Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Return of Religion
Author(s): Warren Breckman
Source: New German Critique, No. 94, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter, 2005), pp.
72-105
Published by: New German Critique
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DemocracyBetweenDisenchantmentand
Political Theology.FrenchPost-Marxism
and the ReturnofReligion1
WarrenBreckman
"On the Jewish Question" is where Karl Marx declared the liberal state,
the "atheistic state, the democratic state," to be the pure essence of the
Christian state. Considering the American republic, the most advanced
model available, Marx claimed that the state stands over society as
heaven does earth; the sovereignty of the citizen rests on a Christian logic
of incarnation that separates the individual from human species-being; the
abstract universality of rights displaces the concrete universality of man's
participation in collective social life. Marx regarded communism as the
last great act in the history of secularization, returning the transcendent
political state to its immanent place in society and removing the final
obstacle to man's recovery of his alienated humanity.2 The salto mortale
was to be surpassed by the leap into the kingdom of freedom; but in our
1. This articleoriginatedas a lecturegiven at CambridgeUniversityin July 2001. I
am especially gratefulto the participantsof the New YorkAreaSeminarin Intellectualand
CulturalHistoryfor their feedbackon a completedversion in April 2002. Given the long
delay in bringingthis issue to press, I have updatedthe bibliography.A version of the
paperwas firstpublishedin Germanin AllgemeineZeitschriftfiir Philosophie30.3 (2005).
2. I discuss this in some detail in Marx,the YoungHegelians, and the Origins of
RadicalSocial Theory.Dethroningthe Self(New York:CambridgeUP, 1999), ch. 7.
72
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the West and the organized "state capitalism"of the East, they pioneered a politics based on worker self-management[autogestion] and
direct democracy.Lefort left Socialisme ou Barbaricin 1958 when he
and Castoriadisfell into disagreementover the form of the group, and
Castoriadisdisbandedit in 1966 afterhis decisive rejectionof Marxism
producedintractabledivisionsamongthe members.
Importantas Socialisme ou Barbariemay look in retrospect,its history played out at the marginsof Frenchintellectuallife. That changed
when new circumstancescreated a receptive audience for their ideas.
For one thing, the events of 1968 loosened the hold of the FrenchCommunist Party and produceda fragmentedLeft, includingthe short-lived
Maoist Gauche Prolktarienne and the so-called Deuxikme Gauche,
which subscribedto the politicalgoal of autogestionthathad been articulated by Socialisme ou Barbarie. For another, the "Common Program,"the 1972 electoralalliancebetweenthe FrenchCommunistParty
and the Socialist Party, drove many noncommunistleftist intellectuals
furtheraway from the majorleft-wing parties.Further,the Frenchpublication of AlexanderSolzenitsyn'sGulag Archipelagogenerateda shock
that jolted leftist intellectuals. The "Gulag Effect" produced some
thoughtful meditations,including Claude Lefort's Un homme en trop,
but it also spawnedthe media savvy New Philosophers,who combined
a hair-shirtand ashes rejectionof their formerleftism with bald assertions that all forms of power corruptequally. The New Philosophers
tried to claim affiliation with Castoriadisand Lefort, but both strenuously refused the tribute. Though the New Philosophersshared little
the wave of antitowith the older men beyond the word "totalitarian,"
renew
interest
in three decades
did
talitarianrhetoricundoubtedly help
of seriousphilosophicalandpoliticalwritingby LefortandCastoriadis.
The ideological conjuncturethat thrustpolitical philosophy,and more
specifically, sustainedreflectionupon the experienceof moderndemocracy and its Doppelganger,totalitarianism,into the centerof Frenchdiscussion may be traced in the sociology and institutionalhistory of
Parisianintellectuallife. Between 1971 and 1980, Lefort and Castoriadis participatedin the foundingof two new politicaljournals, Textures
and Libre, along with Marcel Gauchet, Pierre Clastres, and Miguel
Abinsour.Gauchet,who had been Lefort's studentat the University of
Caen in the 1960s, authoredthe article "L'expdriencetotalitaireet la
pens~e de la politique,"[The TotalitarianExperienceand the Thought
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imaginativeacts whereby a collectivity creates meaning and 'materializes' these significationsin institutions.
Every society is institutedby humancreation,Castoriadisargues, but
at only two times in human history have societies acknowledgedhowever incompletely- the role of the creativeimaginationin the formation of social institutions:once in the ancientGreekdemocraciesand
again in Europefromthe late MiddleAges onward.Moretypically,societies occult this self-creationby imputingit to an extra-socialsource.
