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Title: Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists?
Author: Nathan Coombs
Date: 2009
Language: en
Topics: Christian, islam, zizek
Source: https://mronline.org/2009/12/09/christian-communists-islamic-anarchists-part-1/]
Notes: Nathan Coombs is a PhD candidate in political philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, co-editor of the Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, and co-convenor of the BISA working group: Global and Transnational Politics. His research project is entitled ‘Evental Hermeneutics’. This article was first published byInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 3.3 (2009) under a Creative Commons license.

Nathan Coombs

Christian Communists, Islamic Anarchists?

Part 1

The defeat of the Marxist emancipatory project has brought an end to

radical secular universalism. The result has been twofold: identity

politics and their post-modern ideologies of difference have become the

legitimating motifs of Western democracies, whilst radical political

Islam has taken the anti-systemic baton of secular Marxism, but

subverted it with a brand of universalism with no respect for such

niceties as co-existence with secular democracy, or even the

nation-state.[1] This pincer movement of status quo, secular

particularism (multicultural liberal ‘tolerance’) and radical religious

universalism (‘intolerant’ Islamism, evangelical Christianity etc.),

sets the context for recent Communist appropriations of Christianity as

a paradoxical ‘Third Way’.

‘Communist appropriations of Christianity!’ To the uninitiated, the

initial reaction can only be shock. We might ask what happened to

religion as the ‘opiate of the people’ and, not only that: haven’t

Marxists also long been arguing that Marxism is not just a religion by

another name, but objective science free of illusions? The confusion

would not be unwarranted, and relates directly to the semantic and

historical umbilical cord between Marxism and Communism: a link in the

process of being severed. That is to say, although most contemporary

Communist theorists have roots in 20^(th) century Marxist movements,

many now aim to disassociate Marxism and Communism.[2] The belief is

that if Marxism can be abandoned then the name of Communism can be

saved. A forthcoming conference at Birkbeck College, On the Idea of

Communism (March 2009), announces the terms of the shift: “In spite of

their theoretical differences, the participants share the thesis that

one should remain faithful to the name ‘Communism’: this name is potent

to serve as the Idea which guides our activity, as well as the

instrument which enables us to expose the catastrophes of the XXth

century politics, those of the Left included.” Thus Communism is the

name to be rescued, and as the theoretical and political chasms between

speakers at the conference such as Michael Hardt and Slavoj Žižek

indicates, this recast Communism, free from determinate Marxist content,

can potentially subsume everything from the French Revolution to the

waning anti-globalisation movement, or even, in a more controversial

gesture, St. Paul’s brand of renegade Christianity.

If they stopped there, however, St. Paul’s story would be just one in a

long line of dramatic ruptures from the status quo by a militant group

of believers; a lineage that could include a multitude of religious

figures from Moses to Mohammed to Thomas Muntzer. Communism, in this

frame, would signify solely the violent outbreak of communal solidarity;

distinguished from its reactionary forms by the fact that it carries a

substantively new universal category that affects the split within an

existing social formation. If this heavily subtracted Idea of Communism

was all these theorists argued for then there would be a seductive

parsimony with the entire programme of post-Marxism, and the awkward

distinction between non-Marxist Communism and post-Marxist communism

would be rendered unnecessary. Communism and the multicultural respect

for the diversity of religions would both be saved and we could content

ourselves at the impressively neat accommodation of the two. But here

the problems begin, because many of the theorists do not stop there. It

is not enough for Paul to be an example — just one in a long historical

lineage — it is instead claimed that he in fact founds the originary

categories of Communism. Alain Badiou (2003) even goes so far to claim

Paul as the founder of universalism itself. Christianity and St. Paul

become a demarcation for sorting out the right sort of Communist from

the wrong sort.

All of which brings us back to where we came from: the umbilical cord

between Marxism and Communism which is never cut with the intention of a

final separation. As such, the place of universalism in this Paulian

Communism should remind us of that nagging aporia at the heart of the

Marxist ‘faith’: the fact that universalism never becomes identical with

itself. Without the particular, the universal is meaningless; the

establishment of the universal always presupposes the negation of its

particularistic Other. For instance, in Marxism the bourgeoisie have an

essential role in the realisation of working class universalism, yet the

position of the bourgeois class after the revolution has always been

ambiguous. The idea that it would just gradually disappear was

undermined by the emergence of the state class in Russia, purges of the

‘backward’ bourgeois in Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Pol Pot’s

absolutist logic that necessitated their complete annihilation. And just

as Marxism never really came to terms with what to do with the

bourgeoisie Other, anarchist universalism was its rival Other. It was a

doctrine that took the spirit of Marxism too far; so far in fact that it

frequently needed to be suppressed, as famously demonstrated by Marx’s

expulsion of Bakunin from the International Working Men’s Association[3]

and the clear and present danger that Lenin perceived in the philosophy.

Even if the atrocities by Pol Pot et al. in the name of Marxist

universalism must go a long way to explaining the collapse of the

Marxist-Communist revolutionary movement (Jayatilleka 2007) and its

practical abandonment by theorists such as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri

and, to a much more limited extent, Slavoj Žižek; the troubling question

is whether this same tripartite structure of universalism repeats itself

in the new Communist appropriation of Christianity. To make the parallel

logic explicit: the Judaic particularism of faith (the Covenant was

revealed solely to the Jews) was necessary for the universalism of St.

Paul’s message to have any meaning, but forevermore Judaic particularism

became a justification for their persecution, which much like the

bourgeoisie after Communist revolution just refused to fade away. It is

therefore not surprising, as some have already pointed to (Depoortere

2008; Kirsch 2008), that there are potentially disturbing consequences

for the status of the Judaic faith in this valorisation of the violent,

intolerant universalism of Christianity. In this frame, the continuance

of the Jews can begin to look like a stubborn refusal to secede to the

emancipatory project Christianity inaugurated, and as such resembles an

insurmountable barrier and tool of emotional blackmail against any

universalist aspirations: the state of Israel being the emblematic

example that the left is always quick to invoke.

And to follow the parallel further, if anarchism was Marxism’s universal

rival, then is Islam not also Christianity’s rival: a universal

monotheistic faith declaring a rupture with the past — in Islam’s case

negating the multitheistic tribes of the Arabian peninsular and in

Christianity’s case the negation of Judaic exclusivity? To drop deeper

than we might like into this rabbit hole: is there not a painful irony

at the heart of non-Marxist Communism that it begins to look an awful

lot like the anarchism Marxism spent over a century suppressing and that

the new Communist subject (the emancipatory Overman) likewise begins to

look a lot like an Islamist; that is, one marching under any banner but

Islam? As Hardt and Negri admit, in regard to the Iranian Revolution “we

might think of it as the first postmodernist revolution,” but only

insofar as it represented “a powerful rejection of the world market”

(2000: 149) i.e. only if we subtract its recognisable Marxist dimension

and ignore the Islamic content. Like Marxism’s suppression of anarchism,

the recent focus on the foundational break of St. Paul depends to a

large extent upon the denial of Islam to maintain Christianity’s unique

place in the history of universalism. As Ash Sharma described the mood

at a recent conference of dialectical materialists: “It was only Ali

Alizadeh’s attempt to formulate the Iranian revolution as an Event, that

began to challenge the rather comfortable presumptions of a Christian

hegemony... The underlying presumption remains that Christianity, and

not Islam or any other religion, provides the basis for a true, modern

universality” (2007: unpaginated). Thus, it is not just that Judaism

emerges as negated for being too far from the universalism of

Christianity, but Islam also ends up being ignored perhaps for being too

close to the horizon of thought of the new Communism.

For now, though, even if it eventually proves vital to the argument, we

stick with Christianity and Judaism and leave the discussion of Islam to

Part 2 (forthcoming: International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol 3.2).

Although in recent decades there has been a great deal of interest in

Paul — including from theorists such as: Jacob Taubes, Giorgio Agamben,

Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou — this piece will focus on Žižek and

Badiou’s interventions: as both claim the closest proximity of

Christianity to the foundational tenets of Communism. Despite sharing a

common political project, their tacit alliance in resuscitating Pauline

love to pride of place in the Communist project looks unlikely at first

glance. Žižek has always made it clear that he aims to re-establish

German idealism, and particularly Hegel, at the heart of radical

philosophy. On the other hand, for Badiou, Hegel represents something of

an arch-rival and if there is an aim to his immense project from Being

and Event to the Logic of Worlds it is to replace Hegel’s entire system

with his own: grounded on the non-same-identity of ontology (Being) with

the ontic (Event), even if the short-circuit of Cohen’s theorem of

‘forcing’ is meant to link the two.

However, despite this apparent incompatibility we must add two caveats

to the dialectics/events dichotomy: firstly, that both systems share the

concept of the universal, and secondly, that they arrive at the

universal event of Christianity via two different paths. In keeping with

his Hegelian loyalties, for Žižek it is the death of Christ (the moment

of negativity) which is given priority; whereas, for Badiou, it is the

resurrection of Christ as it effected the event of Paul’s conversion

(the pure positivity of the event) which is given almost exclusive

focus. And perhaps we should add a third caveat, the fact that Žižek’s

Hegelianism is most unorthodox: an open formulation which is read

through Freud and Lacan and visa versa. This openness, although not

undermining the dialectics/event, crucifixion/resurrection dichotomy

with Badiou, should in any case put rest to any overly determined

historical-teleological readings. What we should expect to find in Žižek

is that, rather like Badiou, the universal is not fixed, not a

foundation; but rather a moment, an act of becoming; one that is not

laid down in the heavy ink of history as a form of infinite determinism.

But as we have already discussed, this is what we do not find in these

authors. Against expectations, Christianity does become the foundation

of universalism. So rather than simply critique these authors for their

Eurocentric-Christendom bias, or make wild and unlikely speculations

about anti-semitism or Islamophobia, this essay instead attempts to show

how the cleavage internal to any idea of a foundational universal is at

the root of the problem; because the foundation of a universal is it in

fact its transcription into a fixed object, holding a fixed predicate:

in this case Christian universalism. In Theoretical Writings Badiou

notes: “nothing exists as universal if it takes the form of the object”

(2006: 145). Nothing, that is, except for Paul’s universalism;

signalling a deep inconsistency between the ontological tenets of his

system and this more direct politico-theological intervention. Even

adopting such wildly differing ontological systems, by positing

exclusive foundations I show how Žižek and Badiou appear to fail to

escape the shadow of bad old closed Hegelianism[4] that has always told

the same story of the role of Christianity in the unfolding of world

history.

