Introducing Christo-Marxism

Vanishing mediator as central concept
The central concept of Christo-Marxism is the vanishing mediator, the medium that brings us together by vanishing between us, thereby establishing what Hegel calls our "mediated immediacy". In Christianity, obviously, this concept is paradigmatically exemplified by Christ, the Mediator par excellence, who died on the Cross to bring forth the Holy Spirit, the reconciliation of human beings with God and thus with each other. It is the contention of Christo-Marxism that this Christological notion of the divine mediator appears rationalized and secularized in Marxism, most notably in the mundane form of money as the primary means of social exchange. Hence the sin of capitalism, where money is not allowed to vanish in exchange but is rather accumulated as private property in capital. Thus the redemptive function of the vanishing mediator is frustrated. The mediator does not reconcile divergent interests but comes rather to stand between them as their stumbling block. Capitalist society is left unreconciled, increasingly torn by inner contradictions. 

Liberal communism
The aim of Christo-Marxism is to re-start the redemptive process by enabling the vanishing mediator to vanish again. In the socio-economic register this implies the necessity of liberal-communist action: breaking the power of capital in order to re-start the flow of money as vanishing mediator. Christo-Marxism, then, is a form of liberal communism: free markets yes, capitalism no. Liberal communism maintains that the level playing field required by the free-market mechanism is incompatible with the unlimited accumulation of capital. Hence the free-market mechanism must be protected against itself, against its tendency to result in antagonism between 'winners' and 'losers', between rich and poor. In other words: a market can only function as truly free market (that is, with a level playing field) in a communist state, where the institution of the market is publicly owned as the shared medium of our economic exchange. Money as vanishing mediator is an integral part of that institution.

 A critique of noise
Christo-Marxism aims to be the critical theory appropriate to the 21st century, where the problematic of social mediation is – through the explosive development of communication and information technology – on the verge of a revolutionary climax. Christo-Marxism, then, is first and foremost a philosophy of communication, its central thesis being the claim that the medium of communication must vanish in the process of communication if the latter is to succeed. Thus one of the reasons why speech constitutes a good medium of communication is the fact that spoken sounds vanish immediately after being uttered. If this were not so, speech would literally become a wall of sound standing between us, directing attention to itself rather than to the notions and feelings of the communicating subjects. This is what the information theoretic concept of noise is all about: the medium that refuses to vanish, drawing attention to its own materiality, thereby obstructing the process of communication. Hence the general failure of communication in our so-called 'network society' due to the increasing capitalization of media, turning them into money making machines instead of consensus making machines. The more a medium is capitalized, the more it draws attention to itself ("Buy me, stay in touch with your friends, be connected to the world..."), the more it constitutes the noise that disturbs communication. Hence the central paradox of our age: a scarcity of true mediation amidst a superabundance of media. Christo-Marxism, then, offers a critique of capitalist noise. 

Third position between autonomy and heteronomy
To repeat: Christo-Marxism aims to be the critical theory appropriate to the 21st century. As such, however, it must rethink the very possibility of critique, given the fact that this possibility has become deeply problematic in our postmodern/neoconservative/fundamentalist age. From the Enlightenment onwards, the critical attitude of modernity has been founded on the autonomy of the subject, who – as the self-legislating source of all normativity – granted itself the right and duty to critically examine every external authority, from the epistemic authority of sense data to the political authority of kings and churches, up to the absolute authority of God himself. The destructive effects of this autonomy of the subject have been pointed out by both postmodernism and neoconservatism, albeit from different angles. Where neoconservatism attacks modernity from above, so to speak, in name of the traditional authorities dethroned by the subject, postmodernism attacks modernity in the flanks, from the side, in the name of the multitude of particular others dominated by the subject's legislating powers. Neoconservatism laments the loss of transcendence, a loss that has left modern society rudderless, in lack of a moral compass, leaving men and women subject to the immediacy of their primitive urges. Postmodernism, on the other hand, laments the 'totalitarian egocentrism' of the subject, its constitutive blindness to the otherness of the other. As its own source of value, the subject simply cannot recognize the intrinsic value of the other as other: it can value the other only insofar as the other fits the subject's project of self-realization (his Entwurf in Heidegger's terminology).

Christo-Marxism is indebted to both the neoconservative and postmodern line of attack on modernity. Yet as an emphatically critical theory it must save a certain measure of subjective autonomy. Having recognized the cogency of the above criticisms of modern autonomy, we cannot simply sacrifice our autonomy and trade it for heteronomy, in favor of the rights of the Other. That, after all, would plunge us right back into the dogmatism of the Middle-Ages, the very thing the Enlightenment hoped to save us from. This is exactly what happens in fundamentalism, where the criticism of modern autonomy – though reasonable in itself – results in the unconditional acceptance of absolute external authority, revealed in the literal truth of Holy Scripture. Here the critique of autonomy results in the very impossibility of critique. So where does this leave us? We can summarize the problem before us by means of the following chiasm: subjective autonomy without respect for the other becomes totalitarian egocentrism, yet respect for the other without a measure of subjective autonomy becomes dogmatic heteronomy. Hence, to save the possibility of critical thought, we must find a third position between autonomy and heteronomy, a reconciling mediation between the divergent interests of self and other. It is the contention of Christo-Marxism that this third position is founded on the principle of the vanishing mediator.  

Christianity crucial to Marxism
Critical thought, then, must occupy a third position between autonomy and heteronomy. Hence the combination of Christianity and Marxism in Christo-Marxism – a combination that will undoubtedly appear oxymoronic given the militant atheism displayed by Marxism right from the start. Didn't Marx write that "the critique of religion is the premise of all critique" in his seminal Introduction to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right? The point to appreciate, however, is that Marxist atheism was part and parcel of the modern critical attitude based on the absolute autonomy of the subject – the very shortcoming of modernity which Christo-Marxism aims to overcome. The autonomous subject gave itself the right and duty to criticize every external authority, up to and including the authority of God. Hence the "Death of God" in modernity. If, therefore, we must counterbalance the autonomy of the subject with a measure of heteronomous respect for otherness, then religion must once again become a serious interlocutor for pure reason and the idea of God must be reanimated in philosophy. Religion, as expressing "the feeling of complete dependence" (Schleiermacher) or as the surrender to the "wholly Other" (Rudolf Otto, Levinas), is after all heteronomy par excellence. As such, religion is the necessary antidote to the self-ascribed omnipotence of the modern subject. To repeat: this does emphatically not mean that we should embrace religion tout court, and that the surrender to the Other should be unconditional, for doing so would plunge us into medieval fundamentalism. The critical point is to find a third between autonomy and heteronomy and thus to initiate a dialogue between reason and religion in order to find their common ground. Critical thought must be that dialogue. Thus the hyphen in Christo-Marxism must first of all be read as a double arrow ("Christo↔Marxism") indicating the dialogical exchange between Christianity and Marxism. Christianity, after all, is the religion of the vanishing mediator as such, the religion in which God – through the Crucifixion – reveals Himself as the vanishing mediator of the entire creation in its ultimate, reconciled state. As such, Christianity must be the religious interlocutor of Marxism qua secular critique of capitalism. 

