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wendy brown
Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long
as he does not revolve about himself.... The immediate task of
philosophy... is to unmask human self-alienation in its secular form
now that it has been unmasked in its sacred form.
Marx, Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique of
Hegels Philosophy of Right
Secular Predicaments
Three contemporary predicaments have wreaked havoc with the
modernist and especially twentieth-century Western expectation
that secularism would be the future for ever more parts of the
world and would remain a permanent feature of the West.
There is, first, the phenomenon of enormous planetary slums
where, to paraphrase Mike Davis, the politics of proletarian revolution have been replaced by the politics of the holy ghost. Huge enclaves of poor people find sanctuary in religion todayevangelical
Christianity in Latin America, North America, and southern Africa; populist Islam in Asia and North Africa; and a range of local
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detail. There are also many more insights emerging from recent rethinking of the secular and the sacred, ranging from Asads pluralization of formations of the secular, to Masuzawas brilliant genealogy of the nineteenth century orientalist production of world
religions, to Mahmoods insistence that discourses of secularism
do not simply stipulate religions proper location but its definition
and meanings.8 But the four critiques I have identified here open a
reengagement with Marxs thinking about the religiosity of capitalism, a reengagement undertaken in order to draw out Marxs
thought in consideration of the predicaments with which I began:
Why has a resurgence of religion become coextensive with the unprecedented intensification of globalized capitalism? What is the
religiosity inherent in capitalism itself? What sacralizations, and
not only desacralizations, does capitalism elicit and perform, and
what religious impulses does it incite?
Marx
A secular prejudice is prevalent in readings of Marx that cast him
either as relentlessly seculara hater of religion, a social scientist
bent on replacing all mystery with science, a theorist of capitals
secularizing poweror as a messianic thinker whose Messiah was
communism. Such accounts gloss over Marxs profound intellectual formation through his engagement with critiques of religion.
They also eschew the extent to which his early rethinking of Hegel,
Feuerbach, and the Young Hegelians on the relation of religion to
sensuous experience, consciousness, history, and the state produces
heuristics and frames that persist across his work, sometimes in
shadowy and sometimes more overt form.
Another way of putting this: While Marx was no scholar of religion, thought religion was bunk, and was convinced by his studies
of the English working class that urbanization might be the death
knell of formal religious adherence, he did not believe that religion
is automatically displaced by reason and science, or that capitalism
inherently destroys religious belief. Rather, Marx famously develops the Feuerbachian insight that religion is an expression of human alienation, a projection of human capacities onto an imagi-
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nary Other, a projection that itself signals our unfreedom yet also
limns our inchoate or unconscious awareness of its resolution.9
Marx goes further, of course, combining Feuerbachs insight into
religions generic wellspring with a Hegelian appreciation of the
developmental historical logic of religions, thus seeking to specify
the relation between human life form and religious form.
Already this means that, for Marx, the desacralizing force of
capital (the force he depicts magnificently in the early pages of the
Manifesto) could neither bring an end to religious modalities of
consciousness nor eradicate the conditions for religion itself. This
is the idea we must hold: forces and events of desacralization are
not equivalent to secularism or the end of religion, and desacralization itself is not a linear or unidirectional historical process. Rather, the desacralization of one set of relations or processes in a particular time and place may be rejoined or cross-cut by sacralization
of something else. Thus does Marx speak of money as a visible
divinity (not originating with capitalism but ascending in power
during its reign), a sacralization Jesus also worried about when,
in Matthew, he personified money as Mammon and set it up as a
rival worship object to God.10 Or consider Michael Taussigs account of the emergent devil theology arising in response to the proletarianization of Columbian peasants.11 Or anthropologist Alan
Klimas tracking of numerology cults that sprang up in Bangkok
after neoliberalization devastated the agrarian economy in the late
1980s and the Asian monetary crisis destroyed the urban one in
the 1990s.12 Phillip Goodchild, more broadly, theorizes a range of
secular pieties that take shape under capitalism, from price to
freedom.13
If desacralization is not a one-way process for Marx and is not
equivalent to vanquishing religion, there is no reason for religion
and religious consciousness to disappear in capitalist societies.
Moreover, Marxs Feuerbachian understanding of the basis of religion is at war with the idea that its staying power depends on a
trick of the exploiters or rests in consolation of the poor. Again,
Marx embraced Feuerbachs fundamental conviction that religion
is an inherent emanation of all alienated and unfree social conditions. This emanation differs in its source and sustenance from
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and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more
wonderful than table-turning ever was. (m, 320)
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In this essay, Marx also discerns the Christianity of the bourgeois state in its division of human existence and representation
into two orders, state and economy, which Marx identifies respectively with heaven and earth, celestial and terrestrial life. The
state is otherworldly insofar as it regards all its subjects as free and
equal, but this regard requires abstracting them from real earthly
life, just as the Christian image of souls in heaven does. The political state, in relation to civil society, is just as spiritual as is heaven
in relation to earth. . . . [H]ere man is the imaginary member of
an imaginary sovereignty, divested of his real, individual life, and
infused with an unreal universality (m, 34).
For Marx, these points taken together reveal the political state as
Christian, and political consciousness as religious, even when both
are thoroughly secularized. The state is composed of mans alienated powers, and it figures a Christian political imaginary that abstracts from our everyday lives. The state iterates a Christian theology of consciousness and legitimates itself through a belief structure
that depends upon constituting itself as the source of sovereignty
and making every man an imaginary sovereign. Thus does Marx
identify both state and individual sovereignty as resting on a religious emanation and distortion; political democracy is founded in a
Christian theological stance in which freedom and sovereignty are
posited in an ideal way against their material negation.
Conclusion
It is thus important to underscore the difference between ideology and religion in Marxs thought, a difference between, on the
one hand, reflection of the world from the perspective of the ruling class where subordination and stratification are naturalized
or erased, and, on the other, alienation and unfreedom across the
board where mans alienated powers are attributed to and conferred upon sovereign Others. If Marx provided less elaboration
of each and less calibration of their relation than we might wish,
the distinction itself remains indispensable for understanding his
work and perhaps for understanding the relation of religion and
capital today. Marx never surrenders the Feuerbachian notion that
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This article is the original English version of Wie skular ist Marx
Kapital? in Nach Marx: Philosophie, Kritik, Praxis, ed. Daniel
Loick and Rahel Jaeggi (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013).
Notes
1. Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, New Left Review 26 (MarchApril
2004): 94.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter
Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1967), 28.
3. See Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), hereafter cited as fs; William Connolly, Why I
Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1999); Peter Danchin (with Saba Mahmood), The Politics of Religious Freedom: Contested Genealogies, special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 1 (forthcoming, 2014); Hent de Vries and
Lawrence E. Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in
a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006);
Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham
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