R.Boer:Why I am a Christian communist

Πηγή: Philosophers for Change

Often I am asked, in all manner of situations, what is your position? What is your belief? Christian communist, is my answer. I may be speaking with a group of Chinese students and specialists on Marxism, or a gathering of young anti-capitalist activists, or a room of trade-unionists, or a congress of hard-core Marxists, or indeed a group of religious believers. Inevitably, my answer produces a rain of questions. Christian and communist – are not the two poles apart? Are not communists and communist countries against religion, since it is the ‘opium of the people’? Are not Christians thoroughly opposed to ‘atheistic’ communism? More often than not the questions turn to the intricacies of theological matters, precisely where you would least expect it.

So I would like to indicate what the conjunction of these apparently incompatible terms means. To begin with, Christian communism has a long and colourful history, one that was clearly identified by Marxists such as Engels (1894-95 [1990]), Rosa Luxemburg (1970 [1905]) and Karl Kautsky (2007 [1908], 1976 [1895-97]-a, 1976 [1895-97]-b; 1977 [1922]), and then elaborated and enhanced by a range of critics since. It is a history of more than two millennia, one that obviously predates modern socialism. Its founding mythological statements are found in the New Testament book of Acts, in chapters 2 and 4, where the early Christian community had “all things in common”. Or more fully: “And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need” (Acts 2:44-45).

This might sound simple enough, a commune of the type that appears repeatedly even today, and has done so many a century before now. Yet at times, such a humble effort has had revolutionary import. For instance, Thomas Müntzer, a leader of the Peasant Revolution in the German states in the early sixteenth century, made omnia sunt communia – all things in common – the slogan of the movement. Indeed, his full statement of the message of Christianity was: “It is an article of our creed, and one which we wish to realise, that all things are in common [omnia sunt communia], and should be distributed as occasion requires, according to the several necessities of all”. (Kautsky 1897, 130). I know of Christian communities today that live according to this biblical mandate, who see themselves as part of the long tradition of Christian communism.

However, let us go back to Thomas Müntzer’s statement, for there is a further section: “Any prince, count, or baron who, after being earnestly reminded of this truth, shall be unwilling to accept it, is to be beheaded or hanged” (Kautsky 1897, 130). I read this as a rather graphic call for revolution, which may take many forms but requires putting the ruling class out of its collective job. It is one thing to urge us to live communally, to have communal property, and to explore what a collective really means. But that is only one dimension; revolution is its other. If we focus only on the search for forms of communal life, then the danger is that we may end up becoming too comfortable within the current context. We may become either a cell that has adapted to the wider situation we began by opposing, or we may try to remove ourselves as much as possible from that situation. In either case, we give up on the revolutionary agenda, the desire and need to change the whole system itself.

Instead we become reformists, tinkering with little bits of the system in order to make it more liveable for the time being. I do not wish to suggest we give up on reform, but that it should always be understood in light of the larger revolutionary agenda. Only then do reforms make sense, for they constantly remind us of the need for revolution and ideally work towards that revolution.

So revolution is the other major component of the Christian communist tradition. Is this not what one would expect when the Christian message calls for metanoia, a complete change of direction at a social, economic and personal level? Too often has this call been read in recent years as a call for personal ‘repentance’, thereby neglecting the rich social dimensions of such a turn-around. Throughout the long two millennia of Christian history, one revolutionary movement after another has been inspired by this call, and by the Bible itself. Waldensians, the Apostolic Brothers around Gerardo Segarelli, Lollards, Taborites, the peasants with Thomas Müntzer, the Anabaptists in the northern Netherlands and at Münster, God-builders and God-seekers in the Russian Revolution, Christian materialists in the Chinese revolution, radical Christian socialists of the early twentieth century, guerrilla priests in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s … the list is long indeed. In fact, such a list brings me to another reason for being a Christian communist: it is not that the perfect revolution is still to come, but that there is a long history of such revolutions. That many of them made mistakes is obvious; that they also had many successes should also be obvious. In both cases we have much to learn from these earlier examples.

