MARX AND RELIGION: QUESTIONS ON THE JEWISH, AND CHRISTIAN, QUESTION

Zaccharia Turnbull

i) Introduction: Christian and Jew

Contemporary approaches to Marx must be informed by both the apparent failure, hitherto, of a Marxian world order to eventuate, and by philosophical critiques of progressivist meta-narratives of human development, of which Marxism is one. These factors are mutually enforcing. In particular, such philosophical critiques are supported by the fact not only of this empirical failure, but that capitalism has indeed further cemented itself since the end of Sovietism. We seem now to have reached a general pessimism about the possibility that supposedly undesirable and unenlightened historical phenomena will indeed 'die' as predicted according to progressivist nineteenth-century models. Principal among these phenomena, besides the capitalist structures themselves, is religion. As Vattimo amongst others has emphasised, the manner in which religion has witnessed a common cultural return, and however it has done so, is deserving of a serious philosophical response. 1 Yet Marx's mid-nineteenth century models for human progress and complete emancipation indeed envision the disappeance of all religion and religious consciousness, and correspondingly, the disappearance of religion as of any philosophical concern. As such, one obvious way to engage with the apparent empirical failure of Marxism, whatever one's philosophical and political sympathies , is via the question of religion. For a number of reasons, 'On the Jewish Question', is a privileged text through which to broach this question.2 This text, though representative of the early, political philosopher Marx, nonetheless contains some of the seeds of the later historical materialist Marx. 3 As such it is one of the few places where considerations of religion, state and capitalist economics coincide, but in such manner that religion might be awarded a relative explanatory privilege. This paper will be a contribution to the critique of Marx on religion, in the spirit of the philosophical 'return to religion'.

Any examination of the contemporary world, in which positive religions continue to find broad appeal, manifestly suggests that religion may have some ongoing connection to its general condition, that is, to capitalist economics and to secular, state democracy. Moreover, since the end of Sovietism, these phenomena have been exacerbated together: there has been, on the one hand, a rise in religious fundamentalism and (in certain spheres) ethno-religous nationalism, yet on the other hand, a rapid globalisation of the capitalist system and consolidation of both national and trans-national political entities. Religious fundamentalism, in particular, has become a pressing contemporary concern. I agree with the general assumption that this represents a bad trend, which threatens to scale back much recent political progress of a generally liberal nature. Yet unless we are happy to take it as without deeper political explanation, which would surely be naïve, it becomes necessary to address theoretically how it is that this has at once happened in the context of the apparent completion, in most parts of the world, of secularism. Given that the early Marx and the New Hegelian milieu was where a political anti-religiosity was first theoretically cemented, it is

1 Vattimo, Gianni, After Christianity, trans. Luca D'Isanto, Columbia University Press, 2002, p. 84-7. 2 Marx, Karl, "On the Jewish Question" (1843), Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton, ed. Lucio Colleti, Penguin Books, 1974. 3 Ibid., 235-241.

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surely well-motivated to assess the contemporary rise of religion with respect to potential foundational problems with Marx's early thesis of the complete separability of polity from religion. Capitalism has now achieved such hegemonic status that it is difficult to imagine modern life without it, something which must surely inform some resistance to critique; religion, on the other hand, presents itself as perhaps the central modern quandary. Taken at least in its fundamentalist form, it is equally clear that most people are far less comfortable, for better or worse, with current religion than with current capitalism. So as a question of method, it seems apposite to take the place of religion in Marx as now central to the consideration of Marxism per se, heeding Hegel's message that a real philosophy responds to the 'spirit of the times'.

According to now received readings of Marx, the so-called 'superstructures' of historical materialism, of which religion is arguably the most important, are not strict effects of a causal economic base. To illustrate using disparate Marxist scholarship: according to Gramsci, as representative of a Continental Marxist tradition, the base at most provides enabling conditions for superstructures 4; according to Cohen, as representative of 'Analytical Marxism', superstructures are functionally rather than causally explained in relation to the base.5 I take this broad consensus to license my presupposition herein that we are, firstly, at least entitled to a methodological separation of the consideration of the superstructure from the base, and secondly, that the independent study of any such superstructures (as they will concern me, religion and politics), may in principle inform how we understand the base in turn. While I do not doubt that a scholastic choice to make this separation itself encodes a certain philosophical perspective, I see no reason why such a study may not in principle provide coherently modular input to a comprehensive philosophical Marxism. Using this presupposition, I will argue, via a close critique of the article, that Marx's own ideas about the state/religion relation in fact suggest that there is a general religiosity which political space must accommodate rather than annul. The consideration of such a religiosity, its many manifestations, and further, what should or should not count as religious in such a heterodox array of phenomena, makes for a very unwieldy topic. For this reason, I intend that my reading of the article may delimit some considerations in recent Continental philosophy of religion which reflect a similar sentiment. My own contribution, on the other hand, will be a broadly normative one: it will be a suggestion about how we should make this accommodation, in light, particularly, of what contemporary fundamentalism might represent.

An obvious yet important discrepancy between religion as an empirical, historical phenomenon, and the philosophy of religion as traditionally considered, is that the former presents itself as a plurality. There are many religions, and studied from this standpoint, efforts to develop a philosophy of religion, or indeed to characterise 'religion' or the 'religious' as such, are frustrated. But if, as I have suggested, the empirical and historical horizon must inevitably provide key input into the critique of Marxism as such, then the question of religion in Marx can surely only honestly be broached via this plurality. 'On the Jewish Question' concerns two religions, Judaism and Christianity. So the 'grain' within this article then also reflects the minimum grain necessary to consider what 'plurality' (i.e. at least two) can philosophically reflect about the quality of the 'religious' per se, a question which must first of all be considered within the most ordinary historical and political horizon. The Marx/Bauer debate concerns the place of the Jews as members of the Christian Prussian State. Bauer argues both that the Jews qua Jews are culturally maladapted to assume full citizenship in the State, but that the general condition for any emancipation as full citizenship is the secularisation of a German state. Marx replies, firstly, that there is a general homology in the alienative structure between ideal religion and that of the secular state, so that the perfection of this state is, essentially, at once the perfection of religion; and secondly, that, the case of positive religious life North America empirically illustrates this principle. This means that for

4 Gramsci, Antonio, "Structure and Superstructure", An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs, Schocken Books, New York, 1988, pp. 190-192. 5 Cohen, G. A., "Forces and Relations of Production"., pp. 116-7.

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Marx, the state itself must be overcome to allow a full, 'human' emacipation, if real emancipation is to be achieved. Even in this synopsis, something curious is apparent. In both arguments, the distribution of these two religions over political space is treated as basically accidental. While it is true that both Marx, but especially Bauer, inherited the philosophical, Hegelian bias for Christianity over Judaism, this does not appear to have any immediate effect upon the terms of the debate: it might just have plausiby been the case, insofar as those terms are concerned, if Prussia had been a Jewish state and Christians a supposedly inflexible minority within it. In other words, the Judaism/Christianity opposition does not inform the debate as a sui generis and theological opposition. My intention is then to undertake an interpretation in which the political questions addressed in the article are firstly shown to have stakes precisely in Judaism, Christianity, and Judaeo-Christianity in their theological and theologico-political function. As such, I will be concerned with Christianity and Judaism both as particular religions, and as particular socio-theological configurations in both Prussia and North America. By means of these empirical considerations, I hope to garner enough evidence to plausibly further read contemporary fundamentalism (of whatever flavour) as a symptomatic reaction against the Christian secularising logic which has led to modern political democracy; in particular, then, against a certain fatal tendency of this dominant theologico-politics to dissimulate its own religious structure. I will relate this religiosity, and this system of secularisation/reaction, to the general significance of the mundane opposition between Jew and Christian as it finds expression in the article. This link should finally help to indicate that, contra Marx, Prussia's Jewish politics, insofar as it illustrates an external and collective religious bond, in fact provides a reasonable model for how a polity must, as a matter of principle, accommodate some inalienable religiosity. In other words, the opposition between Christian and Jew may be shown to itself disclose structural and normative possibilities of the 'religious' as such.

ii) Bauer: The Jewish Question

Bauer's "The Jewish Question" (Der Judenfrage) appears in 1843, and Marx's "On the Jewish Question in 1844. These publications occur in the context of ongoing struggle between, on one side, liberals, republicans and left-Hegelians, like Bauer, who desired a united, federal and secular Germany under a democratic constitution, versus conservatives, who wished to maintain Germany as a patchwork of independent, monarchical and Christian states. It is five years before the general revolution in the German states, in which some of the ambitions of this left coalition came close to being realised. The Prussia of which Bauer speaks is one in which, despite the conferral of citizenship upon the Jews in 1812 in the wake of the Napoleonic occupation, and the passage of many general democratic reforms in the intervening decades, the Jews of Prussia still enjoy a general de facto and de jure negative discrimination, particularly where participation in political and civic functions is concerned. As a Christian state, the Christian population is privileged in at least this respect. This situation is no better illustrated than by Bismarck's remark in 1847 to the Prussian parliament that he "would give the Jews all rights, but not to hold positions of authority in a Christian State". 6

Bauer is concerned to answer the general question concerning to what extent and in what way the Jews should be assimilated as citizens of Prussia, and more generally, an imagined German federation. His response has two, related parts: i) the Christian state should be secularised, and all privileges associated with its Christian status therein removed. ii) the Jews qua Jews cannot, for basically cultural reasons, assimilate as full citizens of such a secular state. I will consider them in turn. The Prussian state of 1843 is indeed Christian in several senses. As a monarchy without a constitution (until 1848), the Christian Godhead is

6 Pulzer, Peter G. J., Jews and the German State: the political history of a minority, 1848-1933. Chap. 1, "Why was there a Jewish Question?".

