Reading notes on Jesus and Marx - Ch. 1.2 "Challenge"

Ch. 1.2, pp. 5 - 10

Admittedly, there isn't too much going on in this section. Ellul merely outlines four challenges that Communism brings to Christianity: Justice, the significance of poverty, the relationship between practice/preaching (i.e. theory/praxis), and materialism.

With regard to the first, justice, Ellul points out that contemporary society is, in every way and on every level, unjust. Furthermore, since Christianity has been the dominant socio-cultural touchstone of Western society for the last twenty centuries, contemporary injustice is inextricably linked to the phenomenon of Christianity. Contemporary Christianity, as a whole, has made no effort to change this -- while Communism has.

The second:

Christianity should have taken up the cause of the poor; better yet, it should have identified with the poor. Instead, during almost the entire course of its history, the Church has served as a prop of the powerful and has been on the side of exploiters and states. The Church is numbered among the "Powers"; it has sanctified the situation of the poverty-stricken." (Ellul, 6)

Meanwhile, "Communism sides with the poor. [...] No matter what kind of poverty the poor suffer, the Communists are on their side, and the Communists are alone with them. Consequently, they accomplish what Christianity preaches but fails to practice." (6)

That last phrase leads into the third challenge of Communism: the connection between theory and praxis, or -- put in more religious terms -- between preaching and practice. Ellul here notes that within Christianity the two are divorced: "We teach love our neighbor and we exploit him; we preach about justice and produce injustice, etc." To present the challenge of Communism, Ellul has to accept the "No real Communist society has ever existed" argument -- which is problematic in and of itself, as well as within the context of Ellul's work here -- but nevertheless he draws a reasonable line of connection within the tactical realm of Communism between theory and praxis: "If you take seriously what Marx, and later Lenin, wrote concerning tactics, you see that its applications in the Soviet Union and in Prague, the violation of rights in Poland in 1947, etc -- all these are perfectly consistent with their writings." (7)

The fourth challenge is, to me, the most interesting -- that is, the challenge of materialism. Now, in my experience, the conventional, contemporary "Christian" response to materialism (which, more often than not, is a response to a particularly dogmatic strand of scientific materialism) usually goes something like, "Oh, how terrible! You deny the spiritual realm, the realm of the unseen, and reduce all life to this dust that we are and that we inhabit! You are missing so much more!" Ellul's own response could not be further from this. He welcomes the challenge of materialism, claiming that it highlights the regression of Christianity into "a kind of disembodied spiritualism" that is totally contrary to the most basic elements of revelation -- i.e. the material and temporal intervention of God in the Old Testament, the material and temporal manifestation of God in the person of Jesus Christ, etc.

In Ellul's own words:

[God] enters the concrete life of His people and does not withdraw them from the world. He participates in history. The entire Old Testament is political history and not at all religious. It exalts the body, love in its carnal reality (the Song of Solomon!), and shows that nothing is experienced without the body. There exists no separation between a soul one could consider important and a body looked on as vile and lowly. (7)

Now, some comments of my own:

At first glance, the first challenge seems fairly self-evident. Christianity has been dominant and injustice has thrived -- therefore, Christianity is linked to the thriving of injustice. However, this assertion is more problematic than it may first appear. The "Christianity has produced injustice" thesis, if taken in conjunction with a positive value judgment concerning the appropriateness of pursuing/salvaging/returning to/saving Christianity, necessitates that there be a fundamental disconnect between some "pure" kernel of Christianity -- Christianity as it should have been -- and its actual historical manifestation. In other words, if we admit that historically Christianity has been an indefensibly terrible thing, then we cannot defend the historical manifestation of Christianity -- we must instead appeal to some idealistic notion of a Christianity more like Christianity than itself. (Lacan tempts me here, but I shall restrict myself to Ellul's ground for the moment.)

This appeal to an ideal Christianity is parallel to another argument that Ellul is forced into accepting: that there never has been a true Communist society. Now, in a certain sense, this is of course true, because national Communist revolutions are by definition still constrained within the bourgeois framework of the nation-state -- the "true" Communist revolution must be global, or it is nothing. That being said, Ellul himself asserts a connection between theory and praxis within Communist history, so for our purposes, we cannot rule out the existence of -- as it were -- shades of Communism.

In turn, this reminds me of one of Žižek's observations concerning his youth in Yugoslavia: whenever something would go wrong, the leaders would assert that this was due to the country "not being Communist enough." A similar parallel can be seen in neo-liberal responses to the recent Great Recession: in their analysis, the recession was the result of the market "not being free enough" or America "not being capitalist enough." Now, in both of these cases, the ideological appeal is clear. It is not as if the historical manifestation of a system is the corrupt, ideologically contaminated version, while the ideal system is pure, etc; rather, the very appeal to an ideal is itself a contaminated, ideological move.