And finally, so as not to presume too much prior knowledge before we

commence: to give a brief biographical sketch it should suffice to say

that St. Paul was a citizen of Rome born between 2AD and 5AD. He was a

Pharisaical Jew engaging in the persecution of the Christians who at

roughly the age of 30 had a sudden conversion to Christianity on the

road to Damascus. From that point on he travelled across the known world

spreading the message that Christ was resurrected and of the epochal

significance of the act and the time in which they were living. He held

the existing order defunct and declared an entirely new order founded

solely upon subjective belief, with no need to recourse to miracle or

Christ’s teachings other than an unnegotiable belief in the event of the

resurrection.

The appeal of this narrative to Communist theorists should be amply

clear. However, it is in the method of transmission of Paul’s act to the

present day that the ambiguities start. This matters: because once the

consequences of the appropriation of Paul become clear, how literally we

should take Paul’s acts as the foundation of Communist universalism,

inspiring allegory, or dialectically subsumed part depends upon whether

the relation of these philosophies to history escapes Hegel’s philosophy

of history. Or, in other words, do these secular appropriations avoid

parroting the old Hegelian logic of Christianity as the ‘Absolute

religion?’ And thus, as will become clearer in Part 2, do they also

foreclose the emancipatory possibilities of Islam?

A Gesture for Insurrection

It is an obvious point, but one worth repeating, that the theorists in

question are not advocating anything like the liberation theology of the

Peruvian priest Gustavo Gutierrez, who took Christ’s words literally as

socialism. The appeal to Paul would be much better described as an

advocacy of a certain inclination; a defensive measure against the

tendency in our liberal-multiculturalist orders to purge all belief in

the act of the violent disruption of the status quo. The fact that

Christianity is perceived today in such a different light, under the

platitudinal everyday rubric of ‘turning the other cheek,’ ‘goodwill to

all mankind’ etc.; or in the evangelical movement as: ‘family values,’ ‘

an old fashioned moral compass in a world that’s lost its way’; or in

the liberal-multiculturalist world as ‘the root of all bigotry and

misogyny,’ ‘the logic of colonial humanitarianism’ (Douzinas 2007),

makes the Communist defence of Paul a disruptive and intuitively

appealing gesture.

Badiou and Žižek take a slightly different approach to this gesture, but

one that, at this stage, we can at least say is united by a shared

impulse. For Badiou, St. Paul is the archetype of the militant for us to

draw inspiration from in the time of current political malaise, and for

Žižek the same holds, in addition to his belief that monotheism provides

an ethical imperative against the parlous influence of New Ageism and

Buddhism in Western cultural trends. Where they are closely united is in

regard to the act of belief. Just as Paul was not interested in

persuading the philosopher Greeks of any rational basis for believing in

Christ’s resurrection, so too they imply, the contemporary leftist

militant should not be suckered into the game of pondering the minutiae

of policy choices and weighing up the economic pros and cons of their

positions. In other words: believe in the act, believe that miracles do

happen.

In the opening pages of St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism Badiou

puts his cards openly on the table: “There is currently a widespread

search for a new militant figure — even if it takes the form of denying

its possibility — called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and

the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can said to have

been that of the party militant” (2003: 2). It would not then be a

stretch to say that Badiou’s act of appropriating Paul arises from this

very absence of a Communist, revolutionary subject today. And this

absence has to be seen into relation to the contemporary predominance of

identarian movements, from feminism to gay rights etc., that do no

coalesce into a higher critique of capitalism and/or the greater social

order that structures all these relations in respect to one another.

Paul’s story is thus a perfect case study of a universal break that

arises from the particular, or as he puts it: “It is a question of

knowing what identarian and communitarian categories have to do with

truth procedures, with political procedures for example. We reply: these

categories must be absented from the process, failing which no truth has

the slightest chance of persistence and accruing its immanent infinity”

(Ibid: 11).

His reading of Paul is a polemical engagement centred on the desire for

the re-birth of the subject and an exposition as to how such a subject

must operate according to a universal commitment if such a commitment is

to ever solidify into a truth procedure. Similarly, this commitment,

which Badiou renders as ‘fidelity,’ is also at stake in his analysis of

Christianity. Throughout Being and Event the Christ-event plays a

remarkable role as one of the few consistent concrete examples to which

Badiou ellipses back to, particularly when his analysis reaches an

aporia. On the subject and its relation to the event Badiou foreshadows

his analysis in the Logic of Worlds by stating: “In truth, this is the

problem which remains for philosophy...” in that “It is always a matter

of knowing whether one can deduce, from the evental conversion, the

rules of infinite fidelity” (2006: 239). This unresolved question is

exemplified in the question of Christianity and the “interminable

debates over whether the Christ-event determined, and in what details,

the organization of the Church” (Ibid: 238). Paul’s significance arises

from a more generic philosophical identity in Badiou’s system, that if

“we suppose that there is no relation between intervention and fidelity,

we will have to admit that the operator of connection in fact emerges as

a second event” (Ibid: 239).

To put it another way, what Badiou’s restless theoretical circling is

getting at is that there is a gap in his system — at least at the time

of Being and Event — between understanding the site of the event — the

situation from which the event arises — and the structure of subjects’

fidelity. He therefore supposes that a ‘second event’ completely

distinct from the first could resolve the problematic. Here we now see

the significance of Paul: the only apostle from outside the circle of

Jesus’ disciples, whose militant commitment can thus subtract more

easily from the identarian and particularistic baggage of the situation

(in this case: Jesus as a Jew) because, to describe it quite literally,

Paul wasn’t even there. And on this issue of the close relation of

separation with the universal, the parallel with Lenin also coincides; a

man who never knew Marx but nevertheless bore the burden of realising

the event of his theoretical discovery and putting it into practice. In

the loosest sense, if a moral emerges from Badiou’s analysis it is that

if the subject is to re-emerge today it does not necessarily have to be

in the context of an evental-site he/she is personally engaged in, but

one that simply provokes an unconditional fidelity to that event and its

universal consequences. To dig around for a contemporary example: an

activist campaigning against Israel’s late 2008/early 2009 siege of Gaza

who then commits entirely to the cause of the One State Solution, but

somehow universalises the consequences so that it affects a splitting

across all political subjectivities. Paul’s story — of not even being

there and going on to found the Church — shows that no matter how dire

the political situation appears, miracles can literally emerge from the

void.

Although Žižek shares many sympathies with Badiou’s reading, in his own

writings it is not so much the subject that he is concerned with, but a

more fundamental defence of the significance of Christ in

philosophical-cultural terms. The status of Christianity is for Žižek a

chess piece on the table of cultural warfare: one in which he perceives

the all-embracing self-reflection of post-modern society as inculcating

anxiety and a corresponding avoidance of the act. In this regard, we can

also understand his persistent engagement with Kierkegaard, including

the recurrent motifs of the ‘leap of faith’ and ‘the sacrifice’ in his

work. If this at first seems out of sorts with his professed Hegelianism

it is worth drawing on what he describes as “my Hegelianism: the motor

of the historico-dialectical process is precisely the gap between acting

and thinking” (2007: 88). I.e. the subject must be able to take

unreflective acts for the ‘cunning of reason’ to progress the world in

historical-dialectical terms. And according to Žižek: “The Religious is

by no means the mediating ‘synthesis’ of the two, but, on the contrary,

the radical assertion of the parallax gap...” (2006: 105).

Depoortere (2008) has also provided us with a remarkably systematic

analysis of how Žižek draws his Lacanian analysis into the matrix of

Hegel and Kierkegaard to defend the act from the temptation of

withdrawal and anxious non-action. As Depoortere describes, Žižek’s

Lacanian interpretation of the Christ event revolves around the relation

of the subject to ‘the Thing.’ Žižek’s hypothesis is that Judaic Law, by

throwing a barrier between the subject and ‘the Thing,’ circumvents the

‘death drive’ towards an endless loop of desire, which then defers the

more fundamental human drive for ‘the Thing’ itself. This loop of desire

he associates with Judaic Law finds a common identity with late

capitalism and its proliferation of ephemeral desires to consume. We do

not act on our drives, and defer them to our desires, quite simply

because the Law prohibits drive; whilst at the same time, that same Law

is what establishes us as human in the first place. For Žižek then, when

God becomes Christ and is put up on the cross, the Law is thus annulled

and the original ‘Thing’ effectively put beyond reach forever, releasing

our drives, whilst also maintaining our humanity. Christianity releases

the drive to act and finds its contemporary relevance today in

opposition to the concomitant climate of non-action that Žižek

associates with the rise of ‘Oriental wisdom’ in Western culture: “The

target on which we should focus, therefore, is the very ideology which

is then proposed as a potential solution — for example Oriental

spirituality (Buddhism), with its more ‘gentle,’ balanced, holistic,

ecological approach ... Western Buddhism, this pop-cultural phenomenon

preaching inner distance and indifference toward the frantic pace of

market competition, is arguably the most efficient way for us fully to

participate in market dynamics while retaining the appearance of mental

sanity” (2003: 26).

It quickly becomes clear that Žižek’s contribution, like Badiou’s, is an

intervention and appropriation targeted at our specific time. However,

they have two slightly different events of Christianity in mind. While

Badiou is happy to maintain an almost exclusive focus on Paul, Žižek

defends the significance of the crucifixion in a quite literal way.

Crucifixion and Resurrection

The difference in their approaches shows itself clearly in the relation

of the crucifixion to the resurrection, and it would not be unfair to

say at least one element escapes both their analyses. Let us follow

Badiou and describe the sequence in two parts: event one divided into

crucifixion and resurrection and event two being Paul’s militant

conversion. Žižek’s Hegelian-Lacanian reading primarily focuses on the

crucifixion (the negative) and Paul’s conversion (the positive), whereas

for Badiou the original Christ-event is left almost completely

undiscussed, and where it is — via Paul — it focuses mostly on the

resurrection (the positive). There is a certain inevitability about this

parting of ways, when we see how the status of Hegelian dialectics

divides the two.

