Marx and The Sacred

Marx and the Sacred http://homepages.which.net/~panic.brixtonpoetry/marx.
htm
Marx and the Sacred
James Luchte
Contents
Introduction: Marx and the Sacred
Chapter 1: Into the Breach – the Meaning of Marx
Chapter 2: Marx’s Criticism of Religion
Chapter 3: From Religion to the Sacred
Chapter 4: Sacred Rebellion and Marx
Chapter 5: Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology
Chapter 6: Marx, Heidegger and “eigenlichkeit”
Chapter 7: A Violent Sacred? – Marx and Bataille
Chapter 8: A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx
Conclusion: The Sacred After Marx
Introduction: Marx and the Sacred
Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest
against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
[i]
world and the soul of soulless conditions.
Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a
popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn
complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization
of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against
religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual
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Marx and the Sacred http://homepages.which.net/~panic.brixtonpoetry/marx.htm
[ii]
aroma.
Perhaps the most formidable obstacle in the task of retrieving a sense of the sacred in Marx
consists in his repeated, and often polemical, statements against religion. Indeed, such an obstacle
may in the end be one of our own making, as we are trapped within the labyrinth of our own historical
[iii]
understanding. Yet, assuming, for the moment, that religion and the sacred are the same
phenomena, if we take his pronouncement that religion is the opium of the people in isolation, we may
be lead to believe that Marx felt that at best religion - and thus the "sacred" - is a narcotic, which
while it may be utilized to alleviate pain, remains an illusory amelioration for a situation of despair.
Religion as an opiate not only implies sedation from the pain of a life of exploitation, but also
suggests a systematic and strategic attempt to deaden or absorb any critical impulse to liberation. In
this sense, Marx’s characterization of religion as an opiate is a forerunner to many of the most radical
criticisms of religion in Twentieth Century theology and philosophy – Gutierrez, Miranda, Bultmann,
Heidegger and Bataille. Each of these thinkers, in his own way, articulated a sense of the sacred in
the wake of Marx and his deconstruction of religion as an ideology.
The kinship which is shared by each of these thinkers is a disdain for mere religion in favour
[iv]
of the “sacred”. Religion simultaneously constructs a “picture” (Bild) for contemplation
(Anschauung) and an organization that cultivates our captivity to that “picture”. The sacred, on the
contrary, indicates obligation and commitment, and an engaged, affirmative eruption of liberation
amidst finite existence. Religion constructs its eternal church as an everlasting perpetuation of the
[v]
“picture”, of an idol, while the sacred exults in this moment of lived existence, in the haeccitas of
Duns Scotus. If religion is a “rational” and ‘systematic’ orchestration of feeling and phenomena, the
sacred is an attempt to seek access to a phenomenon beyond the array of objectification towards traces
of the numen. Indeed, for Otto, one need merely begin amidst this singular event.
In light of this preliminary distinction between religion and the sacred, it will be the task of
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Marx and the Sacred to excavate and disclose in the writings and historical activism of Marx an
affirmative sense of the sacred which is alterior to his inherently negative conception of religion.
Amid Marx’s empathy with the "sigh of the oppressed creature", we can glimpse a sense of the sacred
dissociated from a religious leviathan that merely serves to perpetuate suffering - a sacred that exists
as a radical commitment to liberation. In this way, I will contend that Marx’s criticism of religion as
an ideology of oppression and sedation in no way forecloses on a possible relationship with Twentieth
Century attempts to articulate a sense of the sacred. There emerges in these latter attempts the
possibility of an openness which lays out a space for a personal encounter with a sense of a sacred not
mediated by ideology.
In this way, that which will be disclosed as the “unity” and coherence in these encounters of
Marx with different strands of Twentieth century theology and philosophy is the inner kernel of
“obligation” and “commitment”, of affirmation, against nihilism and oppression - this "inner kernel"
is an openness to the Sacred. That which is sought is an indication in Marx’s writings and advocacy
of a personal expression and articulation of the Sacred which transcends both scientific
prognostication and political advocacy. What we seek is the deeper ground of the Sacred in Marx.
[vi]
Otto suggests in the first part of his seminal work The Idea of the Holy that there is a
non-rational, non-moralistic, and obscure feeling, a fascination and dread, in the wake of the
numinous, the Mysterium Tremendum, the Augustus, which intimates to the mortal self a radically
overwhelming and power of the holy, of the Sacred. Such an apprehension stands outside of the
rationalist, moralistic program of mere religion as ideology, of the merely Apollonian. It is that which
stimulates, arouses the mortal being to affirm the sacred – in the well of feeling, amidst this Dionysian
eruption of the event. Such an incitement enacts and intimates a sense of the sacred amid the world –
expressed in poetry, the work of art, and praxi!. It is a call to a radical phenomenology of the sacred –
not of rationalist morality or dogma – of mere religion - but of a sacred affirmation, one which is
situated, for Marx, amidst the historical topos of Capital.
Ideology is a picture which, problematically, indicates the truth of the world. A picture is
untimely – de-temporalized - and thus, the notions, pictures of the “natural” – of species, population,
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nation, race, and humanity are merely idealizations (and erasures) of the concrete situations of lived
existence… this place of strife, conflict and love. An “ideal unity” and ultimate meaning, picture, of
“life” is an ideology which operates as an erasure of a temporality of liberation amid this fractured
existence of an alleged “humanity” – another ideology. For Marx, there exists a temporal and
existential dialectic of action amidst a discordant and coercive matrix of terrestrial power. This
dialectic indicates the actuality of freedom, of a free existence. Yet, Marx’s commitment to such an
emerging actuality of freedom comes into conflict with religion as a disciplinary matrix of the
individual soul. However, if we can agree that mere religion plays a negative or sedative role in the
thought of Marx, this does not preclude the possibility of an existential or ethical openness to an
affirmation of the sacred. Indeed, as I will seek to show, the very criticism of religion by Marx is, in
the context of his writings and actions, indicates an affirmation of the sacred. That which is essential
is an openness which, following Otto, Bonhoeffer, Eliade, Altizer and others, enacts a personal
commitment which transcends, overwhelms, the self – existentially prior to the posited ‘stems’ of
[vii]
“theory” and “practice” – this moment of an ecstatic ‘event’ beyond, but as, existence.
The texts that bring me directly to the sacred in Marx are his early poetry (and the traces of his
poi"si! which emerge throughout his life and later works). I will attempt to enact a retrieval of the
sacred in his early poetry and writings which explicitly affirm a personal, existential obligation and
commitment to revolution. We can find a beginning of his lifelong commitment in his early poetic
writings - before philosophy.
I refuse to simply dismiss these works as merely immature eruptions of "enthusiasm" (that
would be to rubber-stamp the notion of linear temporal development of a thinker – into periods -
which I think is suspect). Marx may have supplemented his early writing of poetry with the concrete
texts of the epigramist and social theorist, but the traces of the poetic opening which signal his
affirmation, his obligation, intersect his entire so-called mature work, from the literary and
rhetorically dramatic works such as The Communist Manifesto, the Eighteenth Brumaire, The Holy
Family to the traces of his early poetic awareness in his many key references to Shakespeare in
Capital and his earlier Contribution and Grundrisse. His opening, and beginning, in poi"si! stands in
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contrast, but is ultimately complementary to, his notion of praxi! . His poetry marks the breach in the
[viii]
usual depiction of his work as merely scientific, or as, Miranda writes, “Western”. Marx’s poetry
guides and envelops his “scientific” prose. As Heraclitus writes, “An unapparent connexion is
[ix]
stronger than an apparent one.” Marx’s “analysis” is not that of a distinterested observer, abiding
safe on the island of knowledge. He writes amidst the act, in the trajectory of obligation, commitment
[x]
and praxi!. His writings, in this way, could be described as a poetry of existence.
In this light, I am trying to excavate the sacred impulse expressed in Marx’s poetry, which
continues to underscore and find expression in his works and life. Indeed, beyond the texts and the
allusion to the [un]said, there is the unmistakable affirmation in the life of Marx - especially in his
political advocacy and in his difficult fatherhood. I do not believe we should see Marx as a mere
[xi] [xii]
political reductionist, junky – or as a one-dimensional man - he may have been an "atheist"
with regards the Judeo-Christian or Islamic traditions, but that does not mean he must stand outside
[xiii]
the sacred.
In the following, I will begin with the question of the meaning of Marx in the controversy
surrounding the “continuity” or “discontinuity” of the works of Marx. In Into the Breach: the
Meaning of Marx, I will examine the theory of the “epistemological break” of Althusser and set forth
a criticism which calls for a complete openness to the various works of Marx. I will next lay out an
interpretation of the extant statements made by Marx concerning religion as such in Marx's Criticism
of Religion, providing a critique of ideology as Weltanschauung (World-view, contemplation) which
seeks to forbid a strategy of interpretation which is oriented to praxi!. I will follow this with the
development of a distinction between religion and the Sacred in From Religion to the Sacred. I will
contrast the terrestrial requirements of religious production and reproduction with the dysteleological
(Otto and Urpeth) affirmation of the Sacred in the moment. In light of this distinction and its
relationship to Marx’s criticism of religion, I will next consider the relationship of revolutionary
thought to the Sacred in Sacred Rebellion and Marx. I will consider the role of the sacred in the
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works of Gustavo Gutierrez and Jose Miranda in light of their commitment to liberation of the poor.
In the wake of their explicit affirmation of Marx’s criticism of capitalist exploitation, I will question
the purist interpretation of Marx’s critique of ideology in light of an explicit capacity for resistance in
a radicalised – Miranda would say “true” - Christianity. I will next turn to a consideration of the
relationship of Marx to 20th Century Theology in Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology.
Rudolph Bultmann will serve as the exemplar of this historical movement in theology. I will be
examining the affinities and differences between Bultmann’s project of de-mythologization and
Marx’s criticism of ideology in light of the notions of ‘obligation’ and ‘commitment’. In a
specification of the sense of Marx’s commitment, I will next consider the Heidegger’s radical
criticism of Marx as a mere “man of action”. Marx, Heidegger and ‘eigentlichkeit’ will raise the
question the sense of the sacred (or lack thereof) with respect to the existential decision of
commitment and action. I will disagree with Heidegger’s contention that Marx failed to articulate a
pre-theoretical understanding of existence and world. I will contend that Heidegger’s portrayal of
Marx as a mere “man of action” fails to appreciate the depth of Marx’s personal obligation and
commitment to a radical historical transformation of the world. It is Marx’s poetry which allows us a
plausible dismissal of Heidegger. Amid the horizon of the same question, I will explore the
intercourse betwixt Marx and the post-structuralist thinker, writer, and activist Georges Bataille in A
Violent Sacred: Marx and Bataille. I will explore the various pathways for such a commitment, the
most significant of which is Marx’s advocacy of violent (“on the outside, trying to get inside”)
revolution as perhaps the most explicit indication of a sacred affirmation in Marx – but in a negative,
actively nihilist, sense.
Without downplaying the necessity of Marx’s commitment to a revolutionary social
transformation of the world, I will explore the possibility of an affirmative sense of the sacred in
Marx, beyond the sacrificial logic of mere political and social violence. The event of dialectical
praxi!, of revolution, as an intimacy of thought and action, forecloses on a merely voluntarist (or, on
the contrary, “scientific”) interpretation of Marx. Seeking a more thoughtful and poetic Marx, I will
begin to delve into the inner kernel of his thought in A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx, a
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hermeneutical examination of his early poetry in which he allows himself to express an explicit
affirmation of the Sacred. I will investigate the poems Transformation, Creation and Awakening.
This consideration of Marx’s early poems will also provide the avenue for re-thinking the meaning of
his later works.
[xiv]
In this sense, we can, in the spirit of Reiner Schürmann read Marx backward in a desire to
come to grips with the root of his affirmation. Yet, differing from the reading the works of Heidegger,
we must read Marx forwards, and then backwards, in a circle, as it were, so as to attempt to cast into
relief not only Marx's own consistent existential and social eqos, but also his affirmation of
revolution as an event amidst this finite moment.
Chapter 1: Into the Breach – the Meaning of “Marx”
Before we can begin to grapple with our question of the “relation” of Marx and the sacred, we
must undertake a more preliminary investigation of the meaning of Marx. This philological problem
that stands in our face is the question of the various – and often mutually exclusive - interpretations of
the very topo! of Marx. On its face, such diversity of interpretation should indeed be encouraged.
Yet, in many instances, interpretation has been over-determined by “political” exigency. Like a
contortionist, Marx has been forced into one posture after another in order to justify a specific
political program. Of course, this is no surprise as Marx himself was a highly political and politicised
thinker. However, as “politics” concerns not necessarily truth, but mere power and strategy, we will
be careful not to allow “Marx” to be manufactured as just another ideology. There must be an attempt
to remain faithful to the texts and life of Marx so as to disclose the meaning of his work beyond the
[xv]
fleeting projections of political expediency. There is no “Marx” an sich, there for our immediate
reckoning – there is no “agreed framework”. Amidst a vast topography of interpretation, we can
apprehend many variants of the formal indicator “Marx”. Yet, it would seem possible to allow the
texts to speak for themselves – in the first instance, through a consideration of all of Marx’s corpus as
a whole.
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Such contortions and renderings took place in Marx’s own lifetime. One need only recall the
well-known anecdote of his dissension at a meeting of the Second International, in which he declared,
in response to a particular interpretation of his political economic theories, that he was not a Marxist.
The question of the meaning of Marx continued in the theoretical controversies – especially those
concerning Capital – in the formation of the Third International between Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg,
Hilferding and others. A more recent controversy concerns the status of his early writings, such as the
[xvi]
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844). This controversy however is unique. Unlike
the earlier theoretico-political disputations which concerned the interpretation of available texts, such
as the drafts of Capital, this controversy is a contestation over the very texts which may be included in
the relevant opus of Marx. This dispute is a struggle between two of the most dominant tendencies in
Marx interpretation since 1932. It concerns a decision on the part of the interpreter upon the
relevance of Marx’s earlier works, many of which were unpublished. It was not until this year that
Marx’s early writings began to be published, including the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
his Dissertation on the differences between Epicurus and Democritus, his critique of Hegel’s doctrine
of the state, his poetry, etc. All of these texts are forcefully suppressed by Althusser. Yet, we ask -
why?
It may be significant that none of the earliest Communist thinkers ever read these earlier texts
– although it will be argued that no book is a prerequisite for the event of revolutionary praxi!. Yet, it
is certain that, with the publication of these works, many party-affiliated “communist” intellectuals
dismissed the libertarian sentiments and philosophical concerns of these works as pre-scientific and
idealist. Indeed, such an opinion held sway as later interpreters such as Althusser declared Marx’s
early writings irrelevant to that which should be deemed as his true achievement – a science of
history. For Althusser, the early writings are too close in affiliation with Hegelian and post-Hegelian
idealism and thus do not achieve the level of science. For Althusser, and the many who follow this
[xvii]
view, Marx had undertaken an “epistemological break” in his displacement of philosophy by
scientific materialism. In this way, Althusser represents the variant of “Marx” interpretation which
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posits a discontinuity in his work – he is a “discontinuity theorist”. On the other side of this great
divide are those who have emphasized the significance of Marx’s early studies of alienation and his
[xviii]
libertarian vision of communist revolution. Such thinkers, such as Ollman, wish to envision
Marx’s work as in continuity, as a network of internal relations, in becoming, and as a result, have to a
great extent re-cast the interpretation of Marx’s later works in the light cast by the earlier
philosophical works. In this context, such thinkers could be described as “continuity theorists”.
In the absence of any explicit repudiation by Marx of his earlier work, it is the contention of
this strand of Marx interpretation that there is no need to censor or suppress the reading and
interpretation of these texts. In other words, there is no need to accept the meaning of Marx which has
been handed to us by Althusser et. al.. Indeed, it will be argued below that all of Marx’s later insights
were originally developed in his early works. Capital did not simply fall from the sky, and this text
exhibits traces of these early works.
In the following, I will argue for the significance of Marx’s earlier works. While there is never
a total continuity in any life, witnessed as a coherent field of discontinuous events, I feel there is no
essential incompatibility between the early and later works. Yet, not only will I argue for the
necessity of investigating Marx’s early philosophical work, but I will also argue that Marx’s poetry
must be included in the “Canon”. Indeed, I will contend that Marx perhaps undertook a break, but
one differing in character from that proposed by Althusser. That which erupts in Marx is a poetic
space in which he began to explore the sense and contours of obligation and commitment, of the
sacred, a space, as with dasein in Heidegger or the ethical in Levinas, where an alterior sensibility is
disclosed which is not articulated via the theoretical and practical ‘logics’ of rational organization.
There has been no significant treatment of Marx’s poetry which is usually described, as with
Nietzsche and his poetic and musical works, as early enthusiasms – at the worst embarrassing, at the
best, irrelevant. In the following, I will begin with an examination and criticism of Althusser’s
interpretation of the meaning of Marx and of his suppression of the latter’s earlier works. On the
basis of this examination and criticism, I will articulate an argument for the inclusion of the early
works in the corpus of texts which will be the topos for an interpretation of the meaning of Marx. I
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will contend that this inclusivity is necessary in order to ask what have become forbidden questions.
Althusser: Marxism as a New Science
Althusser allows for no ambiguity in the question of the meaning of Marx. Indeed, he is very
clear that it is not even a matter of interpretation. The question of an interpretation of Marx is not
even raised. In fact, such a possibility is suppressed. In his lecture, “Lenin and Philosophy”, given to
the French Society of Philosophy in February 1968, Althusser sets forth a rhetorically “scientific”
picture of Marx. This picture indicates a situation in which a reduction is being offered as a new
continent, a new episteme, as that which destroys that which is there in the initiation of a discursive
formation, a new science. And for him, this is the only picture which ultimately matters. He simply
states that Marx’s early works deserve no consideration – perhaps, in that they are children of their
[xix]
times – they are “philosophical” in the worse sense of the word – a “false path”. Philosophy
becomes a mere rumination upon itself and its own questions – divorced from historical
considerations, questions of its own implication in the materialist regime and dissemination of
capitalist power. Althusser states that philosophy – even critical or post-critical – remains implicated
in a regime of indoctrination in an educational system which is part and parcel of the ideological state
apparatus. No matter what, philosophy, as orchestrated in a system of education amid a class society,
serves to propagate capitalist ideology in those who are forced into the indenture servitude of the
student. Philosophy, as it is, cannot escape its status as ideology, on its own. It needs an intervention
from the outside - a theory of philosophy as a “false path”.
For Althusser, such an “outside” is intimated and demonstrated in some works of Marx. He
points to two traces in the works of the Marx, the Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach and the statement in
the German Ideology that this latter work is written to “settle accounts with an erstwhile philosophical
consciousness”. Althusser casts the Eleventh Thesis as a premonition of a breach with philosophy in
an attempt to articulate a new science of material history. The German Ideology, which was also
unpublished, is also interpreted as a displacement of philosophy via a materialist science of history.

Of all the early works, Althusser focuses only upon the Eleventh Thesis, and he is only concerned
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with the first phrase, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world”. Philosophy in this way is
only ideology – ‘interpretation’ is ideology. For Althusser, the “authentic” significance of Marx is
that he is concerned with a science of the world. This science is articulated not only in the German
Ideology but also in Capital and other political economic works.
Despite his earlier criticism of philosophy as being a mere indoctrination system, Althusser
states that there is, in the current period, no exit from the categories and labels which will serve to
orient the meaning of Marx with respect to the division of concepts into science, philosophy,
sociology, etc. In this way, Althusser seems to accept the academic division of labour of capitalist
indoctrination, despite his resistance to this regime. Indeed, he projects this division upon Marx in the
distinction between philosophy and science. Upon the basis of this projection, Althusser suppresses
the early philosophy work of Marx in order to orchestrate a particular meaning for the later, so-called
scientific works. With the early works excised, the later works can be pictured as pursuits of
“objective knowledge”, of science, intellectual praxi! - within the limits of reason alone. Indeed, it
could be argued, against Althusser, that in such a divorcement of context, these works could in the end
be interpreted according to whatever paradigm or ideological context that one may choose.
That which is significant for Althusser is the explication of the “operation” of philosophy, one
which gives off the reek of ideology. It is amidst this realisation that philosophy is a regime of
ideology that it becomes possible to elaborate a theory and a description of philosophy as a “false
path”. With this realization, it becomes possible not only to understand the implication of philosophy
in a regime of indoctrination but also to articulate the possibility of a theoretical intervention which
displaces the stratagems of ideology in favour of an unveiled disclosure of concrete “reality”. In this
way, we can see Althusser’s address on Lenin as such an intervention.
Althusser purports a scenario in which Marx breaks from philosophy. His evidence is, on one
hand, the “philosophical emptiness” that is allegedly exhibited in the wake of the “epistemological
break” announced in The German Ideology. Althusser seems to merely accept the academic
definitions or pictures of philosophy – not only as a separate discipline, distinct from the others, but
also as specific portrait of philosophy as an ontological discourse akin to religion and ethics, each
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conceived in an idealist sense. Althusser declares that, even if we can accept his definition, Marx
never again, after the break, wrote philosophy, he was no longer engaged in “interpretation” but
emerged into the Real, the Science of Concrete Historical Man. In this way, Marx’s break with
philosophy is not merely a theoretical shift from one philosophy to another, but a break from one
episteme to another. As philosophy, for Althusser, is a false path, there must be a theory of an
“epistemological break” that will intervene to put out of play “all existing philosophy”. Althusser
states,
What was announced in the Theses on Feuerbach was, in the necessarily philosophical
language, of a declaration of rupture with all ‘interpretive’ philosophy, something quite
different from a new philosophy: a new science, the science of history, whose first, still
[xx]
infinitely fragile foundations Marx was to lay in The German Ideology.
Althusser characterizes Marx’s “philosophical emptiness” as the proclamation of the “radical
[xxi]
suppression of all existing philosophy…” The emptiness is the awakening of the “fullness of a
[xxii]
science.” Althusser attributes to Marx a suppression of philosophy as it is a “hallucination”,
“mystification”, and a “dream” – as it, in other words, abides some relation with the imagination,
[xxiii]
poetry, or art. Althusser asserts,
Philosophy, like religion and ethics, is only ideology, it has no history, everything which seems
to happen in it really happens outside it, in the only real history, the history of the natural life
of men, known by the action which reveals it by destroying the ideologies that veil it: foremost
[xxiv]
among these ideologies is philosophy.
The veil of philosophy must be torn asunder as it is merely a manufactured article of a capitalist
imagination. The new science will suppress and destroy philosophy as an imaginative artefact
(poi"si!) in order to allow the World of the Real – Science – to emerge as a new source for
knowledge. The character of this new episteme, the new science (scientia) is a system of concepts, a
[xxv]
nexus which displaces a mere play among “ideological notions.”
In order to cast his theory, his interpretation of “Marx”, into relief, Althusser sets out a
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topographical metaphor of the sciences as regional formations, as continents, of the World of Science.
The formation of each continent occurs in an epistemological break. We can imagine the breaking off
of continents in the terrestrial drift of plate tectonics. The break is destructive, but also creative or
formative of novelty, in this case, of a new “real” – science – a new episteme. Among the continents
Althusser identifies are Mathematics (including its sub-grouping Logic), Physics (including
Chemistry and Biology), and perhaps, Althusser muses, a continent that has been opened up by
Freud. Yet, Althusser is more certain about the new continent opened by Marx, although, in the
manner of a good scientist, he sets forth this theory as a hypothesis, as a proposition, one that is to be
put to the test. Althusser proposes,

Marx has opened up to scientific knowledge a new third scientific continent, the continent of
History, by an epistemological break whose first still uncertain strokes are inscribed in The
[xxvi]
German Ideology, after having been announced in the Theses on Feuerbach.
Althusser reassures us that he is only testing the possibility of this new continent. We are to judge
along with him. Indeed, this break, this event, is not, as he warns, instantaneous. Such an event
becomes apparent in the midst of a historical re-organization of concrete existence, occurring in the
wake of such a breach. Indeed, that which we consider to be an instantaneous novelty could be the
fruit or recurrence of an ancient longing. Yet, even in its subtlety and its requirement of patience,
Althusser wishes to apply his theory of an epistemological break to the question of the meaning of
Marx. He states,
In fact, the operation of these reorganizations, which affect essential concepts and their
theoretical components, can be observed empirically in the sequence of Marx’s writings: in the
Manifesto and The Poverty of Philosophy of 1847, in the Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy of 1859, in Wages, Prices and Profits of 1865, in the first volume of
[xxvii]
Capital in 1867, etc.
As we have heard, the break is announced in the Theses on Feuerbach and given a few preliminary
strokes in The German Ideology. In an uncritical positivist vein, Althusser states that the subsequent
texts exhibit empirical evidence of a re-organization in the wake of the breach. Moreover, this is a
scientific break, a declaration of independence of Scientia from Sophia. The implications of this
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break are radical and manifold. In the midst of this event, philosophy must remain silent, it must be
suppressed as it is. Working from a rather academic and political, or, in other words, Platonic,
definition of philosophy, Althusser states, in reference to Lenin,

