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.

Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 1): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

Recently I have been reading and thinking about René Girard and the philosophical import of Christianity for the issues of community, communication and social mediation. Girard advocates a by now quite famous anthropological interpretation of Christianity as the religion in which the violent foundations of culture (the scapegoating mechanism) as such are exposed and which – through the death of Christ – offers a way out of this violence. It struck me that his insights allow us to take a fresh and informative look at the ills of capitalism, the possibility of communism and the relevance of Christianity in this matter. In the following post I would like to share some of these thoughts, with a view to the renewal of Marxism through the spirit of Christianity. In the process I will also comment on the parallels between Girard's views and the psychoanalysis of Freud and Lacan, partly in order to show the fruitfulness of Girard's approach for post-structuralism, partly to prepare for the encounter of Girard's views with some Lacanian-Marxist ideas from Žižek. Due to its length, I have decided to split this text in half; the next half will be posted in about a week on this blog. The first part introduces Girard's theory and then applies it to the issues of capitalism and communism. The second part deals specifically with Marxism and what it can learn from Girard.

René Girard

The mimetic nature of desire

For Girard, the violence inherent in every form of human collectivity (with the exception of the ideal Christian community, which may however never have actually existed) stems from the constitutive importance of mimesis (mimicry, imitation) for all human learning and hence culture. Girard came to this anthropology of mimesis in a rather odd way, namely through his initial study of literature (1961), the findings of which he then generalized to the field of human culture as such. Especially important for Girard in this regard was Shakespeare. For Girard, the Shakespearean drama depicts a universe ruled by the “fire of envy”, where individuals continually infect each other – through some mimetic plague – with their violent desire for power and lust. What Girard learned from Shakespeare is that human desire is always based on imitating a model, someone who we wish to be. We want what the other wants. Thus Girard speaks of “acquisitive mimesis” as the source of desire, which is therefore always triangular. Our desire for an object (1) is always aroused by an other (2) who directs our attention to that particular object (3). It is the other's desire that makes the object desirable. As shall be clear to readers familiar with Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Girard's theory of the mimetic nature of desire is quite close to these theories, although he does not refer them (compare Hegel on the struggle for recognition and especially Lacan on the narcissistic constitution of the ego through the imaginary mirroring of others – also like Lacan, Girard stresses that human desire is essentially based on a lack inside the subject).

Envy, rivalry, conflict, disillusion

Girard's crucial point is that the mimetic, triangular nature of desire necessarily leads to rivalry and conflict with the model and others who follow the same model. “Rivalry does not arise because of the fortuitous convergence of two desires on one single object; rather, the subject desires the object because the rival desires it.” (Girard 1995: 145) Hence the model, whose desire for an object makes the latter desirable for us, thereby becomes an obstacle, standing between us and the object, blocking the way towards our full satisfaction, which therefore takes on a mythical aura. “If only we had what the other has, then we would be complete...” Envy and rivalry thus invest the object with a value beyond its physical characteristics. In this way the object achieves a certain 'metaphysical' status (compare Marx on the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of the commodity). When the object is finally obtained, disillusion is of course inevitable, since the object turns out to be not magical at all, but 'just another object', incapable of filling the lack that motivates human desire. Hence we turn to other objects, that is to say, to other models showing us what to desire. And so the circus of human desire continues, through ever new rounds of mimesis, envy, rivalry, conflict, exalted expectation and disillusion. Girard stresses the volatile nature of this situation and how easy it can degenerate further into a spiral of reciprocal violence. For, or so the subject thinks, if I can get rid of the other, I shall be able to acquire the magical object. But, of course, the other thinks the same about me. In this way Girard's theory of the mimetic nature of desire backs up the Hobbesian hypothesis of the “war of all against all” as mankind's natural state.

The beginning of civilization according to Kubrick

The rise of the scapegoating mechanism

Thus the mimetic basis of human behaviour implies not just the imitation of desire and culture but also of violence, which thereby becomes intensified to the point of threatening the very culture that mimesis aims to install. Once our primate ancestors acquired the trick of mimesis that set them on the road to culture, the challenge became controlling the violence that accompanies acquisitive mimesis. This challenge is especially pressing because mankind seems to lack – as Girard indicates, again in line with psychoanalysis – the protection offered by instinctive “braking mechanisms against violence” which are found among animals, ensuring that “animals of the same species never fight to the death” (Girard 1995: 221 – note: the latter is not entirely true, since some apes do kill within their own species, but Girard’s general point seems convincing). So what is the solution offered by human culture to the problem of reciprocal violence? Girard's answer is that the problem produced its own solution in the form of the victims of the violence, whose deaths offered moments of order and peace in what was otherwise a social chaos of rivalry and conflict. As Depoortere describes this hypothetical situation which must, according to Girard, have happened countless of times among our primitive ancestors:

“Time after time, the same happens. There is total disorder, a lot of aggression and violence; and suddenly, suddenly someone is killed. Violence stops, and everybody comes to take a look at the deceased. They form a circle. Suddenly, disorder disappears and an ordered structure comes into being: a circle around the deceased. Moreover, disorder and violence do not return immediately. The circle dissolves, and the apes take up again their daily routine. Rest has come back in the group.” (Depoortere 2008: 41)

Thus the victim forms – quite literally – the centre of social order, the pacified “circle around the deceased”. After numerous repetitions of similar crises of spiralling mimetic violence and its resolution through the death of a victim, our hominid ancestors began to recognize the pattern: killing an individual puts a stop to crises and creates social order. In this way the scapegoating mechanism was born – the mechanism which according to Girard forms the basis of every human collectivity. Gradually that mechanism became ritualized in the first forms of human culture. Our ancestors learned to anticipate the crises, no longer waiting passively for mimetic violence to engulf the fragile social order: instead, they started to simulate such crises and then kill a victim to prevent the crisis from actually occurring. Thus the ritualized feast came into being, in which the crisis is enacted and concluded through ritual sacrifice. Communal unity is therefore always – in Girard's poignant phrase – “unanimity-minus-one”.

