Schelling as a political thinker

In his Ages of the World Schelling writes: the past is known (gewusst), the present is recognized (erkannt), the future is foreseen (geahndet). Further, he claims that the known is narrated (erzählt), that the recognized is exposed or presented (dargestellt), and that the forseen is foretold. This fragment stems from the “middle Schelling”, between the enthusiast of the French Revolution and Enlightenment and the conservative thinker. The ideas presented in the Ages of the World should be thus read as disenchanted politics seeking for refuge in theology. But can we rephrase his words to restitute the evaporating smell of revolution?

 The past is inherited. It is a virtual patrimony received by our predecessor coming from all corners and times. It can only be accessed by history, by stories, narrations, and testimonies. It includes the history of the oppressed together will all the resources we have to do justice to them and to future generations. It is never exhausted by the present.

The present is the world we can call to interrogate, to appear before a judge. The present is systematically exposed to be examined, especially through its tensions, contradictions and failed expectations. The future can only be strived for. It is our horizon of justice, which can only be accessed in the form of utopia. Utopia is also the space for imagination and ideal variation of the possible. History, criticism and utopia from the indissoluble triad of human collective existence.  

Math is not philosophy

German idealism turned classical logic into a speculative method. Logicism tried to ground speculation in mathematical logic. Structuralism speculated with mathematics. First, with combinatorics and finite mathematics. Later, with analysis and topology. Finally, with set theory. The ultimate question is, however, the expressivity that formal languages grant to philosophical concepts. It is vain to claim that “mathematics” or “logic” is the ultimate structure of reality or ontology. There isn’t a single philosophical issue explicitly formulated in formal languages. There is always a philosophical decision in choosing a formal framework and in assigning philosophical to mathematical concepts. To jump from mathematics to philosophy is an act of self-deceit.

The last attachment

In his Stuttgarter private lessons Schelling writes: “We should abandon (verlassen) everything, not only mother and child as it is said, even God, as a mere being (Seiendes)”. We should now extend this phrase to do justice to its spirit. We should abandon every single concept, not only God, but also Being. Being is not only Heidegger’s but also every philosopher’s last attachment.

Our faith in concepts

Let’s call metaphysics the philosophical confidence in the capacity of concepts to grasp the essence of reality. Metaphysics is a faith in the content and structure of concepts. Metaphysics ends with the change of attention in concepts from their content to their use. What does a concept do? How do they work? Metaphysics returns, however, for praxis occupies the old place that contemplation occupied. The subject displaces the “real”. This is the second end of metaphysics: the deconstruction of both the objective (present in the categories) and the subjective content (the practical dimension, will, desire). Metaphysics returns, however, in the form of self-destruction and self-deprecation. It is acknowledged that metaphysics can be neither embraced nor destroyed. But the real problem for us lies elsewhere. Not in the content, not in the use, but in our expectations about concepts. The weight of concepts lies more in the confidence we have in them than in the content. We can borrow an idea of Indian philosophy: what we exhibit time and again is profound attachment to our concepts.  

Love to hate capitalism

We love to hate capitalism. From this phrase we should emphasize the verb “love”. Indeed, it has become not only fashionable but even a pleasure to condemn capitalism… without even bothering to explain it. Many find the world unbearable, especially because they have lost their will. Not to live, but in general. Now, hating capitalism has become for many the only way to sustain their desire. Hating is preferable to indifference. But this may go even further. We decry consumerism, being bombarded by images, living hooked to all sorts of addictions. We claim that beyond this sphere of demands, there is something like pure will or “desire”. But the truth is that this very world we hate may be the only support we have for our desire. We need to hate capitalism so much. But this is precisely they way in which critics fuel capitalism.

Roger and the (not so magical) jumping beans

Roger and the (not magical) jumping beans

In “Approches de l'imaginaire” Roger Caillois speaks about a letter addressed to André Breton in which he expressed his most profound disagreements with him and the surrealist movement as a hole. The object of dispute was a bunch of Mexican jumping beans.

