The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology by Simon Critchley

Author:Simon Critchley [Critchley, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2012-02-01T05:00:00+00:00

It is not enough for us to reject conditions and institutions; we have to reject ourselves. “Do not kill others, only yourself”: such will be the maxim of those who accept the challenge to create their own chaos in order to discover their most authentic and precious inner being and to become mystically one with the world.117

Although talk of authenticity and “precious inner being” leaves me somewhat cold, what I find significant here is the connection between the idea of self-annihilation and anarchism. The condition of possibility for a life of cooperation and solidarity with others is a subjective transformation, a self-killing that renounces the killing of others. For Landauer, it is not a matter of anarchism participating in the usual party politics, systemic violence, and cold rationalism of the state. It is, rather, a question of individuals breaking with the state’s authority and uniting together in new forms of life. Talk of inward colonization gives a new twist to Cohn’s idea of the Movement of the Free Spirit as an “invisible empire.” What is at stake here is the creation of new forms of life at a distance from the order of the state—which is the order of visibility—and cultivating largely invisible commonalities, what Landauer calls anarchy’s “dark deep dream.”118

This killing of the self in an ecstatic mystical experience is close to what Bataille called “sovereignty,” and which for him was constantly linked with his experimentation with different forms of small-scale, communal group collaborations, particularly in the 1930s and ’40s, from Contre Attaque, the Collège de Sociologie and the Collège Socratique, through to the more mysterious Acéphale.119

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