Myth and the ambiguity of the victim
Girard describes myth informatively as the perspective of the community insofar as it is depends on the scapegoat mechanism (compare Lacan on the imaginary order as founded on the exclusion of the real). Girard: “Myths incorporate the point of view of the community that has been reconciled to itself by the collective murder and is unanimously convinced that this event was a legitimate and sacred action...” (Girard 1987: 148) Hence in myth the sacrificial victim occupies the central position, being both its source and the primal object of its narratives and rituals. As Girard stresses, the scapegoating mechanism turns the victim into an essentially ambiguous figure, who appears mythically as both good and evil – an ambiguity increased by the fact that the community will generally select as victims those who are already on the fringes of the community: the potential victims might look different, have a physical impairment, perhaps they are loners without a family, perhaps they speak differently or come from another ethnic origin. The point is that the very 'strangeness' of an individual makes him stand out from the crowd, thereby automatically drawing attention to himself, being an easy target for the scapegoating mechanism. Moreover, by targeting a relative stranger, the community circumvents the problems that might arise when someone is targeted who is an obvious member of the community, for in that case a new round of reciprocal violence might arise (his family might protest against his murder, for example). In order for the scapegoating mechanism to function properly, then, the community must harbour – indeed: produce – 'internal outsiders' whose difference marks them as potential sacrificial victims. In this way Girard explains the constitutive importance of xenophobia for every community (the exception, again, is the ideal Christian community).

Aztec sacrifice

Thus in the communal mythology the deviating appearance of the victim fuses with his ambiguous character as the sacrificial foundation of the community. On the one hand, since with his death the violence stops, the victim is held to be responsible for that violence, becoming the mythical cause of the mimetic crisis, the principle of evil that must be eradicated if social order is to return. On the other hand, the victim is also the one who through his death delivers the community from violence, appearing as its rescuer, the source of goodness. Thus the phenomenon of taboo is instituted, pertaining to some deviating part of the community which is excluded, forbidden to its members – an exclusion that constitutes the community as such, delineating its limits. As Jan Populier describes this constitutive exclusion of the sacrificial victim: “Being the embodiment of all evil, violence and disorder, his return to society must be prevented at all costs... As the embodiment of all goodness, peace and order, however, he must also remain present in society.” (Populier 1994: 23 – my translation, PS) The sacrificial victim, then, is both inside and outside the community, present through his absence, forming the living centre of the community through his death. In that sense the community is de-centred, having its inner essence outside of itself. Thus the scapegoat becomes in the communal mythology a supernatural being who decides on peace and violence, order and disorder. As the source of violence, he should be feared; as the source of peace, he should be worshipped. In this way, according to Girard, the mythical notion of the divine was born. All gods and goddesses derive from this mythologization of the sacrificial victims produced by the scapegoating mechanism. (And here the Freudian analogy is obviously the killing of the father by the primal horde, by which the Law became installed, backed by a mythologization of the killed father as the ancestral god.)

The desacralization of violence in Judaism

How does Christianity enter this picture, according to Girard? As a religion, Christianity is on the one hand heir to the mythical imagination that accompanies the scapegoating mechanism. At the same time, however, Christianity is the religion in which this mythology and the scapegoating mechanism as such are exposed and overcome (at least idealiter). Christ's message is basically that we must relinquish violence as the basis of community and instead turn to love, letting himself be crucified in order to expose the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism, offering himself as the final victim, exonerating all future victims. For Girard, Christianity is in this regard the final step in the long history of demythologization and desacralization of violence that characterizes Judaism as such (compare Levinas' interpretation of Judaism as a rejection of the mythical totalization of the other). According to Girard, the Hebrew Bible tells the story of the gradual exit from mythical religion. The rejection of sacred violence as the basis of myth is already apparent in Genesis with the story of Cain and Abel. At first sight, this story is as mythological as, for instance, the story of Remus and Romulus: one brother kills the other whereby a civilization is founded. But whereas in the Roman myth the murder of Remus is considered justified and Romulus becomes the founding father of Rome, in the book of Genesis Cain's act is unambiguously condemned as an unjustified and vulgar murder and it is rather the innocent victim Abel who indirectly becomes the founding father of a just community (Girard 1987: 146-7). Girard sees this Judaic critique of the mythology of the scapegoating mechanism culminating Isaiah's Song of the Servant of the Lord, which already points towards the Crucifixion. Here are three revealing verses from Isaiah (53:3-5):

“He was despised and rejected by others;

a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;

and as one from whom others hide their faces

he was despised, and we held him of no account

Surely he has born our infirmities

and carried our diseases;

yet we accounted him stricken,

struck down by God, and afflicted.

But he was wounded for our transgressions,

crushed for our iniquities;

upon him was the punishment that made us whole,

and by his bruises we are healed.”

This fragment begins by describing the Servant of the Lord as the ideal sacrificial victim, selected on the basis of his ugliness and deviating physical appearance (“acquainted with infirmity”). The fragment clearly describes the social reconciliation effected by the scapegoating mechanism (“the punishment that made us whole”). But rather than share in the mythological reversal of the gruesome truth, portraying the victim as guilty and the murderous community as justified, Isaiah stresses the victim's innocence and the community's injustice towards him (“he was wounded for our transgressions”, “like a lamb that is led to the slaughter”, “by  a perversion of justice he was taken away”, “although he had done no violence” – 53: 5-9). As Girard notes, however, although Isaiah goes a long way in exposing the scapegoating mechanism, the desacralization of violence is not fully completed. In Isaiah the victim's sacrifice still remains divinely ordained (“the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all”, “it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain” – 53: 6, 10). Thus the injustice of the community becomes the injustice of God himself, who remains the God of irrational wrath and continues to require the atoning sacrifice of innocent victims. In the Hebrew Bible, Girard concludes, God remains contaminated by sacred violence (Girard 1987: 154-7 – and here one would like to say: indeed, just look at how Israel treats the Palestinians).