I would like to discuss briefly three other dimensions of Christian communism. To begin with, there is the tension between old and new with which that tradition struggles. I mean the tension between a radical break with the past that is entailed by the ideas of revolution (metanoia) and the reality that the past continues after the revolution in so many ways. Having won a revolution, do you destroy everything that has gone before and begin again? Many have taken this approach, thinking that all that has been overthrown is corrupt and tainted, that it has to be swept away for the sake of what is new. Or do you use the leftovers and rubble of the old in order to construct something very different? Do you attempt a dialectical transformation in which the best of what has gone before is taken up and thereby unleash a new level of human imagination and creativity? May I suggest that both elements should be kept together in a tension, in which the radical break and a sense of continuity are held in creative interaction with one another. For example, after the Russian Revolution some wished to destroy all that was left of the old order, while others wanted to keep the best of the past in order to construct socialism. This question also faces us with the tradition of Christian communist movements: each revolution believes that it is brand new, yet the very existence of a tradition of such revolutions means that there is something of the past that continues into the new present.

A further question concerns the obvious conservatism of many religions, including Christianity. They are all too ready to support and justify whatever tyrant happens to be in power, especially if that tyrant favours the religion in question. How does this relate to Christian communism, which is quite the opposite? Some argue that Christian communism is the core, the real truth of Christianity, and that the ones who develop a dirty little relationship with the powers that be are really compromising and betraying the truth of that religion. I would suggest that it is more complex than that. A religion like Christianity is actually caught between its revolutionary and reactionary sides, which has much to do with the tensions of its origins during the Roman Empire. As a result, throughout its history it has oscillated between those two options, with many variations in between. The catch is that either approach may be justified from the sacred texts and from the history. That is, they are both perfectly ‘legitimate’ in that sense. The outcome is that one must ultimately take sides in the struggle. It should be clear by now which side I prefer.

Finally, I suggest that one of the reasons why the Christian communist tradition continues to appeal to many people is because it offers what I call a process of translation between religion and politics. By translation I mean an interaction between two codes or languages, in which neither has superiority or is absolute. As anyone who has engaged in translation knows, no term is completely translatable. The fit is always partial, leaving something hanging over, outside the overlap of words. This means that the intersection of the two terms may well enhance each term in the process, enriching the meaning. Radical politics and religion seem to be quite translatable into one another: think of words like revolution and miracle (and metanoia), justice and obedience to the law of God, land reform and the land as God’s, the abolition of private property and money as the root of all evil, and so on. In fact, many of the key Christian communist terms have an inescapably radical political implication, one that may be expressed in political terms as well as religious terms. It is not for nothing that Marxists and other radicals have continually found themselves engaging with religion.

I have perhaps been a little too theoretical, but I wanted to indicate how Christian communism raises crucial issues in its appeal to me. Occasionally some have asked me whether I am not a pessimist, given the ‘failures’ of one communist movement after another? I respond by questioning what ‘failure’ means, for it seems to me that any revolution that is able to get past the period of inevitable counter-revolution has succeeded. Yet even the shorter-lived moments of left-wing radicalism indicate that the hope for something better persists. Above all, I am an optimist, for I keep meeting young people in different parts of the world who have no time for capitalism and all that it does, who are not interested in careers or making money, who constantly seek out new ways of living communally, and who do so with the greater, revolutionary agenda always in mind. Such young people give me great optimism for the future of Christian communism, which is part of the greater communist movement.

References:

Engels, Friedrich. 1894-95 [1990]. “On the History of Early Christianity.” In Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 27, 445-69. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Kautsky, Karl. 1897. Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation. Translated by J. L. Mulliken and E. G. Mulliken. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Original edition, London: Fisher and Unwin, 1897.

———. 1976 [1895-97]-a. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus I: Kommunistische Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Berlin: Dietz.

———. 1976 [1895-97]-b. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus II: Der Kommunismus in der deutschen Reformation. Berlin: Dietz.

———. 2007 [1908]. Foundations of Christianity. Translated by H. F. Mins. London: Socialist Resistance.

Kautsky, Karl, and Paul Lafargue. 1977 [1922]. Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus III: Die beiden ersten grossen Utopisten. Stuttgart: Dietz.

Luxemburg, Rosa. 1970 [1905]. “Socialism and the Churches.” In Rosa Luxemburg Speaks, edited by Mary-Alice Waters, 131-52. New York: Pathfinder Press.

[Thank you indeed Roland for this contribution]

The writer is a left-winger from Australia, based in the industrial city of Newcastle. His main interest concerns the intersections of Marxism and religion, having written a five-volume series called The Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Haymarket, 2009-13). He has recently completed a long study on Lenin and religion. He frequently visits Asia and will take up a position as professor at Renmin University of China (Beijing) in 2014.

[Note: This piece may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. If any clarification is needed on this, please see: Contact]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for Change, philosophersforchange.org. Thanks for your support.

