Abstract
This article responds to Roland Boer’s Marxism and Theology (2007–13) that offers a unique contribution to understanding the current impasse in revolutionary Left politics and illustrates the importance of the numerous references to theology in Marxist literature. In this response, I focus on Boer's argument of Marxism and Judaeo-Christian theology occupying a similar contested space with respect to their uses of “political myth.” I argue that the key to Boer’s critical project is a two-pronged approach: “materializing” theology and “theologizing” historical materialism. For this critical endeavor to make inroads, it relies not just on the ambivalence of political myth, but also that myths are essential to Marxist theories of emancipation, as well as to Marx’s notion of “the Aufhebung of Religion.” I focus on two figures: Ernst Bloch as a Marxist who emphasizes myth’s emancipatory qualities; and Theodor Adorno as wary of myth while adhering to the theological motif of the bilderverbot. From this analysis, we can begin to see how much Boer’s project depends on a wager on political myth itself.
Marxism and theology?
For all Roland Boer’s (2007–13) emphases on the revolutionary appeal of the “untimely,” it appears his five-volume series of books on Marxism and theology indeed is a “timely” contribution to current debates around the future of both Marxism and Christian theology. Given that there has been a well-documented “return of religion” into the public sphere and intellectual discussion of the crisis of secularism, it is fitting that the topic of the relationship between Marxism and theology should resurface in this context. Boer’s ambitiously monumental five-volume series takes us back to the problem of religion within the variegated history of Marxism from the writings of the “Young Marx” to Western Marxism and the recent post-Marxian theory from post-structuralism and to those of Badiou, Žižek, Negri, and Agamben. Boer’s insightful contribution to this adventure of the critique of religion within Marxism on its fringes emerges in the patient way it discusses how religion, primarily Christian theology, has proven to be a persistent obstacle for the Marxian theory and why that may be the case.
Despite the apparent episodic and impressionistic nature of much of the content in the five volumes, I think Boer teasingly reveals much of his underlying aims guiding the five-book “critical commentary” in the conclusion to the last and fifth volume of the series titled: In the Vale of Tears. In this volume, Boer aptly employs the metaphor of having both feet in “each camp” of Marxism and theology so “that Marxism and theology might have telling points to make against one another.” The originality of this kind of approach is that it “open[s] up an interaction in which neither Marxism nor theology remain the same” (Boer, 2013: 323). Boer courageously takes upon himself this dialectical exercise even if it risks being shot at from both sides by righteous representatives of two traditions in question. With Boer’s analysis, we can begin to avoid playing the game of philosophical reductionism and let the interaction between Marxism and theology unfold without pre-empting its endpoint, or re-legitimating either side of this relationship at the expense of the other.
In this response to the series, I have chosen to focus on two things that I consider pivotal for Boer’s dialectical exercise to be productive. The first one, which I will mainly address, is Boer’s argument concerning “the cunning of myth,” in other words, the political ambivalence of myth—that Marxism has glimpsed as Boer discusses, but has failed to truly grasp and master. The second point of interest I find integral to the project is Boer’s (2012: 144–145; 2013: 49–54) re-examination of the meaning and legacy of Marx’s own critique of religion in terms of the “Aufhebung of Religion.” Boer’s re-contextualizes the trajectory of Marx philosophy and presents him as a thinker who never intended to continue the critical “negation” of religion since that was essentially “complete” after the efforts of the “Young Hegelians” in the 1830s and 1840s. To keep focusing on religion as a political problem preventing social and political transformation would assume religion was the source of alienation, rather than the underlying socio-economic realities that give the “halo” of religion its appeal (Marx, 1975: 244). Yet, it is the renewed discussion and opening up of critique of religion within Marxism after Marx that interests Boer most. Even though Marx referred to Bruno Bauer’s critical writings on religion as a “detour [umwege]” to the real task at hand, that is the “criticism of politics,” from Boer’s (2012: 106–107) perspective, this has proven to be a necessary detour that has continued to draw attention from a league of Marxists for relevant rather than incidental reasons. This is why Boer (2013: 50–51) takes seriously the idea that socialism should have always been, not the “abolition,” but rather (in rather uncannily Hegelian terms) the “Aufhebung, a sublation, a preservation and lifting of religion to another level.” 1