Hence, the characteristicmodality of humanity'srelation to the chaos
that surroundsand is part of itself is a double movementof annunciation and denunciation,institutionand occultation. Castoriadis'smost
extensive analysisof the tension between institutionand occultationwas
writtenbetween 1978 and 1980 in his essay "The Institutionof Society
and Religion." In it, religion becomes synonymous with heteronomy,
concealing the human act of significationwhereby social life is given
form. Attributingthe origin of the social institutionto a transcendent
extra-socialsource stabilizesthe enigma of humanself-creation,assigning it an origin, foundation,and cause outsideof society itself. Although
religion recognizes contingency and creation, it also veils them, inasmuch as "social imaginarysignificationsalways providefor the Abyss a
Simulacrum,a Figure, an Image - at the limit, a Name or a Wordwhich 're-present' it and which are its instituted presentation:the
Sacred."20The significationof the Sacred brings the Abyss back into
society as an immanentpresence,as a space and a ritualizedpractice,but
it remainsthe Otherthat confersmeaningupon society fromthe outside.
Religion is thus a double misrecognition,of the Abyss and of society's
own creation and creativity.In contrastto the heteronomyof religion,
autonomyrequiresa recoveryof the institutingpower and the lucid recognition of ourselvesas the originof our law. Castoriadisdoes not mean
this to imply the masteryof the outside, but ratherwhat he calls "the
permanentopeningof the abyssalquestion:'Whatcan be the measureof
society if no extra-socialstandardexists, what can and what should be
the law if no externalnorm can serve for it as a term of comparison,
what can be life over the Abyss once it is understoodthat it is absurdto
assign to the Abyss a precise figure, be it that of an Idea, a Value, or a
20. Cornelius Castoriadis,"Institutionof Society and Religion," Worldin Fragments. Writingson Politics, Society,Psychoanalysis,and the Imagination,ed. and trans.
David Ames Curtis(Stanford:StanfordUP, 1997) 324.
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of theTheologico-Political?"
222.
Lefort,"Permanence
224.
39. Lefort,"Permanenceof the Theologico-Political?"
40. Derrida,Spectersof Marx75.
41. Derridaquoted in Nancy Fraser,"The FrenchDerrideans:Politicizing Deconstructionor Deconstructingthe Political?"New GermanCritique33 (1984): 133-4.
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eschatologicalprogramor design."47
Separated from eschatology and teleology, messianism becomes a
hope without hope, an impossible attachmentto a democracythat is
always "h venir,"always 'to come.' This formulationoffers a precise
political counterpartto the play on a Dieu and adieu that animatesDerrida's The Gift of Death and otherworks from the 1990s. Hent De Vries
presentsthe adieu as the core of Derrida'sreturnto religion insofaras it
summonsup all "the ambiguityof a movementtowardGod, towardthe
word or the name of God, and a no less dramaticfarewellto almost all
the canonical, dogmatic,or onto-theologicalinterpretationsof this very
same 'God'."48As with the figure of the adieu, the messianic topos
allows Derridato affirm the yearning for democracy,while avoiding
any hint of "Sameness"or closure that might raise the dangerof totalitarian thinking. That this "messianicity without messianism" spills
directly over into "religionwithoutreligion"becomes manifest in Derrida's recent essay "Faith and Knowledge."There, Derridathe atheist
attemptsto separatereligion from fundamentalism,identifyingthe religious instead with "reticence, distance, dissociation, disjunction"and
naming futuritythe temporalsensibilityof the religious. This is a rather
arbitraryand selective definitionof the religious consideringthe powerful impulse toward closure that has dominatedthe history of religions;
but selectively identifying religion with deferraland infinite otherness
serves Derrida'sneeds because it sharesthe qualitiesof the 'democracy
to come'. Religion and democracythus intertwine.Indeed,the religious
and the political prove inseparable:"The fundamentalconcepts that
often permit us to isolate or to pretend to isolate the political [ . .]
remain religious or in any case theologico-political."Derridapresents
this position as if it were opposed to Carl Schmitt, as if Schmitt had
been forced grudginglyto acknowledgethat his "ostensiblypurelypolitical categories"were in fact the "productof a secularizationor of a
theologico-politicalheritage."Yet it was Schmitt who articulatedand
46. Caputo,Prayersand Tears136.
47. Derrida,Spectersof Marx75.
48. Hent De Vries,Philosophyand the Turnto Religion(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins
UP, 1999) 24.
