Re: AUT: Priviledging economics over psychology....

["Harald Beyer-Arnesen" <haraldba@xxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Lowe Laclau" <lowelaclau@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <aut-op-sy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: 16. juli 2002 17.23
Subject: Re: AUT: Priviledging economics over psychology....


Lowe writes:

"Its like a theological liberation through the affirmation of
self vis a vis God... which is revolutionary insofar as it must
negate the contemporaneous acceptance of the social
given."

It seems as you are referring to protestantism, this inner, direct
and solitary relation to "God," which revealed itself to be so
perfectly suited for a capitalist world. Has not this private relation
with "God" also been constitutionalised in the United States?

"Fundamentalists who impose upon us the reading of the
Bible like a Bible or Marx or Freud like a Bible desire for
us to strangle the religion from ourselves, to be dead or
blind in the face of God, which is our source of immanence,
what keeps us in the present as opposed to 1917 or 1776
or 31AD."

To me it seems like this: I am not too eager for pure immanence.
It seem to me just another word for pure nothingness. And
unsurprisingly, it always  tends to end up in perfect transcendence,
which is logical, given the determinism, and even frequently belief
in predestination underlying it. I am not very knowledgable about
these things, but it seems to me that Spinoza ["quod omnia a
Deo fuerint predeterminata") and Calvin might have much in
common here.

Otherwise I very much doubt that pure immanence (or an
imagined world of of pure affects and desire) can in anyway
be combined with the affirmation of singularity, but surely
with "the laws" of the market and the atomisation
bourgeois democracy.

"... desire for us to strangle the religion from ourselves, to be
dead or blind in the face of God blind in the face of God". I
who though that a social revolution involved freeing us from
the chains of this imagined transcendent dictatorship. Other
than this, if you want to live in the present, Christianity seems
a strange choice.  If it is to remain Christanity, it must also
necessary privilige the "Truth" of texts written about 2 000
years ago and older, with all the anti-human garbage which
follows with them, and which human beings, not at least
organised workers and women, have used centuries trying
to free us from. I see no reason encouraging recirculating
this poison in nicer packaging.

There exist less direct anti-human versions of Leninism than
Stalinism and Pol Pot. It is the former that contribute the most
to keeping the ghost alive. The same might be said for
libertationist theology. It is still theology, is it not? It is take just
as much self-deception, probably more, to get the scriptures
to become compatible with what they preach, to be anything
else than "you get pie in the sky when you die." If the gospels
had really had contained such a revolutionary message, half of
them would have been filled with words of rebellion against
for instance the real existing slavery of the times, or for that, the
real existing second rate status of women. This need for
self-deception again entails a silent, collective acceptance of
putting free and critical thought in chains. To start out with a
set of lies is poor beginning.

Some voted for Ralph Nader under the last presidential
election in the U.S., and they got themselves another Bush.
It is pretty symbolic, I think.

Harald






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