Behind the barricades with Lenin? Making sense of the Marxist turn to Christianity in the literature classroom.

Harris, Mitchell M.

During the spring semester of my third year in graduate school, I began hearing strange grumblings from the underground about two notable Marxist scholars of the early modern and premodern periods converting to the Christian religion. Why, so many around me were asking, would the most radical of radicals relent to that oppressive and hegemonic institution, the Christian Church? To that point in life, I had not given much thought to the philosophical and ideological correspondences of what at the time seemed--at least, to me--to be two disparate worldviews. Marxism was unequivocally materialist, political, and antireligious, or so I thought. Who can, after all, forget its chief architect's famous dictum that religion was the "opiate" of the masses? In our time, however, the ascendancy of this dictum was suddenly being questioned by Marx's own followers, some of whom were converting publicly to the Christian faith, and I was intrigued by the thought of these two scholarly converts being sojourners of sorts, making their way through a number of postmodern spiritual "religions" before finding their permanent home in a full-blown orthodox and "hegemonic" Christianity. What did this Western institution have to offer these Marxist materialists that other religions did not?

At the time I was asking this question, I also had begun to hear that Terry Eagleton was reevaluating the significance of his Catholic upbringing in his autobiography, The Gatekeeper; French philosopher Alain Badiou was arguing that the Christian experience was a necessary means to reintroduce the invaluable and indispensable concept of "Truth" in philosophical discourse; and the Slovenian psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek was writing at length about the Marxist need to ally with Christianity in order to ensure the survival of the materialist critique, claiming that "there is a direct lineage from Christianity to Marxism" and that "Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade" (The Fragile Absolute 2).

I was intrigued by the allure of Christianity for its sudden and strange bedfellows, so I began to read what these theorists were writing. If nothing else, I felt that I might learn a little something from some fairly intelligent and deeply respected intellectuals, even if their interests in the Christian religion were not reflective of my own. They surprised me. I was struck by the intensity of their focus on the messianic message at the heart of the Gospels and Pauline epistles. As a graduate student who found himself caught between the invisible bullets of "containment" and "subversion" I was awakened to a theoretical lexicon that would speak instead about truth and historical ruptures. Certainly, their theology is something most wary Christian scholars will categorize as "bad theology" but these same Christian scholars also would do well to concede that it is a much better theology than, say, New Age relativism. After all, the theology of Eagleton, Badiou, and Zizek is, in certain respects, no more radical than the theology of other critical theorists Christian scholars are wont to flock to, like Rene Girard or Paul Ricoeur. Girard himself, for instance, failed to come to terms with the notion of the Atonement of the Cross while working out his mimetic theory. Indeed, one of his chief proponents, Gil Bailie, has gone so far as to suggest that the doctrine of Atonement is "not only logically incoherent" but "morally and theologically inadequate as well" (37). Ricoeur's philosophical hermeneutics, while vastly more conservative than that of Derrida or Hans-Georg Gadamer, still permits its proponents, because they are beckoned to the freedom of the hermeneutic process itself, to fall into the tempting lure of cultural relativism: everything is interpreted and everything is interpretable.

In contrast, the materialist alignment with Paul's messianism is not intended to destroy Christianity (indeed, the materialists never make this their primary point of argument), but to save it from the slew of relativist philosophies that threaten to occlude it from the postmodern theoretical matrix altogether. And I would rather have a good or, at least, intriguing historical reading of Christianity in our theoretical conversation than no reading of Christianity at all. When looked at in this light, I think that it can be said that the proponents of a theoretical Christianity have a good deal in common with their lived Christian counterparts, so much so that we may be able to develop a lived Christian critique capable of confronting the relativisms which continue to have a devastating stranglehold on literary studies.

How is this possible? A first step is to turn to Zizek, who has argued that the Christian religion provides an exacting model for how the process of finding interpellative spaces beyond ideological interpellation is feasible. Through the person of Jesus, Zizek surmises, we are able to witness "a commitment, an engaged position of struggle, an uncanny 'interpellation' beyond ideological interpellation, an interpellation which suspends the performative force of the 'normal' ideological interpellation that compels us to accept our determinate place within the sociosymbolic edifice" (Puppet 112). For Zizek, carving out a space beyond ideological interpellation entails going beyond the spectrum of Althusserian Marxists, who, in his eyes, failed to recognize the gap between ideological interpellation and Ideological State Apparatuses. Zizek seemingly was making this distinction regarding the Althusserian project from the very beginning of his entrance into Anglo-American scholarship with the publication of The Sublime Object of Ideology; however--and I think this fair to claim--his work was never fully capable of articulating the possibility of the interpellation beyond imminent ideological interpellation until it focused in detail on the ontology of power relations, and it did so through the philosophical work of Alain Badiou, a former student of Althusser.

The most important concept Zizek inherits from Badiou is a notion of historical rupture. Historical ruptures are evental forces, what Badiou terms "Events." In his concern for St. Paul's functional status as vocalizer of the Event within the Christian tradition, Badiou provides Zizek the analogical means to understand how historical ruptures become operative--that is, how one can replace an ideological paradigm ("make things new") and develop an Event universally available to all. Let me stress, these two thinkers are not orthodox Christians--both vehemently deny a physical resurrection and Christ's spiritual redemptive function (they remain strict materialists). Furthermore, both concede that Events are historically contingent, localized, and bound to the "Truth" of a specific situation. Once articulated by a subject of the Event, however, there can be only one "Truth" to the situation, not an endless multiplicity of truths that radically destabilizes the status of the Event. To this end, they choose to promote the Christian legacy, because Paul's supplementation of Jesus of Nazareth creates a structure upon which one can model the material process of an Event. (1)