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embracedthat theological genealogy and tried to mobilize it as the ultimate source of the power of political concepts. Ultimately, despite Derrida's effort to distance himself from Schmitt's political theology by
linking politics to the deferrals of religion instead of to its potencies, he
and Schmitt both end up at the conviction that the significant concepts
of modern politics are secularized theological concepts.49
Claude Lefort's claim that the philosopher should learn from religion
would seem to unify religion and politics permanently so long as politics resists the illusion of pure self-immanence and clings to a primordial knowledge of otherness. However, Lefort resists this kind of
conclusion and arguesthat it threatensto negate the meaningof the historical separation of democracy from religion. Derrida's position leads
to the view that a new symbolic representation of a power that has no
religious basis merely conceals the displacement and perpetuation of
religious content. Certainly, considering the practices of democracy
since the French Revolution, Lefort finds ample evidence of democracy's entanglement in religion. For example, from the Jacobins
onward, democracy has been haunted by the Christian logic of incarnation, by the impulse to represent the nation as an actual being or, in
Jules Michelet's phrase, to imagine the sovereign "people" as the democratic Christ. This desire to close the gap between the symbolic representation of power and the complexity of the real through the logic of
embodiment lived on in twentieth-century fantasies of the party, the
nation, the class, the race, and the leader and it has been accompanied
by efforts to unite the existence of democracy in historical time with
permanent duration. Hence, not only the attempt to immortalize the
institutions of democracy, but in the most extreme instance, the "persistence of the theologico-political vision of the immortal body" expressed
literally in the mummification of the leader.50
Rather than taking those entanglements as signs of democracy's intrac-
table relianceon religion, it is significantthat Lefortreadsthem as phenomena of a transitional epoch. In fact, he insists on the radical novelty
of democracy, which lies in the open, indeterminate, and unmasterable
49. Derrida,"Faithand Knowledge:The Two Sourcesof 'Religion' at the Limitsof
ReasonAlone,"Religion,ed. JacquesDerridaand GianniVattimo(Stanford:StanfordUP,
1998) 25-26. See CarlSchmitt,Political Theology.Four Chapterson the Conceptof Sovereignty,trans. George Schwab (Cambridge,MA: MIT P, 1988) 36. For a subtle, albeit
thoroughlyDerrideandiscussion of the differencesbetween Derridaand Schmitt,see De
Vries, Religionand Violenceesp. 353-70.
50. Lefort,"TheDeathof Immortality?"
Democracyand Political Theory274.
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of monotheism.He differs from Weberin anotherand still more revealing way. Weber never claimed that a religious dynamic alone could
explain the emergenceof modernity;accordingly,he supplementedhis
study of the Protestantethic with works on issues such as commercial
behavior and urbanismin the middle ages. Gauchet,by contrast,places
almostexclusive weight on transformation
in the symbolic
extraordinary,
dimension.Indeed,it is amusingto read, in a publishedtable ronde on
his work, Catholictheologianschiding him for neglecting materialfactors.63It is as if, in the rushto shed all trappingsof the Marxianmodel,
Gauchetends up with an unapologeticidealismand his insistenceon historicalcontingencyis over-riddenby the unfoldinglogic of an idea.
Gauchet's book offers a conceptualhistory of religion in which the
true breakis not the adventof Christianity,but the emergenceof monotheism during the Axial Age.64 He rejects an evolutionarymodel of
religion and arguesthat religion received its fullest expressionin primitive societies, when the institutingpower was most fully removed from
humansociety. For such a society, the foundingpower lies at an unfathomable distance in the past; the present is in a position of absolute
dependence on this mythic past, and human activities adhere to their
inauguraltruth.Such radicaldispossessionenforces an "ultimatepolitical equality, which, although it does not prevent differences in social
status or prestige, does prohibitthe secession of unified power."65This
is an importantpoint for Gauchet,as it sets the stage for the "Political
Historyof Religion"thatis promisedby the book's subtitle.
Gauchet's depiction of primitive religion bears the traces of Emile
Durkheim,for whom religion functionsas a system of communication
and a means of specifying and regulatingsocial relationships.Gauchet
had praisedDurkheim'scontributionin an earlieressay, but he had ultimately criticizedDurkheimfor lapsing into a deterministaccountof the
necessity of religion instead of viewing religion as a "free instituting
63. PierreColin andOlivierMongin,eds., Un mondedesenchantd.Dibat avec Marcel Gauchetsur le Disenchantementdu monde(Paris:Cerf, 1988).