Breton saw the behavior of the beans as a surrealist event, as an act of magic. The marvel was there, in front of his very eyes. Dreams were more real than the real. Or, even better, dreams were the only real. He showed the beans to Caillois who was as amazed as his friend. However, something very different was happening in each other’s minds. Caillois didn’t feel in front of a miracle. He urged Breton to get a knife and open a bean. He refused to do so, because for him this would entail killing the magic. He knew very well that there was nothing exceptional behind, that opening the beans would lead to unbearable disappointment.

Caillois gets the knife and opens a bean to discover a worm inside. It had been a worm all the time. But in the letter to Breton Caillois declares not being disappointed at all. On the contrary, for him the very fact that worm would dig a hole in a seed to leave in darkness and “jump” incessantly was enough miracle. Breton was a conservative, opposing nature to magic, dreams to reality. He could not see any wonder in everyday existence. This became a catechism for several French theorists.  The world is horrible. There is nothing in it to be saved. Further, it lacks any inner force to transcend itself. Only a God can save us, or some miracle or radical “otherness”.

Breton had to prohibit himself any action that could put dreams at risk. He wanted to dream perpetually. He was not aware that dreams may save us from reality and that reality can save us from self-deceit and even nightmares. In any case, his world was very fragile. And fragile worlds require enormous amounts of energy and force to be kept going. But Caillois was a realist. But real realists grant the real great capacities of invention.

Decolonial biases

Decolonial thought comes after the twilight of Marxism. Or, if we will, is a displacement of the critique of economic to cultural domination. The claim is that modernity, the West, and science were only instruments of colonization. As an alternative, we have to undo history and return to ancient knowledge. We call the conquered societies “originary”.

The conqueror is seen as an all-powerful subject, the real master that continues to rule even after independence movements. He is seen as a homogenous monster that created his culture. On the other side, there is the “other” now speaking as “me”. I was the other, I am the other, and as such, I am the truth of domination. The contingent encounter of different cultures is seen as an ontological event. The conqueror and the conquered as seen as complete and well-defined subjects. In the end, even if a decolonial discourse seems to be about culture, it is about geography, about having been before or after. The truth of the subaltern is granted by his or her mere existence, without any need to speak. He, in turn, has no subalterns, he is pure, absolute victim. We are not asked what we think, but “from where” or “as who”. As black, as woman, as indigenous.

There is nothing more colonial than thinking the conqueror created alone his own culture. There is no “West”. No pure West. Nietzsche, the philologist, knew this very well. He didn’t grant the Greeks great powers of creation (as so many Germans did, from Hegel to Heidegger), but a privileged stomach to digest the cultures around. To create is to process the surrounding cultures. The so-called West is Greek and Roman, but also Persian and Egyptian. It is Christian and Islamic. Its technology is Chinese, its mathematics, Islamic and Indian. And so on… When we say “modernity”, or “West” we are saying also Islam, Hermetism, Zoroastrism. This should help to stop seeing the West as a disease we have to take out of our bodies.

Symmetrically, the same should be said for the conquered. They also built empires, and systems of oppression. The EZLN bravely acknowledged that while critiquing capitalism, machismo was deeply rooted in their communities. They also called for a scientific congress, giving up the simplistic idea that they had a more originary knowledge of the world. Even the world originary is violent as it obscures the fact that every settlement takes place on top of another one. The “first” never exists. We always arrive some time later.

Sor Juana Inés de la Curz, the Mexican nun from the 18th century, offered a more radical decolonial thought. Se said: gods are powerless when no one adores them. They need people that offer them shelter. Gods are foreigners. Christians worship an Eastern god, but they were hospitable with Jesus and Mary. Mexicans worshiped virgin Mary. She was another form of the indigenous God-mother Tonantzin. But virgin Mary, says Sor Juana, is another name for an older goddess, namely, Isis.           

It is impossible to say what belongs purely to Europe and purely to Mesoamerica. And it is also useless. Culture is, as Nietzsche says, a matter of stomach, of ruminating ideas, gods, practices. Some will be vomited. Some will be expelled. Some will be assimilated.