Performing Profanation: Giorgio Agamben’s Non-Non-Christianity

Πηγή: .politicaltheology.

[This paper was presented on November 18, 2012 at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, in a joint session sponsored by the Theology and Continental Philosophy and Theology and Religious Reflection groups.]

The recent interest shown in religion and, specifically, Christianity, by otherwise non-religious thinkers has been something of a boon for theologians and the like-minded. Even when such non-Christian appropriations of theology offer a presentation of Christianity radically different from received orthodoxy, the very fact that the effort has been made is often taken as a signal of the continuing preeminence of a largely traditional Christian thought and practice. As Paul J. Griffiths has suggested, such thinkers, left without any other viable critical options, are “yearning for [the] Christian intellectual gold” that the church has always held in reserve. Because of this, their services can easily be enlisted for theology, since, as John Milbank has often suggested, it is theology alone that offers any real alternative.

Such readings of this so-called post-secular “turn to religion,” however, tend to move too quickly to theology, and this is especially the case with Agamben. Although some may wonder if Agamben’s putative appreciation of theology means that he is in fact a Christian, his various forays into theology—notably, The Time that Remains and, more recently, The Kingdom and the Glory—present, I suggest, a much different picture. Specifically, among other things Agamben’s reading of the theological tradition represents a concerted effort to profane that tradition, to render it inoperative for a new use, a use that I characterize as non-non-theological or non-non-Christian.
So to begin: towards the end of the Preface to The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben tells us that the “empty throne, the symbol of Glory, is what we need to profane in order to make room, beyond it, for something that, for now, we can only evoke with the name zoe aionios, eternal life.”
To understand what glory does and why it needs to be profaned, we can start by noting that the functioning of the governmental machine depends ultimately on the fracture between being and praxis and the various attempts to suture this fracture in different yet interrelated domains. It is this fracture between being and praxis that we see reflected in the discursive distinction between theology and oikonomia. This distinction, as Agamben shows throughout The Kingdom and the Glory, marks Christian thought as dipolar, suspended between a series of divisions that employ different, though complimentary, rationalities: for instance, the division between the being of God and God’s government of the world, transcendent order and immanent order, Kingdom and Government, and general providence and special providence. Glory is, according to Agamben, essentially the place where an attempt is made to suture these divisions, so as to assure the continued functioning of the theo-governmental machine.

Agamben examines these sutures in detail throughout The Kingdom and the Glory, but we can focus specifically on Agamben’s discussion of the relationship between immanent trinity, which refers to God as God is in Godself, and economic trinity, which refers to God for us in the praxis of salvation. The distinction between immanent trinity and economic trinity, as should be clear, repeats the divisions we have just mentioned and, in this sense, recapitulates the fundamental fracture between being and praxis that the theo-governmental machine attempts to suture. The distinction between immanent trinity and economic trinity does not mean, of course, that we are dealing with two different trinities, as if the inner life of the Godhead is somehow substantively distinct from God’s economic activity in salvation history and the government of the world. Nevertheless, despite this apparent identity, there is a real distinction to be had between immanent trinity and economic trinity, meaning that we should avoid either confusing the two or collapsing one into the other. What is at issue, rather, is the reciprocity between the two, the relationship between the immanent and the economic. If Agamben is correct, the relationship between them is not so much thought as expressed doxologically, in the liturgical formalization of thanks, praise, and adoration. Otherwise put, it is in glory that immanent and economic trinity meet and disjunctively interpenetrate each other. “The economy glorifies being, and being glorifies the economy,” Agamben writes. “And only in the mirror of glory do the two trinities appear to reflect each other; only in its splendor do being and economy, Kingdom and government appear to coincide for an instant.”

Yet only for an instant. Although the thanks, praise, and adoration due to God presuppose the economy of salvation, an economy that, in turn, reflects glory, the relationship between immanent trinity and economic trinity remains essentially asymmetrical. The economy, God’s government of the world, is essentially finite, and will come to its completion or end in the eschaton, when it will be reabsorbed into the immanent trinity, into God’s glory. Although glory, then, serves as the means to express the reciprocity between immanent trinity and economic trinity, it also, in the end, signifies the latter’s dissolution. However, the re-absorption of the economic into the immanent, of act into being, also exposes the essential vacuity of glory.
If, as we have said, the economic comes to an end in its reabsorption into the immanent at the eschaton, then “glory coincides with the cessation of all activity and all works.” Glory is, as Agamben writes, “what remains after the machine of divine oikonomia has reached its completion.” This “postjudicial inoperativity,” as Agamben refers to it, in which all human and divine works come to an end, is, then, an eternal Sabbath, for both God and humans. But if the goal of all things is to become inoperative, to cease activity, then this also means that glory itself is really nothing more than inoperativity. Behind glory is really nothing, which is another way of saying that the center of glory is empty. Glory substitutes itself for this emptiness, filling the latter in with “the splendor of its insignia.”

