I’ll be joining Cadell Last on Philosophy Portal next week to discuss the relationship between politics and love. At least as I relate to the topic, this is fundamentally a question of political theology. I’ve explored this terrain frequently over the years (eg, this process theological response to Carl Schmitt).
In this post, I’ve dug up some old exchanges with Levi Bryant to serve as scaffolding for my argument. I’ll also engage Simon Critchley’s book, The Faith of the Faithless (2012), as a dialogue partner. Critchley’s book, as he describes it, is an experiment in thinking the fraught relationship between politics and religion. As with the modern split between religion and science, emotions run high whenever these issues are explored. But I do sense at least the beginning of a shift in the dominant tone over the last decade or so. In the first decade of the new millennium, the polemic was neatly divided into the evangelical atheism of figures like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, PZ Myers, and Sam Harris on one side, and the fundamentalist theism of folks like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and Ken Ham on the other. More recently, a new openness to religion and a number of prominent conversions have dramatically changed the public discourse (eg, see Brendan Graham Dempsey’s new video on the subject).
I’ve been engaging in these debates online for nearly two decades now. Despite a growing sense of powerlessness in the face of the corporate oligarchy pulling the strings of both major political parties in the US, the blogosphere remains an important site of democratic deliberation. In our catastrophic post-human, post-natural, post-truth era, reality itself is increasingly endangered, making virtuality a necessary haven of withdrawal and incubation. Despite my existing writing, many of my own thoughts on this subject remain at the level of pre-discursive feeling and imaginal strain, as yet inarticulable. The stress of silence acts as an alembic that I hope enables me to form truly new thoughts no longer trapped in the tug-of-war of pointless ideological mud slinging. I pray that the words I offer function as an invitation to a new type of heart-centered political discourse.
From Critchley’s perspective, politics may be conceivable without religion, but it will never be practicable. He justifies his claim by turning to the political thought of Rousseau, who “arguably provides the definitive expression of the modern conception of politics” in his treatise The Social Contract (1762 ). At first glance, Rousseau’s political theory seems to provide “an entirely immanent conception of political legitimacy…an egalitarian conception of association rooted in popular sovereignty (Critchley, p. 8.).
A deeper look at the composition of Rousseau’s Geneva Manuscript (later renamed The Social Contract) reveals that, just before sending it to the publisher, he made a rushed addition to the text “scribbled in an almost indecipherable hand” despite the rest of the manuscript’s perfect penmanship (Critchley, p. 28). The addition was a chapter titled “On Civil Religion.” Rousseau ends up seeming to contradict his immanentist account of political formation by arguing for what Critchley calls the “fictional force” of a political religion.
Rousseau acknowledges the motivational inadequacy of a purely philosophical account of politics and offers the picture of a political religion. … [T]here is a need for fictions other than philosophical in order to unite the general will with the interests to act on that will… (Critchley, p. 34).
“Philosophy,” in this context, should be understood to mean the rational, dispassionate discourse expected of modern, enlightened individuals. Rousseau recognized that logical argument alone was not sufficient to persuade a people to behave in the interests of the common good. Something more was required to overcome individual alienation, namely, faith. The faith of a political religion is not about blind belief in the externally imposed doctrines of a priesthood. Rather, political faith aims to keep its adherents open to the possibility of “a transformation [in our own] manner of existence,” or what Rousseau referred to as a “change of [our] nature” (Critchley, p. 39). Critchley describes the transformation brought on by the enactment of faith as one of mystical love, an “act of spiritual daring that attempts to eviscerate the old self in order that something new might come into being” (Critchley, p. 20).
Rousseau’s “social contract” is a very strange sort of contract, since unlike most contracts, the freely acting independent parties involved don’t even exist until after the agreement. Prior to the contract, the freedom required to justify its legal authority has not yet been created. The contract, at the time of its formation, is essentially a fiction. It is a fiction that the subsequently formed free individuals must conspire together in an enduring act of mutual faith and trust in order to realize. This mutual act of faith—the “rare but ever-potential force…to give oneself in an act of association with others”—is the basis of any civil religion and self-governing society. It follows that the primary purpose of engaging in political activity is not to persuade people, but to form a people in the first place. Critchley proposes that the formation of a people depends upon an act of mystical love, an experience that begins as a fictional force but ends in a new communal reality.
Critchley’s is a civic faith without religious creed, based not on
the abstraction of a metaphysical belief in God, but rather [on] the lived subjective commitment to an infinite demand…a declarative act…an enactment of the self…a performative that proclaims itself into existence in a situation of crisis where what is called for is decisive political intervention (Critchley, p. 13).