64. Gauchethere used the term introducedby KarlJaspersto describethe transformations of the first millenium B.C. See Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der
Geschichte (Zirich: Artemis-Verlag,1949). See also S. N. (Shmuel Noah) Eisenstadt,
"The Axial Age: The Emergenceof TranscendentalVisions and the Rise of the Clerics,"
Archiveseuropdennesde sociologie 23.2(1982):294-314; and S. N. (ShmuelNoah) Eisenstadt,ed., The Originsand Diversityof Axial Age Civilizations(Albany:State University
ofNew YorkP, 1986).
65. Gauchet,Disenchantment25.
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operationarising from an act of creationexpressinga decision of society."66 Gauchet situates himself more closely to two contemporary
anthropologistswho exercised considerableinfluence on the antitotalitarian currents of French thought in the late 1970s. They are Louis
Dumont, whose studies of the emergenceof modern individualismout
of Christianityand distinctionbetween "holistic"and "individualistic"
societies Gauchet embraces, and even more importantly,Pierre Clastres, who was an importantmemberin the milieux of the journals Textures and Libreuntil his death in a car accidentin 1977.67Clastres'sLa
Socidtdcontre 'etat (1974) articulated,as Lefortstated,"the questionof
the political"at the heartof primitivesociety. The book's radicalclaim
is that at the heart of such a social order was the refusal of a power
capable of detaching itself from the community,the rejection of an
internaldivision that would eventuallyrenderpossible the advent of the
State.68Gauchet took up Clastres'sideas but rejected his depiction of
an anarchisticstruggle of primitivesociety against the state. "How can
one be againstsomethingthat does not yet exist?"Gauchetasks bluntly.
Accordingly,he revises Clastres'sthesis from society against the state
to "society againstpolitical division."69Thus, the originaryrole of religion, he reasons, was to preventpolitical division throughthe religious
division betweenthe externalfoundationand society.
Two greatupheavalsshook this originaryform of religion,the birthof
the state and the emergenceof monotheism.Of the two, Gauchetconsiders the emergence of the state around five thousand years ago to
have been the more epochal. Where total dispossessionhad essentially
neutralizedthe dynamicsof grouprelations,the adventof political domination brought new instabilitiesand potencies into the "heart of the
collective process."70Political dominationalso inaugurateda different
66. MarcelGauchet,"Ladettedu sens et les racinesde I'6tat.Politiquede la religion
primitive,"Libre,no. 2 (1978): 10-11.
67. GauchetdiscussesDumontat lengthin "De l'av~nementde l'individui la d6couverte de la soci~td,"Revueeurop6enedes sciences sociales XXII, no. 68 (1984): 109-126.
On Clastres,see the tributeissue of Libre,no. 4 (1978). Sam Moyn is currentlyworkingout
the detailedhistoryof these relations.See "Of Savageryand Civil Society:PierreClastres
andthe Transformation
of FrenchPoliticalThought,"ModernIntellectualHistory1.1 (April
2004): 55-80, and "Savageand Modem Liberty:MarcelGauchetand the Originsof New
FrenchThought,"EuropeanJournalof Political Theory4. 2 (Spring2005): 164-187.
68. See ClaudeLefort,"Dialoguewith PierreClastres,"Writing.ThePolitical Test,
trans.and ed. David Ames Curtis(Durham:Duke UP,2000) 214.
69. Gauchetin Un mondedcisenchantd
72.
70. Gauchet,Disenchantment35.
98
relation between the visible and the invisible, for the distance between
society and its origin became a distance operatingwithin human society between the dominantand the dominated,those who have the gods
on their side and those who do not. The emergenceof monotheismduring the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) addedanotherdimensionof instability. Monotheism brought an infinite increase in the potency and
othernessof the divine, imaginednow as a god-subjectwhose will not
only created the cosmos but also sustains it in every present moment.
Gauchet bases the central thesis of his book on what he calls the
"dynamicof transcendence"inauguratedby the formationof the subjectivized God. Far from dispossessinghumans,transcendencemakes God
more accessible: foundationno longer belongs in the remotestpast, but
in the present. This vision of the world as the object of a single will
opens up possibilities for human understandingof the creation and at
least partial deciphermentof that divine will. The representationof
absolute otherness yields a de facto reduction of otherness. Hence
Gauchet's paradoxicalformulation:"the greaterthe gods, the freer the
humans are."71Christianityradicalizedthe effects of the monotheistic
revolution.With the incarnation,the divine enters the world and introduces new and transformativetensions into the dynamic of transcendence: the enigma of the wholly other and the humanform of the GodMan, inscrutabilityof the Father'smessage and the need to interpretthe
humanvoice of the Son, hope in the beyondversus adherenceto a herebelow that had been graced by Christ'shumanity,world rejection and
the imperative to act upon the world. So explosive were these new
instabilitiesin Gauchet'sestimationthat he names Christianitythe "religion for departingfromreligion."
