Religion: the purloined letter of modernity

Thus, if man does not use the organs which  his Creator has given him in this abode, when his soul leaves the body it cannot find [any of those organs] again and therefore it remains perplexed, like someone who has neither eyes, ears, heart nor tongue; one can imagine how anguished and torturous his condition would be. But if man sees with his eyes that which he is commanded to see, hears with his ears that which he is commanded to hear, walks on that path which the Prophet has commanded him to walk, speaks with the tongue that which he is commanded to speak, and knows with his heart that which he is commanded to known, then when his soul leaves his body [it retains the faculties of] eyes, ears, heart and tongue, so that in the abode of delights he will possess them in their entirety.” Nasir Khusraw, Knowledge and Liberation.

“Paradise is still locked up and the Cherub is behind us; we must make a trip around the world, and see whether perhaps it isn’t still open somewhere in the back.” – Kleist, On the Marionette Theater

When the French missionaries came to North America, they faced a critical problem with the Indian peoples they attempted to convert, which was that these groups had a perfectly clear idea of the afterlife, and it was nothing like heaven or hell. It was like life – it was not, as Marx would have it (speaking on the assumption that religion is monotheism) a counter-society, or society reversed and thus restored. Thus when the French priests would tell the Hurons about heaven, they would get responses like: “for my part, I have no desire to go to heaven; I have no acquaintances there, and the French who are there would not care to give me anything to eat.” In fact, there is an account that neatly captures the Huron this-worldliness in Carole Blackburn’s Harvest of Souls:  the soul of a recently deceased woman came back to a Huron encampment to warn that those who went to heaven were being tortured there by the French.

These stories, which were carried back to Europe in the accounts of the Missionaries, fed into the early enlightenment idea that the Hurons were right. It is a question which is never asked, but should be: did American Indian ideas influence European thought? Lahontan, a French explorer, published a famous book, Supplement aux Voyages ou Dialogues avec le sauvage Adario, in which he represents himself talking with Adario, a Huron, about the cosmic vision of the Christians – which Adario finds either barbaric or comic. We know that this book influenced Rousseau and Diderot.

Marx was the intellectual heir of these accounts, but when he wrote the Kritik he had only an intuition of where this intellectual theme would lead him. And we are still being led there. One of the responses to the Charlie Hebdo massacre was the production of cartoons showing an after life Charlie Hebdo crew. It is a comic instance, because even if we believe in the after life, we don’t imagine it. It has been closed down in the imagination as a serious topic. Perhaps this is why a political act, revenging the “dishonor” shown to Muhammed (and, I would contend, treating him as a God – a blasphemy against which Muhammed directed a lot of his energy), is still not imagined as a religious act. We refuse to engage in the politics of the afterlife. We are going to “respect” religions, but them in a black box.

Myself, I think this is an entirely impossible thing to do. Anything social becomes political – this is the primary law of modernity. It isn’t even something I like or approve of – politics, to my mind, is a buncha shit. But my mind wasn’t consulted when we were constructing the global system, so tant pis for me.

In fact, so unimaginable is religious belief to the “progressive” that it can’t be encountered at all – it must have to do with racism. It must have to do with this world. In this sense, the progressive idea of “respect” for religions is founded on an utter disrespect for them, the disrespect that comes when you simply refuse to argue a topic because you find it beneath you.

It is in this atmosphere of disrespect that, for instance, “christian” leaders can come on news shows and expect not a single question about their christianity. Rather, they are accepted (maddeningly) as prima facie  Christians, even as any reader of the gospels would have to be appalled at every word issuing from their mouth. The same is true with imams, or “spokesmen” for the Muslim community.   

how they celebrate MLK day at the New York Times: "lets get David Duke to write an op ed..."

