a result, have to a great extent re-cast the interpretation of Marx’s later works in the light cast by the earlier philosophical works. In this context, such thinkers could be described as “continuity theorists”. In the absence of any explicit repudiation by Marx of his earlier work, I feel there is no need to censor the reading of these texts. In other words, there is no need to accept the Marx which has been handed to us by Althusser. It could be argued that all of Marx’s later insights were originally developed in his early works. Capital did not simply fall from the sky, and this text exhibits traces of these early works. Marx and the Sacred thus embraces an existential approach to the work of Marx. While there is never a total continuity in any life, I feel there is no essential incompatibility between the early and later works. Yet, not only will I argue for the necessity of investigating Marx’s early philosophical work, but I will moreover argue that Marx’s poetry must be included in the “Canon”. Indeed, it is in this poetic space where we can begin to disclose a sense of the sacred in Marx, a space, as with dasein in Heidegger, where an alterior sensibility is disclosed which is not articulated via the theoretical and practical logics of rational organization. There has been no significant treatment of Marx’s poetry which is usually described, as with Nietzsche and his poetic and musical works, as early enthusiasms – at the worst embarrassing, at the best, irrelevant.
[iv] Although Marx never speaks about such a distinction explicitly, we will excavate an implicit sense of obligation and commitment, of affirmation in not only his existential activity as such, but also in literary decisions in his political economic works and his early works, including his so-called juvenile poetry.
[v] The imagery for this metaphor comes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Notebooks, Number 115.
[vi] Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy, Penguin , 1959.
[vii]Many may contend that Marx is an irreducibly secular thinker. And,
while the all-too-usual – whether Marxist, neo-Marxist, marxian, or
anti-Marxist - approach to his work may bear that out, there are clear
exceptions to the apparent secular
tone of much of his writing. For
instance, we have the quote at the head of this essay, "Religious
suffering is at the same time a protest against real suffering", itself a
piece of poeisis from Marx’s unfinished analysis of Hegel’s doctrine of the
state. There are many indications in the
writings of Marx, many non-scientific, poetic excursions, calls for revolution,
which, like Herodotos’ Histories, do
not sit well with the analysts. Indeed,
one could contend that the very notion of a "scientific socialism",
if properly understood in light of Marx's revolutionary re-configuration of
notion of science from the perspective of a commitment and intimate involvement
with praxis, could indicate the sacred.
[viii] Miranda, Jose. Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the
Philosophy of Oppression, translated by John Eagelson, Orbis Press,
[ix] Kirk, G.S. et. al. The Presocratic Philosophers,
[x] This approach to the poetry of Marx bears a superficial resemblance to the methodology of Heidegger, who has thought through various unsaid possibilities in other thinkers and in the poets. Yet, for Marx, such a saying of the Sacred was said[x] – and continued to be said, even if his poeisis of the sacred was eventually wrapped up in the most analytical prose. Although his poetry was merely the articulation of the logos, it indicated or pointed to an opening to the sacred. Such a use of language pre-ceded or exceeded a logical or conceptual-philosophical discourse which seeks only to objectify an ‘event’ into an entity.
[xi] This is a reference to Herbert Marcuse’s work of the same title.
[xii] Of course, this would
be to systematically ignore the literature which seeks to situate Marx in the
realm of the Old Testament prophets as is indicated by Miranda and the many
others who have sought to appropriate the analyses of Marx within the sacred
tradition. In this way, one can
understand Liberation Theology beyond the tentative appropriations of Gutierrez
towards the work of Miranda and others, including the Popes who have
interpreted Marx in light of the genealogy of the prophets and Jesus.
[xiii] Indeed, beyond the various traces in the extant text of Marx, and even with the arguably relevant early poetry, there can be excavated a deep structure and event of a sense of the sacred in the writings of Marx. As I have pointed out in my final chapter, A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx, Bandera has used Gerard in order to contend that the entire gesture of Marx's thought stands on Sacred ground in the limited and negative sense of sacrifice. Such a negative sense of the sacred emerges in the gesture of a sacrificial event of revolution. Without nullifying the significance of such a gesture of negativity, of active nihilism, I am trying however to go beyond a merely sacrificial sense of the sacred toward that of the gift as indicated in Marcel Mauss’ work of the same title. I seek an affirmative sense of the sacred in the work of Marx, not merely in his early poetry, but in a life of affirmation and engagement. I consider my work to be an overture for a dialogue which I feel needs to occur with respect to a non-reductive ‘materialist’ re-thinking of the sacred. It is clear from early on that Marx contends that a criticism of religion is a pre-requisite for all social analysis. However, it must be asked: what is his motivation for such criticism and social engagement in the first place? Marx explicitly enacts a commitment to revolutionary social transformation. Could such a commitment abide upon a merely scientific or political level? Can we not investigate the existential ramifications of the writings of Marx with respect to the question of the sacred?
[xiv] Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger: Being and Acting, From Principles
to Anarchy,
[xv] I am aware of the
problematic status of truth in the post-modern era, especially in the wake of
the insights of Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and others. However, I will contend that it is possible
to undertake an intimate hermeneutic in which there is awakened a desire for
truth. In this way, the “test” for this
exploration of the Marx and the sacred, as Heidegger wrote at the outset of his
Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, will be its power to illuminate the
question before us.
[xvi] There is a clear precedent in Lenin’s suppression of Theories of
Surplus Value from its status as the fourth volume of Capital due to
the latter’s political differences with its editor Karl Kautsky.
[xvii] It will be seen below
that even Gutierrez held to this interpretation and thus sees the significance
of Marx as merely a supplemental science of political economic history.
[xviii] Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
[xix] Althusser, Louis. “Lenin and Philosophy”, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, p. 26.
[xx] Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 37.
[xxi] Althusser, p. 37.
[xxii] Althusser, p. 37.
[xxiii] Althusser, p. 37.
[xxiv] Althusser, p. 38.
[xxv] Althusser, p. 38.
[xxvi] Althusser, p. 39.
[xxvii] Althusser, pp. 39-40.
[xxviii] Althusser, p. 41.
[xxix] Althusser, p. 41.
[xxx] Althusser, p. 43.
[xxxi] Althusser dismisses those in Mach’s circle who wished to cultivate Marxist thought in the context of an affirmation of a, ‘authentic humane’ eqos, etc. Mach, Althusser reminds us, was the central straw man in Lenin’s work Materialism and Empiro-Criticism.
[xxxii] Marquard, Odo. “In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and
Polymythical Thinking)”, Farewell to Matters of Principle,
[xxxiii] For an excellent disclosure of
a poetic breach, of gaps, in the works of Kant and Hegel, as this speaks to
Althusser, cf. John Sallis, Spacings
– of Reason and Imagination,
[xxxiv] Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, SUNY press (1988), p. xxxii.
[xxxv] Marx, Karl, Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx-Engels Collected Works, International Publishers. This is the same text, by the way, that the opening quote is taken: “Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.” (cf. endnote 1)
[xxxvi] ibid. 3.175.
[xxxvii] I refer here to
Heidegger’s 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Poetry, Language
and Thought, HarperCollins, 1985.
[xxxviii] ibid. 3.175.
[xxxix] Marx, K. Contribution to a
Critique of Political Economy,