For what is wrong with capitalism is precisely the dysfunction of the vanishing mediator, the fact that it is not allowed to vanish but is rather accumulated as the source of socio-economic power, thus leaving society unreconciled and torn by increasing contradictions. To be more precise: in capitalism the vanishing mediator (in its economic form as the means of economic exchange, i.e. money) is accumulated in capital, in the means of production and – in post-Fordism – in the means of communication. One of the results, as we have noted, is a general crisis of communication due to capitalist noise. Now if – as Marx shows – capitalism is not just an economic system but a complete social formation, structuring society throughout, then shouldn't we conclude that simply watching how concrete media function is not sufficient, since their very functioning is tainted by the capitalist attitude? What if the capitalist dysfunction of the vanishing mediator extends not just to money and capitalized technology but to media tout court (language as such, for example), embedded as these are in a capitalist environment? It would seem, then, that the merely receptive attitude of empirical investigation is not enough to break through the ideological surface-appearance of capitalist society. To give content to the concept of the vanishing mediator, something more is needed than empirical research. We need a meta-physical lever to break open the surface-appearance of capitalism. Here Christianity proves crucial to Marxism, insofar as the Crucifixion reveals the true functioning of the vanishing mediator, which is concealed by the capitalist accumulation of mediators. Only Christianity gives Marxism the tools to crack the ideological surface-appearance of capitalism.
 
The between in postmodernism and neoconservatism  

For Christo-Marxism, reconciliation means: finding a third position between autonomy and heteronomy. We have seen how the urgency of finding this third follows from the dialectic between the postmodern and neoconservative attacks on modern autonomy and the subsequent need to avoid a relapse into fundamentalist heteronomy. In the following I will elaborate on this notion of reconciliation, and how it is made possible by the vanishing mediator, by taking a closer look at the dialectic between postmodernism and neoconservatism. The point is that both ideologies, as critiques of modernity, must posit some notion of this third position in order to avoid fundamentalism. This explains a remarkable and usually ignored convergence between postmodernism and neoconservatism, insofar as both ideologies have produced conceptions of “the (in-)between” (alternatively: das Zwischen, le entre, the inter, the metaxy) as third positions beyond the modern dichotomy of self and other, autonomy and heteronomy. Thus we find notions of the between cropping up in the work of postmodern thinkers like Derrida, Lyotard and Deleuze, but also in neoconservative thinkers like Voegelin, Ortega y Gasset and Christopher Dawkins. We also find thinkers who combine postmodern en neoconservative conceptions of the between, notably Sloterdijk and William Desmond, whose work will be of special importance for the articulation of Christo-Marxism, as will be shown later. For now, however, let us focus on the difference between the postmodern and neoconservative conceptions of the between.

Given the radically different approaches of postmodernism and neoconservatism, their notions of the between vary greatly, which is precisely what makes a dialogue between them so fruitful, notably for Christo-Marxism. We have already remarked on the complementary ‘spatial’ directions of the postmodern and neoconservative attacks on modernity: whereas neoconservatism attacks ‘from above’ in name of the traditional authorities dethroned by the autonomous subject, postmodernism attacks ‘from the side, in the flanks’ in name of the multitude of particular others forced into subaltern positions by the authority of the autonomous subject. As a result, these different ‘spatial’ orientations can also be found in the postmodern and neoconservative conceptions of the between. Schematically we can say that whereas postmodern thinkers like Derrida and Deleuze are forced (by the necessity to avoid fundamentalism) to develop a horizontal between – between self and other, freed from hierarchy and dominance – neoconservative thinkers like Voegelin and Ortega y Gasset are forced to find a vertical between, i.e. a Platonic metaxy, a middle between the earthly and the divine. 

Consider, for example, what Dutch philosopher Antoon van den Braembussche writes in his dictionary of postmodernism: “In-between is a key concept in postmodern thought, which is sometimes called the ‘philosophy of the in-between’. In all cases what is at stake is an […] undecidable moment, where between binary opposites there arises a free floating space that cannot be specified any further. What is at stake is a ‘placeless place’, which is neither A nor B, neither man nor woman, neither body nor spirit, but which at the same time is penetrated by both opposites.” (2007: 158) The horizontal orientation of the postmodern between emerges clearly when Van den Braembussche points out the intercultural consequences of this notion of the between, indicating a free and egalitarian space between cultures. Thus he writes of the “in-between between the native and the foreign culture, a kind of bastard form, which belongs neither to the native nor to the foreign culture […] but which at the same time realizes a hybrid in which both cultures are already integrated.” (Ibidem.) Inasmuch as this intercultural between realizes an integrated hybrid, the alleged superiority of one culture over the other (read: the claim of the modern West to be superior to primitive peoples) is undermined, just like the power of one over the other is undermined, since the hybrid escapes the grasp of either culture, like a demilitarized no man’s land between warring states.