GauchetsharesLefort'sinterestin the relationshipbetweenthe incarnation and politics, but he gives a more detailedaccountof the instabilities
that Christianityintroducedinto the institutionof monarchy.WherepreChristianmonarchscould functionas both priestsand kings and occupy
the meeting place betweenthe visible and the invisible,Christhad taken
that place once and for all. The Christianmonarchcould no longeraspire
to be the perfectmediator.However,if the Christianking could no longer
be what Christwas, he could at least be like Christ"to the extentthat he
This preserved
made Christ'sabsencepresentand symbolizedhis truth."72
71.
72.
Gauchet,Disenchantment51.
Gauchet,Disenchantment140.
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100
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order."78Farfrombeing the 'other'of democraticpolitics,the theologicopolitical forms the invisible containerfor the experienceof democracy.
Here,a religiousgenealogyserves the normalizationand stabilizationof a
liberal democraticorderand cautionsequally against both direct democraticaspirationsandthe religiouscriticsof secularsociety.
It is a sign of Gauchet'sintentionsthat in spite of Castoriadis'sinfluence, he completely neglected the ancient Greek origins of democracy.
This neglect fully inverts the democratic vision of Castoriadis, for
whom the ancient Greek model of direct democracyremainedthe vital
germ, if not the model for the modem project of autonomy.Against
Castoriadischampiwhat he called the "metaphysicsof representation,"
oned an uncompromisingAristoteliandefinitionof the citizen as "capable of governing and being governed,"and he devoted considerable
energy to analyzingthe institutionalinnovationsof the first democratic
regime, including, as we have seen, tragedy. Gauchet, by contrast,
totally neutralizedthe value of the Greek experience. He directed his
general argumentthat humansare freerundermonotheismagainstmodernist or postmodernistcelebrationsof paganismand cited specifically
MarcAug6's celebrationof polytheism,althoughone might also include
the even betterknown case of Jean-FrangoisLyotard'sidentificationof
paganism with heterogeneity.79Furthermore,rather than considering
Atheniandemocracyas a relativebreakthroughto a new political form,
Gauchetstressed how the polis was embeddedin a vision of a rational
cosmos that acted as a constraintupon political innovation.Hence, the
political novelty of fifth-centuryAthens gets lost within its general participationin the religious transformationsof the Axial Age.80 The point
is not so much whetherCastoriadisunderstatedthe limitationsof Greek
political innovation;rather,it is strikingthat for Gauchet, the ancient
78. MarcelGauchet,"Le christianismeet la cit6 moderne.Discussion entre Marcel
Gauchetet PierreManent,"Esprit(Apr.-May,1986):99.
79. MarcAug6, Geniedupaganisme(Paris:Gallimard,1982);Lyotard,Instructions
paiennes (Paris: Editions Galilee, 1977). More generally,see MartinJay, "Modernand
PostmodernPaganism;Peter Gay and Jean-FrangoisLyotard,"Enlightenment,Passion,
ModernityHistoricalEssays in EuropeanThoughtand Culture,eds. MarkS. Micale and
RobertL. Diele (Stanford:StanfordUP,2000) 249-62.
80. JohannArnasonweighs the meritsof Castoriadis'sautonomymodel and Eisenstadt's Axiality (without mention of Gauchet)against the state of historicalresearchin
"Autonomyand Axiality: ComparativePerspectiveson the Greek Breakthrough,"
Agon,
Logos, Polis. The GreekAchievementand its Aftermath(Stuttgart:FranzSteiner,2001)
155-206.
102
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publishedan English translationof Gauchet'sbook in 1997. The comrnerstone of the series is an anthologyof recentFrenchpolitical philosophy
compiled by the series editor, Mark Lilla.83 Gauchet's genealogy of
modem democracy figures prominentlyin Lilla's introductoryessay.