Christ’s exposition of the scapegoating mechanism
The desacralization of violence – and one could even say: desacralization as such – is only completed in the New Testament, according to Girard. He refers in particular to Christ’s command to love one’s enemy, the identification of God with love and the denial of God's responsibility for illness and catastrophes, which are no longer taken to be manifestations of divine wrath (Girard 1987: 182-3). Of course, the sacrifice of Christ is still divinely ordained and in that sense there is a residue of sacred violence in Christianity. But the crucial point is that Christ = God, who therefore ordained his own death, exiting from this world in order to free it from sacred violence. In contrast to what many believers and non-believers think, the Gospels do not interpret Jesus' death in terms of God's requirement of bloody sacrifice as atonement for human sinfulness (see Depoortere 2008: 47). This interpretation, which remains within the mythical logic of sacrifice, is a later invention, when Christ's original message was forgotten and Christianity relapsed into mythology, partly because of the Church's collaboration with State power under Constantine (thus turning into Christendom, with its imperial aspirations). The point of Christ's death was not to atone for human sin but to reveal the injustice of the scapegoating mechanism, thereby making possible a radically different, non-violent community. But already in Christ's lifetime, this message was not grasped. According to Girard, his listeners were so blinded by their mimetic attachment to violence that they simply could not understand him. As a result, the direct and 'easy' way out of violence – ie. following the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount – failed. Therefore, as Girard writes, it became “necessary to turn to the indirect way, the one that has to bypass the consent of all mankind and instead pass through the Crucifixion” (Girard 1987: 202). The Crucifixion became necessary as a form of teaching by illustration. 

Detail from The Lamb of God by the Van Eyck brothers

The Crucifixion was the inevitable outcome of the ruling logic of mimetic violence and its sacrificial dissolution. Once Christ's message – the rejection of the scapegoating mechanism in favour of love – had been turned down, he was bound to become the victim of that logic (Girard 1987: 208). In a world dominated by violence one can only survive by becoming an accessory to violence. As the Gospel stresses, however, Christ was without violence (echoing Isaiah on the innocence of the sacrificial victim, “like a lamb led to the slaughter”), hence he could only fall prey to it. Thus he exposed the functioning of the scapegoating mechanism. Because he was emphatically without violence, it is clear that he could not be guilty and that his death was an injustice. Thus the Crucifixion revealed “what has been hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matthew 13:35), that is to say, since the foundation of human civilization through the original sacrifice of an innocent victim.

Girard as a theorist of capitalism?

So how does all of this relate to the issues of capitalism and communism? As a way into this matter, note that Girard's theory of the mimetic source of desire and reciprocal violence seems vulnerable to an objection when we use it to understand capitalism. At first sight, of course, Girard's theory seems to fit capitalism perfectly. His description of the triangular nature of desire (model, desire, object), of “acquisitive mimesis” and the envious rivalry it leads to, investing the desired object with a magical aura – don't we recognize here capitalism's “possessive individualism” (MacIntyre) and the consumerist quest to share in the magical lifestyle of celebrities, whose 'sidereal' aura reflects on the products we buy, especially if our neighbours already bought them? The suspicion, however, is that Girard's theory of desire fits capitalism rather too well. The suspicion, in other words, is that Girard did not construct a universal and timeless anthropology that explains human culture as such and hence also capitalism, but that rather the reverse is the case: his theory seems to have been conceived first on the basis of capitalism and then generalized to the rest of human history and culture. It seems no coincidence that Girard first developed his theory of desire in his work on Shakespeare, for according to many sociologists of literature the Shakespearian drama (like the Hobbesian “war of all against all”) – focusing on the contagious effects of desire and rivalry and the resulting excesses of violence – reflects the competitive nature of bourgeois society and capitalist economy as they began to emerge in the early modern times in which Shakespeare lived.

Liberalism's ideal man: Robinson Cusoe

Consider, for example, Girard's claim that acquisitive mimesis necessarily leads to conflict because individuals cannot possess the same object. This might seem to be the most obvious thing, but when we reflect on it the question arises: But why can't they share the desired object? Why must possession necessarily be individual, that is, private property, as Girard seems to presuppose? Why rule out the possibility of joint possession, that is, communism? Thus we may raise the same objection to Girard that Marx raised against the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo (and with them against the entire ideology of liberalism), namely that they mistook the individualism of modern bourgeois society for a universal and timeless human trait, ignoring the fact that such individualism was an effect of capital (the cash nexus intervening in traditional social relations) rather than vice versa. Thereby they furnished an ideological justification for capitalism as a natural system, corresponding to man's innate desire for individual liberty – what Marx in the Grundrisse called the “phantasielosen Einbildungen der 18.-Jahrhundert-Robinsonaden”. 

Communism instead of Christianity?
Of course, the case of Girard's seemingly individualistic theory of desire is different, since if anything he cannot be accused of justifying capitalist desire – on the contrary: his entire theory is an indictment of such desire (and in that sense one can say that Girard has a tendency toward communism). Nevertheless, the point remains that his critique of mimetic desire seems predicated on individualist assumptions, reflecting not a timeless human nature but rather a social structure peculiar to a very specific historical epoch. This threatens to bring down the entire edifice of Girard's innovative interpretation of Christianity. Although this objection does not affect the efficacy of Girard's critique of mimetic desire, it does seem to limit the scope of that critique to capitalist society, to the competitive and consumerist individualism which Girard seems to capture so well. Thus his work can be read as giving one particular explanation why capitalism requires xenophobia, namely as the scapegoating mechanism necessary to restore the social order as it is threatened by the reciprocal envy and violence of the acquisitive mimesis generated by capitalist consumerism (and this explanation might be taken to complement the traditional Marxist explanation of racism as capital's strategy to undermine solidarity among workers). But precisely insofar as Girard's theory remains limited to capitalist individualism, his appeal to Christianity as the only way out of mimetic violence seems no longer necessary. The mimetic nature of desire still stands, but envy and rivalry seem no longer inevitable when we replace individualism with a communitarian vision of man as an essentially social being – a “species being” (Gattungswesen) as Marx says following Feuerbach – whose “I” is from the outset secondary to the “We” of communal life. For insofar as people can share, can have things in common, there is no reason why mimetic desire must lead to conflict. Instead of the religious detour through Christianity, then, the secular turn to communism seems to suffice to overcome the scapegoating mechanism and bring about a just and non-violent society.

