Jane Austen Faction

Revolt and wage war on all insufferable things!

Obituary: Bob Gould – leftist cultural institution and organic intellectual

“The mode of being of the new intellectuals can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, 'permanent persuader' and not just a simple orator...” (Antonio Gramsci)

Bob Gould, proprietor of the renowned Gould’s Book Arcade in Newtown, Sydney, has died at age 74. The following are some reflections on some of my personal encounters with Bob at his iconic bookstore.

I still remember walking into Gould’s Book Arcade for the first time in mid-2000. I had beheld it frightfully from a distance for about six months from several angles: moving past on the 428 bus along King Street in Newtown, a quick glance in as I trudged past on foot, encircling it in conversation with my new friends in the political economy program at Sydney University. For a wide-eyed eighteen year-old who had just arrived from interstate to Sydney, Gould’s Book Arcade came to stand in for everything frightening and romantic about this new city – big and crowded, rather chaotic, very historical, always intriguing and alluring, and pretty dusty. To cross that line from the pavement off King’s Street and into the bookshop was for me both a symbolic and physical act; Gould’s would become for this perpetually curious bibliophile and political novice an icon of everything that I would come to love about living in Sydney.

From my frequent visits to Gould’s since that time, I came to know its proprietor Bob Gould a little better. In conversation he was relentlessly witty and critical, often adding historical nuance and injecting a little bit of political grunt to any discussion about the state of affairs in Australia and globally. Having achieved some visibility as a leftist bookstore operator, activist and commentator over a long time, Bob was like the embodiment of those small victories and big defeats experienced in the social struggles that preceded my generation. Yet unlike many others of his milieu, he neither traded in the politics of defeat and compromise that presently characterises much of the left (e.g. the Australian Labor Party, about which Bob had plenty to say!), nor that flaccid form of cynicism masquerading as critique that is pervasive amongst those who have been so scarred by defeat that they are intent on dousing the fires of those who might pick up the mantle anew. For the young political activists and radicals who have experienced the torrent of Bob’s political discourse, as I have on many occasions, the experience can only be described as a pedagogical one.

Yet there was also another side to Bob that I had the privilege to know. In 2009, I embarked on a PhD in Cultural Studies at the neighbouring University of Sydney with a project on the relationship between religious institutions and the hegemonic liberal, market-oriented culture. The revelation of my research interests to Bob ensured that many of my Saturday nights – and sometimes both Friday and Saturday nights – would be spent in long discussions with the veteran about the history and politics of religion. Often they would begin with a recount of his experiences and upbringing in the tradition of Irish-Catholicism, an institution which like the Labor Party, Bob saw himself estranged from but never completely disavowed. I remember late one wet and cold Saturday night in 2010 when he had saved a long op-ed from the Sydney Morning Herald that appraised the politics of Pope Benedict XVI, insisting on reading it to me in its entirety and interspersing the paragraphs with his own critical commentary; I didn’t have the guts to interrupt the master to let him know that I was in urgent need of the restroom. He shared my interest in radical political theology and the history of Anabaptism as a counter-establishment movement, as well as a critical appreciation for the recent articulation of Marxism and Catholicism by cultural critic Terry Eagleton, with the latter speaking to Bob’s own experiences and cultural history, I sensed. In another instance, I had managed to track down a copy of Eagleton’s early works The Body as Language and New Left Church (when he was still Terence rather than Terry) on the second level of Gould’s massive (and sometimes precarious) stacks, only to be sent up again when trying to pay so that I could retrieve another copy for the old bookseller himself.

Bob passed away on the 22 May 2011, news I only heard about the following morning from a young friend (who incidentally and perhaps fittingly, is himself a Catholic and Marxist). I must admit I have not yet come to terms with the loss of this man, a cultural institution, an organic intellectual and teacher who longed for a world more just. What will Sydney be like without Bob Gould? I haven’t been around for that long, but I have no doubt that it will be a little less radical, a little less committed and a whole lot less interesting.

Réquiem ætérnam dona ei Dómine, et lux perpétua lúceat ei. Requiéscat in pace, my dear Comrade.