Critchley’s sense of an “infinite demand” emerges out of his study of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of otherness. Rather than the individualistic ethos of liberal modernity, Critchley’s ethical theory is rooted in what he calls “dividualism,” the existential process whereby
the self shapes itself in relation to the experience of an overwhelming, infinite demand that divides it from itself—the sort of demand that Christ made in the Sermon on the Mount when he said: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you’ (Matt. 5:44) (Critchley, p. 6-7).
Critchley’s experiments in political theology draw upon a rich history of radical mystics and religious revolutionaries. But he begins the book by unpacking what he calls “Wilde Christianity,” the faithless faith articulated by Oscar Wilde while he was imprisoned by the British government for two years (1895-97) for being gay. Wilde could not bring himself to believe in any church religion, but the symbol of Christ nonetheless remained compelling to him. Critchley reads Wilde’s imaginative engagement with the figure of Christ as a kind of “soul-smithing,” where through the fires of sin and suffering, one forges a new identity. We are to imitate Christ’s ultimate creative and artistic act: “the incarnation of the inwardness of suffering in outward form” (Critchley, p. 5).
“To the artist,” writes Wilde,
expression is the only mode under which he can conceive life at all. To him what is dumb is dead. But to Christ it was not so. With a width and wonder of imagination that fills one almost with awe, he took the entire world of the inarticulate, the voiceless world of pain, as his kingdom, and made of himself its external mouthpiece (quoted by Critchley, p. 5).
Politics, then, is as much an artistic as a spiritual or even a religious endeavor. Religious in that it requires an act of self-giving akin to faith, or mystical love; artistic in that, as Wilde put it, “its symbols must be of my own creating” (quoted by Critchley, p. 4), smithed in the caldron of my own soul rather than received externally.
Critchley continues:
Christ is the incarnation of love as an act of imagination, not reason, the imaginative projection of compassion onto all creatures (p. 5).
A political religion is a religion based on the fictional force of love. Love, whatever its potential power, is hard to come by in this world. It is indeed mostly a fiction. But on those rare occasions when authentic political activity bursts through the surface of ideology, it can only be the result of this fiction becoming a reality.
…
Over the years, one of my interlocutors on the subject of political theology has been Levi Bryant. It’s been over a decade since our last sustained engagement on the topic, but his 2012 blog post “Some Theses on Religion, But Not Really: A-Theology” remains instructive. He begins by suggesting that what is at stake here is not ontological, but logical. That is, the core issue is not whether reality is finally material or divine, natural or supernatural: the issue is whether we employ a logic of immanence or transcendence. This focus on logic follows from Bryant’s distinction between the structure and the content of a worldview. There are plenty of worldviews structurally organized around a logic of transcendence that nonetheless remain secular or naturalistic in content. Bryant prefers to utilize the abstract notation of the Lacanian matheme when describing the structure of a worldview, since it minimizes the potential for diverse contents to distract us from the underlying logic at work. The independence of structure from content is mirrored by the independence of the intention or belief from the function of a person’s actions. Bryant gives the example of going to a grocery store with the intention of providing food for one’s family: though one’s intention is not to re-enforce the structure of capitalism, that is in fact how one’s intention ends up functioning. The same is true of those who attend church with the best of intentions: from Bryant’s perspective, they only re-enforce the structure of oppression that any institution founded upon a logic of transcendence is fated to create. Why is any social structure founded upon such a logic fated to be violent and oppressive? Because, argues Bryant:
it is formally impossible to generate a totality or a whole, yet this is precisely what such structures aim for. Every attempt to generate a totality or a whole generates a remainder or an accursed share– what Lacan calls an ‘objet a’—that marks what the structure cannot integrate or the failure of the totality. Participants within these systems see this remainder not as an ineluctable and necessary consequence of attempts to form a social and intellectual totality, but as a contingent accident. The next step is then to eradicate this remainder as that which prevents the social order from being instantiated so that social harmony might be produced. In other words, structures of transcendence, exception, or sovereignty necessarily generate a friend/enemy logic.
The aim of political transformation, then, should be to establish anarchical forms of social organization not premised on the insider/outsider logic of transcendence. Transcendence, according to Bryant, is the first form of political violence, since it denigrates the world by claiming it is not enough. Such a logic leaves all worldly things vulnerable to exploitation. So far as it goes, I agree with Bryant’s reasoning. He goes on to suggest that religion need not necessarily obey the logic of transcendence as he has laid it out. Even some variants of Christianity are able to
see Christ as an ordinary man (not the son of God), who died on the cross showing that God, the patriarch, is literally dead, and who was not resurrected, and where the holy spirit is nothing but a metaphor for the activity of a community based not on law, but love, and not on a label or tribal identification (“Christian”), but where anyone—atheist, Hindu, Jew, pagan, etc.—could participate.