Now consider the vertical between of neoconservatism, between ‘the low’ and ‘the high’, the earthly and the divine, the temporal and the eternal, the finite and the infinite. Referring to this vertical between, neoconservative thinkers often use Plato’s concept of the metaxy, that is, the middle between the temporal world of the sensory flux and the eternal world of the divine Ideas. In the Symposium Plato introduces the metaxy through a myth about the birth of Eros, that is, love as the (semi-)divine force behind man’s desire for beauty and procreation – a love which in the end is aimed at the divine itself. Eros, Plato writes, is the child of Poros (prosperity) and Penia (poverty), and as such Eros lives between the animal and the divine, between extreme ignorance and absolute wisdom. According to Eric Voegelin, this vertical between is the human condition: “Existence has the structure of the In-Between, of the Platonic metaxy, and if anything is constant in the history of mankind it is the language of tension between life and death, immortality and mortality, perfection and imperfection, time and timelessness; between order and disorder, truth and untruth, sense and senselessness of existence; between amor Dei and amor sui […].” (1989: 119-120) Because man lives in the tension between the earthly and the divine, he has “always already” a feeling for the divine order of the cosmos. It is this order which man must approximate in culture, though he can never grasp it completely, since he must live in the tension of the metaxy – a tension which according to Voegelin is eminently expressed in the Greek-Jewish-Christian traditions. This metaxic “tension of existence” must always be kept alive. Otherwise, so Voegelin warns us, catastrophes will ensue. On the one hand, the divine may disappear from view altogether, spelling the ruin of society in nihilism and anarchy. This is what happens in modernity when the critical ideal of autonomy, having cut itself loose from external authority, degenerates into unchecked individualism, egoism and hedonism. On the other hand, when sight of the metaxy is lost, the divine may also come too close, leaving no space for human autonomy, resulting in religious totalitarianism. This, of course, is what happens in fundamentalism, where divine Truth is experienced as immediately given in Holy Scripture, without intermediation by human interpretation. Thus as one Voegelinian puts it: “The seeking of heaven can lead to the establishment of hell once balance in the metaxy is lost, as it is lost […] in religious fundamentalism.” (Morrissey 1999: 22)

Christianity between postmodernism and neoconservatism  
So on the one hand we have the horizontal between of postmodernism, the non-hierarchical interrelation of self and other. On the other we have the vertical between of neoconservatism, the hierarchical metaxy between the earthly and the divine. The complementarity between these positions – between the horizontal and the vertical – is striking. Doesn’t this suggest that the postmodern and neoconservative notions of the between should somehow be seen together in order to see the whole truth, that is to say: to develop a full-fledged third position between autonomy and heteronomy? Don’t we need a third notion of the between here, a between between the horizontal between and the vertical between, so to speak? Notice that if we take this suggestion seriously, we arrive at a cross shaped between, where the non-hierarchical relation between self and other intersects with the vertical orientation of the metaxy. Aren’t we reminded here of the Christian symbolism of the Cross? And doesn’t this reveal something of the importance of Christianity as an answer to our current problem situation, shaped by the dialectic of postmodernism, neoconservatism and fundamentalism?

 Indeed, following Luther, many theologians speak of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christianity, where the vertical obviously consists in the human relation to God and the horizontal in the solidarity between humans and with creation as a whole (Kolb 2004). Luther claimed – echoed by theologians like Barth, Tillich, Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer – that in Christianity these horizontal and vertical dimensions are essentially interrelated in a historically unique way. On the one hand the vertical relation to God is actualized only in the agapeic love between human beings and with creation, reconciled in the Holy Spirit. On the other hand, the horizontal dimension of human love is only made possible by the ‘vertical’ sacrifice of God, who becomes man in Christ, suffering and dying to expiate human violence. It has been noted before that the Cross symbolizes not just this divine sacrifice but also this essential interconnection of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of Christianity (Guénon 1975). Something of this symbolism can be found in Paul’s letter to the Ephesians, where he speaks of “the breadth and length and height and depth” of Christian love (Ephesians 3,18).

So how does Christianity allow us to synthesize the postmodern and neoconservative notions of the between and thereby to develop a true middle between autonomy and heteronomy? Obviously, the mere analogy between the symbol of the Cross on the one hand and the complementarity of the horizontal and the vertical orientations of the between on the other is insufficient to demonstrate the relevance of Christianity. What we need are philosophical, theological and political arguments. Delivering these arguments is precisely what Christo-Marxism is all about. Thus the central thesis of Christo-Marxism is that the non-hierarchical relation of self and other in the horizontal between is only opened up by a sacrifice in the metaxy, that is to say, by the death of the God-man Christ as the vanishing mediator in the mediated immediacy of reconciliation. In other words: to envisage a non-hierarchical togetherness of self and other, postmodernism needs a measure of neoconservatism: it needs a neoconservative return to the transcendent authority of Christianity. At the same time, however, this authority must be thought of as radically humble, self-effacing, sacrificing itself for the reconciliation of self and other. In that sense, one could say, the perverse power claim of what calls itself neoconservatism in the realm of politics – epitomized by the war mongering and neo-liberal Bush administration – is avoided and indeed criticized on principle grounds. In so far as Christo-Marxism, in its rehabilitation of the authority of Christianity, has neoconservative traits, it proclaims a decidedly leftist neoconservatism, aimed at the critique of existing power structures.  

References
-Guénon, René (1975), The symbolism of the Cross. London: Luzak and Co.
-Kolb, Robert (2004), "Luther on the Two Kinds of Righteousness", in: Wengert, T.J. (eds), Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and the Church, pp.38-55. Cambridge, Eerdmans Publishing Company.
-Morrissey, Michael P. (1999), "Voegelin, Religious Experience, and Immortality", in: Hughes, Glenn (ed.), The Politics of the Soul: Eric Voegelin on Religious Experience, pp.11-32. Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield.
-Van den Braembussche, Antoon (2007), Postmodernisme: Een intertekstueel woordenboek. Budel: Damon.

-Voegelin, Eric (1989), “Equivalences of Experience and Symbolization in History”, in: Sandoz, Ellis (ed.), The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 12. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.

“God is not dead, He just smells funny” – Reflections on the Syrian Massacre of the Innocents

Jean-Hyppolite Flandrin - "Christ's Entry into Jerusalem"

“Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…” This paradoxical paraphrase of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem (Mt 21:5, Jn 12:15) went through my head when I tried to ‘digest’ the news about the latest UN report on the status of children in situations of armed conflict (www.un.org/children/conflict/english/index.html). The report expressed special concern about the deteriorating situation in Syria, where a growing number of children are among the casualties of what is by now a very bloody civil war. Apparently, militia’s are killing indiscriminately, women and children no less than men. Children whose parents are suspected rebels are tortured or simply executed. Some children have been found with their heads caved in. Also there are reports about children being used as human shields, positioned on top of tanks in order to discourage enemy fire.