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implicitly understood to confer authority upon the monarch. Since political power is legitimised by the Christian faith, this logic leads to a situation in which Christian citizens are privileged, i.e. enjoy second-tier citizenship privileges in relation to Jews. There is then a natural, immediate relationship between religion and political authority in Prussia. As such, Bauer sees the Christian religion as destructive to the prospects for greater democracy in a German state, and therefore wishes to see Germany secularised at the highest political level. I understand that Bauer would see the effect of this as being both to lead to general democratic reform, i.e., in the first place, by the removal of divine political authority, but also to greater equality by the removal of religion as a determinant of rights.7

Bauer's second argument is that the Jews cannot, qua Jews, assimilate in such a way that the Jews would be able to assume, simply put, their responsibilities along with their rights in the secular state. But Bauer seems to view this as primarily a matter of culture. He argues that the Jewish cultural mentality would resist full identification with a German state, since the Jew would still more strongly identify with, and therefore act in accord with, the Jewish community over the State. I am not concerned to elaborate on Bauer's specific arguments in this regard, both because they may be legitimately considered simply anti-semitic, and therefore dispensable to whatever strength his argument may have, but also because I intend to circle back to some of the same themes concerning Judaism and Jewish identity in the closing sections. Bauer then views the Jew's call for full emancipation and citizenship rights as unwarranted, since the Jew is not yet prepared to assume that citizenship. But he also maintains that the call for Jewish emancipation within the context of the Christian state makes no sense in any case, since, on the one hand, a Christian state by definition could not liberate the Jews, and on the other hand, the only way everyone may be properly emancipated is by the removal of its Christianity. It appears that Bauer views the two issues as logically separable. In other words, given the long tradition in the Jewish community, Bauer would view Jewish assimilation as presenting an issue irrespective of the status of the State vis. its secularism. However, there is a suggestion that Bauer also views Jewish non-assimilation as gaining some support by the existence of the Christian state, insofar as that state, and its religious discrimination, necessitates as a reflex the Jewish community's greater religious and political consolidation.8 This creates a situation, as Marx expresses it, where both "are equally incapable of either giving or receiving emancipation".(212) In summarising his strategy, Bauer writes:

Until now the enemies of emancipation had much the advantage over its advocates, because they considered the contrast between the Jew as such to the Christian state. Their only mistake was that they presupposed the Christian state as the only true state and did not subject it to the same criticism that they applied to Judaism. Their opinion of Judaism seemed harsh and unjust only because they did not at the same time look critically at the state which denied and had to deny liberty to the Jews.

Our criticism will be aimed at both sides: only in this way will we be able to find a solution….Whoever insists upon complaining, may accuse Liberty, because it demands not only from other nations but from the Jews as well, that they sacrifice antiquated traditions before they win liberty. 9

There is, then, at least a perceived common basis for these criticisms. In each case, what is criticised is exactly the existence of any relation between religion and polity, if 'polity' is most broadly understood as a form of collective existence of a people. Bauer's basic (if under-thematised) reason for this criticism is religion's inherently prejudicial influence in naturalising conditions of privilege and inequality, since a religion, in Bauer's thinking, appears to entail a space of differential access to the source of the divine. The outcome of secularisation for Bauer is then, if not to remove religion altogether from the life of the state and its members, to at least render religion a "purely private affair."10 Hence, whether enacted

7 Bauer, Bruno, "The Jewish Problem: Introduction", The Young Hegelians, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, p. 188. 8 Ibid., pp. 188-9. 9 Ibid., p. 188. 10 Quoted in Marx, op. cit., p. 218.

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at the state or community level, it is religion as a political thing, as sustained by way of relations between people, which is to be removed.

iii) Marx: On the Jewish Question

"On the Jewish Question" falls roughly into two parts: the first concerns the relation between politics and religion, the second concerns that between religion and economy. It is for this reason that the text contains hints of an historical materialist account, in which economic relations might achieve some explanatory privilege. As stated, my focus will be upon the politics/religion section, and within that section, only upon the main argumentative sequence. Marx's paper is first of all a direct response to Bauer. Bauer had argued that the establishment of a secular state would lead to a general diminution of the significance of religion in the state, as a matter of either political or individual concern.11 However, Marx argues that the establishment of such a state does not overcome religion, and that indeed religion is presupposed within the structure of this state. This belief will lead Marx to advocate a more radical overturning of conventional statism. As such, unlike Bauer, Marx does not see any inherent contradiction between religious prejudice and political emancipation. The question of how many separate arguments Marx offers is a complex one, since Marx reiterates his point in changing language and images. However, one important distinction appears to be between the argument for a homology between state and religion, and the argument based upon the supposed liberation of religious consciousness under the modern state, as supported by the American case.

a) The State/Religion Homology

The secular State, for Marx, is the perfection of the separation of two levels of life in the political community. The first level, in which the individual participates as citizen, is the level at which the individual's membership within the State is defined and constructed. This citizen is regarded as an equal to all other citizens where functions vis. the State are concerned. The citizen is granted equality with other citizens regarding political participation and representation in the state. This political equality is achieved precisely by disconnecting the basis of political participation from some set of social variables, which are now considered, from the State's perspective, a purely personal matter. These variables, as subsequent history shows us, are subject to amendment (and may now explicitly include, e.g., race, gender, sexual orientation, age, disability status, political beliefs, etc. ). However, from the birth of the secular state, religion has been by definition a primary element. Marx's first point, upon which his argument will depend, is that the public constitution of the individual qua citizen of the state remains internally related to the private constitution of the individual within this state. In other words, the new division itself between public and private political space works to constitute either side.

At the level of polity, the secular state itself is internally related to that which for Marx a purified 'civil society': life within a free market of interaction and competition between individuals. The delimiting of private space under the division is at once the delimiting of an atomic individual, with private wants, preferences and needs, who may inhabit this civil society and freely pursue their interests. Such life is licensed by the modern State because equality and unity in the polity are in the first place given a narrowly political definition. However, as Marx also shows, this definition conversely licenses the system of 'rights' of the 'freedom to…' kind which take as their predicates these privatised social variables. Indeed, in Marx's analysis, it appears precisely here that the intelligibility of the individual's free life in civil society is shown as a subtantial product of a constitutive State

11 Cf. as quoted in Marx, above.

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apparatus involving an abstract ideology about what 'Man' is, does and should be able to do. 12

In Marx's understanding, this sharp division between State and Civil Society distinguishes the modern state from all prior ones, in which inequality was a directly political affair. The mutual reinforcement and mutual presupposition between these two elements is one of the primary motifs of the early Marx, and is argued extensively in his critiques of Hegel.

Marx's first argument against Bauer is that the secular state just described does not represent a definitive conquering of religion and religious consciousness, and this firstly because there is a clear homology between the structure of the life of a member of such a state, and the life of a person of religious consciousness. What is common in each case is the ideal and imaginary constitution of equality and unity with others, or with the world as such. From the preceding, we see that the state, in Marx's understanding, provides such a unity via the constitution of citizenship. Yet the unity in this sense is for Marx illusory, and in fact facilitates the actual disunity found at the level of civil society, purified in a new radical individuation. Indeed, this disunity may be paradoxically precisely licensed in the name of ideal unity, e.g., in universal individual rights defined as rights to pursue material interest. This structure exemplifies for Marx one important form of alienation. The real thing desired or required (in this case, the complete unity and cohesion of the polity) is posited but in an 'alienated' form (in this case, as ideal equality in a political state, insulated from the inequality of actual life). Clearly, this argument relies upon an understanding of secular State and civil society as mutually constituting, as considered above. Marx considers alienation of this particular kind destructive because it prevents the development of consciousness of the thing really sought, and meanwhile excuses existing conditions of disunity.

Marx's contention is that this kind of alienation is essentially the same as that found generally in religious consciousness. In religion, an individual posits an ideal object of religious faith (God, heaven, spirit, etc.) in which some idealised unity is felt; e.g., the equality of all people in the eyes of God, or an ideal reconciliation between the finite individul and their world. Just as with the state, religion and religious consciousness for Marx then acknowledges what is really sought, but in an alienated form. We would expect the range of things potentially 'sought' by religion and religious consciousness per se to be broader than those sought in specifically political consciousness. But we can describe the homology as minimally concerned with a system of unity and disunity: some ideal unity is posited and believed in, in order that a real disunity may be tolerated:

The relationship of the political state to civil society is just as spiritual as the relationship of heaven to earth. The state stands in the same opposition to civil society and overcomes it in the same way as religion overcomes the restrictions of the profane world, i.e., it has to acknowledge it again, reinstate it and allow itself to be dominated by it. Man in his immediate reality, in civil society, is a profane being. Here, where he regards himself and is regarded by others as a real individual, he is an illusory phenomenon. In the state, on the other hand, where is considered to be a species-being, he is the imaginary member of a fictitious sovereignty, he is divested of his real individual life and filled with an unreal universality. 13

The members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual life and species-life, between the life of civil society and political life. They are religious inasmuch as man considers political life, which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of the separation and distance of man from man. Political democracy is Christian inasmuch as it regards man - not just one man but all men - as a sovereign and supreme being; but man in his uncultivated, unsocial aspect, man in his contingent existence, …14

These two passages satisfactorily express the terms of the homology. The 'dualism between individual life and species-life', in particular, demonstrates a key intellectual inheritance from Feuerbach concerning the issue of religious alienation in the Christian faith. But there is a reason why I have called the Marxian apparatus a 'homology' rather than 'analogy': this direct

12 This in turn means that the subsequent, liberal idea of the 'individual' as a political primitive, and of the state correspondingly as mere instrument for the protection of the individual's freedom, is in fact a direct political product, having involved a complex historical and political negotiation.13 Marx, 220. 14 Ibid., 226.

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and unqualified employment of Feuerbachian terms suggests that Marx means to claim that the secular state is as religious (at least, in terms of the western, Christian tradition) as Christianity is political (I will consider further the secularising process as specifically Christian below). In other words, there is a common, substantial apparatus, beyond mere analogy, with which this kind of alienation is associated. Such a strong reading of Marx's philosophical relation to Feuerbach is likewise taken by Althusser. For this reason, it will be useful to consider Feuerbach on the issue of individual and species-being with respect to Christianity, since I take it that these notions substantially inform Marx's political assertions.