(originally posted here)

Undead

"Braaaaaaaains..."

Hello friends and allies. I have recieved a few kind notes and emails from some of you wondering if I'm ok, still alive, still sane, etc. I'm very grateful for your kind thoughts and concern.

I am indeed still alive and ok, though my sanity has always been ambiguous. I'm just at a crucial juncture in my life going "monastic" on my PhD this year. As well, Roland Boer has organised a panel on 'Capital as Religion' at the upcoming 'Capital Against Capitalism: New Marxist Research' conference where I'll be presenting a paper on Liberation Theology in retrospect and prospect. So all this has kept me well occupied and off the streets (and internet).


I will however be back soon with some new posts. Three I have in mind in particular, and that have been floating around in my head in line with what I have been writing, are:



* The last instalment of a series of posts on Ernesto Laclau's latest work on the dynamics of populism beyond the fashionable politics of 'pure immanence'



* The rehabilitation of Sartre's later work (i.e. Search for Method, Critique of Dialectical Reason) within an non-humanist rubric, especially pertaining to his work on praxis, the practico-inert, organisations and institutions, which I think have a lot to offer in terms of how to think through the relation of social structures with everyday practices



* And possibly the most ambitious (and least well-formed) of all, the possibilities for a re-configuration, re-articulation and re-deployment of concepts from Radical Orthodoxy's earlier work (i.e. Milbank's Theology and Social Theory and Pickstock's After Writing) for progressive politics(!). This follows my long-held conviction that much of the diagnosis RO is valuable and pertinent for a nominalistic age (of pure immanence!)... but that their political prognosis, esp. in the form of 'Red Toryism, constitutes a spectacular of crash-landing (on a smaller scale but homologous to Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt's BIG-ASS crash landing in the 1930s).



Looking forward to chatting with you all soon.

CFP: Capital Against Capitalism: a conference of new Marxist research

Capital Against Capitalism

a conference of new Marxist research

Saturday 25 June 2011

Central Sydney


It seems significant, and hardly coincidental, that the impasse that politics fell into after the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the eclipse of Marx and the research project of historical materialism. Social democracy, various left-wing melancholies and/ or the embrace of dead political forms has stood-in for these absent names. Returning to Marx, to Capital and to the various traditions tied-up with these names may present a way to cut across this three-fold deadlock.

We invite papers responding to contemporary politics from a range of historical materialist perspectives. We want to bring together the theoretical discussions and debates occurring in Capital reading groups, PhD study circles, and Marxist political organisations and networks. Our conjuncture – its manifold crisis – urges new analyses, new strategic orientations and the engagement of activists and academics alike on these questions.


Conference structure

The conference will involve two plenaries and four workshops. There will be space for 12 workshop papers about, or connected to, the conference theme. We are happy to receive proposals for themed workshops of three papers, with the caveat that we may need to alter suggested panels or reject individual papers to ensure overall timetabling.

In our opening plenary, Rick Kuhn will overview the argument of his new book, with Tom Bramble, Labor's conflict: big business, workers and the politics of class (Cambridge University Press, 2010). Geoff Robinson and Tad Tietze will act as respondents. The final session will be a keynote address from Nicole Pepperell on the key ideas of her PhD thesis and forthcoming book on Marx’s Capital (to be published by Brill, as part of the Historical Materialism Book Series, later this year).

In all sessions there will be time for contributions from conference participants. To maximise discussion at the conference, each first plenary and workshop speaker will have 15 minutes to overview their paper.

Proposals for papers

Proposals for papers should be submitted by 15 March 2011 to Elizabeth Humphrys (lizhumphrys [at] me.com) and Jonathon Collerson (jonathoncollerson [at] gmail.com). Authors should also indicate whether they would be submitting a written paper for refereeing. Papers should be 1500, and no longer than 1800 words. Refereed conference papers will be published, potentially also as a special issue of an academic journal. We reserve the right to reject papers if we have too many to fill the allocated slots, or they are deemed unsuitable, but we will do our best to accommodate everyone.

