The Iridescent Shadows of the Cross: What the New Left Got Wrong About Universalism
Lapo Lappin
Differens Magazine, autumn 24
On a rooftop in Rome, the drone of the scirocco buzzing in the background, the dome of Saint Peter’s shimmering in the distance, Louis Althusser sits with his characteristic scarf and dishevelled hair. The date is April 1980, only months before Althusser strangled his wife and spent the remaining decade of his life in mental institutions. The interviewer on Italian public television asks him why he became a communist. Althusser answers in perfect matter-of-fact Italian: Sono diventato comunista perché ero cattolico. ‘I became a communist because I was Catholic’.
But even after becoming a communist, Althusser confesses he had ‘remained Catholic – that is to say, universalist, internationalist’. He simply came to believe that the Communist Party was a more expedient way to achieve the Christian goal of the universal brotherhood of man. Even so, he claims that societal change is only possible through ‘an alliance between Catholics and communists’.
Kris Lemsalu, Red Fox, 2023-2024.
A similar line of argument can be found in the French philosopher (and Maoist) Alain Badiou’s Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism (2003), a prolonged philosophical meditation on Saint Paul’s declamation that in Christ there is ‘neither Greek nor Jew’. Of course there are Greeks and Jews, says Badiou: ‘there are differences. One can even maintain that there is nothing else’. But it is to these differences that the universalist message addresses itself; it is through these differences that universality passes and ultimately constructs itself.
But it is to these differences that the universalist message addresses itself; it is through these differences that universality passes and ultimately constructs itself.
In this way, for Badiou, Paul becomes ‘our contemporary’: he outlines the possibility of a radically universalist event, which has been lost to ‘the culturalist and relativist ideology’. This ideology is, in Badiou’s Marxist analysis, simply the flip-side of the homogenising process of capitalism, which bulldozes all differences in its reduction of everything that exists to quantity and number. These two poles, capital’s universality and difference, form a comprehensive metaphysics of the contemporary world – which is, for Badiou, ‘in no way as “complex” as those who wish to ensure its perpetuation claim. It is even, in its broad outline, perfectly simple’.
In any case, these two all-encompassing polarities are perfectly intertwined. They even feed one another: the endless fragmentation of new identities and groups is the perfect fuel for the capitalist engine. New niches are constantly emerging, breaking off and waiting to be reterritorialised by ‘specialised magazines, improved shopping malls, “free” radio stations, targeted advertising networks, and finally, heady “public debates” at peak viewing times’. As Badiou puts it in one of the more memorable (and one of the more abrasive) passages:
What inexhaustible potential for mercantile investments in this upsurge – taking the form of communities demanding recognition and so called cultural singularities – of women, homosexuals, the disabled, Arabs! And these infinite combinations of predicative traits, what a godsend! Black homosexuals, disabled Serbs, Catholic pedophiles, moderate Muslims, married priests, ecologist yuppies, the submissive unemployed, prematurely aged youth!
In contrast to this Badiou wants to rehabilitate a new universalism, in the shadow of Saint Paul.
To Althusser and Badiou we could add several other prominent thinkers of the New Left, who agree in their chastisement of a fragmentary identity politics, and elevate a politics of universality, inspired by Pauline Christianity, as its corrective. The Slovenian Marxist philosopher (and former Russia Today pundit) Slavoj Žižek, for instance, also envisions a socialist ethics construed as the natural continuation of the Christian event. In his latest book, Christian Atheism: How to Be a Real Materialist (2024), he interprets the Christian story as one where God – the transcendent source of being – dies on the cross, not to save humanity, but to save humanity from himself. The death of God sets humanity free, ushering us into an age of abandonment, and thus of radical freedom and contingency: ‘his dead body is a monstrous frozen monument to the lack of any transcendent agent safeguarding our fate’. After his death God returns, no longer as the big Other, but as the haunting social force of the Holy Ghost. For Žižek (echoing Hegel), the Holy Ghost becomes an immanentized god, a god who simply becomes the community of believers. The ‘self-secularisation’ of Christianity into Marxism is thus, for Žižek, the organic unfolding of the Christian message; politics is therefore always already political-theology.
It is safe to say that the New Left’s politics of universality has crashed and burned. We are as far as we possibly can be from the universalist communities of Disabled Serbs, Catholic paedophiles, French Maoists, post-Marxist wife-stranglers, and Russia Today pundits.
One may wonder whether the failure of this project of secularised Christianity lies in the misdiagnosis – or, at any rate, an incomplete diagnosis – of the identitarian movement. The chief error of the thinkers of the New Left is to fail to see that the secularisation of Christianity is hardly a univocal or homogeneous process. While Žižek sees the immanentised Holy Spirit immanentised in Community as the Shadow of God in Nietzsche’s cave, the shadows of the Cross are in fact less univocal, far more refractory – iridescent, even.
… the shadows of the Cross are in fact less univocal, far more refractory – iridescent, even.
In their attempt to appropriate and immanentise Christian theology, the New Left neglected an aspect that previous socialisms built on. While these thinkers aim to secularise Christian ethics and politics, they forget the eschatological horizon upon which these conceptions are formed. By neglecting this dimension in their own political imaginary, they were unable to identify that it is the lack of an eschatological horizon that is the reason behind the breakdown and fragmentation of a socialist universalism.
Kris Lemsalu, Domestic Cat, 2023-2024.
A glance at earlier forms of socialist thinking, on the other hand, reveals a different story. In line with Karl Löwith’s famous formula of the inception of Marxism as a ‘secularised eschatology’, what is immanentized from the metaphysical realm into history is not only an ethical-political universalism, but the ultra-historical promise of the Kingdom of God. After all, Paul’s point was not only, as Badiou says, that there are Jews and Greeks, and that the universal constructs itself by passing through these categories. But the point is also – while there still are Jews and Greeks – that there will be no Jews and Greeks, literally. The eschatological horizon is what frames the almost impossible claims this universalism makes on us in the present world.
This is arguably what gave Marxism most of its historical appeal, pushing itself beyond the limits of its own analysis. Its self-understanding saw the awakening of class-consciousness as the ineluctable product of deterministic dialectical-material processes; but its actual appeal was a kindling of a metaphysical hope, an awakened desire to self-transcendence beyond any necessity.
This need not be understood as a naive utopianism, Fourierian dreams of bioengineering the oceans to taste like lemonade or of spinning on an earth orbited by four moons. With time – and possibly with the failure of actual historical communism to bring about a heaven on earth – Marxist eschatology became more negative, more apophatic, and, in a paradoxical way, more in line with theology. The Jewish mystical tradition has always placed emphasis on the utter otherness of God, the sheer inconceivability (and the absolute certainty) of the Messianic moment. So it was for Walter Benjamin, for whom every second of time was the straight gate through which the Messiah might enter, as for Theodor Adorno, whose negative eschatology required the ‘iconoclasm’ of any positive picture of utopia.
What identity politics lacks is an eschatological dimension. It is hardly clear exactly what the endgame of political struggle is supposed to be.
It is perhaps this dimension that is sorely lacking in the identitarian context of today. But the attempts at diagnosis by the New Left failed, because they could only cast this critique in an immanent key. What identity politics lacks is an eschatological dimension. It is hardly clear exactly what the endgame of political struggle is supposed to be. What have we achieved, when we reach the goal of having a perfect ratio of CEOs of every gender, of having every manuscript scoured by sensitivity-readers, of cleansing language from any possibly offensive ambiguity, of launching a Marvel superhero-franchise for every conceivable identity? The question that is left unuttered is: what next? Even if this question will have to remain unanswerable, it opens the horizon on which all politics plays out.
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