The need to rewrite Holy Scripture
It was this image of a child on top of a tank that reminded me of Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a donkey […]. And most of the crowd spread their garments in the road; and others cut branches from the trees, and spread them in the road. And the crowds that went before him, and that followed, cried out, saying, ‘Hosanna to the son of David: Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest.’” (Mt 21:5-11)

Doesn’t the image of a child used as a ‘human shield’ on top of tank force us to rewrite Holy Scripture, as if Christ is again entering the city where his crucifixion will take place? Only this time that Holy City is not Jerusalem but the Syrian city of Hama. And the road is not strewn with garments and palm leaves but with enemy fire, with bullets singing: “Hosanna to the son or daughter of whomever!” And if we are thus rewriting Holy Scripture, we might as well rewrite the passage about the murder of the children under Herod, such that it is now not in Rama but in Hama where “a voice [was] heard, lamentation, and weeping, and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children, and would not be comforted because they are not!” (Mt. 2:17-18; Jer. 31:15)

Giotto - "The Massacre of the Innocents"

“If he is not the word of God, then God never spoke”
This is what a father says about his son in Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) – turned into a film by John Hillcoat. The narrative is set in a post-apocalyptic world, where due to some global disaster – whether natural, man-made or divinely ordained remains unclear – all civilization has crumbled and nature is dying. Those who are still alive are reduced to a sub-human existence of daily struggle for food and the realistic fear of cannibalism. In this world, where all hope and value is lost, this father has made it his sacred mission to protect his son: “the child was his warrant,” McCarthy writes. “What if I said that he's a god?” the father says about his boy to an old man who is amazed to see a child still being alive in the disaster zone the world has become: “When I saw that boy I thought that I had died […]. I never thought to see a child again.”

In this godforsaken world, where all faith has died, where God himself is “dead”, this father finds a superhuman faith through his son, who has for him become a divine being, indeed, Christ himself, the Incarnate Word of God. The grimness of McCarthy’s dystopian vision, however, is such that besides the father no one believes anymore. Not even the old man puts any faith in the divinity of the child: “Where men cant live gods fare no better. You'll see. It's better to be alone. So I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true. Things will be better when everybody's gone.” Even the living, walking and talking Word of God carries no weight anymore: the world of The Road is too far gone, too godforsaken for that. The father’s task to protect his child against rape, murder and cannibalism is indeed a superhuman task, a more or less impossible mission.

The Road

Optimistic dystopia?
In comparison the film Children of Men (2006) – based on the novel by P.D. James – offers an almost optimistic vision of post-apocalyptic dystopia. Here too the story revolves around the divinity of childhood in a seemingly godforsaken world. The premise is that due to some unknown cause – a virus or divine intervention? – mankind has become infertile and faces extinction in several decades. When the youngest person on the planet – celebrity Baby Diego, aged 18 – is killed by a disappointed fan over a refused autograph, people lose their last ounce of hope and give in to despair and nihilism, epitomized by the government-issued suicide drug Quietus. For why take care of the planet, indeed why take care of oneself if there is no future? The future after all is what a child is: the future beyond oneself. Then, miraculously, one black girl becomes pregnant, giving birth to a healthy baby amidst the brutal civil war into which the world is falling apart. Bullets are flying, bombs are exploding, people are dying on the spot, but when the mother and her newborn infant appear all falls silent, the fighting stops abruptly, people stand in awe, soldiers fall on their knees before this epiphany which can only be described as religious – underscored by correspondingly dramatic music. It’s a beautiful scene and arguably the high point of the film, far surpassing its dramatic ending when mother and baby are finally aboard the Tomorrow, the ship that will bring them to the utopian community of the Human Project.

Children of Men

“Everything of value is defenseless”
So where do we stand now, what is the status of our own world when children are used as ‘human shields’ on top of tanks? Are we closer to the ‘optimistic dystopia’ of Children of Men? Or are we in the truly hellish world of The Road where faith in the divinity of childhood has all but disappeared? Apparently we are right in between, since the sanctity of childhood is both recognized – for otherwise children would be worthless as ‘shields’ – and violated, since they are used as shields. As the Dutch poet Lucebert wrote: “Everything of value is defenseless.” The supreme value and defenselessness of the child is apparently also the supreme armor, not impenetrable for bullets, no not quite, but almost impenetrable for considerations that rationalize the killing of another human being. The Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas described the “Face of the Other” as that ultimate instance of vulnerability which calls the spontaneity of our violence into question. But what has become clear now is that this Face is first and foremost the face of a child. It is the ideal mask to hide behind. What has also become clear is that post-apocalyptic dystopia is not just a Hollywood genre, some entertaining vision of horrors predicated on the hypothetical question: “What if…?” No, dystopia is here and now: it is this-topia so to speak. The apocalypse is taking place again and again, each time an innocent child is brutally murdered, abused, raped. How can we believe in a God who lets such things happen? But then again, how can we stop believing in God if this means giving up the divinity of the child? We must have faith, then, simply for the sake of the children. This is the great strength of McCarthy’s line “If he is not the word of God God never spoke”. And therefore I say: “Behold, your King is coming to you, Meek, and riding upon a tank…”

"After Auschwitz" – On regurgitating clichés
Obviously this ‘Christological’ reading of the Syrian ‘Massacre of the Innocents’ is meant to be abysmally cynical rather than as an expression of faith in the redeeming power of (forced) imitatio Christi. Confronted with such horrors, faith crumbles in despair. To repeat: How can one believe in a God who lets such things happen? This, of course, is an age old question, a powerless cliché nowadays, incapable of causing serious religious doubt. Why? Because we have already stopped believing in the goodness of God a long time ago. Auschwitz cured us of that, to use another cliché. This is the way the world is, we sigh, and then we look away and think about something else, lest we would have bad dreams at night. And we can’t have that, can we? No, we must be rested and fresh in the morning for another productive day.

But still… Doesn’t a feeling of sacrilege encroach on us when we hear the invocation of Auschwitz being reduced to a mere cliché? Who dares to say such a thing? True, some people – especially in academia – use it as a cliché when they unthinkingly repeat claims like “After Auschwitz there can be no more poetry” (Adorno) in order to please their professors and further a nice academic career. Such claims have become clichés all right, but they are all the more painful in light of the horrors of Auschwitz. And for Auschwitz we might as well substitute any of the other disasters that constitute the history of the modern world (as Joyce wrote in Ulysses: “History […] is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”). I won’t go into particulars – that is to say: I don’t want to ‘regurgitate more clichés’ – but just think about that child on top of a Syrian tank, that instance of supreme (in)vulnerability. Don’t we encounter here, despite all clichés, something sacred and divine? Something that suggests the image of Christ entering Jerusalem on a donkey and perhaps even requires the rewriting of Holy Scripture in the indicated way?