In Boer’s eyes, the “Aufhebung of Religion” is envisaged as a “materializing theology,” whereby there will be a genuine “rubbing together” of Marxism and theology that could possibly render a political alliance, possibly an opportune one, between the “Religious Left” and the “Secular Left.” However, such an alliance requires two challenging dialectical maneuvers. First, it requires the existence of a Religious Left who would be able to go through “the materialist turn.” In Boer’s (2007: 451) words, it is only “through the full materialist move that the possibility of theology begins to emerge.” But this process cuts both ways. As in volume five, Boer (2013: 49) motions that if theology can reach its own “materialist” truth-content by way of a materialist philosophy of religion, Marxism itself must also be “pushed hard” until it reaches its own “theological” truth-content. 2 This is why I believe that a “materializing theology” depends on Boer’s insight into political and biblical myths. Boer’s argument about “the cunning of myth” concerns the persistence of myths in public political discourse as both the object of critique by secular atheists and Marxists, but also as a method for critique in many of the Marxist writings that are the subject of Boer’s series. This is why Boer defines myth as “an important story” and not simply as a fantasy or fiction. Myths serve a function of providing an “alternative language” for expressing a “better world” and a “way to speak about an unutterable future” (Boer, 2009: 47, 2013: 92). At most, Boer (2013: 70) claims, myth is indispensable for any revolutionary discourse, whether it is Marxism or theology. Two instances of political myth from Boer’s series stand out in uncovering this kind of importance and opening the borders between theology and Marxism: the “discernment of myth” in reference to Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno’s “wariness of myth”—Boer’s (2013: 78) “closest conversation partners” on the topic.
The cunning return of political myth: The case of Ernst Bloch
Boer (2013: 82) confesses he has a “soft spot” for Bloch, a figure who rather symbolically bookends the series. Bloch plays an important role in Boer’s series because he was one of the first self-proclaimed Marxists to reappraise the revolutionary core of Christianity, primarily the Bible, and one of the first to offer us a crucial insight into the “ambivalence” of myth itself. For Bloch (2009: 26–27), we must avoid dismissing biblical myths as “fairy tales” and judging them in black and white terms such as reality or illusion. From his close study of the Bible, Bloch found myths could be equally revolutionary-emancipatory as well as reactionary-repressive. Despite biblical passages honoring authority, there were also passages highlighted by Bloch that advocate rebellion, such as in Exodus where we have a “God of the future” rather than one reaffirming the status quo (Boer, 2007: 39). Bloch referred to his own method of reading the Bible as the “discernment of myth” that seeks to uncover a “dialectical theory of myth” through close “detective work” of Scripture.
This is why Bloch places importance on the tradition of biblical criticism that was at the heart of the Reformation. This tradition for Boer (2007: 4–5, 2012: 25–52) was like Christianity’s own heterodox branch of critical theory where the Bible was primarily a “polemical resource” and hermeneutics was political. The existence of such a tradition also explains why Christianity is riven with so many internal political schisms, producing authoritarian-Papal figures, but also dissident heretics, activist-reformers, and anticlerical protest. Even though Bloch (2009: 13) finds the Bible will always stand as the Church’s “bad conscience,” he also notes that any attempt using the Bible for liberation purposes only would be assuming there is a real consistent or true meaning to Scripture. Instead, Boer uses Bloch to suggest that it may be a better strategy to concede the political ambivalence of the Bible by employing the “discernment of myth,” for one can still distinguish salvageable myths as well as use the critique of myth as superstition.
The implications of this method of discernment are not lost on Boer (2007: 27), who argues “[f]or Bloch, all ideologies, no matter how repressive, have an emancipatory-utopian dimension about them… utopian residue.” Thus, we should always be able to “find the insurrectionary moment in the midst of suppression” (Boer, 2013: 20). Myths can have an anticipatory utopian function that neither side of any revolution can exploit nor exhaust. Boer’s use of Bloch is telling in that the reluctance to let go of myth may be even a stronger sign of one’s revolutionary commitments than a strict humanist atheism. What is intriguing here with Boer’s analysis of Bloch is that there remains a secret appeal to myth even in spite of one’s wariness of its dangers of falling into the wrong hands or leading to further political disappointments. But in Boer’s (2012: 223–229) view, the “discernment of myth” also helps us relativize and undermine theology’s grasp on the rule of myth, and thus Marxism need not extricate itself from all theological attachments for fear of becoming opium-dealers themselves. The discarding of myth even if done in the name of a secular reason may itself (as the current crop of “New Atheists” demonstrate by their fervor) risk the danger of replicating the patterns of oppression by generating its own authoritarianism or secular theology as in the Adorno and Horkheimer critique of the “dialectic of Enlightenment” (Boer, 2009: 192, 2011: 28–29). Rather than focusing on the assumed pre-scientific content of myth, Bloch (2009: 59) argues that we should focus on whether the function and purpose of myths are genuinely emancipatory—that is, “cui bono?” [For whose benefit is the myth being staged?] (cf. Boer, 2009b: 138).
