The Faith of the Faithless by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-06-06T04:00:00+00:00

SOME PERHAPSES: INSURRECTION AND THE RISK

OF ABSTRACTION

We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anti-capitalist experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic, or dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly childish ways, we now think we know better than to try to bring heaven crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias. To that extent, despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are all political realists; indeed, most of us are passive nihilists and cynics. This is why we still require a belief in something like original sin, namely, that there is something ontologically defective about what it means to be human. As I suggested above, the Judeo-Christian conception of original sin finds its modern analogues in Freud’s variation on the Schopenhauerian disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger’s ideas of facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives Schmitt’s defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship, which has seduced significant sectors of the left hungry for what they see as realpolitik. Without the conviction that the human condition is essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of justifying our disappointment, and nothing gives us a greater thrill than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars of our prison cell by reading a little John Gray. Gray provides a very persuasive Darwinian variant on the idea of original sin: it is the theory of evolution that explains the fact that we are homo rapiens. Nothing can be done about it. Humanity is a plague.

It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s, in which an echo of utopian Millenarian movements like the Free Spirit could be heard—such as the Situationist International—led to various forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and, in extreme cases, disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property, or in communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive institution of the family—or indeed R.D. Laing’s experimental communal asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the sane—seem like distant whimsical cultural memories captured in dog-eared, yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor quality film. As a child of punk, economic collapse, and the widespread social violence in the United Kingdom in the late 1970s, it is a world that I have always struggled to understand. Perhaps such communal experiments tried to be too pure and were overfull of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were, in a word, too moralistic to ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were doomed because of what we might call a politics of abstraction, in the sense of being overly attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal denial of reality. Perhaps, indeed.

At their most extreme—say in the activities of the Weather Underground, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s—the moral certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally linked to redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to bring about the end of virtue.

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