This article argues that faith is a crucial concept for understanding the relationship between reason and affect. By allowing people to learn from religious faith for secular ends, it can help generate political action for emancipatory change. Antonio Gramsci's underexplored secular-political and materialist conception of faith provides an important contribution to such a project. By speaking to common sense and tradition, faith avoids imposing a wholly external set of normative and political principles, instead taking people as they are as the starting point for generating emancipatory change. It also allows us to imagine the construction of alternative institutions (the Church provides an interesting model for challenging existing state authority). Theorists should therefore pay attention not just to the rationalist logic of discursive justification but also to the complex processes of social, collectively held emotions and how these influence political action as forms of affect. The article provides a detailed reconstruction of Gramsci's conception of faith and analyzes the instruments it provides for bridging the gap between reason and affect.

What does it mean to disagree with people with whom you usually agree? How should political actors concerned with emancipation approach internal disagreement? In short, how should we go about critiquing not our enemies or adversaries but those with whom we share emancipatory visions? I outline the notion of comradely critique as a solution to these questions. I go through a series of examples of how and when critique should differ depending on its addressee, drawing on Jodi Dean’s figure of the comrade. I develop a contrast with its neighbours the ally and the partisan, thus identifying key elements of comradely critique: good faith, equal humanity, equal standing, solidarity, collaboration, common purpose and dispelling fatalism. I then analyse Theodor W. Adorno and Herbert Marcuse’s private correspondence on the 1960s German student movement as an illustration of (imperfect) comradely critique. I conclude by identifying a crucial tension about publicness and privateness.

No series of analyses, papers, discussions, and books will stop the slaughter in our streets, or children from having children, or men from beating up women. The role of intellectuals is limited; excessive expectations will only produce disappointment. But that limited role is crucial, and fears of disappointment should not serve as an excuse for continuing along the current course. (Rivers, 1995, p. 18) Some 25 years ago, Edward Said claimed that "the world is more crowded than it ever has been with (. . . ) intellectuals" (Said, 1996, p. 15). Yet Black intellectuals continue to be sidelined, marginalized, and ignored in public discourse. As Jeffrey Watts contends, there has been a "longstanding racist marginalization of African American intellectuals within mainstream American intellectual discourses" (Watts, 2004, p. 2). However, this "came under intense attack during the 1960s and 1970s, at least within black intellectual circles" (Watts, 2004, p. 2). In recent decades, this attack has slowly permeated into the wider/Whiter discourse in the United States, but has by no means been fully accomplished yet.Bolstering the Black archive is a crucial task to allow new generations of scholars to draw on a wider set of contributions from key Black intellectuals. Recovering Reverend Eugene F. Rivers III's interventions for our days is an important contribution to this task.Debates about the causes of Black suffering in America usually fall into one of two camps. According to Cornel West in Nihilism in Black America, "liberal structuralists" focus on the structural and societal constraints facing Black Americans while "conservative behaviorists" focus on the decline of the Protestant ethic and a growing crisis of anomie (West, 1994, p. 13). While Rivers falls most clearly in the latter group, his combined attention to structural constraints and individual morality places him idiosyncratically in relation to the two camps. As West urges, the "debate must go far beyond the liberal and conservative positions" (West, 1994, p. 12). Rivers' essay provides an important contribution to going beyond this dichotomy. I develop three main lines of argument from within Rivers' thought. First, that he seeks to bridge the disconnect between intellectuals and social struggle. Second, that he envisages a role of the intellectual between the vanguard activist intellectual and disinterested scholastic academics-resembling Boaventura de Sousa Santos' idea of the rear-guard intellectual. Third, that Rivers provides the basis for distinguishing between two typesThis is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

No abstract

No abstract