Lenin began his book State and Revolution with this simple empirical comment: the State has
not always existed; the existence of the State is only observable in class societies. In the same
way, I shall say: philosophy has not always existed; the existence of philosophy is only
observable in a world which contains what is called a science or a number of sciences. A
science in the strict sense: a theoretical, i.e. ideal (idéelle) and demonstrative discipline, not an
[xxviii]
aggregate of empirical results.
Althusser draws a broad conclusion from this observation, indicated, we will recall, in the context of a
discussion of the emergence into the Light of a new episteme, a new science of History. In order to
clarify the relation between philosophy and science in this context, Althusser invokes Hegel’s myth of
the Owl of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom who only flies at dusk. Minerva/Athena born from the
head of Jupiter/Zeus evokes a philosophy of evening and Night. Yet, as Althusser is not open to the
influence of such a Night upon the contours of the new day, he focuses merely upon that which he
calls the dawn – science - that which could, in the end, if he is mistaken, be the longest and darkest of
nights. Althusser enters a mythological topo!, but retains the posture of an ‘objective scientist’.
Philosophy is not yet, it is a possible recurrence under certain specific conditions. He states,
Philosophy is this always a long day behind the science which induces the birth of its first
form and the rebirth of its revolutions, a long day which may last years, decades, a
[xxix]
half-century or a century.
Althusser thus offers us, at a lag, the possibility of a new philosophy. The pre-scientific philosophy
will be suppressed either directly or indirectly in the wake of the scientific epoce. Indeed, any new
philosophy must be born from the scientific inducement of an epistemological break. Succumbing,
perhaps, to this warmed-over Hegelian myth, Althusser states that a Marxist philosophy will arise
only in the newly founded neighbourhood of a Marxist science of History. In a very poetic, though
bastardised, vein, Althusser states,