No politics of life

Life is never enough to ground politics. We don’t want life, but good life, just life. We forget very often Aristotle’s view on politics and logos. For him logos allows humans to discern good from evil. Life is a presupposition for politics, but it can never count as bare life. Here we must contradict Dussel. Living labor is not the source of value. It is its presupposition. Labor is always in Marx a social activity. We may speak of modes or ways of living collectively, but this is not immediate corporal life. There is no secret of capital, no exteriority constituting its truth. Marx finds the limits of capital in its contradictions. To proceed otherwise would have meant reintroducing a form of transcendence, something outside the world.     

Vitalism was ruinous for politics, especially after Nietzsche. For him culture was necessarily linked with self-deceit. Morals, the crown of culture, were but a hidden form of domination. There is only life. And life only wants something: to live more. Or, to put it in Spinozist terms, life only wants to persevere in its being. Now, life can be healthy or not. Life wants to live healthy and powerful. There is no other goal for life than increasing its powers. Now, once my powers are not limited from within, they must now vanquish limitations coming from outside. The others are my enemies, a risk for my life. Collective life must be a constant struggle for domination. But since culture is always based on some form of community, it is ipso facto a form of lie that decreases the powers of life. And since social powers are objective, grounded in institutions and practices, nobody can really escape. The individual is powerless… unless he manages to rule from above the world, as an existential prince. This is the Übermensch, the existential hero. He lives in society, he obeys the law, but deep inside he knows everything is a lie. He knows everything, because he knows there is nothing to know. Every night he goes to bed knowing he is the only aristocrat of spirit, capable of enduring the lack of meaning of life. He destroys the world in his head, allowing it to exist deprived of legitimacy and truth. This is breve individual affirming his or her life in isolation.  

The magnificent Deleuzian-Guattarian conceptual forest inherits Nietzsche’s life heroism. The follow his genealogy of morals and create their own version of the timeless hero called Übermensch. Unlike Aristotle and his politics, Nietzsche and his heirs claim to be beyond good and evil. How can politics be grounded without this elementary ethical stance? More or less power for life is not a question of politics. Unless we destroy the egalitarian aim of politics and reduce it to the sheer exercise of power and domination.  

The absolute other or just another one?

Contemporary left politics stems mostly from self-deprecation. The idolatry of the “other” is most of the times a sign of guilt and nausea against oneself. The political Right saw this clearly and turned itself into a spiritual liberator. The left used planet pollution to present humanity as a despicable species. It didn’t only make the “ego” and “subjectivity” responsible for wars and oppression, it turned into a despicable formation, calling for disintegration. Culture was not seen as inextricably bound to barbarism, but identical to it. The other was only instrumentalized to allow the West to process its guilt. The political right just denied everything: there is no climate change, there is no exploitation, there is no barbarism, there is no sexism or xenophobia. Just be a jerk, it’s ok, no guilt.

If we take the other seriously, it cannot be reduced to “absolute otherness”. Absolute otherness is the name for something that never reaches us, some mystery beyond our scope. But distance is never dangerous but proximity. Otherness is ambiguous. The neighbor might be more distant to you than someone coming from afar. The first crime in the Bible is fratricide. Cain kills his brother because he cannot understand how different they are before the eyes of God. So far, so close. So close, so far. When Spaniards arrived to America for the first time they were not confronted with simple, inexplicable otherness. They were amazed that humans could have flourished under different gods. This is why after intense discussions they were granted humanity, but at the same time, they were considerer inferior for lacking the word of the Christian world. They had another human in front, another creature of God, and yet… This “and yet” summarized the whole political problem of otherness.

Althusser’s materialism of the encounter

In Althusser materialism came to be synonymous with chance. Materialism means for him the absence of any rules governing the world and its coming to be by pure accident. This materialism was supposed to counter idealism and above all its theological form. The world has no logos, no justification, no teleology. It just simply is. And yet, Althusser does not contempt with the pure facticity of the world. He travels, like Heidegger, to the night of the origins to confirm that, in effect, there is nothing there. It resembles a skeptical spectator in a magic show confirming that the hat is empty. But what follows is a real act of magic: suddenly, there is the world. But wait, some will say, this is not Althusser!  