Key Dates

1 February - Call for papers
15 March - Abstracts due
1 May - Papers due for refereeing; conference timetable released
1 June - Feedback to authors
25 June - Conference

Other details

The conference will be held in Central Sydney, in easy reach of public transport and in an accessible location. There will be a small conference fee, of approximately $20-$30 on average, to cover the cost of lunches and travel costs for the interstate speakers. Full details to follow. If you require childcare please contact us to discuss this by 1 June 2011. The conference organisers will not be arranging billeting, but please contact us if you are unable to arrange your own accommodation option. As the conference has no outside funding source, we will be unable to cover travel costs for workshop presenters.

Facebook:
Facebook event page


Elizabeth Humphrys and Jonathon Collerson (obo the organising group)

Can pure immanence break bricks (2)? Ernesto Laclau fights Slavoj Zizek

(...continued from HERE)




Having traversed Laclau's critique of Hardt and Negri, I now turn to Laclau's beef with Zizek. Here I have been on record as a sympathiser of both, but on balance I think I'd fall on Laclau's side, if only because the latter has actually produced a viable analytic + alternative for progressives. Zizek is extremely insightful about a great many things, but I've grown tired of reading/waiting for him to outline (systematically) a project or even an analytic frame beyond the usual bricolage of anecdotes and criticisms of others. Yet as Roland Boer has recently intimated, perhaps it's because at heart Zizek remains an idealist (in the strictest Hegelian sense), and as such is torn between multiple demands (Hegel/Marx/Lacan /German Idealism/etc) and unable to cohere anything programmatic. As Laclau (2005) notes, this means that Zizek's analysis inevitably comes across as entirely eclectic.

Laclau points to one such tension in Zizek's work: the incompatible ontologies of psychoanalysis and the Freudian discovery of the unconscious on the one hand, and on the other to the predominantly Hegelian philosophy of history (with some Marxism). Laclau is brutal in his summation of Zizek's style: "His favourite method is to try to establish superficial homologies." (235)

For Laclau, "the coherence of capitalism as a social formation cannot be derived from the mere logical analysis of the contradictions implicit in the commodity form, for the social effectivity of capitalism depends on its relation to a heterogeneous outside that it can control through unstable power relations, but which cannot be derived from its own endogenous logic." In other words, what Laclau is claiming is that capitalist domination does not arrive in a self-determined and readymade form straight from the commodity form, but rather as the result of a hegemonic construction, "so that its centrality derives, like anything else in society, from an overdetermination of heterogeneous elements." (236) So 'capitalism' can come in many and various forms depending on the contextual hegemonic formation: from US-style cowboy capitalism to Chinese state capitalism to Indonesian crony capitalism to Saudi petro-feudal-fundamentalist-capitalism.

Here, Laclau persists with the notion of a war of position in the Gramscian sense, i.e. any dominant societal form is a result of a conjunctural articulation of different elements under a leading element that stands as the terrain on which the rest operate (e.g. US Neoliberal Capitalism as leading element enables Nationalism + Religious fundamentalism + Libertarianism + Ersatz postmodernism, etc. while not being reducible to any and in many instances, each is utterly incommensurable with the others). Laclau rejects Zizek's assumption that capitalist domination could be derived from the analysis of its mere form for "if we were confronted with a homogeneous, self-developing logic [then] any kind of resistance would be utterly useless, at least until that logic developed its own internal contradictions" (236) Put crudely, if capitalist domination was so complete as to not require political articulations and hegemonic contestation, then we'll just have to wait for the next big internal problem within capitalist production - i.e. economic crisis - before any change can happen. And for Laclau, even when such a crisis does occur, there is no guarantee that a communist revolution will take place. (Fascism, for example, does seem to occur at least as often)

So for Laclau, it is here that we reach the crux of the inconsistencies in Zizek's approach:

"On the one hand, he is committed to a theory of the full revolutionary act that would operate in its own name, without being invested in any object outside itself. On the other hand, the capitalist system, as the dominating, underlying mechanism, is the reality with which the emancipatory act has to break. The conclusion from both premises is that there is no valid emancipatory struggle except one that is fully and directly anticapitalist. In [Zizek's] words: 'I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle.'"

