Red Theology

Being Christian (and, worse, being an American Christian) does not prevent one from succumbing to politically tendentious mythologies and stupid ideas, including the claims that capitalism is reconcilable with Christianity, and socialism and communism are inherently opposed to it. A new book upends many of those silly assumptions: Roland Boer, Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition  (Haymarket, 2020), 294pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

In Red Theology: On the Christian Communist Tradition, Roland Boer presents key moments in the 2,000 year tradition of Christian communism. Defined by the two features of alternative communal practice and occasional revolutionary action, Christian communism is predicated on profound criticism of the way of the world. The book begins with Karl Kautsky―the leading thinker of second-generation Marxism―and his oft-ignored identification of this tradition. From there, it offers a series of case studies that deal with European instances, the Russian Revolution, and to East Asia. Here we find the emergence of Christian communism not only in China, but also in North Korea. This book will be a vital resource for scholars and students of religion and the many aspects of socialist tradition.

The Gods of the Marketplace

I was, to be honest, a little amazed to learn that Harvey Cox is still alive, lazily assuming that anyone whose first big book was published in the 1960s must have died some time ago. But he's not just alive, but set next month to release a paperback edition of The Market as God (Harvard University Press, 2019), 320pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The Market has deified itself, according to Harvey Cox’s brilliant exegesis. And all of the world’s problems—widening inequality, a rapidly warming planet, the injustices of global poverty—are consequently harder to solve. Only by tracing how the Market reached its “divine” status can we hope to restore it to its proper place as servant of humanity.

The Market as God captures how our world has fallen in thrall to the business theology of supply and demand. According to its acolytes, the Market is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. It knows the value of everything, and determines the outcome of every transaction; it can raise nations and ruin households, and nothing escapes its reductionist commodification. The Market comes complete with its own doctrines, prophets, and evangelical zeal to convert the world to its way of life. Cox brings that theology out of the shadows, demonstrating that the way the world economy operates is neither natural nor inevitable but shaped by a global system of values and symbols that can be best understood as a religion.

Drawing on biblical sources, economists and financial experts, prehistoric religions, Greek mythology, historical patterns, and the work of natural and social scientists, Cox points to many parallels between the development of Christianity and the Market economy. At various times in history, both have garnered enormous wealth and displayed pompous behavior. Both have experienced the corruption of power. However, what the religious have learned over the millennia, sometimes at great cost, still eludes the Market faithful: humility.

Cox is of course a Protestant, and I hope it will not be taken as an ecumenical felicity if I mention that I shall read his book second. I will do so after I have read The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity by Eugene McCarraher, a Catholic scholar and writer of singular insight whom I have often cited since discovering him a few years back.

McCarraher's big book of 816 pages, is also published by Harvard UP, and released this week. About it the publisher tells us this:

Far from displacing religions, as has been supposed, capitalism became one, with money as its deity. Eugene McCarraher reveals how mammon ensnared us and how we can find a more humane, sacramental way of being in the world.

If socialists and Wall Street bankers can agree on anything, it is the extreme rationalism of capital. At least since Max Weber, capitalism has been understood as part of the “disenchantment” of the world, stripping material objects and social relations of their mystery and sacredness. Ignoring the motive force of the spirit, capitalism rejects the awe-inspiring divine for the economics of supply and demand.

Eugene McCarraher challenges this conventional view. Capitalism, he argues, is full of sacrament, whether or not it is acknowledged. Capitalist enchantment first flowered in the fields and factories of England and was brought to America by Puritans and evangelicals whose doctrine made ample room for industry and profit. Later, the corporation was mystically animated with human personhood, to preside over the Fordist endeavor to build a heavenly city of mechanized production and communion. By the twenty-first century, capitalism has become thoroughly enchanted by the neoliberal deification of “the market.”

Informed by cultural history and theology as well as economics, management theory, and marketing, The Enchantments of Mammon looks not to Marx and progressivism but to nineteenth-century Romantics for salvation. The Romantic imagination favors craft, the commons, and sensitivity to natural wonder. It promotes labor that, for the sake of the person, combines reason, creativity, and mutual aid. In this impassioned challenge, McCarraher makes the case that capitalism has hijacked and redirected our intrinsic longing for divinity—and urges us to break its hold on our souls.

AngloArabia

If, like me, you have long wondered (i) how and why North American and British governments all maintain that the Saudis are our "closest ally" and no horrors--executing gays and journalists, denying women drivers' licenses, treating their Philippine domestics like dirt, and of course permitting no churches anywhere in their bogus kingdom--they brazenly and constantly commit in full view of the world can dislodge them from such exalted status and (ii) why this status persists when the US, Canada, and the UK are virtually energy-independent and no longer reliant on Middle Eastern oil in any significant degree, then Tom Stevenson's essay in the 9 May 2019 issue of the London Review of Books makes for fascinating reading. It is a review essay discussing David Wearing's new book AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain (Polity, 2018), 275pp.

Stevenson begins by showing that the policy of the UK and later the US since the interwar period has been to maintain such a close relationship as a means of controlling much of the rest of the world that is dependent on Saudi and more broadly Middle Eastern oil--China, Japan, and the rest of Asia above all, but also parts of Europe.

Stevenson quote Gordon Merriam of the US State Department in 1945 who plainly admitted that Saudi oilfields were above all a "stupendous source of strategic power," which power the UK and US have exploited to their advantage against the aforementioned others. But there's more.

There is, Stevenson reports, the military codependency which exists between the Saudis (and others) and the US and UK. In fact, many current heads of state in the region (Jordan, Bahrain, Oman, Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Qatar) are graduates of Sandhurst, which is of course the leading English military academy. And all of them buy billions of arms from the US and UK, and never more so than in the last two years. So the Saudis are armed by the West, allowing them to kill over 75,000 people in Yemen. And the UK and US both maintain massive military presence in the region, on land and at sea, all of this reinforcing to the rest of the world that if you want the region's oil you will only get it if this superpower and her mistress ("special relationship" indeed!) let you.

There is also the monetary codependency, and here is where things get really interesting if you believe, as I do thanks to Benjamin Fong's insights (some of them discussed here), that advanced capitalism is not only not a "secular" system of exchange, but a religious cult of far-reaching and almost exclusive psychic control dependent on total and blind faith not in gods but in commodities. Stevenson notes that "around a fifth" of UK current account debts are underwritten by Saudi Arabia.

But for both the US and UK, it is oil that is the new talisman, the new idol, the new gold standard. In 1974, Stevenson reports, when the US abandoned the gold standard, its Treasury secretary was on a secret flight the next day to Saudi Arabia "to secure an agreement that remains to this day the foundation of the dollar's global dominance" (a point documented in David Spiro's 1999 book The Hidden Hand of American Hegemony).