In Feuerbach's analysis of Christianity, the Christian God, and relation to the Christ, represents the human being's ambition to achieve a real unity between individual being and their 'species-being', or that form of being sharesd with all other human beings. Indeed, the figure of Christ himself, the God-Man, represents this unity as an idealised reclamation of Man as the actual ground of God, an acknowledgement that "God is a human being, God is a man", but in a form in which this insight has not yet been directly or non-figuratively cognised.15 'Species-Being' is understood to be what the God-Man represents, firstly, because Christ does indeed hold an idealised relation toward all men, but secondly, because Feurbach takes this relation to signify that it is Man in the abstract, the nature of Man, which will found the ground of a new non-religious objectivity and infinity for the individual man's existence. This will be what a man should eventually grasp as his self-consiousness of himself as Man. The structure of this religious consciousness as a form of alienation is pictured in The Essence of Christianity in the following passages:

…when religion - consciousness of God - is designated as the self-consciousnes of man, this is not to be understood as affirming that the religious man is directly aware of this identity: for, on the contrary, ignorance of it is fundamental to the peculiar nature of religion. To preclude this misconcepton, it is better to say, religion is man's earliest and also indirect form of self-knowledge. Hence, religion everywhere precedes philosophy, as in the history of the race, so also in that of the individual. Man first of all sees his nature as if out of himself, before he finds it in himself. 16

Man - this is the mystery of religion - projects his being into objectivity, and then again makes himself an object to this projected image of himself thus converted into a subject; he thinks of himself as an object to himself. Thus here. Man is an object to God. 17

One of the most important inheritances consequent upon Marx's early relation to Feuerbach is an essentialist humanism; Feuerbach's Christianity (and, more broadly, his 'religion') has an 'essence' precisely because 'Man' has one, even if that essence is, as here, understood with respect to some anthropological evolution. As we see from these passages, the former essence is to be explained via the latter. It is precisely this which licences Marx's picturing of an ultimate emancipation in "On the Jewish Question" as 'human emancipation', i.e. as recovery of the ground of a tacit human essence. Marx would appear to have heeded Feuerbach's message that "religion has no material exclusively its own", or that at least some classes of 'alienation' are all validly considered 'religious'. His position aligns 'Man', conceived as a universal, constitutional entity under the State, as an approximate equivalent to Christ, i.e., that object to consciousness taking the role of an alienating abstraction. But this equivalence brings out one significant non-equivalence. For Feuerbach, the overcoming of religion is achieved when the individual man achieves consciousness of the former object of religion as his species-being, or the nature of his collective identity. But clearly, for Marx, this is not adequate, since political emancipation, as the elevation of universal Man, has in one sense arguably achieved precisely this. Marx then implicitly radicalises Feuerbach's epistemological program into an ontological one as well; i.e., religiosity is only overcome when some kind of identity, in a sense to be determined, is also achieved between individual and species-being, and cognised as an identity.18 Thus Marx states his goal:

15 Fuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1881), trans. George Eliot, Dover Publications, Mineola, 2008, p. 121. 16 Ibid., p. 11. 17 Ibid., p. 25.

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Only when real, individual man resumes the abstract citizen into himself and as an individual man has become a species-being in his empirical life, his individual work and his individual relationships, only when man has recognised the forces propres as social forces so that social force is no longer separated from him in the form of political force, only then will human emancipation be completed. 19

The very fact that there remains a projection of the individual's self-understanding into some object of consciousness under the State/Civil Society division, in, e.g., the rhetoric of the 'Rights of Man', suggests that some ontological alienation may of necessity correspond to some epistemological alienation. While this difference will repay consideration, the homology I have addressed may nonetheless retain a basic epistemological shape. This homology stands alone as one significant argument advanced against Bauer's claim that the secular State represents a freeing of human society from religion. While of course, such a state is validly regarded as an immense improvement upon its predecessor, for Marx, nonetheless, a certain structure, homologous to (Christian) religion proper, keeps individual people separated from one another, and hence separated from their collective social potential.

b) Secularisation as Liberation of Religious Consciousness: North America

Marx says that the members of the political state "are religious inasmuch as man considers political life, which is far removed from his actual individuality, to be his true life and inasmuch as religion is here the spirit of civil society and the expression of the separation and distance of man from man (my emphasis)".20 While these two 'inasmuches' are sometimes difficult to separate in the text, I will take them as separable arguments which it will repay to treat as such. For Marx, Christian Prussia deploys religion as a direct and unmediated mechanism of power: it is in the direct name of religion that political privilege is conferred. According to Marx, this means that religion qua state religion is not yet 'pure', i.e., it has not yet achieved its own proper terrain as a pure question of faith and of personal conviction. So if there is a religiosity proper to the secular state as such (i.e., in the very concept of political Man), there is, according to him, another religiosity now proper to Civil Society. The apparent liberation of the individual in Civil Society at once liberates religion also as a personal matter of faith, as something freely chosen. The apparent removal of a state religion is then at once a kind of 'gift' of religion as a matter for the private individual. This, according to Marx, is a purifying of that which religion always purported to be, i.e., a purely spiritual matter. He writes:

The freedom of egoistic man and the acknowledgement of this freedom is rather the acknowledgement of the unbridled movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence man was not freed from religion - he received the freedom of religion. 21

In a perfected democracy the religious and theological consciousness regards itself as all the more religious and all the more theological since it is apparently without any political significance or earthly aims, an unworldly and spiritual affair…22

Marx's use of the case of his contemporary North America in "On the Jewish Question" is of some significance because it will later allow a comparison with contemporary western fundamentalism. North America putatively illustrates Marx's point extremely well, since here we have the most advanced secular State, or collection of states, at least with respect to political secularism. On the other hand, it is arguably, as Marx says referencing, amongst

18 This implicit difference presages the "Theses on Feuerbach", and Marx's definitive split with Feuerbach's program. This split coincides with a reworking of the terrain of religion, politics and economy into a system in which economy is privileged. 19 Marx, op. cit. p. 234. 20 Ibid., 217. 21 Ibid., p. 233. 22 Ibid., p. 226.

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others, Tocqueville, "the land of religiosity par excellence", i.e. the land where religion is most enjoyed in ordinary civil life. 23 In other words, there is prima facie some inversely proportional connection between political secularism and civil secularity. Hence, again, apparently by freeing the state from religion, the member of the state is at once freed for an 'unbridled' indulgence of religious life, as a matter of identity and expression in the realm of civil society.

Summing up, then, Marx has argued against Bauer that religion is in fact presupposed as the basis of the secular state in the two ways I have addressed. It is for this reason that for Marx, 'political emancipation' from religion is not yet 'human emancipation' from politics, where the latter would be the achievement of a real unity and solidarity between human beings in the polity. It is precisely religion which expresses this deficit of human emancipation in the state, the separation of man from man. Marx's key result, directed at Bauer, is that it therefore makes no sense to request of the Jew to relinquish the 'privilege of religion' as a precondition to becoming a citizen of a secular state. On the contrary, becoming such a citizen appears to entail the freedom to religion in an unbridled private sphere. The definitive defeat of religion, that aspect of human life which for both Marx and Bauer indexes a social defect, will only be overcome by abolishing the apparatus of the secular state itself.

iii) The Relation Between Marx's Two Levels of Religiosity The relation between the two levels of religiosity in Marx's secular state is complex, and requires considerable interpolation. The first question which must be asked is: why are there two levels at all? In particular, if the function and structure of religion is at base a Feuerbachian alienation, why is this alienation doubled, insofar as it appears at the level both of the State and of Civil Society? We may first consider the condition of a Jew in Christian Prussia. The Jew is discriminated against in the form of a directly political Christianity. Let us suppose that the Jews arrange a religious culture, i.e. a kind of sub-polity, in defensive response. Suppose that a Jew is now fully politically liberated under a secular state. This Jew will, supposedly, participate in and enjoy the feeling of an idealised unity with all other citizens via, amongst other things, a universal set of rights and political participation. Correspondingly, this Jew's Jewishness as a cultural and political identity will supposedly undergo reduction, since the Jew has now achieved, as a single citizen, the political identity necessary to replace that which his former, Jewish identity provided. But it must now be asked: what need has this Jew now of Judaism, or of any other religion, even as a private faith (assuming, for the moment, that her Judaism could be adapted in this way)? For religion in Marx's understanding seemed first of all to serve as an idealised unification in view of a de facto separation between fellow human beings; but this need would seem now already to be met by one's identity as citizen under the state.

We may consider a first answer to this question following the difference between the Feuerbachian and Marxian conceptions of alienation as considered above. There may be an explanation, in other words, in terms of Marx's unique conception of alienation as both epistemological and ontological. It is worth comparing in this regard the basic story about how religious consciousness, as a superstructural phenomena, interacts with a material base, i.e., as outlined in the "Contribution". Under the relations of capital, the worker is considered alienated from the product of their labour, a situation which would presumably cause consternation and massive unrest were it clearly recognised. Ideology in general, and religion in particular, might in this situation be taken as supplementing the ontological alienation in relation to capital with an epistemological alienation from clear thinking, under which the ontological alienation is better concealed.24 The question then becomes whether we can find evidence for such a similar story in the relation between religion and politics in the earlier Marx, which might explain this doubling of levels of religiosity. I ask, in other words,

23 Ibid., p. 217. 24 "Contribution to the Critique of Hegl's Philosophy of Right: Introduction", in Marx, op. cit., p. 252.

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whether there is potential to treat political alienation as the functional equivalent of an ontological alienation in the early Marx, which might clarify this story.

In his preface to Marx's text, Colleti appears to hold that it is the very situation of civil society itself, i.e., of being isolated and at war with all as an ontological fact, which in turn necessitates religion as "the heart's cry of alienated, atomised man, who overcomes the separation he experiences in everyday life, but only on the level of fantasy".25 Since I understand by Colleti's 'heart's cry' something here of a truly volitive nature, I believe he is referring to that individuated religiosity which Marx associates with modern Civil Society. So Colleti's claim is that individuated religion becomes necessary to cope with the fact of ontological alienation from other humans in civil society. But again, that, as far as I can see, is precisely the function of the state apparatus of citizenship. There is no apparent problem with there being a multiplicity of superstructural phenomena in relation to some base, and we could of course maintain that the simple summative weight of both levels of reliogiosity are necessary to counter-balance one's ontological alienation. But aside from not being a very interesting conclusion, there still seems to be something wrong with the fact that two very different yet prominent aspects of life in the secular state, i.e., citizenship identity, and religious civil identity, are now explained in essentially the same way: as ideological and/or epistemological strata effecting ideal unification. Given that they are quite different phenomena, even from Marx's standpoint, I believe, and believe Marx believes, that they should be explanatorily differentiated. Against Colleti, it is worth emphasising again that Marx precisely does not picture this 'unbridling' of religion in civil society in the direct terms of alienation; on the contrary, he pictures it as a matter of the positive expression individuation. To that extent, we seem licensed to interpret Marx's religious civil life as in fact itself part of the substance of ontological alienation.