The day is always long, but as luck would have it, it is already far advanced, look: dusk will
[xxx]
soon fall. Marxist philosophy will take wing.
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It is in this way that Althusser bids farewell to philosophy as it has and does exist – he welcomes an
eclipse, a new dark age. He embraces the philosophical primitivism of Lenin (and of Engels) as this
is interpreted as a sign of an emergence of a primitive consciousness of the “concrete” from behind
the veil of ideology. The day is long, it is not yet dusk. A new philosophy is to be reborn, recur, amid
complex re-organizations of philosophy in the wake of the “epistemological break”. Perhaps, it
smoulders as the “unknown continent” of Freud, a student of Nietzsche. Yet, despite the rhetorical
tentativeness of his “proposition” of Marxist history as a new continent, Althusser reiterates his
disdain for Marx’s early writings in criticisms of Lukacs and Gramsci. Those who cannot wait out the
“long day” proclaim a “philosophy of praxis”, take their point of departure from “Marx”, in proximity
to Hegel - not in the Real of Science.
The topo! of Revolution: a Criticism of Althusser
The meaning of Marx for Althusser consists in a theory of an “epistemological break” from
the false path, ideology, of philosophy, to the science of History. As stated, this is not a shift from one
philosophy to another, but of one episteme to another. In the wake of this break, all existing
philosophy becomes silent in the wake of a new dispensation of truth. Only after this dawn, after a
long day, can philosophy, at dusk, take flight. In the context of this narrative, we must forget Marx’s
pre-scientific, philosophical works as these are creatures of a Night that had never known a dawn,
have never set foot upon the ground of a new science. Althusser never explicitly mentions Marx’s
poetry, but in light of his dismissive reference to “God-builders” among some of the members of
[xxxi]
Mach’s circle, it is not difficult to fathom his line on this issue.
It is clear that publication was not a criterion for Althusser. He had the benefit to live in the
post-1932 generation in which all of Marx’s texts were available. Yet, on the basis of his theory of a
“Marxist science”, he unflinchingly suppresses all of the texts which pre-date the Eleventh Thesis on
Feuerbach. This is a strange decision, especially in light of his reliance on Hegelian metaphors, but
one that operated according to a quite straight forward logic. From the latter text, Althusser deduces
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that it is interpretation that is illusory, and in The German Ideology, he points out that Marx wishes to
“settle accounts” with philosophy. From these facts, Althusser alleges a radical break from “all
existing philosophy”. His supporting evidence for this interpretation is the “philosophical emptiness”
which followed the announcement of the break. Since philosophy is criticised by Marx and since it is
alleged that Marx no longer wrote philosophy, an epistemological break is certain enough for
Althusser that he will effectively and overtly reject Marx’s earlier works. For him, the theory is
proven.
An initial point of contention for Althusser’s picture of Marx is this preliminary scenario in
which Althusser defines his terms. Indeed, Althusser’s theory of an “epistemological break”, as it is
applied to “Marx”, remains parasitic upon the academic division of labour in its definition, planning,
orchestration, and assessment of the boundaries of several disciplines. Foucault, a fallen student of
Althusser, will designate these disciplines as “truth regimes”. While it may be argued that amidst
such a system there is no exit from its historical limits and horizons, in this case the division of labour,
such a perspective remains blind to other phenomena and possibilities. From an existential
perspective, it could be argued that Marx was not an academic, even though he received his doctorate
in philosophy with a dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus. As his thought is of the “outside”, it is
not clear whether we can understand Marx from the perspective of the academic division of labour, of
its “pictures” and formal specifications of philosophy and science. It is certainly possible to conceive
of the so-called “scientific works” as explications of truth in a deeply philosophical sense. Indeed,
one can point out enormous philosophical continuities between Capital for instance and the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts. One could also find a marked similarity between the German
Ideology and Marx’s early poems Transformation, Creation and The Awakening. Yet, it is upon this
political-academic division that Althusser sets his application of the theory of the epistemological
break (although this is not necessary, but a different sense of such a breach could alter the limits of
“canonical” texts). In a rather crude way, Althusser lays out his theory of a “philosophical emptiness”
on the basis of these academic demarcations. In his indication of the signs of a re-organization in
philosophy, he lists the works on political economy which followed The German Ideology and the
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Theses on Feuerbach. Althusser seems to naively accept the disciplinary division between
philosophy and political economy and of history without question. Since Marx is centered on
political economics, he is not focussed upon philosophy. And thus, he has broken with philosophy…
Althusser cannot let himself conceive of Capital as a philosophical work, as a pathway of articulation
which discloses of logo! of truth.
Even if we, just for an instant, submit to this logic of identity and discipline to which Althusser
seems to have already acquiesced, we may question the “identity” projected upon Marx’s texts (and
the blind violence to the eqo! and poihsi! of Marx’s life). Indeed, it would seem that Althusser reifies
the academic division of labour into a historical necessity and forgets the bios of the street. Within
the same parameters of evidence, of the Eleventh Thesis and The German Ideology, and the later
string of works on political economy, we could give a radically different interpretation than that
proposed by Althusser. In the first instance, as already suggested, these works are explications of the
conditions and limits of truth in a philosophical sense. Indeed, Marx shares with Althusser a criticism
of idealist philosophies in all of the texts which precede The German Ideology. Yet, his so-called
scientific works are not only seeking truth, but are orchestrated conceptually according to familiar
philosophical patterns. For instance, the analysis of money in the Contribution to a Critique of
Political Economy is hardly the articulation of a simple empirical fact. It is a highly orchestrated and
post-Hegelian analysis of the dialectical conditions for the emergence of the social relationship of
money. The significance of Marx’s transformative appropriation of Hegelian dialectics with respect
to his portrayal of the myriad social relationships amid the capitalist era, a philosophical strategy that
is shared by the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s
Doctrine of the State and the Contribution, and indeed, Capital, is Marx’s concern to intimate the
existential situation of concrete estrangement in the capitalist era.
Moreover, as Marx is not merely a “scientist” or an “epistemologist”, but a revolutionary and a
finite human being, his emphasis upon the estrangement of human existence also abides an indication
of pathways, of praxi!, which may transform this temporal situation. Perhaps, if we were working
from that reductionistic agenda as Althusser, we could consent to the picture of Marx as a “scientist.”
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Yet, this would be blind to not only a much broader and richer expression of the desire for truth that is
philosophy, but also the deep philosophical and ‘categorial’ background to any alleged scientific
“fact”. Moreover, as I will argue below, it is not even a question of whether or not Marx wrote
[xxxii]
philosophy, but that he wrote at all, and in many voices throughout his life. This pluri-vocity
exhibits a continuity and maturation of insights that emerged quite early, as we will see. Perhaps we
could assent to Althusser’s epistemological break, but understood as an existential breach, we would
wish to resituate the “event” not merely in the early philosophy, but in Marx’s poetry, an expression
which indicates the emergence of a profound questioning which took placed amid his first readings of
Hegel and Schelling. Without such considerations, Althusser’s picture of Marx is, to invoke Rosa
Luxemburg, quite “bloodless”.
Indeed, Althusser himself descends from the pedestal of positive science to that of metaphor,
of poeisis, on three significant occasions. His first excursion into poetry is his attribution of
“philosophical emptiness” to Marx in the wake of the birth of the new science of History. This
formulation has an existentialist ring in its statement that Marx is nothing that is philosophical, he is
empty of philosophy. Yet, as we will see in Althusser’s other uses of metaphor, his attempts
ultimately fail as he seems to be unable to see the internal relations of the metaphor amid the nexus of
concrete existence and thus the possibility of differing and myriad interpretations of a metaphor. For
instance, perhaps Marx’s “emptiness” could imply that “Marx” is in need of philosophy or of a
existential “interpretation” which explicates the philosophical continuity in the later works, or, to
throw out another metaphor, that he is an empty vessel longing for a philosophy. While Althusser
may chose the latter version, it is clear that not only are there many possible readings of this situation,
but also that, as I have indicated, there is a manifest kinship between Marx’s “early” and “later”
works.
Althusser’s second significant metaphor, that of epistemic continents, is applied to Marx to
show that there is an epistemological break between the early and later works – indeed, it is this
theory which sets up this distinction in its agenda of constituting a “science” of History. I have
conceded that the meaning of Marx could be, in a significant way, associated with a breach, but not
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one which could be described in terms of the academic and political nomenclature of the day. Marx’s
radical criticism, his breach, I will argue, begins in his poetry and unfolds throughout the trajectory of
his works, as a literary praxis. It should be said that Althusser’s topography points to a topos of
expression that is the finite existence of “Marx”. A sensitivity to phenomena and existence may allow
us to take a step back into the deeper ground of Marx’s breach from the labyrinth of ideological
indoctrination and of his creative transformation of the intimate kinship of truth and praxi! - an
‘outside’ which seeps in, as in the Masque of the Red Death of Poe. Perhaps, Althusser would simply
dismiss such considerations as a descent into psychology, biography, anthropology – or, god forbid,
the “existentialisms” of Heidegger and Sartre. Such notions still persist in the Night before the dawn.
Indeed, such a relationship between Night and the dawn is prominent in Althusser’s use of
Hegel’s myth to the Owl of Minerva. As we have seen, Althusser places his emphasis upon the dawn
as the “epistemological break” which founds a new continent, a new science. It is only after the
dawn, after a long day, that dusk will descend upon the world. At such a time, [Marxist] philosophy
will take wing. However, such a hyper-linear formulation forces philosophy into the role of the
vulture which ‘sucks blood from dead corpse’. Indeed, despite Althusser’s appeals to the “natural
man”, he fails to apprehend the cyclical implications of his metaphor of dawn, dusk, Night and
twilight. Indeed, he projects his linear “Enlightenment” agenda upon a phenomena which displays
itself as akin to a circle, a recurrence of the same. In this way, if considered in a circular fashion, it is
the Night and the twilight before the dawn which give birth to this Twilight and Light. Perhaps the
dawn is only one moment in a circle, in which each possessed ultimate significance. It is clear that
Althusser’s metaphors bring with them more questions than answers. In fact, it is quite simple to
subvert his meaning into a differing interpretation.
Yet, that which is most perplexing about Althusser’s address on Lenin is the Janus-faced
character of his discourse. On the one hand, he specifies a reduced terrain of textual relevance in his
constitution of the meaning of “Marx”. On the other, he slips into metaphors which serve in the end
[xxxiii]
to subvert his initial proposition. For instance, how can Althusser reject Marx’s early works
due to their “Hegelianism”, and simultaneously justify his significant reliance on the Hegelian schema
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of the Owl of Minerva? In light of his own use of metaphor and poetry, how can Althusser reject
Marx’s poetry as the spark of the breach which announces a different meaning of Marx? Indeed, a
powerful meaning of the Myth of the Owl of Minerva is the deep gestation of the thought, of
lightening from the dark cloud, the birth of Athena from the head of Zeus, or Apollo from Dionysus.
One can neither destroy the kinship of these powers of existence, nor assert a priority betwixt them.
In this way, the poetry and early philosophical writings of Marx, even on Althusser’s terms, would be
the gestation, the topo! of formulation for the insight of Marx, and are thus worthy of better treatment
than suppression, rejection, and libel. It is this topos which opens a ‘place’ for an authentic
revolutionary praxi!.
As “evidence” for this alternative interpretation, one which emphasizes the “continuity”
amidst the works of Marx, we can highlight that which is missed in a merely scientific – or
epistemological - interpretation of “Marx”. As suggested, the kinship between the early and later
works, indeed, the flow amidst differing topographies of expression, from poetry, to philosophy,
political pamphlets and programs plays itself out an a still unfinished legacy of political economic,
philosophical, sociological, and ideological analysis and deconstruction. “Marx” therefore is a topo!
of indication and expression, the truth of which would be destroyed if there was an imposition of a
monologicity of meaning, an interpretation, which in the end forbids all subsequent interpretation.
Philosophy as the desire for truth is not enough for Althusser. He must possess her, his new
episteme. Althusser’s presumption of concrete historical truth, free of interpretation, is similar to
Hegel’s Absolute Idea. The latter described his Logic as the “thoughts of god before creation.” It is
also significant that Marx placed a copy of this book upon his desk as he wrote Capital. He also had a
physiology textbook on his desk. These “simple empirical facts” show the ambiguity which is
introduced if we seek to deconstruct the rigid portrayals of the meaning of a work. Indeed, it may be
suggested that with his consent to the symbolic division of labour of the academic ideological
apparatus, Althusser’s interpretation of “Marx” as a new science is a commodification of Marx and is
perhaps one of the vanguard of capitalist ideologies. That to which Althusser is blind is the sense of
estrangement and alienation that exists amidst capitalist hegemony. As he does not see the surreal
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up-side-down world of the capitalist eqos and bio!, but consents to it in his adoption of the Hegelian
schema, Althusser’s theory becomes a “case study” of alienation. Not only does it drift into
seemingly non-scientific regions such as metaphor and poetry, but it also blindly acquiesces to the
stratagems of otherwise condemned philosophers. Yet, amidst the detours into pictures, a linear
reason is preserved as it runs roughshod over the cyclical or lateral metaphorical topographies.
Althusser suppresses that which does not fit into his schema. However, as we have seen even his
break is problematic as continuities are readily in evidence throughout the works of Marx. It is in this
way that we can ask questions, such as the sacred, that have been forbidden by the architectonic
rhetoric of Althusser, questions which involve the internal relations between each and all of the texts –
and of life, etc….
Chapter 2: Marx’s Criticism of Religion
Marx sets forth his first philosophical criticism of religion in his appropriation of the
Feuerbachian humanist criticism and inversion of not only Hegel, but also of Christianity. Returning
to the poetry of Theognis, such a sensuous inversion of religion forces us to become, as Bataille has
[xxxiv]
written, disintoxicated - no longer to stand upon our heads – but, to see religion as that which
it is, as an abstraction of “real man” into “ideal man”. Such an idealization constitutes alienation in
the loss of agency vis-à-vis this all-too-human artifice which occurs, for Feuerbach, in the
forgetfulness of the concrete origin of the work of art – in human sensuousness. For Feuerbach, it was
simply enough to realise such a loss and alienation to regain the essence of humanity once and for all
– for Marx, Feuerbach remains an idealist, a contemplative.
The simplicity and genius of Feuerbach's insight, that God is the ideal representation of the
aspiration of the human species, was not enough for Marx. While he would not ultimately deny the
possibility of flights of desire, of thought and being on the “outside”, as in a moment of revolutionary
aporia, Marx also demanded a materialist deconstruction of the real interests of religion, in word,
thought and deed. Mere insight, mere thought, could never undo this material substratum, that
configuration of terrestrial power, which originally sets the hegemonic parameters, horizons for
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thought – which deny this eqos of existence. There must be, as the root of any theoretical activity, on
the contrary, a radical dialectical transfiguration of the real conditions of existence for there to be a
transmutation and alternative disclosure in the ideal reflection or thought of being.
Marx contends that a criticism of religion is the pre-requisite for any concrete analysis of the
[xxxv]
actual social relationships of human existence. Indeed, a criticism of religion is not merely an
exercise of thought. It requires resistance to and refusal of its rituals of outward effect. It requires
existential praxis. Religion - as distinct from the sacred - becomes ideology, as it is, for Marx, an
alienated product of an alienated existence. As an alienated activity, amidst a matrix of systematic
alienation, its own self-interpretation is divorced from any immediate awareness of the conditions of
its emergence and maintenance – one that, with Nietzsche and Bataille, hides its own dark roots. It
therefore cannot be anything but a mask that shrouds the concrete truth of human existence. In this
chapter, I will set forth Marx's criticisms of religion as mere ideology. While I will argue below that
Marx's criticism of religion is already expressed in his poetry, his initial philosophical criticism of
religion is greatly influenced by Feuerbach, and the humanist criticism of absolutist idealism. Marx’s
step beyond, towards a materialist criticism of religion, is a specification and concretization of the
insight of Feuerbach. Yet, despite the significant traces of Feuerbach in the later Marx, as in the
notion of fetishism of commodities articulated in Capital, Marx’s deconstruction of religion abides the
implicit possibility of a retrieval of a non-alienated sense of the sacred as a concrete human activity
and reflexivity via praxi!. While Marx departs from Feuerbach, it is crucial to the following inquiry
that there be a deep continuity in the writings of Marx. It is this continuity which must put to rest a
greatly misunderstood “epistemological break”. I will attempt to disclose the contours of this
continuity and argue that it is only from this perspective that we can glimpse, most clearly, the
distinction in Marx between religion and the sacred.
Let us begin with one of Marx’s most direct statements on mere religion,
Religion is the general theory of that world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in a
popular form, its spiritualistic point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn
complement, its universal source of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization
of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality. The struggle against
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religion is therefore indirectly a fight against the world of which religion is the spiritual aroma.
[xxxvi]
As long as "analysis" is embedded in the grand narratives of idealistic religious instruction,
however, there exists no avenue to explore the intimate trajectories of the way or manner of temporal
irruption of the sacred. In mere thought, we cannot smell the spiritual aroma of the religious cult. In
this way, religion, as a concrete indication of existence, is a symptom of an actuality in which
humanity is alienated from its own self-understanding. A desire for a truth of the sacred must
overcome mere thought and the practical, utilitarian stratagems of religion. As I will argue below,
such a situation of alienation indicates a severance of humanity from an authentic sense of the sacred.
Religion as ideology prevents an awakening to an intimate and authentic sense of the sacred, just as is
the case with those other ideological forms such as mere politics, art and philosophy. Indeed, if it is
possible, as Marx suggests in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, to achieve via a
revolution a non-alienated sense of social being and social praxi!, it would seem possible to be able to
achieve a non-alienated sense of the sacred. This would be to indicate a sense of the sacred which is
not merely a phantasmogorical product of mere thought and ideology, but an authentic singular and
social praxis which is liberated from the snares of a condition of alienation.
Beginning with the Feuerbachian inversion and transformation of the Hegelian dialectic, Marx
insists in the Theses on Feuerbach, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and in the
Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, that the authentic interests of a "universal
humanism" remained enshrouded within an a-historical regime of consciousness in the matrix of
religious ideology. In this interpretation, the traditional grand referent "God" and the theological
[xxxvii]
infrastructure articulated on the basis of such a conjecture persists as a lost work of art -
ultimately of human origin, but forgotten in its genealogy. Marx writes that religion is the “self-
consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself
[xxxviii]
again.” That which was created by human beings has attained an abstract agency over
humans in that the origin of the work of art has been erased. Amidst the narrative of consciousness,
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our own creations have been given agency over and against us. An alienated social existence gives
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rise to an alienated consciousness. We can no longer see or hear these contours of our
existence as we only apprehend that which is indicated in a free-floating matrix of an imposed
interpretation. As Miranda suggests, we do not question the legitimacy of the ownership of capital or
of the apparent justice of the wage system, for as Wittgenstein writes in his Philosophical
Investigations, “A picture held us captive, and we could not free ourselves from it as it is inexorably
repeated in our language.” For Miranda, the picture must be destroyed amidst the birth of the
kingdom of god amidst the invasion of Yahweh. In different language, the “death of God” meant, for
Altizer, the fulfilment of love in the moment of existence. We are here together now, and we can do
whatever we must do amid this temporal opening. Amidst existence, possibility expresses the
meaning of this phenomena, of my own self.
Yet, the language of ideology is a “phenomenalism” all its own. It points out, indicates, that
which will specify the “facts” which will serve to reproduce its own existence, its theory or morality.
We are talked to death. We are given a world through these words. But, these words serve merely to
cover over that which exists – at least from the concrete perspective of a contestation of “which”
facts. We are told everything, but shown nothing. And, as with Miranda and others who challenge
the entire edifice of religion and cult, Marx hit upon a struggle for truth in the wake of a systematic
falsification of existence by “religion”, by a “cult of sacrifice”. This raises the question of the relation
of the sacred and revolution (Cf. Chapter 6).
In Marx’s works written under the influence of Feuerbach, one senses a transition away from
the merely religious - albeit negative (“the against”) - sensibility one finds, for instance, in
[xl]
Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity. The famous Eleventh Thesis, which exhorts action over
interpretation, serves as a transition from mere thought to a praxi! amidst this everyday and existence.
Yet, it does not operate amidst any new epistemic event – the Eleventh Thesis is akin to all of Marx’s
early works. Already in his poem, The Epigramist, Marx expresses a preference for concrete action
against the religiosity and ideologi-osity of moral demagogues, even such as the contemplative poetry
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of Schiller. Indeed, concrete action or the praxis of human existence takes center stage in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or Paris Manuscripts of 1844, texts written, as with the
Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (1845), under the shadow
of the fiery brook… Feuerbach.
However, the posture of the Eleventh Thesis does not mean that Marx has merely abandoned,
or will ever abandon, interpretation as criticism or even the methodology of inversion which he
orchestrated in his earlier writings. Despite the many academic and political dis-continuity theorists
who seek to leave Marx dissected upon the cutting table – in an epistemological break - Marx
continued his life of writing and political advocacy continually setting forth engaged interpretations,
analyses, and pictures and poems of the “situations” and “laws of motion” of the “world”. For Marx,
interpretation undergoes a transformation of meaning – amidst praxi!.
A critical hermeneutic and strategy of inversion continues to surface in Marx's writings, even
in those in which he collaborates with Engels, such as The Holy Family, a radical and often comic
criticism of the idealist philosophies of the so-called young Hegelians and in the German Ideology, a
text not published in his own life time. In both of these texts, there is a displacement of a
Feuerbachian humanist fundament via a materialist analysis of history. That which is consistent in
these critical works is a confrontation with an idealist and a-historical "interpretation" of human
existence, a camera obscura which remains parasitic on an abstraction of human essence which
projects an eternal exemplar deemed to possess exclusive access to a disclosure of “Nature”. From
one side of the coin, such an image or world-picture (Weltanschauung) fails to acknowledge the
radical historical character of human existence; from the other, such a picture merely serves to
reinforce a conception and eqos of human existence which is portrayed as a natural, and therefore,
unchangeable static situation. Such a picture simply obscures existence in its eruption amidst
struggle.
This is the essence of Marx's criticism of religion - and "objective" science and “systematic”,
“rational” theology - it merely serves to pre-empt, ideologically, the ethical intentionality, of an ethical
significance of our lifeworld, of the possibility of a radical disclosure and transformation of the
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situation and contours of human existence. Marx's disclosure is therefore more complex than a mere
refusal of an interpretation of human existence, which projects itself as an eternal exemplar. He never
throws down the ladder. His motivations are also existential in the sense that he deconstructs a
metaphysics of interpretation which projects a typology of interpretation which not only paints a static
image of that which is, what existence is, but also, in accord with this depiction, serves to consolidate
a dominant ideology which considers change impossible.
Mere interpretation - the "scientific method" - as it exists, in the context of Marx's criticism,
beyond the maelstroms of existential temporality and historicity, gives the interpreter - the safe,
eternal observer - a sense that he can create the world in his own image. The interpreter, in this
sense, sets back away from historical events and merely describes that which is - in a posture of
objectivity – as a transcendental subject of modernity, as a contemplator of ideology, a Christian ego
in a Secular world. Marx writes that religion is the “illusory sun which revolves around man as long
[xli]
as he does not revolve around himself.” Such a gesture conjures the spirit of Giordano Bruno,
against the merely Copernican metaphysics of Kant, who opens up the possibility of an intimate
self-interpretation of human existence which resists the “secure” stratagems of ideological
falsification. Bruno wrote that the center was everywhere, that each tenuous existence opens toward
the Sacred. Such a notion of radical immanence subverts the solid and safe architectonic of a
subjectivity which could only rest upon a structure of transcendence which was immune to a radical
sense of the sublime. The structure of transcendental subjectivity, as it is immune from the
overwhelming sublimity of the sacred event, of the roots of the sublime, temporality, or as Otto
suggests, of the numinous, posits a safe place where the “subject” is protected from the radical
makeshift sense of existence. The sublime, in the context of Kant's Third Critique, becomes nothing
but a spectacle viewed from the safe distance of a protected exteriority, a transcendental subject which
is a safe, little island… very little, almost nothing.
For Marx such a comfortable station was not an option. With his indication of praxi!, and
with the serious visceral repercussions of his political advocacy (not to mention the tenuous situations
of his life of poverty in London), there was no longer the possibility of an 18th or even 19th century
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scientific (Enlightenment or Darwinist) objectivity to his inquiries, but an engaged praxis through
which he learned as he acted amidst his world. Once again, this is not, however, to suggest that Marx
merely refused interpretation as such. It would be to set forth the possibility of a radically different
typology of interpretation - one influenced at its core by the cry of the oppressed, even the cry of
oneself as he walked for thirty-five years to the Round Reading Room at the British Library, as he
aged in Levinas’ sense. For instance, one could contend that Marx's Capital is a work of
interpretation, a hermeneutic poiesis. And, as one reads this work, one fathoms that it is neither a
merely mythological interpretation of the “beginning”, as with the earlier political economists with
the “natural state” (the myth of the hunter and the fisherman), nor is it a work exhorting the pretence
of a scientific methodology of an objective, pan-optic or god's eye observer. It is an engaged work,
one of revolutionary advocacy, but also one infused with myriad factual data and documentation of
the actual situation of workers (cf. Chapter 10, On the Working Day) and of owners of capitals amidst
a novel matrix of historical existence – that which Marx dubbed as the capitalist mode of production.
However, Marx's work is not therefore a work of positivism of empirical descriptive generalization as
with the inductive works of the working class writer Dietzgen, who Marx called "our philosopher".
There resides a strong interpretative and hermeneutic sophistication in Capital - and there is the
[xlii]
legacy of Feuerbach in Capital in its historical and political economic articulation.
That which truly discloses Marx's criticisms of religion is a consistent criticism of idealistic
abstraction from the perspective of lived existence. This perspective is underscored by Marx's choice
of words to describe this novel historical constellation - fetishism. It is in this light that we can fathom
Marx's Eleventh Thesis in a new light. It is not interpretation as historical hermeneutics oriented to
praxis (or poiesis in the sacred sense) that Marx is criticising, but the idealized projections which
attempt to stand beyond the historicity of human existence – the always bad poetry which merely
serves power. While Marx sets forth his (and Engels) grand narrative of historical materialism in The
German Ideology (condemned to the criticism of rats and mice), he, the old mole, is involved, from
the imminent perspective of praxi!, in an intimate hermeneutic of human existence, articulated amidst
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the horizons of a specific opening of historicity. The commodity is the latest manifestation and modus
operandi of Adam and Eve, of the inexorable narrative and theatre of human impotence. The
commodity is our god - our fetish. Marx no longer seems to need to speak of religion per se as all this
idle chatter – pseudo-religion - is being catastrophically eclipsed amidst the pseudo-renaissance of the
19th century. But, it is a renaissance which is also indicative of an eclipse of an authentic notion of
the Sacred. Religion and the sacred become identified into a matrix of the Same. Not only that, but
the new god, the commodity, as a fetish, exudes the resonance of that which is utterly profane -
intimating the other connotation of the term fetish – in the sublime spirit of the Marquis de Sade who
was so admired by Georges Bataille. Religion cowers in its concentration camp. It is the
concentration camp. This sacred affirmation erupts amidst this “life”.
Marx is playing here to Protestant ideology as the novel spirit of capitalism and to Christianity
[xliii]
as the “special religion of capital”. Not only does he suggest the possibility that capitalism
constitutes a retrogression to the so-called “savage” religions, which would so offend the supremacist
delusions of the newly-chosen Christian elite, but that our very situation of affliction is a perverse
desire - a fetish. We are addicted to our affliction, to our god and to our masochistic prostration to a
mere “cultus”, as Miranda suggests. Such prostration to the “Grand Inquisitor”, of cultus, is a
renunciation, a displacement, of an affirmation and cultivation of the sacred. The madman Nietzsche
shouts out, as the new Cassandra, that God is Dead in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra and his Gay
Science. No one listens to him, but everyone feels the wake of that which he speaks. But the death of
god does not mean - or was not intended to mean - that there is nothing holy, that there is nothing
divine. A Sacred opening does not close with Marx's deconstruction of religion, or of Nietzsche’s
objections to a mere Platonic or Aristotelian “Christianity”. Indeed, the impetus for such cries in the
wilderness, as with any prophetic intervention, was and is that there exists a sacred that has not been
destroyed by the facile refusals of a scientific or religious hegemony. The deconstruction is the
simultaneous prerequisite for an affirmation of the Sacred. Marx's criticism of religion consists in a
confrontation with an a-historical idealism and moralistic rationalism which, through its inability to
disclose the truth of human existence, serves merely to mask a historical condition of self-deception
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and perverse self-laceration. Religion, or, the a-temporal, but successionistic ideology of power is not
concerned or existentially aware of an intimate affirmation of the sacred.
Marx does not need to directly articulate a doctrine of the sacred – or of the possibility of a
non-alienated sense of the Sacred after communism. His affirmation is enough – indeed, communism
was only the means for that which would emerge - he is always already on Sacred ground in his
taking sides with the weak and oppressed. In deed, Miranda contends that the praxi! of earthly
justice, of love, [is] the sacred itself, which for him is envisioned as a god of liberation, justice and
love. Such a possibility and comportment is evident in the said of a life of confrontation and
advocacy for a different world. As Kant writes in his Religion, the actions and life of a man indicate
his disposition. Marx’s poetry and his poetic references in his later works and his actions serve as
symptoms or indications of a desire, an affirmation which is the concrete actualization of an
intentionality toward and amidst a sacred opening. Indeed, although it is unlikely that Marx is
working within the horizons of the Bible, he, in his affirmation, fulfils the prophets’ injunction against
speaking or setting forth an image of the god. Such an image is a symptom of an existence which
had created masks to obscure and prohibit the possibility of communication. That which lies beyond
the image is an affirmation of a sacred praxi!.
Mere religion as an instruction, as an ideological discipline, collaborates with the
de-sacralisation of the world - with the eclipse of the sacred. There is nothing left but words which
point to nothings, which disclose nothings. The refusal of these nothings - of the myriad chaos of
beings entering and exiting “THIS” world which are distinct from the No-thing of transcending in
Heidegger - is a rejection of an eqos and methodology which serves to either reduce the event of
existence to either an a-historical narrative, without phenomenological or existential relevance, or, to a
scientific narrative of descriptive everydayness. Marx is not interested in constituting a Marxian
Science or a Marxian politics - he confronts the abyss of commodity, this mere being which
determines our alienated, capitalist consciousness - one which yawns between you and me. We
cannot pretend that this abyss is not there - that we can ignore it. By ignoring this situation, we more
firmly affirm our situation of pathetic incarceration. [Mankind] is afflicted by its own alien
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projections and fabrications. Marx incites us to apprehend our own concrete situations and
predicaments… it is not merely the workers with which he is concerned - ‘we’ are all alienated - each
from each other.
There must be something deeper at work here…
Chapter 3: From Religion to the Sacred
Religion, in a dialectical materialist analysis, is not dismissed merely as an idealism or a
phantom – as if a mere refutation of ideas could lead to the evaporation of religion. Indeed, Marx
uses the term ideology (weltanschauung), and this term does not indicate a mere "reflection" of
material conditions, as a logos is that which issues forth as not only as an interpretation of existence
(dasein), but also as an expressive topos of a differentiated and conflictual matrix of power. Ideology
is a camera obscura which masques power relationships by means of an organization which
orchestrates a regurgitation of spurious interpretations, or pictures. As Foucault writes in Discipline
and Punish, ideology is not merely a repression of conscious representation, but as discourse,
indicates, in its intimacy amid the disseminations of power, a proactive cultivation of a reproduction
of configurations of power. The medium is the message, as McLuhan taught us. And vice versa.
[xliv]
Miranda contends that religion, as the cultus, is a falsification of the meaning of lived existence.
From the radical perspective of Miranda’s interpretation of the Old and New Testaments, the cultus of
religion, as it has suppressed the authentic meaning of the sacred as a pursuit of justice, serves to
eradicate the breach which is a call for resistance against oppression. In this way, religion is not
simply an idea, but a medium of transmission and control, with its own organisations, networks, and
mnemnotechnic devices of indoctrination, of "remembrance".
Yet, from amidst this exposure of religion, one sees, hears and smells that a sense of the sacred
does not depend on the latest concept or image - all of these will be engulfed in the various
modifications of the spectacle, of the serial articulation of a profane gallery. That which clears the
topos for an opening to a sacred dimension is a temporal existence which overwhelms the finite self in
the moments of horror, terror, and to a lesser extent, in anxiety. In a radical phenomenological
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gesture, we can cast the sacred into relief as not only this personal apprehension of finitude, but also,
as this possible awakening to the Other – or to, as Otto suggests, the numinous, the mysterium
tremendum, or, with the face, as indicated by Levinas. In this way, an apprehension of the negativity
of finitude may pass over into a situation in which one may tune into one’s own ethos amid an
affirmation of the possibilities of ecstatic existence. For an isolated, alienated self – there erupts the
event of transcending – Ariadne’s thread descends amidst a labyrinth of a merely “negative
dialectics”. This exit-less destination is transfigured into an affirmation of the sacred meaning of
existence.
It was perhaps with the Emperor Constatine that religion, specifically the Christian religion, as
it was made the legal and ideological orthodoxy of the Roman state, began a process in which the
ancient Pagan, and if we can agree with Miranda, the authentic Biblical notion of the Sacred was
erased from the public lifeworld of existence (it is perhaps possible that the Biblical notion of the
sacred was eradicated at an even earlier date in the redactionist interpretation of, for instance,
Exodus). In the wake of the untimely death of Julian, the so-called Apostate, who attempted to
[xlv]
reverse the subversive and radical edicts of the new religious hegemony of nascent Christendom,
the myriad public and private cults of the gods, goddesses, and spirits began to suffer inquisitorial
interdiction amidst a totalitarian project which sought the establishment of a unitary and political
sense of the sacred. With the eventual establishment of the Holy Roman Empire under Charlemagne,
and with the triumphant power of the Roman Church, the actuality of a political cultus overwhelmed
an immediate and fragile assertion of a sacred resistance to oppression and injustice. For Miranda, the
[xlvi]
hegemony of Greek (Platonic and Aristotelian ) philosophy over Christian Theology served to
continue the suppression of the authentic conception of the sacred in the Old and New Testaments –
not to mention of the Pagan mysteries. The sacred as the breach of the “order of things” was
suppressed in the wake of the desire for worldly security. Such an inquisitorial project existed even
after the paltry initiatives of the Reformation. For even in light of the assertion of Luther that one
would be judged by God via the criteria of faith alone, the various reformational cults aimed, in the
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end, to establish their own regional jurisdictions, serving merely to highten the paranoia of the
inquisitional spirit. For instance, despite the idle chatter against popery and the priest, there was never
any affirmation of a singular disclosure of the sacred on the part of the individual soul - this soul was
never set free. If one did manage freedom, she could find herself burning on a stake at a public
festival, the Christian version of human sacrifice. Once again, the propaganda and rhetoric of Luther
far exceeded the actual transformation which he was facilitating as this re-formation did not provoke
or invoke the questioner to a singular awakening and liberation to an intimacy amidst a sacred event.
The iconoclasm of images and the erasure of the indulgences (bribery of God) and the destruction of a
politico-religious bureaucracy never foreclosed on the mediating role of the spiritually elect, of the
reverend, and of a protestant political authority. The continued propagation of a specific
interpretation of the bible, a book, biblio, which is in any event political through and through - having
been changed here and there with the whim of power - not to mention the exclusion of hundreds of
books of the original - served to foreclose on the possibility of a radical encounter of a singular mortal
being with the sacred. If one is to perceive and imbibe the divine by faith alone, and not via works,
then there is no need of a bible - or a Church. There is the radical possibility of an immediate opening
amidst the sacred. For Miranda, such an opening is a pursuit of justice which is the sacred, is the
divine. In this sense, there is not even a need to proclaim and name such an intimacy - it is
inexorably lived. In this way, an outward appearing a-religionism may indeed betray a life lived in the
immediate light of the sacred. Do not let your right hand know what your left is doing.
The Reformation, in this way, is aptly named, as it indicates a re-configuration of that which
was already there. There was never any attempt to re-write the bible – the Canon - or to re-insert the
many documents which had been excluded by the Roman Catholic Church, that whore of Babylon,
such as the Gospel of Thomas, or to dismiss the bible as such - or to separate the Old from the New
Testaments, etc... Religion remained the same as it had been since the monotheist insurgencies – that
which Breasted designated as “religious imperialism” - albeit in devolved, fragmented “forms” –
“organizations”, “networks” - but still articulated by that strange hybrid, the “Bible” – the book, the
index. The doctrine of faith alone - as it was a doctrine of a church, never set free the soul to cultivate
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a direct and intimate relation with the divine or the sacred. The reformation, under the directives of
Luther, Calvin and others, never allowed for the possibility of an I and Thou. In the language of
Marx, born into a Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism for reasons of physical and
emotional survival, religion, even after the so-called reformation, remained an ideological and
political concern. Max Weber does well enough to describe the intimate relationship between
Protestantism and capitalism. The Reformation not only provides cover for an expropriation of the
spoils of theocratic order of roman Christendom, but also set forth its modus essendi.
However, it is not merely the Christian religion which is subject to the characterisation of
ideology. It is well known that India and ancient City-States such as Sparta and Athens projected
their own hierarchial discipline as a sacral topography upon everyday life in the articulation of its own
narrative of cosmic and political legitimacy. Each city-state created a muqo! in its own image, but as
a city-state, forced the play of the Sacred opening into a reduced logic of communication, command
and control – of politics. What is significant here is that there is in religion a political and
organisational component which necessitates the laying out and the perpetuation of an idea - a logic of
ideas. The Pythagoreans often spoke of mnemnotechnic artifices which would facilitate the
continuance, remembrance and dissemination, of a specific array of ideas or beliefs. For instance,
there is poetry, stories, music instruments such as the rudimentary monochord, which any child can
learn, or various other symbolic and narrative artifices or icons, which can be passed on and
remembered. Religion implies a historical dimension of reproduction which stands outside any direct
and intimate awakening to the sacred as such with respect to a singular mortal being. Indeed, as we
see in the “dawn” of modern philosophy, religion, if not summarily dismissed, is given a merely
instrumental or rational signification. It is, to again invoke Foucault, a technical regime of
disciplinary power. The word "religion" itself implies a "binding", a "tie", which holds, contains the
constituency of believers in a way which transcends any situation of an intimate and free encounter
with the divine. Indeed, such a “tie” and “binding” may intimate the possibility of a connection to the
divine, but as it is articulate in the form of ritual, it is a tie and binding which implies an alterior
meaning of the “religious”.
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One could consider, as an example, the situation of Akhenaten in his attempt to eliminate the
priesthood of Amun for an immediate encounter with the Aten or Sun-Disc. The bureaucracy of the
priesthood, for its continuance, necessitated obedience towards it authority and an active propagation
and dissemination of its doctrines if it is to survive. The heretic Akhenaten built his city in the desert,
but within little more than a decade, was killed and his son was re-named Tut-ankh-amun from
Tut-ankh-aten. There is not merely a change of power in the terrestrial sense, but also a
transformation in the articulation of the symbolic and aesthetic dimensions of the topoi of the
phenomena of sacred meaning. In this way, the Amun priests sought to erase any artefact of
Akhenaten.
This allusion may serve to explain the timidity of the Reformation. Mere religion does not
necessarily have anything to do with the sacred. It has its own interests and reasons, and as an
[xlvii]
organised bureaucracy, must orchestrate its own procedures, its discipline, its truth, in order to
secure its own survival, its terrestrial recurrence. A priest or a reverend has different interests and
“ideas” than his flock – or should have. Paul is not Jesus (nor is Homer Odysseus). He thinks
beyond this or that mass or service to the future of the church. He asks different questions: how am I
to make sure that this teaching will survive into the future? How will I ensure that the children of my
flock accept and perpetuate the doctrine of this teaching? The answer to his questions, for the Judeo-
Christian or for the Civil-Pagan, inexorably comes in the form of the Bible or of a retroactive
“hierarchy” (as opposed to hierophany, first suggested by Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane)
projected upon doctrines of polytheism - these are extant texts that can surf along amid the tides and
waves of history. Yet, such a-historical life-rafts, as they are merely mnemnotechnic artifices of trans-
generational continuance, may preclude, conceal an intimacy with the sacred - with the divine. This
intimacy is an irruption amidst the homologous articulation and operation of profane ideology of a
radical power of horror, terror – of the overwhelming. This vertiginous encounter reveals to us that
we are, each of us, is radically vulnerable, not only existentially, but each step along the path of
ageing – as one makeshift resolution displaces the last. At the gateway of such a disclosure, the
singular being exalts in surprise amidst its fatal and tenuous predicament. If this being does not seek
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to flee, to hide amidst the cult of security, of the Last Man, she or he may seek to embrace this
situation of uncertainty as an intimation of the sacred significance of this opening of our being. Of
course, much of this mysterium is sublimated and even eradicated from this terrain of utilitarian
reproduction, if, that is, we are to continue amidst this prevailing “order of things”. Yet, despite the
sanitization and the tranquillization of horror, death – abjection – via the profane world of work and
profane religion, sacred events, moments of vision, truth events break in reminding us of the chaos
which churns in ourselves. Of course, we do not wish to merely disintegrate into animality from our
suspension between consciousness and the sacred. Yet, we neither wish to be absorbed in a
pantheistic reason which turns us into puppets and parrots. We wish, each of us, to have an autonomy
amidst our own personal and spiritual lives, a demand which breaks the chain of homogeneity and
irrupts this heterogeneity of the singular, mortal, being, event. Yet, if such an intimacy has always
been or is always a possibility for each soul, what would be left for the priest, the reverend, the
mediator - the politician - the self -chosen elect?
In this present study of Marx, we are already forced to remove ourselves from the mediational,
ideological reality of religious and political assertion. Marx has already rejected - in line with his
understanding of the being of this historicality of human existence, religion as an ideology, as a mere
'logic' of “ideas” – eidos, mere pictures, idols. Such a rejection implies a criticism of not only the
narrative idealism and mechanisms of perpetuation of the cloth, but also the recognition of the
politico-ideological discipline of an organisational matrix of cultural perpetuation. This discipline
asserts itself as a religio-cultural matrix. It is "consciousness" in the free-floating vision of the
idealists, but in the eyes of Marx, this "consciousness" is determined by being, existence, and thus
becomes - as with any phenomenology of life - symptomatic and indicative – but not therefore
powerless. That which is implied in such a deconstruction of "consciousness" becomes the sacred
meaning of praxis. We are not to live in the camera obscura of the 'world picture', but are to act and
be, and in this nunc, to think, to grasp after, and seek deep within that which is glimpsed in this event
of praxis. Marx is not a Prostestant in that he exults action, but he is not a Catholic or a Jew. He
advocates revolution, a transgression of the “Law” in all its concrete manifestations. His indication of
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praxi! (especially in light of Aristotle's distinction between praxis and poeisis) shatters, as we will see
in Marx’s encounter with Bultmann, the world picture of representation via events of transgression –
the existential breaks which give insight amid an the “de-ontological” event, a “slant of the eye”
(augenblick), saturnalia, potlatch - this event of sacrifice and the gift, as Mauss tells us.
Yet, incessant action, excessive transgressions dissipate the mortal self into a profane chaos of
existence. Mere action alone, having dispensed itself of the necessity of interpretation, of thought,
loses itself in the everydayness of a busy flight from existence. We run after our commodities, our
fetishes, and thinking this is the ultimate being of the “real”, we suppress any hermeneutic
engagement with existence. Mere action, assertion (but not, as we will see, praxis, in Marx’s sense),
as it is oriented only to the everyday, remains outside an authentic poeisis of existence. In Heidegger's
conjuration, Marx’s Eleventh Thesis is pictured in its seeming haste. Even though Marx may have
expressed himself under the influence of a deeper affirmation, he in the end holds the fragments in his
hands. Yet, seeing, feeling these chards of reality, he does not reject action, but instead castigates the
fragments. For Heidegger, Marx seeks action in a displacement of his own finite existence. Bataille
intimates Marx’s ambiguous senses of the sacred and the profane. Yet, Heidegger's literal reading of
the Eleventh Thesis cannot stand as Marx is not simply embracing a superficial version of
"headlessness" or voluntarism.
We should keep in mind that Marx himself engaged in a poeisis of the sacred in his early
poetry and in the genealogy of his work. Poetic expression is not annihilated in his later works, but
only emerges into the light amidst a phenomenology of Capital, a disclosure of the cycles of profane
reproduction. All throughout Capital Marx makes references to literature, poetry or throws in a
statement about the coming revolution which will resolve the contradictions, oppression, and suffering
of class “society”. His vision is always that of a radically transfigured situation via praxi! in which
the direct producers - the workers - own the means of production and self-manage a matrix of poi"si!
at the point of production. This is the poetic and philosophical affirmation of liberation, of the sacred
– born amidst this deconstruction of the capitalist eqos. Perhaps, such a revolution, as envisioned by
Marx, will allow for a transfiguration of the mere poeisis of capitalist, utilitarian production to the
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sacred poi"si! of the gift.
As he never repudiated his poetry, we may not, in the usual manner, simply assert that such
expression was of an immature student, nor can we interpret Marx as one who designates all
linguistic, expression, indication as ideology. While some language games subsist in themselves as
idealistic totalities, Marx's poetry indicates an awakening to alterity – and in this awakening he
apprehends, amidst his topo!, a sense of obligation and commitment, of affirmation. Each of his
writings can be seen as a phenomenology of indication which seeks to disclose the truth of the world,
truth as a-leqea, which must be dis-closed via a struggle for authentic self-expression.
While the specific contours of Marx's early poetic affirmation of the sacred may transfigure
themselves amidst a life of writing, the poeisis of affirmation abides in his consistent advocacy of
revolutionary transformation. Marx is neither priest, scientist, nor politician - he is engaged in the
poetry of existence – he is, as Arthur Miller wrote, a “white nigger”, a reluctant prophet. If we are, in
our interpretation of Marx, to give to the 'picture' a sense of the whole man, we must witness his acts
as symptoms or indicators, as Kant writes in his Religion, of a disposition, even if such a notion of
[xlviii]
character is, with Heidegger and Bataille, and Marx, ultimately temporal - and secret.
Chapter 4: Sacred Rebellion and Marx
While the quip that religion is the opium of the people is well known, the preceding lines are
lesser so. As we have seen at the head of this study, Marx had also written, "Religious suffering is at
one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is
the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless
conditions…." This reference to opium goes beyond for Marx his own contemporary resonances of
lost souls, such as Poe, who were mired in the clouds of the den. Indeed, this analogy of religion to
opium has been made by Kant and Nietzsche, among other philosophers. Religion as opium, as heart
of a heartless world, while implying that such a heart may ultimately be illusory, indicates a space of
difference and of a desire to be liberated from a profane hegemony of objectification and
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commodification. Such a gesture toward difference, to the “exit” indicates the desire and the
possibility of a nascent movement of resistance and solidarity, of refusal and, simultaneously, of
affirmation amid the prevailing situation of the world.
The primary criticism by Marx against religion consists in its operation as an ideological
matrix, a panopticon of the soul, of the heart. This description displays a religion, which not only
distorts the truth of the world, but also subverts the ethical obligations of members of this “tie”
(religio). Religion systematically instills a con-fusion in the hearts of the many, spiritually coercing
these to a behaviour which is against their own profane and sacred “interests”. In the wake of the
classic Nietzschean criticism, religion breeds nihilism for and sickness in the world to legitimize its
Janus-faced valorization of the other world of reward and repose – the carrot which disguises the
stick. This picture of religion is well known. Yet, how can Marx respond to a movement of
"materialist" Christians, indigenous religions, and even Neo-pagans, who in many cases have been
and are being killed for their advocacies for liberation?
Marx cannot simply recoil into the posture of scientist - nor does he want to. Marx is engaged
in praxi! and so are the Liberation Theologists. Moreover, Marx has a nuanced perspective of human
freedom and of this existent capacity for resistance and affirmation, phenomena which the usual
determinist or structuralist stereotypes will not allow. Such perspectives come to light in his early
writings most explicitly, but continue to emerge throughout his further works. He cannot be regarded
as merely a scientist. Perhaps “science” is one strand in the tapestry of his work, but it is not the sun
around which the planets revolve. Such a view risks turning Marx into a “one-dimensional
[xlix]
man”. In this way, Marx could perhaps welcome this eruption of a free affirmation of the sacred
from amid the ideological matrix itself. The affinity between Marx and Liberation theology consists
in an obligation and a commitment to “justice”, beyond these myriad “grand narratives” of religio-
political reduction. Both resist these narratives - and that which is indicated in these words - the topos
and eqos of this hegemony.
Indeed, although the dominant religious interests have generally been those allied with the
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“ruling class”, there are many instances, prior to and contemporary to Marx - and in our own era -
where "religious suffering" has facilitated resistance to conditions of oppression – or has sought
intimacy amid the sacred. One need only think of the various historical rebellions, such as German
Peasant's Rebellion, the Abolition movement against Slavery, the non-violent Ghandian civil
disobedience to colonial and racial oppression, Nelson Mandela, Liberation Theology, the Civil
Rights Movement - and, in a much more contemporary upsurgence, Islam - especially in it more
militant expressions. In each of these instances, it is the preference for the poor as enunciated by the
Zoroastrianism, the Jewish Old Testament, Buddha in the 6th century B.C., by Jesus and early
Christianity and the Koran, among others - which serves as the exemplar for sacred resistance and as
an exception to dominant religious interests and alliances with the ruling matrix. While “Marx” may
not find such a contention satisfactory, it is clear that [religious] suffering need not merely serve the
interests of power and wealth.
Liberation Theology is a movement most relevant to our present concerns in light of its
explicit affirmation of much of Marx's analysis of the operational matrix of capitalist exploitation.
Ghandi, on the contrary, never affirmed the Marxist explication of an explicit opposition of labour and
capital - his vision was much more wed to a theologico-corporatist strategy of reconciliation - as
[l]
Nelson Mandela describes his pursuit in an article The Sacred Warrior, as bringing the oppressors
and oppressed into a common pursuit of Truth. Liberation theology seems far less naïve as to the
possibility of a moral conversion of the exploiting class and their agents. As articulated by the
dominant theorists of this movement, such as Guttierrez and Miranda, there is an explicit preference
for the poor - a taking sides in favor of the liberation of the poorest of the poor from a labyrinthine
system of oppression and exploitation. That which is significant in this context is, as I have
mentioned, an explicit affirmation of the work of Marx. Yet, each of these Christian thinkers have a
differing perspective upon Marx. Gutierrez sees Marx as a scientist, while Miranda discloses him as a
prophet.
It may seem – from the usual picture of “Marx” as an “atheist materialist” - inconceivable
that there would explode a movement of Christians - both Catholic and Protestant – and in some
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cases, Neo-Pagans and native religionists, which would embrace his analysis of capitalist
[li]
exploitation. Yet, the very fact that such an embrace was undertaken serves to place into question
the unambiguous opposition “Marx” seems to have held against that which he portrayed as the
mystifying idealism of religion.
That which is significant about Liberation Theology is its explicit attempt to examine and
confront material conditions of oppression, not only as Jesus threw the money changers out of the
Temple, but also as a legacy of thought and reflection upon sacred action amidst this eqo! of a profane
capitalist hegemony. Recognition of, and reflection upon, these conditions of exploitation leads to a
praxis oriented via a desire for “justice”, for the “kingdom on earth”.
Theologies of Liberation: Gutierrez and Miranda
Perhaps the most prominent member of this group of thinkers is the Peruvian Catholic
[lii]
theologian and activist Gustavo Gutierrez who published his Theology of Liberation in 1971.
Guttierrez, with his formula, see-reflect-act, has embraced the Marxian analysis of capitalism, but as
he sees Marx, following Althussere, as merely a “scientist of history”, has integrated this analysis into
an already existing eqos of Christian leadership, activism and scholarship.
The main concern of Gutierrez in his work, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and
Salvation, is upon an explication of the relation of a critical, reflective theology to praxis amidst a
situation of economic exploitation and political domination. Indeed, action on behalf of the liberation
of the poor is not merely a supplemental aspect of his work, but exists as an integral aspect of any
authentic theology. The incantation of see-reflect-act incorporates an explicit recognition of Marxian
social analysis. This latter recognition holds its most significant place in the first moment of this triad
- although it cannot be excluded from the other two moments. To see the world, to ascertain the
conditions of exploitation amid existence, in capitalist society, is not merely a naïve, empirical act of
sense perception (although in some cases, that may be sufficient). Gutierrez, writing under the
shadow of Hegel and Marx, writes:
For Marx, to know was something indissolubly linked to the transformation of the world
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through work. Basing his thought on these first intuitions, he went on to construct a scientific
understanding of historical reality. He analysed capitalist society, in which he found concrete
instances of the exploitation of persons by their fellows and of one social class by another.
Pointing the way towards an era in history when humankind can live humanly, Marx created
[liii]
categories which allowed for the elaboration of a science of history.
As Marx had already articulated - and which is a repetition of Hegel's criticism of sense-certainty in
his Phenomenology of Spirit - to see already involves a structure of categorical determination. In
other words, to see is to ascertain the underlying conditions of a situation of exploitation and
oppression. Yet, the significance of Marx extends far beyond a mere methodological procedure for
interpretation, conceived as mere contemplation of an external object. As Gutierrez intimates, the
very meaning of “science” undergoes a radical transformation in Marx, and this is a mutation not lost
on Gutierrez. In a discussion of the eminent East German Marxian theorist Ernst Bloch, Gutierrez
underscores the importance for Bloch of Marx’s famous Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: The
philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it. Yet,
in an attempt to delineate the contours of Marx’s radical re-casting of the meaning of interpretation, he
emphasizes the not-so-famous First Thesis on Feuerbach. Gutierrez quotes Marx:

The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism – that of Feuerbach included – is that the
thing [Gegenstand], reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object [Objekt]
or of contemplation [Anschauung], but not as human sensuous activity, practice, not
[liv]
subjectively.
The significance of this reference is disclosed most forcefully in light of the insertion by Gutierrez of
the original German. The transformation of the meaning of interpretation (and of materialism) by
Marx and of its intimate connection to action (praxi!) is cast into relief through the distinction
between Objekt and Gegenstand. While the former implies an external thing thrown against, as a
thing to be contemplated by an external observer, inside the causal nexus of a merely phenomenal
consciousness, the latter stands against in an immediate intentional topos of existence. This is not
merely a thing that is distinct from the observer or knower, but a situation which stands here and
there, as intimacy in this breach, as this phenomena of existence, as the self amidst its world.
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In contrast to a merely contemplative, theoretical orientation toward this sensuous life, there is
articulated a possibility of an emergence of a different topos, one of human praxis amidst this opening
of existence. Gutierrez writes,

Marx’s idea of praxis is different; it is based on a dialectical conception of history –
necessarily advancing, with eyes fixed on the future and with real action in the present,
[lv]
towards a classless society based on new relationships of production.
Yet, despite these several references to the poetic vision of Marx and of the circumscription of
production and science within this vision, Gutierrez follows the line of Althusser. Marx is merely a
“scientist”, and therefore, an instrument to be oriented into the broader fabric of an eschatological
project. The Marxian analysis of capitalist exploitation, divorced from its own indigenous ethical
meaning, becomes a mere supplement to his theology. At the end of the day, there was no need to
depart from the explicit preference of the poor which is extant in the canonical Gospels. The analysis
is merely to serve the overriding affirmative project of liberation of the poor. Indeed, this points to the
second moment of the triad - with the recognition of the exploitation of the poor and the material
processes thereof - there is the reflective moment which reflects upon the meaning of this exploitation
and oppression. And, despite the traditional alliance of the Church hierarchy with the landowners and
an urban capitalist class, Gutierrez, a theologian, activist and priest - at a high personal cost to himself
- placed his focus upon the martyrdom of Jesus in his celebration of the poor. To reflect upon the
material conditions of exploitation is thus, for him, to look upon the spoken words and example of
Jesus – and of those - Bonhoeffer, Huber, and Benjamin – not to mention the countless faces of the
[lvi]
oppressed - who have been erased amidst this hegemony. For Gutierrez, poverty is an explicit
challenge to the “Christian” - and a call which discloses the possible, sacred significance of human
existence. At the same time, this was also the response of Marx in his own political advocacy, one
which intimates the connection between his own dialectical approach to the historicity of existence to
an affirmation characteristic of the sacred. But, that which is peculiar to Gutierrez, in distinction from
the usual caricature of Marx, is the explicit and primary moment of reflection. In this caricature, there
is nothing equivalent to this reflective, existential moment in the extant writings of Marx - there is
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nothing beyond the latter's early affirmation of social or species being – which is thereby excluded
since it is not “scientific”. Yet, as I have suggested, such a ground of affirmation and criticism can be
found, not only into his poetry, but also in his call for revolution – it is in this call that one is invited to
return to the existential depth of human existence. Amidst the wasteland of the 19th Century, Marx
could draw on no affirmative resources which obviated the horizons of "scientific optimism". His life
of engaged praxis is enough to indicate that there was, after all, something different about Marx.
The final moment of the triad – see-reflect, act - is action or praxis - once again, a decidely
Marxist reference. Once one sees and reflects, one is confronted by the necessity for action in the
pursuit of the liberation of the poor. Marx is not merely a scientist of history as Althusser suggests.
Instead, such a science – as the analysis of historical – cannot be divorced from concrete praxis in the
world, and from each of the strands in the tapestry of the world. Interpretation is not a self-subsistent
endeavor – it is necessary, but not sufficient. There must be engagement amidst human sensuous
activity. In this way, we must gather together the dissected strands of Marx’s work in order to fathom
a holistic existence. He is not merely a theorist, but also an activist, father, etc, but also a singular
mortal being, engaged in a project of affirmation and commitment.
Marx enacts a radical phenomenology of capital. In this light, we must indeed draw from the
decidedly sensuous content of these early works – especially Marx's poetry. It is here where we can
find the affirmation for his commitment to and advocacy of a revolutionary transformation and his
affirmation of an engaged praxis. To do otherwise is to miss the radical significance of Marx’s insight
and elaboration of a dialectical materialism. For, it is in these early works that we can decipher the
meaning of his persistent, though understandably sublimated, commitment to a poeisis of existence,
one which propels him into praxis.
In the same year as Gutierrez’s Theology of Liberation, Miranda published Marx and the
Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression. He contends in this work that the authentic
message of the Bible has been displaced via the infiltration of Greek concepts into Christian theology.
Yet, with closer reading, we discover that it is not the “Greeks”, but instead, Plato and Aristotle – and
their monsters, Augustine and Aquinas. Even though he is attuned with the Platonic Allegory of the
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Cave, Miranda objects not only to the treatment of the poets, but also to the radical otherness of the
doctrine of forms which serve only to undervalue the present situation, this world. Miranda, as with
Nietzsche, wishes to find affirmation amidst “this”. His objection to Aristotle is concerned with the
notion of substance, ousia, or in its ancient Homeric meaning, possessions, of the household. His
opposition to Aristotle and Plato amount to one thing – a revolution against property and merely
contemplative otherworldliness – escapism -for these are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, far from
being anti-Greek, Miranda intimates the spirit of Odysseus in his attempt to disclose an authentic
Christianity. The suitors have taken over the very possibility, the seeds of kingdom, turning it into
grain for a household to be consumed. Miranda seeks to deconstruct the Thomist aristocracy of
property and security so as to clear a space for the eruption of an authentic biblical affirmation and
engagement amid this world. Yet, Miranda does flirt with Augustine, yet, again, he is suspicious of
Augustine’s neo-platonic affiliations in that these are nihilistic. Miranda is not averse to the
apocalyptic sensibility of Augustine, but, in his opposition to the collateral damage of “Greek”
concepts of substance and political discipline, he seeks a notion of “justice” which is not merely
juridical, legal, amidst our current krisi!. Miranda seeks a “kingdom of god” beyond Platonic Law,
Aristotelian Substance and Augustinian polis.
Miranda, among others, points out that there are differing interpretations of the Christian
biblio!, from the perspective of the Libertarian-Exodic interpretation of the Bible to that of the Sinai
redaction. He emphasizes that the latter interpretation rests upon a redaction, or upon an addition to
the sacred text at a later date. For Miranda, the “Bible” was originally a document of resistance. And,
despite the redactions, it still is a sacred text of revolution. In this context, Marx is portrayed in two
ways. First, as a prophet, as one who echoed the prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea, etc. Secondly, as
a dialectical philosopher, one whose poihsi! engages amid a terrain of praxi!. It is clear that Miranda
seeks to appropriate Marx into his project of a “kingdom of god” upon the earth. His notion of the
sacred, of the divine, and of justice are the same. It is “love”. We must thus act amidst this “moment
of love” to eradicate suffering and oppression. We must have a “preferential option for the poor”.
The very struggle against suffering and oppression is “the” divine, “the” sacred. That which is
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significant about Marx is his thoughtful commitment amid a struggle for liberation, of a poeisis which
abided an existence of praxi!.
In light of the third moment of action, Marx's explicit emphasis upon praxi! in his Eleventh
Thesis on Feuerbach underlines the status of Liberation theology as an exception to his overriding
characterization of religion as a narcotic, as a mystifying ideology which serves an explicit
denunciation of the oppressed in favour of the ruling elites. The suppression – and often
assassination, torture, and mutilation of members of this movement – including Archbishop Romero
and countless others, via the religious hierarchy and the ruling landowning families in Latin America,
[lvii]
indicates a sacred resistance which can be distinguished from mere religion.
Chapter 5: Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology
It must be stated again that religion is not identical with the sacred. Such a distinction has been
made countless times, from the deists of the Enlightenment to the radical theologians of the Twentieth
Century, such as Otto, Bultmann and Altizer, who each in his own way, advocated a religion-less
Christianity or a de-mythologization of religion. In this way, the idea of the holy, as Otto dubbed the
sense of the sacred, could plausibly be distinguished from not only the rationalization of morality, but
also the practice of Christianity in particular or from organized politico-religion generally. One could
also mention the forerunners of these thinkers, such as Kierkegaard, hardly an atheist, who
distinguished the religion taught by Jesus and that which he castigated as Christendom. Even
Nietzsche, the greatest enemy of Christianity, affirms a sense of the sacred or eternal in his work Thus
Spoke Zarathustra, in his poetry and prose. In this sense, Marx, a contemporary of Nietzsche and
Kierkegaard, could be considered a forerunner of Twentieth Century theology in light of his ethical or
moral critique of capitalist exploitation. Yet, in tune with many contemporary criticisms of mere
humanism and of scientific optimism, Marx can be called to account as to the “root” for his ethical
and/or moral-political advocacies. Marx is clearly on sacred, or at the very least, he is upon “ethical”
ground.
Revolutions are not instigated and waged merely as the result of scientific analysis. They are
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creatures of the heart which explode into the streets as rage takes hold of the exploited, or the
ambitious. After all, it was the Marquis de Sade, hardly a cold rationalist, who screamed through a
drain pipe from his prison cell to the French hordes, telling them that prisoners were being killed and
invoking them to storm the Bastille. Revolution is a creature of commitment. In this chapter, having
ascertained that Marx shared with Liberation Theology a core of practical commitment, we will
sketch out the meaning of this commitment in an interface betwixt Marx and radical, existentialist
theology. Marx shares with this theology a criticism of religion as Weltanschauung, and both project
a critical posture to the exoteric baggage of the cultus of religion. I will first set forth the attempt by
Rudolph Bultmann to articulate a de-mythologization of the Christian religion in his Jesus Christ and
Mythology. I will next turn to his attempt to disclose a non-objectified sense of the divine which is
the expression of the sacred from the concrete situation of the person – outside the scientific
objectification of the antithetical regime of ‘subject’ and ‘object’ in his essay “What does it mean to
speak of God?.” In this light, I will not only criticise the scientific variant of Marx and its attempt to
speak of existence from the “outside”. Drawing on the full spectrum of Marx’s writings, I will next
attempt to compare Bultmann’s deconstruction of a scientific world-view (Weltanschauung) with
Marx’s critique of ideology. I will contend that the only way for Marx to escape his own criticism of
ideology (i.e., for Bultmann, a scientific analysis of ideology remains a Weltanschauung and thus an
ideology) will be for him to take the “step back” from his criticism of religion towards an affirmation
of the sacred significance of existence. Such a “step back” from the constructed stems of subjectivity
and objectivity will disclose a non-alienated sense of the sacred.
The current question is the character of Marx’s affirmation of the sacred, of his obligation and
commitment amidst his criticism of religion as idealism. Indeed, Marx not only fails to answer the
existential theology of the 20th century, but it remains possible that Marx may also be in accord with
this theology in its critical posture to the exoteric cultus of religion.
Perhaps the most significant Twentieth Century radical theologian in this context is Rudolf
Bultmann. In the following, I will set forth the attempt by Bultmann to articulate a
de-mythologization of the Christian religion in his Jesus Christ and Mythology. I will next turn to his
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attempt to disclose a non-objectified sense of the divine which is the expression of the sacred from the
concrete situation of the person – outside the scientific objectification of the antithetical regime of
‘subject’ and ‘object’ in his essay “What does it mean to speak of God?” In this light, I will not only
criticise the scientific posture of “Marx” and an attempt to speak of existence from the “outside”, but
will also attempt to compare Bultmann’s deconstruction of a scientific world-view (Weltanschauung)
with Marx’s critique of ideology.
For Bultmann, the phenomenon of the sacred is disclosed in a personal way. In many ways
anticipating and also echoing Heidegger, he points to "God" in radical despair. This is no idealist
philosophy or logic of ideas, but a despair of a singular being amidst nothingness, "God". The
significance of Bultmann lies not, as with Liberation Theology, in any explicit social analysis of the
[lviii]
conditions of material exploitation, although he is not unaware of such contours of existence.
The importance of Bultmann lies instead in his attempt at a de-mythologization or, in the present
context, at a de-ideologization of religion and a call for a thinking, and acting, which is an expression
[lix]
of the concrete situations of one’s existence. Not only did he call, in his works "The Crisis in
[lx] [lxi] [lxii]

Belief", "What does it mean to speak of God?" and Jesus Christ and Mythology for a
de-mythologization of Christianity and of the impossibility of conceiving of "God" as an object (as
opposed to a phenomena), but he affirmed the this-ness of a personal apprehension of the sacred.
Religious dogmas and religious laws are merely detours, distractions, impediments. Bultmann indeed
rejected systematic theologies and the ideological propagation of the Christian religion - in a way
which would be and has been disturbing for most Christians. In this way, there is a special affinity
between Bultmann and Marx - at least in their own respective attitudes to the idealistic distortions of a
hegemonic religion. However, that which distinguishes Marx from Bultmann is (if we go along with
the usual portrayal of Marx) the latter's explicit articulation of an existential dimension of the self
which apprehends an un-certain - non-theoretical - sense of the sacred in a moment of existential
despair. As with Otto, Bultmann apprehends the Holy as that which radically overwhelms this finite
self.
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Of course, one could point to the early poetry of Marx as an explicit affirmation of the divine.
Or, one could also trace the places where such affirmations emerge throughout the latter texts of
Marx. Yet, this would be insufficient as it would underplay the implicit criticism of the scientific
Marx that is possibly offered by Bultmann. Bultmann does not mention Marx, as does Gutierrez. Yet,
it would almost seem that Marx, or at least Nietzsche, somehow haunts Bultmann’s works, especially
in his critique of scientific objectivity in “What does it mean to speak of God?” There seems to be an
invitation for an engagement of the two thinkers. In the following, I will attempt to accept this
invitation.
Jesus Christ and Mythology to a significant extent replays or repeats Bultmann’s earlier
criticism of world-view (Weltanschauung) in his earlier writings and lectures, especially “What does it
mean to speak of God?” which will be consider below. In Jesus Christ and Mythology, he is
explicitly turning his critical arsenal toward the figure and person of Jesus of Nazareth. It would seem
that his audience is the Christian community itself. He is neither simply seeking to dismiss
mythology as such, as a “primitive science”, nor is he seeking to simply dismiss Jesus and the lore
which surrounds his name as myth, muqo!. Instead, in an echo of Heidegger’s early radical
phenomenology, he is seeking to see the stories of Jesus in the New Testament as indications of the
[lxiii]
possibility, but un-name-ability, of sacred existence. Bultmann writes:
This method of interpretation of the New Testament which tries to recover the deeper meaning
behind the mythological conceptions I call de-mythologizing – an unsatisfactory word, to be
sure. Its aim is not to eliminate the mythological statements but to interpret them. It is a
[lxiv]
method of hermeneutics.
Bultmann, as with Heidegger, does not wish to simply dismiss mythology as untruth in the face of a
judicious scientific objectivity which claims a pre-eminent enlightenment. As we will see below in
Bultmann’s essay, “What does it mean to speak of God?”, such a posture of the “outside”, of
enlightenment objectivity, is merely “fraud”, “posture”, as it loses, erases, that which it claims to
name, to “identify”. On the contrary, mythology points to truth in an exoteric sense, but it is our task
to disclose the esoteric meaning of the text. Bultmann writes:
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Mythology expresses a certain understanding of human existence. It believes that the world
and human life have their ground and their limits in a power which is beyond all that we can
calculate and control. Mythology speaks about this power inadequately and insufficiently
[lxv]
because it speaks about it as if it were a worldly power.
In this light, Bultmann is not interested in destroying mythology. He merely wishes to evade the
ousiology of the said. He wishes to get back to this [de-ontological] event of saying. This
distinguishes his work from the Critical Theory of Adorno and Horheimer, which orchestrates an
objective mission to bring light to the world, to eliminate the superstitions of the masses, and the
phenomena to which “they” point. Bultmann, on the contrary, is attempting a hermeneutic endaevor
to disclose the meaning of the text, of the mythologies - without destroying them. There is an
intimacy between myth and meaning, but Bultmann is seeking to go beyond the objectification
inherent in the mythological procedure of ousiological, substantialist naming. He contends that
names, the words of the myth, cannot be conceived as objects which can be viewed from the
“outside”. The hermeneutic enterprise seeks to disclose that to which these names point, indicate.
Bultmann writes:
We can understand the problem best when we remember that de-mythologizing is an
hermeneutic method, that is, a method of interpretation, of exegesis. “Hermeneutics” is a
[lxvi]
method of exegesis.
But it should be stated that this is not a scientific or objectivist procedure, but as is most explicit in the
earlier works of Bultmann, the “life-relation” to the sacred is an expression from the concrete
existence of my finite being. Bultmann writes:

I call this relation the “life-relation”. In this relation you have a certain understanding of the
matter in question, and from this understanding grow the conceptions of exegesis. From
reading the texts you will learn, and your understanding will be enriched and corrected.
Without such a relation and such previous understanding (Vorverstandnis) it is impossible to
[lxvii]
understand any text.
Such an understanding of a life-relation, as a personal expression of this concrete situation of
existence, a pre-understanding, can neither provide a system of meaning, nor can it provide an ideal
picture of that which should be or is. On the contrary, there is no stability or ground in such a
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relation. There is no attempt to flee from this situation of finitude into a paradise of the “outside”. In
this situation in which there is “no exit”, we cannot simply dispense with mythology, but see it as
indicative of the truth of a situation amidst a life-relation. Myth points to these various contours of
personal existence. In this way, myth is not the same as the objectifying stratagems of a rational,
everday, consciousness. We cannot dispense with myth in favour of mere regimes of consciousness,
of a rationalist conceptuality which seeks to destroy the event of the numinous in an "order of things".
Bultmann writes:
Mythological conceptions can be used as symbols and images which are perhaps necessary to
the language of religion and therefore of the Christian faith. Thus it becomes evident that the
use of mythological language, far from being an objection to de-mythologizing, positively
[lxviii]
demands it.
In anticipation of the engagement of Bultmann and Marx below, we could contend that what
Bultmann is seeking to achieve is a non-alienated sense of the sacred. In a way similar to Marx’s own
criticism of ideology and an uprooted consciousness, Bultmann is seeking the determining context of
being or existence for his phenomenology of the sacred. Indeed, Bultmann could agree with Marx’s
criticism of religion as an idealist falsification of thought which masques the concrete relations of
existence. Yet, he would disagree with Marx, however, that the notion of the sacred - as opposed to
his early advocacy of "social being" or the secular notion of the comrade - simply would disappear
with the evaporation of religion. In the step back from ideology, there is a place from which one can
undertake a hermeneutics of existence through which one can understand the radical finitude of my
own being. Bultmann writes:
In my personal existence, I am isolated neither from my environment nor from my own past
and future. When, for example, I achieve through love a self-understanding, what takes place
is not an isolated psychological action of coming to consciousness; my whole situation is
transformed. In understanding myself, I understand other people and at the same time the
whole world takes on a new character. I see it, as we say, in a new light, and so it really is a
new world. I achieve a new insight into my past and my future. I recognize new demands and
am open to encounters in a new manner. My past and future become more than pure time as it
is marked on a calendar or timetable. Now it is should be clear that I cannot possess this
self-understanding as a timeless truth, a conviction accepted once and for all. For my new
self-understanding, by it very nature, must be renewed day by day, so that I understand the
[lxix]
imperative self which is included in it.
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Bultmann offers us a makeshift sense of self-understanding, a radical temporal hermeneutic of
existence. He could contend against “Marx” that a non-alienated sense of the sacred would indeed be
such a radical hermeneutic of existence, such a ceaselessly existence of new lights and new worlds.
“Marx” does not himself explicitly speak of such possibilities - unless one looks to his poetry and his
early works, and from this fresh perspective, his “later” works. Indeed, I will contend that Marx’s
poetry expresses the so-called “scientific” insights of Capital, etc., although it also says a lot more.
In order to draw out this possibility in more detail, we must turn to Bultmann’s analysis of
Weltanschauung in his essay “What does it mean to speak of God?” It is in this essay that we can find
the most striking affinity with the work of Marx, but an affinity which will pose a challenge to Marx –
despite his obvious reservations about religion – to consider the possibility of a non-alienated sense of
the sacred.
In his 1925 essay, “What does it mean to speak of God?”, Bultmann goes to great lengths to
explain to us that the very attempt to speak about God, in its event, serves only to erase God, to
obliterate the Divine. The key phrase is italicised: to speak about. Obviously, Bultmann is speaking
about God – he is deploying the word in a field of linguistic construction, a communication. Indeed,
he admits this and closes his essay with the bald statement that this very essay is a work of sin. We do
“speak about” God, but what does our speaking mean? What is the meaning of the activity of
constructing and uttering propositions and sentences about God? Bultmann has already indicated that
such speaking about is sin. Yet, what is sin, in a de-mythologized sense? For Bultmann, the speaking
about God interjects the Divine into a discourse which is governed by a logic of objectification. God
becomes an entity, an object (Objekt) - in our concepts, we become alienated from the divine. Not
only, in this gesture, does God lose its capacity for a transcendental significance, but also God,
beyond the picture it has become, is severed from the singular mortal being. Our “speaking about” is
a symptom or indication of a fallenness from God. We speak about God for we do not apprehend
God. The deeper significance of the objectification of God is that instead of an intimacy with a God
which transcends the world - we have a worldly God, who as worldly, must die. We have killed God
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and our speaking about God is a symptom of our guilt – as with Nietzsche, we are the ugliest man.
We are speaking about God, but not living God, amid a life of intimacy inside the sacred opening of
existence. Such speaking becomes a picture of the world, it becomes a world-picture
(Weltanschauung) – an ideology.
Bultmann contends that reality itself is a construct according to criteria laid down by the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment, these movements, as with Miranda, articulating themselves in the
shadow of the world view of “Greek” philosophy. He says,