That agreement, Stevenson says, guaranteed Saudi and Gulf security (including against their own people, whose periodic attempts at rebellion are put down by police and military forces trained by the British and using British equipment, and often in the presence of British military attachés) provided that the region's oil sales were used to prop up the dollar. As a result, "a de facto oil standard replaced gold."

Well do I remember the American evangelical picketers outside our worship tent in Canberra in 1991 at the seventh general assembly of the World Council of Churches, denouncing us for "syncretism" and proclaiming the imminent arrival of "one world religion" to do the devil's bidding. But the WCC could not pull that off in 1991, for the US-UK-SA alliance, and through them the rest of the globe, had already shown that being Muslim, as Saudi Arabia is, or Christian as the UK and US try to claim, always inexorably gives way to the one true religion of us all: oil.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41

The venerable London Review of Books recently tempted me to subscribe with one of those sharply discounted promos that as a half-Scot I am constitutionally incapable of resisting. So now every two weeks a lovely treat arrives chez moi full of fascinating reviews, essays, and short notices. (I am just old enough to have grown up on the eve of the digital revolution, and therefore still prefer newspapers and reviews like this in print, but the print subscription gives me access to their on-line archives, too, which is a bonus.)

Part of the reason for having this blog in the first place was to share word of new books in one area--Eastern Christianity--so if, from time to time, I post some ad hoc, unsystematic notes on what I've been reading in the newest LRB it is for the same reason--viz., so that you, too, may benefit from what I've been reading of recent reviews of books across a wide array of subjects. Sometimes these reviews are so comprehensive and skillfully done that I think "Right. I don't need to read anything more." But other times, of course, one is tempted to order the book and read the whole thing oneself.

Volume 41, dated 21 March 2019, is a goldmine of things, including an essay by Madawi Al-Rasheed on the perpetual lies, corruption, despotism, and tyranny of Saudi Arabia, a regime of whose horrors no conscious person should require convincing--unless, that is, you are a part of, e.g., the US government under any and every president and party.

Michael Kulikowski, an historian at Penn State, has a long and fascinating discussion of The Codex of Justinian, trans. Fred. H. Blume and ed. Bruce W. Frier, 3 vols. (Cambridge UP, 2016), 2963pp.

The size, and cost, of this enormous collection would likely limit it to academic libraries, or private libraries of exceptional means, but the influence of the Codex is still considerable even today.

Kulikowski, however, is--as I have been seeing for a decade now among academic historians, especially of antique or medieval Christianity, when they stumble into trying to understand, much less describe, anything theological--utterly unreliable and embarrassingly so when he attempts to sum up the theological debates of the fifth century by saying that "the central controversy was Christological: did father and son [sic] have two different natures in one indivisible divine person, or was their nature single and indivisible." All such questions are quickly dismissed as "hair-splitting" and "baroque episcopal politics...[and] contorted sectarian tractates," which tells us everything we need to know of the ignorance and snobbery of Kulikowski and nothing of the debates themselves. (To be fair, in a letter to the editor in the next issue, Kulikowski, tail firmly between his legs, corrects the error with enough overcompensating bluster as to suggest he's desperately trying to show he really does understand basic theology, or at least convince himself that he does.)

Michael Wood lavishly studs his review of The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht, trans. and ed. by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine (Norton, 2018, 1286pp.) with many excerpts of those poems, to great effect. I have only read a bit of Brecht, but this collection really does make me want to read more.

I think the most interesting review in this issue is Rosemary Hill's. She discusses Desmond Fitz-Gibbon, Marketable Values: Inventing the Property Market in Modern Britain (University of Chicago Press, 2018), 240pp.

I find all such recent works in a range of areas fascinating because I am increasingly convinced of two things: first, our images of, and from, "history" are as much a product of current politics and unconscious desires as anything; and second because a book like this merely illustrates something that others more interesting and intelligent than I--Zizek, Todd McGowan, Terry Eagleton, inter alia--have been arguing for some time: the basic practices and beliefs of so-called free-market capitalism are recondite mysteries and simulacra more properly classified as "religion" requiring a level of faith that makes believing in the hypostatic union easy.

When you think of how highly regulated, and litigated, questions of "property" are today, and all the complexities and intricacies of stock markets, bonds, debts, and the international market in the same, it will astonish you to read Fitz-Gibbon's book about the slap-dash way in which so much of this developed in the United Kingdom, and so recently, too: he notes that in some parts of England there was no agreed upon land registry until as late as 1991.

Michele Pridmore-Brown's review of Edith Sheffer, Asperger's Children: the Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna (Norton, 2018), 316pp. is, not surprisingly, very sobering reading when she describes the horrifying practices of this period.

I have fond memories of my time in that Habsburg capital in 2016, not least my pilgrimage to our father among the saints, Sigmund of Vienna's house at Bergasse 19. But I knew, of course, of the dark shadows hanging over Vienna after the Anschluss, whose effects Freud and his immediately family only barely managed to escape--those harrowing days are well covered in any number of books, including all his biographers; and, in a particular way, the study of Mark Edmundson and the book by Freud's last physician Max Schur.

But I was only vaguely aware of the sinister "medical" and "scientific" experiments going on in Austria in the antebellum period (from 1934 onward). Sheffer's book, according to Pridmore-Brown's review, relays all kinds of horrifying details about the career of Hans Asperger and others around him, who often condemned children to their deaths--while also managing to help some of them. His sounds like a truly complex life.

Beyond the political horrors of the period, the review and book both raise good questions about the politics of "science" which we must always keep before us. Those who claim, as I regularly hear from students and others, that they "don't believe in God because I believe in 'science.'" utter fatuous nonsense, of course, but it seems that they--and too many of us--fail to realize that "science" is not infrequently gratuitously invested with un-challengeable deified authority to dispatch people because of perceived "defects," whether mental or physical. That should make our blood run cold as we realize that too often "science" is just an idol whose politics of devotion requires the destruction of thousands of children for what Asperger and others called "Gemüt poverty"--soul poverty.

In this light, and to conclude, let me note that news is emerging of Jean Vanier's move into palliative care at the end of his long and extraordinary life caring for precisely those kinds of "defective" kids and adults dispatched by Nazi doctors with that banal and ruthless efficiency so well documented by Lifton, Arendt, and others.

Vanier's life stands as an eloquent rebuke to all this, which is surely part of the reason for him being given the Templeton Prize in 2015, as noted here.