A further consideration can be made on the function of civil religiosity. Marx also writes:

…it follows that even when man proclaims himself an atheist through the mediation of the state, i.e., when he declares the state an atheist, he still remains under the constraints of religion because he acknowledges his atheism only deviously, through a medium. Religion is precisely that: the devious acknowledgement of man, through an intermediary. 26

This characterisation of religion again clearly shows Marx's Feuerbachian terms of reference. What this passage suggests, in combination with the State/Religion homology, is a system of two structurally parallel levels of alienation which are inverted with respect to religious content: i) an ideal unification of citizens located over a total civil individuation, where religious content is located at the State level, i.e., in the discourse of citizenship, and ii) a parallel ideal unification (i.e., from the standpoint of the individual) where religious content is located at the level of Civil Society, i.e., in actual, religious faiths. In this connection, let us consider what the 'atheism' of the State actually amounts to. Secularism in the context of the perfected State (i.e. France and North America) means, besides the separation of State from all directly religious institutions, the citizen's right to the religion of their choice. The citizen has a freedom of religion. In this statement we see the combination of these two levels of Marxist religious content, i.e., at the level of universalising abstractions about the 'citizen', and at the level of individual religious faith itself. This story at least appears consistent itself with Marx's apparent understanding of the expressive function of civil religion, i.e., as something concerned with the substratum rather than the conscious object of alienation.

The problem apparent with this picture, as I see it, concerns how it must be shown to measure up against a Feuerbachian understanding of the function of religion, which it does purport to do. In the first place I am unclear about in what sense the citizen 'declares the state an atheist' besides the evident meanings concerning secularism itself which could attach to that statement. This suggests to me that we would do better to take the assertion as purely rhetorical. The problem, now, however, is that, beyond religion's expressivity of an

25 Ibid, p. 211. 26 Ibid., 218.

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ontological alienation between people, there can be no particular, theological weight associated with one's adoption of a religion. This is both because of the apparent redundancy of levels of religiosity I addressed above, but also because, given that it does not make any real sense to say that 'the State is an atheist', the religiosity of the individual can not be imbued with any particular religious significance in contrast to this atheism, as Marx seems to also want. The reason why the story I began with, concerning an individual Jew in Prussia, makes sense as measured against Marx's account is directly related to the inheritance of Feuerbachian terms, in which religiosity is interpreted as a question of anthrolopological essence. Since, on the one hand, such an essence must be distributed within individual human beings, and since Marx's Civil Society has been dissolved into, and can therefore now presumably be measured in terms of 'individual experience' in the modern sense, we are surely required to be able to make sense of an individual's choice to enjoy religious faith from her subjective horizon. Talk of 'State atheism' or 'State fideity', by contrast, makes no such sense.

But as I have suggested, within that horizon, there is no apparent further need for religious faith per se, on the model Colleti presents, if the function of religiosity is being met by a State ideology. There is, in other words, now a conflict between a subjective (if essentialist) story, and a political, structural story about the function of particular religious faith; in the first case, the object of faith is the conscious object of alienation, in the second case, it is part of a 'material' substratum, or a very ingredient of collective alienation. We can of course maintain that Marx means to retain particular religiosity in just the latter way, against the Feuerbachian implication. If that is so, however, there becomes no explanation for why the individual would choose to pursue religion any more than anything else which might express or define her individuality within the ontological conditions of Civil Society. Even if the original, enabling condition for secularism transports the privilege of religion to the citizen in positive terms, which might provide some initial historical boost to civil religiosity; nonetheless, given my analysis, we would predict that the historical effect of this transportation would be to erode the need for positive faith, in the manner Bauer did apparently predict, and as has approximately taken place in Western Europe today. That North America, not only in the 1840s, but now as well, enjoys religious life so enthusiastically, remains, according to my analysis, a mystery. So to the extent that Marx is correct about the religious function of the secular State, there is no explanation for why there should be any ongoing significance of positive religion in the life of individuals in Civil Society.

If we consider the terms of debate between Marx and Bauer, it is in any case perplexing that Marx would use the phenomenon of individuated religion to argue his point, given that Bauer concedes that religion may indeed continue as a 'purely private affair'. I understand that Marx's mileage from pointing up Bauer's concession consists in the apparent inconsistency of both wishing to deny the place of religion in the state yet admitting its potential ongoing private significance. But I believe Bauer indeed meant what he said in view of his stance on religion. That is to say, he believed that religion might indeed continue as a matter of concern to individuals, but would end up as no more of a concern than, say, stamp collecting; indeed, that as the political conditions in which religion found its place grew ever distant, so too would religious consciousness. So in effect if not in intention Marx must be making a wholly different point with reference to the American case, but one which, according to his own model, is yet without explanation.

iv) Tocqueville's America: Religion and Association

I have argued that the religiosity of civil life under the State, and hence that of Marx's contemporary North America interpreted using Marxist metaphysics, remains unexplained. In the preceding section I argued that Marx's envisioned unity between individual and species-being remains structurally within the limits of a Christo-theologico-politics. I now wish to work towards an explanation of the empirical phenomena of the 'return to religion' and its

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fundamentalism using the apparatus of this theologico-politics. Bu to do this I want to use as a bridge Tocqueville's account of religious life in mid-nineteenth century North America. Insofar as Marx's conclusion on the State's presupposition (rather than annulment) of religion finds empirical backing in the case of North America, we are thereby licensed to inquire whether this North America in fact supports the thesis Marx proposes. Marx notably cites Tocqueville's studies on North America in this connection. Since Tocqueville considers questions of positive religious life extensively in his Democracy in America, this text will be a useful touchstone.

To recap, Marx maintains that the rise of religion in North America is directly associated with the "dissolution of Civil Society into its constituent elements". The radical individuation of civil life then licenses a religiosity as a 'purely private affair', which is true religiosity because the religious feeling becomes a purely internal matter of faith, divested of any political meaning. Hence:

[religion] has become the expression of the separation of man from his community, from himself and from other men, which is what it was originally. It is now only the abstract confession of an individual oddity, of a private whim, a caprice. The continual splintering of religion in North America, for example, already gives it the external form of a purely individual affair. It has been relegated to the level of a private interest and exiled from the real community. 27

and to repeat the quotations from section ii) b), above:

The freedom of egoistic man and the acknowledgement of this freedom is rather the acknowledgement of the unbridled movement of the spiritual and material elements which form the content of his life. Hence man was not freed from religion - he received the freedom of religion.

In a perfected democracy the religious and theological consciousness regards itself as all the more religious and all the more theological since it is apparently without any political significance or earthly aims, an unworldly and spiritual affair…

I already detect some ambiguity in these passages, between a reading of such individuated religious consciousness as a 'whim' and 'caprice' versus such consciousness as having indeed become the very essence of religious faith. Of course, Marx can be taken to mean that, viewed omnisciently, religiosity does assume this capricious appearance, if that simply means that there appears no universal logic governing it. Nonetheless, it must also be asked why the social appearance of North American religiosity could, in the first place, assume a form which so radically differs from what this religiosity purports to be. For if this religiosity has indeed become a 'private affair', a matter of 'private whim', and if this is indeed its proper locus, it is odd that we would, in the first place, have access to such a wealth of displays of this religiosity in public forms, e.g., in the 'splintering' of faiths to which Marx refers. In other words, insofar as this 'unbridling' of 'spiritual and material elements' continues to manifest in particularly overt, public ways, I would suggest that it fails to be adequately explained on the basis of individuation and privacy alone.

Tocqueville's observations on religious life can help provide some answers to these questions. Tocqueville firstly notes the sheer enthusiasm for religion In North America, and that religion is not associated, as it is in Europe, with limitations on freedom. In deference to Marx, there are indeed indications in Tocqueville's treatment of a sourcing of this religiosity in secularism. Upon asking Catholic clergy about the reasons for the dominance of religion in North America, he remarks that "all thought that the main reason for the quiet sway of religion over their country was the complete separation of church and state". (295). Furthermore, in some places this agreement seems to extend to an agreement about this religiosity as an expression of individuation, finding its natural place under this political unleashing of the individual, and as something distributed within individuals alone:

27 Ibid., p. 222.

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When a religion seeks to found its sway only on the longing for immortality equally tormenting every human heart, it can aspire to universality; but when it comes to uniting itself with a government, it must adopt maxims which apply only to certain nations. Therefore, by allying itself with any political power, religion increases its strength over some but forfeits the hope of reigning over all. 28

However, as something which might potentially 'reign over all', we obtain an indication that Tocqueville's conception of the function of this religiosity nonetheless remains distinct from Marx's, i.e., as something which might retain a political content. So Tocqueville's emphasis when enquiring 'why?', where this question is framed with respect to a political or sociological horizon, is almost always upon religiosity as a force which creates bonds or associations between people; amongst other ways, by limiting free expression. The meaning of American religiosity taken thus appears to contradict its meaning determined qua individuation:

…while the law allows American people to do everything there are things which religion prevents them from imagining and forbids them to dare.

Religion, which never intervenes directly in the government of American society, should therefore be considered as the first of their political institutions, for although it did not not give them the taste for liberty, it singularly facilitates their use thereof.

The inhabitants of the United States themselves consider religious beliefs from this angle. I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion-for who can read the secrets of the heart? - but I am sure that they think it necessary to the maintenance of republican institutions. That is not the view of one class or party, among the citizens, but of the whole nation; it is found in all ranks.(my emphasis) 29

Religion, on this reading, forms part of the maintenance of a republican and/or associative ideal. To that extent, religion here would not be merely the interiority of faith, but at least in addition, the exteriority of ritual, the maintenance of real, material bonds between the members of civil society. It is worth noting in particular that here Tocqueville identifies public religion as that which facilitates the use of individualism, rather than, like Marx, the State apparatus itself. This suggests to me, in summary, that the appeal to the American case, insofar as it is supported by research of which Tocqueville's is supposedly exemplary, does not unambiguously support Marx's claim that total individualism thereby purifies religion of all political meaning. Religion, on the contrary, again appears as a supplement, a public artifact which, in its publicness, might condition the possibility (rather than express the quality) of individualism within certain limits, like the State is taken to do by Marx. I then identify Tocqueville's second explanation here as drawing out something which, as I suggested, is implicit in Marx's own descriptions of civil religiosity. This leads us to now better account for the puzzle I presented in the previous section: if civil religiosity in Marx's exemplary case retains even some elements of publicness and political binding in its function and meaning, this has grave implications for Marx's entire political topology. On the one hand, of course, this different reading of the role of civil religiosity helps to account for the redundant duplication of levels of religious levels which I addressed above: it gives civil religiosity a definite function, against Marx's own reading of the same phenomena. On the other hand, if this reading is correct, as I take it to be for that reason, it straightaway challenges the whole model of political alienation Marx employs. For if the alienative, spectral experience of unity under State and citizenship is supposed to release in principle the new atomised individual from all local political bonds, then the fact that the latter are still evidently required must in turn ramify upon Marx's understanding of the State. If Tocqueville is then at least even partly right, as I believe he is, then we require another explanation for the felt need for religion as a public, civil bond within the limits of a secular State. The structure of this State itself must therefore be considered more closely.

v) Christianity and/as Secularisation: The Beyond of the State

28 Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (1848), trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer, Harper Perennial, 1969, p. 297. 29 Ibid., 293.