Let’s start with the rain, like him. It is raining. Atoms fall in parallel movements in the void. All the materials for the world are there. But in a sterile manner. Nothing happens. Everything remains the same. Suddenly, something happens. By no reason, an atom deviates from its trivial trajectory and collides with another atom. Then magic happens. From this encounter a cascade of effects is unleashed. Atoms meet each other and start creating relationships, “molecules”, we could say until yes, in the end, there is a world.

Althusser claims there is secret and repressed tradition in philosophy, leading from Epicurus to Heidegger: that of the materialism of the encounter. This is the story of how a world came to be out of the void, for no reason. It is a story of the beginning, like in classical metaphysics. But this time there is no God, no logos, no order.

Althusser hated Schelling, like most Marxists. The late figure of German idealism was seen as a reactionary. Yet, Schelling fits perfectly his secret story of materialism. In his middle period, including the Freiheitsschrift and the Ages of the world Schelling defended that idea that God created the world for no reason. There was also, since the very beginning, a nature in God. The originary God-nature is trapped in an eternal cycle of creation and destruction, where nothing can emerge. Suddenly, some happens and for no reason, God creates the world. Schelling also cuts off theology from his theogony. There is no theodicy governing history.

Probably Althusser never read anything of Schelling. But he would have seen that Schelling and his own materialism do not lead to atheism. On the contrary, it provides theology with a new basis. No real faith is possible where there is no separation between God and the creation. However, for Schelling the arbitrariness and contingency of the world and its order don’t say a single word about matter, but about God and the absolute origins. To understand the material world requires a philosophy of matter, which in turn can only be addressed by a philosophy of nature. Matter, energy, information, individuation, system, order, chaos, emergence… These are the concepts materialism demands.    

To begin with, Althusser does not start with a real void. Everything exists already. Atoms are there. And since they move, there is already time and space. And since atoms can associate with each other after the original deviation, they must possess already qualities that allow them to bond. Otherwise, they would just bounce, without any consequences. In truth every atomism comes too late to the spectacle of origin. They are already constituted individuals, monads, existing from eternity but themselves, independent of any relationship. Relationships come later. First, there are the prime elements. But where do they come from? They must be eternal, perfect and self-subsistent, i.e. individual substances. Finaly, the clinamen, the infinitesimal deviation in an atoms trajectory, is but a poor explanation of the complex phenomenon of emergence. Chance is most of the time sterile and impotent. It brings about the most probable arrangement of particles, the most probable combinations of a system. We call it entropy. Chance is productive only where there is some previous structure, where there are already tendencies, asymmetry. Dice are trivial, except when we use them in board games, where they can have different consequences.

Schelling is, despite his theological and conservative stance, more materialist than Althusser as he attempted a philosophy of nature, involving change, chance, duration, self-formation of matter. Matter can only be studied in history, through its formations and transformations, not in the night of origins. Origins are only beginnings, not the full development of Being through beings. The other path for a materialism of the encounter, a promising idea indeed, if offered by Simondon. Contrary to a dominant tradition in the 20th century, Simondon refused atomism, He started with the relationship. Clinamen was unnecessary as the single unleashing event, since everything is changing constantly. AND does not mutate once, but constantly. We may assume that the clinamen, another name for the “event” must happen not once, but many times in the already constituted world. As it interrupts its very order, it must be regarded as a miracle. But if we assure that matter is in tension, constantly changing and creating new forms, the void, the atoms and the clinamen are rendered useless.