I first heard Vanier on CBC radio in the 1990s when his Massey Lectures were broadcast. You can listen to some of that here, but the Ideas website has many links to many broadcasts with him over the years, all of them worth your time. And of course his many books may be found here, including a new one I noted here just last month.

Can Christians Escape Capitalism? Do They Want To?

D. Stephen Long's discussion of Devin Singh's new book Divine Currency: The Theological Power of Money in the West (Stanford UP, 2018), 296pp. is found in the 15 February 2019 issue of Marginalia. He notes early in his review that "There seems to be no challenge to the distorting effects of capitalism available to theologians. There is only the flow of power through a theopolitical-economy, and we theologians cannot do much more than unmask it." That is very much my own frustration as well, as I noted, e.g., here in discussing the very insightful books of Todd McGowan. (Long's argument also bears close resemblance to MacIntyre's point, now nearly forty years old and coming in his discussion of Yeats' poetry as political philosophy, that there is no longer left to us any coherent political imagination outside the modern nation-state--or outside capitalism.)

It is not for want of trying to criticize capitalism, however, at least among theologians of the last three decades or so. Long begins by noting that Singh's is a critique advanced in part by some before him, most notably John Milbank and William Cavanaugh, as well as Daniel Bell, and before them all Dorothy Day's companion Peter Maurin.

Long does not mention--but I often have--the role that Alasdair MacIntyre plays in influencing Milbank, Cavanaugh, and many others. MacIntyre clearly had Day in mind when he argued that

Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities.

From here, Singh's book gets a good deal more complicated, and, according to Long's review, rather less than convincing. it seems the rage today--and among Christians, or at least concerning Christian topics this is especially true--to engage in these grand efforts at intellectual genealogy, as though that proves, much less solves, anything. I suspect my inner Freudian is impatient with these efforts because remembering is only one part of the triad--where is the repeating leading to working through? I suspect even more strongly my impatience is (Jordan Peterson call your office!) a result of being totally in agreement with Marx's eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

In any event, about Singh's book the publisher tells us this:

This book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West. Examining the religious and theological sources of money's power, it shows how early Christian thinkers borrowed ancient notions of money and economic exchange from the Roman Empire as a basis for their new theological arguments. Monetary metaphors and images, including the minting of coins and debt slavery, provided frameworks for theologians to explain what happens in salvation. God became an economic administrator, for instance, and Christ functioned as a currency to purchase humanity's freedom. Such ideas, in turn, provided models for pastors and Christian emperors as they oversaw both resources and people, which led to new economic conceptions of state administration of populations and conferred a godly aura on the use of money. Divine Currency argues that this longstanding association of money with divine activity has contributed over the centuries to money's ever increasing significance, justifying various forms of politics that manage citizens along the way. Devin Singh's account sheds unexpected light on why we live in a world where nothing seems immune from the price mechanism.

Capitalism and its Deceitful Pseudo-Eschatology

I previously discussed in detail an earlier book by Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have, which is an extremely insightful and helpful book and has much of the same apophatic-ascetic wisdom of Adam Phillips, as I have been suggesting for some time. Both Phillips and McGowan have a great deal to offer Eastern and other Christians.

Now I have finally had a chance to read his more recent book, Capitalism and Desire: the Psychic Costs of Free Markets (Columbia University Press, 2016), 304pp.

I have been investing (!) this time in figures such as Phillips, Fong, and McGowan because of an inchoate but increasing sense that too much of Christianity, especially in North America, has been infiltrated and corrupted by market ideas and practices in ways most Christians are not consciously aware of. In some cases, of course, this is obvious--indeed, it is the most obvious feature of such blatant shysters as, say, Joel Osteen or Creflo Dollar.

But the real danger lies elsewhere. The real danger comes when capitalist influences on Christian belief and practice are unrecognized; worse still, when their recognition is resisted because it would upset too many apple carts, that is, profit margins and comfortable, quiet middle-class lives. The real danger is assuming that Christian desires are uninfluenced by capitalism, a point I learned from Alasdair MacIntyre, as I showed here.

Like MacIntyre, I do not have answers as to what we do with all this. If a man of his vast erudition and learning, with his reading in Marx and a thousand other sources ancient and modern, says we still have to figure out ways beyond advanced capitalism, then I can but nod my head in agreement and hope that he and others smarter than I will continue to push forward in search of a new pathway--which includes, just to be clear, in no way attempting to re-create the genocidal atrocities and daily brutalities of "Kruschev Enterprises Inc."

But in the meantime, my little piece of the puzzle came several years ago in teaching my class on Catholic social teaching and realizing that there was an increasing tendency to elide any differences between CST and advanced capitalism in this country, making it appear that the former could become a useful form of the latter. In this approach, something like, say, recycling or paying your employees a just wage was simply "good business sense." Do the right thing and rake in handsome profits! What's not to love about that?

And, indeed, if Christian virtue operated thus, we'd all be billionaires. But Christian and especially Catholic social teaching is much more radical than this, and many of its most outstanding models are incomprehensible in the categories of capitalism. There's no money to be made in tending dying lepers on obscure islands; no amount of "branding" can "monetize" ministry with gay male prostitutes on the streets of Chicago; nobody can read Dorothy Day (or her Canadian counterpart and contemporary Catherine Doherty) and think she was in favor of the militarism and capitalism of her day and ours--and what a pity that her Catholic Worker houses didn't enter into a partnership with Starbucks to help each other out since bad coffee was so often a lament in her diaries.

In this regard, we are witnessing the transformation of CST into Costco. Sure they have a reputation for good hours and wages, and lots of "hipsters" appear to work there, but they are still a capitalist corporation catering to an elite. There is more than a whiff of upper-class elitism among those Catholics who think there can be some kind of "seamless garment" between CST and American capitalism. It is precisely their failure (or unwillingness, whether conscious or not) to see the corruption of desires already within the Christian mind that alarms me. Hence I find McGowan--who is otherwise both uninformed about and unduly critical of much of what he takes to be Christianity--actually very helpful, not least when he delivers himself of reflections such as this: "under capitalism Christianity becomes a romance comedy that ends with the discovery of one's soul mate in Christ," the right spouse being, of course, just one more commodity to find and acquire via that legal contract we call marriage.

That line comes near the very end of McGowan's newest book. McGowan, who teaches at the University of Vermont, starts out by facing a question I have long considered: can a method pioneered in an individual-clinical setting be applied to a social-economic one? In Civilizations and its Discontents and other works of his last period (1921-39) Freud recognized the dangers of this, if not its impossibility. But still he pressed on and with good reason. And McGowan says that if we cannot psychoanalyze the underlying dynamics of capitalism, then we allow it to continue unchecked in its dubious claim that capitalism is merely an outgrowth of "human nature" and we thus have no space from and in which to analyze it.