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By way of beginning to reconfigure the Marx/Bauer debate in terms which take the Judaeo-Christian inheritance as of direct political relevance, I wish now to consider in more detail the secular state, and secularisation per se, in its relation to Christianity. I hope to connect this problematic to that I have considered above, i.e., in the hope of deriving some further explanation for the enthusiasm for religion in the American case, and eventually for contemporary fundamentalism at large. A problematic that is more or less implicit in the Marx/Bauer debate is the process of secularisation as a Christian product, i.e., not merely in sociological or indirect terms, but as a product of the ontolo-theology of Christianity itself. That this is both a pressing horizon in the text, yet one which yet finds inadequate thematisation therein, is first of all evidenced by Marx's equivocation between the terms 'religion' and 'Christianity'. In other words, it is apparent that Christianity itself may have a much larger stake in the question of secularism as well as the post-State politics Marx evisages. So I first of all see at least the potential to finally resolve the problem above concerning the place of religion in civil life if the secular State can be read as having some direct stake in Christianity itself.

The existence of a connection between the secular State and Christianity is hardly denied by either Bauer or Marx. As Young Hegelians, I understand that they have both inherited a minimal, Hegelian understanding of such a State as a genetic onto-theological product of Christianity. In addition, they have inherited the Hegelian teleological understanding of Judaeo-Christianity (i.e., Christianity as teleological fulfilment of Judaism) , as providing some of the key conceptual furnishing for a historical, teleological progress towards secularism and secularity (i.e., secularity as teleological fulfilment of Christianity). As we know, however, for Bauer, the modern secular State may be so related genetically but not structurally to Christianity; for Marx, on the contrary, this State exhibits a general religiosity, but also structures homologous to Christian ones. In what general sense, then, can the modern, secular State be understood as a Christian accomplishment? Some remarks from Feuerbach on the conception of Christianity as furnishing a progressivist and teleological narrative may first be instructive:

The historical progress of religion consists in this: that what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceive to be something human. 30

The course of religious development which has been generally indicated consists specifically in this , that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. 31

and on Christianity in particular:

Chrit is God known personally: Christ, therefore, is the blessed certainty that God is what the soul desires and needs him to be. God, as the object of prayer, is indeed already a human being, since he sympathises with human misery, grants human wishes; but still he is not yet an object to the religious consciousness as a real man. Hence, only Christ is the last wish of religion realised, the mystery of religious feelings solved:- solved however in the language of imagery proper to religion … 32

These observations on Christianity help to account for the general service which Christianity has made to the movement of secularisation. That is, quite aside from Christianity, as 'religion', posing simple resistance to secularism, we see, on the contrary, that secularism can be read as an inner possibility of Christianity itself, since part of the meaning of Christianity is the human reclamation of the divine. It may be safely assumed that Marx accepts this story concerning the function of religion as providing at least a genetic background condition for the establishment of the secular State. It is this very unilinear religious progress, which

30 Feuerbach, op. cit., p. 11. 31 Ibid., p. 26. 32 Ibid., p. 21.

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reaches, like Hegelian progress, its penultimate step in the 'revealed religion' of Christianity, which provides the platform for an 'ultimate' secular politics and modern political democracy. Again, it must be emphasised that these are not particularly tendentious assertions. Aside from oblique endorsement by Marx and Bauer, they have been considerably extrapolated in recent philosophy of religion. A field of enquiry thereafter opens upon in what way certain theological structures have informed certain political structures, taken up by, inter alia, Carl Schmitt.

But I want now to address again, using some further Christological comparisons, both Marx's negative and positive propositions: both that the secular state is structurally (as well as genetically) Christian, but that there is some envisagable post-religious (and hence post-Christian) polity possible. To rehearse again Marx's position, the secular State may be regarded as essentially Christian (over and above religious) because 'Man' in the abstract has simply replaced Christ: 'Man', 'humanity' or the conception of Species-Being, represents the unity of human life in projected, alienated form. On such an understanding, the function of the famous passages of the American Declaration of Indepedence, that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed…with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness" would be to establish in alienated form what is to be reclaimed, in exactly the fashion of that which was partially reclaimed when Christ replaces God. The possibility of the pluralism of the modern State in the form of individuated civil life is in turn licensed by the universalism of this (Christian) elevation of humanity; i.e. it seems to make that pluralism intelligible by containing it within a metaphysics of particular versus universal:

….Christianity here achieves the practical expression of its universal religious significance in that the most disparate outlooks come together in one group in the form of Christianity. Moreover, it demands of no one that he accept Christianity, but simply that he accept religion in general, any religion. The religious consciousness revels in a wealth of religious opposition and religious diversity. 33

But to reiterate, I see no reason, in Marx's own scheme, why this diversity should manifest, as Marx insists, in positive religious forms. It is finally Marx's arguably unique contribution that, since it is, generally speaking, an ideology of 'humanity' itself which alienates humans under the secular State, the gap over alienation can in fact only be closed in ontological terms: in terms of an individual/species ontological fusion, in a sense yet to be determined.

What does such an emancipation entail in practical terms? What would such a polity look like in relation to an orthodox political typology? The answer is not at all clear. Let me preface that consideration by some situating remarks. As I began, this study of Marx on religion must first of all be informed by the fact that we basically do not (yet) live in a Marxian world, if by 'Marxian world' we minimally mean an economically Marxian world, i.e., a post-capitalistic world. I further suggested that my ambition was to make the fact of contemporary fundamentalism and the return to religion possibly intelligible in relation to that failure. But to the extent that Marxian ambitions have failed, it of course remains open to Marx to retort, on this rise of religion, "Of course religion flourishes, because the State and Capital remain yet undefeated, and in some respects, strengthen themselves". Yet given that Marx appears to admit that the secular State is at least a political improvement upon the Christian one, and given that the subsequent democratising evolutions of the secular State in the context of an emergent world order since the 1840s (e.g., in the success of suffrage movements) seem to have addressed themselves to the self-same problem of political alienation, it is arguably the case that Marx would view this political evolution as progress with respect to his goal, if anything could. For I take this program as a political one only; or at least, as having a political dimension which can be assessed in independent terms. So taken, it seems undeniable that from an early Marxist perspective, the world has progressed. So still having not pinned down exactly what this individual/species fusion means in practice, I am nonetheless inclined to take this evolution as providing us with a clue.

33 Marx, op. cit., p. 226.

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Let us then to try to draw out some of the prominent features of the contemporary world order in a way which might allow some reasonable comparisons with the metaphysics Marx attributes to the nineteenth-century secular State. We now witness a gradual erosion of the nation-state as the centre of political and general historical development. Poole notes that the collapse of the nation state that Marx prophesies in the Communist Manifesto is coming true in key respects. He writes:

For the past 200 years, the nation has been the central political focus of the major historical transformations which have taken place. It has provided an organising principle within which most social, cultural and even economic activity went on. Most political projects were formulated in terms of the nation-state, and those which were not, such as socialism, were quickly reformulated in national terms. But the nation no longer enjoys this centrality. The main political, economic and cultural projects of the contemporary world do not involve the nation as an organising principle….Nationalism no longer projects a future. 34

Since the nation-state is, at least implicitly, the arena for Marx's political metaphysics, this erosion appears to explain the apparent evolution in the way in which the individual relates to a polity, and therein something of an evolution in the constitution of subjectivity itself. Since the significance of the modern State has weakened, and while it has, to some extent, been replaced in significance by trans-national political and legal entities, this has resulted in a further spectralisation of political master-concepts; indeed, a move away from 'citizen's rights' toward 'human rights' as the general object of political consciousness. On the other hand, this political development has coincided with cosmopolitan diversification, and a deepening and internalising of the logic of subjectivity and personal authenticity. The latter phenomenon perhaps first found expression in the existentialist movement, but has since been appropriated into the political and economic psychology of mainstream western culture. These twin and apparently complementary developments account for a general intuition, which I believe is correct, that, at least in orthodox political terms, there is less to be alienated from. That is, the interface between the sense of the private individual and the category of 'humanity' and 'the human being' understood in the context of a global political space seems smoother and less alienating than that associated in the immediate and distant past with regional manifestations of political power.

Yet, in another sense, it is also true to say that this situation is indeed more alienating, by virtue precisely of its breadth; while, in addition, the continued existence of any alienation surely counts against the fulfilment of Marxist ambitions. Zizek makes the observation, that the apparent political reconciliations involved in late capitalism have in fact led to less addressable problems of a more spectralised alienation sourced in the very 'depoliticised' constitution of a subjectivity enjoined to 'enjoy' and 'express' itself: a passifying or objectifying of the subject in the very availability of absolute enjoyment. 35 As an account of late capitalism this observaton seems to me quite plausible. But I now wish to suggest that this is all that the early Marxist ambition can in practice amount to; indeed, that the very formulation of the terms of success presages this actual success and actual failure as mutually reinforcing movements. As I suggested above, I believe that since we are witnessing the erosion of sigificance of the State, and that this is precisely Marx's criterion for 'human emancipation', we have good reason to understand what Marx's ontological fusion potentially means in terms of contemporary developments. The meaning of such fusion is domesticated if we can then take it to mean that the broadening of political categories creates an ever smoother interface between public and private space as first (poorly) instigated by the modern State. But as suggested, that is not the same thing, and does not appear to logically herald the same thing, as a perfect fusion between public and private space. Why, then, should there be any ongoing sense of alienation, indeed, in some senses, greater alienation, as this interface nevertheless becomes ever smoother? I suggest that this is because the manner in which Marx inherits the problem of alienation in Feuerbachian terms renders his solution to that problem (like, arguably, Feuerbach's also) within the general mode of an alienative logic; and that 34 Poole, Ross, Nation and Identity, Routledge, London, 1999., p. 151.35 Zizek, Slavoj, How To Read Lacan, Granta Books, London, p. 23.