Glory is thus essential to power to the extent that it seeks the “capture and inscription in a separate sphere of the inoperativity that is central to human life.” Human life in its essence, if we can even use that word, is for Agamben inoperative, without a predetermined purpose, whether we understand this purpose metaphysically or materially. The human being is, Agamben says, “the Sabbatical animal par excellence.” Yet it is exactly this inoperativity defining the human that enables operativity, human production and labor. In order for the governmental machine to function, then, it has to seize this inoperativity and transpose it into glory, a transposition that simultaneously attempts to conceal the emptiness at its center. It is in this way that “inoperativity is the political substance of the Occident, the glorious nutrient of power.”
The symbol of the empty throne crystalizes the relationship between inoperativity and glory. Although we find the image of the empty throne in various contexts, Agamben notes that its meaning culminates in Christianity, with the hetoimasia tou thronou. In the Christian context, the empty throne does not refer primarily to regality, as may be the case in other contexts, but to glory: it sits prepared, awaiting the glory of God. The throne’s emptiness, however, should not only be understood in its correlation to the fullness of glory; it is, rather, constitutive, part and parcel of the inoperativity that lies at the heart of glory and that glory must seize to operate. For this reason, “The void is the sovereign figure of glory.”
Now, the problem, here, is not inoperativity as such but its capture in the apparatus of glory, which for Agamben means that we must think inoperativity outside the apparatus of glory, so as to restore human beings to the inoperativity that defines their essence. In other words, we must profane the empty throne, the symbol of glory, in order to make room for what Agamben tentatively calls eternal life.
To understand what it means to profane, we can turn to Agamben’s essay “In Praise of Profanation.” Here, Agamben argues that religion does not primarily refer to the binding-together of the divine and the human. Rather, it refers to their separation into the sacred and the profane and the attention given towards this separation. That is, religion refers in the first instance to “that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere.” The religious or, perhaps more broadly, the sacred, establishes itself and the domain proper to it through separation, through the consecration of various objects, broadly construed. The consecration of these objects removes them from the realm of normal, ordinary use, isolating them in a zone of inaccessibility that rests on the manufactured division between the sacred and the profane. The paradigm for the passage from the profane to the sacred is, in the religious context, sacrifice, the act of which removes the victim from the profane sphere, giving the victim over to the realm of the divine. Indeed, for Agamben sacrifice represents separation in its pure form, and in this sense it can be understood as the apparatus that founds and maintains the division between the sacred and the profane.
So understood the division between the sacred and the profane is far from absolute: it does not refer to any supposed metaphysical or natural qualities that inhere to certain objects but constitutes itself through the act of separation as such, meaning that virtually any object can become sacred, so long as set apart from the realm of normal use. Being sacred or, conversely, profane, is only the result of passing an object from one sphere to the other. If, however, the division between the sacred and the profane relies on the act of separation as such, then it is always possible to return an object that has been made sacred to the realm of the profane.
We should not, however, confuse profanation, the return of an object to common use, with secularization. Whereas secularization merely transfers power from one sphere to another without altering its form, profanation “neutralizes what it profanes,” in the sense that it “deactivates the apparatuses of power and returns to common use the spaces that power had seized.” Otherwise put, profanation renders objects inoperative, making them available for a new use that ignores any proper or sacred sense that the object may have once had.
Agamben gives numerous examples of profanation throughout his works, but we can focus more specifically on Agamben’s reading of Pauline klesis. Agamben’s discussion of Pauline klesis, of course, constitutes a significant portion of The Time that Remains. It reappears, however, in The Kingdom and the Glory at a turning point in the “archaeology of glory,” where Agamben shifts his attention to zoe aionios, eternal life, as the means to begin to think inoperativity outside the apparatus of glory. In Judaism and the New Testament, zoe aionios does not merely refer temporally to the future eon but also to “a special quality of life and, more precisely, the transformation that human life undergoes in the life of the world to come.” The notion is found in Paul, but Paul also takes it as characteristic of life in messianic time, the time of the now. Such is the sense of Paul’s use of hos me or “as not,” which Agamben takes as a technical term in the Pauline lexicon, used to indicate the meaning of messianic life as klesis, that is, calling or vocation. For Agamben klesis is not the messianic repetition of factical conditions or a calling to something more authentic or higher. Klesis, under the pressure of the hos me, is rather the “revocation of every vocation,” in the sense that “it revokes the factical condition and undermines it from within without altering its form.”