He also commendably begins by facing the criticism, not unjustified, that in some hands psychoanalysis has functioned as a handmaid of capitalism--a point David Pavon-Cuellar also makes in his new book, which I began discussing here (and will soon return to), Marxism and Psychoanalysis: In or Against Psychology.

That, certainly, was one of the fears Freud had about psychoanalysis moving across the Atlantic to take up post-war primacy in America. And there is evidence that it did function this way once the American medical establishment took it up in a Cold War context in which it required everyone to be trained in medicine first--something Freud also strongly resisted in his last period with the curiously overlooked essay The Question of Lay Analysis.

So we must admit, as McGowan does, that the record of analytic thought cooperating with (and being co-opted by) capitalism is bound up with a record of it being a critic of capitalism also--a mixed legacy in other words. That is both true, and a quintessentially Freudian recognition for who among us can cast the stones of pure and unmixed motives?

Instead of focusing only on the social effects of capitalism, or its economic structures, we need to understand how it operates dynamically on the human mind. Though he appears not to have read MacIntyre, this is exactly the latter's point, as I showed last year, when he claims that capitalism “is not only a set of economic relationships. It is also a mode of presentation of those relationships that disguises and deceives.” McGowan quite agrees, as do I. It is especially the disguises that Catholic social teaching has not sufficiently recognized or begun to remove.

McGowan further agrees with MacIntyre that the question of surplus value is the key question we must face. And in facing it, he draws on Adorno, Foucault, and others, including early analytic "radicals" such as Wilhelm Reich and Otto Gross.

Picking up on themes from his earlier book, McGowan notes that capitalism "has the effect of sustaining subjects in a constant state of desire. As subjects of capitalism, we are constantly on the edge of having our desire realized, but never reach the point of realization. This has the effect of producing a satisfaction that we don't recognize as such" (11). It is this lack of recognition of how capitalism operates on us that must be brought to light.

It operates, in part, on faith, on trust, and on promises: I invest on faith and while trusting that the promise of this stock increasing in value will in fact come true. And the biggest promise capitalism advances is what I would call (and McGowan does not) eschatological: of a better, more "prosperous" future where all shall be well: "to take solace in the promise of tomorrow is to accept the sense of dissatisfaction that capitalism sells more vehemently than it sells any commodity" (13).

McGowan says his book cannot entirely escape the idea of a better future--else why bother analyzing, let alone criticizing, capitalism? But the future as he sees it is not one so radically better than the present as to constitute some kind of break from it or some kind of entry into an entirely new world. Rather, the future is but a continuation of the present but without the false promise of finally fulfilling hitherto thwarted desire.

McGowan notes once again the crucial role of Freud's death drive in all this. For capitalism presupposes that individuals operate much as Freud theorized in what was and remains perhaps his most controversial book that revised so much of the analytic edifice up to that point. (Most analysts ignored or scorned it. Even the authorized biographer Ernest Jones--who can scarcely let Freud sneeze without spending twenty intimate pages on all the implications, meanings, and reactions to it--is clearly holding his nose when discussing Beyond the Pleasure Principle.) McGowan goes on to claim without hesitation that this book of Freud's, especially in its claim that "the pleasure principle seems actually to serve the death instinct"--offers "the most thoroughgoing critique of capitalism that anyone has ever written" (50).

And that is perhaps why so many have been so opposed to this book, starting with that second generation of analysts in America who so desperately wanted acceptance and recognition by the medical and other establishments. The price of such things was to ignore and disdain Freud's death drive as being very bad for business.

And yet it must be said that the idea that some unconscious force motivates people to undermine themselves, destroying themselves and their loved one--whether via opioids, adultery, or a thousand other actions--seems patently obvious in nearly every human life. To alter Chesterton's famous aphorism, the presence of the death drive is the one demonstrably verifiable Freudian dogma. The death drive is an attempt to answer the same question as that answered by the Christian doctrine of original sin: why do we not only harm others, but most often ourselves? Why do we repeat self-destructive patterns that "kill" so much of what we love?

Far from writing off such behavior as absurd, the analytic tradition says, as McGowan certainly did in his earlier book, that the repetition of seemingly self-destructive behaviors exists, has meaning, contains an internal logic: the death drive both has aim, and aims at something rather than nothing; its nihilism is merely one more disguise we have to ignore, one more trap laid for the analyst to get lost in a useless detour of apparent meaninglessness. The repetitions of the death drive very much have meaning, and our refusal to see what they are condemns us to never be free of them. As Freud, in discussing why patients actively undermine a therapeutic analysis and refuse to get better, noted, a "negative therapeutic reaction" exists for a reason, or several reasons, not the least of which is that patients find satisfaction in their suffering. (For those inclined to dismiss this as crazy-talk from a now long-dead and discredited "Godless Jew," I ask them to explain, inter alia, the half-billion dollar Fifty Shades of Grey industry.)

Capitalism is no different. It operates by undermining desires and their satisfaction, promising, perpetually promising, that soon and very soon they will be satisfied. This repetition of promised satisfaction which is never totally fulfilled is a very big part, perhaps the biggest part, of its success. As McGowan puts it at the end of his introduction, "capitalist subjects cling tightly to their dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction is the main thing holding them to capitalism" (18).

What is to be done? McGowan telegraphs that the book will proceed along similar lines to his earlier work, arguing that we need to learn (as Phillips argues, and the Christian tradition going back to at least Evagrius before them did and does) how to bear our dissatisfactions without seeking their resolution, and to learn to experience the sublime here, now, today, without promise of a better but illusory future. Thus the task remains--as he puts it later in the book--to turn the French slogan of 1968 on its head: rather than jouir sans entraves (enjoyment without obstacles or hindrances) it should be jouir les entraves (enjoy the hindrances). Only in this way do we break the power of the endless repetition of promised but unfulfilled desire.

In his first chapter, McGowan notes that one must distinguish between culture and capitalism, the latter promising but never giving the same sense of identity and belonging that the former sometimes proffers and secures. Indeed, capitalism exists in part to undermine any sense of belonging--until and unless one has attained some commodity which will then induct one into a club of, e.g., car-owners, sports fans, married people, etc. One is promised belonging but the price is accumulation, which never ends. Thus one never fully or finally attains the promised belonging. Here again I would argue--though McGowan does not--just how much capitalism is first and foremost a disguised eschatology, a point (to my surprise) that seems to have been little developed in modern theology. Perhaps I shall have to write something along these lines. (Matthew Shaidle's new book, which I have just learned of, seems to discuss these themes a little bit.)