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indeed, Marx's radicalising of that program in some respects makes his project more theological than Feuerbach's. This inheritance will show that Marx's solution space also remains structurally religious, like Bauer's, and that, to that extent, it remains structurally alienative; by which I mean, it could not be what it is unless an alienation structured its possibility.

It is first worth comparing the principle of ontological fusion between individual and species with some themes of Christianity, which seem to illustrate a similar concern. I consider here the concepts of 'kenosis' and 'pleroma' to make this comparison. 'Kenosis', or 'self-emptying', may be understood as "Jesus' renunciation of the state of glory with the Father in order to share human life and death". 36 In other words, kenosis involves a partial renunciation of divinity, and therein, a first reconciliation between divinity and the human life. 'Pleroma', on the other hand, meaning 'fullness', is used for the completion of Christ and the Church by one another; or, in other words, the sharing and dissemination of Christ's divinity within a community. These two Christological concepts suggest two obvious political parallels. Firstly, early modernity would seem to have had a primarily kenotic concern insofar as it sought to replace direct political divinity with 'Man'; on the other hand, late modernity, presaged by Marx, has had a pleromatic concern, directly illustrated by Marx's ambition, namely to reconcile spectralised 'Man' as a political category (and thus, indirectly, subjective, isolated 'man') with actual men. Such a pleromatic concern, as least understood as a structural parallel, seems indeed to be expressed in the ambition to 'resume' the abstract citizen into oneself and to 'become' a species-being. I make these comparisons as a first way to consider the Christo-theological basis of Marx's political ambition.

If anything, it seems to me that Marx's strengthening of Feurbach's program into an ontological one renders it more theological than Feuerbach's itself. For we can note, first of all, and as suggested by the above Christological principles, it is part of the theological meaning of Christian alienation (aside from its omniscient, Feuerbachian determination) that the Christian feels alienated from God qua God, i.e., that they wish combination with God. In at least this respect, Marx's wish to directly combine with species-being instantiates a structure more reflective of Christianity than Feuerbach's own. In addition, Marx's ambition shares a literal perplexity with the positively Christian one - again unlike Feuerbach's epistemological principle of cognition of species-being, which in itself is quite coherent. It must now be considered how this ambition for species-individual unity interacts with a generalised alienative logic. For I believe that there is a deep connection between the very constitution of alienation and the ambition itself. We can, by way of introduction, consider that it is in the first place odd that if, as Feuerbach says, "what by an earlier religion was regarded as objective, is now recognised as subjective; that is, what was formerly contemplated and worshipped as God is now perceive to be something human", he would not be also circumspect about the possibility that his own telos, i.e., awareness of species-being, might not also be subsequently shown to be yet another elusive objectivity. I introduce the problem in this way only to situate Marx as having an even greater stake, in his own way, in the mechanism of what, as far as I can discern, is a permanently alienative historical movement.

To cognise species-being as a highest principle, let us say, in the manner of Feuerbach, is indeed to make a projection of something which is not oneself , as Marx correctly recognised. I am also willing to assume that the individual may experience life in the form of a communal unity, i.e., in terms a community of citizens in the State, according to this Bauerian/Feuerbachian understanding. I am of course aware that this involves an 'alienation' in some ontological sense, if that means, provisionally, no more than that there is a difference between the individual and some universal structure. But we must, nonetheless, ask whether it might not indeed be this very difference which conditions the very possibility of such an experience of unity with all others in the first instance. Of course, within the limits of what is supposedly a 'false consciousness' (or at least, a consciousness which stands to be supplanted by some truer consciousness) this is a correct assertion. Yet this is nonetheless

36 Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, ed. W. R. F. Browning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.

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regarded by Marx as an inferior experience to the one he eventually envisages. Unlike this one, however, is own 'truer' one involves an ontological union which, on the surface, is impossible to understand. But even if we were to be charitable, and understand it to mean no more than that 'we enjoy a feeling of unity with all others' without any political coersion, it is still not clear that the very terms with which he pictures such an accomplishment would themselves be recoverable if such a hierachical political life were altogether removed. In other words, it is not clear that one could 'become a species-being in ones empirical life', if that means enjoy a feeling of unity with all others, in some at least analagous way as one 'falsely' does as a political citizen, if the entire idea of that which citizenship represents in this system were removed - which it surely must according to his ambition. For any experience of a 'unity with all others' would seem precisely to depend upon the abstraction, i.e., the putative alienation, by which this 'all' can be phenomenally constituted for the individual at all. In other words, the overcoming of alienation seems to be pictured in terms of categories only available to 'alienation' itself; which suggests that the very notions of this 'alienation' as of its 'overcoming' must be put into question.

I do not doubt, on the other hand, that some cognitive formulation of species-being, as of citizenship, may not come to be experienced as directly alienating, as it has done for Marx. On the contrary, it seems to me, and as the empirical situation I considered above also seems to confirm, that it is part of the logic of making a projection, of positing a master-concept by which to understand one's relation to the whole, that this projection sunders, i.e., it alienates itself. This appears to happen regardless of how ostensibly answerable the universal category becomes to the nature of the individual. And as I noted, in its recent depoliticising movements, this alienation has rendered itself less corrigible precisely because of an apparent weakening of the ontology of the 'political' as a real exterior to the individual. Nevertheless, what we can say is that the movement as a political one (and it surely remains 'political' even as a depoliticising) tends to ontologise itself. That is to say, abstracting gestures, even appeals to 'humanity' and 'human rights', tend to manifest in terms of some external political formations, such as international political and juridical bodies (not to mention the ontology of techno-science itself, e.g., that of 'MySpace' - which is precisely not my space). If this is correct, it suggests that the locus within which a so-called 'recovery' from alienation is determined to make sense can in practice only manifest as a non-terminal iterative movement of alienations. How are we to understand, then, the appeal to the perfected unity, or pleroma of Marx's ambition? I would suggest that the very idea of this pleroma is constituted in the same movement as that of a general, alienative logic; indeed, that it is in the very striving after such a unity, in view of some alienative principle, that precisely sustains its non-terminal movement. Another way to picture this movement, in terms of its intimate relation to Christianity, is as a system of representations. For just as the very first representation of Christianity, i.e., that of the Christ, expresses what is sought but in projected, that is to say, represented form, so this understanding appears to determine this ongoing reconciliation between particular and universal as a representational relation. In order for what is desired, i.e., finite and infinite reconciliation, to be conceivable at all, it requires that a universal be represented which must in principle be distinct from the particular in whose name it speaks. This is why the desire for absolute unity between individual and species-being remains a theological gesture par excellence: it is the mark of literal impossibility. This, then, is why I maintain that Marx's ambition in its structure also remains a profoundly Christo-theoleogical one. Of course this does not threaten the possibility, which we might take as having in fact eventuated, of a post-religious politics in the mundane sense; however, as I consider below, I also believe that this post-religious politics has developed its own symptomatology in view of its structural Christo-theological determination.

The conclusion I have reached here seems to throw into doubt the very possibility of the deployment of at least this notion of 'alienation' as the basis for a trajectory by which a Christo-theologico-politics might genetically exceed itself. I have read Marx on this issue in the first place in roughly Althusserian terms. I mean this in the sense that Marx's inheritance from Feuerbach, and partial manipulation of Feuerbach's concepts, has not removed Marx's

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program from the general limits of a Hegelian logic, if that means the limits of a system regulated by particular/universal relations. On the other hand, I have also attempted a critical response to the understanding of those limits, i.e., in which the very teleological determination of alienative difference as in service to resolution might be questioned. This can also be expressed by saying that the genetic and teleological application of this alienative logic, in service to political recovery, at once also determines the structural space for what such recovery could possibly mean. The result, again, is that this structural space is in fact informed by alienation as its essential principle.

(vi) Secularism, Reactivity and Fundamentalism

The viable conclusion we now have is that, not only is the modern, secular State 'religious' in the senses considered by Marx; but if it is religious in those senses, then Marx's utopian ontological synthesis between individual and species-being remains, if anything, more so. Indeed, Marx's telos is the logical (if literally impossible) completion of the movement which begins with secularism; its genetic subsequence only confirms its structural complicity therein. As Bernstein suggests, this utopianism thereby seeks exit from the political altogether, insofar as the political is concerned with determinate relations between individuals. It is then "complicit with the metaphysical anti-political utopianism of philosophy from Plato to contemporary liberalism", 37 though under an ontological assimilation exactly complementary to liberalism. The question becomes now how to put these two pieces of the puzzle together: a) from section iv), the existence of religion as a civil bond, and as then political in this sense, and b) from section v), the topology of the Christian polity (whether modern or post-nationalist) as structured by alienative relations. In particular, I would like to consider how the phenomenon of contemporary religious fundamentalism informs and is informed by this answer.

A way to picture the accomplishment of a Christian polity, in the most abstract terms, is as a universal system of authentic individuals, who are able both to preserve their own uniqueness and yet also respect infinitely every other's uniqueness. In the maxim, "Do unto others…", this is well if naively illustrated: it implies a levelled exchangeability of what are nonetheless unique existences (and is thereby itself the possibility of pluralism, as well as religious pluralism, in the modern State). There are two complementary ways of viewing this as a political accomplishment. On the one hand, there are those, like Vattimo and Patocka, who consider that Christianity is something which might not have fully 'worked itself out', in the sense of both accomplishment and exhaustion; in other words, that as perpetuated, Christianity amounts, in Vattimo's words, to "metaphysical weakening" 38: a 'hollowing out' of strongly alienative structures to allow, presumably, fuller ethical engagements between individuals. On the other hand, there is another strand of thought which would view Christianity as metaphysically totalitarian in essence: strong alienative structures are replaced by more spectralised and ideal ones, which are nonetheless in principle just as alienative as the former. Clearly I incline to the latter view, though part of the very space of this question is how it can be that the same metaphysics at once invites opposite ethical conclusions: its complexity is lost if this is not fully appreciated.