The problem, according to Laclau, is this: Zizek gives no indication of what an anti-capitalist struggle might be! For given that Zizek quickly dismisses multicultural, anti-sexist and anti-racist struggles as not being directly anti-capitalist, AND dimisses the traditional aims of the Left such as the demands for higher wages, for industrial democracy, for control of the labour process, for a progressive distribution of income, etc, what does Zizek hope for?

Laclau's barbed response to this question is given in the sub-title of this section... 'Zizek: waiting for the Martians'

(to be continued...)

A study on the elementary structure of fantasy; or why the Daily Telegraph is so crap

It is needless to say that the need for identity and meaning is most intense in periods of increased uncertainty, social instability and conflict. As Stavrakakis (1999) points out from a Lacanian frame, when elements of The Real (i.e. the unsymbolisable flux of contingencies and nature) in the form of economic crisis, natural disasters, or even plain old economic pressures subvert the fantasmatic stability of our symbolically construed ‘reality’, quasi-utopian visions or social myths (i.e. fantasies) are often generated to ‘fill the gap’ that emerges due to the confusion, antagonisms and anxieties in society. Since the symbolic order (i.e. our "worldviews") is never able to fully cover over the contingencies of The Real, fantasies arise as the ‘necessary illusions’ that allow all people to live with this inconsistency. In other words, the function of fantasies is to give reality the consistency required for some semblance of stability and meaningfulness.


In view of persistent uncertainty, the worldviews mobilized (especially by political leaders) may either be articulated as a 'call to arms' for a total and universal victory over circumstances – i.e. a promise of absolute mastery of the totality of The Real – or alternatively it may be a call to ‘return to the past’ – i.e. a promise of returning to a romanticized time when things were not the way they are now (e.g. see Tea Party movement in the USA). Both of these fantasmatic routes are aimed toward an object of desire the possession of which will eliminate all insecurities and problems.


However, this fantasmatic symbolisation produces its own remainder: "there is always a certain particularity remaining outside the universal schema. It is to the existence of this evil agent, which can be easily localised, that all persisting disorder is attributed. The elimination of disorder depends then on the elimination of this group." (Stavrakakis, 1999) In other words, such political discourses need to point to a group of people that stand in the way of the majority's consummation with the object of desire - the reason why we don't have it yet. For example, blaming 'the Jew' in early-20th century Europe for all the problems, hardships and anxieties - "They steal our jobs"; "They rape our women"; "They have all our money" ... In short, "they are enjoying at our expense". Other popular culprits are single-mums and unemployed who "steal our taxpayers money and enjoy doing nothing."


This can be formalised into a structure of fantasy; if we take $= the subject(s) who lacks the object(s) of desire and a= the object(s) of desire, then fantasy can be seen as the space that occupies the gap between the two:

$ [fantasy] a

Now keep this structure in mind as I line up the following headlines from Sydney's most popular tabloid newspaper - The Daily Telegraph. See if you can spot the structure of fantasy in each of these headlines:

• Uni student $20bn hex on taxpayer

• 'Pro' students get government subsidised loans for life
  

• Aussies will be the minority in 15 years
  

• Fury as migrant workers keep jobs
  

• Call to revoke rapists' citizenship
  

• [Emissions Trading Scheme] blamed for 'up to 64pc' power hike

Can pure immanence break bricks? Ernesto Laclau against Hardt and Negri

I am a big fan of the work of Ernesto Laclau. I'm aware that he has endured the accusation from Deleuzean-post-anarchists like Richard J.F. Day for being a proto-"Leninist" and paradoxically, from Zizek for being a "liberal". However, I still find his work, especially his use of analytical concepts - e.g. discourse, hegemony, empty and floating signifiers, nodal points, etc. - the most consistent and powerful explanatory framework amongst the contemporary 'antihumanist left'. In my mind, Laclau and his progenies (e.g. Oliver Marchart, Yannis Stavrakakis, Jason Glynos and David Howarth, etc) still offer the most promising development of Lacan's theories for critical explanation in contemporary politics.