Bryant here moves a bit closer to the possibility I am attempting to articulate. But I take issue with his dismissal of spiritual metaphor as “nothing but” (eg, see my reflection on Graham Harman’s ontologization of metaphor). The spiritual power of metaphor—that is, the way metaphorical language can function to carry beyond or transfer both its speaker and her listeners into another world—is precisely why I take issue with Bryant’s complete rejection of transcendence. Metaphor (along with myth and parable) may be the most effective means of conveying spiritual facts otherwise inaccessible by literal statements. The religious significance of logics of transcendence need not necessarily be predicated upon a rejection of worldliness per se, but rather upon the rejection of the present state of the world in the service of bringing forth another world.
In Faith of the Faithless, Critchley contrasts the spiritualities of Paul and Marcion to bring into relief the sense in which Paul’s rejection of the fallen world as it existed under the rule of the Roman Empire was simultaneously a Messianic hope in a future world redeemed by Christ’s love. The future world would be one in which human beings existed in societies of free association, not because we had overcome our fallenness and achieved some transcendent state of guiltless self-mastery, but because we’d accepted our helplessness before God. The conversion brought about by faith reveals that the transcendent love that Jesus called us to practice is an infinite demand that remains entirely beyond our ability to achieve on our own. It forces a realization upon us: “You are not your own,” as Paul put it (1 Cor. 6:19). Critchley reads Heidegger’s existential analysis of Dasein as a phenomenological translation of Paul’s religious metanoia, but stops short of Heidegger’s seeming aspiration towards the totalized wholeness and autarchy of the authentic Self. Critchley writes:
The human being is essentially impotentialized in its relation to the Messiah. The decision about who I am is not in my power, but only becomes intelligible through a certain affirmation of weakness. Authenticity is not so much a ‘seizing hold’ as the orientation of the self towards something that exceeds oneself, namely the hetero-affectivity of an infinite demand that calls me. Freedom is not something I can confer upon myself in a virile assertion of autarchy. It is something that can only be received through the acknowledgement of an essential powerlessness, a constitutive impotence. Freedom can only be received back once one has decided to become a slave and attend in the endurance of love—for love endures all things. (Critchley, p. 182)
The Marcion heresy, on the other hand, must be rejected for precisely the reasons that Bryant lays out. Unlike Paul, who saw how the whole of creation was “groaning in travail” alongside the human community, waiting together with us for redemption, Marcion rejected creation as irrevocably evil. Critchley retells the story of an elderly Marcionite who used his own saliva to wash himself each morning so as not to be contaminated by the evils of the created world (Critchley, p. 198): “[Marcion’s] dualism leads to a rejection of the world and a conception of religion as a retreat from creation…[becoming] a theology of alien abduction” (Critchley, p. 202).
Critchley goes on to draw inspiration for his thesis on the revolutionary potential of faith from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. Kierkegaard describes the difference between the Old Testament conception of law based on “worldly love,” wherein “you do unto others what others do unto you and no more,” and the New Testament conception of love without law, wherein, as Critchley describes it, one
engages in a kind of transcendental epoche of what others owe to me, and instead [quoting Kierkegaard] ‘makes every relationship to other human beings into a God-relationship’ (Crichley, p. 248).
Kierkegaard continues:
Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term. (WL, p. 112-113)
In this sense, divine transcendence comes to participate in the down to earth ethicality of face to face encounters. When I truly love someone—truly in that I engage them according to the logic of a gift rather than the logic of exchange—it is because I have transcended myself, making room within my soul for the divine to act in the world through me. “Not I, but Christ in me,” as Paul put it (Gal. 2:20). Is this just a metaphor? Perhaps it is metaphorical, but let us not underestimate the power of words to re-imagine worlds.
Much of my writing on this topic is an attempt to re-imagine the political function of religion (and the religious function of politics) by arguing that:
1) there is no neutral ground outside religion from which to critique it: we are ineluctably mythic creatures, our individual and collective identities being necessarily narrative in structure.
2) faith can and has functioned as the motivating factor underlying revolutionary political action.
These theses led Bryant to accuse me of being what Deleuze called a “state thinker”— someone who attempts to both naturalize and sanitize hierarchical religious social structures by (even if unintentionally) justifying the logic through which they operate. Bryant singles out theologians (those for whom the logic of transcendence is operative) as especially guilty of “state thinking,” since they always idealize how faith could operate without paying due attention to how it has actually functioned in the world among lay people. While I think there are plenty of real life examples of faith operating to dispel and dismantle state violence and oppression (eg, Gandhi and MLK in the 20th century), I have no problem admitting to idealization. Like Socrates in the Republic, I find it valuable in the extreme to defiantly journey beyond the walls of my city of residence, not only to critique the obvious injustices of the day, but also to “dream another city in dialogue,” as Critchley puts it (p. 93). Critique of existing structures is not enough. We must also construct a new view of the world. Further, as Plato also discusses in the Republic, I believe the city (the collective) and the soul (the individual) must become transparent one to the other. If we are to become capable of enacting a genuinely anarchic society not ruled by any exceptional sovereign, super-wealthy class, or miraculously representative body (Madison’s “refined democracy”), we must find a way to collectively relate to one another that is no longer bound by the self-serving capitalist logic of exchange. Is the “logic” of love engendered by faith such a way?