Wow, the New York Times has a jump the shark moment: they invite Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, founded by her father explicitly on the fascist model, to write about Islam today - on Martin Luther King day. Hmm, I'm surprised they didn't invite David Duke to write about MLK, just to make things nice and cozy. Of course, there is no explanation that the FN actually liked to beat up CharlieHebdo journalists in the nineties and sued the journal repeatedly - but what the hell, ignorance is such bliss! I'm expecting an op ed piece on how the Holocaust didn't happen from her father, Jean Marie Le Pen, for Rosh Hashanan. Here is a link to the history of the FN's relationship to Charlie Hebdo that the NYT, in its infinite ignorance, never bothered to share.

"Remembering Charlie Hebdo in the 90s

MARK LEE HUNTER 8 January 2015
"Charlie Hebdo was about more than its fiercely satirical cartoons. It changed the French media and legal landscape forever and was instrumental in the struggle to protect hard-hitting investigative reporting.

As I write, the news coverage of the massacre at Charlie Hebdo’s offices has been remarkably good, detailing the weekly’s provocations of Islam over the years. Less has been said about Charlie’s running battle with the French extreme right, and its role in widening the space for investigative reporting in France.

I met the staff in the mid-1990s, shortly after the Front National party, a heterogeneous mix that included neo-fascists (and a few real fascists), won municipal elections in four French cities. I was making the rounds of reporters who covered the party, to draw up a list of precautions. The Front’s members regularly beat up journalists at the time, and Charlie’s former editor, Philippe Val, was among those they attacked. Val was calling for the government to ban the party.

The day we met, Val told me that he and his staff had been threatened with attack if they attended a book fair in a Front city, Toulon. To my amazement, he asked me what they should do. He was scared for his people and rightfully so. We found an idea that might lower the risk. Val publicly demanded protection from the Mayor of Toulon. It was the Mayor’s duty to provide it. Instead he said, 'We don’t protect garbage. We collect it.' The state stepped in, and Charlie Hebdo went to Toulon."

Of course, it is the leader of this party that we should turn to in the light of the massacre of the editorial board.
Actually, I can't really mock this sick decision. It is too sick. It is too stupid. It is an unconscious signal about how the elite really feel about the world. It is a reminder that the NYT was an active collaborator in the lies that took the US into Iraq. "

the instituted day dream

Because Marx’s opium metaphor has been seen as implying either that religion is simply an hallucination or a supplement to heal the pain of daily life, his more extended idea of the function of religion, and indeed its genesis, has been cast in the shadow. There are those who have picked up in Marx a certain complicating tendency that changes this story – notably, Ernst Bloch. Bloch, in The Principle of Hope, emphasized the fact that ordinary thinking is often not the kind of closeted reflection we find in philosophy: it is, instead, day dreaming. One could say that, religion, for Marx, in as much as it stems from a vulgar, popular impulse, is day dreaming writ large. It deals, as ordinary calculative thought does not, with the real media in which human life takes its shape and movement:
“Man, that is to say, the world of persons, state, society. This state, this society produces religion, an inverted book of world consciousness, because it is an inverted world. Region is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualized point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its holiday expansion, its general grounds of comfort and justification. It is the fantasmatic realization of the human essense, because the human essence possesses no true reality.”
These terms give us a much larger field to work with in relation to religion. If religion is the inverted world, the secret critique of the real world, it is also frozen forever in that position. This is the meaning of the fact that the fantasmagoric realization of the human essence is the realization of the human essence because the human essence possesses no true reality.
In order, however, to accomplish the work of disenchantment that Marx – all too hastily – thinks is the necessary accompaniment to abolishing a set of circumstances that make illusion necessary – that make happiness dependent on illusion – one has to turn to history, and in particular, that part of human history which describes the transition from the pre-modern to the modern. It is this theme in the critique that bears reflection, because what Marx says here both about the modern and the pre-modern has not lost its relevance because we have twisted the knobs and produced the post-modern.   