But let’s not through the baby with the dirty water. The idea of introducing the “encounter” in materialism is potent. It speaks of horizontal associations, while history and development are always vertical. It does justice to space and not only to history. It makes possible stories of association of beings, without having to speak of their origins. The biologist and mathematician Stewart Kaufmann offers a beautiful example of a materialism of the encounter working in evolution, that would do justice to Althusser’s intuition. Imagine a rock. It has certain temperature, hardness, and morphology. All these are its qualities and can be explained by mechanical means. Now imagine a spider, coming from a completely different evolution path. Now, the spider finds the rock and makes a nest in one of its holes. The association rock-spider turns into a biological niche and affects the life and development of the spider. Soon, more spiders move to other rocks. The life of the species has changed. The individual history of spiders and rocks is a presupposition but is not the real event. The event is the encounter that makes a new association possible. Margulis’ theory of the mitochondria and the innumerable examples of parasitism, and symbiosis provide a vast universe of examples.

Spinoza: the invented materialist

Spinoza was summoned in 20th century to kill the Hegelian demon infecting Marx. It was also used to provide the latter with a new precursor. And thus Spinoza the materialist protomarxist was born. Concepts like substance, immanence or multitude have been used for leftist politics. However, his whole system of deduction and demonstration, that makes him a magnificent representant of rationalism, was simply wiped out. The same happened in Western Marxism: dialectic was seen as too Hegelian to be truly revolutionary. The problem is that in both cases the argumentative element was erased leaving beautiful but arbitrary images of matter, society and revolution.

Žižek, the liberal

Some years ago (2016), Žižek claimed that Trump was a centrist liberal, but used racism and sexism to cover it:  

 “Trump is a paradox: he is really a centrist liberal, and maybe even in his economic policies closer to the Democrats, and he desperately tries to mask this. So the function of all of these dirty jokes and stupidities is to cover up that he is really a pretty ordinary, centrist politician”. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/28/slavoj-zizek-donald-trump-is-really-a-centrist-liberal

 But what if Žižek was receiving his own inverted message as Lacan said? What if Žižek’s declared communism and Leninism is but a mask to cover the fact that HE is the liberal one?

Marx’s collapse of idealism

Marx’s work is construed on one of the poorest readings of classical German philosophy, specially of Hegel. Marx’s genius can’t be overstated. He offered the most systematic and lucid explanation of the capitalist mode of production. Yet, the worst way to understand Marx and his contributions is to think of an “inversion of Hegel”. Marx wrote in a prologue to Das Kapital that he “flirted” with Hegel’s dialectics but used him in a properly materialistic way. He was thus conduced to invert Hegel to put his feet on earth. Nothing is more diffuse in Marx than the distinction between the real and the ideal. Hegel, Schelling and Fichte were infinitely more subtle and nuanced in this respect. They never denied corporality, material existence or reality. They never denied praxis and transformation of reality. Quite on the contrary the two central concepts of German classical philosophy are precisely praxis (Tätigkeit) and effective reality (Wirklichkeit). Marx’s materiality is almost synonymous with Wirklichkeit.  The latter meant the concrete, historical and collective existence of humanity. Marx’s materiality is also found in the concrete historical organization of humanity and cannot be with nature, mechanistic reality or some metaphysical concept of matter. The early recourse to the body and the sensible under the influence of Feuerbach had to be dropped by Marx in his mature oeuvre. It is also wrong to confuse empirical consciousness with self-consciousness as such. In classical German philosophy the task of thought consisted in allowing the contingent and empirical subject to understand his own unconscious history. This is why history is never that of consciousness and its contents, but the process of becoming aware, of becoming self-conscious. This cannot be directly lived. It has to be reconstructed. The reconstruction is called “system”. The system serves the understanding our own times. The task of philosophy is to understand the present times in light of their historical development.

The operation Marx applied to Hegel’s system was not inversion but collapse. Hegel had a name for Marx’s social materiality: objective spirit. Hegel’s system is divided into three broad domains: logic, philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit. They correspond roughly to the conceptual articulation of the world, nature and social life. Philosophy of spirit is divided into subjective, objective and absolute spirit. The first is a sort of anthropology. The second is the proper social domain including family, civil society and state. This is the world of law, labor, and private contracts. It is not by chance that Marx focused his criticism in Hegel’s philosophy of right. Absolute spirit includes art, religion and philosophy.