For example, Badiou identifies Paul’s significance in the shattering of

attempts by some in the Jewish establishment to subsume Christ’s message

and resurrection under existing Law. He uses this distinction between

Paul’s insistence upon the fundamental rupture in all existing social

relations and thought (a properly Badiouian idea of the event) and the

Judeo-Christian idea of the event as the perfection of existing Law as

indicative of a dialectical approach: a fine distinction that he will

reiterate again and again in the text. In regard to the Jewish

establishment: “Its conception of the subject is dialectical. It is not

a question of denying the power of the event. It is a question of

asserting that its novelty conserves and sublates the traditional site

of faith, that it incorporates it by exceeding it. The Christ-event

accomplishes the Law; it does not terminate it. Thus the marks inherited

from tradition (circumcision for example) are still necessary” (2003:

23).

Likewise, Badiou needles the Jerusalem Conference, where Paul is

pleading for acceptance from the establishment, as an unhappy synthesis,

but one that is “genuinely foundational, because it endows Christianity

with a twofold principle of opening and historicity.... Admittedly, the

conference does not seem able to fix the content of this difficult match

between eventality and immanence to a situation” (Ibid: 25). The

conference nevertheless lays the basis for the truly disjunctive later

event, such as the incident between Peter and Paul in Antioch. When

Peter leaves the table of the ritual meal at the arrival of the

non-Jews, for Paul: “The incident reveals to him that the Law, in its

previous imperative, is not, is no longer, tenable, even for those who

claim to follow it” (Ibid: 27). In these passages Badiou is attempting

not only to make a point about the militancy and radicality of Paul in

his time, but to also to limit the confusion related to his system, as

it is commonly interpreted that events appear from nothing and are

constituently external to the situation of the subject. Obviously, this

would be completely ontologically untenable; therefore, although Paul

was external to the Christ-event itself, Badiou is trying to ground

Paul’s actions in a concrete situation to prevent a sliding back to

dialectical thinking, which has a more brute ontological-ontic relation.

In his discussion of Marcion’s The Anti-theses and the division Marcion

erects between the God of the Old Testament and the New — that it is

actually a different God — Badiou claims that: “The result is that the

Christian News is, purely and simply, the true God’s mediating

revelation, the event of the Father, which, at the same time, denounces

the deception of that creator God whom the Old Testament tells us about”

(Ibid: 35). The key word in Badiou’s account of Marcion is ‘mediating,’

signalling that in his view Marcion’s account, paradoxically, on account

of the extreme radicality of the event, becomes more dialectical, not

less. Contrasting Paul and Marcion: “That Paul emphasizes rupture rather

than continuity with Judaism is not in doubt. But this is a militant,

and not an ontological, thesis. Divine unicity [unicite] bridges the two

situations separated by the Christ-event, and at no moment is it cast

into doubt” (Ibid). For Badiou, the Christ-event has no

theological-ontological dimension, and this is what precisely delimits

his evental interpretation from the dialectical one.

As we have already seen, however, for Žižek it is this ontological

dimension which gives Christ’s crucifixion such importance. There is

however an ambiguity: for Žižek the coming to earth of God in the body

of Christ, and his crucifixion, necessarily ends in the secessionist

theory of Christianity that signals: “The “Holy Spirit” is the community

deprived of its support in the Big Other. The point of Christianity as

the religion of atheism is not the vulgar humanist one that the

becoming-man-of-God reveals that man is the secret of God (Feuerbach et

al.); rather, it attacks the religious hard core that survives even in

humanism, even up to Stalinism, with its belief in History as the “big

Other” that decides on the “objective meaning” of our deeds (2003: 171).

According to Žižek the significance of Christianity is not just

secularism, but an even purer secularism that exceeds the imagination of

Stalin and the scientific socialists of the 20^(th) century. Yet, what

is ambiguous here, is that an ontological thesis of this type can either

go two ways: (1) in a fudged Hegelian teleological sense of the ‘cunning

of reason’ acting through subject’s illusions that Christ really is God,

which through that mediation eventually reveals the God really is

nothing but Geist, or (2) that if Žižek wishes to avoid the teleological

implications of the thoroughly Hegelian reading he has to take quite

literally the assertion that God actually did die on the Cross, which is

a kind of secularism, but a peculiar one: God really did exist, but is

no longer! Either way, Paul’s militant band of believers is seen to

dialectically reverse the negativity of the crucifixion into the

positivity of the secular, Holy Spirit. And in this narrative the

resurrection needs to be short-circuited, lest it undermine the death of

God thesis and the secular appropriation of the all too human image of a

man dead on the cross.

There is another implication to Žižek’s reading: that whatever

ontological status we apply to the crucifixion, it takes on a

determining role vis-à-vis all other religions. Clearly, if God died on

the cross the continuance of Judaism begins to look like a farce: “So

when the Jews are conceived as a remainder, we should be very precise in

defining this with regard to what they are a remainder of: of themselves

of course, but also of humanity as such...” (Ibid: 131), even if Žižek

sometimes defends Judaism on account of his assertion that “Christianity

needs Judaism to remind itself of the otherness of the Divine Thing”

(Depoortere 2008: 140). But Islam, in this reading, looks equally as out

of time as in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, where it is awkwardly filed

under the ‘Germanic World.’ And the polytheistic and pantheistic

religions fare even worse in the Hegelian schema Žižek enthusiastically

adopts. Hegel posited three essential movements to the development of

religion: the immediate religion, the religion of substance and the

religion of spiritual individuality. Buddhism, Hinduism and Taoism

inhabit the second movement of the unfolding of religion to the

spiritual individuality inhabited by Judaism and Christianity. To take

Žižek’s pet hate Buddhism, the fact that being is associated with

nothing implies that the worship bridging the universal (the One) with

humankind (the particular) takes the form of self-annihilation: which

could either end up as an avoidance of the act (why act if all reality

is just a dream?) or, alternatively, could end in unthinking violence

and tyranny. Thus, just as for Hegel — “since here the finite mind, as

being merely accidental, is wholly swallowed up in substance, is a

nullity, has no reality, no right of independent existence as against

substance, it is for that reason not free ... for the same reason, these

religions go hand in hand with despotic government in the political

sphere” (Stace 1955: 494) — for Žižek too, the Dalai Lama and his

strategy of non-violence in Tibet goes hand in hand with the repressive

theocracy his old-regime represents.

The Universal and Violence

We have already pointed towards the differences between Badiou and

Zizek’s appropriation of Christianity: a difference that would be

irreconcilable if it were not for the category of the universal they

both share. For here Hegelian dialectics and Badiou’s theory of the

event coincide. They both posit an event as constitutively defined by

its enactment of a new universal; although Badiou’s event, unlike

Hegel’s, to be ontologically consistent should not establish a

foundation. And therein Iays the ambiguity of his reading of Paul in

relation to his greater system.

Badiou demonstrates Paul’s universalism from a line in Corinthians: ‘To

the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win the Jews; to those under the

law, I became as one under the law’ from which he extrapolates: “an

instance of what Chinese communists will call the ‘mass line,’ pushed to

its ultimate expression” (Ibid: 99). This is an unavoidably tenuous

connection, even on its own terms. This is not to critique him

stylistically, but rather to highlight the ambiguity that runs through

the text. Are we to take his treatment of St. Paul as simply an allegory

of the universal political subject — an example of his system in action

— or is there an excess of affection for the specifically Christian

religious conception? For if we were to boil down Badiou’s thesis to one

single point it would be this: that St. Paul’s fidelity to the

resurrection of Christ signals the singular event of the birth of a

truly universal monotheistic faith. This universal faith becomes forever

ingrained in humanity’s psyche and elides into the universalism of the

‘Marxist faith.’ For the sake of clarity, this is not the Marxist faith

in objective historical processes which subsequently became the

orthodoxy of the majority of Marxist movements. It is rather the faith

in the universalism of the event of Marxism itself: the fact that Marx’s

work revealed something entirely new: an orientation towards the working

class within a society conceived as totality, which at its core is

non-reducible to scientific analysis and cuts across all identarian

particularities.

But the outstanding question is of the depth and nature of this

connection between the universalism of Paul and latter-day universalist

movements; of which first and foremost would have to be included the

Marxist-Communist movements of the 20^(th) century. If we accept that

this foundational break becomes carried (even if in a degraded

institutionalised form) by the Catholic Church — a possibility that

despite Badiou’s insinuation of the Church’s infidelity to Paul’s

message is not totally placed off the table by him — then it is not a

great leap to pointing to some essential philosophical connection

between the de-universalised Russian Orthodox Church and Stalin’s gulags

(increasingly recognised to have an ethnic component), Chinese

Confuscianism and Mao’s fatalistic disregard for human life, and

conversely the relative humanity of the Latin American communists

(existing within a historic Catholic legacy) in Cuba, Nicaragua and so

forth. The problem is that the consequences of Badiou’s reading of Paul

can result in the inscription of culturalism onto the legacy of the

20^(th) century’s Communist movements — a move that Dayan Jayatilleka

(2007) also pursues when he describes the success of the Cuban

Revolution in terms of the moral inheritance Castro gained from his

Jesuit upbringing and its significance in differentiating his guerrilla

group from the ‘neo-barbarism’ of other groups in the global,

revolutionary movement.

Badiou’s position is not even as far from Hegel as he would have us

believe. For Hegel too Christianity was uniquely perfect, the ‘Absolute

religion’ in his words, precisely because it universalised the

previously Judaic exclusivity of faith. Monotheism only realised itself

once: “...it was freed from the particularity by which the worship of

Jehovah had been hampered. Jehovah was only the God of that one people —

the God of Abraham, of Isaac and Jacob: only with the Jews had this God

made a covenant; only to this people had he revealed himself” (Hegel

2001: 373). The distinction between Badiou and Hegel comes down to the

difference we ascribe between the dialectical event and the event of a

Badiouian truth procedure. Badiou has never delineated an empirical

philosophy of history to supplement his system; this work and The

Century are as close as we get.[5] But the category of the universal,

the appearance of the universal over time from human origins to the

present day, marks a baseline of continuity with Hegel. As Badiou puts

it: “We also share with Hegel the conviction of a universality of the

True. But for us this universality is guaranteed by the singularity of

truth-events, and not by the fact that the Whole is the history of its

immanent reflection” (Badiou 2004: 230).

Even if Badiou’s ontology of infinite multiplicity deters the

possibility of closure, of reaching Hegel’s ‘end of history,’ the

ambiguity remains that Badiou does ascribe certain foundational

universal events to specific historical moments. But unlike Hegel a

universal does not arrive as an always-to-be unfolding, which is

transcribed into Law, rather “That thought is the proper medium of the

universal means that nothing exists as universal if it takes the form of

the object or of objective legality.” Because, for example: “the

universality of a mathematical proposition can only be experienced by

inventing or effectively reproducing its proof” (Ibid: 145). The

universal is an experienced becoming that can be infinitely iterated.