Badiou's theoretical articulation of the Event is disarming, and I believe, worthy of our greater attention, especially in the literature classroom where poststructuralist linguistic philosophy and neohistoricist ideologies continue to dominate the way we approach literary texts with our now near-myopic focus on culture. Both linguistic philosophy and neo-historicism instituted themselves by abandoning notions of the absolute and a stabilized vision of history--the former giving way to the endless deferral of meaning and the latter to the endless narrativizations of the past (exchanging history for "histories"). And while poststructuralist theorists raised alarming questions of subjectivity, those questions failed to approach adequately an ontology of the subject. Because there is no substance, because there is no self-reflexivity, and because there is no object (and, likewise, no stable correlate of the object), the distinction between the field of ontology and the theory of the subject vanishes into thin air. (2) While this loss may be championed by the very poststructuralists who brought it about, it is not without its dire philosophical consequences: foremost, it creates inherent problems surrounding the issues of identity and agency, and poststructuralists are inclined--often to a fault--to tend to the former rather than the latter (and by tending to the former, one means destabilizing the former). This near-exclusive attention to (non-self-reflexive) identity, results in the production of canon fodder for the regressive, conservative critics of poststructuralism: if there is no self-identity, how does one explain autonomous rational action, especially in the realm of the ethical? When we strip the question of its implicit political ties, one can see that the question elucidates the unspoken problem of poststructuralism. As such, this problem becomes the driving force behind Badiou and Zizek's ontological formulation of the "Event" and "Truth."

By returning to the issue of ontology--more specifically, the issue of an ontology of the subject in tension with a general ontology--Badiou reconfigures the position from which one could--and, perhaps, should--address the current issue of ethics. While the poststructuralist can work, de facto, from the position of the subject in self-authorship and in mystical relation to the unspeakable, unknowable Other (Emmanuel Levinas, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Derrida, and even Ricoeur), Badiou proposes that one work directly from the being of subjectivity in relation to being in general. For his theoretical purposes, "the question of agency is not so much a question of how a subject can initiate an action in an autonomous manner but rather how a subject emerges through an autonomous chain of actions within a changing situation" (Infinite 6). How so? In mathematical set theory, the multiple cannot be reduced to the specific, or the individual. All things are of a multiple, a set, and all sets are multiple multiplicities stretching from infinity to infinity. This is to say that even if we can imagine the smallest, indivisible something, it cannot be a something in and of itself--it only has its being at the level of the multiple multiplicity. Hence, applied to ontology, set theory allows Badiou to conceive of the "situation" without reference to historicism, or, perhaps more specifically, a historicized narrative of X, Y, or Z. As Peter Hallward reminds us, we know from Badiou that "all situations are infinite by prescription, that infinity is simply 'the banal reality of every situation, and not the predicate of a transcendence" (94). (3) Badiou thus is free to claim that "every situation, inasmuch as it is, is a multiple composed of an infinity of elements, each one of which is itself a multiple" (Ethics 25). In this regard, all things (multiple multiplicities), including history, are immanent for Badiou--present and available in the now: "Infinite alterity is quite simply what there is. Any experience at all is the infinite deployment of infinite differences" (25). Thus, he argues that "[e]ven the apparently reflexive experience of myself is by no means the intuition of a unity but a labyrinth of differentiations" (25-26). As the multiple multiplicities stretch out in the ever-moving now, it becomes apparent that the subject is not confined to history as such; rather, history is merely, in Badiouian jargon, the structuration of the situation as it orients itself around an Event, and the Event can only be determined by the fidelity of a subject to it. Thus, in any given moment, radical change is possible if only there is a subject capable of laying claim to the Event--for example, St. Paul laying claim to the "Truth" of Jesus Christ.

Because this ontology of the Event and the resurrection of "Truth" as a philosophically operative term turns poststructuralist readings of subjectivity and power relations on their head, Badiou and Zizek present us the timely means to a conversation that now can (once again) take place with regard to the meaning of literature, art, and authority: what is the value of truth and how can we get beyond the containment-subversion binary? To argue, then, that Christians and Marxists should join each other on the same side of the barricade may not be as radical as one might presuppose. To envision the possibilities the Marxist turn to Christianity presents in terms of redirecting our conversations about the literature we read, I believe, presents us an opportunity to institute a powerful corrective to the hegemonic forces that continue to shape the English discipline, often against our will.

Augustana College

WORKS CITED

Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Trans. Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.

--. "A Finally Objectless Subject." Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. Eduardo Cadava. London: Routledge, 1991. 24-32.

--. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2004.

--. Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassier and Alberto Toscano. London: Continuum, 2004.

Bailie, Gil. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003.

Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000.

--. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003

NOTES

(1) In order for being to be thinkable, Badiou posits, "it has to be considered on the basis of the mathematical theory of multiplicities;' where it is reduced to its barest core, an unrecognizable and unnameable "something" (Theoretical xiv), and, as two of Badiou's latest translators comment, "such being could only be described as an 'inconsistent multiplicity" (Infinite 13). In turn, in order for truth, as such, to "come forth, a hazardous supplementing of being is required, a situated but incalculable event" (Theoretical xiv.). The subject then can be "constituted" when he or she effects "a multiplicity that is anonymous and egalitarian, which is to say, generic" or, for-all (Theoretical xiv).

(2) Here I am greatly indebted to Feltham and Clemens's wonderful introduction to Infinite Thought, "An Introduction to Alain Badiou's Philosophy" 1-38.

(3) Hallward is quoting Badiou's L'Ethique: Essai sur la conscience du mal, 25.