In capitalist systems, much of their power comes from this satisfaction-dissatisfaction dynamic propelling one forward. The commodity never satisfies, but I rarely realize that. Rarer still do I get to see that the object or commodity is not what I want anyway at an unconscious level. I want unconsciously--the level on which capitalism is most insidious and most effective--the sense of dissatisfaction, of the quest, of the ongoing search. That is what gives me satisfaction of a sort; that is what propels me forward; that is what capitalism cultivates for its own survival.

By contrast, bad consumers are those who resist this search for that new thing, or that upgraded model, that will promise me satisfaction. Quiet subverters of capitalism, McGowan says, are those who are happy with the outdated VCR, or the flip phone that does not text, or the car with the big dent in the hood. Resisting the allures of new commodities and perpetual accumulation are not just acts of Christian asceticism, but blows against the system.

Chapter II looks at the creation of privacy as capitalism advances, arguing that the latter depends on the former. The effects of this are twofold: as we move away from the public commons into our private spheres, we must of course each have our own lawnmower, car, tractor, etc. But we also thereby retreat from politics as well. As he puts it, capitalism has an "allergy to the public world [which] inspires a thoroughgoing retreat from this world" (57). Here McGowan draws on Rousseau's distinction between un homme (private) and un citoyen (public). Rousseau saw this as a problem, but McGowan says he could not see how much it would be a problem in the late 20th century--the person to see that more clearly would be Hannah Arendt in her The Human Condition.


Such retreats from the commonwealth are manifested in the rise of private prisons and gated communities, and the calls for "austerity" in public finances. In this discussion McGowan also draws on Habermas, especially his The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.

Such retreats are not, contrary to some images, what psychoanalysis aids and abets. McGowan notes that psychoanalysis requires that one enter into the "public" in order to have a conversation with one's analyst, thereby "publicizing" what one would usually prefer to keep private. Though he claims to have attempted it with himself, Freud does not recommend self-analysis (Lacan would later call that Freud's "original sin") and thus psychoanalysis cannot be seen as purely private.

The chief result of psychoanalysis that it offers patients in a capitalist society is that "the satisfaction of desiring derives from the obstacle rather than overcoming it" (63). In other words, each time we obtain what we think is the desired object, we quickly find it dissatisfying; it has not lived up to not just its hype, but also our own unconscious sense of desire. Capitalism depends on this to be so. As he nicely puts it later in the book, "though capitalism demands that subjects act out of their self-interest, it sustains itself through their self-sabotage" (73).

The problem here is thus with our own inability to realize that we do not desire what we think we desire, and do not find satisfaction because we have not realized that the ostensible obstacles to our desire are the very thing that would satisfy us if we could but recognize this. What I take McGowan to be saying here is that psychoanalysis breaks the cycle of repetition of false promises of satisfaction, which satisfaction is always said to be enjoyed in private. Rather, McGowan argues, we need to learn that satisfaction takes place in public and together right now, rather than in some ever-receding future promise. As Alexander Schmemann might have put it, private joy is impossible. And as Schmemann might also have said--and the Christian ascetical tradition before him certainly has said--the refusal to lust after objects is a refusal ultimately of illusion and idolatry.

McGowan's third chapter has yet more strong echos of MacIntyre in arguing that capitalism succeeds in part by its disguises, by its charade of seeming to come from nowhere and to have no history but simply to constitute the only available-believable of our world without every drawing attention to itself in those terms. Capitalism thus disguises from us that its purported offer to us of "choices" (where and how to work, what to eat, how big a house to buy) are not naturally occurring. Rather all such choices take place within a very narrowly defined set of possibilities. To put it in a MacIntyrean vein, there are three such choices on offer in today's politics: conservative capitalists, liberal capitalists, and radical capitalists. There is no possibility of putting capitalism itself to the question in any serious way.

Sacrifice and its persistence are the themes of the fourth chapter, which puts me in mind of Terry Eagleton's recent book on that theme, discussed here. McGowan notes that in some ways capitalism lives without ritual sacrifices, at least of, say, vestal virgins. But it does demand periodic sacrifices, as seen, e.g., under the guise of "creative destruction." Or consider the titans of industry subject to regular fawning profiles in which they are portrayed as sacrificing their time (and families) to work 90+ hours a week while inventing some new widget or putting their company in the top ten most profitable corporations in the world.

McGowan rightly says that capitalism secularizes sacrifice--no longer is it a turtledove or a fatted calf--and privatizes it, denying to it ritual's socially cohesive power. Now it is the individual CEO, or worse, the worker who gets up at 3am, hidden in the dark, to start his shift at the factory, sacrificing sleep, breakfast with his family, and much else. In this light, sacrifice is actually demanded by capitalism's logic because no satisfaction is possible without loss--the loss that motivates us unconsciously to search perpetually for some new object to supposedly satisfy us. Loss is thus a phantom that haunts our unconscious minds, and capitalism pretends to offer rest and relief to this perpetually restless and searching spook.

McGowan uses an arresting example when he notes that most capitalists would prefer to sell, and most consumers to purchase, Cheetos over bananas for the former involves much more sacrifice--worthless sacrifice--and complicated processes (which involve more people making profits) than the latter. Growing bananas would be rather simple and straightforward, but this, we think, is unsatisfactory. Better to spend millions researching how to keep taste buds in perpetual unslaked longing for the salt and fat of a Cheeto (which, admittedly, I love but refuse to buy because I will eat an entire bag in one sitting).

Chapter V is McGowan at his most theological: "A God We Can Believe In." While stipulating at the outset the tiresome old canard that the rejection of God has created a world of freedom, McGowan does not proceed to do what most others who claim this do: celebrate the absence of God. For he knows that the human psyche cannot abide a void like that--as Freud did too, which is why he has no false hopes that if everyone followed his counsel in Future of an Illusion and rejected God as neurotic paternal projection and illusion then the world would be free. On the contrary: such a rejection creates an opening which others rush in to fill. And here McGowan is right: "capitalism...erects a new form of divinity, one even more tyrannical than the old form" (114).

But the old God was superior insofar as one never had to guess where one stood: he declared he was a jealous God. The market makes no such open declarations, leaving one perpetually uncertain of where one stands. And in fact, of course, the market is jealous--and capricious, and mendacious: its promise of being a free market is always insistently stated thus because it is as Freud might say, an obvious overcompensation (to put it mildly) to hide and distort the truth. This new god of the market turns out to be intolerable and intolerant, leaving McGowan to end his chapter with this rather bald-faced claim: "the fundamental catastrophe of modernity is the disappearance of God as a substantial Other" (135).