The problem of community

Yet Girard cannot be get rid off that easily. Although there is some truth to the claim that Girard modelled his theory of desire on capitalist individualism (especially in light of the importance of Shakespeare for the formation of his theory), there is nevertheless a sense in which Girard does succeed to transcend those historical limitations and to formulate ideas with a universal, anthropological reach. After all, the entire point of his theory is to explain the possibility of community as such. In criticizing Girard, then, we may not simply presuppose the possibility of community as an unproblematic given, as the above objection to Girard does. Such a critique is circular: the unproblematic community, to which we appeal in order to obviate Girard's apparent individualism, is precisely what he contests. In particular we may not presuppose some natural, innate sociality in man, as an evolutionary extension of the instinctive herd mentality of our primate ancestors (and insofar as Marxism presupposes such natural sociality – what Marx calls man's “species being” – it commits the inverse mistake that liberalism makes when it relies on the fiction of man's natural individualism). Here we must stress, with psychoanalysis, that human beings have lost such instincts, so that human community is primarily cultural (based on laws, prohibitions, signification etc.) rather than natural. It is precisely this transition from nature to culture – from the primitive herd to human community based on what Lacan calls “the Law” – that Girard wants to explain. Just as Freud explained this transition in terms of the primordial killing of the father by the primitive horde, so Girard explains it in terms of mimesis and sacrificial killing. Girard's particular strength here is that his theory allows us to explain why man is deficient in his natural instincts, namely, because man is primarily a learning animal, whose instincts have been replaced with the capacity for mimesis as the basis of human culture (and this fundamental importance of imitation for human development has been corroborated by much recent research in disciplines like neuroscience, evolutionary anthropology, primatology and memetics – for a good overview, see Depoortere 2011).

The sacrificial victim as vanishing mediator

To the extent then that mimesis took over from instinct, to that same extent man's natural sociality (the herd mentality) was lost and mimesis had to make up for that loss by creating the unnatural sociality called culture. Thus mimesis works on the basis of what Žižek has termed the vanishing mediator between nature and culture:

Slavoj  Žižek   

“How do we pass from “natural” to “symbolic” environs? This passage is not direct, one cannot account for it within a continuous evolutionary narrative: something has to intervene between the two, a kind of “vanishing mediator,” which is neither Nature nor Culture – this In-between is not the spark of logos magically conferred on homo sapiens, enabling him to form his supplementary virtual symbolic environs, but precisely something which, although it is also no longer nature, is not yet logos, and has to be “repressed” by logos […]. It is interesting to note how philosophical narratives of the “birth of man” are always compelled to presuppose a moment in human (pre)history when (what will become) man, is no longer a mere animal and simultaneously not yet a “being of language,” bound by symbolic Law; a moment of thoroughly “perverted,” “denaturalized”, “derailed” nature which is not yet culture.” (Žižek 1997)

Hence, what our proto-human ancestors imitated were evolutionary useful behavioural patterns within a broader context of “perverted nature”, characterized by the loss of social instincts. It seems clear that in such post-natural and pre-cultural anarchy mimesis must have involved the copying of violent and generally a-social behaviours. Thus we can understand Girard's claim that the mimetic nature of desire necessarily leads to a spiralling reciprocal violence, insofar as that desire is primarily anarchic, the desire of the unruly vanishing mediator between nature and culture. The first community made possible by mimesis, then, is the unstable 'community' of envy, rivalry, competition and violence (and here, again, we recognize capitalist society, which raises the interesting question how capitalism relates to the vanishing mediator between nature and culture). It is here, as Girard points out, that the scapegoating mechanism must intervene, deflecting the reciprocal violence on 'internal outsiders', thus stabilizing the community. In a sense, then, the sacrificial victim allows the vanishing mediator to realize its destiny – that is to say: to truly vanish and give way to human community governed by the Law. The violence of the vanishing mediator is both projected and exerted on the sacrificial victim, who thereby – through an expiating substitution – becomes the vanishing mediator of human community. Or in Christian terms: the vanishing mediator is incarnated by the sacrificial victim produced by the scapegoating mechanism.

The next part of this essay investigates the lessons that can be drawn from Girard for Marxism:Why Marxism and Christianity need each other (Part 2): René Girard and the implications for capitalism and communism

References

-Depoortere, Frederiek (2008), Christ in postmodern philosophy: Gianni Vattimo, René Girard and Slavoj Žižek. London: T&T Clark.

-Girard, René (1961), Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque. Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset.

-(1995 [1972]), Violence and the sacred. London: The Athlone Press.

-(1987 [1978]), Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. London: The Athlone Press.

-Populier, Jan (1994), God heeft echt bestaan: Met René Girard naar een nieuw mens- en wereldbeeld. Tielt: Lannoo.

-Žižek, Slavoj (1997), “Cogito, Madness and Religion: Derrida, Foucault and then Lacan”. To my knowledge the English version of this essay has only been published online by www.lacan.com. The complete url is: http://www.lacan.com/zizforest.html A Dutch translation of this text can be found in: Žižek, Slavoj (1997), Het subject en zijn onbehagen: vijf essays over psychoanalyse en het cartesiaanse cogito. Amsterdam: Boom.

Islamic fundamentalism and the dialectic of modernity

The following text is part of broader project I am working on, having to do with the postmodern necessity to redefine our notion of freedom. The aim is to get away from the autonomy of the modern subject and move towards a third position between autonomy and heteronomy, where subject and other are engaged in a mutually enforcing reciprocity. The critical importance of such a third position can be glanced from a chiasma which according to me summarizes the current state of critical theory: autonomy without respect for the other degenerates into totalitarian egocentrism, but respect for the other without a measure of autonomy degenerates into dogmatic heteronomy where the other is deified as “The Other” (which happens, for example, in Levinasian ethics).