In a related post, “Transcendence and the Problem of Boundaries: A Confession,” Bryant asks the most pressing and all-important question: “Is it possible to form a community of strangers without identity and to still really have a community?” He specifies “without identity” because if a community names itself, it creates outsiders, reproducing the logic of remainder and leading to the violent elimination of that remainder as discussed above. Bryant suggests that the social form practiced by the historical Jesus may have been such a community. Unfortunately, the institutionalization of Christianity led it to become “the greatest of conspiracies against Christ (we fetishized his death to obscure the trauma of the socio-political philosophy he proposed).” I couldn’t agree more with Bryant here. But what of the form of transcendence I am attempting to reconstruct? I don’t think it is unique to the teachings of Jesus, but like Bryant, this is the tradition I know best: Jesus’ teaching that love supersedes the Mosaic law broke open the closed community of Israel, with its unique relationship to a transcendent deity, such that all peoples, regardless of class, creed, or color, were to be treated as friends, as fellow members of the communal body of Christ. This universalization was so far reaching that Jesus said even those who wish to do us violence should be treated as friends: “Turn the other cheek” (Matt. 5:39); “Love thy enemies” (Matt. 5:44). Jesus realized that this would be the only way to break the tragic cycles of violence and revenge characterizing human history for millennia.
But is the transcendent love taught and exemplified by Jesus a realistic possibility for normal human beings? To give one especially vexxing example, members of oppressed and colonized communities often seek vengeance upon their oppressors. Is there any other way for them to reclaim their stolen land and livelihood, indeed, their very humanity? “It is through violence against the colonist,” writes Critchley, “that colonized subjects can rid themselves of their deformed inferiority and liberate or literally remake themselves” (p. 238). Critchley grants that the case of the colonized makes any sort of a priori pacifism seem entirely inadequate, but he still remains skeptical of the glorification of violence, even if in the name of revolution. Critchley examines the meaning of the commandment, “Thou shall not kill,” asking whether it should be interpreted as an absolute prohibition or “impersonal, coercive law.”
The commandment is a more fragile, but insistent, guideline or plumb-line for action, addressed in the second person…[C]rucially, the force of the commandment is non-coercive and requires our assent…[I]t is an ethical demand that requires approval. By virtue of its non-coercive force, the commandment of nonviolence is a guideline for action with which we are obliged to wrestle in solitude, and, in certain exceptional cases, to take responsibility for ignoring. (Critchley, p. 16)
Following Critchley’s Levinasian analysis of the ethics of violence, it’s clear that the transcendent character of divine love is never going to be something that is easily put into action by finite human beings. It remains beyond our individual power to actually follow Jesus’ teaching to “turn the other cheek” in every case. This doesn’t mean we are off the hook, however. Political struggle is messy and requires taking personal responsibility for the commandment not to kill, which in Levinas’ sense is written on the very faces of those we’d seek to do harm.
But what of the role of faith in allowing for the possibility of “mystical love,” a faith described by Critchley as “that act of spiritual daring that attempts to eviscerate the old self in order that something new might come into being” (p. 20)? Perhaps this form of transcendence—namely, self-transcendence—remains ineluctably violent. It is a violence done only to oneself, to one’s selfish and death-fearing ego, such that genuine love for one’s neighbor may become possible.
…
Some closing thoughts that hardly tie up this topic but point toward where imaginal tension continues to draw me: I think much of today’s progressive political activity is structurally describable as “Christianity without Christ.” In other words, even while most leftists reject religion and especially Christianity, the ethical motivations driving their pursuit of justice are, historically speaking, deeply indebted to Christian universalism. I worry that the righteous critique of existing systems of oppression, should it succeed, will have nothing of enduring value to replace them with without some sense of the transcendent love I’m gesturing toward. Without Love, revolution risks remaining nothing more than another cycle of revenge.
The 20th century was the bloodiest in human history, largely because the ideological vice grip of both nationalism and materialism (including the false form of state socialism it engenders). In the lecture below (text here), delivered on Holy Saturday in 1920, Rudolf Steiner speaks of nationalism and materialism as the stones which must be removed for Christ’s love to rise again as a healing power in our time.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?