Of Laclau's many works, I have found his most recent book - On Populist Reason (2005) - to be the most fruitful and developed articulation of his theory. In it, he posits in detail his theory of radical social change, as well as spending some time outlining his differences from adjacent theorists. Since I have often been asked about why I find Deleuze and Guattari's work and their main offspring - Hardt and Negri's Empire trilogy - interesting but unconvincing, I thought I'd draw on Laclau's criticism of the latter that captures much of what I hold.

If I had to sum up why I find the Deleuze and Guattari + Hardt and Negri account fantastic (in the sense that it is thrilling but/because it reads like a science-fiction fantasy), it is because its insistence on pure immanence (rhizomes, flows, deterritorialisation, etc) is unable to adequately explain how and why social movements and institutions arise, gain strength and fade away. By eschewing the operation of hegemony on the political terrain, D&G/H&N presuppose an innate desire to rebel against the social order. At best, the latter describe different global antagonisms will one day give rise to a global "Multitude" to topple the "Empire":

"According to Empire, [the unity of "the multitude"] does not involve any kind of political mediation. Because it is only natural, according to [Hardt and Negri], that the oppressed revolt, their unity is simply the expression of a spontaneous tendency to converge. Unity, as a gift from heaven, occupies the place [Laclau and Mouffe] attribute to hegemonic articulation." (Laclau, 2005: 240)

Given this disposition towards pure immanence in the emergence of the "multitude", H&N (following D&G) eschew institutional forms and the 'overdetermination' of certain political factions in political struggle. For example, while Laclau might argue that the banner of "the environment" may be strategically appropriate as a 'universalised particular' which heterogenous struggles (e.g. workers, third world, farmers) march under in particular contexts to further their causes, H&N reject any strategic articulation under any banner. In other words, they reject "strategies" for "tactics" (cf. Michel de Certeau):

"[In the past], the socialist tradition advocated a total subordination of tactics to strategy as a result of its vision of history as based in the operation of necessary laws that made long-term predictions possible and its notion of social agents as constituted around rigid class positions. Today, however, because the future is seen as open to contingent variations, and the heterogeneity of social actors is increasingly recognized, the relation of strategy and tactics is reversed: strategies are, necessarily, more short term, and the autonomy of tactical interventions has increased.

This, however, has led Hardt and Negri to an extreme - and, in my view, mistaken - conclusion: strategy disappears totally, while unconnected tactical interventions become the only game in town. Again: only punctual vertical struggles are recognized as objects of a militant engagement, while their articulation is left to God (or to Nature). In other words, we have the complete eclipse of politics. The approach of Hardt and Negri evinces the worst limitations of the Italian operaismo of the 1960s." (Laclau, 2005: 242)

H&N's argument from 'pure immanence' draws from a distinctly Spinozan-Deleuzian ontology, which offers little by way of coherent explanations of how social antagonisms emerge from particular circumstances. What is postulated from this position is rather a vague Spinozan-Deleuzian posture of "being against", i.e. people's natural and healthy propensity to revolt. Being against what? According to Laclau, H&N's presupposition of natural revolt as an underground fiat has several serious consequences for how political theory and praxis is conceived:

"First, they tend to oversimplify the tendencies towards unity operating within the multitude. They have a somewhat triumphalist and exaggeratedly optimistic vision of these tendencies, although one can never decide, on the basis of their account, whether they are virtual or actual.

Secondly, and for the same reason, they tend to reduce the importance of the confrontations taking place within Empire.

But thirdly, and most importantly, they are unable to give any coherent account of the nature of the break that would lead from Empire to the power of the multitude. I am not, of course, talking about a futurological description of the revolutionary break, but about something more basic: what does a revolutionary break consist of? I would argue that this explanatory failure - which has serious consequences for social-political analysis - is not peculiar to Empire, but is inherent in any radical, immanentist approach, whose explanations are always uneasily suspended in an undecided terrain between break and continuity."

(to be continued...)

Paulo Freire on "being critical"

"The point of view of pure knowing is contradictory: there can exist only the point of view of engaged knowing. This implies that knowledge and action are only two abstract sides of an original and concrete relation."

(Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1969: 308)

Q. The concept of critical consciousness is, of course, central to your theory. There is a "critical thinking" movement in the U.S. in which students learn a kind of informal logic and acquire the ability to analyze and synthesize. Unlike your own context-specific critical pedagogies, however, such training is often directed toward atomistic dissecting of texts or arguments and is not linked dialectically to "action." How can we influence this movement to include your concept of praxis as reflection plus action?

A. I think the best way for us to have dialogue with these people is not just to try to teach them about that but to discuss with them how it is not even possible to get their own results without praxis—that is, without action plus reflection. Theoretically, it is not difficult to understand, for example, that becoming critical in the process of reading reality does not come about through a mere intellectual exercise. Through an intellectual exercise, I can increase and improve my power of speaking, for example, so that I speak fluently, beautifully even; but what makes me critical, what gives me knowledge, what teaches me how to read reality, how to reread reality is my insertion in the struggles in order to intervene in reality. It is praxis; it is practice. On the other hand, there is also another danger, which is to think that just practice or just action is enough to teach someone how to become critical. For me, the only way (which is already the critical way of doing things) is to experience the tension between theory and praxis without denying one or the other. Thus, I am never interested just in theory, just in praxis, but in the relationships between them. This is what makes me more critical.

(from interview 'History, Praxis, and Change: Paulo Freire and the Politics of Literacy' with G.A. Olsen, Journal of Advanced Composition, 2006)

Love wasn't meant to be easy

"In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market." (Erich Fromm)

In an era of much cheap + vulgar sentimentality, I (like many others) have often hungered for a thicker account of love, a type of "militant love" one might call it.

I've recently read two short (old-skool) books on love that have been both satisfying and provocative on this count: Paul Tillich's Love, Power and Justice (1954) and Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956). These two books approach the paradoxes of love from different angles, trying to tease out its ontological status and practical applications. Some of the adjacent concepts dealt with are desire, passion, rejection, force, power and justice... both in roughly 80 pages or so.

Two short antidotes to the insipid nonsense on sale in Hollywood culture - love at bargain basement prices. Time to turn off the crappy TV and read some good books kids!

"Is love an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, which to experience is a matter of chance, something that one "falls into" if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.

Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless numbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about love -yet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.

[The] attitude - that nothing is easier than to love - has continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. if this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do better - or they would give up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love - to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.

The first step is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering. (Fromm, The Art of Loving)

And I love this line from Tillich (which has a nice Badiou-eque/Jacobin feel to it):

Love, through compulsory power, must destroy what is against love. But love cannot destroy those who act against love. Even when destroying their work it does not destroy them. It tries to save and fulfil them by destroying in them what is against love." (Tillich, Love, Power and Justice)

Happy Christmas (for all the people)!

"…the priest reads the Song of Mary from Luke's Gospel. The text tells of Mary's surprise that God has chosen to identify with the weak and the poor. Mary sings: "[God] has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away" (Luke 1:51-53). After hearing this song, the people… now see her not as one who stands on the moon but in the dust and dirt with other poor people; she does not wear a crown but an old hat to shield her head from the sun; she has no rings and her hands are rough; she does not wear a purple and gold robe but old clothes. The people exclaim that Mary is more at home in the slum than in the cathedral."

from Daniel L. Migliore, Called to Freedom (1980)

"One seldom recognizes the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder"

"One seldom recognizes the devil when he has his hand on your shoulder."

(Albert Speer)

Christmas Island shipwreck kills asylum seekers

So who is homo sacer? The term is borrowed from the Roman period: homo sacer (i.e. sacred man, living dead) means the life that can be killed with impunity, but not sacrificed: "The sacred man is the one whom the people have judged on account of a crime. It is not permitted to sacrifice this man, yet he who kills him will not be condemned for homicide". The person is thus outside both divine law and juridical law. They exist in a kind of 'no man's land' or margins between the spaces of law. These figures can thus be disappeared or banished or tortured with greater speed and less public consciousness or concern than ever before.

(Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, 1995)

How NOT to conduct a theology-psychology correlation: the case of Paul C. Vitz

A few months ago, I engaged in a dialgoue with a moderately prominent "Christian psychologist" in Australia that arose out of the latter's critical review of my unfolding, long-term project on Neo-Calvinism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Amongst his more interesting points was a passionate appeal to one Paul C. Vitz, author of Sigmund Freud's Christian unconscious and articles such as The Father Almighty, Maker of Male & Female and Support from Psychology for the Fatherhood of God. So off I went to track down and/or borrow these for the education and edification of my soul.

No one can fault Vitz for lack of sincerity or effort in research. His book on Freud for example is weighed with interesting biographical details about the life of Freud while the latter articles survey a wide gamut of contemporary pop-psychology (though few indicative feminist texts). However, one can easily fault Vitz for his approaches to argumentation, approaches that are commonly deployed in Christian literature either for defensive and sometimes offensive purposes. So prevalent are these approaches that I've nearly become allergic to certain publishers and paranoid about certain keywords in titles, a phobic reaction that I wish I didn't have.

So what are these lame modes of argumentation?

Let's take Vitz's earlier work on Freud (I will leave his even lamer attempts at defending the Fatherhood/Masculinity of God via proto-Jungian categories for others ppl to rip). Vitz's biographical sketch of the father of psychoanalysis paints a picture of the Christian milieu of Freud's upbringing, including interesting facts about the latter's early childhood relationship with his Catholic nanny, his rejection of his father, his sexual attractions and encounters, etc. The sum total of Vitz's argument in this book is (surprise surprise!) how Freud projects his own prejudices and psychodynamics onto his theory and (even bigger surprise surprise!) how his entire project is built on a repression of his good ol' childhood Christianity.

Now while it's not wrong to conjecture that Freud's upbringing did affect his work, it does seem a little lame to predicate an entire argument that attempts to hamstring psychoanalytic theory and validate a conservative form of Christianity by appeal to biography. This approach to argumentation deploys two well-known fallacies: firstly, the circumstantial ad hominem, which works as follows:

A makes a claim about X

B attacks A's circumstances/upbringing/life

Therefore, X is false

This one is very popular with some Christian authors who, lacking an angle on an adversary, will go for the latter's circumstances. This is tempting for everyone to indulge in. For example, "hoho... look at Christopher Hitchens, he's an alchoholic. Therefore, his accusations against theism must be false." Yes, Hitchens' brand of atheism is pathetic, but such a conclusion cannot be deduced from the fact that he likes a little bit of Johnny Walker. Likewise, a theology-psychology dialogue cannot be productive if it is immediately undermined by attacking the circumstances of proponents on either side. E.g. "You are a Christian, therefore anything you say is a result of trauma and is purely fantasmatic" or (in John Milbank syle) "You need psychology because you don't have God/Christianity/the Church. Therefore, psychology is your replacement religion."

And a second fallacy that is deployed is the false choice dilemma, which goes something like this:

Either X or Y is true

X is taken to be false

Therefore Y is true

This one is a favourite of so-called 'intelligent design' writers and often goes something like this: "Oh, you see! There are missing links in the evolutionary chain. Therefore, there must be an intelligent designer." Likewise in Vitz's approach, one might humbly suggest that the contradictions of Freudian psychoanalysis might not entirely be owing to a repressed "purer" form lying underneath - i.e. a childhood Christianity. Contradictions in theology and/or psychoanalytical theory are inevitable parts of their symbolic structure as living and dynamic discourses in contingent circumstances. Any good theology-psychology correlation must surely move beyond construing the other as a competitor in a zero-sum game of "it's either you or me", as if the best that either discourse could do is kill the other one off and eat their carcass. (e.g. such a view is held by Philip Blond of Radical Orthodoxy and Red Tory fame, who has argues that "psychoanalysis is an essentially atheistic discourse” which carries with it the “idea that the resolution of the interior life of consciousness is still fractured by an a priori transcendental that has no interest or desire for human reconciliation or elevation" - see Clayton Crockett's response)

So in sum, I have found Vitz's book and articles to represent the most embaressing aspects of Christian publishing and a waste of 8 hours of my life. But heck, at least I got a (therapeutic) blog post out of it.