Christianity and transcendental violence
Levinas spoke of a metaphysical and even religious dimension coming to paradoxical presence in the anti-phenomenon of the Face of the Other, who questions us from beyond the sphere of being and makes us responsible to the Platonic “Good beyond being”. Levinas, of course, was a Jewish thinker, who took his lead from the dialogical nature of the Judaic relation to God, who speaks to the individual through the personality (the “Face”) of the other human being – hence Levinas’ fondness of the Jewish proverb “the other’s material needs are my spiritual needs”. Yet one wonders if the metaphysical dimension he discovered – the supreme ethical authority of supreme vulnerability – isn’t more amenable to a Christian interpretation rather than a Jewish one, given the apparent necessity of sacrifice in order to bring this dimension to manifestation.

Isn’t this the gist of Derrida’s essay “Violence and Metaphysics” where he criticizes Levinas for ignoring the fact that the otherness of the Other – and hence his ethical authority – can only become manifest through the violence perpetrated against her? Thus Derrida spoke of a transcendental and pre-ethical violence as the condition of possibility of the ethical relation to the Other: “For this transcendental origin, as the irreducible violence of the relation to the other, is at the same time nonviolence, since it opens the relation to the other.” (Derrida 2002: 160) Hence the intimate relation – which is more than etymological – between sacrality and sacrifice: only through the violence of the latter is the former truly revealed. But this transcendental violence as the precondition for the sacred authority of the Other – isn’t this first and foremost the crucifixion, as the violence that reveals the divinity of Christ? Derrida himself does not investigate this suggestion, despite the fact that “Violence and Metaphysics” shows a strong Christian undercurrent in the reciprocity envisaged by Derrida between (the transcendental violence of) Greek logocentrism and (the ethical authority of) Jewish heteronomy. For isn’t it clear that Christianity is this reciprocity as a historical ‘synthesis’ of Hellenism and Hebraism? Derrida suggests as much when he writes: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks? We live in the difference between the Jew and the Greek […].” (Idem: 191) For this, of course, is not just an allusion to Joyce’s Ulysses (“Jewgreek is greekjew. Extremes meet.”), but ultimately refers to St. Paul’s statement that “There is neither Jew nor Greek […], for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28).

The divine emptiness of God's grave

The presence of divine absence
Paul’s meaning, of course, is that such parochial distinctions are no longer relevant in light of the universality of the Christian revelation, which addresses humanity as such (see Badiou 1997). Yet we might also interpret his statement more creatively as pointing to the special nature of Christianity as being between Greek philosophy and Jewish religiosity: it is “neither Greek nor Jew” since it is both, as the impossible excluded middle between these contradictories. Christ as the incarnation of God is both ‘Greek’ insofar as He is the veracious presence of the divine logos, yet He is also ‘Jewish’ in that this presence manifests a constitutive absence of the divine, of God as “wholly Other” who as such cannot be made present – and the attempt to do so can only kill him. Hence the Incarnation of God is only truly fulfilled in the Crucifixion: the moment when God dies – that is the moment when He is truly present/absent, when his absolute authority is truly manifested in his absolute (in)vulnerability. As I said, Derrida doesn’t investigate these suggestions, although they are clearly implicit in “Violence and Metaphysics”. One wonders why he remained silent…

Be that as it may, the suggestion with which I want to end is that the Syrian child – put as a ‘human shield’ on top of a tank – manifests this Christological dimension of sacrifice. Doesn’t this child force us to rethink our (post-)modern disbelief vis-à-vis the divine? “God is dead,” we say following Nietzsche, and we say so especially “after Auschwitz”. But doesn’t God die again in that Syrian child? And how can He die again if He was already dead? Shouldn’t we say then that God is not (yet) dead but rather dying, continually dying in all the innocent victims of human violence? To paraphrase Zappa’s famous statement on the status of rock music: God isn’t dead, He just smells funny… And it would indeed almost be funny if it wouldn’t be so horrific.

-Alain Badiou (1997), Saint Paul et la foundation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris.

-Jacques Derrida (2002 [1964]), “Violence and metaphysics: An essay on the thought of Emmanuel Levinas”, in: Derrida, Writing and Difference. London and New York: Routledge, pp.97-192.

Some Theses on Christo-Marxism

The following theses have been written only for the sake of self-clarification. They are part of an ongoing project which I hope will culminate one day in a more systematic and comprehensive presentation. Feel free to comment and criticize. Also see: Introducing Christo-Marxism

Vanishing mediator
The central principle of Christo-Marxism is the vanishing mediator, the medium that brings us together by vanishing between us, thereby establishing our “mediated immediacy” (Hegel).

Capitalism as accumulation of the mediator
What Christo-Marxism objects to in capitalism is that here the vanishing mediator – in its socio-economic form as money – is not allowed to vanish but is accumulated in capital. Thus the redemptive function of the vanishing mediatior (reconciliation) is frustrated: the mediator does not reconcile divergent interests but rather comes to stand between them as their stumbling block.

Liberal communism
The aim of Christo-Marxism is to re-start the redemptive process by enabling the vanishing mediator to vanish again. In the socio-economic register this implies the necessity of liberal-communist action: breaking the power of capital in order to re-establish the flow of money as vanishing mediator. Christo-Marxism, then, is a form of liberal communism: free markets yes, capitalism no. Liberal communism maintains that the level playing field required by the free-market mechanism is incompatible with the inlimited accumulation of power. Hence the free-market mechanism must be protected against itself, ie. against its tendency to result in antagonism between 'winners' and 'losers'. In other words: a market can only function as truly free market (that is, with a level playing field) in a communist state, where the institution of the market is publicly owned as the common medium of our economic exchange. Money is an integral part of that institution.

From Catholicism to capitalism
In contrast to historical materialism, Christo-Marxism emphasizes the equal importance of 'spiritual' and 'material' factors in explaining historical change. Thus with respect to capitalism, Christo-Marxism emphasizes (in contrast to Weber) its continuity with the mind-set of Catholicism. The original perversion of Christianity in Catholicism – namely, the accumulation of Christ as Mediator in the hands of the Church – prefigured the perversion of money in capitalism, its accumulation in the hands of the capitalist. Weber was right in pointing to Protestantism as a spiritual force behind capitalism but only insofar as Protestantism shifted the Catholic attitude to the socio-economic realm. That is: Protestantism dis-intermediated the self-enriching priesthood but only to re-install its perversion (the accumulation of the vanishing mediator) in secular life. Protestantism, then, was not a real break with the mind-set of Catholicism but only its deflection onto another terrain.

