The 'Returns to Religion': Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part I: 'Wakefulness to the Future'

Abstract

Th e central strength of the Hegelian dialectical tradition is that reason is not divorced from its own internal limits in the name of a reason free from ideological mediation and constraint. Th is article holds onto this insight in the examination of the recent (and widespread) returns to religious categories in political philosophy and political theory (in particular Agamben, Badiou, Negri and Žižek). In this respect the article follows a two-fold logic. In the spirit of Hegel and Marx, it seeks to recover what is 'rational in religion'; and, at the same time, examines the continuing entanglements of politics (and specifically revolutionary thinking) with religious categories. Th at this is an atheistic and materialist project is not in a sense strange or anomalous. On the contrary, it is precisely the 'secularisation' of Judeo-Christian categories in Kant, Hegel and Marx's respective theorisation of history, that provides the dialectic ground of the atheistic recovery and invocation of Judeo-Christian thought (in particular messianism, renunciation, and fidelity) in recent political philosophy. Consequently the discussion of religion, or 'religion beyond religion', here, has very little to do with the spread of obscurantism and anti-rationalism in the global upsurge of reactionary Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms, neo-Pagan mysticisms, and other retreats from the real, or with the left-liberal denunciation of religion in the recent writings of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Rather, 'religion' here, in its Judeo-Christian legacy, is that which embodies the memory or prospect of a universal emancipatory politics.

Transcendence, Consciousness and Order: Towards a Philosophical Spirituality of Organization in the Footsteps of Plato and Eric Voegelin

“…The problem with this type of spiritually-based progressivism is that it shifts its metaphysical stance from transcendental contemplation to immanent activism after having cleared ground for an enlightened gnostic cognition (Roberts 2008). The strict other-worldly metaphysical commitment shared by Plato (1993) and Voegelin (1952) is compromised in the spirituality discourse in the form of an ambivalent logic that accommodates both transcendence and radical immanence.…”

The Fate of Christian Communism

“…More significantly for my argument, leading figures in the early German communist movement were also deeply influenced, including Wilhelm Weitling, Hermann Kriege, Karl Grün, and Gottfried Kinkel. Marx and Engels worked until they dropped to excise this rather Christian element from within communism (Marx and Engels [1846b] Yet, despite all the hard work of Marx and Engels, this stream of Christian communism -with its long, long history that precedes Marx and Engels (see Kautsky [1895Kautsky [ -97] 1947a[1895 -97] 1947b; Kautsky andLafargue [1922] 1977;Roberts 2008aRoberts , 2008b)-would not exit the scene, tail between its legs. Instead, I suggest, it shows up in Luxemburg's argument in Socialism and the Churches, profoundly modified and reshaped in light of Engels's reconstruction of the revolutionary origins of Christianity.…”