Such is the sense of Paul’s “weeping as not weeping,” “rejoicing as not rejoicing,” “buying as not possessing,” “using the world as not using it up” (I Cor. 7:29-31). So understood the messianic hos me coincides with profanation. Like the act of profanation with respect to the sacred, messianic klesis does not destroy factical conditions but reworks them from within through their neglect, which renders them inoperative. In Agamben’s reading of Paul, the hos me indicates the “generic potentiality” that klesis pries open and it itself is, a potentiality that, again like profanation with respect to the sacred, allows factical conditions to be put to a new use, a use subtracted from proper ends. Messianic life is profaned life, a life constituted in and through profanation. It is this profane life that gets transposed into glory, since the theo-governmental machine cannot function without it.
How, then, should we position Agamben’s analysis of glory with respect to theology? It should be clear, I think, that Agamben’s genealogy is simultaneously critique: to explain how the theo-governmental machine functions is to indicate the points at which it might be put to a halt. We should not confuse Agamben’s appeal to theology in this register, then, with theology itself, as if it were a covert endorsement of theology. It is also the case, however, that when searching for alternatives, Agamben seemingly makes a theological appeal in his insistence on the importance of the messianic dimensions of Paul’s thought and in the notion of eternal life. Nevertheless, we should not confuse this appeal with theology either, at least in the strict sense of the term. Agamben certainly finds an essential inoperativity at work in the “as not” of Pauline klesis and eternal life, and in this sense these coincide with his own specific concerns. But Agamben attempts to read these and similar notions by isolating them from the ways in which they have functioned in the theo-governmental apparatus, putting them to a new use. Otherwise put, Agamben’s use of theology, in both its negative and positive senses, is an act of profanation. If Agamben claims to find an essential inoperativity at work in theology, it is because this inoperativity itself has been rendered inoperative through the act of profanation, the profanation of the empty throne. Agamben’s use of theology, then, should not be confused with theology proper, but it also should not be confused with a secularization of theology, since this would merely reproduce theology in a different register. Neither theology or an anti-theology, it is, rather, what I could call a non-non-theology or, if you will, a non-non-Christianity.
To label it so puts to a different use Agamben’s discussion in The Time that Remains of the remnant that results from the messianic division of the law for understanding his own position with respect to theology. The messianic announcement comes out against the ways in which the law divides Jew from non-Jew, but it does not do so through the establishment of a new, universal identity. The messianic announcement, rather, “divides the divisions of the law themselves and renders them inoperative, without ever reaching any final ground.” The messianic announcement divides each term of the opposition Jew/non-Jew from within, leaving a remnant on both sides that does not coincide with either: some Jews are not Jews and some non-Jews are not non-Jews. The messianic remnant, then, is non-non-Jew, and, in this sense, it corresponds to the “as not” of messianic klesis. The messianic announcement, then, is neither the dissolution of identity nor the establishment of a new identity; it is, rather, a specific type of ignorance with respect to factical conditions, an ignorance that deactivates factical conditions and returns them to inoperativity.
Similar to the way in which the messianic announcement neutralizes factical conditions through the as not, Agamben uses theology as not using it but also as not-not-using it. It is in this sense that we should understand Agamben’s foray into theology as a non-non-theology and his identification with the theological tradition as non-non-Christian.

By way of conclusion, if we are to appropriate Agamben’s work for theology, then, we must do so as not-not-for theology. A non-non-theology certainly cannot take the form of glory, either theoretically or doxologically in thanks, praise, and adoration. Rather, a non-non-theology or, put differently, a profane theology must render its objects inoperative. If theology has traditionally constituted itself through glory, in the attention it gives to divine being and economy, perhaps a profane theology would constitute itself through ignorance and neglect. Such a theology would no longer revel in thanks, praise, and adoration, but treat God and God’s economy as a “disused object,” as essentially inoperative.

Hollis Phelps is Assistant Professor of Religion at Mount Olive College, Mount Olive, NC. He is the author of Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Theology, forthcoming from Acumen Publishing in January 2013.