So can we not draw the same conclusions regarding the move to blame the failures of Christianity on "not being Christian enough?" Is not the appeal to an ideal, pure, unadulterated kernel of Christianity the ideological (and consequently, historically and politically bound) move par excellence? Should we not therefore be distrustful of perpetual calls to return to the practices of the early Church, ground ourselves in the "true essence" of Christianity, etc?

This is why Ellul's seemingly joyful embrace of the materialist challenge is most intriguing to me; if we name ideal Christianity as ideology, then we are left with the Pascallian/Althusserian/Žižekian reading of belief and action -- that is to say, beliefs/ideals exist only insomuch as they are manifest as actions, as interventions in the material world. If Christianity is truly materialist -- no, that is the wrong way to phrase it, because such a question appeals to an ideal -- if Christianity can become materialist (in a Lacanian sense of retroactive "quilting"), then it may be able to answer the four aforementioned challenges.

Reading notes on Jesus and Marx: From Gospel to Ideology, by Jacques Ellul (p. 1-5)

It's been quite a spell since I last read any Ellul. In fact, my own intellectual appetites (i.e. Žižek) and opinions (i.e. Is technique subservient to capital, or vice versa?) have changed enough that reading him isn't quite the awing experience that it used to be... But I'm willing to give Ellul a chance, nonetheless.

I don't actually own a book copy of Jesus and Marx, but for a time Jesus Radicals had a section on Ellul that featured some of his out-of-print books as pdf files, and so I obtained a pdf copy. (The section is still there, but Jesus and Marx is not.) I've actually found going through the text in pdf form preferable to going through it in book form, because I tend to only print out a few pages at a time (and therefore go through the text slower and more methodically) and it's easier to write marginal notes on a sheet of paper than on book pages.

That being said, here are my notes for the first chapter:


Page 1:
Ellul's conception of ideology seems, to me, woefully inadequate. He first criticizes the myriad of meanings the word "ideology" can have, depending on the scholar, but then goes on to give a rather vague definition:

"An ideology is the popularized sentimental degeneration of a political doctrine or worldview; it involes a mixture of passions and rather incoherent elements, always related to present realities."(1)

Note: Political doctrine is pure while ideology is not. Does this mean (unsullied) political doctrine is outside the realm of ideology?

But Ellul's version of ideology becomes even more strange:

"Often an ideology springs up to parry an ideology-free practice. Male domination for example, has no explicitly formulated ideology; feminist ideology arises to oppose it. Capitalism is a practice with no explicitly formulated ideology; socialist ideology arises to oppose it. Afterward, capitalism will produce an ideology of 'defense.'" (Ellul, 1)

It seems that Ellul is mixing ontology and epistemology here. Just because early capitalism did not have an explicitly articulated ideology doesn't mean that the ideology did not exist. (Indeed, Žižek argues that we now experience ideology as non-ideology -- but let's not throw one thinker against another just yet.)

To be fair to Ellul, however, the ideology-free understanding of early capitalism makes some sense if ideology is confined to the sphere of explicit, popular doctrine. It's just that this version of ideology is vastly different than the kind of thing that they introduce into basic sociology courses -- and consequently, what I have in mind when I hear the world "ideology." I suppose this divergence of meaning could be attributed to the influence of Freudian theory of Marxism -- that is to say, the influence of the idea of the unconscious (this would certainly explain Žižek). Not having read Marx (oh, reading list!), I can't say whether this brief interpretation of the history of Marxist theory is accurate or not, but it's worth keeping in mind. Either way, I think it's good to permit at least one charitable reading of a text, so I'll proceed keeping Ellul's version of ideology in mind.


Pages 2 and 3:
Ellul recognizes Christianity as an ideology, but he distinguishes between Christianity-as-ideology and "pure" Christianity. (Perhaps in the same way he distinguishes between "pure" political doctrine and ideology?) For Ellul, "pure" Christianity -- I think it might be appropriate to use the Žižekian term, "kernel" -- is radically anti-ideological, in that "biblical revelation necessarily entails iconoclasm, that is, the destruction of all religions, beliefs, ideolatrous images, and fads." (2) (I'm thinking of Galations 3:28 here.) Furthermore, the kernel of Christianity is founded on radical God-given freedom. Consequently, the Christian (in the pure sense, not the ideological sense) is specifically called to critique ideology, because ideological confines attack Christian freedom.

This leads Ellul to acknowledge the epistemological problem I raised earlier: How to recognize ideology? Ellul nods his head to Marx and Nietzsche, saying that their critiques of Christianity (as ideology) are valid, but also argues that it would better if this work was taken up by Christians.

