The Domestic, Moral and Political Economies of Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland: What Rough Beast? by Kieran Keohane & Carmen Kuhling

Author:Kieran Keohane & Carmen Kuhling [Keohane, Kieran & Kuhling, Carmen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ireland, Europe, Social Science, History, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781526102201
Google: hW25DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2015-11-01T08:17:15+00:00

Towards alternative theologies

Presently we are in a period of intense liminality similar to the period of the 1920s and 1930s. Already we have a transcendental principle and totalitarian power, a power not so much this time around embodied in the person of il Duce, der Furher or the Great Leader, but the dictatorial decisionism of the Market – ‘let the Market decide’ – which is everywhere articulated in anthropomorphic terms as a mythic power – ‘the Markets reacted badly today to news of renewed protests in Greece’; ‘the further stimulus package approved by Congress has pleased the Markets’. The first commandment in the political theology of neoliberal Market fundamentalism is monotheism: ‘There Is No Alternative.’ As it is questioned, the truth of the Market is proclaimed even more sternly. This is the political theology of authoritarian neoliberalism. To begin to imagine an alternative to authoritarian neoliberalism and the dictatorship of the Markets we look back to an alternative to Schmitt’s project represented by the work of James Joyce.

Schmitt and Joyce, contemporaries, writing from the heartland of Europe in the inter-war years, exemplify two paradigmatically alternative responses to the crisis of modernity. Schmitt stands for the re-assertion of Apollonian logo-centrism – naming, defining, clarifying and simplifying the political cultural field: restoring primacy of authority to the decisionism of the sovereign whose word is Law. But Apollo’s law-giving logos, while it clarifies and simplifies like blazing sunlight, can become an anti-life political theology, just as neoliberalism obliterates the society it purports to serve. In Joyce’s work we see the antithesis of Schmitt’s. Against the singular logos Joyce resurrects a more fundamental muthos; a Dionysian gynocentric celebration of Zoë, singularity dissolved by the chthonic forces of indestructible life. Whereas Schmitt seeks to end the flux and slippage of discussion through determination by the logos, Joyce stands for the over-determination of muthos; he destabilizes the logos, disassembling, re-combining and generating polysemy; restoring and celebrating the irreducible plurality and inexhaustible fecundity of the social.8

The antinomy between Schmitt and Joyce exemplifies problems addressed by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy and throughout his work: the need to transcend the rationalism and nihilism of modern civilization by relocating the primordial, mythological and political-anthropological substratum of a human will to power, the source of vital energy that would enable a transvaluation of values and the emergence of ‘beyond man’.9 Nietzsche’s central thesis is ‘the antithesis of the Dionysian and Apollonian – translated into the realm of metaphysics; history itself as the development of this idea’ (Nietzsche, in Kaufmann, 1968: 395). Schmitt and Joyce exemplify history developing this idea in terms of antitheses, alternatives: the Apollonian (ultimately simple) and the Dionysian (always complex and multiple). Socrates, for Nietzsche, is the original synthesis: a ‘beyond man’ who takes one ‘in contact with those extreme points . . . where he stares into the unfathomable. When to his dismay he here sees how logic coils around itself at these limits and finally bites its own tail’ (1995: 54). Socrates surpasses himself through reason and thereby gives birth to new art.

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