Nevertheless the contours of thought to reproduce and re-experience the

universal have to be at least somewhat differential from a new universal

never before thought in history: which is the universal event Badiou

implies as Paul’s ‘foundation’, or as Žižek describes it: “the example

of a Truth-Event” (Žižek 2000: 130). The tension between the definitive

and singular article gives the game away. If it is viable that there be

an infinite production of new universals in history remains to be

clarified. Are there in fact only a finite number of new universals that

can be ‘discovered’ as opposed to the infinite process of experiencing a

universal afresh? If so, it is not clear how finity in history can be

accounted for in Badiou’s system or how foundational universals escape

finity’s telos, i.e. some form of progressive, historical teleology.

Žižek, on the other hand, explicitly embraces the consequences of

Badiou’s investment in Paul as the foundational universaliser of

monotheism and what could be inferred for the fortunes of ‘Third World’

Marxist revolutions. Drawing a parallel with what I believe is a certain

implication in Badiou — that peoples with Catholic philosophical

underpinnings will be the only ones to successfully realise

Marxist-Communism — Žižek has this to say about Che Guevera:

What, then, is the difference between this “warrior Zen” legitimization

of violence and the long Western tradition, from Christ to Che Guevara

... it is not that, in contrast to Japanese military aggression,

revolutionary violence “really” aims at establishing a non-violent

harmony; on the contrary, authentic revolutionary liberation is much

more directly identified with violence ... it is all too simple to say

that this militaristic version of Zen is a perversion ... the truth is

much more unbearable — what if, in its very kernel, Zen is ambivalent,

or rather, utterly indifferent. (Žižek 2003: 30–31)

It is curious that Western military violence is given Che Guevara as an

archetype and Eastern military violence with the imperial regime of

Emperor Hirohito. A leftist guerrilla is compared to an imperial

Emperor, a cop-out in taking on any argument over religion and

revolution. He should have compared Che and Mao to truly mine this

comparative vein of thought, but as we know from his introduction to

Mao’s Practice and Contradiction (2008) he goes to great lengths to

avoid any cultural- religious explanations and rather settles on Mao as

a poor reader of Hegel. As we have seen, for Žižek the theological turn

in Communist circles is justified to performatively negate the embrace

of ‘Oriental wisdom’ in Western capitalist societies, but beyond that he

never really offers a clear, positive reason for turning to Christ

today. In perhaps an act of projection, he even levels this charge

against Giorgio Agamben’s (2005) work on Paul: “What Agamben describes

as a messianic experience is the pure formal structure of such an

experience without any specific determinations that would elaborate the

claim that Benjamin ‘repeats’ Paul: why is today’s moment a unique

moment which renders Paul’s letters readable? Is it because the New

World (Dis)Order is parallel to the Roman Empire (the thesis of Negri

and Hardt)?” (Ibid: 108). And furthermore, without a clear-cut rational

of his own, it would be tempting to read a suspicious over-investment in

Christianity for its own sake in Žižek’s work too.

That is not to imply Žižek the Christian dogmatist reveals himself

subconsciously through his argument. I would rather argue that his

Lacanian-influenced open-Hegelianism inadvertently reveals its thinness

of novelty. To clarify: against common misinterpretation Hegel’s theory

of human progress from the master and slave right up to the ideal modern

state is not supposed to be a pure historical abstraction from ancient

Egypt to 19^(th) century Germany in the same way that Marx’s transition

from feudalism to capitalism to Communism has an undeniable temporal

unfolding. Instead, Hegel’s ideal state is that form which always will

have existed as the ideal form in the Notion and which is founded on its

internal logical movement from the master and slave dialectic up to

resolution in the modern state, and is explicitly opposed to solely

contingent historical justifications. Yet the ahistorical realisation of

dialectical self-consciousness is at times elided into a historical

dialectic. This point of elision is one of the most nagging aporias of

the entire Hegelian edifice. As Adorno describes it: “The system has to

acknowledge the conceptual irreducibility of the concept, which is

inherently historical: in terms of logical-systematic criteria the

historical, all else notwithstanding, is disturbing; it is a blind spot”

(quoted in Widder 2002: 160). The contours of this aporia are revealing;

Jean Hippolite, for one, claimed that in the Phenomenology of Spirit

“only in the chapters on spirit and religion is there a movement

coinciding with actual historical development” (Ibid: 159).

Therefore, we should take Hegel’s world-historical theory of religion in

the Philosophy of History as a limit case for Žižek’s open-Hegelianism.

As Žižek admits: “The main way to assert the actuality of Hegel — that

is, to save him from the accusation that his system is totally outdated

metaphysical madness — is to read his thought as an attempt to establish

the normative conditions and presuppositions of our cognitive and

ethical claims” (2006: 28). This means primarily that the fundamental

Hegelian insight that there is no Kantian thing-in-itself and the

awareness that we ourselves posit the gap between appearance and essence

coincides with the Lacanian Lack. Hegel is thus a framework for seeing

how we arrive at our own philosophical, political and epistemological

enigmas; it does not prescribe their closure in ideal forms. What

matters is not that this epistemological-spatial openness Žižek

perceives in Hegel is at best a partial reading, but rather that it

circumvents through neglect the aporetic historicism of Hegel’s

philosophy of world spirit and religion. It is therefore not surprising

that Žižek’s philosophy of religion ends up following a remarkably

similar schema.

Drawing from the Bhagavad Gita Žižek comes to the same conclusion as

Hegel in regard to the primitive religions: “if external reality is

ultimately just an ephemeral appearance, then even the most horrifying

crimes do not matter.... This means that Buddhist (or Hindu, for that

matter) all encompassing Compassion has to be opposed to Christian

intolerant, violent Love” (2003: 32–33). Žižek is careful not to invoke

the religious historical-teleological unfolding of Hegel, but as his

open epistemological appropriation reaches exactly the same conclusions

we have to wonder if he really leaves it behind or merely covers his old

Hegelian tracks. Moreover, the fact that although according to Žižek’s

emphasis on the universal, monotheistic event, Islam should fit the

exact same criteria as Christianity — but that like Hegel, it is the one

religion he stubbornly ignores — means that when we speak of Žižek’s

open Hegelianism and the ‘real’ bad old Hegelianism we might consider

them functionally identical.

An Incomplete Conclusion

We have seen how Badiou and Žižek approach the Christ event from very

different perspectives. For Badiou all that matters is the subjective

belief of Paul and the event of his conversion to Christianity, whereas

for Žižek there is a deeper, dialectical — and hence ontological —

significance to Christ’s crucifixion. Both are however united in defense

of the universalisation of monotheism Paul affected. Unfortunately, this

disagreement in fact points to an inconsistency: neither Badiou’s theory

of the event, nor Žižek’s open-Hegelianism — to be truly open that is —

should posit historic foundations, yet they seem too quickly to leap to

this conclusion. The claimed historical foundation to the universalism

of Communism can easily start to have implications for the fortunes of

Marxist-Communist movements in non-Catholic countries in the 20^(th)

century. Neither Badiou nor Žižek has actually explored this consequence

directly, and indeed it would even be counter-productive to their

philosophical and political aims to do so; yet it seems an almost

inevitable development of their work that Christian essentialism should

creep into a retrospective assessment of the global, revolutionary

movement — a task that at least Dayan Jayatilleka seems to already have

picked up upon.

In Part 2 (forthcoming: International Journal of Zizek Studies, Vol 3.2)

the Hegelian assumptions underwriting the religious teleology in Badiou

and Žižek will become even clear as the limit case of Islam befuddles

both their systems and their privileging of Christian universalism.

Since both philosophers, like Hegel, have very little to say about Islam

— even considering its current predominance in key theatres of

anti-systemic resistance — the analysis will move beyond these writers

to examine the philosophies of two of the most influential ideologues of

the Iranian Revolution: Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari and Ali Shari’ati.

Through these philosophers, and the way they appropriate a modernist,

revolutionary conception of Islam, we will see the limitations of any

proposed foundation of universalism, sharpening the critique so far

discussed.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the

Letter to the Romans. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Badiou, Alain. 2006. Theoretical Writings. London: Continuum.

Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. London: Continuum.

Badiou, Alain. 2003. St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Birckbeck College Conference. 2009. On the Idea of Communism. [online]

Accessed 17/02/2009. <www.bbk.ac.uk/bih/news/communism>.

Depoortere, Fredereiek. 2008. Christ in Postmodern Philosophy: Gianni

Vattimo, Rene Girard and Slavoj Žižek. London: Continuum.

Douzinas, Costas. 2007. “The Many Faces of Humanitarianism.” Parrhesia.

Number 2, 2007: 1–28.

Gunkel, D. 2008 Jul 15. “Zizek and the Real Hegel.” International

Journal of Zizek Studies [Online] 2:2.

Hardt, Michael and Negri, Antonio. 2000. Empire. Harvard: Harvard

University Press.

Hegel, G. W. F. 2001. The Philosophy of History. [online] Accessed

14/08/2008.

Jayatilleka, Dayan. 2007. Fidel’s Ethics of Violence. London: Pluto

Press.

Kirsch, Adam. 2008. “The Deadly Jester.” The New Republic. [online]

Accessed 10/02/2009

Mao Zedong. 2008. On Practice and Contradiction. London: Verso.

Robertson, Ann. 2003. The Philosophical Roots of the Marx-Bakunin

Conflict. [online] Accessed 14/02/2009.

Sharma, Ash. 2007. “Materialism Today.” Dark Matter. [online]

Accessed.01/09/2008.

Stace, W. T. 1955. The Philosophy of Hegel: A Systematic Exposition.

Dover Publications.

Widder, Nathan. 2002. Genealogies of Difference. Champaign: University

of Illinois Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. “A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist

Temptation.” In: Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth. Eds.

Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek. Durham and

London: Duke University Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. London: MIT Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of

Christianity. London: MIT Press.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of

Political Ontology. London: Verso.

Part 2

In Part 1 of this article we argued that Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou’s

account of the foundation of Communist universalism in the event of

Christianity signals a number of inconsistencies immanent to their

respective ontologies (Coombs 2009). For Slavoj Žižek it appears

difficult to reconcile his touted open interpretation of Hegel with the

ontological significance he accords to Christianity; whereas for Badiou,

the ‘foundation of universalism’ attributed to St. Paul’s militant

‘truth procedure’ of universalising the Christian faith and effecting a

split with Judaism appears to contradict his ontology of inconsistent

multiplicity, which denies historical or evental foundations. Still,

this critique only takes us so far in undermining the ‘Christian

hegemony’ of a certain school of ‘post-modern’ Communist theory.