Marx and paradise

In  volume 41 of the old Marx Engels Werke, which gathers together Marx’s scraps and trivia (the stuff he carved on his school desk, the limerick he made about a fellow gymnasium student, the boxtops he sent off for a secret decoder ring, etc.)  there is a passage in a gloss on Schelling which concerns the existence of God. This is one of the rare times Marx explicitly talks about old Noboddaddy.  He does so in the most bored manner possible, showing briefly why no proof for the existence of God has ever or will ever work, with all the passion of a page out of Atheism for Dummies.
So: God is not very important in Marx’s critique of religion. Nor, surprisingly, is the church, or priestcraft. If it as if this, too, which had an urgency in the French revolution, is all settled now. Or at least it isn’t primary.
What is primary is paradise.
Marx is fascinated by the anthropological fact that societies have dreamed up an image of utopia which is the exact negative of society as it is lived. I think it is interesting to contrast Marx, here,  with Nietzsche, who tread on the same territory forty some years later. Nietzsche as far as I know never read Marx, but he shares a vocabulary with the Critique. He also shares an interest in eschatology – but he emphasizes the exactly opposite anthropological fact, which is the popular dream of hell. For Nietzsche, hell reveals the true secret of slave morality, its cosmic resentment. For Marx, paradise reveals the secret of what the vast majority of society, the laboring obscure, thought of the society they supported with their labor: that it would be good only if it was utterly changed.
It is this aspect of Marx’s critique that is obscured by the opium wisecrack, which casts too great a shadow over this essay, which begins on the anthropological note:
For Germany, the critique of religion is essentially over, and the critic of religion is the presupposition of all critique.
After is heavenly oratio pro aris et focis is contradicted, the profane existence of the error is compromised. Man, who, seeking the Overman in the fantasmal reality of heaven has found only the reflection (widerschein) of himself, will no longer be inclined to to find only the semblence (Schein) of himself, the Un-person, where he is seeking, and must be seeking, his real circumstances.”

rhetoric and revolution

I have a tremendous future thesis about Marx’s style curled up in my mind, sleeping and issuing yelps like an old  hunting dog dreaming of its glory days. One day, I will eventually write it down in a severely truncated form, where it will flow over three pages max. I’m not a long distance runner, scholarship-wise.

Here are the previews of this exciting and never to be completed future project: Marx’s style, as I would like to prove, is where we see the actual form of dialectical materialism in practice. Or, to put it another way, Marx discovered at an early point in his career that reversal is a tremendous power. Turning things inside out and upside down, wrenching the lines of ownership inscribed in the genetive and the lines of power inscribed in the accusative and dative,  one could truly say that in Marx’s work, rhetoric precedes revolution. He sinks into the regimes of ownership and of power that are his target – as he puts it somewhere in the Grundrisse – allows him to come out of those regimes through a pass that fundamentally alters our view of them.

Perhaps – and this is the kind of semi-psychoanalytical speculation that hovers near fiction, but what the fuck – perhaps Marx’s feeling for reversal is his replay of a crucial moment in his childhood: the moment when he was baptised. Or rather, the moment when his father converted his household from Judaism to Christianity. Apparently his mother resisted this decision for a while, but finally agreed to it. To reverse that baptism did not mean, for Marx, becoming Jewish again. Instead, he became something other than the Jew and the Christian, or at least that was the project.  It is here, trying to reverse an essential surrender, that Marx stumbles upon the principle of negativity. The way forward and the way backwards are contained in one self-identical way, according to common sense, which seeks, thus, to squelch the power of inversion. This is not the case with Marx.  He embraces negativity fiercely in  order not to become the dupe of either positivism or a naïve belief in progress – while still trying to found a “universal history.”

To Anglo-American thinkers, steeped in the culture of common sense, Marx’s reversals can simply seem crabby or crooked, a matter of rhetorical excess that is vaguely alluded to by the term “prophetic” . The first task for these thinkers is to straighten Marx out, get a clear position of the case so we can properly “go forward”.