However, Boer is not simply repeating Bloch for us in a post-communist or post-secular context. He argues that Bloch “fails to live up to his own method, particularly his key category of the discernment of myth” (Boer, 2007: 56). Bloch failed to make a decisive distinction between the Bible and theology, primarily the “theological categories” of transcendence and teleology, and by not doing so, gave up too much ground to the latter. For instance, Boer (2007: 33) points out how Bloch’s “Feuerbachian” claim of an immanent potential of atheism within the Bible tries to beat the theologians at their own game, by reducing the “truth-content” of theology to a singular one in the form of historical materialist atheism. However, Boer argues Bloch’s method of “discernment” can still be rigorously applied so as not to fall into this trap of secular theology. It is assumed by Boer that we can still read the Bible without having to surrendering to a theological framework, and as Bloch (2009: 27) originally wished, do so by “destroying and saving the myth in a single dialectical process.” But Boer’s suggestion on how we should apply this discernment to its full potential for the redemption of myth takes him into difficult territory. In the Vale of Tears, he articulates the demands of discernment require calling “the bluff on political myths of reaction by forcing the constitutive exception, the unnamed and feared underside of such myths, to be revealed, which really means that the Left should ask what those myths might look like should they be realised” (Boer, 2013: 74). However, before I discuss the other side of Boer’s analysis of myth and its “Protestant” twist with his discussion of Adorno, I want to first discuss the possible issues with this poker-game analogy for the use of political myth that Boer draws out of his reading of Bloch.
Skiing and bluffing down slippery slopes
Prima facie, one of the issues Boer’s argument of ambivalence of myth argument raises is the prospect of the slippery slope problem resulting from such an entrenched attachment to myth—perhaps we could say a necessary slippery slope. In other words, how do we know if any commitment to political myth would not lead to further social alienation or destruction of society, or even become inverted and reinforce greater and perhaps new unseen reactionary forms of authority? The example of Georges Sorel would seem apt here, a figure who is conspicuously absent as a key interlocutor for this series, and who only appears in an occasional reference as a true believer of political myths. 3 After writing Reflections of Violence (2004), whose keystone is the myth of the “General Strike” as a motivational force for the Left, Sorel turned to nationalism and formed an alliance with figures from the far right group, Action Française. That a man of the revolutionary Left with firm attachment to political myth for the purposes of emancipation could choose to side with reaction would seem to illustrate the dangers of myth’s ambivalence for the one takes the risk in seeing through myth’s potential. 4
Boer’s belief is that there is a way to resist this fate of political myth capitulating to reinforcing nationalist feeling or reactionary forces. His way of responding to the problem is to argue for a materialist theory of revolutionary grace, which he argues, “may run in two directions. It may fall a little to the left, and before long we are with the antinomian side of grace.” However, “if it falls to the Right, then it runs a very different course down the mountain. Here it may become the ‘miracle’ that sanctions the exceptionality of the monarch,” that is Schmitt’s political theology (Boer, 2012: 231–232). The wager then appears to be that the ambivalent reaction to myth as well as any pending slippery slope will disappear through an “unexpected” moment of revolutionary grace and “ákairos” (Boer, 2013: 227–234). This point reveals the epistemic implications of Boer’s analysis of myth. As we cannot refute myth by reference to its lack of objectivity, factual conditions, or even absent ethical basis (Boer, 2013: 245–286), at best, we have to trust in the power of myth for the greater good.
