I've previously mentioned the impending release of Gerald Arbuckle's book Abuse and Cover-up: Refounding the Catholic Church in Trauma (Orbis, 2019). My copy has now arrived. I will be discussing it extensively on here over the coming days, not least in dialogue with my own new book on the structural issues in the Church which have contributed to the crisis, and without changes to which nothing will improve: Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico, 2019).
The theme of the book is picked up immediately in the introduction: the trauma of the current crisis is actually long-standing, going back at least thirty, and closer to fifty years, during which time the conciliar promises of a more locally accountable and synodally governed Church were never materialized--were, indeed, rolled back. So the crisis of abuse has been but the latest in a long line of hierarchical betrayals leading, the author repeatedly says, to sadness, rage, and grief: all three are manifestations of trauma, as I discussed here.
Those betrayals were led by men who, Arbuckle rightly points out, feared "scandal" more than the truth--a point I also made in my discussion, here, of the uses and abuses of the whole notion of "scandal," a word which, in episcopal usage, means "what makes me as bishop look bad."
The author moves quickly into a discussion of cultural theory and the incredible resistance built into cultures, including ecclesial culture, to any serious efforts at change. He notes, rightly as many of us have been saying for some time, that this must be an all-hands-on-deck affair: not just "prayer and fasting" types of change, not just "new evangelization," and not just new structures: the reform required is a radical change in the way we think, pray, structure our life, and act together. One discipline that will help us see the far-reaching and comprehensive nature of the changes needed is cultural anthropology. Here Arbuckle references such key players as Clifford Geertz and, later on, Mary Douglas, whom I am reading with my students this semester.
I had forgotten what an exhilarating ride Douglas is in Natural Symbols as well as Purity and Danger and other works. But I also hadn't realized how merciless she is in the former book, too, which is so tightly written it's almost an act of warfare. She lobs one dense, high-powered sentence after another without warning, introduction, transition. She packs an incredible amount of high theory into a very short book and clearly takes no prisoners.
The author concludes his introduction by laying out the plan of the book. Chapter 1 will look at cultural dynamics in the Church leading to cover-up; 2 will ask what makes the Church uniquely prone to such cover-ups; 3 will focus on grief in the Church today; four will look at new leadership; 5 at new structures; and 6 at other assorted action plans going forward.
In the coming days we will proceed systematically through the book, first discovering what the author argues and then critically analyzing it.
Continues.
Showing posts with label Mary Douglas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mary Douglas. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 2, 2019
Friday, August 2, 2019
Forgetful Remembrance of Ireland's Troubles
Back in 2016 I began exploring several new works treating the theme of forgetting as an unexplored category for how we treat controversial, divisive pasts, particularly between Eastern and Western Christians. I continue to read in the area for an article I'm working on.
Two weeks ago, on a tiny lake in northern Indiana while my kids spent the day swimming and playing, I sat on the deck and began reading a very dense but fascinating new work by Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), 736pp. If you have any interest in Irish history, or the history of religio-political conflict, of British imperialism, and of historiography, this book will give you depth and detail in abundance. It is the very impressive fruit of serious and wide-ranging research into all kinds of out-of-the-way places and sources.
Being no expert in Irish history, I will not essay comments on the book's treatment of it. Let me, rather, note that the book's introduction alone is worth the price and effort of slogging through the whole thing. The author has given a wonderful summary of a large body of literature in memory studies, cognitive psychology and neurology, and historiography. Much of this he picks up again in his concluding chapter, "Rites of Oblivion."
The book breaks new and important ground between the heavy emphasis found in much of Western culture since at least 1945 on social remembering (of, e.g., the Holocaust), and the more recent, and still developing, awareness of the importance of forgetting both as an important phenomenon in its own right, but also as part and parcel of how human remembering works. Its use of the category of "social forgetting" shows how, in situations of longstanding and complex conflict such as that of Northern Ireland, politically mandated forgetting of, say, "The Troubles" does not always or even usually result in total obliteration of any and all memories of those events. Instead, what one finds is that officially or publicly "forgotten" events may not be discussed openly by those in power, but unofficially, in, say, families, or cultural societies or historical associations, they may be kept alive in varying forms. Thus socially and politically one may pretend to "forget" while, sotto voce as it were, one does not. The relationship between these two phenomena has not been well studied, and so, as the author says in his preface, that is what he seeks to do: "Studies of cultural and social memory have too often made sweeping claims that have not been fully substantiated. It is therefore necessary to lay out the nuts and bolts of remembrance in order to closely examine the mechanics of how social forgetting actually works" (xvii). Thus his book is situated somewhere between les lieux d'oubli and les lieux de mémoire.