Now, while Hegel offered a stratified system, Marx intentionally collapsed the system into objective spirit. Hegels metaphysical logic was transformed into the logic of capital. Philosophy of nature lost its relative autonomy and was incorporated to the human process of production as its absolute presupposition. Finally, subjective spirit was dropped, while absolute spirit was interpreted as ideology. Only the thin layer of objective spirit survived. But, as we have seen, the system (logic and nature) is far from disappearing. It remerges but within the absolute ground of objective spiri

Heidegger’s McGuffin

Being and Time is an extraordinary work of phenomenology. Husserlian ego is displaced by Heidegger’s Dasein and the noematic content is transformed into a world around us. The theoretical subjectivity of phenomenology descends to earth. Originally lost in an impersonal world, it is confronted with death to gain an existence facing its deepest possibilities of being. The text is clear and systematic. Yet, it starts with seven paragraphs that promise a new ontology opened up by a new a radical question: “the meaning of Being” (die Frage nach dem Sinn des Seins). The phenomenological and hermeneutical analyses fall short in offering a new ontology. Being and Time was very well received as a work of phenomenology, as a new transcendentalism, as philosophical anthropology, as the universalization of hermeneutics, etc., not as a new ontology. Heidegger claimed, however, that the only question he cared about was that of being, and that Being and Time was a relatively failed attempt.

Being is the pedal note of Heidegger’s work. From Dasein’s access to the question of Being, to the posterior history of Being, and finally to poetic language as the shepherd of Being, Heidegger’s always revolved around ontology. But not only did he fail to provide an ontology; he insisted that we were not mature enough to even raise the question. We were too early for Being and too late for God. He understood his work as prolegomena to the real issue at stake.

Alfred Hitchcok coined the term McGuffin to describe mysterious objects inserted in a plot to motivate the characters, but which were devoid of all meaning. It could be a letter, a box, a secret. The object in itself was unimportant or even empty but played the role of the most extraordinary thing. It was like the holy grail. Lacan recognized the same recourse in Poe’s The Purloined Letter. A complicated triangle of power and deception develops around a secret letter, whose content could sink the very king. We ignore the content of the letter; but also the characters of the short story. The oblivion of Being is like the purloined letter and Hitchcock’s McGuffin. Nobody knows what was lost, nor what could be recovered, it is devoid of all content, but it motivates the development of a great philosophical story called “the history of metaphysics”.

Derrida and Hayek

In The Communist Postscript Borys Groys presents a provocative thesis. Derrida’s philosophy explains without knowing the phantasy of the free market economists.

The notions of subjective ignorance, autonomy of the market, i.e. its infinite play, and the non-existence of a transcendental instance are central to Hayek. For him the market constitutes the absolute instance, an anonymous space in which all social interactions take place without any command or subjective knowledge. The market is also understood as a formal system of information. Prices carry local information into the big field of the market. Now, prices are neither right nor wrong. They are signifiers determined by other prices. This constitutes an infinite play of offer and demand. The State is seen as an illusion, an institution that intervenes the market from the outside based on claims of knowledge. But neither the State nor individuals can know anything. Because this game is not biased and cannot be mastered, winners and losers are only temporary, accidents of the movement of the market. The market is “open” because peaks and valleys cancel each other. Wins and loses are always temporal.

Now, Derrida claims that the ultimate philosophical field is not subjective. It is “writing”, a system of signs that determine reciprocally. The phenomenological subject is actually tied to the game of signs. The term sign is retained as is points towards a system of differences, but it does not require a meaning or a meaning. There is nothing to know behind signs. We don’t play with them but are played by them. There is no transcendental signifier that can stop or control the play of signs from some outside. This movement can be called “différance”. In later texts Derrida claims that différance and play are other names for justice, because there are no subjective powers to control it, and what it gives will also be taken away. The play of signs produces and destroys meaning at the same time.