Despite this aspect of the wager and its relation to grace in Boer’s analysis, there is also a sneaking suspicion that Boer is also dealing with myth on a hegemonic level. As we can see in Boer’s 2009 book Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of the Biblical Themes, which serves as an important addendum to the series, the discussion of myth is much more explicitly discussed in terms of a hegemonic battleground between the Left and Right and, therefore, important for thinking revolutionary strategies in the here and now. In this text, he shows how the Right still effectively wields “mythmaking” as part of its political ideology despite the secular self-understanding of liberal-democratic modern societies. 5 From Boer’s perspective, if the Right are so effective at the “abuse” of myth, why cannot the Left use it for the greater good? However, Boer’s proposal to reach this greater good first requires us to call the “bluff” of the myth of the Right and take them at their eschatological word. So rather than just simply resisting or deconstructing the ideological messages of the Right, we should instead say yes, let us try and “realize” your ideological utopia of, for example, unfettered capitalism, only to know this would lead to a disaster. 6
To his credit, Boer is quite transparent in admitting what this kind of leap of faith into political myth entails at a pre-revolutionary level. He is fully aware that “[t]he problem is that there is no guarantee that social and economic life after the deluge will be qualitatively different.” He suggests the seeing through of any successful revolutionary moment of “ákairos” will be as difficult as what former Australian Prime Minister Paul Keating once referred to as, “skiing down a slope on one ski without poles” (cited in Boer, 2009b: 189–190). In the end though, I find Boer never gets out of the problems posed by his analysis of the ambivalence of myth. However, more importantly, why does this analysis of political myth mean that any secular alternative that would move from myth to social critique be exempt from any future radical Leftist theoretical program? Why has taking our critical or normative bearings from this world and this age become a worthless exercise? This question brings us back to the historical context Boer (2009a: 1–30, 250–251, 2013: 214) is responding to, the crisis of secularism. Boer’s response to such a crisis is to switch the conversation to the point where we should, at the least, face the prospect that we may have to suspend the secular “humanist” ideal that human “works” or an “ethics” of struggle can lead us toward socialism—that is, we may have to be prepared to take a detour or radical U-turn if the moment of myth’s revolutionary potential arises. Therefore, the discussion of political myth in this series leads to an inverse wager that any secular political program, no matter how progressive, whether it is in the form of radical democracy or democratic or ethical socialism, will most likely fall short of attaining that “missing” truly revolutionary ingredient of grace, because it will be blind to its possibility.
Where to now? Navigating the detour of theology via the Bilderverbot
In this five-volume series, Boer demonstrates how myth is not the product of Marxism and theology secretly collaborating and thus a sign of weakness in Marxism, or simply a case of capitulation to a secularized theology. When it comes to its appearance in both Marxism and theology Boer (2013: 69–70) concludes, “myth is inescapable and even sorely needed within both [camps].” What this means then is that Marxism and theology “offer competing myths” specific to their own relative domains, nevertheless, the friction and attachment that forms between them arises in part because the “game” these respective myths play is “similar.” They are both located in the same “revolutionary crucible,” rather than the case of Marxism simply being a secularized version of theology (Boer, 2012: 317–319). 7
Finally, I would argue it is within Boer’s reading of Adorno where we get a glimpse of not only of how this “crucible” functions, but also the possibility of political myth returning without bringing destruction and deluge in its wake. Although Adorno provides the most steadfast critique of myth in Boer’s series, he can help Boer realize further Marx’s “Aufhebung of religion” in two ways: firstly, by way of connecting the critique of commodity fetishism with critique of idolatry in relation to capitalism thus demonstrating the “similar game” thesis just mentioned. Secondly, Adorno serves Boer as a much-needed dialectical foil to Bloch, ensuring that attachment to myth does not lead to its non-discernment and the risk of myth falling back into reactionary hands and counter-revolutionary abuse. Adorno may not be a fan of myth, but as Boer is well aware, he never renounced the theme of utopia—and shared with Bloch, this strange passion for utopia that is promised by myth but also beyond it. But still, this move by Boer to keep the spirit of myth alive after Adorno would all seem to depend upon the effectiveness and check of Adorno’s exit-strategy of the “Ban on Images” (Bilderverbot). As Boer shows, Adorno appears to navigate this ambivalence of both theology and myth through his merciless fidelity to the Bilderverbot—a Biblical myth itself.