Instead, if we can demonstrate that even the conditions by which they

violate their own systems are present elsewhere, then the essentialist

platform of ‘Paulian materialism’ and its exclusivist foundations come

to look even more shaky — shaky to the point of collapse. These

conditions we can also find in Islam.[6]

Firstly, however, it is important to differentiate our argument from Ian

Almond’s The New Orientalists (2007) — the most prescient scholarship on

the matter. Because although Almond manages to locate the spectre of

Islam in post-modern philosophy from Nietzsche to Foucault, the

pre-suppositions of his critique means it has the curious feature of

bouncing back off his targets in the manner of an echo chamber. Unlike

Edward Said’s polemic against the colonial representation and

construction of the Orient in his canonical Orientalism (1979), there is

a post-modern twist in Almond’s study that even Alain Badiou might find

satisfying. What Almond traces is not so much the brutal violence of

representation, but a lineage of absence, or ‘ghostly demarcations’, by

which Islam asserts itself in the interstices and footnotes of

post-modern philosophy. None of the philosophers in his study (we except

here the authors Orhan Pamuk, Salman Rushie and Jorge Luis Borges) have

ever made explicit claims to scholarship on Islam and have only

discussed the religion at those points where it has intersected with

‘Western affairs.’ That includes Michel Foucault’s fascination with

Shiism in his reportage on the Iranian revolution; the simulacrum of

Islam Jean Baudrillard found refracted in the Gulf War; and Slavoj

Žižek’s passing remarks on the religion in connection with 9/11 and the

Iraq War. In regard to his chapter on Žižek, Almond writes “Islam is

conspicuous by its absence” (ibid: 177) as well as being a “casualty of

this ‘other’ Eurocentrism of Žižek’s — the semantic denial of any

ontological depth or even tangibility to the marginalized subject”

(ibid: 183).

Unfortunately, this tension in Almond’s critique never allows it to

penetrate deeper than a genealogy of marginality. For the absence of the

representation of Islam in Slavoj Žižek’s work cannot at the same time

be a great violence against it. And furthermore, when Almond argues that

“in Žižek’s work, if we scratch the skin of a Muslim, sooner or later we

find a socialist underneath” this is because of Žižek’s “considerations

on the Jamesonian concept of the ‘vanishing mediator’ — the mechanism by

which a belief may facilitate the emergence of another belief-system,

and render itself obsolete in the process” (ibid: 191) — to which Žižek

might simply reply: ‘exactly’! Almond thus excoriates Žižek on the basis

of a series of a priori assertions — i.e. the Eurocentrism of Hegelian

philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis etc, and for the resulting lack

of respect for the true Otherness of Islam; whilst at the same time

bemoaning the absence of this Otherness in Žižek’s representations of

religions which are not Other to him. In other words, Almond’s critique

remains nested in the very ideology of multicultural inclusion and

non-judgemental tolerance that Žižek has spent so much theoretical

energy attempting to combat.

To draw a sharp contrast, what we are aiming for here is a different

critique to Almond’s in that we share many of the same principles as

Badiou and Žižek, but rather see their Christian essentialism as a

deviation from the tenets of their own systems, not just as an

expression of their hopelessly Eurocentric gaze on the world.

In Part 1 of the article we saw the close affiliation of Badiou and

Žižek’s valorisation of Christianity’s universalism with Hegel’s

exaltation of the ‘Absolute religion’ and for our purpose here again

Hegel will be an important touch-point. The problem with Hegel we will

explore is not necessarily the provincialism of his positioning of Islam

under the ‘Germanic World’; but rather, like in Badiou and Žižek’s

fleeting representations of Islam, the problem lies in Hegel’s inability

to see beyond the abstract idea of Islam to its actual particularities.

But it is only by taking Hegel at his word that we can see the immanent

inadequacy of his schematisation of Islam as a religion of purely

abstract universality. Not because it represents an unacceptably malign

value judgement (such a criticism would remain within the realm of

non-judgemental multiculturalism and respect for Otherness); rather

because the particular details of Islam actually contradict Hegel’s

judgement, even if we were to accept the truth of his criteria of

judgement. This particularity is most notably expressed in the split

between Sunni and Shia and what these splits have meant in practicefor

the politics and historicity of the religion. Further, once we see that

the fact of this split forecloses any essentialist philosophical

identity to Islam we also have the material by which to undermine any

essentialist reading of Christianity at the foundation of universalism.

To strengthen the case, in the second part of this article, we examine

two of the key ideologues of the Iranian revolution: Ayatollah Morteza

Motahhari and Ali Shariati. Their debate and rivalry on the

pre-revolutionary scene in Iran we will argue focuses on their differing

interpretations of revolutionary Shia Islam: Motahhari’s dialectical

conception and Ali Shariati’s militant, evental conception — which

echoes Badiou’s emphasis on Paul’s truth procedure. Although sensitive

to the fact that some may see the reading of the Sunni/Shia split

through Hegel and the Mottahari/Shariati debate through the

dialectics/event split we have located in Badiou and Žižek as a form of

transcription into ‘Westernese’; in the spirit of Enlightenment and

universality that this writer shares with the authors he is critiquing,

this is considered not so important as highlighting some of the shared

philosophical problems of two of the world’s universal religions. And

more, we hope to demonstrate the respect and awe in the face of the

supposed Otherness of Islam is part and parcel of the problem of how

Christianity becomes essentialised and posited as a foundation by the

exclusion of its counterpart universal religion.

Hegel and Islam

It is worth considering Hegel’s reflections on Islam, not to snigger at

their bold-faced Christian chauvinism, but to understand them as still

implicit within the predominant understandings of Islam suppressed even

within the non-judgemental, multiculturalist discursive framework: a

framework forced to distinguish between ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’,

‘modernists’ and ‘fundamentalists’ etc. For all the formal procedures of

denouncing teleological thinking in contemporary culture, there is

nevertheless the association of Christianity — or at least Protestantism

— as possessing the telos of secularism; and Islam, lumped in with

Judaism and Hinduism etc., as being somehow stuck in the past, unable to

secede itself into a true modernity.

This perspective is reflected in Hegelian teleology, where Islam is

neither consigned as a more primitive religion, nor dialectically

incorporated into any part of the unfolding of the Notion towards

Christian perfection. As W.T.Stace remarks: “It is a very curious

omission on Hegel’s part that although he has numerous scattered

references to the religion of Islam, he assigns it no place in his

history of religion” (1955: 491). For Hegel Islam went further than any

other religion in abstracting the unity of God into a universal One, the

movement to which marks the increasing perfection of the world religions

in the Philosophy of History. But whereas this process of extracting the

divine into abstract universality has a dialectical necessity in the

unfolding towards the Notion, Hegel claims that it is because of the

extremity of the abstraction in Islam that particularity and the

universal are unresolved into the higher individuality of Christian

worship. In other words, without the recognition that the Son of God

died on the cross, there remains an unresolved bridge between humanity

and God that leaves the individual separated from divine unicity and

mankind separated from realising that its destiny lies within itself. It

is no wonder then that Islam is consigned to an awkward place under Part

IV of his chronological world history, in the section on ‘The German

World’, despite its origination in the 7^(th) century AD. It represents

what should have been a historical dead-end in the ascent towards the

Notion, but its continuation can find no telos within itself — leading

to its expected retreat in the twilight of history. Thus the excessive

attachment of its believers to the faith acts as a roadblock to their

development of the substantive basis of modern universality, requiring

an anchor in individualism. This excess for Hegel has catastrophic

consequences:

Subjectivity is here living and unlimited — an energy which enters into

secular life with a purely negative purpose, and busies itself and

interferes with the world, only in such a way as shall promote the pure

adoration of the One. The object of Mahometan worship is purely

intellectual; no image, no representation of Allah is tolerated. Mahomet

is a prophet but still man — not elevated above human weaknesses. The

leading features of Mahometanism involve this ... so that the worship of

the One remains the only bond by which the whole is capable of uniting.

In this expansion, this active energy, all limits, all national and

caste distinctions vanish; no particular race, political claim of birth

or possession is regarded — only man as abeliever. (Hegel 2001: 374)

Islam is correspondingly supposed to possess the same philosophical

identity as the Terror in the French revolution. For Hegel, the

dialectical necessity of the revolution — the replacement of the

monarchy by bourgeois rulers — models a rational Christian ethos where

the universal is concretised in the particular, or: “What is rational is

actual; and what is actual is rational” (Hegel 1991: 20). However, Islam

is foundationally closer to the quest for abstract unity in Jacobin

Terror: “during which all differences of talents and authority were

supposed to be cancelled out ... because all institutions are

incompatible with the abstract self-consciousness of equality” (ibid:

39). Hegel draws the parallel in logics:

Mahometanism was, at the same time, capable of the greatest elevation —

an elevation free from all petty interests, and united with all the

virtues that appertain to magnanimity and valor. La religion et la

terreur were the principles in this case, as with Robespierre la liberté

et la terreur. But real life is nevertheless concrete, and introduces

particular aims; conquest leads to sovereignty and wealth.... (Hegel

2001: 375)

As Hegel dedicates only five pages to what he calls Mahometanism (Islam)

it is clear that his empirical knowledge is limited, or deliberately

delimited. As may be the case for some readers, more extensive empirical

background and comparisons are necessary. Most obviously, Mohammed,

unlike Christ, never claimed to be a deity but solely a prophet. If we

must speak in analogical terms — in a Badiouian phraseology for instance

— we could say that Mohammed was both Christ and Paul, in that after the

event of the prophecy he declared an internal fidelity to his own

message and from that fidelity he himself established the protean Muslim

community. But unlike Paul, Mohammed did not declare the rupture in the

same sense. Islam, with Mohammed as its greatest prophet, was presented

as the ‘perfection’ of the lineage of monotheistic faiths with its

prophets including such Judeo-Christian familiars as Moses and Christ.

Yet the dialectical language of ‘perfection,’ should not disguise the

reality of rupture; the sudden revealed knowledge opening up the new and

the militant truth procedure that concretised it.