Radicalizing the Protestant revolution
Christo-Marxism therefore proposes a radicalization of the Protestant revolution, which – although it dis-intermediated the priesthood – did not proceed to the logical conclusion of Christianity itself: the dis-intermediation of God as such. The unique contribution of Christianity is the conception of God as vanishing mediator – or alternatively: of the vanishing mediator as God. Christianity is the religion where God Himself – incarnated in Christ – dies in order to open up op the Holy Spirit as the reconciled community. God as Christ, in other words, is the vanishing mediator of the Holy Spirit. Christo-Marxism aims to take this “Death of God” to its logical extreme, up to the point of atheism. It sees modern atheism – and in particular Marxist atheism – as the logical culmination of Christianity. This atheism, then, is not opposed to religion: it is religion in the mode of its self-negation, parallel to God's self-withdrawal from His creation. Thus the hyphen in Christo-Marxism can also be read as an arrow (Christo→Marxism) designating the historical culmination of Christianity in Marxism. Yet this historical transition is never complete: Marxism remains bound to Christianity as its vanishing mediator, just as every form of community remains bound to the vanishing mediator that establishes its “mediated immediacy”. The Death of God, then, must be understood as an ongoing process: God is not yet dead but eternally dying, eternally disappearing further away from us. It is precisely by thus withdrawing that He performs His divine function. To paraphrase Frank Zappa: God is not dead, He just smells funny.

The vanishing mediator as Heideggerian Being
Christo-Marxism maintains that God let's everything be precisely through His disappearance. For by thus disappearing, God forms the background of non-being or nothingness against the backdrop of which beings can first appear as beings. In that sense God is simply what Heidegger meant with “Being”. Where Heideger went wrong was in his rejection of onto-theology. To be sure, Heidegger was right in maintaining the ontological distinction, which emphasizes that Being is not a being. What he ignored, however, was the possibility of conceiving Being as an infinitesimal, a vanishing being on its way to nothingness. As an infinitesimal, the vanishing mediator does not violate the ontological distinction, for as such it is no longer a full-fledged being but rather an almost nothing, a nothing-to-come. Christo-Marxism, in other words, stresses the irreducible ontic trace – or the trace of the ontic – in the ontological: Being (qua Nothingness) is only thinkable as the (self-)negation of a primordial being, who is nothing but this self-negation. It is in this way that Christo-Marxism aims to understand the personality or subject-hood of God: His “self” consists only in self-negation. This self-negation is intrinsic to God's nature as vanishing mediator. In short, Christo-Marxism maintains the compatabiliy of the onto-theology of the vanishing mediator (ie. Christianity) with Heideggerian ontology. 

The ego as vanishing mediator of the critical subject
The ethics of Christo-Marxism is an ethics of imitatio Christo, the imitative following of Christ. Its main injunction is: become a vanishing mediator, sacrifice yourself as medium for the reconciliation of others. Not only is this the way to contribute to the Good of community, it's also the only way to become a subject (in more or less Badiou's sense of the term). By becoming a vanishing mediator, one approaches the pure self-hood of God. Critical freedom, qua independence from all immersion in natural positivity and substance, is only attained by withdrawing or subtracting oneself from the world. Yet this withdrawal is never fully completed in life but only in death. As long as the subject lives, then, he (or she or it) is still particularized by the ontic traces (like the ontic trace in the ontological) of his former, empirical ego. The ego is just an object in the world: it is an image, the product of the narcissistic mirroring with others (Lacan's imaginary). The subject is the self-negation of the ego, the empty place left behind as the ego vanishes. Yet, to repeat, this vanishing is never completed (only in death). Thus the subject is always conditioned by the ever vanishing contingency of the ego. This is what individualizes the subject.

Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 2): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

The following text continues the investigation begun in: Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 1): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

Capitalism and the scapegoat mechanism

What, then, can Marxism learn from Girard? First of all, his theory reinforces – from a different perspective – the critique of capitalism as an inherently unjust system. Complementary to the Marxist focus on economic exploitation in capitalism, Girard can be used to expose capitalism's inherent xenophobic violence (as I noted above, Girard's explanation might be taken to complement the traditional Marxist explanation of racism as capital's strategy to undermine solidarity among workers). Indeed, Girard's theory shows us why such violence must reach its peak in capitalism – ie. why Auschwitz occurred and why it must keep on occurring in one form or another as long as capitalism exists. Here the crucial point is the similarity remarked above between capitalist society and the first mimetic 'community' based on what Žižek termed the vanishing mediator between nature and culture: both are characterized by intense envy, rivalry and the mimesis of a-social behavioural patterns in general. This suggests that, as a socio-economic system, capitalism constantly regresses to the anarchic state of the vanishing mediator, constantly undoing the social order, hence also constantly in need of new sacrificial victims in order to restore that social order. What causes this constant regression into anarchy is capitalism's constitutive competitive individualism. In the spheres of both production and consumption, this competitive individualism constitutes the motor behind capitalist productivity. In the sphere of production, capital produces competing individuals by substituting the cash nexus for traditional social relations (eg. feudalism, village life, the family), thereby forcing individuals to compete on the labour market and participate in the exploitation of labour by capital (since capital = private property of the means of production). This productive moment of capitalism is then complemented by the competitive individualism inherent in consumerism, where what Girard calls “acquisitive mimesis” seems to reach its peak.

Branding: Aura in the age of mass production

At first sight, however, capitalism's mass production for mass consumption (“Fordism”) might seem to defuse Girard's claim that acquisitive mimesis must lead to conflict. As we have seen, his claim turns on the assumption that different individuals cannot possess the same object, so that those desiring that object must necessarily come into conflict. Mass production may seem to forestall that conclusion. For if the 'same' commodity is mass produced, thereby loosing its uniqueness, then 'shared' private possession of the 'same' object does seem to be possible after all (as if capitalism were an individualistic communism). Here the apologist of capitalism could – for once – invoke support from Walter Benjamin's claim that the work of art has lost its aura in the age of its mass production. This loss of aura might be taken to indicate the defusement of the conflict that acquisitive mimesis threatens to cause, since – as we have seen – it is this conflict which according to Girard imbues the desired object with a kind of magical value. Thus the loss of aura noted by Benjamin might be taken to exonerate capitalism, clearing it of the charge that it produces mimetic rivalry and hence sacrificial victims.