This is a catastrophe because--as he will go on to show in chapters six through nine--the disappearance of God opens up an endlessly infinite and pseudo-transcendent space ("the sublime") for capitalism perpetually to expand and try to fill with stuff, giving us what--quoting Agamben--McGowan refers to as means without end, "end" understood here not just as "endless" but also in the sense of purpose or goal; or what MacIntyre recognized as the abandonment of teleology (first principles) in modern philosophy.

Quo vadis? What next? Like any good psychoanalyst, McGowan's conclusion is its shortest and does not get into highly detailed prescriptions. Instead he begins from the striking premise that "the critique of capitalism must begin out of our satisfaction with capitalism and not our dissatisfaction with it" (239). This is precisely an anti-capitalist move for, as we saw earlier, capitalism does not want, and cannot long survive, our being satisfied with anything. Constant modes of production, and product improvement, must fuel constant economic "growth," all of it driven, of course, by a never-ending sense of dissatisfaction. For one can never have enough.

But this endless quest for more than enough hides not only the accumulative impulse of capitalism, but also its unwillingness to acknowledge what McGowan calls "traumatic loss" and to mourn it. That which is lost to us, what is the lost object of our unanalyzed desires, motivates us to accumulate more, all the while ignoring the fact that the lost object will never satisfy.  Thus we must realize that "only the turn from the logic of accumulation to the logic of satisfaction--with an acceptance of the lost status of the object--can move us beyond the crisis of capitalism" (242). To go beyond capitalism, McGowan recognizes, is of course a political act; but before we can act politically towards such change, we must first think differently, and here, once more, is where Freud is invaluable, showing us that "until we accept that the satisfaction of loss is our driving motive, we will remain the hostages of an economy of enrichment" (244).

Mourning and Melancholia, Sex and Capitalism: Two New Books

I have, on here and elsewhere, been testing out certain psychoanalytic ideas over the past few years in the context of considering both Eastern Christian and Islamic historiographical abuses. What I am increasingly coming to wonder in both cases--but especially the latter--is how much unacknowledged romanticized nostalgia is mixed up with a strange sort of unrecognized mourning for past glories.

Moreover, I have been returning to the whole category of "lament" to see how and where it has largely disappeared from contemporary Christian experience--e.g., the bowdlerizing or outright censorship, in contemporary lectionaries, of the psalms of lament, of Job, etc. And within a contemporary Islamic context, I am wondering if their developing of a literature of lament would not be useful in grappling with Western imperialism and its century of damage in the region, beginning with the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire after 1918 and continuing through the Gulf War of 1991 and, above all, the utter disaster of the 2003 Iraq war which has destroyed so many lives, Muslim and Christian alike, across the entire region.

Finally, I have been watching with fascination as several recent critical theorists--starting with Todd McGowan--have begun the process of bringing Freud's theory of the death drive back in from the cold where it has been consigned by analysts and others alike for almost a century now.

All of these themes--mourning, lament, and the death drive--are on prominent display in two news books I've just finished, starting with Madelon Sprengnether's Mourning Freud (Bloomsbury, 2018), 288pp. (For a third book along these lines, see my discussion of Christopher Bollas's new Meaning and Melancholia: Life in an Age of Bewilderment here. For a fourth, see Freud, Psychoanalysis, and Death, which makes some good if at times over-obvious points about the neglect, both clinical and theoretical, on death as such in the Freudian tradition.)

Hers is a very insightful and important book, movingly written in places and offering important additions to and new directions for psychoanalytic thinking after Freud, with whom she is rightly not afraid to differ on certain points. I have never once understood the refusal of certain people--most of them now dead, I should think--to differ from Freud, or to treat such differences as some kind of treason. No human figure deserves unquestioned loyalty; but it seems especially ironic to treat Freud in such terms given the insights and tools he bequeathed to us precisely to see through both the demand for such loyalty and the urge to give it.

Moreover, the idea that psychoanalysis is somehow fixed for all time in Freudian theory has also never made sense to me. The developments after Freud--especially in the British middle or independent tradition--have been invaluable. There is, rightly, a variety of approaches and theories; and as Sprengnether later puts it in her book, "psychoanalysis as Freud conceived it does not come down to us as a fixed and internally consistent body of theory. Freud's texts interact with one another in myriad ways, repeating, revising, and commenting on one another as if to represent an ongoing internal conversation rather than a logically ordered set of ideas" (164).

In addition, she is further right in moving past that silly and protracted distraction of scientism which has been too conveniently used by both Freudians and his haters for too long to distract us from some of his key insights. Claims to psychoanalysis (and much else) being a "science" have never made sense for those with a modicum of understanding of the philosophy of science and its history. What the average person means by "science" (and even, alas, what too many so-called scientists mean) is a fantastical ideological construct used to ward off politically inconvenient questions. In this light, Freud was himself too hung up on some late-Enlightenment "scientific" claims as a way of securing for his "Jewish science" a certain kind of stability and respectability that minorities in Habsburg Europe needed to find for their own security. As Sprengnether puts it, "what Freud invented, in my view, is not an objective science of mind but rather a new form of subjective self-inquiry. The power of his discovery is in no way diminished by its lack of 'scientific' status" (183).

I found the most useful part of her book to be the one that might make strict orthodox Freudians (are there any left?) unhappy: her argument that Freud unhelpfully side-tracked himself (beginning in the self-analysis of his own life) down an Oedipal alley and in so doing missed the role of mourning, thinking instead that the "trauma" of childhood was about sex rather than loss. (Another point I've never understood: those who want to make, as Freud himself seems to do, the tale of Oedipus into something to be taken literally. That we have complicated libidinal-erotic-sexual feelings, understood very broadly, towards others, including family, seems unremarkable. But to go beyond that and posit anything further seems de trop.) As she puts it bluntly right at the outset, "the subject that Freud most clearly failed to confront in his life and his work, I maintain, is mourning" (1). As she later elaborates on this point, "oedipal theory performs the function of acknowledging anger toward the deceased (murderous wishes directed towards the father) while enshrining an idealized memory of maternal love" (55). He does this, she continues, because "he chose to theorize from a text that offered him more consoling images. Out of the tragic material of Oedipus Rex, Freud forged a hopeful, if sober, psychic construct" (85).