Paul, our saint

Freud, Nietzsche and Marx, the big atheists that shaped 20th century culture are nothing compared to the powers of St. Paul. He provided contemporary philosophy with the model of subjectivity par excellence. Heidegger was the most influential philosopher in the past century. His most important work was undoubtedly Being and Time. It was an attempt to ground ontology in the transcendental structure of subjectivity. But unlike Kant, the transcendental subject would have no categories at hand, no pure concepts to apprehend being. The only category Heidegger retained was possibility. The concept of time as openness fitted well the exigences of radical possibility. This transcendental subjectivity was called “Dasein”, concrete existence, the hic et nunc of Being. Being was reduced to appearance, appearance to understanding (verstehen). Ontology was no longer a question on Beingm but its meaning (Sinn des Seins). Of course, only Dasein is capable of understanding. But understanding is nothing but self-relation, self-understanding of our possibilities of existence.

Now, where does Dasein come from? Heidegger’s early lessons on phenomenology of religion examined the figure of St. Paul. His reading was highly influenced by Kierkegaard. For him God leaves the objective world to dwell in the spirit. Now, God is reached only by a leap of faith, a salto mortale beyond knowledge and the world. St Paul offered the model for such a transformation of spirit. Heidegger’s Dasein retains key features of Kierkegaard’s Paul. Paul is the subjective hero para excellence, more potent that Nietzsche’s Übermensch or Marx’s proletariat. Paul was also the central figure for the political theology of Benjamin (messianism), Taubes and Schmitt. Finally, Badiou had the courage to acknowledge that contemporary philosophy was a philosophy of the subject, modelled by the figure of St. Paul. Politics was thus explained through revelation, faith, conversion and practice. Revelation was called “event”. Faith was called subjectivation. Practice was called militance. From left to right, from existentialism to Marxism, St. Paul was the saint of saints. Our saint.

The subject of psychoanalysis is the subject of capitalism

The subject of Lacanian psychoanalysis is the subject of domination. In other words, Lacan elaborated a philosophical anthropology on the basis of the exploited subject. His model of subjectivity was the master-slave (Herr-Knechtschaft) dialectic found in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. But for Hegel such a moment in the system corresponded to a social relationship involving two subjectivities (two Selbstbesutssein), where the asymmetrical relationship leading to domination could be sublated. For Lacan, on the contrary, the master position was assigned to impersonal social order and the slave position to the subject. The subject is ontologically a slave. There is however a small chance for emancipation, capture in Lacan’s “ethics of psychoanalysis”: be faithful to your own desire, even if that leads to self-destruction and a radical confrontation with society. But this is capitalism’s promise: to save yourself through desire against the homogenizing powers of society, while at the same time it is this very society which urges you to do so.

Badiou’s left Heideggerianism

Badiou’s philosophy is left Heideggerianism. “Revolution” corresponds to the “event” which constitutes authentic existence (Eigentlichkeit). The world is regularly sunk in improperness (Uneigentlichkeit). This is assimilated to ideology and “knowledge” (savoir). This has nothing to do with Marxism as the revolution of the means or production of the world, or social relationships. Marx aspired to criticism of economy (the social system) and economics (the ideological exposition -Darstellung- of economy). Like Hegel, Marx aspired to knowledge (Wissenschaft). Militance, conviction and personal desire correspond to the limited sphere of individuality and subjective immediacy. The real political test takes place where positions are confronted. The ideological prerequisite for revolution is not “deconstruction” but critique, i.e. arguing in the element of knowledge and with the terms of the adversary. Inventing new terms blurs the analysis of society. Demanding some “exteriority” to knowledge leads directly to arbitrariness and irrationality.

Cultural Marxism

Cultural Marxism never existed. So-called cultural Marxism was actually anti-Marxist. We associate the term with liberal cultural criticism starting in the 60’s. Their enemy was not capitalism, but repression, fascism, and totalitarianism. Capitalism was addressed only as it involved totalitarian elements. In this sense, Soviet communism was but another example of authoritarian rule. The main inspiration for these movements were Heidegger and Nietzsche, two conservatives. It isn’t easy to explain why this left and postmodernism in general were so close to right-winged thinkers. In any case both were openly hostile to Marxism.