We consider something to be real if we can understand it in relation to the unified complex of
the world. The relation may be thought of as determined causally or teleologically, its
components and forces may be conceived as material or spiritual. The antithesis between
[lxx]
idealism and materialism is irrelevant for the question with which we are concerned.
The question is of our speaking of the sacred, of the divine, of God, the gods. With Idealism and
Materialism, there is much to be said about God and gods or the lack thereof. But in our obsession
with pictures, with our great artwork [Reality], we displace the intimacy of personal existence and the
space for an encounter with the Divine, the Holy. Bultmann describes this act of displacement, and
contends it is rooted in an anxiety in the face of existence, amidst the horizon of finitude. He says:
We ourselves are observed as an object among other objects and are put in our proper place in
the structure of this picture of the world which has been fabricated without reference to the
question of our own existence. When this picture of the world is completed by the inclusion
of man, it is customary to call it a world-view (Weltanschauung). We strive to acquire such a
[lxxi]
world-view or, if it supposedly has been attained, to propagate it.
Such a construction is makeshift, although it is not recognized amidst the panic flight from the truth of
existence. The world-picture is a cave in which to hide, but one composed of sand. Yet, they are
secure enough and allow one to hide from themselves for many ticks of the clock. The flight from an
authentic apprehension of the truth of finite existence is the construction of the world-picture - it is its
modus operendi. As such, this abandonment of the truth, not only of death but also of the Divine,
indicates an abandonment into the world, a fallenness into the world, a guilt to oneself. We have
forgotten the truth of ourselves, we have abandoned ourselves in anonymity. Bultmann contends that
the very attempt and operation to construct the truth regime of Reality is a flight from the “riddle of
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destiny and death”. We are confronted by the overwhelming, and as with Kant’s response to the
sublime in his criticism of aesthetic judgment, we imagine that we are able to control the
overwhelming, the sublime. We name it, classify it into a discursive formation, a "truth regime". Our
subjectivity is satisfied that it is more powerful than the sublime itself, than the overwhelming. God
becomes an object in our standing reserve of useful concepts. We imagine that we have found the
truth. However, Bultmann contends that this picture is built at an extreme cost:
But that very view is the primary falsity (prvton yeudos) and its leads necessarily to mistaking
the truth of our own existence, since we are viewing ourselves from outside as an object of
scientific investigation. Nor is there any gain if we label ourselves ‘subject’ in distinction to
the other objects with which we see ourselves in interaction. For man is seen from the outside
even when he is designated ‘subject’. Therefore the distinction between subject and object
[lxxii]
must be kept separate from the question of our own existence.
We can speak about neither God or ourselves as objects. For as we do we at once set the latter up as
the edifice of reality for the former. In such a cloud of falsity, we lose ourselves and God. Bultmann,
in an anticipation of Heidegger, asks if indeed silence, Quietism, is our only recourse in this situation.
However, he contends that this posture too is merely an act of the subject “with respect to” God. It is
making a decision on how God is to be treated. This procedure, this silence, is also a species of
objectification.
[lxxiii]
As Lenin once asked, “What is to be done?” But, contrary to Lenin, Bultmann argues
that there is a “middle course”. Existence is in-between and prior, it is the root of the stems, to echo
Heidegger’s appropriation of the metaphor of the tree of life from Aristotle and Descartes, of the
subject and object. For Bultmann, existence consists of the free act, and this act is that of obedience
to God, a must that is freely undertaken. This free act is commitment to the divine amidst a sacred
opening. The free act is resistance to the flight from existence; it is a free acceptance of the truth of
finitude. Amidst this situation of complete dependence, the postures, masks, of the subject and object
melts into air. Bultmann says:

For the free act which is truly the expression of our existence (in the proper sense we exist
only in such action and not otherwise and such action is really nothing other than our existence
itself), the truly free act can never be known in the sense of being objectively proven. It
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cannot be offered for investigation as something “to be proved” (probandum). For in that case
we should be objectifying it and putting ourselves outside it. A free act can only be done and
[lxxiv]
in so far as we speak of such doing, the possibility of it can only be believed.
In the externality of mere discourse about God, there is not only a flight to an illusory ground outside
of God, but there is also a fleeing from this free act which is the truth of one’s own existence. The
free act is an openness to the intimacy of finite existence, the truth of which is God. The intimacy of
this act cannot be conceived or integrated into a lawful system of objectified knowledge. It cannot be
subjected to logical or argumentative proof. Such a displacement of the intimacy of the sacred would
forbid that very object of our desire. Indeed, only in a surrender to God, to our own radical finitude
do we paradoxically find the greatest surety. Bultmann says,
Only in the act is it sure. It is always sure as faith in the grace of God who forgives sin and
who, if he pleases, justifies me who cannot speak from god, but can only speak about God.
All our action and speech has meaning only under the grace of the forgiveness of sins. And
[lxxv]
that is not within our control. We can only have faith in it.
One may be perplexed about the possible relation of the foregoing explication and Marx,
especially this last affirmation of faith. Yet, if we consider the meaning of this indication
as a surrender to the sacred in a de-mythologised sense, we apprehend a situation of radical finitude,
a world of care the limit of which is death, which is at once an openness to the sacred, a free act of
binding commitment. In this light, and in tandem with Bultmann’s deconstruction of “objective” and
“subjective” reality as an organized system of knowledge, we can glimpse the deeper significance of
not only Marx’s affirmation of praxi!, but also of his dialectical materialism. Marx’s criticism of
religion as an ideology is strikingly similar to Bultmann’s explication of the regime of the subject and
object, of the world-picture which masks the “truth” of human existence. Yet, for Marx, as well as
Bultmann, to escape from this antithetical regime of speaking about, each must find a place, a topos,
from which to not only resist this “truth regime”, but also to retrieve an intimacy amid this truth of
human existence. For Marx, it is praxis – beyond the sin of speaking about, from his early poetry on
throughout his later analytical works – which beckons the truth event of one’s own existence, event.
Yet, as with Bultmann, these words are not meant to re-enforce a self-similar regime of ideology, but
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to break through these words with counter-indications, threads, and acts which can possibly lead us
out of this labyrinth of objectification. For Marx, it is a praxis which seeks to go beyond, to
transform, the world – or to intimate a differing world. His dialectic indicates a space in-between in
which an affirmation and a commitment, as a free act, can invoke the true to human existence.
Bultmann’s de-mythologization of the sacred seeks an intimacy amidst a sacred praxis which resists
the world-picture (Weltanschauung) of falsity for the truth of finitude.
That which Marx and Bultmann share is an affirmation of an obligation and commitment
which seeks to go beyond this world, not in a Platonic sense, but as an awakening of a topos of
existence exudes a non-alienated sense of the sacred, which Marx does intimate in his spacings,
[lxxvi]
in his surprises, his interjections of truths from the “outside”. It could be contended that the
practical implications of such affirmations bore radically differing fruit in Marx and Bultmann. And
the words each deployed were radically distinct – the classless society of non-alienated human
existence or the free acceptance of finite existence as a surrender to God. Yet, there persists a striking
similarity not only with respect to the regime of objectification, world-view and ideology, but also
with respect to the inner kernel of an obligation and commitment which abides in the free act, in
praxis. In each case, there is an affirmation and a commitment to the truth of human existence as the
sacred.
It cannot be over-emphasized that Bultmann is not the typical theologian - indeed, he is
rejected by many theologians who fear that his radical existential sense of the sacred falls merely into
"subjectivism". Yet, what this criticism fails to comprehend is that Bultmann is invoking a
hermeneutical phenomenology of the sacred - amidst the “intentional structure of consciousness",
Bultmann is open to the phenomena of the holy, of the sacred. "God" as a formal indicator, [He] can
never be an ousiological object, a thing in the world - it is rather a "No-thing" as a transcendental
condition or limit for existence. But, such a Kantian gesture would be too far for Bultmann. The
sacred is apprehended in the singular moment of vision - in this, my situation of openness to that
which overwhelms - this is not “subjectivism” as it concerns not "objects", but phenomena, a sacred
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praxis amidst finite existence. In other words, it is perhaps in prayer, in the moment of anticipation,
or in aiding the needy, where Bultmann meets God - perhaps as a "Father" or a “friend”.
This attempt of a de-mythologization of the sacred, as with Liberation Theology, answers in a
significant way Marx's critique of religion as such and the Christian religion, in situ, as an ideology of
oppression. However, on the other hand, this attempt abides an openness toward the sacred which is
seemingly absent in Marx - if that is we refuse to detect the traces of such affirmation in his early
work and his poetry. In this way, an openness toward finitude and the possibility of the sacred
invokes a dimension of awareness which is not tainted by the facile slander of ideology or
mystification. Bultmann calls on us to find the sacred for ourselves, amidst our own event - not to
adhere to a mythology, a morality or stable systematic theology in profane exoteric repetition. In this
way, he is not an idealist or propagandist - but an existentialist who abides a sense of the holy. While
the question may be put to Bultmann why he never spoke explicitly about the capitalist system, it
could just as easily be asked of Marx why he did not explicitly speak about a non-alienated sense of
the Sacred. Between the two, there is a meeting place and a chance for dialogue.
Chapter 6: Heidegger, Marx and eigentlichkeit
It could be suggested that in his attempt to decode the camera obscura of capitalist ideology,
“Marx” occluded from his own perspective the possibility or necessity of a retrieval of not only a
non-alienated sense of the sacred, but also, a non-alienated meaning of existence, of be-ing. “Marx”
remains relatively silent, in the “Canon”, of an affirmative sense of existence – or to, as Heidegger
indicates, an existence which is Eigentlichkeit. Heidegger paints a rather one-dimensional portrait of
Marx, playing his typical game. Yet, even if it could be argued that Marx had a sense of “world”, it is
possible that his “pre-understanding” had not undergone the interrogation of death and demise. We
will have to see. Through an encounter with Heidegger, we will “step back” to an existential sense of
the situation of the finite self for Marx. Yet, this leads us out of the Christian neighbourhood that we
have been travelling – as instead of God or Jesus, we will be entering “nothingness”. The question,
therefore, is the noesis and ethos of the sacred that is opened up in Marx.
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Heidegger specifies praxi!, Marx, is a mere creature of the deed. In this way, the latter has no
access to a primal “unity” of phenomena. That which is crucial is the starting point. Heidegger could
ask: what is the character of the “unity” in the dialectic of dialectical materialism? Amidst his own
ecstatic temporality, in which the meaning of being is disclosed as a projection upon temporality,
Heidegger does not apprehend a starting point in severed positions, of a subject and object. Marx
does not seem to abandon unity either. Yet, Marx continues to deploy the arsenal of modernist
subjectivity in his dialectical analysis of historical development. For Heidegger, Marx throws down
the mask or statue of “interpretation” only to deploy an uncritical array of concepts in an attempt to
change it, the world. Marx fails to articulate a philosophy of existence which gives appropriate
respect to thinking and acting. Such considerations are greatly shrouded by the tecne of the subject
and object, phenomenon and noumenon, and of the profane and sacred. For Heidegger, to rework or
destructure a dispensable and problematic starting point, to question one’s own presupposition, or to
be open to the possibility of a new or different truth, is the essence of philosophy as the love of the
truth. The question would simply be: is the Hegelian trace in Marx, amidst the “against”, of the
aufhebung, instructive as to Marx’s theoretical willingness to not only advocate a violent revolution,
but also to assert that such an event is the preservation and transcendence of the “order of things”.
What does Marx mean by “revolution”?
Despite Heidegger’s notion that Marx was not awake to an "analytic of dasein", it is easily
shown that Marx incessantly expressed his sensitivity to thought, imagination and temporality –
something lost in Heidegger’s focus on his own reading of the Eleventh Thesis. Marx neither recoils
in the face of the overwhelming, nor flees into an anonymity of action. Marx, in his advocacy of a
radical transformation of the “world”, the praxi! of revolution discloses his own existential world, his
nexus of binding commitments, expressed implicitly in his be-ing, and explicitly in his poetry and
writings. Such sensivities intimates a life attuned an affirmation of and a desire for a sacred
existence.
Perhaps Heidegger felt that Marx’s emphasis upon class struggle was a species of the warring
stems and did not give due honour to a more fundamental “unity” amidst ecstatic, singular existence
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in Marx’s moment of the open. This dangerous “perhaps” demands a disclosure of the moment of
sacred affirmation in Marx. An existence, one which has not disclosed to itself, its own finitude, of
this insurmountability of death, is still alienated – the impetuous move to action forclosed, for
Heidegger, on the opportunity, the topo!, of finite questioning, makeshift thinking. Marx, an enemy
of religion, still intimates a sense of the sacred, of obligation and commitment amidst a world of
horror and terror. Indeed, such a sacred obligation and commitment seeks to invoke a non-alienated
existence. Yet, as Levinas and Bataille ask, “what” is on the hither and thither side of such an ethical
affirmation?
In the following, I will set forth Heidegger's criticism in more detail, in reference to
Heidegger’s only references to Marx in his Letter on Humanism, his Kant's Thesis on Being, and his
criticism of Marxism as a "productionist metaphysics" in his 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. I will
contend that not only does Marx, in light of his poetic resolution, basically escape the criticism of his
Eleventh Thesis. Moreover, with a richer interpretation of Marx’s thought and action – not to mention
the other ten Theses - we can answer the questions regarding Marx’s “subjectivism” and
“productionism”. In light of these answers, we will in many ways detect a strong affinity between
Heidegger and Marx. However, such an affinity is set upon tenuous ground in the context of the
question of death. This question will be the destination of the following as this chapter will lead up to
an investigation of the phenomena of death in Heidegger and Marx. Our discussion will focus upon
one of the rare indications of “personal” death in Marx from the Economic and Philosophical
Manuscripts. Indeed, the great fault of this effort is its resignation with respect to a personal,
individual or singular sense of sensuous human existence. Yet, it is the poetry of Marx which evokes
the topos for a questioning of finitude and death. It is amidst such a topos that it is possible to
question the deeper obligation and commitment in Marx, shrouded in his other works.
The Meaning of World
In addition to his brief reference to "Marxism" as a productionist metaphysics in his notorious

Introduction to Metaphysics (1935), Heidegger intimates his criticism of Marx as a mere “man of
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action” in at least two texts, the post-war essay Letter on Humanism and in the 1962 lecture, Kant's
Thesis About Being. In both instances, Heidegger circles in on Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach,
which I already cited above. In response to the contention that the philosopher has only interpreted
the world in various ways, but the point is to change it, Heidegger contends that in order to act, one
must already have a sense of the meaning of world. Such a “having” for Heidegger implies much –
indeed, it implies that we can never have the “world”. One can only objectify things.
For Heidegger, Marx seems to want to throw all into the abyss in an orgasm of action in an
effort to possess the world. Heidegger is certain that Marx has become a “positivist” and a mere
[lxxvii]
“activist”. Marx is blind to the world, existence, such as that transcribed in Being and Time –
a necessary task of disclosing the world and the meaning of existence, the truth of being from the
perspective of being-there, existence (da-sein). As a result, Marx is forced to adhere to a notion of the
world conceived merely a collection or system of objects. From the perspective of Heidegger’s
formal indication of the Goethean tree of life in his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Marx has
never left the derivative and constructed modalities of vorhanden and zuhanden, translated as
theoretical and practical. Ironically, it could be suggested that it is Heidegger who may give the best
analysis of the tragically continual litany in the Marxian paradigm of the question of the relationship
of theory and practice.
Heidegger insists that Marx, if he were to descend from the stems to the root, would have to
seek to disclose the world in this singularity of being towards death as it climaxes in the event of
anticipatory resoluteness, in a disclosure of a sense of being, the meaning of existence as a
simultaneous projection of temporality upon Sein and the excession, giving, of temporality by Sein.
Marx speaks about history, but for Heidegger, he does not realize that if he had a sense of the radical
finitude of existence, he would abandon his architectonic of subject and object, and thus, of a
dialectical reason. There is no need of a dialectic between relata, if these latter do indeed find there
“unity” in a differing topos. Indeed, despite the affinities between Bultmann and Marx, it is not clear
whether the persistence of the dialectic between subject and object, which is predominant in the first
volume of Capital allows Marx to escape the taint of ideology. Moreover, it is further unclear
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whether this distinction and dialectic is the only way to read the works of Marx – not to mention the
many texts which do not evoke these terms.
Marx poetry has never been allowed to enter the house of the “Canon”. His “juvenile” poetry
is, according to the pundits, mere enthusiasms of youth, and therefore, deserve no “scientific” merit.
Yet, if poetry is excluded from the “Canon” of Marx, then we must merely accept the Kantian idealist
schema in which the imagination, temporality itself, will be merely harnessed in order to provide the
synthetic engine for the fulfilment of the theoretical and practical ends of reason. If we can consider
Marx’s poetry and the light that is cast upon existence via this indication, we can trace a
circumvention of the “order of things”. It is here where we find the seat of Marx’s affirmation of the
sacred.
For Heidegger, and I feel as attested by Marx, human existence cannot be reduced to such a
merely theoretical or practical interpretation. As Heidegger is attempting a radical phenomenology of
existence, he is seeking the finite horizons of sense, meaning, for the mortal being. Heidegger can
charge Marx – in the absence of a sensitivity to the latter’s poetic, interpretive hermeneutic - with not
only repeating the metaphysics of subjectivity, of humanism, as being is merely posited by the
subject. Whether this is by the scientist of dialectical materialism or by the proletariet as the subject
of history, this revolution violates his own rhetoric of having transcended “ideology”, the world-
picture (Weltanschauung) in the call to action, or mere praxi!.
If we accept Heidegger's interpretation of the Eleventh Thesis, Marx never escapes an
interpretative matrix in his impatient call to throw down the ladder in action or praxis. Such a call
merely repeats the process of objectification which annihilates the unique character of human
existence indicated as a projection in the face of finitude. It is in this way that we should interpret
Heidegger's statement that "Marxism" operates on the level of a productionistic metaphysics. In such
a scenario, social or species being, despite it naturalistic or socialistic call for an annihilation of
egoistic individuality, remains, for Heidegger, in the ideology of the Anyone (Das Man). Yet, Marx
neither wishes to nor can escape interpretation. He merely interprets the world - conceived as a
system of objects - in yet another way. Yet, it is not clear if Marx is merely blind to “world” in
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Heidegger’s sense. Indeed, even if Marx is an atheist, such questions such as finitude must have
come up… More seriously, that which is essential is not mere questions of “time” and “being”, but of
the temporal disclosure of truth amid this opening. As I have stated, the entirety of Marx’s work
could be seen as poetry of existence, with an affinity to the original irruptions of a poetic opening.
Such a perspective is disclosed in light of a reading of Marx’s poetry and plays, and if one is attuned
to literary perspectives, in all of Marx’s work. We must explore the significance of his hermeneutic of
existence and its relation to the sacred - even if much of it is disseminated in the form of scholarly
prose. Could the event of revolution and decision to participate in such an event be an authentic
expression of the sacred? Or, is the affirmation located at a deeper place of existence, before this
ethical event, in the ethos of the self, of the moment of vision (augenblick) in singularis? What
would a post-Heideggerian Marx look like - and what sense of the sacred would be evident in a Marx
set free from modernist subjectivity? Or, did Marx already set himself free, as Schürmann suggests
with respect to his anti-humanism?
If we can find resources in Marx which can fend off the most serious challenges from
Heidegger’s Being and Time, the most deadly criticism of Marx by Heidegger comes from his
emphatic turn to releasement, piety and contemplation. Augmenting his own early emphasis upon
the finitude of existence, his thought, after the turn, in a Taoist gesture, seems to have displaced that
voluntarist project of any subject, agent, whatever apparition it may take. But such a thinking which
is a thanking is a further transfiguration of the philosophy of the turn which gave to da-sein a destiny
amidst this prevailing dispensation of technological being. For that Heidegger, there is a danger in
this technological unfolding. Our role in this prevailing circumstance is to not only be open to future
possibilities, but, in the mean time, to resist the hegemony of technological representation in its
communication, command and control of its assertion of the “truth” of existence and the world.
Yet, despite that Das Man are far from being open to the truth of being, and are enthralled by
the latest big lie, Heidegger does not wish to loose a sense of Being in its dispensation – in its
withdrawal. Such a sentiment is similar to his 1936 lecture course “What is a Thing?” in which he
delineates (in a quite late Heidegger manner) the various systematic projections of mathesis in the
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context of the sciences. He gives as an example a leaf. One could see it amidst the botanical
projection as a species from such and such a region, requires this care, has this diseases, has a specific
physiology. Or, as a quantity of chemicals and chemical configurations analysed into its constituent
substances, its component parts. Geometrically, the leaf is of a certain shape and configuration.
Chaos theory steps up with its “medicine bag” of fractals. Calculus can compute the ultimately
approximate spatial dimensions of this leaf. Or, on the other hand, we could see it as a religious or
secular symbol, such as the fig leaf and the laurel. Religion and the Secular swarm at each other in a
matrix of the Same. Yet, even in the Same, there is already a plural voice, even amidst the projected
mathesis. Yet, the only voice that is missing is that of the leaf itself – to simply sense the leaf, in its
[lxxviii]
Istigkeit , to witness it in its this-ness, in its singular, authentic existence.
As Heidegger increasingly apprehended, and was also noticed by Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida
and others, there must a cultivation of this space on the “outside”, amidst ek-sistence, so as to shelter
the phenomena in its openness to the truth of its own existence. Such an “outside” is indicated in
poetry as poetic expression allows for the self-expression of the phenomena in question. It is unclear
how Heidegger may have taken Marx’s poetry – yet, it is clear that he regarded the poetic and
philosophic works of major thinkers, such as Kant and Nietzsche, and those by the poets themselves
Holderlin, Rilke, Sophocles, as artistic events which disclosed that which “was” there, “is” here. In
the context of Heidegger’s 1920’s phenomenology, such a formally indicative role is played by his
elaborate topology of phenomenological descriptions and existential categories, or existentials
(Existentiale). In this light, it could be suggested that the poetry of Marx can in fact be interpreted as
an articulation of a pre-philosophical, existential and ethical understanding of the world. Not only is
such a world indicated and disclosed, but the basic commitments of the poet are also disclosed.
In light of the prolific corpus of Marx and the existential continuity between his various
excusions and detours, it could very well be contended that Heidegger’s objection to Marx can be cast
aside in light of his extant poetry and of the continuation of this poetic trajectory throughout Marx’s
writings and his political, social and familial engagements. In the end, if we take into account Marx’s
poetry and his in-depth writings, we can dismiss Heidegger’s claim that Marx is implicated in a vulgar
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sort of praxis. Marx’s poetry deals directly with the phenomena of death and struggle in its relation to
the authentic commitments of the self - of his own self. Indeed, these poems are a precise objection
that has long been held against Marx with respect to his notion of the personal, or of existence in
Heidegger’s tumultuous sense.
Death and the Sacred
For Heidegger, there is a deeper region of being which is – in light of the formal indication of
the Goethean tree - the root of these stems is existence (da-sein). This root-being (Wurzel-sein) and
the morphology, contours of this existence is prior to the realm of technical production, practical
morality, politics or ethics, superficially conceived. Marx is forced to posit action or praxi! as the link
to the world, conceived, Heidegger would suggest, as a world view (Weltanschauung). In the absence
of any apparent knowledge or insight into the poetry of Marx by Heidegger, however, any analysis of
Marx remains in the superficiality of the stems, to continue with Heidegger’s long standing metaphor
of the tree. In such a context, Marx fails to enact a self-interpretation of existence which would
explicate world as a projection of binding commitments disclosed in the anticipatory resoluteness of
being-towards-death (Sein-zu-Tod). Such an indication is relevant due to the paucity of references to
death in the writings of Marx of the post-Hegelian Marx. Yet, many senses of death are articulated in
the poetry of Marx, not to mention in his later writings. There is described a situation of finitude,
desire, sorrow, joy and a thoughtfulness amidst nihilism and commodification. Yet, in the
post-“Canon”, Marx speaks only of the deaths of revolutionaries, workers, and the death knell of
capitalism.
Accepting into our discussion the post-Hegelian Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
Marx refers to death almost in passing in one sentence. He writes in “Private Property and
Communism”, giving his most explicit “analysis” of the self:

Man, much as he may therefore be a particular individual (and it is precisely his particularity
which makes him an individual, and a real individual social being), is just as much the totality
— the ideal totality — the subjective existence of imagined and experienced society for itself;
just as he exists also in the real world both as awareness and real enjoyment of social
existence, and as a totality of human manifestation of life.
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Thinking and being are thus certainly distinct, but at the same time they are in unity with each
other.
Death seems to be a harsh victory of the species over the particular individual and to
contradict their unity. But the particular individual is only a particular species-being, and as
such mortal.
One gathers from this reference that singular death is subsumed within the category of
existence conceived as a species event, as a great cycle which transcends the individual being, a
particular. He or she is merely a leaf falling from the tree of life. Our relationship to the other is
mediated by experience and imagination, but in the end, the particular being is merely a finite aspect
of a deeper, non-subjective truth of being. For Heidegger, who never mentions the Paris Manuscripts,
death - or the overwhelming existentiale of a being-towards-death, indicates the primal phenomena of
which discloses the finitude of existence and the possibility of an authentic projection of the meaning
of existence as temporal. Such a projection of binding commitments, as World, though temporal or
ultimately makeshift, is the primal excession of meaning which discloses the horizon for any
subsequent articulation of theory or practise.
Yet, beyond the apparent brevity of his reference to death, Marx contends that the individual is
real, actual, a singular human being who must think and act to exist. That which is essential in this
excerpt from the Paris Manuscripts is that Marx states that the individual conceives of his relationship
to others in the context of an "ideal totality". It is obvious that he exists in a material, terrestrial
adjacency with others. However, his conscious, thoughtful relationship to these others is mediated via
the imagination, by language, art, and all other types of action, articulation and expression. In this
way, thought and the possibility of self-interpretation still maintain a sense of freedom with respect to
being – there is no determinism, whether by class or structure or place or blood. Marx reveals his
imposture in his seeming resignation with respect to death. His poetry has already said so much
more. Yet, leading to his thin statement about death as a surrender of the particular to the universal,
he speaks of an "imaginary" relation with others as an “ideal totality” – Marx, in this Aristotelian
schema, lays out a theological relationship between the mortal being and the everlasting. Worlds and
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ages roll. Yet, in this opening, amidst “real” social existence, Marx asserts, in this and in other places,
the imaginative, temporal and singular character of existence. His poetic engagement with existence,
amidst the “imaginary”, Temporality, history, etc. exposes his eqos of affirmation and commitment to
spiritual transfiguration and world revolution.
In the projection of a temporally binding horizon of commitments amidst the event of
anticipatory resoluteness, there is, for Heidegger, the disclosure of not only the insurmountable
horizons of finite singularity, but also, by implication, the possibility of an apprehension of that which
transcends this situation of finite existence – toward its meaning. It could be argued that such a
situation of finitude would de facto eliminate the possibility of a disclosure of the transcendens, and
this may well be the case. However, in accordance with Heidegger's contention that Sein is the
transcendens pure and simple, and that da-sein as ecstatic being-in-the-world (in-der-welt-sein) is
transcending in its projection of its meaning upon temporality, it could be argued that with the
deconstruction of the edifice of transcendental subjectivity, there is an invasion of the finite self by
that which overwhelms it.
In this way, while a transcendent conception of an ousiological God-idea may be inaccessible
to finite singularity, this does not preclude the possibility of an apprehension of the sacred - even if
Heidegger, in his early radical phenomenology remains reticent to express Sein in terms of the Divine
[lxxix]
or Sacred. Marx’s commitment to revolutionary praxis parts ways with later Heidegger in that
Marx seeks to further specify what Heidegger indicates as Das Man as a topos of praxis. Heidegger,
once an advocate of praxis, seeks only the pious gift of dispensation. Marx is not so content.
Chapter 7: A Violent Sacred?: Bataille and Marx
For Bataille, as an event of affirmation, release, the sacred erupts amidst terrestrial existence,
an intimacy amid terror, horror, ecstasy, and joy. It would be instructive to investigate the contours of
Marx’s sense of obligation and commitment in this context, even as he purportedly maintained his
own focus upon the political economy of concrete Man. In this way, we can turn to Bataille, who
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more than anyone else, has not only brought the question of the relation of the sacred and “economy”
into relief, but has intimated the eqos of suspension that is this “human condition”. In light of
Bataille's indication of restricted economy with the profane and his advocacy of the general economy,
which allows a sacred as the dimension of uselessness, of that which transcends the regime of
utilitarian calculation, it is possible to raise the question of the sacred and the profane in “Marx”.
Bataille takes “Marx” to task in light of his contention that the fulfilment of reason is taking
place through the socialization of production in the capitalist economy, within the limits of mere
reason – via a profane reduction to thing-hood. For Bataille, such a rationalist, evolutionist theory of
the “laws of motion of modern society”, stands in contradiction to Marx's own insistent affirmation of
unlawful revolution. It also suppresses the question of a sacred characterized as a resistance amid
oppression and poverty. Which is the real Marx? Is he, as Sayyid Qutb describes the “West”,
“schizophrenic”? Or, is this question un-decidable? In this vein, we can cast into relief the character
of Marx’s “revolution” and question if it merely repeats the “sacrificial” rationality of theoretical and
political economic violence. In the bad neighborhood of Bataille, we will seek to disclose in “Marx”
the possibility of a sense of the sacred which moves beyond the scenario of a "great night". After a
portrayal of the sense of the sacred and revolution in Bataille, we will seek to move beyond a merely
sacrificial sense of the sacred as formulated in Girard’s work, Violence and the Sacred to a topos of
the gift. In light of Marx’s poetry, a possibility arises where we may move toward an affirmation of a
sacred economy of the gift, of a community of sacred praxis. Can an affirmation of revolution be
congruent with any notion of the sacred? And, if so, what type of revolution would fulfill the
conditions of this sacred? Can such a revolutionary affirmation rest upon the profane rationality of
political economy?
Bataille and revolutions
In one of his many incarnations - one of his many merely makeshift projects - Bataille initiated
a politico-sacral group entitled the Democratic Communists. This temporary, ad hoc project, standing
[lxxx]
alongside his other attempts, such as the "secret society" Acephalae and his short-lived
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anti-fascist re-alliance with Breton in the guise of the Combat Group (not to mention his brief
inclusion in the "official" Surrealist organization of the "Trotskyist" Breton), extolled the virtues of
[lxxxi]
"headlessness" and "heterogeneity" as counter-thrusts to operative fascism. From what one can
gather from the paltry extant literature of these groups, Bataille attempted to incite the desire for a
"Great Night" in which the capitalist class and it “organized” henchmen would be sacrificed on the
[lxxxii]
altar of a sacred rebellion of a leader-less proletariet. Bataille writes, in “Notion of
Expenditure”,
As dreadful as it is, human poverty has never had a strong enough hold on societies to cause
the concern for conservation – which gives production the appearance of an end – to dominate
the concern for unproductive expenditure. In order to maintain this pre-eminence, since power
is exercised by the classes that expend, poverty was excluded from all social activity. And the
poor have no other way of re-entering the circle of power than through the revolutionary
destruction of the classes occupying that circle – in other words, through a bloody and in no
[lxxxiii]
way limited social expenditure.
Such a desire intimates the possibility of an eruption of radical intimacy, of the sacred instant
of a differing potlach amidst the terrestrial world. In an obvious way, this desire exemplifies Marx's
maxim that the liberation of the working classes must be performed by the workers themselves – and
it has to be done in the most radical manner – through the destruction of the ruling classes. The only
other option for the bourgeosie would be a renunciation of the rationalist propaganda that it used
against the exuberant nobility and to become noble itself. That would mean, however, resuming the
obligation of the gift in all of its myriad transfigurations and rhythms. Despite Bataille’s curious
ambivalence with respect to aristocracy, he announces the “headlessness” of existence, of the lack of a
single power of command, control and judgement – of a de facto paganism, polytheism – many
voices, pluri-vocity.
From a philosophical perspective, "headlessness" would thus express the possibility of an
excession of a will (Willkür), which is not determined and disciplined by a purist reason, whether
theoretical, practical, or aesthetical. In a tacit criticism of Kant’s valorization of Christianity in his
Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone and the former’s practical faith in the substantial reality of
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God, Bataille writes, in his essay, “The Sacred”, that the “grail” which haunts the reductive stability of
the “modern spirit” concerns not a “personal and transcendent being (or beings), but an impersonal
[lxxxiv]
reality. Christianity has made the sacred “substantial.” For Bataille, on the contrary, the
sacred erupts as a “privileged moment of communal unity”, in an event which discloses a radical
disjunction or breach between the sacred and substance/profane. Indeed, in light of the traditional
meaning of substance, especially in Aristotle, as possessions or property, one can clearly discern an
intimate connection between the sacred and anti-capitalist revolution – as an event of “convulsive
communication” of the suppressed and oppressed. For Bataille, however, this breach is not a mere
disintegration but a portal which opens up a field “perhaps of violence, perhaps of death, but a field
[lxxxv]
which may be entered – to the agitation that has taken hold of the living human spirit.” In fact,
in the current era, after Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of god, it is the radical breach between a
substantialist (or ousiological) god and the sacred which intimates the event of revolution. Practical
Morality has become propaganda for theft, property - the sacred is suppressed, controlled and diverted
in the violence toward the outside. Bataille writes

The fact that “God is recognized to be dead” cannot lead to a less decisive consequence; god
represented the only obstacle to the human will, and freed from God this will surrenders, nude,
[lxxxvi]
to the passion of giving the world an intoxicating meaning.
The open field is this realm of intoxication and headlessness of revolution before the trauma, prior to
the attempt to consciously control that which erupts from ecstasy. One embraces the open field and
the risk of the radically unknown. We are humbled, we are nude – amidst the death of God, we do not
[lxxxvii]
proclaim ourselves gods, but dance ourselves into intoxication, in Emma Goldman’s sense.
Bataille writes,
Whoever creates, whoever paints or writes, can no longer concede any limitations on painting
and writing; alone, he suddenly has at his disposal all possible human convulsions, and he
cannot flee from this heritage of divine power – which belongs to him. Nor can he try to know
if this heritage will consume and destroy the one it consecrates. But he refuses now to
surrender “what possesses him” to the standards of salesman, to which art has conformed.
[lxxxviii]
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It is the “profoundly ambiguous” and “dangerous” character of the sacred which erupts into the
intoxication of the privileged instant. Bataille has no illusions that such an instant will become an
enduring nunc stans, that we can somehow hold on to these as our possessions. In a reversal of the
hubris of the “modern spirit”, he suggests that we are in fact the ones possessed by such moments.
We seize hold of these makeshifts of a maze, surrender to our possession – while the fleeting lasts –
until we again return to the “stability” of the dis-intoxicated. As is readily seen, such an explicit
absence of rational and moral determination of the will, the typology of morality, is not meant to
indicate a be-ing which is not open to the sacred. Quite the contrary.
Bataille and the Sacred
In a way which evokes a strange resemblance to Kant's distinction between phenomena and
noumena, Bataille lays out a historical and philosophical distinction between the profane and the
sacred. In his much neglected work, Theory of Religion, Bataille traces the genealogy of the
phenomena of the sacred before and within the limits of Reason (alone). Yet, that which may seem
strange to those versed in the nuances of the Kantian system of pure, practical Reason, Bataille
indicates that any rational determination of the will (to use the language of Kant) abides – in an echo
of Mauss - in the domain of the profane. This does not mean, however, that Bataille is merely
inverting the Kantian schema in an exhaltation of the “irrational”. Nor is he repeating Kant’s maxim
of limiting reason to “make room” for faith – and thus, a pure, practical reason.
Heterogeneity, the “outside” of mere representational consciousness (system) – as a primal
remembrance of mere animality, as Bataille begins his narrative, indicates a situation which is akin to
"water in water". Animality describes a situation of radical immanence - there is no possibility of a
procedure of linguistic and bodily objectification - of the reification of [consciousness]. However,
human beings have not, in becoming [conscious], merely thrown down the ladder of animality, having
attained an enlightened, unambiguous situation of clear and distinct rationality. We cannot escape the
domain of objectification - of project - in a similar way in which we cannot escape the modality of the
everyday in the early Heidegger. Nor can we escape the entanglement of animality. Yet, what must
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be emphasized, there is no radical distinction between the domain of animality and consciousness as
with Kant's implausible distinction between phenomenon and noumenon - or between the theoretical
and the practical. Instead, the human situation is suspended in-between consciousness and animality,
the profane and the sacred in the archaic “general economy”. We cannot escape the ordinary - this
strange situation of suspension erupts as a chaotic dance of influences, events. Another version of this
situation of suspension is expressed in Bataille's work Inner Experience as that between the wildness
of ipse and the loss of self in a desired communion.
The message seems to be that there is no simple, analytical distinction between well-defined
regions of rational determination. That which marks Bataille off from Kant is his historical genealogy
of the emergence of a regime of rational determination - of religion without the limits of Reason. For
Bataille, the possibility of the sacred has its roots in the remembrance of animality – immanence - and
the desire to retrieve the radical intimacy or communion with the divine. Such a desire intimates a
threat to the profane realm of the conscious determination of everyday, practical ends – of utility, of
production and destruction of products, business as usual. The objectification of a profane
consciousness serves for the reproduction of a system of needs.
Yet, just as it is impossible to mark a clear and distinct gulf between consciousness and
pre-conscious animality, it is also impossible to achieve a merely profane system of rational
organization and objectification – there must be an openness to a general economy, to the economies,
official and unofficial, the threads in the perverse and decadent tapestry of existence. This is not due
to a lack of progress in our faculty of Reason, one to be remedied by the further expansion of an
enlightened reason - as is the case in Spinoza, Hegel and their latter-day descendents. It is due to our
situation of suspension – of ambiguity. Yet, each makes his and her own decisions, as the story goes.
The situation of “the” human being, while being determined by the emergence of
consciousness, cannot, as historical, ever leave animality or the remembrance, recurrence thereof
completely behind. Indeed, such a radical breach would not even be desirable - just as, for Nietzsche,
a pure Apollonian clarity would not be able to extinguish the radical ferment of a Dionysian force of
life. The Platonic project to achieve the pure realm of the light - of the Good - is not only impossible,
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but may not be desirable as it will provoke a radical implosion of a system of enlightened
objectification in a "Great Night". As Nietzsche suggests in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, as one seeks the
realm of pure light and goodness, the roots of the self strive ever deeper into evil and darkness. Wild
dogs bark in the cellar seeking release from their cages. Just as the surrealists refused to consent to
the aesthetics of pure order, Bataille - in a much more radical manner - contends that the very
possibility of the sacred abides in an affirmation of a radical non-knowing - in the abyss of the Night –
[lxxxix]
in the heterogeneous.
For Bataille, in his explication of the meaning of sacrifice, the sacred thrives in the affirmation
of the desire for radical immanence. However, as he warned in Inner Experience that the desire for
total communion would - if possible – would annihilate the wildness of ipse, of the self, a situation of
total sacrifice would not only destroy the profane conditions of existence, but in such a destruction,
would condemn the destroyer to radical self-destruction. This - as Marcel Mauss admirably outlines
in his The Gift - allows us to ascertain the incipient - sensuous - reason indicated in sacrifice,
specifically in the potlatch. The project for a pure reason or logic - of a conscious regime of
utilitarian objectification - is illusory and intimately self-destructive. Such a recognition of the truth
of the human situation - as the Delphic Oracle counselled "Know Thyself" and "Know Thy Limits" -
affirms the constituent significance of non-consciousness, non-knowing - of the virtue of uselessness,
of a dysteleology. The enactment of sacrifice intimates such an awareness of the surreal limits of
human consciousness.
Sacrifice enacts a limited destruction of the regime of conscious objectification in the
annihilation of an everyday object of use. The destruction of the object is a partial return to the
immanence of the animal - but as it is a partial destruction of this regime, it indicates a sacred
awareness of the constituent ambiguity of the human situation. The gift to the gods or spirits implicit
or explicit in the sacrifice is the affirmation of an alterior dimension of existence - beyond the mere
calculative, rational domain of systemic reproduction. But, it must be emphasized, such a Saturnalia
must be limited as there is the simultaneous recognition of the historical, genealogical emergence of
the human from the intimacy of pure animality. We are suspended between the domain of the animal
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and the illusory, de-ceptive goal of a noumenal kingdom of ends. But, perhaps, there is no Overman
(Ubermensch) which could provide an escape, from another, many detours. In such a place, Bataille
can agree with Sartre that there is "no exit" – that all is “nausea” and impossible responsibility.
However, amidst this labyrinth of total mobilization, one, many can resist towards a “better”
expenditure.
This Saturnalia of radical expenditure, implicit in the enactment of sacrifice, is a recognition
of the specific character of the human predicament - and an affirmation of the sacred dimension which
overwhelms the latter-day hubris of a desire for a pure Enlightened subjectivity - of religion within
the limits of reason. As indicated above, there is a superficial resemblance between Bataille's
makeshift distinction between the sacred and the profane and the Kantian statement that theoretical
reason must be limited in order to make room for the rational faith of practical reason. And, despite
the radical difference suggested by the apparently a-historical character of the Kantian architectonic,
the enactment of sacrifice differs radically from such an illusory limitation of reason. Indeed,
practical reason, in its blind determination of the will (Willkur by Wille), has, in an unfavorable
contrast to even the Second Edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, eliminated any trace of
imagination or sensuality. This is beyond even the mere considerations of an Epicurean concern for
private happiness (heteronomy) - especially in light of Heidegger's emphasis on the hidden -
suppressed - operation of a transcendental imagination in the Second Critique. For Bataille, a Kantian
autonomy stands - in light of his work Theory of Religion - necessarily in the domain of the profane as
it is still a function of reason - of a moral consciousness albeit, as Kant reassures his theological,
anti-Spinozist critics – “it is merely practical”.
Perhaps, there may be some affinity between Bataille and the anti-rationists Jacobi and
[xc]
Hamann, but it is clear that these latter would be uncomfortable with the former's admiration for
eroticism, transgression, and joy, each of which implies a neo-pagan affirmation of the sacred. In a
radical refusal of a rationalist concept of autonomy, Bataille affirms a sense of the sacred bound to the
excession of heterogeneity. Such a volatile sense of the sacred traces its roots to that which is before -
a merely historical Reason, beyond a schizophrenic compartmentalization of differing regions and
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sectors of a hegemonic rationality. For Bataille, beyond a rationalist autonomy, there is - amidst the
eruption of a sacred heterogeneity, a sovereignty for the mortal self in its suspension between merely a
calculative, utilitarian reason and an immanent animality. Such a situation of suspense indicates the
sacred possibility of human existence. There is no escape from the surreal trace of the accursed
share.
This detour into the work of Bataille places an interpretation of a sense of the sacred in Marx
at a crossroads. For the post-Hegelian Marx - for whom the real is rational and the rational is real, it
is capitalist articulation – socialization - which demonstrates the positive enactment of reason in the
world - it need only be consciously recognized and controlled - disciplined - "Thus I willed it!" – the
cheer of a strategic planner. In this way, one could simply state that Marx either left any relationship
with the sacred behind and walked into the realm of the profane, seeking to describe its laws of
motion, or considered the actualization of reason through history to be the fulfillment of an eschaton.
Or, perhaps there is another spin, blah. Blah, etc. After all, even if we keep within the post-Hegelian
schema and Nietzschean framework, it could be that the “I” is the saturnalia of the poor, of the
workers, etc... The every-second intimacy of the poor in spirit and of a world which would be born of
this present world, is an affirmation of a sacred alternative. It is resistance amid, toward these “busy”
articulations of power.
Marx was not merely interested in "science" and he is not a Hegelian theologian. His concern
is thought and action, as evident in his writing Capital and his affirmation and agitation of revolution,
an invocation of a breach in history. For Marx, revolution would inaugurate true human history. We
have little to go on – outside his poetry - there is only the reference to social or species being in the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts – and the traces of poeisis which surface here and there in
his so-called mature works. Upon this least trodden path, one is left with many questions.
What is the basis of Marx's affirmation of a social being? Is there a sacred ground for his
affirmation of praxis, of a conscious-material interaction which radically transcends the animality of
design witnessed in the labour, for instance, of the spider? What is the sacred? What is the ground of
Marx's attribution to Man the capacity to comprehend and articulate in a universal manner all of the
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operations of mere animality. What is the basis and source of this capacity, of this attunement with
the Universal? Is it merely the ruse of a blind, quasi-historical reason which is merely material -
although dialectical? Against the background of the Platonic dialectic - and in light of the
Nietzschean criticism of the ressentiment of all dialectic - what lies hidden - if anything - in this
"dialectical materialism"?
There is after all the road less taken. Beyond the questions pertaining to the mere basis of
Marx's designation of social being and of his statements of the necessity and inevitability of a
worker's revolution - Workers of the World Unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains! - all in
the context of a ruse of political economic reason, there is the affirmation of violent revolution, of the
"Great Night" of a radical breach against the calculative regime of disciplinary control. Is violent
revolution an expression of Marx's aspiration for a Saturnalia, for an eruption of the sacred amid the
world of the profane? Marx’s enduring affirmation of violent revolution indicates a wiillingness to
step outside of the profane existence of utilitarian calculation. His desire for radical change, his "No!",
abididing a "Yes!" cannot merely be reduced to the obsessions of a political junky. We can and must
return to the pre-Hegelian Marx - before philosophy - in order to retrieve a sense of the sacred which
is set free from the violence of the Hegelian aufhebung. In light of Bataille's sense of the sacred,
Marx discloses an intimacy with the sacred, indicated in his poetry. Bataille writes in “The Notion of
Expenditure”:
The term poetry, applied to the least degraded and least intellectualised forms of the
expression of a state of loss, can be considered synonymous with expenditure; it in fact
signifies, in the most precise way, creation by means of loss. Its meaning is therefore close to
that of sacrifice.
In the suspension, the gift can never be free of sacrifice. Poetry, for Bataille, is/was always, or almost
always accompanied by a sigh of despair. Mere writing can never be a substitute, simulacrum, for this
eruption of cosmic affirmation. Amidst such an eruption of a singularity, existence, poetry indicates,
evokes, and invokes. Yet, in the postures of a life of writing, it is once removed. In this sense, the
step beyond poetry transfigures sacrifice and the sacrificial situation into a topos of the gift – it returns
to poeisis, poetry. Indeed, on this basis, one could set forth a different interpretation of revolution in
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its relation to an affirmative sense of the sacred. Mere poetic revolutions intimate only the impotence
of loss, reluctant detachment. It is a poetry of existence, of praxis, that, in its transgression of the
limits of power, discloses this truth of be-ing via its own actions and words amidst a horizon of events
and situations. Despite Bataille’s pessimism with regard to poetry, there could be a more congenial
and fruitful path traversed in the awareness of an intimacy between poeisis and praxis, in tandem amid
a comportment of openness, affirmation.
Chapter 8: A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx
There are not only instances of “theological” thought which is not merely complementary to
the Marxian project - such as Liberation Theology, but there are also varieties of “interpretation”
which surpass the reflections of Marx, calling into question his silence with regard to the possibility of
a non-alienated sense of the sacred. In light of those such as Bultmann who abides his reflections
upon the inner despair of existential motivation, one could suggest, with Heidegger, that in his all-too-
impatient dismissal of “theology”, Marx has remained in the mode of alienation - while he calls on
“humanity” to reclaim its social being in a non-alienated form in terms of the political economic
artefacts of the direct producers, he fails to provide a convincing affirmation of the sacred. As we
have detected in the philosophical criticisms of Heidegger and Bataille, a mere determination of
human existence in terms of species, class, nation, etc. remains, to use Marcuse's phrase,
one-dimensional. Such a determination remains susceptible to an overriding neo-Spinozist liquidation
of the multi-dimensional character of human existence into a monological reduction to mere animality
and mere consciousness - or perhaps, to the collective happiness of the Last Man, which fails to
explicate the singular, existential dimension of the mortal being.
Marx’s relative silence with respect to death has already been indicated - the particular species
being must merely accept the harsh judgment of Nature. Such a fatal-ism fails to comprehend the
specific character of human existence - and thus, fails to affirm the true character of real human
beings in real social and individual situations - referring to the rhetorical language of the Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts. In light of Marx’s poetry and his openness to the “imaginary”, to the
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Temporal, as a rejoinder to Heidegger’s limited portrayal, such an emphasis upon the singular mortal
being and upon its disclosure cannot merely be dismissed as a retreat into or a repetition of petty-
bourgeois or bourgeois ideology – as a mere ideology. Such a dismissal based on our makeshift
theories about ourselves would not only trivialize the existential situation of the mortal being, be also,
would dismiss the poly-valent depths of human existence. In this light, bringing Marx’s poetry into
play would provide the latter with the resources to deal with so many questions.
However, this criticism of Marx and the present attempt to enact a retrieval of the sacred in
Marx would stand at an impasse if the latter and his post-Marxists advocates would simply remain in
a state of refusal - insisting that religion and all anti-Enlightenment mythology must simply be "put to
[xci] [xcii]
sleep". In such a situation, one could merely insist, as Althusser seems to have done, that
Marx had attained a position outside idealism - that "Marxism" has achieved the standpoint of a
"Science". In response to such an impasse, siege, one must not only make the claim that Marx, in this
portrayal, has failed to disclose the true depth of human existence, but also that the absence that it
detected in his extant project indicates an implicit failure to escape the parameters of a sacred logic.
This suggestion has already been made with respect to the question of the authentic ground of
the Marxian advocacy of revolutionary transformation of capitalist society. Yet, even such a question,
which in a significant way is based upon a reading of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,
could be dismissed by such advocates of a “discontinuity” in the significance and theoretical intent in
Marx's extant writings. Interpreters such as Althusser could merely state that the early philosophical
works remain too close in their affiliation with Hegelian idealism and thus do not attain to the level of
"Science" as for instance that articulated in Capital. In this way, all of Marx’s writings – before
perhaps the German Ideology, are species of ideology – and can therefore be dismissed, except as
historical antecedents and anecdotes (doxa).
However, it would be simple (and unnecessary if one merely picks up the works) to respond to
such a blanket dismissal of Marx’s early works by pointing out continuities in the later work – for
instance, the notion of alienation in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts with the notion of a
“fetishism of commodities” in Chapter One of Capital – or, of the portrayal in Chapters 12-15 of the
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transformation of the artisan into the “appendage to the machine”. Or, one could merely point out the
many ethical and advocational statements, his voluminous letters, or, in his later writings which
obviously move beyond mere science. At the end of the day, one is left either with a very limited
reduction of Marx to “Science” (with all the philosophical problems which that would entail), or one
would be open to explore what Heidegger would call the “unsaid” in the work of Marx. In such a
case, it is clear that much has been left unsaid – that much is absent in the work of Marx – especially
with respect to the sacred. Yet, in his poetry, there is much that is said – not to mention the saying
(Levinas).
In light of the possibility of a radical refusal in the wake of the question of the sacred on behalf
of Marx or the Marxists, a stronger work of deconstruction emerges in the contention that the very
“logic” of the Marxian attitude towards the sacred never abandons that which may be indicated as a
“logic of the sacred”. Such a criticism comes from the topos of literary criticism in Cesareo
Bandera’s work, The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction.
[xciii]
Bandera takes his point of departure from the work of Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred,
in which it is argued that the essence of the sacred, a function of the “unity” of a “community”
consists in the radical expulsion of a sacrificial victim. In the destruction of the victim, often an
innocent, that which is affirmed is an original position – every wrong of the collocation of singular
beings is projected upon the sacrificial initiate. With the offering of the sacrificial being, there is a
re-affirmation of the icons of the “community”.
In the case of Marx, it is, for Bandera, the notion of the sacred itself which is sacrificed on the
altar of a Marxian “Science”. In tune with the reflections of Gerard, Heidegger asserts that
Nietzsche’s “against”, in his polemic The Anti-Christ, incites a repetition of that which is opposed.
There is no escape from the logic of the sacred if the very operation of the opposition and exclusion
repeats or re-enacts the character or trauma of the attack, extermination, etc. Even if that which is
affirmed is to be utterly distinct from that which is refused – as is Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice
his temporal son for the a-temporal truth of the “Father” – or, of the eternal Son - the very
methodology of opposition – even if the scapegoat is cast into the wilderness – forces a repetition of
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the deep logic of exclusion, in Girard’s view ala Bandera, of the sacred. In this way, as with
Nietzsche in Heidegger’s view, Marx does not escape the logic of the sacred – even if he is left merely
with the “empty hands” of an a-theology – which in this context is – as it was with the “death of God”
mysticism of Bataille – still a theology.
While the raison d’etre of Bandera’s deconstruction of Marx consists in making the strong
case that Marx – even in his radical refusal – could not extricate himself from the “logic of Sacred”, it
would seem that this criticism – while dealing with the obstinate refusal of “Marxist Science” to even
entertain the possibility of a non-alienated sense of the sacred, remains unsatisfactory with regards the
question of a retrieval of an affirmative sense of the holy in Marx. What we are told is that Marx
cannot escape the sacred. We are neither told what such a sacred may entail, nor are we able to pose
the possibility of a radically different affirmation of the sacred in Marx. Yet, we could throw into
[xciv]
question the very sense of the sacred set forth by Girard. A merely sacrificial interpretation of
the sacred – as it seems to rely all-too-heavily upon the etymology of the term “sacred” - fails to take
into account the possibility of a positive apprehension of the polymorphous divine – even Bultmann
seems, in his existential emphasis upon finitude, seems open to an affirmation of the holy, even if we
– ultimately – must remain in the Nameless. Prayer, for instance, seems to be an act –
non-apophantic, and thus, non-reductive – that, while one may be able to trace it to some genealogy of
sacrifice, to have as its pre-eminent moment an affirmation of that which overwhelms – or
transcends. Moreover, in the absence of an affirmative sense of the sacred, and therefore, of the
divine, what would be the content of a “Marxian Sacred” – as it still would reside in the negative
interpretation of the sacred? Are we to erect a violent revolution against the capitalist system in
which there is an orchestration of a “Great Night” of sacrifice in which the capitalist class and its
supporters are sacrificed on the altar of proletarian et al. revolution? Should we return to the Aztecs,
as it were? Shall we eat the Rich?
While such a possibility may be intriguing for some, we could question such a negative sense
of sacred action from several perspectives. Firstly, one could simply question the ultimate
effectiveness of such a meta-strategy. In light of that which we have indicated with respect to the
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“against”, would not such a “meta-strategy” entangle a movement of liberation in a scenario of violent
repetition? Consider the ultimate failure of the French Revolution. Did the guillotine aid the cause of
France? Are the writings of the Marquis de Sade more influential than a French Revolution for our
“time”? While a revolutionary transformation must of necessity be a creature of the heart, there must
exist an inner kernel of affirmation which emerges as an event of radical alterity – any “against” must
be of necessity a secondary moment to the radical cultivation of an alternative existence. To borrow
from Bakunin, freedom must be achieved by means of freedom – and not from coercion. In such a
scenario, violence is merely a derivative factor in a movement which affirms and enacts an alternative
situation of intimacy. Such is the case with Liberation Theology. The advocacy of violent revolution
points to the possibility of an affirmative sense of the sacred - wrapped up in the rhetoric and street
fighting of violent change. Yet, even though there may be suitors who are plundering the household,
Marx underscores, in this Paris Manuscripts, that alienation afflicts human beings per se – capitalist,
manager and worker. He seeks to emphasize the systemic and historical “ground” of this relation.
There is the possibility of an affirmative path for Marx, but despite the latent humanism of his
analysis, his own experiences of Realpolitik, such as that of the 1871 Paris Commune, assured he
would not be blinded by a naivety as to the possibilities of reconciliation. Even amidst affirmation,
Marx may still needs be mixed up in violence, agitation and alterity.
In this light, we must attempt to excavate the radical, inner kernel of affirmation in the work of
Marx – beyond the mere sacrificial logic of revolutionary transformation. In a retrieval of the sacred
in Marx, I will excavate the radical, inner kernel of affirmation in its initial expression in Marx’s
poetry in which we can begin to discern an affirmative sense of the sacred. Contrary to Heidegger’s
procedure of sometimes forcing his interlocuters to “say” the very words he has already placed in
their mouths, I believe that we can find such a saying affirmation – said - in the early poetry of Marx.
However, in accord with Heidegger, we can enact a retrieval of Marx in light of his phenomenology
of formal indication. Each is an artwork which discloses that which is there…
In his poetry, Marx expresses a dazzling sense of the sacred, of the divine, to an extent that has
been a source of embarrassment to the dogmatic materialists. This poetry has often been dismissed as
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juvenile work, as enthusiasm. Yet, I will attempt to show that these poems express, in poetic form, his
incessant and “durable” radical insights. I have chosen the poems Transformation, Creation, and
Awakening to provide a rich tapestry for an exploration of the sacrificial and affirmative senses of the
sacred in Marx. I will contend that Marx’s poetry not only pre-figures most of his later criticisms of
idealism, ideology, and existence, but also expresses an affirmative sense of the sacred in his
commitment to a meaningful and authentic existence amidst his concrete engagements of everyday
life.
Without undertaking a didactic analysis of the poetry of Marx, it will be sufficient to indicate a
few poems which express a positive affirmation of the sacred, of the divine. Indeed, it would seem
that – even in his many love poems to Jenny – that Marx had abided an imaginative kosmos inhabited
by a myriad of spirits, gods, goddesses and supernatural powers. In the following, I would like to cast
light on some of these poetic references in order to begin to unearth a positive affirmation of the
sacred at the “inner kernel” of Marx’s work. Such attempts are provisional, but ought to intimate the
questions posed in the proceeding lines.
It could be stated that some of Marx’s poetry exalts the “diabolical”, as with his poem “My
World”, where he proclaims his will higher than that of even the gods. Yet, even here, he states that
“endless battle” is like a “Talisman”, and in this way, has not left the ground of the sacred. Indeed, his
references could even be described as Faustian or at the least as pagan – such as High Magician and
the like. Whatever the case, Marx is working from a topos of magical and surreal events.
For instance in his poem, “Feelings”, he writes,