She goes on to show how this is not only the case in his own incomplete mourning for childhood figures, but is then projected onto the famous story he recounts--in Beyond the Pleasure Principle--of his own grandson's reactions to the death of his mother, Freud's daughter Sophie, who died of the Spanish flu. Freud's own reaction, and what he records of his grandson, both point to a man steeped in a kind of stiff-upper-lip stoicism that would not allow for open grieving--and this he projects onto his grandson.

A few final critical thoughts to end with: Sprengnether: to my enormous surprise she seems not to have read, or at least never cites anywhere, three contemporary theorists whose work overlaps considerably with her own, and who, in at least one case, would have strengthened her own case considerably. I speak here, firstly, of Adam Phillips (especially his discussions on the links between psychoanalysis and literature as seen in, e.g., Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature). Also nowhere to be found is Christopher Bollas. But finally Ana-Maria Rizzuto, whose work on Freud's mourning of his father in Why Did Freud Reject God 

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Now on to Benjamin Fong's fascinating book, Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism (Columbia UP, 2018). There is a lot of wisdom here, but I'm not sure how well this holds together as a book. Nevertheless, there are many great insights scattered throughout this book. 

Fong begins not unlike Sprengnether: wanting to think with Freud, but also to develop certain of his ideas, to see how others after him (especially Lacan) have grappled with these problems, and in some cases to go beyond Freud.

After Freud, the other major interlocutors in this book are those of the Frankfurt school, above all Theodor Adorno, whose work on The Culture Industry is discussed with great intelligence and insight.

Marx plays a role, but very much in the background. Max Horkeimer is also featured prominently. Herbert Marcuse comes in for considerable, and highly critical, discussion. (I've never been able to take Marcuse seriously since MacIntyre so thoroughly trashed him decades ago.)

Hans Loewald comes in for extensive discussion. René Girard is also discussed here, and rather critically in such works as Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World. Fong is especially hard on John Milbank and others who have picked up ideas about violence and rivalry to trumpet a supposed Christian offer of peace.

Fong begins by noting that the death drive, to the extent that it is considered at all, often overshadows what he sees as a co-relative drive, viz., to mastery. Indeed, as he puts it early on, "the death drive becomes its own counter-drive, a drive to mastery" (18). This can manifest itself in many ways, and no drive is ever going to be totally contained; but, he says, they can at least be understood. One key example of this process, he says, is that of the drive to intellectual mastery, which is often a drive to overcome the destructive death-dealing effects of past trauma.

So too is the compulsion to repeat, as McGowan so abundantly illustrated in his book, as I showed in my discussion of it. We often repeat things that are very clearly destructive and death-dealing because in doing so we are seeking some lost or misplaced or inaccessible good. There is a logic here, though on the surface it may look perverse and self-defeating--thereby illustrating, of course, the importance of Freud's hermeneutic in The Interpretation of Dreams of looking not just at manifest but especially at latent content and meaning.

Fong's book is worth it if only for this central insight, which comes almost exactly half-way through: "there is perhaps no more confused assertion, for a critical theorist, than that capitalist society is becoming increasingly 'secular'." Why churchmen and others insist on using this term or its even more fatuous variants ("secular humanism") has never made sense to me--except, of course, to flog their hideous books.

Rather, capitalism is itself not just an ideology and substitute "religion." More to the point, as the final parts of Fong's book argue, it is "a committed psychic investment" and an "insidious....internalized social structure" whose "comfortable obviousness" makes it all the harder to distance oneself from and to think about with "self-reflective reason." As a result, "late capitalism is defined not only by a reorganization of production, radically heightened capacities of distribution, and a new ideology of consumption but also by a sea change in what Judith Butler calls 'the psychic life of power'" (86).

Such psychic effects, to be clear, have not totally robbed most people of the capacity for some critical thought. But too much of that capacity in too many people has been anesthetized by capitalism, and most recently and most especially by the technology that so consumes our life today. As a result Fong is quite right to say, as others recently have, that any dreams of any sort of "revolution" are never going to come to pass; for capitalism is extremely adept at using all its commodities to inculcate in people a "remarkably stubborn adherence to the status quo" (98). Such technology gains its power, he asserts, from first gratifying "a psychic need before it does material ones" (110).

Using classic Freudian terminology, Fong explains how this works: the culture industry works both sides of the ego, giving satisfaction to the id in various ways (that is, satisfying many basic material desires and wants) so as to blunt the force of the superego's critical capacities. If you doubt this, just think how often, in conversation with a defender of capitalism, you have immediately been met with the tedious rejoinder "Yes, but think how many people today own their own home" or "How many more have joined the middle class from poverty."

Nobody doubts that moving from poverty is a good thing, but that is not why such utterances are made. They are made to close down discussion because the apologists for capitalism know what a weak case they have in the face of massive psychic and spiritual costs--to say nothing of real, material costs, too, to lives devastated by its myriad social pathologies. As MacIntyre memorably put it in his most recent book, advanced capitalism today has “destroyed…traditional ways of life, created gross and sometimes grotesque inequalities of income and wealth, lurched through crisis after crisis, creating recurrent mass unemployment and left those areas and those communities that it was not profitable to develop permanently impoverished and deprived.”

In the end, Fong's very insightful book does not give us a lot of detailed directives on how to overcome these problems--which is, of course, a classical instance of Freudian "abstinence." Freud himself made it clear that an analyst should usually hold him/herself abstinent from the analysand insofar as the latter wanted the former to tell him what to do, how to live, and how to decide certain matters. It is up to us to begin to think much more critically about all this, and then to figure out what is to be done. We are in Fong's debt insofar as he has helped us to see all this more clearly and to realize the nature of the challenges we face. 

On Misunderstanding Sacrifice

I have just finished reading and being edified by Terry Eagleton's newest book, Radical Sacrifice (Yale UP, 2018), 204pp.

Eagleton, for those who don't know him, is a wide-ranging and prolific theorist, literary scholar, and cultural critic who comes out of that always-fascinating world of the post-war British left. But unlike others whom one might mention here--the late Christopher Hitchens, say, or the tiresome pamphleteer Richard Dawkins--Eagleton has a Catholic background which shows up in some of his many books, including this one, where his grasp of both Scripture and theology is impressive and far outstrips many other academics who try to write about these matters.

In this regard, he is part of the world shaped by the late Herbert McCabe, and still populated by the great Alasdair MacIntyre. All three of these men, in ways that seem depressingly rare, understand the radical nature of the gospels and the fact that, properly understood and lived, Christianity is revolutionary in overturning so much of the neoliberal capitalism and violence of our world today. All three have sought to show (as, discussing McCabe and MacIntyre, I also did a bit here and here; and as Dorothy Day also did--for more on her see the book that Lance Richey and I edited for the splendidly named Solidarity Hall Press) that the relationship between Christianity and Marxism is far less antagonistic than has often been portrayed.