1. The so-called “Clash of Civilizations” as the self-destruction of modernity

The analysis of Islamic fundamentalism offered below aims to show the urgency and actuality of this critical program of overcoming modern autonomy in the direction of a more reciprocal notion of freedom, where self and other are in normative equilibrium. In contrast to neoconservatism, I stress the essential modernity of Islamic fundamentalism.Thus in the text below I show how Islamic fundamentalism shares the violent dialectic with which the modern subject has realized his autonomy in the world through capitalist imperialism: the dialectic of self-determination through negation of the other. As a consequence, I see the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” between modernity and Islamic fundamentalism not as a clash between different cultures which are essentially alien to each other. Rather I see that clash as an internal contradiction of modernity itself, which has – through globalisation – conquered the world and now begins to bite its own tail. Thus the violent dialectic of modernity turns back on itself, producing its own self-negation in the form of Islamic fundamentalism. The religious heteronomy of the fundamentalist is therefore not alien to modern autonomy at all, rather it is its self-sublation. In this context I will stress the Protestant origins of fundamentalism and show how it was exported from the West to Islamic cultures.

2. The remaining threat of Islamic fundamentalism

This concern with the “Clash of Civilizations” may seem outdated. With the current economic crisis, the question is whether Islamic fundamentalism is still the fundamental problem which it used to be less than a decade ago. However, the post-modern difficulty of freedom – ie. the critical necessity to find a third between autonomy and heteronomy – is still not resolved. The violent dialectic inherent in modernity and by extension in Islamic fundamentalism has yet to be fully overcome. Although the threat of Islamic fundamentalism seems to have lost much of its punch due to the democratic movement of the recent Arab Awakening (which goes to show that Islam is not in and of itself anti-democratic), there are still many fundamentalist factions active in Islamist circles, with extremist attacks still taking place in Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Indonesia and other muslim countries. After 9/11 and the subsequent security crackdown, Islamist violence has now more or less ceased in western countries. Yet, the threat is still real. Much probably depends on how the recent democratization movement in the Middle East will work out. As nearly happened in Algeria in the 1990s, it could very well be that elections bring fundamentalist parties to state power (a very real possibility with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt), especially if pro-western parties fail to bring stability and prosperity. In the West, the worsening economic crisis could intensify scapegoat mechanisms, leading to increasing islamophopia, exploited by right-wing politicians with populist agenda’s. Their rhetoric of a “Clash of Civilizations” could easily turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, resulting in increased violence between the West and Islamist factions. Finally, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – that great motor of Islamic fundamentalism – is still not resolved. If war breaks out between Iran and Israel, which is a real possibility, there is no saying what the consequences will be for the relations between the West and the Islamic world.

3. The shared dialectic of Islamic fundamentalism and modernity

As I said above, the crucial point to be appreciated is that Islamic fundamentalism is not so alien to western modernity as the rhetoric of a “Clash of Civilizations” wants us to believe. Both exemplify a modern dialectic of self-determination through negation of the other. On the one hand, Islamic fundamentalism is obviously opposed to the modern West in that it rejects individual autonomy and democracy in the name of Islam. This rejection is constitutive of Islamic fundamentalism insofar as the fundamentalist must negate or exclude modernity in order to assert himself as a true muslim. Religious heteronomy requires the active and sometimes violent negation of autonomy. The suicide bombing, in which not only western (or westernized) individuals are killed but also the bomber himself, constitutes the ultimate proof of the fundamentalist’s utter disregard for individual autonomy and hence his total commitment to Islam. This social function of terror against others as a means of self-affirmation has been noted before, especially with regard to Islamic fundamentalism. As Benjamin Barber remarks about the latter in his book Jihad vs. McWorld: “Self-determination has at times amounted to little more than other-extermination.” (1995: 11) But what is seldom noted – also not by Barber – is that fundamentalism is in that respect not alien to modernity at all. Rather, Islamic-fundamentalist terrorism repeats the basic pattern of modern autonomy, the dialectic of self-determination through negation of the other. This dialectic received its paradigm expression in the Hegelian system, where the other is reduced to the negative counterpart of the subject, its alien externalization, to be reintegrated by means of a synthesizing negation of the negation. Thus Barber's criticism of Islamic fundamentalism mirrors the postmodern critique of the Hegelian dialectic and the broader logic of modern autonomy which that dialectic exemplifies.

4. Modern manicheism: The West and the rest

The autonomous subject props itself up as the sole and self-legislating source of value, blind to the intrinsic worth of the other, whose influence it can only experience as heteronomous infringement of his freedom, an obstacle to be eliminated. The other has value for the subject only insofar as it is valued by the subject, insofar as the other fits into his plans and projects, his subjective “design of possibilities” (Heidegger, Sartre). This is the sensitive underbelly of the modern autonomous subject, the dark side of the Enlightenment: the fact that the subject can only be autonomous by means of violence against otherness. Barber’s note regarding Jihad – “Self-determination has at times amounted to little more than other-extermination” – is no less true of McWorld, the globalization of western modernity. Struggling to realize his autonomy in the world, the subject experiences the other either as raw material to be used or as an obstacle/enemy to be overcome. The autonomous subject cannot be interested in the other as other but only as non-ego, as that which the subject is not. The developmental logic of autonomy is therefore dialectical in the Hegelian sense: the opposition between ego and non-ego is resolved through the synthesis of the enriched ego having assimilated the other to the sphere of his own freedom (negation of the negation). That is to say, the autonomous subject realizes itself through a branching structure of hierarchical oppositions, in which it is posited as the superior pole through the negation of the subaltern, the abject, the imagined inferior other. Thus the subject is posited through oppositions like subject-object, high-low, civilized-primitive, mind-body, reason-feeling, male-female, hetero-gay, light-dark, capital-labor, etc. The real wealth of differences in the world is thereby reduced to dualisic, Manichean schemes employed by the – usually western, masculine – subject.

5. The scapegoat mechanisms of McWorld

This dialectic holds for autonomous subjectivity in general, not just for human individuals but also for groups that can say “we”, the collective subjects of families, tribes, gangs, nations and even entire cultures. On this social level, the dialetic of self-determination through negation of the other functions by means of what René Girard has termed the “scapegoat mechanism”: the projection of inner social tensions on 'internal outsiders' as the imagined guilty ones that must be sacrificed in order to restore social cohesion. This social dimension of modern autonomy shows that its dialectic has very real, material effects, manifested in practices of exclusion, domination and extermination: from the persecution of witches, antisemitism, sexism, slavery, apartheid, colonialism, up to and including contemporary cultural racism (cf. the neoconservative assertion of the cultural superiority of the modern West).