After Mohammed’s death, the early Islamic community was divided by

almost two centuries of internal civil war (Halm 1991). There was

nothing overwhelmingly territorial about this cleavage, although it did

at times become carried by certain tribal rivalries between Caliphs. In

the most significant split between Sunni and Shia, adherents to both

creeds frequently existed alongside each other, even in the same

Caliphal courts. Although Heinz Halm notes that “the Arabic word shia

just means ‘party’...” and that “Theological and dogmatic differences

play a subordinate role in differentiating between Sunni and Shia”

(ibid: 1–2), from a Hegelian perspective — Hegel beyond Hegel if you

like — this is questionable. The unity of God, his Oneness eternally in

opposition to the particularity of humanity, his ‘purely intellectual’

character as Hegel describes it, was undermined by the anthropomorphism

of Shiism. Majid Fakhry argues: “we might safely assume that their

anthropomorphism was dictated by the urge to ascribe a divine or semi

divine status to the Imams, in whom according to the extreme Shiites God

periodically became incarnate” (2004: 57–58). This ‘urge’ was perhaps

historically determined.

The question of the succession of Mohammed was never adequately resolved

in Islam. In response, the Kharijite movement of the ‘first Islamic

civil war’ moved close to what Hegel describes as abstract

self-consciousness of equality. They advocated tyrannicide and waged a

brutal civil war against the Caliphate, advocating the complete equality

of access to God and the destruction of institutions of power, and

denounced their Muslim enemies in a similar way to how Sayyid Qutb in

the 1960s would rationalise Islamist terror against the all-pervasive

jahiliya (ignorance) amongst fellow Muslims. Even now, in a direct

genealogical link, the name of the Kharijites continues to be evoked in

Egyptian public discourse to warn against the temptation of ‘Islamic

anarchism,’ and the abuse of the label is so widespread in the Middle

East that it is even denounced by Osama Bin Laden (2005: 224). Arguably,

the dichotomy between supporting the status quo and the bloodthirsty,

literalist anarchism of the Kharijites was ended by the death of the son

of Mohammed’s daughter Fatima’s son Hussain in Kabala in 671 AD. It is

with Hussain that Islam experienced its ‘Christ moment’, with his

‘martyrdom’ on the Euphrates beginning the anthropomorphic bridge

between humankind and the One. Shiism as the central Islamic theology of

resistance to the status quo gained prominence over the Kharijites; now

opposition was grounded in real social imbrications, i.e. in the support

for the leadership of the familial lineage of the Prophet.

Does all this mean that from a Hegelian perspective we could consider

Shia Islam in the same dialectical genus as Christianity? Does this mean

that although Sunni Islam could be considered the foundational

provocateur of arbitrary despotism (tyranny) or the pursuit of

unmediated abstract equality (Anarchism), in Shiism we can find a more

acceptable Christianity-lite and thus an analogous foundation for

Communist universalism? Perhaps, but such nonsensical dialectical

insights only highlights the inadequacy of Hegelian teleology. From a

Hegelianistic perspective the fact that Shiism did not develop through a

dialectical sequence towards secularism would show that the religion

remains essentially inscribed in teleology as a dead-end and can only

continue unchanging and obscurantist, yet still bursting with the

vitality that Christianity ceded to the Kingdom of Men.

Žižek and Badiou on Islam

According to Frederiek Depoortere, for Žižek, like Hegel, Islam took the

wrong path of dialectical mediation, which explains why Žižek’s “most

important reference to it is in a footnote of On Belief, in which he

states that Islam, in its attempt to synthesise Judaism and

Christianity, ‘ends up with the worst of both worlds’” (2008: 140). It

is true, as Almond (2007) notes, that for Žižek Islam possesses a

vitality unable to be recuperated into global capitalism with the ease

of other religions (Tibetan Buddhism for instance); but still Žižek

follows Hegel’s limited understanding of Islam as possessing a

fundamental ontological mistake — a teleological anomaly in ‘world

spirit’ — which prohibits its overcoming. It seems, then, that the

Hegelian schema is unable to account for the event of Islam, or

comprehend the anthropomorphic event foundational to Shiism.

Problematically, from a Badiouian perspective things are not much

better. In theory, it should not be difficult to consider the event of

Mohammed’s prophecies and the ‘truth procedure’ of establishing the

Islamic community as an equivalent to the militant universalism of St.

Paul. Considering the confusion in Western culture as to the meaning of

the advent of Islam it is worth quoting Bernard Lewis on the matter — a

scholar who, considering his tacit promotion of the Clash of

Civilizations (1997) thesis with Samuel Huntington, can hardly be

accused of Islamophilia:

In a profound sense the advent of Islam had itself been a kind of

revolution. The new faith overwhelmed existing doctrines and churches,

bringing not a third testament to add to the previous two, but a new

scripture to supercede them.... In Islam, as ideally conceived, there

were to be no priests, no privileged orders or castes or estates of any

kind.... In Islam, unlike the ancient world, a slave was no longer a

chattel but a person, with a recognized legal and moral status. Women,

although still subject to polygamy and concubinage, were accorded

property rights not equalled in the West until modern times. (1995: 72)

However, despite this revolutionary change, according to prominent

Badiou scholar, Peter Hallward, Islam is exempted from being an event on

the grounds that:

Though Muhammed’s revelation certainly broke with the prevailing state

of the situation, it was anything but an ephemeral anomaly whose very

lack of definition would allow for the elaboration of open-ended

fidelity. On the contrary, his words settled (in principle) every

philosophical issue in advance. Islamic philosophy is generally not

oriented toward the future composition of a still unknown truth, so much

as “back-up” to an originally definitive (and subsequently obscured)

sufficiency. (2003: 408)

Although we can agree with Hallward that the Quran is more mimetically

prescriptive that the Bible, and particularly more so than the writings

of Paul, it is nevertheless an exaggeration to draw a sharp contrast

between an explorative, future-oriented Christian legacy and a

backward-looking Islam; such extrapolations merely repeat the Hegelian

line of Christianity as the ‘Absolute religion’ within a different

philosophical framework. We might further ask, given the Badiouian

ontology of inconsistent multiplicity how all issues can be settled in

advance? If nothing else, the history of the religions shows that it is

not difficult to perceive a multitude of factional splits in both Islam

and Christianity, for example: the prevalence of neo-Platonism in both

the philosophies of Christian medieval thinkers and in Islamic

philosophy; the hermeneutic splits in both religions regarding the

literalism of interpreting the book (the Ismailis, for one, proposed an

esoteric reading); and the split between Sunni/Shia and

Catholic/Protestant as a broadly analogous divide over the correct

political and doctrinal authority — all of which throw doubt on the

relevance of philosophical issues being settled ‘in principle’. Rather,

we could argue that the attachment of Muslims to factions of these

splits indicates to us precisely that everything was not settled in

advance; since if so the Quran as the uncontested, principal text should

represent a clear guide. Concomitant to the closed space of Islam that

Hallward supposes would be the absence of necessary ambiguities in order

for subjects to articulate their fidelity to the event. Contra Hallward,

though, the ex-post counter-propositional evidence shows us that once

plugged into a Badiouian framework, the original event of Islam very

much fit the categories.

Still, from the same Badiouian perspective — although not considered by

either Badiou or scholars working with his ontology — Shiism looks to

very much tarry with the negative. The demand for continuing leadership

from the familial lineage of Mohammed appears to deny the demands of

fidelity to an event by a free subject. Hussein’s ‘martyrdom’ was also

only with a great retroactive lag transformed into a foundational myth

of Shiism and the process of the occultation of the 12^(th) Imam did not

unfold suddenly by the demands of an event, but as a dialectical

reaction to both the oppression of the burgeoning Shiite faction and the

degenerating logic of leadership by familial lineage over a long period

of time (Halm 1991). From this perspective, it is not hard then to see

Shiism as the ultimate religion of ressentiment. As Arshin

Adib-Moghaddam observes: “Couldn’t we point to the nobility of failure

so central to Shi’i Islam and its foundational legends? ... Is it a

cultural coincidence that Iranians revere those members of the Prophet’s

household who have ‘failed’ in their political mission?” (2007: 186).

Yet like with Hegel and Žižek, historicity is absent from the monolithic

name of Islam presented by Badiou in his considerations on contemporary

political Islam. In his eagerly anticipated follow-up to Being & Event

(2005), the Logics of Worlds (2009), he denies that a progressive

revolutionary subjectivity can arise from political Islam:

... it is in vain that one tries to elucidate genealogically

contemporary political Islamism, in particular its ultra-reactionary

variants, which rival the Westerners for the fruits of the petrol cartel

through unprecedented criminal means. This political Islamism is a new

manipulation of religion — from which it does not derive by any natural

(or ‘rational’) inheritance — with the purpose of occulting the

post-socialist present and countering, by means of a full Tradition or

Law, the fragmentary attempts through which some try to reinvent

emancipation. From this point of view, political Islamism is absolutely

contemporary, both to the faithful subjects that produce the present of

political experimentation, and to the reactive subjects that busy

themselves with denying that ruptures are necessary in order to invent

humanity worthy of the name, and who moreover flaunt the established

order as the miraculous bearer of a continuous emancipation. Political

Islamism is nothing but one of the subjectivated names of today’s

obscurantism. (cited in Toscano 2006: 29)

It is only an elementary exercise to join the dots between the

hypothesis of the non-evental character of Islam and the obscurantism

Badiou accuses political Islam of. Admittedly, the above

characterisation does fit many, if not most, of the Islamist movements

in the 20^(th) and 21^(st) century; but what is significant is the

foreclosure of potentialities located in the foundations of the

religion. For Žižek and Badiou, it is not just that contemporary

political Islamists are obscurantist; it is that the very foundations of

their religion (respective to the possibilities Christianity opened up)

forecloses the possibility for an emancipatory opening on its own terms.