For Boer (2013: 274, 309–310), the biblical ban listed in the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4; Deuteronomy 5:8) and in the Book of Isaiah has to be understood as a political myth itself, and one that in its “utopian starkness has extraordinary appeal.” Instead of focussing on the emancipatory movements in the Bible such as Exodus, Adorno sticks to a methodological principle—I would argue to the “letter” of the Commandment. 8 Adorno, unlike Bloch, will make sure he keeps his eyes wide open and his ideological suspicion active at all times as he surveys theology and secular atheism or any systematic form of thought that presents itself innocently. The Bilderverbot is attractive for Adorno because it provides a way to critique secular theology whilst also being a “non-concept” that prevents it from becoming a metaphysical and therefore theological category in itself. As Boer (2007: 426) cites Adorno at one stage, secular theology is an “insult not only to thought, but to religion.” Paradoxically, even though the Bilderverbot is a theological term, it nevertheless, gives rise to the prohibition of any secularization or any positive representation of utopia, whilst maintaining the supposition of utopia. For the Bilderverbot prohibits not just the divinization of humans such as Jesus of Nazareth, but has the political function of also prohibiting the personality cults of Stalin and Hitler, as well as the reification of nature, claims of existential authenticity, or the transforming of anything finite into something infinite (Boer, 2007: 434–435, 2013: 87). The link between worship of idols and fetish of commodities is not a far stretch if we adopt Adorno’s twist on the Bilderverbot. One wonders though how the ban itself, if strictly adhered to, would not generate its own unchallengeable authority—that of the revolutionary censor. However, Boer notices two different issues that arise with the use of the ban. The first one is the historicist point that iconoclasm within theology was “deeply political,” situated within a specific geo-political context that would suggest it is a temporary means of critique. The second one being as Boer (2013: 318–320) asks: “is political iconoclasm really possible and viable?… [for] some image always bounces back.” This touches on the point that the ban exists and must exist for Adorno, because if unchecked, the power of myth will run rampant and betray its essential promise, and thus, Adorno presupposes a real power to what he is fighting against. Therefore, what Boer has argued to be the “cunning of myth” throughout the five volumes cannot help but resurface in arguably its most cunning critic in Adorno. But why does some “image” with mythic content “always bounce back”? With reference to Roland Barthes, a semiotician of mythologies, Boer shows how any kind of pursuit of a demythologized world will always already be a “utopian myth” itself. Boer (2013: 107) cites Barthes’ book the Empire of Signs that portrays an “imaginary” Japan where Barthes finds “no master signifier,” “no leftover”—a supposedly “denotative” utopia where there is no “meaning” for which myth or ideology can gain a foothold. However, as Boer (2013: 320) notes, even that utopia would ostensibly fall victim to Adorno’s use of the ban for it would still mobilize myth and the fetish transfer as a result—yet paradoxically, this very ban still “opens up the possibility of precisely such an iconoclastic utopia.”
In this consideration of Adorno, we can see the necessary paradox at the heart of Boer’s overall project. Even in Adorno’s critique of theology and myth there is a “glimpse” of the “possibilities for theology after theological suspicion has done its work” (Boer, 2007: 409). Boer refers to Horkheimer and Adorno’s comment that the “guarantee of salvation lies in the rejection of any belief that would replace it” as hinting at or begging for a theory of grace (cited in Boer, 2007: 432; cf. Horkheimer and Adorno, 1997: 23). However, even though Horkheimer and Adorno here qualify this “salvation” to be gained through “knowledge,” in his later work on Negative Dialectics, Adorno (1973: 207) did explain that the adherence to Bilderverbot was equivalent to a “desire for the resurrection of the flesh” (cf. Adorno in Bloch, 1989: 10). Would this also not be the kind of desire that underlies Boer’s sought-after “materialist theology”? If Boer (2013: 108) is able to sublate the critical and utopian tendencies of Adorno and Bloch, then he may be able to argue that any theological or ideological suspicion anticipates its own means for recovery and materializing. Hence, I can see why Boer would want the expedition towards a materialist theology to continue, following Adorno’s footsteps, but adding a few of his own with respect to ákairos and political grace. Why Adorno feared to enter into such areas and Bloch did not know how one could, is understandable given both of their feet were primarily in the camp of Marxism when it came to making the choice. However, this is what Boer’s series seems to demand of us—the remainder of theology that spontaneously appears after the “materialist turn” is still “the possibility of theology.” Such a point appears to deliberately challenge and even alter the usually linear meanings that have been attached to Marx’s (1975: 245) prediction that in the assumed last instance, the “criticism of theology turns into the criticism of politics.” The “Aufhebung of Religion” requires both aspects of criticism, almost simultaneously, rather than a following from one to the other, then to the endpoint. However, whether there is a truly ground-breaking immanent revolutionary potential to be found by tarrying with the theological and the task of criticism in this way depends still on how much one is a betting or Pascalian kind of revolutionary, and one can only know that by taking that bet. Boer’s wager appears to be: Marxism and theology, yes please!