Of course, this is a capitalist pipe dream. We all know that mass production has not robbed the commodity of its magical aura, as is witnessed by the exchange value that branding adds to commodities (if two pairs of shoes are exactly identical, except for the fact that one pair belongs to Nike, then that pair will be more valuable). Hence, mass production might defuse mimetic conflict, but branding reinstores it, since it creates a hierarchy of values among commodities, thereby creating relative scarcity and hence mimetic conflict. Indeed, Girard allows us to understand why and how branding works. The extra value of branded commodities is no inherent value, it is what Marx would call a fetishistic projection: it is the magical aura attributed to the commodity by the very consumers who compete over it because of its supposedly magical aura. This is obviously also the reason why branding was invented by capital in the first place, that is, to counter the pacifying effect that mass production has on the conflictuality of acquisitive mimesis. It is the same reason why product differentiation was invented, the constant creation of hierarchical differences within the same brand. In this way capitalism creates ever new desires, ever new rounds of acquisitive mimesis and competition, rivalry, envy and conflict. It is thus also in the moment of consumption that capitalism constantly regresses to the state of the vanishing mediator between nature and culture, constantly dissolving the community in competitive individualism, the war of all against all. Thatcher, the queen of neoliberalism, captured this truth of capitalism perfectly when she made her famous claim that there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals.

The eternal return of the vanishing mediator in capitalism
Capitalism thrives on this regression. Competing capitals must accumulate or perish, hence they must constantly increase competition both on the labour market (thereby lowering the price of labour) and in the sphere of commodity consumption. Hence the fact that the scapegoating mechanism is more important for capitalism than for any other social order. As a form of society, capitalism is inherently contradictory: it must dissolve the social order in order to further competition, but at the same time it must save the social order if it is not to destroy itself by degenerating into complete anarchy, the Hobbesian war of all against all. Thus, as Žižek (2006: 266) says, the condition of the possibility of capitalism is the very condition of its impossibility (which, so we might add, is the precisely condition of the vanishing mediator between nature and culture). Capitalism's amazing potential for exponential growth lies exactly  in this “condition of (im)possibility”, that is, in its capacity to unleash the dynamic of competition by dissolving its own social order. The scapegoating mechanism, then, is constantly required to save capitalism from itself, to restore the social order that it constantly destroys.

In that sense we can say that capitalism stages an eternal return of the vanishing mediator, constantly regressing to the anarchic stage between nature and culture, constantly requiring sacrificial victims to let the vanishing mediator vanish and reinstall culture. This eternal return of the vanishing mediator is essentially related to that other 'eternal return' in capitalism, the return on investment, the circular movement of capital in it's self-accumulation. For it is capital's drive toward accumulation which causes the constant dissolution of society and hence the constant need for sacrificial victims. The more intense capital's accumulation becomes, then, the more society is in need of scapegoats. Hence the fact that the scapegoat mechanism reaches its peak in capitalism. So if Christianity – as Girard says – is fundamentally the rejection of the scapegoating mechanism, then (post)modern Christianity should first and foremost be the rejection of capitalism. Christians, that is, should make common cause with Marxism.

The messianism of Marxism

But does the inverse hold as well? Should Marxists make common cause with Christianity? In one sense, of course, this is a moot question, since from its inception Marxism has had deep affinities with Judeo-Christian messianism. Some interpreters point to Marx's Jewish ancestry as the unacknowledged source of this messianism (his mother's family produced many rabbi's), but it seems more likely that Christian messianism reached Marx through Hegel, who was a profoundly Christian thinker. Be that as it may, the parallels between Marxism and messianism have been noted many times before, both by the religious friends of Marxism and by its enemies, who see in this the proof that Marxism is an irrational and hence dangerous faith rather than the atheistic science which it has claimed to be. For example, as Robert Tucker (one of the religious friends) writes in his widely read book Philosophy and myth in Karl Marx:

“Like the Christian religious system [...], Marxism views all existence under the aspect of history; it fundamentally tells a story that has a beginning, middle, and end... For Marx, the drama of mankind's historical existence is framed by a temporalized pre-history at one end (primitive communism) and a temporalized post-history at the other (future communism). Communism lost and communism regained – such is the plot of world history as he expounds it. Between the one and the other intervenes a series of world-periods stamped with a fundamental antagonism... And just as Augustine portrays the present as the last of the historical world-periods before the Judgment, so Marx finds that the present bourgeois epoch is the 'closing chapter of the pre-historic stage of human society', the time of the deepest suffering, and the prelude to the final revolution... Thirdly, there is far more than a formal analogy here. For deeply embedded in Marxism is a theme that corresponds to the master-theme of salvation of the soul in the Christian theology of history. Marx, of course, does not use the word 'salvation'. Yet, he has the concept of a total regeneration of man.” (Tucker 2001 [1961]: 22-25)

The proletariat as secular Christ

What is especially significant in this context is the analogy drawn between the suffering of the proletariat and the soteriological suffering of the sacrificial victim in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Wackenheim (1963), for example, points specifically to Isaiah's suffering servant as the model for the proletariat as conceived by Marx – and given the fact that Marx attended Bruno Bauer's lectures on Isaiah in 1839, this particular influence on Marx's conception of the proletariat seems quite plausible (Manuel 1997: 8). Other theorists, however, point rather to Christ as Marx's main model for the proletariat. Thus, for example, Michel Henry:

“As has been rightly said: the proletariat is Christ. The proletariat is the one [...] who must go to the very limit of suffering and of evil, to the sacrifice of his being, giving his sweat and blood and ultimately his very life, in order to reach – through this complete self-annihilation, through this self-negation which is a negation of life – the true life which leaves all finiteness and all particularity behind, which is complete life and salvation itself.” (Henry 1983: 74)

What seems to be specifically Christian about this conception of the proletariat is the theme of kenosis, that is, of God's emptying himself in Christ, shedding his divine nature in becoming human and then even shedding his humanity by dying on the Cross. As Henry points out – in line with the above remark about Hegel's influence on Marx – the Christian theme of kenosis reached Marx through Hegel, who coined his concept of alienating externalization on Luther's translation of kenosis as Entäusserung (externalization). Hence, insofar as the soteriological function of the proletariat turns on the complete alienation of its humanity, Marx's conception of the proletariat seems indeed to be Christian rather than Judaic. This focus on the proletariat's loss of humanity, and the redemption brought about by that loss, is especially clear in the famous Introduction to Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1844), which was the very first text in which Marx conceived of the proletariat as the revolutionary class that will overthrow capitalism. I quote the relevant passage in extenso, since it ties together a number of themes that relate directly to the Girardian problematic of the scapegoating mechanism and the way it functions in capitalism:

Soviet kitsch by N. Khukov

For Marx the proletariat is “a class with radical chains, a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society, an estate which is the dissolution of all estates, a sphere which has a universal character by its universal suffering and claims no particular right because no particular injustice, but the injustice as such is perpetuated against it; which can invoke no historical, but only the human, title […]; a sphere, finally, which cannot emancipate itself without emancipating itself from all other spheres of society and thereby emancipating all other spheres of society, which, in a word, is the complete loss of man and hence can win itself only through the complete re-winning of man.” (Marx 1844)

Already by itself this is an extraordinary passage, but when read in the light of Girard it becomes especially instructive. What is so interesting about it is that here the Girardian theme of the scapegoat appears in tandem with the theme of the proletariat, both as exploited labour power and as the secular Christ whose suffering performs a soteriological function. The theme of the scapegoat is easily recognizable in the first sentence, when Marx conceives of the proletariat as “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society”. In other words, the proletariat is the 'internal outsider' of capitalism, included through its exclusion, by law part of the citizenry yet also criminalized as a “social problem” due to its poverty, unruliness, squalid living conditions, alcoholism etc. Here we have to remind ourselves of Girard's claim that the scapegoating mechanism requires internal outsiders, whose deviating appearance marks them as potential sacrificial victims. Indeed, the sacrificial victim is the internal outsider par excellence, since his exclusion  constitutes society as such.

Surplus value and sacrifice: The proletariat's double function

What this suggests, then, is that the proletariat performs a double function in capitalism. On the one hand, there is the well known function exposed by Marxism, the economic function of the proletariat as exploited labour power, the source of surplus value. On the other hand, however, there is the function exposed by Girard, that of the sacrificial victim whose death reconciles the social order to itself. Contrary to Marxism, then, we should not see the scapegoating mechanism as limited to instances of racism or sexism as these undermine workers' solidarity. Rather we should see the proletariat in its entirety as the sacrificial victim whose exclusion reconciles the social order of capitalism. In other words: the proletariat is the (eternally returning) vanishing mediator of capitalist society (corresponding to the eternal return of capital in its self-accumulation). This poses the interesting question what the precise relation is between these two functions of the proletariat, being both sacrificial victim and the source of surplus value. Is the relation between these two functions external, such that the relative outsider's position of the proletariat as society's scapegoat also happens to render it vulnerable to exploitation, being forced to sell its labour power and thus become the source of the surplus value on which capital feeds? Or is this rather an internal relation, such that the social effect of the sacrificial victim (the mythical institution of community) enters into the very essence of what surplus value is? I will not deal with this issue now, however, since it requires an investigation of its own (I hope to investigate Marx's labour theory of value from the perspective of Girard's theory in one of the future posts on this blog).

The “injustice as such” in the light of Girard
Thus Marx's characterization of the proletariat as “a class of civil society which is not a class of civil society” fits Girard's theory of the scapegoat perfectly. But how does the rest of the above passage from the Introduction hold up in the light of Girard? Here I would like to argue that a Girardian interpretation of the proletariat as conceived by Marx allows us to develop a new and informative interpretation of Marx's claim about the proletariat's “universal suffering” and the fact that “it claims no particular right because no particular injustice, but the injustice as such is perpetuated against it”.

For Marx, this “injustice as such” is not just the economic exploitation of the proletariat (which in itself is a mere “particular injustice”, however grave), but its dehumanization, its kenosis in alienation, such that the “species being” of its humanity appears as an alien force in capital as it commands all the powers of collective human labour. As I already noted, however, insofar as Marxism relies on man's natural sociality – the human “species being” – it commits the inverse mistake that liberalism makes when it relies on the fiction of man's natural individualism. The crucial turn in human evolution was precisely the loss of such innate sociality, which was replaced by the artificial sociality of culture. Thus the special nature of the human “species being” consists in the fact that it no longer has a species being. What makes us human is precisely our alienation from humanity. The vanishing mediator between (human) nature and culture is this constitutive alienation. Thus the “injustice as such” can no longer be interpreted in terms of proletariat's alienation from its own humanity. The same holds for the universality that Marx sees in the proletariat's suffering: this universality can no longer be understood as pertaining to some general essence of humankind.

Marxist imitatio Christi

This does not mean, however, that Marxian notions like “injustice as such” and “universal suffering” make no sense anymore. Girard allows us to interpret such notions in a new and indeed more convincing way. The “injustice as such” can now be taken to mean the fate of the sacrificial victim, whose exclusion constitutes the universality of society as such (what Girard calls “unanimity-minus-one”). This fate is the “injustice as such” because – as constitutive of the social order – the injustice perpetrated against the sacrificial victim cannot be addressed within the social order: it remains strictly unthinkable within society's mythology (and the legal system is part of that mythology). As the victim of injustice, the sacrificial victim has no 'official' name: he only appears in a mythically distorted way, as the ambiguously divine root of evil/goodness, but not as the innocent victim he really is (compare Lacan on the real as the excluded of the imaginary order). Hence the fact that the fate of the proletariat – its exclusion as internal outsider – must remain invisible from the vantage point of capitalist society. Marxism is necessary to make the proletariat visible, to give it a name and a voice.

Marxism, then, is a form of imitatio Christi, the mimetic following of Christ. Just as Christ substituted himself for all the victims of the scapegoating mechanism, so the Marxist substitutes himself for the proletariat, turning its messianic suffering – the suffering of Isaiah's Servant of the Lord – into a self-conscious role, a messianic mission. The sacrifice of the proletariat is thus transformed into a voluntary self-sacrifice in name of the Revolution, to save the proletariat from the cross of capital. Marxism must constantly renew this self-sacrifice. Without it, communism degenerates into just another social order, based on sacrificial victims. The anti-Semitism and show trials in Stalinist communism have taught as that much.

References

-Henry, Michel (1983 [1976]), Marx: A philosophy of human reality. Bloomington: Indiana University.

-Manuel, Frank E. (1997), A requiem for Karl Marx. Cambridge, Mass & London: Harvard University Press.

-Marx, Karl (1844), “A Critique to the Contribution of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right – Introduction”, this text can be found online: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm

-Tucker, Robert C. (2001 [1961]), Philosophy and myth in Karl Marx. New Brunswick & London: Transaction Publishers.

-Wackenheim (1963), La Faillite de la religion d'après Karl Marx. Paris.m

Žižek, Slavoj (2006), The parallax view. Cambridge, Mass & London: MIT Press.