The central material practice of modern autonomy, however, is capitalism. The economic rise of the capitalist class, from the Renaissance onwards, went hand in hand in with the theoretical development of the ideal of autonomy, which functioned as the ideological legitimation of the bourgeois claims against feudalism. Next to its supposedly superior productivity, capitalism is normally legitimized as the truest economic expression of individual autonomy, the self-determination of market players. In capitalism the subject relates to himself via his possessions and relates to the other as either a competitor or a means of production (labor power) – a form of subjectivity which, followingAlisdair MacIntyre, we may call “possessive individualism”. In capitalism the autonomous subject is the one who – through his possessions – is in possession of himself. Hence the Giradian 'internal outsider' of capitalism, the scapegoat whose exclusion constitutes bourgeois autonomy (self-possession), is the unpropertied class, the dispossessed. In industrial capitalism this was of course the proletariat, which was as Marx says “a class of bourgeois society which is not a class of bourgeois society” (1844 [1970]: 390). The proletariat, as unpropertied, was both part of and excluded from society, part of the citizenry yet also criminalized as a “social problem” due to its poverty. Thus the proletariat functioned as the constitutive outsider of industrial capitalism, not least because its “freedom from all possession” allowed it to be exploited as labor power.

6. Modernity’s terror against otherness

In its negative relation to otherness, then, Islamic fundamentalism is not foreign to the West. Islamist terrorism merely makes explicit what usually remains hidden, the dark side of modern autonomy, its dialectic of self-determination through negation of otherness. Terrorism is the bare form of modernity’s inherent ‘terror against otherness’– which is not merely a dramatizing metaphor, but something concretely felt in modernity’s material practices of exclusion, domination, extermination and exploitation. When confronted by Islamist terrorism, then, we should never forget that terrorism is essentially a western invention. To be precise, terrorism is an invention of the French Revolution (in which, of course, modern democracy and autonomy were taught for the first time as universal human ideals) when it degenerated into the Jacobin Reign of Terror, which – to protect the Revolution against “counterrevolutionary forces” – killed 40,000 people in the name of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

The fact that revolutionary terrorism is linked to the modern ideal of autonomy was already noted by Hegel in his analysis of the French Revolution in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In the section titled Absolute Freedom and the Terror (1986 [1807]: BB, III), Hegel argues that absolute collective autonomy (the democratic expression of many particular volitions into the state’s universal will, Rousseau’s volonté general) necessarily leads to tension between the universal and the particular, because particular individuals can never fully identify with the universality of the state, since each individual is unique. The state as ‘executor’ of the universal will is therefore always – at least latently – at war with its own citizens: it can see the various particular departures from the universal will only as threats to be eliminated by reason of state, especially in times of crisis. Thus collective autonomy produces in its own body politic the Fremdkörper which it must exclude, through a Girardian scapegoat mechanism, in order to be itself.

Ever since the French Revolution, terrorism is a proven tactic of left-wing radicals advocating absolute (individual or collective) autonomy. See the “individual terrorism” of the anarchists, the Red Terror of the Bolsheviks, the attacks of the German RAF and the Italian Red Brigades. In recent Dutch history (which is my background in writing this piece), there is the murder of the right-wing populist politician Pim Fortuyn in 2002, committed by the left-wing animal rights activist Volkert van der Graaf. In this respect, left-wing terrorism is no different from its right-wing counterpart, the xenophobic violence of virulent nationalists. As Zygmunt Bauman argued in Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), the modern ideal of autonomy – the foundation of the Enlightenment’s critical attitude – led in its collective form not just to democracy but also to nationalism as the historical self-determination of a people. Here, that is to say: in Auschwitz, Barber’s dictum – “Self-determination has at times amounted to little more than other-extermination” – has found its paradigmatic vindication.

7. Modern morbidity
In light of the parallel between collective and individual subjectivity, something analogous to this internal production of Fremdkörper must also be found in individual autonomy. Hence Hegel’s argument with respect to absolute democracy has its counterpart in his analysis of individual freedom. Following Kant, Hegel understands the autonomous subject as standing above his biological existence: the subject must not be controlled by immediate urges, it must govern itself through reason, to which all natural instincts must be subjected, including the organic life instinct. Hegel’s conclusion is therefore that the subject can only prove his freedom – to others and to himself – by demonstrating his independence from life, by risking his life in mortal combat: “The absolute proof of freedom in the struggle for recognition is death. Already by the fact that both combatants risk the danger of death, they posit their shared natural being as something negative and thus they prove that take it to be a nothing.” (Hegel 1986 [1830]: §432, Zus., 221) For Hegel, then, dying is the highest form of freedom. The prevalence of this absurd contempt for death in modern philosophy reflects the dominance of Kantian autonomy. Firstly, of course, in Kant himself, the prophet of perpetual peace, for whom nevertheless a little war now and then was needed to impress on people the inferiority of their empirical existence. Cut from the same black cloth is Heidegger’s analysis of Being-unto-Death as authentic Dasein, trivialized into the existentialist fancy of suicide as the free act par excellence. But – so we may ask – is there not something fundamentally wrong with a conception of freedom for which death is the ultimate proof? Freedom must be an affirmation of life, not its negation. “A free man thinks of nothing less than of death”, Spinoza says: “his wisdom is not to meditate on death, but life.” (Ethics: IVP67)

This modern morbidity underscores the fact that the otherness, which the subject must exclude in order to be autonomous, comes not just from outside but is produced within, as through an internalization of the scapegoat mechanism. In order to achieve total self-control, the subject produces in himself the unruly nature to be conquered, cultivated and exploited. To the extent that people are social beings and their self-legislation arises from the internalization of group norms (embodied by the authority of the father), the meaning of modern autonomy is ultimately giving your life for the fatherland in the war with inferior others. In that sense, the Islamic terrorist blowing himself up in an attack on infidels is a truly modern autonomous subject. To repeat: Islamic fundamentalism is not alien to modernity, rather it holds up a mirror to the West: we may be shocked by what we see, but what we see is merely the balaclava face of our own culture, the reflection of autonomy’s inherent terror against otherness.