In sum, what allows Hegel, Žižek and Badiou to see what they like in

Christianity — Christ’s death and resurrection as the reversal of

negativity into positivity for Hegel, or the pure positivity of Paul’s

fidelity to Christ’s resurrection for Badiou — is the dualistic

structure of Christianity that Islam does not share. But what exceeds

both schemas and what renders these ever more obscene

philosophical-theological abstractions redundant is change. Foundations

only render themselves as foundations through dogmatism. It is not

Christianity or Shiism that is foundationally positive or negative, but

subjects’ willingness to declare radical ruptures within or from these

frameworks. What unites a Christian fundamentalist and an Islamic

fundamentalist is the denial of the possibility of this rupture. That

said it is worth considering the Iranian revolution of 1979 as the

exemplary case impossible to understand within the rubric of the

foreclosure of Islam’s emanciatory potential proposed by Žižek, Badiou

et al. Firstly, however, we need to forget those over-simplified

narratives of the revolution popularised in the West; whereby either

only a reactionary Islamic force was at work from the start, or where a

pure left was crushed by an Islamic right in the revolution’s

aftermath.[7]

In reality, there was an inter-pollination of Western philosophy,

Marxism and Islamic ideology throughout 20^(th)-century Iran, and the

revolution should be seen as a culmination of that dialectic, as part

the larger ‘effective history’ (to steal a piece of terminology from

Gadamer) of the global revolutionary movement in the 20^(th) century. It

is another indication of the circularity of Christian hegemony in

Western Communist theory that generally there is seen to be no

contradiction in the Catholicisation of Latin American Marxism through

liberation theology, yet the rare cases of the Islamisation of Marxist

theory are treated with comparative suspicion and neglect.

Because some may think the analysis to come is overly abstract by not

treating Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s central role in the revolution as

our point of departure, it is worth observing that although he was the

most important figure of the Iranian revolution — it’s guiding force

from exile and the grand jurist of the state following the establishment

of the Islamic Republic — his philosophical writings are substantially

less interesting than his charisma which allowed him to lord over the

post-revolutionary state. Despite the intellectual milieu preceding the

overthrow of the Pahlavi regime in Iran, his doctrine of the supreme

jurist, allied to his morally and politically conservative

interpretation of Islam, collapsed all the novelties introduced by the

pre-revolutionary Islamist ideologues into a ‘modernist-fundamentalist’

programme (the paradoxical conjugation is necessary to differentiate

Khomeini from the medieval Islamism of the Afghan Taliban). Khomeini’s

only novelty, excepting the idea of the grand jurist as one of only a

quasi-original break from the state of the situation, was to

re-orientate Iran from American puppet state to challenger for regional

hegemony vis-à-vis the Western allied bloc. Khomeini’s ideology, in this

sense and more, can be seen just as transference of traditional Shiite

ressentimentagainst the Sunni majority to the West.[8]

Much more interesting are two of the ‘vanishing mediators’ of Iran’s

Islamic ideology: Morteza Motahhari and Ali Shariati. It is true that

they are not the only mediators of the revolution to have vanished in

the consolidation of the Islamic state: the Fidayeen and Mujahideen

Marxist guerrilla groups were similarly purged and written out of Iran’s

official historiography. But for our purposes of examining the

potentialities within Shia Islam it is the Islamic ideologues who help

to best demonstrate — through their unrealised potentiality — the false

exclusivity of Christian essentialism.

Revolutionary Rivals: Motahhari and Shariati

Both Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari (1920–1979) and Ali Shariati

(1933–1977) used Shiism’s motifs as a tool in their revolutionary

ideologies; yet, for all their similarities, they were voracious rivals.

Their rivalry culminated in Motahhari being assassinated by an obscure

faction called the Furquan, loyal to Shariati’s ideas, after the fall of

Shah’s government. Many have noted the similarity of their revolutionary

appropriation of Shiism and have implicitly reduced their rivalry to one

of the differing audiences: for Shariati, urban, secular intellectuals;

and for Mottahari the seminaries and devout. Hamid Dabashi places

particular emphasis on their ideological affinity: “Their ideas may have

occasionally appeared as if issued from two diverse political

worldviews. But in their respective contributions to the making of ‘the

Islamic Ideology’ they are part and parcel of the same revolutionary

enterprise” (2006: 157). However, there are reasons why Motahhari’s

ideological legacy has been etched into the legitimating discourse of

the post-revolutionary state and Shariati’s has not. As Ali Rahnema

recounts in his biography of Ali Shariati, in discussions with a

bookseller in Tehran, the seller admitted was not sure if Shariati was a

“Saint, or the devil himself” (Rahnema 2000). Without telling us the

political persuasion of the bookseller, it could easily be read either

way: the seller could either have been a secular reformist, or a pious

Muslim, such is the ambiguity surrounding Shariati’s thought. On the

other hand, Ayatollah Khomeini publicly wept at Motahhari’s funeral, and

on the 28^(th) anniversary of his death in 2007, Iranian President

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared: “At present, a specific source of thoughts

is manifested in Iran which is contributing to the development of all

Muslim Nations. The secret behind our success and fulfilment of divine

purposes is to continue the path of Ayatollah Motahhari.” (Notes on Iran

2007)

Although we could reduce these differences to one of Motahhari’s

clerical authority chiming with the ideology of the grand jurist, it

seems insufficient to account for the valorisation of Motahhari and the

ambiguous mix of demonisation and cooption of Shariati by the Iranian

establishment. Instead, it is their approach to Shiism and the clerical

establishment which seems to orient the split. For whilst both were

extremely critical of the state of Shiism and its inadequacy as a

revolutionary ideology, Motahhari’s was a dialectical, revolutionary

Shiism that preserved its juridical tenets; whereas Shariati’s Shia

Islam was a heavily subtracted conception emphasising rebellion,

equality and universality. As Dabashi puts it: “No one did more than

Motahhari in legitimating this updated Shi’i juridical discourse.

Shari’ati simply concocted his own modern discourse, totally outside of,

and indeed antagonistic to, the Shi’i juridical hermeneutic circle”

(2006: 201). The difference we should emphasise, then, is between the

preservation of tradition in Mottahari’s dialectical Shiism and the

sheer invention of Shariati’s.

Taking Motahhari first, this difference is not surprising when we

consider that he was Ayatollah Khomeini’s student, friend and later

representative in Iran during exile. But he was not simply a mouthpiece.

Motahhari’s philosophical output exceeds Khomeini’s by far, because it

did not just engage in negating through ressentiment everything the West

materially and philosophically stood for in his imagination (even if he

did contribute he fair share to this discourse). He read Western

philosophy, albeit imperfectly, and attempted to elevate theological

scholastic discourse to equal academic philosophy. Both Motahhari and

Ali Shari’ati’s father, Mohammed Taqi-Shariati, were primarily

conditioned by the rise of the Communist Tudeh party in the 1940s and

the appeal of its Marxist, emancipatory alternative to traditional

Shiite ressentiment amongst young urban intellectuals (Dabashi 2006;

Rahnema 2000).[9]

Taqi-Shariati’s foundation of the God Worshipping Socialists was a

direct reaction to the Tudeh’s propagation of Marxism, forcing the

Islamic-left in Iran to engage with Marxism in order to adequately

defend its positions against the ideologues of the Tudeh. From this

first instance of negation, Islam and Marx in Iran were put into a

dialectical relationship. Motahhari’s intellectual development can most

productively be seen in the tradition this relationship gave rise to. By

attempting to negate the disenchanted world of secular Marxism,

Motahhari’s own discourse ended up sounding awfully similar to the

objects of his consternation. This was not against his wishes, however,

because this lexicographic transcription and smattering of sometimes

critical, sometimes cooptive, references to Plato, Aquinas, Kant and

Hegel served its ideological purpose to make political Islam resonate

amongst modernist revolutionaries in the country. Foremost was his

attempt to reconfigure Shiism from being a religion of ressentiment and

weakness to one of strength and revolution; and in the process he had to

challenge orthodox historical and religious doctrine. Dabashi tells us:

“He had to rid Islam of all apparent signs of misery and passivity. For

this reason, he severely admonished his audience for chanting,

commiserating, and self-flagellating. He went as far as to challenge the

authenticity of the canonical reports that Imam al-Husayn’s household

actually came to Karbala on the occasion of his martyrdom” (2006: 176).

And along these lines he redefined asceticism, as it ought to be: “The

astonishing resistance of the Viet Kong is due to that which in Islam is

called ‘the lightness of one’s necessities.’ A Viet Kong can go on for

days in hideouts and continue to fight on a fistful of rice” (Motahhari

cited in Dabashi 2006: 193). The hermeneutic challenge of attempting to

square Shiism with the demands of modernist revolutionary discourse and

practice made him go out of his way in the practice of hermeneutically

revising Shia Islam. For instance, against the injunction that the Quran

stipulates that only Muslims (in the masculine tense) should seek

knowledge, “he then produces an extraordinary explanation in a footnote

where he argues that the Arabic masculine noun “Muslim” stands for both

the masculine and feminine genders” (ibid: 205). In other words, for all

its radicality, his theoretical practice operated within the hermeneutic

contours of Shiite juridical tenets and points of reference — stretching

them as far as possible from traditional understandings to ones based on

the primacy of rational deduction.

That is also not to say Motahhari’s discourse was a solely superficial

exercise of the accommodation of two contradictory world-views. In

attempting to undermine the Tudeh’s variety of scientific Marxism

Motahhari also wittingly or not adopted what could be called a

quasi-Hegelian Islamist perspective. For instance, in Spiritual

DiscoursesShiite mythology is represented according to a phenomenology

and ethical schema recognisably Hegelian in its emphasis on the

universal and the recognition of the self-same identity of difference:

Is it a class feeling which makes us think of ourselves as belonging to

the group of martyrs of Kabala and dislike Yazid and Shimr as we dislike

our enemies? Do we project our feelings of sympathy or hatred on to each

group respectively, while in truth both are related to ourselves? ... On

the contrary you may look at it from a different angle which is not

personal and individual but is related to the whole of humanity in which

there is no question of personal dislike but the truth. There your

connection with the martyrs in your praise, and your dislike of their

enemies, is not personal but general and universal. (Motahhari 1986: 22)

In this schema Motahhari argues that all positions are just relative,

and thus incomplete, judgements except when viewed from the totality of

the Whole. In referring to the Shiites, the substitution of religious

sect, or faction, with ‘class’ is the curiosity of greatest interest. It

is true as Dabashi (2006) claims that Motahhari’s readings of Marx were

limited by the range of Persian translations and the absence of a

developed intellectual environment in the seminaries equipped to discuss

such topics. Nevertheless, although his reading of class as a form of

identity in opposition to totality is flawed according to a properly

Marxist reading, the point is that he implicitly seeks to undermine

Marxism here by equating class with exclusionary Shiite identarianism.