I nonetheless seek some understanding of the retention of the religious in political life in a way which is not informed, or at least not only informed, by Christian metaphysics. I will begin by saying that, owing to my sympathies, which I have tried to defend in relation to some contemporary political evidence, I view the process of Christianisation/secularisation (whether terminating in Marxist or liberal political systematics - which are in some deep respects the same) as a process of suppression of religiosity (which is of course not the same as removal of religiosity) - where 'religiosity' of course means not positive religion (which Bauer's secular State will already have dealt with), but rather some more primordial

37 Bernstein, J. M. Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question, p. 95.38 Vattimo, op. cit. p. 91.

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metaphysical principle. I have then first of all argued for this suppression from the principle that a logic of alienation is temporally perpetual; so if the goal is nonetheless always pictured as removal of alienation in real time, some key insight must be being missed. To be more precise, to the extent that this alienation is associated with religiosity as falsity (and at least in its filiation, Marx's 'alienation' was always in the first place religious in flavour) this new insight into the deeper logic of alienation must reconfigure our attitude towards that religiosity. This religiosity might now be pictured, in most general terms, as a kind of relation (or perhaps, non-relation, or the possibility of all relation) to the other qua other. I indeed believe that such a Levinasian kind of formulation is requisite, at least as a matter of conceptually isolating what we are concerned with. We have hitherto always been implicitly concerned with this question: the very idea of alienation, and recovery therefrom, seems to me to be an idea implanted upon a principle of alterity, a way of making metaphysical sense of alterity in its strangeness. I take this to be the case whether or not it concerns groups or concrete individuals (since an alienative logic involves one by involving the other). As such, I see both the metaphysical gesture of Christian politics and the direct, secularising reaction against it as reactions against that relation. The spectral constitution of political unity, e.g., the 'rights of man', etc, is of course a means of suppressing difference as alterity, i.e., exactly as Marx pictures it, as an overcoming in ideal and representational terms. But, as I take the conclusion from the previous section, a real solution is misconstrued if this alterity is taken, in the spirit of the Hegelian tradition (with which, at least in this respect, Marxism is entirely consonant) as having a merely teleological meaning, i.e. in the service of totality as recovery from difference. Rather, I think all I have considered so far points to the need to reread alienation, and the meaning of political recovery, in terms which preserve political difference, insofar as that is now associated with some more primordial religious idea of alterity - and in a stronger sense than that licensed by the liberal discourse of (conventional) rights, tolerance and pluralism - as something of ongoing political relevance.

The more difficult question then becomes: what is the concrete manifestation of a political difference which would be more answerable to religiosity as a principle of difference; and hopefully, thereby, more edifying as a political culture? For surely the answer, both conceptually and normatively, is not to be a reactionary one back into positive religious culture. But the question nonetheless brings me to the need to read the positive phenomenon of American religiosity, as pictured by Tocqueville, as furnishing the germ of an answer. My first assumption is then that there remains a structural connection between the theologico-political structure of Christianisation/secularisation and American religiosity as a positive phenomenon; though a different one to that proposed by Marx. Specifically, I want to argue that we must read this religiosity as a reaction against something, rather than a fulfilment of something made possible by the State. If it is such a reaction, but is so as a visible, external, and social phenomenon of Tocqueville's America, I think we must read it as something distinct both from i) Marx's treatment of it as merely a dominant mode of individualism in the sense of the interiority of faith, and from ii) Colleti's apparent treatment of it as something preserving of unity at a merely cognitive level. Indeed, the exteriority of this religiosity and its link to the American tradition of association precludes both readings. If one dominant practical function of this religiosity, as Tocqueville seems to imply, is to maintain bonds between individuals, and therein to limit individual atomisation at the civil level, then I assume that there is a reason for this sourced in the structure of the State itself. But we can no longer claim that this religious culture is fulfilling something about the State, for, as I have previously argued, if it were a fulfillment, it could be so only in the Bauerian mode of its own erasure towards secularity. I would rather say, pre-theoretically: a civil society, or whatever it is that constitutes concrete human relations, appears simply unable to cope with absolute unity and absolute difference (i.e., as social atomicity) insofar as that structure is promoted by the movement of secularisation. I think we can interpret some of Tocqueville's remarks in a way that would license such an answer. In particular, that there remains some priority of ritual, and of immediate, external bonds between people generated by ritual, in those phenomena Tocqueville recounts suggests to me that this America has at least one important dimension which is not associated with an interiorising of faith. We can picture this as

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reaction in the following way: if the the machine of alienation, as of recovery therefrom, only licenses more alienation, what other option do actual communities have than to reconstitute solidary societies in the mode of actual external practices? Given that the 'sense' of alienation (if I may put it this way) remains in itself a response to some actual ontology, it seems plausible to imagine that the means of exiting the loop of alienation would take such a form. We might then read Tocqueville's hedging: "I do not know if all Americans have faith in their religion- for who can read the secrets of the heart? (my emphasis)", as then instead disclosive of some positive necessity, i.e., a necessity precisely to exceed the understanding of faith as an interiority and as an interiorising movement, precisely to the extent that this very late Christian conception of faith is inexorably linked to the very possibility of secularisation.

Theory within the contemporary return to religion sets about, amongst other purposes, to postulate a mechanism which is able to explain how secularity and secularism now coexist with contemporary fundamentalism and the new 'war of religions'; in other words, what political ontology is that it licenses, and has licensed, this kind of duality. It has been less my purpose here to offer a full explanation of the mechanism of this duality than to offer a critique of "On the Jewish Question" which points to an arrangement of phenomena in a more philosophical space which would show the necessity of some such mechanism. It is not yet clear to me that any such suggested mechanism has been entirely convincing. But I can consider one suggestion, offered by Derrida, which may hopefully further elucidate what general form such a mechanism must assume, and to tie together several of the themes I have considered. One way Derrida pictures such a mechanism is in terms of 'immunity' and 'auto-immunity'. Firstly noting two significant focii, that of the 'unscathed' and of 'faith', in the phenomenon of religion, 'immunity' and 'immunisation' in this context might be taken as a process of sacrifice towards the unscathedness of the State, which would mean, more concretely, a sacrificing of the body of the people (i.e., taken to mean simply, a sacrificing - whether it be figural or literal - of the bodily, concrete life of a human community) to create the modern State (and post-State) as the sacrality of the human being:

…the dead machine yet more than living, spectral fantasy of the dead as the principal of life and of survival <sur-vie>. This mechanical principle is apparenty very simple: life has absolute value only if it is worth more than life. And hence only in so far as it mourns, becoming itself in the labour of infinite mourning, in the indemnification of a spectrality without limit…Thus, respect of life in the discourses of religion as such concerns "human life" only in so far as it bears witness, in some manner, to the infinite transcendence of that which is worth more than it (divinity, sacrosanctness, the law)…The dignity of human life can only subsist beyond the present living being. Whence, transcendence, fetishism and spectrality; whence the religiosity of religion. 39

On the other hand, the modern, democratic State itself is indemnified by way of sacrifice as it adjusts and accommodates itself to the people; i.e., insofar as it is ensured (within the limits of this logic) that concrete, individual life and community is not an exterior or actively viral moment to the State's own 'truth'. But what, then, of 'auto-immunity'? Derrida further writes:

The law of the unscathed…both requires and excludes sacrifice, which is to say, the indemnification of the unscathed, the price of immunity, . Hence: auto-immunity and the sacrifice of of sacrifice. 40

Thus auto-immunity, as the excess of sacrifice, while exhibiting the very same tendency of immunity, is that which cannot be incorporated into an immunology in an economic way, and which expresses the violence and indeed the evil implicit in that logic in its most overt form. This principle is used by Derrida to account for contemporary fundamentalism; which is not to say, fundamentalism in all of its forms, which are surely as multifarious as religion itself, but at least, philosophically speaking, to some inner meaning, which might at least provide a model for how the contemporary world stands. This new 'auto-immune' violence:

39 Derrida, Jacques, "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone"(1996), Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidar, Routledge, London, 2002. , p. 87. 40 Ibid, p. 88.

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reverts (according to the return, the resource, the repristination and the law of internal and autoimmune reactivity we are trying to formalise here) as closely as possible to the body proper and to the premachinal living being…41

[It] claims, in the name of "religion", to allow the living community to rediscover its roots, its place, its body and its idiom intact (unscathed, safe, pure, proper). It spreads death and unleashes self-destruction in a desperate (auto-immune) gesture that attacks the blood of its own body…42

This, then, following the very logic of immunity, is apparently what becomes of such reactivity in the contemporary age. If we associate this auto-immune reaction with fundamentalism, we see that it claims another route to indemnification than the spectral one, hyperbolised in the opposite direction. It takes place only 'in the name of religion', which is to say, in a certain sense, and just as much as the infinite interiorising of faith, it is the suppression of the religious. Or again, if the Bauerian absolute dematerialising of the religious suppresses religion in its way, the absolute corporealising or opening of the religious into the world would equally do so. Insofar as religion is supposed to be associated with ethics and ethical response, this analysis would at least begin to account for the general 'enlightened' reaction to religious violence, the reaction of 'how can they do that in the name of religion?' What is then curious is that there would then be a sense in which the very extremes of the appearance of religion also function, in a certain sense, to cancel the religious out.

It should be asked, however, whether Derrida, under the label 'auto-immunity', provides us with a valid characterisation of fundamentalism; or we should at least make sure that it points us in the right direction to such a characterisation. It is noted by Nielson, firstly, that "there is widespread consensus among social scientists and historians of religion researching fundamentalism that it is first and foremost a defensive reaction, a negative response to what is seen as the specter of modernity". 43 It indeed seems that on the horizon of such a sociology of religion, the return to religion can indeed only appear as such an external reactivity, as my own analysis of Tocqueville's work also assumed. Nonetheless, even if such general analyses in terms of 'reactivity' are phenomenally consistent with that offered by Derrida (as representative of recent philosophy of religion), it would of course be the further philosophical project to show in what way this 'specter' is reactivity itself, i.e., reactivity within an alienative and immuno-logic - as Derrida's mechanism suggests. On the other hand, we see that fundamentalism, on Derrida's analysis, is precisely not the 'defensive' reaction; it is rather the abysmal and openly virulent one, though of course still undertaken in the name of an unscathing, but in which the scathing is at the same time evident and most public. But there are further parallels between Derrida's auto-immunity and the explicit themes of fundamentalism which suggest to me that the mechanism is a reasonably valid one, at least as a picturing of what is at stake. In particular, the literalness associated with fundamentalism, the desire to make absolutely literal and supposedly pure religious interpretations, as well as the literalness of a brand of violence (at least in its Islamic manifestation), its making-literal as a 'de-spectering', is consistent with Derrida's understanding of fundamentalism; both in terms of the attitude towards the body, and in terms of a re-racination to be achieved in directly anti-Hegelian fashion.