Perhaps I am making too much of the effect of conversion – although I can’t resist pointing out that there is a line of great German polemicists – Heine, Marx, and Karl Kraus – who all used thundering reversals as their grand trope, and who all were converted Jews. Converted to fit with a society that was always hostile to Jews. Make of this what you will. 

Germany: a third world tale

Michael Loewy calls the Critique “pre-Marxist” because it was written before Marx had absorbed the lesson of the French socialists that class struggle was the fulcrum of society. I can see Loewy’s point, but the essay not only carries the essential voice of Marx – his way of mixing the prophetic and the sarcastic in his most characteristic rhetorical ploy, inverting relations – but it also expresses  Marx’s concern about the place of modernity in universal history – a history that he tried to write in the Grundrisse.  For us, one of the great interests in the piece is that Marx treats Germany as a ‘pre-modern’ country – essentially as a piece of the third world. Marx is the spirit that haunts all post-colonial discourse for good reason – he founded it. Or at least, he was one of the people who gave it shape.

There’s a historical school that claims that Germany’s history did not travel the path of modernity like other European countries. The Sonderweg school is associated with the right, but there is some truth in it for the left as well. At least for Marx, Germany was a lesson in underdevelopment.  Unlike the Sonderweg historians, Marx doesn’t take Germany to be more “authentic” in its struggle with modernity – rather, he takes it to be politically and culturally half-made in an interesting way: one can see, in the forces that fail to synthesis into civil society and industrial capitalism in Germany, the forces that are in operation in the so-called “modern” societies. For Marx, these societies have not come to rest in modernity; they, too, are fractured. The ancien regime might have been overturned, Marx says, but it exists in the unconscious as a trauma with multiple effects on everyday life.

It is in this situation that Marx wants us to think about religion. 

Marx's IED: religion, modernity, the west, all that shit...

Out of all the phrases in Marx’s  1844 Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, the one that has stuck is: “religion is the opium of the people.” Careless readers – and aren’t we all? – have a Jack Horner like tendency to stick our thumb in the pie and pull out a plumb, destroying the pie’s structure, the cooking that went into it, its mix of tastes.  In this case, to collapse Marx’s essay into this one plumb is an act of barbarity. 

Marx was in his young twenties at the time he wrote the essay – later, as a middle aged man with persistent sores that kept him bedridden in agony, he learned to appreciate the power of opium, which is not a little thing. But the opium crack is only one of the comparisons to which religion gives rise. These comparisons are expressed in the exuberant style favored by a certain Berlin crowd that liked to be  scratchin Hegel and Heine. There’s a study by Bercovitch of the American Jeremiad as an essential American style – the essential style of modernity in Germany, from Lichtenberg to Brecht, echoes with this Berlin  tone. It is repulsive to a certain Anglo-American sensibility – I think the general sense is still in agreement with one of Marx’s glossers, Donald Kelley, who wrote that Marx’s essay contained “no poetry” and a “large amount of convoluted and ill humored philosophizing.” I think, on the contrary, that this may be the most Heine-like of Marx’s essays. Its style is not separate from its argument – which may well be the object of revulsion by Anglo-Americans who have traded style for specialization and thus distrust rhetoric as the mark of the amateur.  The poetry, here, has to be seen as a sort of futuristic act – to be anachronistic. Marinetti, though, would have appreciated Marx’s phrase that critique should not be an anatomical scalpel, but a weapon.  In fact, the weapon Marx devised in this oddly gay romp is rather like our old friend, the improvised explosive devise. It is a combination of deadly technologies tied together on the spot, in the midst of everyday life, and meant to explode both the façade of ‘modern’ society and the, in Marx’s view, ‘pre-modern’ level of society in Germany.

I think it is a good piece to read in the light of the Charlie Hebdo murders and the response to them, especially (and perhaps provincially ) by the high hats of the American left and the lowdowns of the street.

So I think this is what I will do for a while.