All things I would strive to win
All the blessings Gods impart
Grasp all knowledge deep within
Plumbs the depths of Song and Art.
At the same time, a deep, existential passion resides in these poems (not to mention his many plays).
Of course, there are references to spirits, gods, demons, etc., but that which is most prominent is a
soul who is struggling, who is seeking, loving – a soul which expresses anguish, doubt, love –
something which is mostly sublimated in his later work – even in his last poems which become
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merely those of, what he calls, an epigramist. In these, he merely comments on events – the inner
depths of his soul – whether saved or damned – becomes a utility. This is the origin of the
suppression of a sacred topography in Marx. One such poem is entitled “Epigrams” and concerns the
external motif of the German public. He contents himself to dismissing the pretensions of the higher
aspirations of poetry for the voice of the street (but the voices in the street can be an affirmation of the
sacred). Yet, there are too many poems to mention which exalt in an ecstatic awareness of the divine
and the sacred. Almost all of his pre-epigrammatic poems abide amid a terrain of supernatural beings,
Homeric references, and affirmations of the divine source and significance of a magical world. He is
also not adverse to articulating his own very personal and passionate existence.
In the following, I would like to indicate this sensitivity to a sacred, divine, world in Marx
through a consideration of the poems “Transformation”, “Creation”, and “The Awakening” – there are
certainly more, but these indications will suffice for a beginning. It should be noted that Marx – even
in these early poems – was already radically sceptical of the hegemonic religion of the time, as
expressed in his “The Last Judgement – A Jest” and in his other un-conventional (Spiritualist,
pantheist, neo-pagan) and classical – mostly Homeric and Ovidian - references. Yet, that which is
significant is his positive affirmation of a sacred and divine existence which in many ways is quite
radical – even in comparison to his later, so-called “mature” works.
Yet, without further digression, let us read a few of his poems:
[xcv]
Transformation
Mine eyes are so confused

My cheek it is so pale
My head is so bemused
A realm of fairy-tale.
I wanted, boldly daring

Sea-going ways to follow
Where a thousand crags rise soaring
And floods flow bleak and hollow.
I clung to Thought high-soaring
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On its two wings did ride,

And though storm winds were roaring,
All danger I defied.
I did not falter there,

But ever did on press,
With the wild eagle’s stare
On journeys limitless.
And though the Siren spins
Her music so endearing
Whereby the heart she wins –
I gave that sound no hearing.
I turned away mine ear

From the sweet sounds I heard,
My bosom did aspire
To a loftier reward.
Alas, the waves sped on,

At rest they would not be;
They swept by many a one,
Too swift for me to see.
With magic power and word,

I cast what spells I knew,
But forth the waves still roared,
Till they were gone from view.
And by the Flood sore pressed,

And dizzy at the sight,
I tumbled from the host
Into the misty night.
And when I rose again

From fruitless toil at last,
My powers all were gone,
And all the heart’s glow lost.
And trembling pale, I long

Gazed into my own breast;
But no uplifting song
Was my affliction blessed.
My songs were flown, alack;

The sweetest art was gone –
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No God would give it back

Nor Grace of Deathless One.
The Fortress had sunk down

That once so bold did stand;
The fiery glow was drowned,
Void was the bosom’s land.
Then shone your radiance,

The purest light of soul,
Where in a changing dance,
Round Earth the Heavens roll.
Then was I captive bound,

Then was my vision clear,
For I had truly found,
What my dark strivings were.
Soul rang more strong, more free,

Out of the deep-stirred breast
In triumph heavenly
And in sheer happiness.
My spirits then and there

Soared, jubilant and gay,
And, like a sorcerer,
Their courses did I sway.
I left the waves that rush,

The floods that change and flow.
On the high cliff to crash,
But saved the inner glow.
And what my Soul, Fate-driven

Never in Flight o’ertook,
That to my heart was given
Was granted by your look.
[xcvi]
Creation
Creator Spirit uncreated
Sails on fleet waves far away,
Worlds heave, lives are generated,
His eye spans Eternity,
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All inspiring reigns his Contenance,

In its burning magic, forms condense.
Voids pulsate and ages roll,

Deep in prayer before his face;
Spheres resound and Sea-floods swell,
Golden stars ride on apace,
Fatherhead in blessing gives the sign,
And the All is bathed in Light divine.
In bounds self-perceived, the Eternal
Silent moves, reflectively,
Until holy thought primordial
Dons forms, Words of Poetry.
Then, like Thunder-lyres from far away
Like prescient Creation’s Jubilee:
“Gentler shine the floating stars,

Worlds in primal rock now rest;
O my Spirit’s images,
Be by Spirit new embraced;
When to you the heaving bosoms move,
Be revealed in piety and love.
“Be unlocked only to love;

Eternity’s eternal seat,
As to you I gently gave,
Hurl to you my soul’s lightning out.
‘Harmony alone its like may find,
Only Soul another Soul may bind.’
Out of me your Spirits burn

Into Forms of lofty meaning;
To the Maker you return,
Images no more remaining,
By Man’s look of Love ringed burningly,
You in him dissolved, and he in me.”
[xcvii]
The Awakening
When your beaming eye breaks
Enraptured and trembling,
Like straying string music
That brooded, that slumbered
Bound to the lyre,
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Up through the veil

Of holiest night,
Then from above glitter
Eternal stars
Lovingly inwards.
Trembling you sink

With heaving breast,
You see unending
Eternal worlds
Above you, below you,
Unattainable, endless,
Floating in dance-trains,
Of restless eternity;
An atom, you fall
Through the Universe.
Your awakening
Is an endless rising,
Your rising,
An endless falling.
When the rippling flame

Of your soul strikes
In its own depths,
Back into the breast,
There emerges unbounded,
Uplifted by spirits,
Borne by sweet-smelling
Magical tones,
The secret of soul
Rising out of the soul’s
Daemonic abyss.
Your sinking down

Is an endless rising,
Your endless rising
Is with trembling lips –
The Aether-reddened,
Flaming, eternal
Lovekiss of the Godhead.
Before I undertake a reading of each of these poems, and of all of them amidst their various
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interactions, I will make a short comment on the significance of poetry to any philosophical or
hermeneutic endeavor. Everyone is familiar with Plato's wishful desire in his Republic in which he
casts the poets from the polis. Fewer are aware that Plato was himself a poet, but one who wished to
convey, like Euripides, in his poetry, an array of philosophical conclusions. Plato failed as a tragic
poet as his anguish in the face of the Dionysian – in the destruction of the “household”, of
‘substanse”. Plato became a philosopher and a very specific type of philosopher. It is certain that
there is a measure of hypocrisy in Plato's refusal of the poets. He himself relied heavily upon poetic
images to convey the sense of his ideas. For Plato, the imago was subservient to the project of a
dissemination of the possibility of pure reason. Yet, there are other ways to look at images, pathway
and ways of being which do not necessitate the banishment of poetry. Moreover, unlike the
Renaissance moralists who wished to exterminate poetry, we can become open to language which
indicates the myriad truths and expressive possibilities of the world and earth.
Whether we consider the methodology of formal indication in the radical phenomenology of
the early Heidegger, or his reflections upon the origin of the work of art in the 1930's or of the
Fourfold in his later work; or, if we listen to the surreal expressionism of Bataille in his ambiguous
juxtaposition betwixt the sacred and Profane; or, again, if we witness the sacred refusals of Liberation
Theology or the many other fighters of the good fight; or finally, if we heed the warnings of the
Twentieth Century theologians who called us back to the immanence of the source - to an existential
phenomenology of the moment – there are non-apophantic acts and contemplations would allow for
the cultivation of a topos of opennness toward the sacred. There need be no rational control of the
works of imagination and temporality, but only an openness to that which is resonating in the
language of existence. Whether we conceive of language as expression or indication or in any other
way, there is no ultimately secure position from which to radically exclude one expression from
another.
We must seek to listen to Marx’s early poetry and to his “first” decisions and affirmations in
these works, written in the late 1830's when he was in his late teens turning twenty. There is no
reason to contend that this writing is not significant - look at the wide interest in Rimbaud, who retired
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at nineteen. Moreover, Marx never repudiated these works - he cultivated an interest in literature to
the ends of his days. Yet, that which is most striking is the compatibility between his early
expressions of the sacred and his later social revolutionary affirmation - even though no such
connection was never explicitly made by Marx or by anyone else.
In the following, I will enact a reading of each of the selected poems in light of the question of
Marx and the Sacred. This does not mean that I will conduct a poetic analysis of these poems, nor,
will I not provide a line by line commentary of these poems. In the wake of a summary of each poem,
I will excavate the sense or senses (or non-sense) of each of the poems in light of our questioning of
the sacred in Marx. We will be looking for traces of a pre-philosophical, poetic, affirmation and
disclosure of life, existence, and the sacred.
Transformation
Marx is left bloodless and confused by a sudden realization, his head is bemused by a realm of
fairy tale. Casting himself as Odysseus, he expresses the sense of his confusion, pallor and
bemusement as a drowning amidst a courageous, sea-going flight into thought. He did not falter, but
pressed upon his journey. He resisted the seduction of the Siren in his pursuit of a higher goal. But
the waves of Poseidon sped on, overwhelming him in a misty night. Marx rises again from his
fruitless toil, but without power, his heart's glow lost. Song is gone and there is no God or Deathless
one who can save him. The fortress has disintegrated, there is no home. Yet, in this nothingness, the
light of the soul shines, a changing dance, that of the heavens rolling around earth. In this vision,
Marx has found the fulfilment of his dark strivings. Soul rings freely in happiness out of a daring
breast, his heart is reawakened. His spirits soar and are swayed by Marx himself - who becomes a
sorcerer. Crashing waves of the sea are left behind, all trappings are lost, but an inner glow is
preserved. The fate of existence has overwhelmed the flight of thought, but the inner glow of the
heart has achieved, in the vista of the heavens, that which thought could not offer.
It would be tempting to set forth an interpretation of this poem as an early rehearsal of Marx’s
later criticisms of idealist philosophies and religion. However, while such may be the case, such an
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interpretation erases any discontinuity within the corpus of Marx. Such attempts, already indicated
above, to break up the work of Marx into periods fail to be sensitive to the existence of Marx as a
poet, thinker, writer, political activist, father, husband and man. This poem serves as a landmark in
the destination of Marx. In a way similar to Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, Marx has expressed a
‘limit-situation’ in which the world he knew has disintegrated, he is overwhelmed. Mere thought,
whether religious, scientific or philosophical, proves insufficient in the wake of existence. Yet,
though Marx has been laid bare, or perhaps he has experienced his own finitude, he is open to the
sublimity of the cosmos, to the heavens. Heidegger has suggested, in tune with most Ancient
Philosophy, that the sky is the face of the divine. Marx does deny that he can be saved by a God or
Death-less one – but he speaks of an inner glow which remains in his re-awakened heart. And, he
casts himself as a sorcerer in control of the spirits which overwhelm him. In his openness to the
overwhelming excession of existence, an inner glow lives in his heart. He accepts his finitude and the
inability of his thought to subject the this to rational control – yet, in this existential disclosure, Marx
discovers his own openness to the sacred and the spiritual power of resistance and revolutionary
agitation.
To a significant extent, Marx is in accord with Bultmann in his denial of the possibility of
“God-talk”. Significant for Bultmann is the encounter with the sacred - perhaps, as the inner glow of
Marx. While we cannot perhaps ignore the denial by Marx of a salvation via a God or Death-less one,
Marx indeed has expressed the possibility of a sacred moment in his affirmation of soul, even if this
could be described as another variant of the Plotinian world-soul. After all, such a soul is still an
emanation from the divine. In this way, Transformation can be read as a deconstruction of the
suffocating artifices of “religion”, of thought and ideology, but simultaneous to this radical criticism,
as an opening to a deeper affirmation of the sacred.
Creation
An uncreated spirit sails upon the waves far way, an eternal spirit in whose magic forms
condense, worlds are born and die. Golden stars ride on apace. In prayer in the face of the heavens,
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the Fatherhead gives the sign amidst the overwhelming pulsation and roll of voids and ages. The
self-perceiving eternal gives forth forms of existence in the words of poetry. The heavens reveal and
emanate piety and love, the only harmony which can bind a soul to a soul. The spirits of the eternal
find expression in the voice of the poet, in images, but these are makeshift, inexorably returning to the
creator. Man's look of love is encircled in a fire in which is dissolved this one and the All.
This poem, Creation, has a different character than Transformation. While the latter performs
a critical deconstruction with a simultaneous affirmation of another possibility, the former is an
explicit attempt to develop the affirmation of the Sacred which began as a mere openness. Having
thrown off the ideological and idealist-philosophical baggage which prompted him to the impossible,
he seeks in Creation, to express a rough sketch of the sacred world to which he has become open.
There is no longer (not yet) a transcendental subjectivity or reason which disciplines and controls the
sublimity of existence, but, an open-ness to an uncreated spirit – a transcendens pure and simple, in
which forms condense and fade. Yet, beyond the myriad modulations and excessions of Being, the
self-perceiving Eternal, the Fatherhead, communicates, gives a sign, expresses existence itself as the
words of poetry. The cosmos itself, the heavens, is the poetry of the great spirit, and these heavens, as
we saw in his affirmation in Transformation, communicate via their very disposition and life, piety
and love – these are the only virtues, Marx says, which can bind a soul to a soul. Man himself is
dissolved in and as a manifestation of this poetry of the heavens, in this world of love and piety. Each
finite expression and image is, once again, dissolved into the soul of the great spirit.
It could be suggested that this poem indicates a mysticism which intimates a radical intimacy
with the divine. All images will crash - does this not speak to Marx's longing for total revolution, his
criticism of idealism and ideology? Each of these is one of the images that will shatter in its return to
the source, to the sacred existence which originally spoke these words of poetry. In a way similar to
Schopenhauer, poetry is an expression of the Will, it is an emanation of the divine. However, as
Reiner Schürmann wrote in his Heidegger, these emanations, as they travel away from the source,
have merely deficient similarity to the origin, to the one. In such deficiency, it is all too possible, as
Heidegger warned in his 1928 lecture course, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, to get lost in a
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detour of an array of free-floating concepts which no longer indicate existence in an authentic
manner. In this light, Marx's affirmation of an intimacy with the divine in its truth, as that which is
beyond the word and image, continues to play itself out in his criticisms of religion, science, and
philosophy as ideology. In a way which would make Luther blush, Marx aspires to the truth of the
phenomena with a faith that the cosmos itself ceaselessly reminds us that all works are makeshifts.
However, all is not vanity or futility simply due to this sacred affirmation of meaning. All words and
images, ages and empires, can be washed away by the waves, but the inner glow remains, the glow of
soul which aspires to and already possesses (beyond its camera obscura) an intimacy with the divine.
Awakening
Amidst the holiest night, your vision breaks, enraptured and trembling, your fingers on the lyre
stray, brooding and slumbering, but through the veil, you see from your inner depths, this boundless
sky, endless worlds dancing in the heavens. Amidst the eternity of existence, you fall through the
universe as an atom. An awakening to this existence is an endless rising, the rising, an endless falling.
The soul rises out of its own daemonic abyss - the secret of this rise erupts amidst the rippling fire of
the soul and sweet smelling magical tones, lifted by the spirits. Marx evokes,
Your sinking down is an endless rising
Your endless rising is with trembling lips -
the Aether-reddened , Flaming, Eternal
Lovekiss of the Godhead.
Awakening expresses the most explicit encounter with the sacred in the poetry of Marx.
Perhaps his best poem, Marx moves beyond both of the moments of vision expressed in
Transformation and Creation. In this poem, the songs of the lyre, amidst the holiest night, as with the
song in Transformation, breaks down – the fingers clumsily fall off of the strings – poetry itself is
silenced in the wake of the boundless sky which is discovered in the inner depths. In the vortex of
endless transmutation, one falls through the cosmos as an atom. Yet, in accord with his criticism of
Democritus in his Doctoral Dissertation, The Difference between the Philosophies of Democritus and
Epicurus, even amid a descent of the atom through the cosmos there is an ascent – a “wiggle” -
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indeed, the Cosmos is an endless rising and falling of which this atom or monad is a makeshift
figuration. In the spirit of Giordano Bruno, there is something more than a mere endogenous system
of atoms – each rises from its own daemonic abyss. The fire of the soul and the excession of magical
tones intimate the secret of this rising. One falls - but in ascent, in this openness, each fears, and
trembles before this overwhelming destination. Yet, at the apex this is, despite the fear and trembling,
a kiss of love amidst the sacred.
I believe that this poem specifically answers the charge that Marx's poetry are works of
immaturity. Indeed, Awakening sets forth a very sophisticated and mature indication of an eternal
fluctuating cosmos in which there is an intimacy with the sacred dimension of the soul, or as
Heidegger indicates, this abyss of ecstatic singularity. That which is significant is Marx's radical
dismissal of the Democritean atomism and its latter day Newtonian survivals. The daemonic abyss is
an Epicurean "wiggle" which is existence, the surreal openness to that which is not merely physical -
whether this be pseudo-religion, science, or politics. Marx, more informed by the pre-Socratics and
Homer, than post-Christian philosophies - which he calls idealist - expresses a sense of the sacred
which implies a divine significance to a world, which while intimating the truth of the sacred, is
merely another makeshift which will fall into the vortex of nothingness. In this sense, Marx's
affirmation of death in its mystical significance, is not a fatalism, but an openness to the sacred, to the
radical apprehension of that which overwhelms. As he writes in the Holy Family,

Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only as
mechanical and mathematical but even more as impulse, vital spirit, tension, or – to use Jakob
Bohme’s expression – the anguish and torment of matter.
Epilogue: the sacred after Marx
It is clear that, even if we wanted to, we could establish some type of relationship between
Marx and the Sacred, even if this were only a negative relationship. Marx is not the great atheist, nor
is he the great authoritarian. Such interpretations result from either deliberate mis-representation or
reductionistic and partitionistic readings which fail to disclose the most plausible ands profound
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readings of Marx. Lenin never read the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, nor the German
Ideology – it is truly doubtful if he ever read Marx’s poetry. Be that as it may, such an example can
serve as a warning for those who have become complacent in their theoretical stereotypes. There is
more to Marx than the merely political or even historical significance to which he has been assigned.
Even in the 2100 pages of Capital (excluding the text Theories of Surplus Value, rejected by Lenin as
its editor, Karl Kautsky, did not support the policies of revolutionary defeatism and insurrectionary
communism), Marx makes numerous advocacy and poetic statements. Often, he speaks of a
communist society as a contrast to capitalist exploitation. His most explicit reference to the “moral”
as that which must be affirmed is his reference in Capital, Vol. 1 of the moral character of the
[xcviii]
standard of living (similar to Sraffa’s “standard commodity” ). There is a moral, practical
criteria for the level of subsistence, based on the prevailing historical situation of class warfare and
struggle. This concrete phenomenology of a temporal morality of material existence is in tune with
his own sense of the overwhelming character of the Sacred and the inner glow that remained after the
implosions of his own illusions. One could speculate, as legitimate as any of the interpretations of
Marx, that he maintained his inner glow and sense of the Sacred even amidst his dull references to a
scientific political economy. The implicit affirmation exhibited by his own statements and by his
political advocacy and involvement (even to the extent that he was sought for arrest and was exiled
numerous times) indicates that a merely secular or atheist interpretation of Marx is unsound.
I have attempted, firstly, to show that the typical Marxian quip that religion is the opium of the
people and merely idealistic distortion is contradicted by historical example of sacred rebellion such
as Liberation Theology and the Ghandian rebellions in South Africa and India. I have tried to show,
secondly, that Marx’s ostensible criticisms of religion are much in tune with 20th century radical
theology most clearly articulated by Rudoph Bultmann, but falter in the face of the latter’s radical
phenomenology of the Sacred. Thirdly, I have tried to show, through interpretations of Heidegger and
Bataille, that the usual interpretation of the question of Marx and the Sacred - even if this is expressed
in Marx’s own words - is met with strong counter-interpretations which demonstrate clearly that Marx
not only remains embedded in a metaphysical, interpretive topos, but that a sense of the sacred is
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necessitated by his ethical and moral advocacies. In light of Marx’s poetry, the sense of the sacred is
cast fully into relief. Yet, the question remains as to the significance of these sacred affirmations in
his poetry -especially in light of his subsequent works and statements regarding idealism and religion.
Yet, in the absence of an alternative ground of affirmation – to seek the affirmation which sets beneath
Marx’s humanism and his later conformity to 19th century scientism, we are thrown back to his
poetry, especially in its sophisticated criticism of a merely idealistic sense of the Sacred and in its
imaginative reconstruction, affirmation of a Sacred which overwhelms the finite self, but also allows
this self to guide the spirits which infuse themselves into the self – as a Sorcerer who writes this
poetry of existence. He is a poet, who will remain silent in the face of the Nameless – the
Overwhelming.
Wittgenstein ends his "mystical" Tractatus with the words: What we cannot speak about, we
[xcix]
must pass over in silence. Yet, even though the mystical lies at the limit of "world" - Die Welt
ist als der Fall - the mystical stills exists. The mystical, or in the context of this present study, the
sacred is not "the case", it is not a thing, an object or state of affairs in this world to which a
convenient label can be tagged. It is “outside” – at the limit of the world, but it can and does erupt
amidst existence, of which, a world is only one aspect. Marx has already said all of this in his early
poetry. Marx can neither escape the sacred, nor can a merely negative sense of the sacred be defined
for him. His poetic explorations are indeed the existential root of his latter work and thought. There
is no discontinuity.
[i]
Marx, Karl. Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Oxford University Press,
translated by Joseph O’Malley, 1970.
[ii]
ibid. 3.175.
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[iii]
This point indicates the question of the various interpretations of Marx. Indeed, there is no “Marx” an sich, there for
our immediate reckoning. Indeed, there are many variants of the formal indicator “Marx”. Yet, two of the most dominant
tendencies in Marx interpretation concern a decision on the part of the interpreter as to the relevance of Marx’s earlier
works, many of which were unpublished. It was not until 1932 that Marx’s early writings were published, including the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts. It is a significant fact that none of the earliest Communist thinkers had ever
read these earlier tasks, although Lenin plowed through Hegel on his own in 1916, as evidenced by his Philosophical
Notebooks. Yet, it is claimed by interpreters such as Althusser that Marx’s early writings are irrelevant to that which
should be deemed as Marx’s true achievement – a science of history and society. For Althusser, the early writings are too
close in affiliation with Hegelian idealism and thus do not achieve the level of science. For Althusser, and the many who
follow his view, Marx had undertaken an “epistemological break” in his displacement of philosophy by scientific
materialism. In this way, Althusser represents the variant of Marx interpretation which posits a discontinuity in his work –
he is a “discontinuity theorist”. On the other side of the great divide are those who have emphasized the significance of
Marx’s early studies of alienation and his libertarian vision of communist revolution. Such thinkers, such as Ollman, wish
to envision Marx’s work as a continuity, and as a result, have to a great extent re-cast the interpretation of Marx’s later
works in the light cast by the earlier philosophical works. In this context, such thinkers could be described as “continuity
theorists”. In the absence of any explicit repudiation by Marx of his earlier work, I feel there is no need to censor the
reading of these texts. In other words, there is no need to accept the Marx which has been handed to us by Althusser. It
could be argued that all of Marx’s later insights were originally developed in his early works. Capital did not simply fall
from the sky, and this text exhibits traces of these early works. Marx and the Sacred thus embraces an existential approach
to the work of Marx. While there is never a total continuity in any life, I feel there is no essential incompatibility between
the early and later works. Yet, not only will I argue for the necessity of investigating Marx’s early philosophical work, but
I will moreover argue that Marx’s poetry must be included in the “Canon”. Indeed, it is in this poetic space where we can
begin to disclose a sense of the sacred in Marx, a space, as with dasein in Heidegger, where an alterior sensibility is
disclosed which is not articulated via the theoretical and practical logics of rational organization. There has been no
significant treatment of Marx’s poetry which is usually described, as with Nietzsche and his poetic and musical works, as
early enthusiasms – at the worst embarrassing, at the best, irrelevant.
[iv]
Although Marx never speaks about such a distinction explicitly, we will excavate an implicit sense of obligation and
commitment, of affirmation in not only his existential activity as such, but also in literary decisions in his political
economic works and his early works, including his so-called juvenile poetry.
[v]
The imagery for this metaphor comes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Notebooks, Number 115.
[vi]
Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy, Penguin , 1959.
[vii]
Many may contend that Marx is an irreducibly secular thinker. And, while the all-too-usual – whether Marxist,
neo-Marxist, marxian, or anti-Marxist - approach to his work may bear that out, there are clear exceptions to the apparent
secular tone of much of his writing. For instance, we have the quote at the head of this essay, "Religious suffering is at the
same time a protest against real suffering", itself a piece of poeisis from Marx’s unfinished analysis of Hegel’s doctrine of
the state. There are many indications in the writings of Marx, many non-scientific, poetic excursions, calls for revolution,
which, like Herodotos’ Histories, do not sit well with the analysts. Indeed, one could contend that the very notion of a
"scientific socialism", if properly understood in light of Marx's revolutionary re-configuration of notion of science from
the perspective of a commitment and intimate involvement with praxis, could indicate the sacred.
[viii]
Miranda, Jose. Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, translated by John Eagelson, Orbis
Press, Maryknoll, New York, 1974.
[ix]
Kirk, G.S. et. al. The Presocratic Philosophers, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
[x]
This approach to the poetry of Marx bears a superficial resemblance to the methodology of Heidegger, who has
thought through various unsaid possibilities in other thinkers and in the poets. Yet, for Marx, such a saying of the Sacred
[x]
was said – and continued to be said, even if his poeisis of the sacred was eventually wrapped up in the most analytical
prose. Although his poetry was merely the articulation of the logos, it indicated or pointed to an opening to the sacred.
94 of 99 2/6/11 1:17 PM
Such a use of language pre-ceded or exceeded a logical or conceptual-philosophical discourse which seeks only to
objectify an ‘event’ into an entity.
[xi]
This is a reference to Herbert Marcuse’s work of the same title.
[xii]
Of course, this would be to systematically ignore the literature which seeks to situate Marx in the realm of the Old
Testament prophets as is indicated by Miranda and the many others who have sought to appropriate the analyses of Marx
within the sacred tradition. In this way, one can understand Liberation Theology beyond the tentative appropriations of
Gutierrez towards the work of Miranda and others, including the Popes who have interpreted Marx in light of the
genealogy of the prophets and Jesus.
[xiii]
Indeed, beyond the various traces in the extant text of Marx, and even with the arguably relevant early poetry, there
can be excavated a deep structure and event of a sense of the sacred in the writings of Marx. As I have pointed out in my
final chapter, A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx, Bandera has used Gerard in order to contend that the entire gesture of
Marx's thought stands on Sacred ground in the limited and negative sense of sacrifice. Such a negative sense of the sacred
emerges in the gesture of a sacrificial event of revolution. Without nullifying the significance of such a gesture of
negativity, of active nihilism, I am trying however to go beyond a merely sacrificial sense of the sacred toward that of the
gift as indicated in Marcel Mauss’ work of the same title. I seek an affirmative sense of the sacred in the work of Marx,
not merely in his early poetry, but in a life of affirmation and engagement. I consider my work to be an overture for a
dialogue which I feel needs to occur with respect to a non-reductive ‘materialist’ re-thinking of the sacred. It is clear from
early on that Marx contends that a criticism of religion is a pre-requisite for all social analysis. However, it must be asked:
what is his motivation for such criticism and social engagement in the first place? Marx explicitly enacts a commitment to
revolutionary social transformation. Could such a commitment abide upon a merely scientific or political level? Can we
not investigate the existential ramifications of the writings of Marx with respect to the question of the sacred?
[xiv]
Schürmann, Reiner. Heidegger: Being and Acting, From Principles to Anarchy, Indiana University Press, 1986.
[xv]
I am aware of the problematic status of truth in the post-modern era, especially in the wake of the insights of
Nietzsche, Foucault, Derrida and others. However, I will contend that it is possible to undertake an intimate hermeneutic
in which there is awakened a desire for truth. In this way, the “test” for this exploration of the Marx and the sacred, as
Heidegger wrote at the outset of his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, will be its power to illuminate the question
before us.
[xvi]
There is a clear precedent in Lenin’s suppression of Theories of Surplus Value from its status as the fourth volume of
Capital due to the latter’s political differences with its editor Karl Kautsky.
[xvii]
It will be seen below that even Gutierrez held to this interpretation and thus sees the significance of Marx as merely
a supplemental science of political economic history.
[xviii]
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Cambridge University Press, 1971.
[xix]
Althusser, Louis. “Lenin and Philosophy”, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, translated by Ben Brewster,
Monthly Review Press, p. 26.
[xx]
Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy, p. 37.
[xxi]
Althusser, p. 37.
[xxii]
Althusser, p. 37.
[xxiii]
Althusser, p. 37.
[xxiv]
Althusser, p. 38.
[xxv]
Althusser, p. 38.
[xxvi]
Althusser, p. 39.
95 of 99 2/6/11 1:17 PM
[xxvii]
Althusser, pp. 39-40.
[xxviii]
Althusser, p. 41.
[xxix]
Althusser, p. 41.
[xxx]
Althusser, p. 43.
[xxxi]
Althusser dismisses those in Mach’s circle who wished to cultivate Marxist thought in the context of an affirmation
of a, ‘authentic humane’ eqos, etc. Mach, Althusser reminds us, was the central straw man in Lenin’s work Materialism
and Empiro-Criticism.
[xxxii]
Marquard, Odo. “In Praise of Polytheism (On Monomythical and Polymythical Thinking)”, Farewell to Matters of
Principle, Oxford University Press, 1989.
[xxxiii]
For an excellent disclosure of a poetic breach, of gaps, in the works of Kant and Hegel, as this speaks to
Althusser, cf. John Sallis, Spacings – of Reason and Imagination, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
[xxxiv]
Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, SUNY press (1988), p. xxxii.
[xxxv]
Marx, Karl, Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx-Engels Collected
Works, International Publishers. This is the same text, by the way, that the opening quote is taken: “Religious suffering is
at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the
oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions.” (cf. endnote 1)
[xxxvi]
ibid. 3.175.
[xxxvii]
I refer here to Heidegger’s 1936 essay, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Poetry, Language and Thought,
HarperCollins, 1985.
[xxxviii]
ibid. 3.175.
[xxxix]
Marx, K. Contribution to a Critique of Political Economy, Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 20-21.
[xl]
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways, the point is to change it."
[xli]
Marx, Karl, Introduction to a Contribution to a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, CW 3.176.
[xlii]
One need only consider, as an archetypal example, Section Four of Chapter One of Capital on commodity fetishism.
[xlii]
Immediately, in this "scientific" work, as Althusser ands Gutierrez describe it - one that has left the youthful,
immature Hegelianism behind, one finds a sophisticated and darkly humorous analysis of an all-too-human situation in
which commodities become the real actors in human existence. This self propelling wheel of commodities not only
afflicts the working classes – who, for Marx, in a significant way, serve merely a strategic position for the liberation of all
human beings – but also the owners of capital. Commodity fetishism orchestrates a camera obscura of oppression. Such
a characterization of the commodity as fetish echoes his earlier Feuerbachian alliances. We have created the commodities,
but now they have agency over us - they are our fetishes. Of course, it is the direct producers who have created these
commodities, but the capitalists and agents of dissemination and distribution (commodity realisation) read and create the
desires in the direct consumer – We are all alienated, but that does not evaporate personal responsibility – differing ways
and with differing concrete involvements. Yet, for "we", it is the commodities who go up and down on the magic wheel of
fortune of the stock exchange. It is they, as well as the abstractions of nation states, who are deemed to have the agency
and authentic power of human existence. We are all left - workers and capitalists alike - setting here witnessing the
flashing lights, sounds, smells, tastes of an alien orchestration, on our skin - if that is, we continue adhere to Feuerbach's
humanistic optimism.
[xliii]
Marx, Karl, Theories of Surplus Value, CW 3.448.
96 of 99 2/6/11 1:17 PM
[xliv]
Miranda, Jose. Marx and the Bible, pp. 53-67.
[xlv]
For an impression of the character and tactics of the early Christians, see Plotinus’ treatment of the “Gnostics” in the
Enneads.
[xlvi]
Under the influence of Levinas and of the various readings of Heidegger of this period, Miranda lays out a radical
differentiation between Biblical revelation and Greek ontology. Yet, it is not clear whether or not his interpretation of the
Greeks is either inclusive or accurate. On the one hand, it seems that he is relying on a very Aristotelian picture of
“Greek” philosophy and religion, and on the other hand, he is discounting the justice which is sought and described not
only by the pre-socratic Greeks and the Homeric indications of a plethora of Gods who seek justice in human affairs. It is
simply not clear that the “gods” as he portrays them, even if they have devotees in various situations of cultus are any
different from the “God” Yahweh who is beyond cultus. One could ask if the same criticisms of cultus could be applied to
the “gods”. In other words, is “God” so different from the “gods”? It could be radically questioned whether it is possible
to simply label the Greeks as “ontologists”. Such a generalization has as much meaning as the “Christians”.
[xlvii]
For an excellent discussion of the tactics and matrix of discipline of a religious and/or political bureaucracy, see
Foucault’s work Discipline and Punish.
[xlviii]
There is no suggestion, in this present study of Marx, of either a psychological or biographical treatment –
reduction - of “Marx”. That which is demanded is the possibility of considering the works of Marx in depth, an attempt to
disclose in these a sense of the sacred. Marx was more than a philosopher, writer, etc., but a husband and father, in a
household, engaged in networks of radicals, in keeping with the trends of the 19th century, where two of his children died.
He took long walks with his children, telling them stories on the way. The stories on a path point to aspects of human
existence, to things themselves, each of which express and indicate this event of existence. Yet, this is part of the fiction,
for we cannot know what lies in the heart of Marx. We can simply attempt to consider the works of Marx as
hermeneutically rich texts and extend the notion of his works to his social and political praxis - a work attuned and
expressive of his basic affirmation.
[xlix]
This of course is a reference to the well-know work of Marcuse.
[l]
This article is available from Time magazine’s section on the “Person of the Century”, 2000.
[li]
For a more exhaustive discussion of the relation between Christianity and Marxism, see Arthur McGovern, marxism:
an american christian perspective, Orbis Books, New York, 1984 and Jose Miranda, Marx Against the Marxists: The
Christian Humanism of Karl Marx, Maryknoll. Orbis, 1980.
[lii]
Gutierrez, Gustavo. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, translated by Sister Caridad Inda and
John Eagleson, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York, Revised Edition, 1988.
[liii]
ibid. p. 19.
[liv]
ibid. p. 123, 232n.
[lv]
ibid. p. 126.
[lvi]
This term is to be understood in the sense laid out by Reiner Schurmann in his final work Des Hegemonies Brisees.
Mauvezin, Trans-Europ-Repress, 1996.
[lvii]
Mere religion, an echo of C.S. Lewis, indicates religion as a mere instrument of political utility.
[lviii]
It is not that Bultmann is unaware of the potentialities of a liberation theology. Indeed, in his 1924 essay,
“Liberation Theology and Latest Moment”, in Faith and Understanding, he explores the ethical implications of Christian
Theology – sixty seven years before the work of Gutierrez. However, that which is significant in the present context is not
Bultmann’s political credentials, but his possible criticism of Marx in that the latter has not articulated an explicit
philosophy of liberation which is rooted in the concrete situation of his own existence. Bultmann could say that Marx’s
97 of 99 2/6/11 1:17 PM
ideology critique is mere ideology.

[lix]
Houston Craighead sets forth an interesting, though deficient, exploration and defense of Bultmann in “Rudolph
Bultmann and the Impossibility of God-Talk” in Faith and Philosophy 1/203-215 (April 1984), where, although he
indicates the importance of Heidegger’s Being and Time for Bultmann, fails to leave the neo-Kantian lexicon of
“experience” in favour of a radical phenomenology of the sacred.
[lx]
Rudolph Bultmann, “The Crisis in Belief”, Philosophical and Theological Essays, MacMillan, 1975.
[lxi]
Bultmann, “What does it mean to speak of God?”, Faith and Understanding, Harper & Row, 1969.
[lxii]
Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology, Charles Scribner, 1958.
[lxiii]
One can readily detect the divergence of Bultmann and Heidegger in the latter’s 1936 lecture, “The Origin of the
Work of Art”, as artworks which disclose the truth of that which is. Bultmann never leaves the topos of the icon, while
Heidegger finds intimations and disclosures of “truth” in a pair of shoes.
[lxiv]
ibid., p. 18.
[lxv]
ibid., p. 19.
[lxvi]
ibid., p. 45.
[lxvii]
ibid., p. 50.
[lxviii]
ibid., p. 67.
[lxix]
ibid., pp. 75-76.
[lxx]
Bultman, Rudolph. “What does it mean to speak of God?”, Faith and Understanding, Fortress Press, Philadelphia,
1987, p. 58.
[lxxi]
ibid., p. 58.
[lxxii]
ibid., p. 59.
[lxxiii]
Lenin, V.I. What is to be Done?: Burning Questions of Our Movement, International Publishers, 1986.
[lxxiv]
“What does it mean to speak of God?”, p. 62-63.
[lxxv]
ibid., p. 65.
[lxxvi]
Sallis, John. Spacings – of Reason and Imagination, University of Chicago Press, 1987.
[lxxvii]
Heidegger never mentions that Marx spent thirty-five years in the British Library’s Round Reading Room [now
merely a library museum], investigating the discordant circulation of existence and agitating for its possible harmony.
[lxxviii]
This reference is taken from Aldous Huxley’s work The Doors of Perception (Perennial Library, Harper & Row,
1990, p. 17), in the context of a reference to Meister Eckhart.
[lxxix]
See, for instance, Sonya Sikka's book Forms of Transcendence: Heidegger and Medieval Mystical Theology
(SUNY, 1997) which explores the relation of Heidegger to religion and the sacred.
[lxxx]
Bataille, Georges at al., Encyclopedia Acephalica, Atlas Press, 1995.
[lxxxi]
For an excellent look at Bataille's activities and writings in the 1930's see Jean-Michel Besnier, George Bataille in
the 1930's: A Politics of the Impossible, On Bataille, Yale French Studies, 1990.
[lxxxii]
That Bataille had indeed made an explicit connection between his notions of the sacred, sacrifice, and
98 of 99 2/6/11 1:17 PM
headlessness with revolution can be seen in a footnote to his essay, “Nietzsche and the Fascists”, in Visions of Excess,
where he writes: “The Russian revolution perhaps shows what a revolution is capable of. The questioning of all human
reality in a reversal of the material conditions of existence suddenly appears as a response to a pitiless demand, but it is not
possible to foresee its consequences: revolutions thwart all intelligent predictions of their results. Life’s movement no
doubt has little to do with the more or less depressing aftermath of the trauma. It is found in slowly active and creative
obscure determinations, of which the masses are not at first aware. It is above all wretched to confuse it with the
readjustments demanded by the conscious masses, carried out in the political sphere by more or less parliamentary
specialists.”
[lxxxiii]
Op. cit. “The Notion of Expenditure”, pp. 120-121.
[lxxxiv]
Bataille, G. “The Sacred”, Visions of Excess, University of Minnesota Press (1999), p. 242.
[lxxxv]
ibid. p. 242.
[lxxxvi]
ibid. p. 244.
[lxxxvii]
Goldman, Emma. The Traffic in Women, and Other Essays, Times Change Press, 1970.
[lxxxviii]
Op. Cit.. p. 244.
[lxxxix]
Bataille, G. “The Psychological Structure of Fascism”, Visions of Excess, pp. 140-148.
[xc]
For an excellent discussion of the context of the Kantian historical “synthesis”, consult Beiser’s The Fate of Reason,
Harvard University Press.
[xci]
These are the words of Simon Critchley in a Doctoral Supervision meeting at the University of Essex, in the Fall of
1999. He contended that the use of myth in philosophy amounted to fascism.
[xcii]
Louis Althusser. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, Monthly Review Press, 1971.
[xciii]
Cesareo Bandera. The Sacred Game: The Role of the Sacred in the Genesis of Modern Literary Fiction,
Pennsylvania University Press, 1994.
[xciv]
Rene Girard. Violence and the Sacred, John Hopkins University Press, 1993.
[xcv]
Marx Engels, Collected Works, Volume 1, International Publishers (1975); trs. Clemens Dutt.
[xcvi]
ibid.
[xcvii]
ibid.
[xcviii]
Pierro Sraffa. Production of Commodities by means of Commoditiies, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
[xcix]
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963.
! 2002
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Marx and the Sacred http://homepages.which.net/~panic.brixtonpoetry/marx.

Introduction: Marx and the Sacred

Chapter 1: Into the Breach – the Meaning of Marx

Chapter 2: Marx’s Criticism of Religion

Chapter 3: From Religion to the Sacred

Chapter 4: Sacred Rebellion and Marx

Chapter 5: Marx and Twentieth Century Radical Theology

Chapter 6: Marx, Heidegger and “eigenlichkeit”

Chapter 7: A Violent Sacred? – Marx and Bataille

Chapter 8: A Retrieval of the Sacred in Marx

Conclusion: The Sacred After Marx

Introduction: Marx and the Sacred

the wake of Marx and his deconstruction of religion as an ideology.

situated, for Marx, amidst the historical topos of Capital.

writings - before philosophy.

of Religion, providing a critique of ideology as Weltanschauung (World-view, contemplation) which

Marx’s criticism of ideology in light of the notions of ‘obligation’ and ‘commitment’. In a

actively nihilist, sense.

Without downplaying the necessity of Marx’s commitment to a revolutionary social

his later works.

revolution as an event amidst this finite moment.

Chapter 1: Into the Breach – the Meaning of “Marx”

reckoning – there is no “agreed framework”. Amidst a vast topography of interpretation, we can

exhibits traces of these early works.

Althusser: Marxism as a New Science

from the outside - a theory of philosophy as a “false path”.

unpublished, is also interpreted as a displacement of philosophy via a materialist science of history.

Ideology but also in Capital and other political economic works.

way, we can see Althusser’s address on Lenin as such an intervention.

Althusser characterizes Marx’s “philosophical emptiness” as the proclamation of the “radical

put to the test. Althusser proposes,

definition of philosophy, Althusser states, in reference to Lenin,

bastardised, vein, Althusser states,

is interpreted as a sign of an emergence of a primitive consciousness of the “concrete” from behind

complex re-organizations of philosophy in the wake of the “epistemological break”. Perhaps, it

to Hegel - not in the Real of Science.

The topo! of Revolution: a Criticism of Althusser

which discloses of logo! of truth.

is shared by the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, Introduction to a Critique of Hegel’s

existential situation of concrete estrangement in the capitalist era.

Moreover, as Marx is not merely a “scientist” or an “epistemologist”, but a revolutionary and a

Luxemburg, quite “bloodless”.

Althusser’s second significant metaphor, that of epistemic continents, is applied to Marx to

subvert his meaning into a differing interpretation.

episteme. Althusser’s presumption of concrete historical truth, free of interpretation, is similar to

apparatus, Althusser’s interpretation of “Marx” as a new science is a commodification of Marx and is

and of life, etc….

Chapter 2: Marx’s Criticism of Religion

– for Marx, Feuerbach remains an idealist, a contemplative.

transmutation and alternative disclosure in the ideal reflection or thought of being.

alienated product of an alienated existence. As an alienated activity, amidst a matrix of systematic

distinction in Marx between religion and the sacred.

As long as "analysis" is embedded in the grand narratives of idealistic religious instruction,

this way, religion, as a concrete indication of existence, is a symptom of an actuality in which

social praxis which is liberated from the snares of a condition of alienation.

existence as we only apprehend that which is indicated in a free-floating matrix of an imposed

meaning of this phenomena, of my own self.

of the sacred and revolution (Cf. Chapter 6).

of the fiery brook… Feuerbach.

interpretation undergoes a transformation of meaning – amidst praxi!.

a dominant ideology which considers change impossible.

objectivity – as a transcendental subject of modernity, as a contemplator of ideology, a Christian ego