The irony of any requests or still more demands--especially those enforced by the power of the state--for forgetting is, of course, that it makes remembering more likely. But curiously, Beiner notes, "the request to disregard does not" have the same effect. As he puts it, reviewing a number of recent studies, including those of juries in courtrooms, a "conscious effort to forget produces an altered form of memory, and this 'forgetful memory' needs to be better understood" (18).
Forgetting of all kinds, Beiner notes, is still given short shrift in many places, and it is often badly understood, too. Later in the book Beiner distinguishes, based on what he has observed in Ulster historiography since 1798, different kinds of forgetting: troubled forgetting, partial forgetting, nonconformist remembering that forgets differently from others around it, and a kind of "restored forgetting" brought to bear once the prevailing politics shifts again and something that was for a time officially remembered must now be suppressed in the interests of, say, an "amnesty" after a long period of political violence and a fragile social peace that feels victims must "forgive and forget." These and other types of forgetting are similar to what Mary Douglas (in an essay in Shifting Contexts) called "selective remembering, misremembering, and disremembering."
Many people assume that forgetting is bad, remembering good, and there is a straightforward connection between them. But in some ways, at least as far as human memory is concerned, remembering is the problem or, better, the aberration: we spend most of our time forgetting most things. Think, e.g., just over the last 12 hours of your life: can you give an hour-by-hour, or even more minute-by-minute recounting of everything you saw, thought, smelled, heard, and did? Would not most of us recollect only in broad outline: "Well, I was in a meeting this morning until 11:30, and then I had lunch, and then I did some paperwork at my desk for a couple hours, took tea about 3pm, and knocked off around 5 to drive home?" In other words, we forget much more of the details of a given day than we remember, and this is not only normal but necessary for if we remembered every detail out memory would soon approach saturation and exhaustion.
If attempts to enforce forgetting are problematic, so too are those demanding remembrance of an event, for it is becoming clear in the literature that "constructions of memory are not uniform and cannot be simply imposed from above and passively adopted by subservient communities" (23). Practices of social forgetting are similarly complex and incompletely successful. They may and often do come at some cost: "Practices of disremembering bury secrets" (30), with all the well-known psychic sequelae that follow from keeping traumatic secrets.
This is perhaps especially clear in the partition of states, the formation of new states, or civil war between factions within a state (see, e.g., the el pacto del olvido decreed in the 1977 Amnesty Law after Franco left office in Spain). Much of that violence is forcibly buried, resulting in disremembering in the very peculiar ways we see--what Vamik Volkan, to whom I have so often returned, calls narratives of "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory." Here ostensibly (or even genuinely) traumatic pasts get traduced for present felt purposes. Much of these dynamics and developments are still only just now being understood, and so as Beiner comes to the end of his very long and dense book, he notes that "the history of these dynamics of generating, repressing, and regenerating social forgetting has been mostly missed by conventional historiography."
There is much in Forgetful Remembrance that needs to be brought to bear on Christian ideas of forgetting, especially of major conflicts in ecclesial history--e.g., the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, or the Union of Brest, or the pseudo-sobor of 1946. It is clear that exhortations to remember such events as these have left Christians unable to move towards that "healing of memories" so often called for by the late Pope John Paul II. But it is equally clear that simply calling for all such events to be forgotten will not work either. Instead, I think we need to explore that "thin line between an inner duty to remember and a right to be outwardly forgotten" which Beiner calls "social forgetting," for it "offers another way to approach this dilemma" by seeing that "the desire for willful forgetting produces rites of oblivion, which are in effect forms of unofficial remembrance that are discreetly performed alongside social memory in defiance of state prohibitions and social taboos" (626).
Two weeks ago, on a tiny lake in northern Indiana while my kids spent the day swimming and playing, I sat on the deck and began reading a very dense but fascinating new work by Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford University Press, 2018), 736pp. If you have any interest in Irish history, or the history of religio-political conflict, of British imperialism, and of historiography, this book will give you depth and detail in abundance. It is the very impressive fruit of serious and wide-ranging research into all kinds of out-of-the-way places and sources.
Being no expert in Irish history, I will not essay comments on the book's treatment of it. Let me, rather, note that the book's introduction alone is worth the price and effort of slogging through the whole thing. The author has given a wonderful summary of a large body of literature in memory studies, cognitive psychology and neurology, and historiography. Much of this he picks up again in his concluding chapter, "Rites of Oblivion."