8. The Protestant origin of fundamentalism
The paradox of Islamic fundamentalism is that it confirms its autonomy by destroying it, by submitting to the heteronomous authority of Allah, rejecting the ideals of freedom and democracy. One might perceive this paradox as a refutation of the preceding analysis. After all, how can Islamic fundamentalism be a radicalization of modernity when it violently rejects modernity? Doesn’t this rejection confirm the neoconservative analysis of Islam as being essentially alien to the modern West, in that Islamic cultures have not evolved beyond premodern, medieval bondage, unlike our own Judeo-Christian tradition, from whence modernity came? Yet, the point to be appreciated here is that the fundamentalist turn to religion is not so alien to modern autonomy as is commonly believed. The link between them is the Protestant Reformation. As has often been remarked, Protestantism contributed greatly not just to the rise of capitalism (as Max Weber argued) but to the formation of modern autonomous subjectivity as such. By doing away with the mediatorship of the priesthood, Luther turned the relation with God into a subjectively internal affair of individual responsibility. Luther, as Marx said, “shattered faith in authority because he restored the authority of faith. He turned priests into laymen because he turned laymen into priests. He freed man from outer religiosity because he made religiosity the inner man. He freed the body from chains because he enchained the heart.” (Marx 1844 [1970]: 386) By declaring the priesthood of every believer, Luther in effect turned the believer into his own priest, his own spiritual master, who 'enchained his own heart', thus paving the way for the self-mastery of Kantian autonomy. Now the crucial point is that fundamentalism originated in Protestantism, or to be more precise, in American Protestantism during the late 19th and early 20^th century, when the most individual religious experience resulted in absolute faith in the literal truth of Scripture, a voluntary self-sublation of subjective autonomy into religious heteronomy (see Euben 1999: 16-17). This origination of fundamentalism in Protestantism highlights the constitutive importance of modern subjectivity for the possibility of fundamentalism: only an autonomous subject is capable of a radical break with the past in order to give himself without reserve to God. By analogy with this radicalization of Protestantism, the concept of fundamentalism is applied to similar movements in Islam, especially since the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

9. Orientalism: The 'white man's burden' in the Middle East

To understand how movements similar to Protestant fundamentalism arose in Islam, we must appreciate how the Middle East was introduced to modernity. Especially since the demise of the Ottoman Empire during the First World War, the Middle East has been occupied and colonized by the West, particularly the French and the British (though the Americans have had military presences in and around the Persian Gulf since the second half of the 19^th century; see Palmer 1992). Under western supervision, the Middle East was divided into modern nation states, who then tried to modernize their economies and populations, following either capitalist or socialist models. In this way the Middle East was introduced to the modern ideology of autonomy (be it capitalist or socialist) and the practices of exclusion, domination and exploitation that went with it. Thus the Middle East was inserted into the developmental logic of modernity, the dialectic of self-determination through negation of the other. The ideological aspect of this modern self-determination involved what Edward Said (1978) called “orientalism”, the imaginary production of the East as the Other of the West, the anti-West. In orientalism, Islam was inscribed as one of the inferior poles in the hierarchical oppositions through which the West defined itself: civilized-backward, progressive-traditional, rational-passionate, tolerant-intolerant, individualism-collectivism, industrious-lazy etc. Thus the shared history and mutual influence of the Islamic world and the West was gradually obliterated, until one appeared as essentially alien to the other, thus feeding the rhetoric of a “Clash of Civilizations”. This despite the fact that Islam, Christianity and Judaism used to be reckoned as the three “universal religions of monotheism”, rooted in the same Semitic culture of the Book (Torah, Bible, Koran). Orientalism has made us forget this common history, just as it obliterated the fact that medieval Islam, whose civilization was far more advanced and more tolerant than medieval Christendom, contributed greatly to the formation of western modernity. Greek philosophy, after all, was mainly passed on to the West by Islamic philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroes. Hence the pertinence of Francis Robinson’s question: “Is it really possible for muslims and westerners to experience each other as radically different and separated when so much has been shared for so long?” (Robinson 1994) The answer, of course, lies in the functioning of orientalism as the ideological expression of the dialectical development of the modern West. The imaginary construction of the Middle East as the dialectical Other of the West legitimized – and still legitimizes – the concrete exploitation of the Middle East in the practices of modernity (capitalism, cultural imperialism), especially after the discovery in the 1930s of vast reserves of oil in Arab soil. In the western world itself, orientalism functioned to reduce muslims to a socio-economic underclass of second-class citizens, separated from the rest of society by an efficient scapegoat mechanism. This is how orientalism functions as the new racism, the cultural successor to the biological racism of the past.

10. Islamic fundamentalism as modern anti-modernism

Orientalism characterizes the context in which Islamic fundamentalism has arisen and still arises – the context of a universalizing modernity in which nonetheless some are excluded, dominated and exploited. Disillusioned about this false universality, many muslims turn away from modernity, rejecting it as a lie, an ideology in the Marxist sense: a universal dream that hides and serves particular interests, mainly those of western capital. Attracted to fundamentalist movements are therefore not the rural muslims who have remained relatively uneffected by modernity, but rather muslims who grew up in modern cities, often highly educated, but who nonetheless feel themselves – as muslims – displaced within modernity, excluded as its ‘internal outsiders’. Islamic fundamentalism is rooted in the modern culture of autonomy and stems from disillusionment about that culture in which – in Orwellian terms – all people are equally free, although some are more equally free than others.

This explains the paradox mentioned above in section 8, the paradox that Islamic fundamentalism repeats the dialectic of modern autonomy while at the same time rejecting this autonomy in the name of religious heteronomy. Islamic fundamentalism is the resistance of modernized subjects to modernity, ie. of modernized subjects who have become victims of modernity’s violence to otherness and who therefore respond be rejecting modernity, but they do so as modern, autonomous subjects. As Partha Chatterjee puts this crucial point: formed by the modern discourse of autonomy, such “post-colonial subjects” are forced to choose their “place of autonomy” from a “subordinate position vis-à-vis a colonial regime which had on its side the most universal sources of legitimation produced by social thought after the Enlightenment”. (Chattergee 1993: 11) That is to say: their “place of autonomy” can only be the rejection of the Enlightenment culture that dominates them. By rejecting modern autonomy, the post-colonial subject posits his autonomy.