Christianity, as Eagleton, McCabe, MacIntyre, and Day have helped us to see, is also far more critical of the capitalistic world than most Christians realize. Every Christian, instead of making placards with John 3:16 on them to wave at sports events, should instead write this to chasten and harrow players (and their corporate sponsors) making millions for whacking balls and pucks around: "Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them." If they have especially big placards, they can put the whole quote from MacIntyre:

Capitalism is bad for those who succeed by its standards as well as for those who fail by them, something that many preachers and theologians have failed to recognize. And those Christians who have recognized it have often enough been at odds with ecclesiastical as well as political and economic authorities.

Getting back to Eagleton's new book, I would note that among its several virtues, it makes some necessary and, it seems to me, overdue criticisms of parts of Girard's theories about sacrifice, mimesis, and the scapegoat. Eagleton, greatly respecting Girard's insights and achievements, nonetheless rightly says that, inter alia, Girard often greatly exaggerates, provides too few concrete historical examples, and ignores questions of class.

Eagleton begins by noting that the notion of sacrifice is too little understood today and too often derided based on narrow, incomplete, or outright faulty notions. So the first part of the book is an exercise in clearing the ground to help us move beyond the idea that sacrifice means nothing more than "the voluntary relinquishing of what one finds valuable. But renunciation is only one feature of sacrifice, and not always the most prominent" (3). As he goes on to say, "sacrifice cannot be reduced to self-denial" (4). It is, rather, a "polythetic term, encompassing a range of activities that have no single feature in common." If this is true in general, a fortiori it is so in Christianity where it "spans a number of activities (praise, thanksgiving, prayer, witness, peacemaking, dedication to God and the like)" (6).

What makes Christian notions and practices of sacrifice even more unique, as Eagleton notes later in the book, is their lavish, superabundant, extravagant, and promiscuous nature: turning the other cheek, returning good for evil, blessing those who curse us, forgiving seventy times seven, etc. In doing all these things, Christians are engaged in "eschatological forms of excess--absurdist, avant-gardist, over-the-top gestures foreshadowing a future in which exchange-value will have been surpassed for what Paul Ricoeur terms 'an economy of superabundance'" (104).

Incidentally, this theme of superabundance puts me in mind of Hans Urs von Balthasar's winsome sermon for Trinity Sunday that I have often read to my students over the years where he says:

God is not a sealed fortress, to be attacked and seized by our engines of war (ascetic practices, meditative techniques, and the like) but a house full of open doors, through which we are invited to walk. In the Castle of the Three-in-One, the plan has always been that we, those who are entirely "other," shall participate in the superabundant communion of life. 

With an eye on anthropological work, especially that of another fascinating British Catholic and highly regarded scholar, Mary Douglas (whose book, Natural Symbols, should be required reading for liturgists, inter alia), Eagleton looks at sacrifice in a number of cultures, ancient and modern, and finds there common themes of power and the exchange of powers, especially with a divine figure or figures. There is, here and elsewhere, a paradox at work: to sacrifice something is in some instances to be able to go on to possess it more deeply later and in different ways. So what looks like a loss initially is often but the gateway to a much deeper and more powerful grasp of it, or by it, later on.

With a second eye on the Old Testament in particular, Eagleton notes that it generally takes a dim if not hostile view of sacrifice at least insofar as it is thought to be a means of averting God's gaze from injustice or a cheap trinket thought to appease divine wrath in the face of unchanged and unjust behavior. (See, e.g., much of Jeremiah or Micah.) This leads Eagleton on, in the next chapter, to argue that sacrifice-as-suffering cannot be blithely endorsed for others to endure, let alone forced to volunteer for: "Jesus never once counsels the diseased and disabled who flock around him to reconcile themselves to their misfortune" (38).

This is an especially important thing for Catholics to hear who may be inclined, as the Church often is, towards a passive siding with reactionary regimes whose injustices are downplayed while people are told to "offer up" various sacrifices of poverty, human rights, and injustice. In doing so, Christianity, whether inadvertently or not, presses its ascetical tradition into the service of profit and the violence that so often attends profiteers and capitalists: "Asceticism, Marx considers, is an integral part of a profit-driven social order" (180, referring to the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts). (For more on this, see my notion of an "ascetical politics" which I discussed in three parts here by drawing on the fascinating and valuable work of Todd McGowan, Enjoying What We Don't Have: The Political Project of Psychoanalysis.)

But that is not to say that voluntary acceptance of injustice and suffering is without merit. Indeed, in the example of Christ Himself voluntarily accepting the horrors of arrest, torture, and crucifixion, we come once again to the notion of sacrifice as an exchange of powers enabling one to go far deeper and far beyond what one otherwise could have done. Here Mary Douglas is pressed into service, when she notes (in Purity and Danger) that "when someone freely embraces the symbols of death, or death itself,...a great release of power for good should be expected to follow." Nowhere is that more true than in the case of Christ.

In addition to his work on Marx, Eagleton has also read Freud (and Lacan, inter alia) very perceptively, which most people today seem incapable of doing. This allows him to say--without, alas, developing it to the extent I wished--that the silence of the Father faced with His Son on the Cross "may be compared to the silence of the psychoanalyst who refuses the role of Big Other or transcendental guarantor" (41). (One thing it took me a long time on the couch to realize was that such silence was not neglect or lack of interest on the part of the remarkable woman who was my analyst. It was, rather, the very condition of freedom, and a very necessary reminder that the responsibility for the authorship of our lives must not mindlessly be handed over to others, tempting though that often is for many of us--cf. both Fromm and Winnicott on this point--as well as Adam Phillips.)

Here as elsewhere, Eagleton, discussing notions of sin, puts these Christian theological claims into dialogue with Freud and his notion of the death drive. Picking up a theme--that of desire--that one finds increasingly today in a good deal of work in philosophy, theology, and psychology, Eagleton notes that "desire itself can become ritualized and automated, assuming all the coercive, anonymous force of a law. If Freud names this condition neurosis, Paul gives it the title of sin, which he regards as a matter of the unconscious. When I sin, he writes in Romans, 'I do not understand my own actions'" (47). In this light, sin is a fake floor or false consciousness that prevents us from having access to and "being aware of our true desire" (48).

Eagleton, however, later turns the death drive around in a way that perhaps only a Christian could to argue that "there is a sense in which the death drive, striving to defeat the flow of temporality with its compulsive repetitions, represents a way of being undead, and so lies on the side of the living" (95).