The book breaks new and important ground between the heavy emphasis found in much of Western culture since at least 1945 on social remembering (of, e.g., the Holocaust), and the more recent, and still developing, awareness of the importance of forgetting both as an important phenomenon in its own right, but also as part and parcel of how human remembering works. Its use of the category of "social forgetting" shows how, in situations of longstanding and complex conflict such as that of Northern Ireland, politically mandated forgetting of, say, "The Troubles" does not always or even usually result in total obliteration of any and all memories of those events. Instead, what one finds is that officially or publicly "forgotten" events may not be discussed openly by those in power, but unofficially, in, say, families, or cultural societies or historical associations, they may be kept alive in varying forms. Thus socially and politically one may pretend to "forget" while, sotto voce as it were, one does not. The relationship between these two phenomena has not been well studied, and so, as the author says in his preface, that is what he seeks to do: "Studies of cultural and social memory have too often made sweeping claims that have not been fully substantiated. It is therefore necessary to lay out the nuts and bolts of remembrance in order to closely examine the mechanics of how social forgetting actually works" (xvii). Thus his book is situated somewhere between les lieux d'oubli and les lieux de mémoire.
The irony of any requests or still more demands--especially those enforced by the power of the state--for forgetting is, of course, that it makes remembering more likely. But curiously, Beiner notes, "the request to disregard does not" have the same effect. As he puts it, reviewing a number of recent studies, including those of juries in courtrooms, a "conscious effort to forget produces an altered form of memory, and this 'forgetful memory' needs to be better understood" (18).
Forgetting of all kinds, Beiner notes, is still given short shrift in many places, and it is often badly understood, too. Later in the book Beiner distinguishes, based on what he has observed in Ulster historiography since 1798, different kinds of forgetting: troubled forgetting, partial forgetting, nonconformist remembering that forgets differently from others around it, and a kind of "restored forgetting" brought to bear once the prevailing politics shifts again and something that was for a time officially remembered must now be suppressed in the interests of, say, an "amnesty" after a long period of political violence and a fragile social peace that feels victims must "forgive and forget." These and other types of forgetting are similar to what Mary Douglas (in an essay in Shifting Contexts) called "selective remembering, misremembering, and disremembering."
Many people assume that forgetting is bad, remembering good, and there is a straightforward connection between them. But in some ways, at least as far as human memory is concerned, remembering is the problem or, better, the aberration: we spend most of our time forgetting most things. Think, e.g., just over the last 12 hours of your life: can you give an hour-by-hour, or even more minute-by-minute recounting of everything you saw, thought, smelled, heard, and did? Would not most of us recollect only in broad outline: "Well, I was in a meeting this morning until 11:30, and then I had lunch, and then I did some paperwork at my desk for a couple hours, took tea about 3pm, and knocked off around 5 to drive home?" In other words, we forget much more of the details of a given day than we remember, and this is not only normal but necessary for if we remembered every detail out memory would soon approach saturation and exhaustion.
If attempts to enforce forgetting are problematic, so too are those demanding remembrance of an event, for it is becoming clear in the literature that "constructions of memory are not uniform and cannot be simply imposed from above and passively adopted by subservient communities" (23). Practices of social forgetting are similarly complex and incompletely successful. They may and often do come at some cost: "Practices of disremembering bury secrets" (30), with all the well-known psychic sequelae that follow from keeping traumatic secrets.
This is perhaps especially clear in the partition of states, the formation of new states, or civil war between factions within a state (see, e.g., the el pacto del olvido decreed in the 1977 Amnesty Law after Franco left office in Spain). Much of that violence is forcibly buried, resulting in disremembering in the very peculiar ways we see--what Vamik Volkan, to whom I have so often returned, calls narratives of "chosen trauma" and "chosen glory." Here ostensibly (or even genuinely) traumatic pasts get traduced for present felt purposes. Much of these dynamics and developments are still only just now being understood, and so as Beiner comes to the end of his very long and dense book, he notes that "the history of these dynamics of generating, repressing, and regenerating social forgetting has been mostly missed by conventional historiography."
There is much in Forgetful Remembrance that needs to be brought to bear on Christian ideas of forgetting, especially of major conflicts in ecclesial history--e.g., the aftermath of the Council of Chalcedon in 451, or the Union of Brest, or the pseudo-sobor of 1946. It is clear that exhortations to remember such events as these have left Christians unable to move towards that "healing of memories" so often called for by the late Pope John Paul II. But it is equally clear that simply calling for all such events to be forgotten will not work either. Instead, I think we need to explore that "thin line between an inner duty to remember and a right to be outwardly forgotten" which Beiner calls "social forgetting," for it "offers another way to approach this dilemma" by seeing that "the desire for willful forgetting produces rites of oblivion, which are in effect forms of unofficial remembrance that are discreetly performed alongside social memory in defiance of state prohibitions and social taboos" (626).
Wednesday, July 11, 2018
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:
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:
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).
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).
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