Seen in this light, Islamic fundamentalism is essentially a counter-reaction of modernity to its own violent dialectic, a counter-reaction which therefore still takes place within that dialectic, in the form of self-determination through negation of the other – the other who is in this case modernity itself. In Islamic fundamentalism, modernity has become its own exlcuded other. Islamic fundamentalism is the suicide of modern autonomy, the turning on itself of its own constitutive violence against otherness. That is why Islamic fundamentalism chooses religious heteronomy, as the self-negation of modern autonomy: not because Islam is essentially alien to modernity, as neoconservatism says, but because Islamic fundamentalism is still too much related to modernity and hence functions according to the same dialectic.

11. Occidentalism: The muslim’s burden in the West
The insight that Islamic fundamentalism, despite reverting to archaic traditions, is not pre-modern but rather a contemporary manifestation of discontent in modernity, is not new. The characterization of Islamic fundamentalism as a distinctively modern anti-modernism can also be found in Islamologists like Roxanne Euben (1999) and Ira Lapidus. As the latter writes: “Islamic revival movements can be understood as a reaction against modernity, but more profoundly they are also an expression of modernity.” (Lapidus 1997: 444) I would like to sharpen that claim by saying that modernity’s dialectical exclusion of otherness is repeated by Islamic fundamentalism. Thus the orientalism of the West is mirrored by what Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (2004) call “occidentalism”, which is “[t]he West in the eyes of its enemies” as the subtitle of their book says. Occidentalism is the stereotypical, imaginary depiction of the West by anti-western movements, who thereby feed and legitimize their hatred. Thus Islamic occidentalism consists in the imaginary construction of the West as the Other of Islam. It is the inscription of the West as the inferior pole in the hierarchical oppositions by means of which the ‘real muslim’ defines himself: devout-unholy, community-egoism, spirituality-materialism, sincere-corrupt, brave-cowardly, pure-decadent etc. Occidentalism, then, functions according to exactly the same dialectic as orientalism: they are no more than mirror images.

12. Modernity and the cult of martyrdom
The anti-modernism of Islamic fundamentalism might be taken to imply its closeness to postmodernism. Thus, for example, Hardt and Negri in their book Empire (2000): “The anti-modern thrust that defines fundamentalism might be better understood, then, not as a premodern but as a postmodern project. The postmodernity of fundamentalism has to be recognized primarily in its refusal of modernity as a weapon of Euro-American hegemony – and in this regard Islamic fundamentalism is indeed the paradigmatic case. In the context of Islamic traditions, fundamentalism is postmodern insofar as it rejects the tradition of Islamic modernism for which modernity was always overcoded as assimilation or submission to Euro-American hegemony.” (149) However, what Hardt and Negi do not take into account is the fact that while Islamic fundamentalism is indeed anti-modern, it is so in a totally modern way, in the modern mode of autonomy and its exclusive dialectic. It is not a postmodern overcoming of modernity but rather the latter’s inner contradiction, its short circuit. Islamic fundamentalism is not postmodern enough: this is what makes it is so aggressive and dangerous. As the sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar (2002) points out, the martyrdom of the suicide terrorist is actually quite alien to traditional Islam, which knew no real tradition of martyrdom, let alone of suicide terrorism. For a long time Islamic faith inspired a certain earthly resignation and passivity rather than a radical, revolutionary attitude. According to Khosrokhavar, this changed with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 (the “first postmodern revolution” according to Hardt and Negri) when a relatively modern people, disillusioned with the forced modernization of their country, rebelled against the pro-western Shah and turned to Islam as an alternative to western modernity. Only then did the cult of martyrdom come into existence which became the trademark of Islamic terrorism. This underscores the above remark about the Protestant roots of fundamentalism, ie. the fact that fundamentalism can only arise and thrive in a modern culture. Modernity’s cult of death and terror (practically inaugurated by the French Revolution and theoretically by German idealism) had to be installed first before Islam could produce a tradition of suicide terrorism. Islam is not in itself extremist, it is the mixture with modern autonomy that makes it so explosive.

13. Conclusion: The epochal meaning of the “Clash of Civilizations”

In short, the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” between modernity and Islam is basically a conflict within modernity. Due to modern colonialism and subsequent capitalist globalization, modernity has now more or less conquered the globe and begins to bite its own tail. The modern subject has fallen prey to its own terror against otherness, to which it can only respond with counter terror: terror against modernity and its ideals of autonomy and democracy. Here lies the philosophical, even epochal significance of the “Clash of Civilizations”, in the self-dissolution of modernity, as it reverts into its own opposite. Western violence against otherness, usually hidden under an ideology of universal freedom and equality, appears nakedly in Islamic fundamentalism, stripped of its veil and exposed in suicide bombings. The religious heteronomy of the inviolable belief in the literal truth of the Koran is a manifestation of the dogmatism of the modern autonomous subject, his uncompromising belief in himself. It now becomes apparent to what extent the dialectic of the “Clash of Civilizations” is a self-reinforcing process, a negative feedback of orientalism and occidentalism, of terror and counter terror. If Islamic-fundamentalist terror increases, the West will be confirmed in its neoconservative distrust of Islam, thus increasing its islamophobic violence – resulting in a further alienation of modern muslims and their increased attraction by Islamic fundamentalism as a theology of anti-modern resistance and liberation. Caught in the maelstrom of a suspicious reflection, orientalism and occidentalism will increasingly meet each other’s fears. We have already seen this happen in the run-up to 9/11 and especially during its aftermath: Al Qaeda was the ghost raised by American imperialism, Bush was dialectical doppelgänger of Bin Laden – thesis and antithesis in a deadly dialectic, seemingly without any prospect of reconciliation.

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