What, then, should we take to be the relation between the religiosity of Tocqueville's mid-nineteenth century America and contemporary fundamentalism? Of course, on the one hand that it would be historically, sociologically and philosophically inadequate to conflate the two. Nielson notes that the term 'fundamentalism' was coined in 1920, a coinage made to reflect, again, the supposed reaction toward the threats felt to that more insulated world of American Protestantism (e.g., from the influx of Catholics, and other groups) in which Tocqeville had travelled. Nonetheless, clearly the analysis I have made of (some of)

41 Ibid., p. 88. 42 Ibid., p. 89. 43 Niels C. Nielsen, Jr., Fundamentalism, Mythos and World Religions, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, p. 3.

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Tocqueville's observations on religious life bears a structural resemblance to the generally accepted analyses of fundamentalism; that is to say, minimally, analyses in terms of 'reactivity'. Further, since the general conditions which I suggested to have lead to the enthusiasm for positive religious life in nineteenth-century America have been now ever expanded into an international, secular, democratic order, it would seem to be a very promising analysis to take the religiosity of Tocqueville's America as the genetic germ for the phenomena of contemporary fundamentalism; that is, to relate the proportional severity of that fundamentalism (in relation to nineteenth-century America) to the proportional strength and breadth of secularising forces. Indeed, it would appear that the very emphasis upon ritual in Tocqueville's America is what might serve to connect the two periods and their phenomena: it is specifically religion in the form of ritual which, when hyperbolised to become the central principle of religious life, lends itself to the satisfaction of a re-visceralising and de-spectering of the sense of bond in social life, and potential reconstitution of that bond outside of an alienative logic.

vii) Conclusion: Jew and Christian

I believe that the foregoing analysis points to the re-visceralising of social bonds, and this exterior aspect of religiosity per se, as paradoxically both the possibility of escape from the alienative/immuno-logic which I have tried to describe, but also, of course, its implicit danger. So long as this secularisation/Christianisation associated with that logic continues its singular yet universalising control, the reactivity of external and positive religion, while in a sense an ontologically necessary complement to modernity (according to the immunological picture), also no more lends itself to an edifying conception or example of how to live. This tension between the two seems to be only on a one-way escalative path. Moreover, the problem becomes that any empirical analysis inevitably tends to present the fundamentalist gesture as monstrous and aberrant in relation to the secular and the modern, rather than, as I have argued here, something of its inner possibility. What is missing at least overtly in this text of Derrida is any political direction in a normative sense; that is to say, a positive normative sense, not merely that 'ethical' sense which has been associated with his name. But I assume that it is part of the responsibility in addressing the return to religion to at least address this issue in positive political terms; by which I of course do not mean an entire political scientific program, but at least the outline of a political direction. Of course I entirely understand the relative reticence amongst some, for example Critchley, to do this; it is part of an acknowledgement of the metaphysical hold that a broad Hegelianism still has over at least the West to also acknowledge the limitations, conceptual and practical, upon any positive exit from a Christian/secular political metaphysics.

Nonetheless, as I broached briefly at the beginning of the previous section, I am not convinced that the path of 'negative theology', or a broad Levinasianism, constitutes an adequate response to the current political world and the 'war of religions'. While I think Levinasianism is a very strong ontology by which to picture what is at stake concerning the 'religious' and the 'ethical' taken as primitives, I remain unconvinced that a fiduciality of infinite answerability to the other furnishes in itself the resources to make a normative response to the theologico-political as it has concerned me with reference to the Marx/Bauer debate. This is because, in particular, I see what Derrida describes as this "fiduciary "link"" preceding "all determinate community, all positive religion", and linking "pure singularities prior to any social or political determination" as indeed the product of the Christianising/secularising movement, insofar as that movement is the possibility of religious interiority. In the absence of a stronger argument for that assertion, I note only that the anthropo-philosophical possibility of conceiving the religious in that way has roughly coincided with fundamentalism as its absolute antithesis. It is then possible to see the negativity of the Levinasian stance (or rather, the programming of Levinas in normative terms) as apologium for the determinate arrangements and determinate infrastructures which are driving on fundamentalism in blithe indifference to the possibilities of negative theology.

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But this is another way of saying that we may be instead required, by way of an adequate normative response, to make something, create something which might directly challenge the representational, and/or general/particular paradigm, within which alienative logic moves. This in turn is another way of acknowledging that the fundamentalist concern with praxis is at least in itself not misguided; such a concern is the possibility of the end of alienation. But what is a possible model of praxis which could also exit the limits of auto-immunity and reactivity as I have described them?

Mightn't we now circle back to the 'Jewish Question' and ask ourselves if the Jewish model itself, as manifested in nineteenth-century Prussia, actually offers the beginning of an answer to that question? Or that the modifier 'Jewish' in that question might finally be shown to function as both question and answer? Such a response would, in other words, take us back before the Bauer/Marx debate even begins; that is to say, it would take us back before the shared presupposition of that debate, namely the aberrance and backwardness of the Jew in relation to the 'modern' (whether Bauer's or Marx's version) is even installed. Indeed, if we examine the very constitution of traditional Jewish life, we see that it ostensibly occupies the ground of a religiosity which is both stably ritualistic and externalistic, and concerned in Marx's phrase with "practical need" - therefore, at least in that, sense, immediately political - and yet fiduciary. But isn't something like this exactly what we need? On the other hand, isn’t the Christian-philosophical distrust of that culture tied exactly to those qualities? By taking this stance, of course I do not mean to suggest that we all rush out to find a Rabbi. Rather, I believe that the Jewish case in its outline represents something of a reconciliation between tendencies which, in the Christian case, have only managed to manifest in virological/immunological terms. To elaborate this point, we might finally consider a certain strand in the work of Buber, concerning the national identity of the Jews with reference to Zionism:

Isreal will not fit into the two categories most frequently invoked in attempts at classification: "nation" and "creed". One criterion serves to distinguish a nation from a creed. Nations experience history as nations. With individuals as such experience is not history. In creeds, on the other hand, salient experiences are undergone by individuals, and, in their purest and sublime form, these experiences are what we call "revelation." When such individuals communicate their experiences to the masses, and their tidings cause groups to form, a creed comes into being. Thus nations and creeds differ in the same way as history and revelation. Only in one instance do they coincide. Israel receives its decisive religious experience as a people; it is not the prophet alone but the community as such that is involved. The community of Israel experiences history and revelation as one phenomenon, history as revelation and revelation as history. In the hour of its experience of faith the group becomes a people. Only as a people can it hear what it is destined to hear. The unity of nationality and faith which constitutes the uniqueness of Isreal is our destiny, not only in the empirical sense of the word; here humanity is touched by the divine. 44

This passage illustrates all the major themes in Judaism which pose an alternative model to that witnessed, on the one hand, in the modern, secular State, on the other hand, in the privacy and individuality of faith or 'revelation'; which, quite aside from being Bauer's neutral, enlightened conception of the proper place of religiosity, is surely itself a genetic and structural product of Christianity and the kenotic Christ. That is to say, at least in these terms, I would picture the alternative model to Judaism as just as singular, just as unique, albeit a model whose genius has been to simultaneousy strengthen and weaken itself - strengthen itself by way of weakening itself - in dissimulating its strength over the globe. Unlike those works, like I and Thou, of an existential and more Levinasian turn, Buber's later Zionist message presents the very essence, i.e., as a first philosophical principle, of the link between religion and politics: politics as religion and religion as politics. But from all that that has been said, we are surely allowed to now read into that link more than its Jewish singularity; or rather, in that very singularity a salient message is surely disclosed. By conceiving divinity in terms of the 'creed', and therefore in terms of something which can never entirely exit the space of externality, we are permitted to substantially rework the opposition between the

44 Buber, Martin, "The Jew in the World" (1934), The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1997, p. 455.

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internal and external which Christian metaphysics controls. The 'divinity of the creed' manifests a simultaneous distance and presence, or distance as presence, i.e., in the sense of the link between members of this creed as transcendently constituted; a principle which seems not to fall within the polarising and alienative logic which conceives of distance in the mode of crisis and loss: that logic which dictates to Marx the necessity of a 'human emancipation' by way of species/individual fusion. But this is also a concrete example, i.e., the Jewish people, at least according to Buber, exemplify this principle in better or worse terms. This example, then, and specifically the example of Israel, could be taken as something which could positively inform what we make of both the success and failure - failure by success and success by failure - of Marx's political metaphysics. I hope I have succeeded in showing that the Jewish Question is indeed a theological problem, and deserves a theological answer; to this extent, we must return to Bauer and to Bauer's religious opposition between Christianity and Judaism as in fact disclosive of the terrain of its political question. In reference to this section, we see that the prospects and failings of the modern state of Israel, in their way, encode also the prospects and failings of a new potential relation between religion and politics at large: whether that State will indeed, in Tocqueville's phrase, finally manage to "harmonise heaven with earth", or will, alternatively, slip into the outright pre-modern theocratic barbarism of Bauer's Prussia. This question could not be of greater importance.

Works Cited

Bauer, Bruno, "The Jewish Problem: Introduction", The Young Hegelians, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983.

Bernstein, J. M. , "Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question".

Buber, Martin, "The Jew in the World" (1934), The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1997.

Cohen, G. A., "Forces and Relations of Production".

Derrida, Jacques, "Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of "Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone"(1996), Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidar, Routledge, London, 2002.

Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1881), trans. George Eliot, Dover Publications, Mineola, 2008.

Gramsci, Antonio, "Structure and Superstructure", An Antonio Gramsci Reader: Selected Writings, 1916-1935, ed. David Forgacs, Schocken Books, New York, 1988.

Marx, Karl, "On the Jewish Question" (1843), Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone & Gregor Benton, ed. Lucio Colleti, Penguin Books, 1974.

Niels C. Nielsen, Jr., Fundamentalism, Mythos and World Religions, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993.

Oxford Dictionary of the Bible, ed. W. R. F. Browning, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996.

Poole, Ross, Nation and Identity, Routledge, London, 1999.

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Pulzer, Peter G. J., Jews and the German State: the political history of a minority, 1848-1933, Blackwell, 1992.

Tocqueville, Alexis de, Democracy in America (1848), trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer, Harper Perennial, 1969.

Vattimo, Gianni, After Christianity, trans. Luca D'Isanto, Columbia University Press, 2002.

Zizek, Slavoj, How To Read Lacan, Granta Books, London, 2006.

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