However, Ellul's formulation of the method of the Christian critique is rather vague. He mentions that Christians must stop reading the Bible to find arguments or justifications for their positions (because this merely produces ideology) and instead interact with the Bible as an kind of interrogation -- God questions the believer about their thoughts, behavior, church, etc. (I suppose this would be termed "conviction.") Furthermore, the believer must be sociologically aware -- i.e. of popular trends -- so that they may resist the alluring ideologies present in the mass actions (or inactions) of groups.


Pages 4 and 5:
Finally, Ellul remarks than critiques of ideology are historically specific, so the Christian critic must not think that their critique will be longstanding. Ellul points to Marx, who constructed a thorough, specific critique of his historical moment -- but this critique, when divorced from historical context, merely became an ideology. Christian critique of ideology, for Ellul, must always center on the present -- a present which is intimately connected to the future via the here-but-still-yet-to-come temporality of the Kingdom of God. Thus, the Christian critique of ideology is really prophecy -- that is, the understanding of the current historical moment in relation to the known future (i.e. the Kingdom of God).

This is all well and good, but I'm not sure how Ellul can even use the category of ideology, since it is rooted in a materialist theory (Marxism). Maybe this is at the heart of my confusion. Ellul doesn't seem to speak of ideology in material terms -- in contrast to the Althusserian understanding of ideology as always manifested in the material -- but rather in spiritual terms. I'm not sure if I think this is limiting or restricting... or neither.

Well, I'm only five pages into the book. I'm guessing he'll elaborate further.

Currently Reading [Part I]

Update:

I've read the first chapter of Prometheus Wired, I've almost finished with the introductory section of Saussure's Course, and I'm about three quarters through How to Read Freud. (Haven't got Theology yet -- though I ordered it through the university library system.)

So far, How to Read Freud seems to be an excellent primer to Freud, although it is certainly not strong enough to stand on its own. Indeed, the book demands an independent, critical reading of Freud's own texts. As far as content goes, I'm increasingly intrigued by the (much simplified, I'm sure) Freudian idea of all love being an attempt to "get back to" the original mother-child sexual configuration, particularly because my own reflections have hinted in that direction (although I did not take my conclusions all the way back into infancy).

As I wrote in my journal last August (and now edit slightly for the sake of public eyes):

"On the whole, I look at life as a series of steadily degrading experiences -- nothing of the future can ever compare to the simplicity of childhood play... The problem, of course, is that childhood, first naïve love, etc are always drowned in desire for the future. One spends childhood imitating and desiring adulthood, and so squanders its simplicity. Likewise, the beauty of the first love lies directly in its prohibition; to consummate it renders it far too earthy, material, and obscene. A consummated first love is no first love at all; it destroys itself while birthing another.

Nostalgia.

Prohibition.

Is not nostalgia a way to relive the prohibitions of childhood and first love -- except that the original prohibitions are exchanged for the prohibition of time? I.e. "You may appreciate it fully now, but only from the distance designated by the intermediary of time!"

Of course, we constantly try to bridge this distance. Every time I've gone longboarding on the Discovery Trail has been an attempt to reclaim the tall dune grass, the smooth pavement, and the cool sea breeze that is fixed into my memory as a record of last August...

And if life is most fully expressed in nostalgia -- that is, the desire for the unreachable, the unattainable... What then?"

Response to Dora

Well, now enough time has elapsed that my initial impressions concerning Dora have faded and my observations have become muddled. So this will be hardly be the essay-length response I envisioned it to be... but in the interest of getting this monkey off my back:

I greatly appreciate how Freud is continually modeling the processes he describes in his own texts. Since I'm new to Freud's work (and psychoanalysis in general) I really could only detect the processes from Dreams (Freud's subtle invocation of secondary revision stood out particularly strong in the "Prefatory Remarks" section) although now that I've finished the text and have been introduced to transference as a psychoanalytic concept, I see that Freud was modeling it in the text all along (or is that just my own secondary revision...?).

All in all, this makes plain the necessity of reading each of Freud's work more than once. Dreams certainly wouldn't have made a bit of sense (especially that infamous "Dark Forest" at the beginning!) if I hadn't gone through it twice (once last term on my own, and again this term for this Freud seminar), and I'm sure that Dora would be much more lucid if I had the time to go through it again as well.

...but alas, that's not going to happen anytime soon. C'est la vie d'un étudiant, non?

Blogging Dora, Part [?]

This term, I'm taking a seminar on Freud -- and loving every minute of it. (Freud is such a clever -- and creepy -- writer!) I've already made my way through Dreams, and this week I read Dora. I had planned to type up some thoughts on Dora as I was going through the text, but I got through it surprisingly quickly (it's a much faster read than Dreams) and as such, I wasn't as thorough in my note-taking. Instead of composing several posts on different sections of Dora, I think I'll just dedicate a single post to a variety of bits that jumped out at me.

But, no time for that now. Biopolitics calls me. Dora can wait until this afternoon. Or, more realistically, a few days from now.