Bearingthe title "TheLegitimacyof the LiberalAge," Lilla's text obviously evokes Hans Blumenberg'sgreat book The Legitimacy of the
ModernAge. Ironically,however,Blumenbergis strikinglyabsent from
the French debate that I have partiallysketchedhere. In fact, Blumenberg's book appearedin Frenchonly in 1999, thirty-threeyears after its
Germanpublicationand sixteen years after the English translation.By
comparison,almost all the works of Carl Schmitt,a majorpurveyorof
the idea of political theology and a target of Blumenberg'scritique,
were translatedinto French in the 1980s. That disparityreveals something about the crucial importanceof nationalcontexts and traditionsin
giving particularform to a debatethat, on anotherregister,has a kind of
deracinated cosmopolitan reference to the historical destiny of the
"West."Blumenberg'sinterventionin the debate over secularizationis
almost exclusively concerned with the condition of knowledge, of
human self-assertionunderstoodas curiosity. As Martin Jay has written, "the self that is doing the assertingis essentially a transcendental
one developing itself over time, engagingin what might be called a species Bildung."84Even in the chapterdevoted to Carl Schmitt, Blumenberg's main concern remains the epistemological value of Schmitt's
claim aboutthe secularizationof theologicalconcepts. Thoughone may
easily extrapolateliberal democraticpolitics from Blumenberg'simpassioned defense of Enlightenmentvalues, he does not directly address
the implicationsof Schmitt's views for modem democracy or liberalism. By contrast,the Frenchinterestin the question of the relationship
between modernityand religionhas seldom strayedfar from the domain
of politics. It is perhapsnot surprisinggiven a national context where
the invention of democraticpolitics was inseparablefrom a struggle to
drive religion out of the public domain;after all, throughoutits entire
history, French republicanismhas been virtually synonymouswith the
secular campaign against religion. Nor is it surprisingthat within an
83. MarkLilla, ed., New French Thought:Political Philosophy(Princeton:Princeton UP, 1994). For a generalassessmentof this series, see MartinJay,"Lafayette'sChildren:The AmericanReceptionof FrenchLiberalism,"SubStance31.1 (2002): 9-26.
84. Jay,"Blumenbergand Modernism:A Reflectionon TheLegitimacyofthe Modern Age,"Fin de SikcleSocialismand OtherEssays (New York:Routledge,1988).
104
intellectual traditionwhere the leading thinkers had long been resolutely laic, the religious should returnas, essentially,a functionalistcategory. For Castoriadis,Lefort,and Gauchet,religion is basicallynothing
more than a symbolic system that ordersthe social-politicalworld. As
to "religiousexperience,"they remaintone deaf.
There is a deeper irony in Mark Lilla's attemptto borrow gravitas
from Blumenberg. For in fact, measured by Blumenberg's criteria,
Gauchet's account actually fails to establishthe legitimacy of political
modernity.Indeed,even makingfull allowancefor Gauchet'soriginality
and brilliance, his account resembles the kind of secularizationnarrative that Blumenbergcriticized in figures like Carl Schmitt and Karl
L6with.85Thatis, Blumenbergstrenuouslyresistedviews that regardthe
age as formedthrougha kind of transferof religious substance
modemrn
into secular forms. Such views, Blumenberg argued, delegitimize
modernityby dressingit in borrowedclothes, overlookingits autonomy
and novelty and seeing it insteadas a derivativeof a religiousworld.
Karl Marx's confident campaign against political theology in the
name of a radicalvision of humanself-determinationmust surely stand
as one of the strongestassertionsof the autonomyof the modern.The
collapse of the Marxist project of emancipationin the late twentieth
century broughtwith it the collapse of confidence in the secularizing
project that had accompaniedit. Awarenessof the ambiguity of that
struggle against political theology, not to mentionthe possible perils of
attemptingto liberatethe humanspherefrom its dependenceon an Oththat has traditionallybeen enshrinedin religion, has markedthe
emrness
sensibilities of post-Marxistdemocraticintellectualsat least as much as
celebratoryassertions of "legitimacy."Indeed, there is a moment of
arbitrarinessor undecidabilityin this post-Marxistreassertionof contingency, social openness, and human creativity.It can lead to Castoriadis's militantrejectionof religion or to Derrida'sappeal to messianism
in the name of a "democracy"that is always a venir, a political Otherness thattherebysharesa sublimeplace with religion.
If the returnof religion in Frenchpoliticalthoughtis inseparablefrom
the collapse of Marxism, it is, nonetheless, tempting to see parallels
between the aftermathof Marxismand the periodof fermentjust before
its birth.For in the 1820s and 1830s, anothergrandsynthesizingsystem
85. Liwith's Meaningin History,anotherimportantwork in the Germansecularization debate,was publishedin Frenchtranslationin October2002 by Gallimard.
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