Therefore, Shiism as a singular perspective or force of ressentiment is

also rendered inadequate; the only truth to Shiism becomes that which

meets the standards of the universal. Motahhari’s mission is thus to

appropriate for Islam this rational, universal perspective and

vice-versa. He asks for example: “why do we think of Hadrat Ali, peace

be upon him, is a perfect human being? Because he felt society’s pain,

and his ‘I’ had become ‘We’. He was a limb or organ of a whole body”

(1986: 10). The twin necessities of revising Shiism to fit the standards

of the universal and provide an ideologically adequate theology of

revolution forces Motahhari to negate common Shiite precepts. The

movement within Mottahari’s hermeneutic reinscription of Shiism creates

a dialectical event that opens the possibility of the new; a rupture

impossible for functionalist fundamentalists like Khomeini to imagine.

To give another example of how he fundamentally questions received

Islamic doctrine, in Man and His Destiny Motahhari turns to the

ever-contentious issue of pre-destination (fate) in Islamic philosophy.

The core problem is that owing to Shiism’s belief in the destined return

of the 12^(th) Imam there has always been a concomitant sympathy for the

Asharite idea of predestination, which also became Sunni orthodoxy after

the fall of the Mutazilites (Fakhry 2004). The Asharite doctrine, in

contrast to the rationalist Mutazilite school of thought, curtails the

possibility of human freedom because of “God’s absolute omnipotence and

sovereignty in the world and the finality of his moral and religious

decrees” in which “the human agent plays no part in the drama of

choosing or doing and reaps none of the moral or religious fruits

accruing from such initiative” (ibid: 210–211). The problematic of

humankind’s free will and divine predestination, although seeming an

interminable religious question, is not all that different from Marx’s

famous difficulty with incorporating voluntarism in his otherwise

teleological communist worldview.[10] Likewise for Motahhari, it is

important from a revolutionary, ideological point of view to discredit

divine predestination and create an active conception of Shiite

doctrine. On this issue he takes a different position on the

conventional dichotomy between destiny and free will; attempting a

transcendental critique of the dichotomy in regard to conventional

Quranic exegesis on the matter:

The reason why the two sets of these verses are considered to be

conflicting is that the scholastic theologians and some commentators of

the Qur’an think that destiny implies that man is not free. According to

them destiny and liberty are mutually inconsistent. They argue that the

fact that everything is within the Knowledge of Allah means that

everything has been predetermined by Him.... Now let us see if it is

feasible to have a third view which may resolve the apparent conflict

between the belief in fate and destiny on the one hand and Allah’s

Omnipotence and His Omniscience on the other. If we can find such a

proposition there will be no need of interpreting any set of the

Qur’anic verses. (Motahhari 2008: part 1)

Motahhari proceeds by dividing the concept of destiny into two: “It

appears that there are two kinds of fate and destiny, one inevitable and

unalterable and the other non-inevitable and alterable” (ibid). The

dialectical movement begins. Motahhari goes on to infer from this

something remarkable: destiny cannot be changed except by a change in a

destiny itself — it divides itself internally in a sequence of

self-negations — and in that complex change in destiny human agency

inserts itself. It is worth quoting again at length to make clear the

profundity of Motahhari’s deduction:

Hence, a change of destiny in the sense that any factor can go against

what has been divinely ordained or what the law of causation

necessitates, is impossible.... But a change in destiny in the sense

that the factor bringing about the change should itself be a

manifestation of what Allah has decreed, is possible. Though it may look

rather queer, it is a fact that the destiny can be changed by another

destiny.... It may look more surprising if we think of the divine aspect

of fate and destiny, for a change in this aspect implies a change in the

celestial world, in the angelic tablets and books and in the Divine

Knowledge. So can Allah’s Knowledge still undergo a change? The surprise

reaches its height when we admit that certain terrestrial affairs,

especially human will and actions cause changes in the celestial world

and the angelic record. (Motahhari 2008: part 5)

In other words: humankind affects Allah’s knowledge, it affects the

internal orientation of the celestial world and it renders obsolete any

conception of eternal Law. And all this is deduced explicitly not from

Quranic exegesis but through the strictures of logic itself. Further,

does not the telos of this argument also imply that with the culmination

of humankind’s will the celestial is subsumed entirely? If so, is this

not something like the Hegelian subsumsion of God by Geist from an

Islamic perspective? Is this what allows Motahhari to claim: “The human

being is the goal of the universe whether the earth is the centre of the

universe or not. What does the phrase ‘goal of the universe mean?’ It

means that nature moves in a certain direction in its evolutionary

course whether we consider the human being a spontaneously created being

or a continuation of other animal species” (Motahhari 1986: 20) Morteza

Motahhari, Ayatollah Khomeini’s right hand man in Iran, emerges as an

ultra-humanist Islamic revisionist.

The Quran is negated as the eternal source of knowledge and humankind

emerges as the end point of the evolution of thought and will in the

world. Still, the path to this dialectical event, owing as it does from

a series of dialectical inductions from hermeneutical juridical

analysis, contains within it the necessity of the negated precepts. The

event in Motahhari’s thought, no matter the radicality of its deductions

and propositions, is ultimately tied to the authority of the hermeneutic

circle, even if he occasionally appears to cast aside exegesis in favour

of rationality. This fundamental philosophical difference is what

separates Motahhari from Ali Shariati. Although they collaborated for

some time in Husainiyya Ishad, Motahhari withdrew prematurely in 1971,

unable to rival Shariati’s popularity and shocked by the unorthodoxy of

his appropriation of Islam (Martin 2000: 79). Shariati proposed a

political Islam neither fundamentalist, nor that of a dialectical

convergence of Marx and Islam, but an Islam capable of generating the

new itself entirely free of external determinations. Or, in other words:

a political Islam bearing all the hallmarks of a Badiouian event.

The Event of Shariati’s Islam

As we have discussed, Shariati’s political genesis was the dialectical

relationship between Marx and Islam initiated in Iran, a theoretical

conjuncture shared by Motahhari and his father Taqi-Shariati; i.e.

attempting to negate Marxism for Islam by dialectically subsuming

Marxism within Islam. But therein lies the problem. Although Motahhari’s

dialectical hermeneutics creates the new, it is a new internal to its

precepts, it is not a radical rupture as such. On the other hand,

Shariati’s break from this tradition was most obviously manifest after

studying in Paris in 1959, where he was exposed to the heady environment

of social self-criticism and intellectualism. Studying under the French

orientalist Louis Massignon Shariati learnt about aspects of his own

Persian culture and Islam that he was unaware of himself. And from

Frantz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre he learned of the latest developments

in the fusion of existentialism and ‘Third World’ revolutionary theory.

Thus began the productive inter-pollination of theories that has

typically been described as his eclecticism, or strategic Leninism. Ali

Rahnema, for one, claims him as a “first class eclectic, he was part

Muslim, part Christian, part Jew, part Buddhist, part Mazdaki, part

Sufi, part heretic, part existentialist, part humanist and part sceptic”

(2000: 370). But just as Motahhari’s quasi-Hegelian interpretation of

Shiism has gone unnoticed, there has conversely been a lack of

theoretical exegesis of Shariati’s method. Eclecticism implies that all

ideas are held simultaneously regardless of their epistemological or

ontological contradictions. We could not claim that Shariati altogether

left behind the contradictions of the variety of sources he drew from,

but significantly the structure of his argumentation at least aims

towards that very purpose.

In his treatise on revolution, love, women, Islam, Marx and modernity

Shariati’s structure was to continually posit a dichotomy and explicitly

not resolve it but render it deficient against the possibility of the

new; satisfied by no synthesis or negation of the negation. Even the

titles of Shariati’s works express this anti-dialectical approach:

Religion vs. Religion, Fatima is Fatima etc. In the latter work,

regarded by many as his masterpiece, he successively looks at the

dichotomies between Eastern women and Western women, and reveals their

inadequacy. For example, the choice for Muslim women of traditionalism

versus the role model of the liberated Western woman is revealed as an

irresolvable choice of two evils.[11] His answer is to find both choices

wanting and to propose a new revolutionary way of being for Western

women to inhabit that rejects both these propositions, which equally

resonates for Iranian women in their unique social situation. His

unfolding structure is always to undermine the dichotomy of choices, and

then undermine the choices contained within those choices themselves.

In Religion vs. Religion he identifies the only true religion as that of

the becoming of universal monotheistic religions against the status quo,

and conversely their petrifaction in tradition or Law is the loss of the

ethical imperative of universal monotheism to a form of covert

polytheism. In his own words: “If I talk about religion, I do not talk

about a religion which had been realised and which ruled society.

Rather, I speak about a religion who goals are to do away with a

religion which ruled over society throughout history” (Shariati 2003:

40). This division of the world into two states: polytheism and

revolutionary universal monotheism, is clearly transcribable with

Badiou’s division of temporality around the event. And in Fatima is

Fatima Shariati describes the truth procedure of a Badiouian event

almost exactly:

In Islam the scholars are not wise people. They guarantee nothing. They

do not have a handful of knowledge. Science does not consist of hundreds

of pieces of information and knowledge. In their hearts is a ray of

light, the light of God. It is not a question of divine science,

illumination or Gnosticism. It is also not chemistry, physics, history,

geography, jurisprudence, principles of jurisprudence or logic, which

are all types of scientific knowledge. A science becomes illuminated

with light when its knowledge brings about responsibility, guiding

knowledge, and organization of ideas. (Shariati 1996: 98)

Here Shariati echoes Paul when he declared redundant both the Greek and

Jew, meant not as nations, but as the subjective inclinations of wisdom

and obscurantism. Shariati denounces the reduction of religion to a type

of scientific knowledge, which is nothing but taxonomy, whereas science

itself is the structure of subjective orientation to the opening of the

new. For “responsibility” we could read ‘fidelity’ and the moment when

“a science becomes illuminated by light,” as ‘event.’ Motahhari also

aimed at a ‘sui generis’ authority on Shiism when he stated: “As you see

in physics, a scientist comes and introduces a new school. Then all

others follow him. It is the same in jurisprudence. There are all these

uluma’, yet only one of them succeeds in producing a new school”

(Motahhari cited in Dabashi 2006: 1999). Yet, remaining trapped in the

discourse of jurisprudence, Motahhari cannot imagine the radical event

Shariati is calling for. And is Shariati’s philosophy not an event in

itself? For far from being a dialectical convergence of Islam and Marx

within a juridical hermeneutic framework, Shariati is declaring a new

guiding principle of Islam from ground zero, tabula rasa. As Dabashi

argues: “He was convinced, like no one else in his historical vicinity,

that he had, in fact and in the fullest extent possible, seen the light”

(2006: 145). That Shariati relates back to the inspiration of the

Prophet Mohammed and his daughter Fatima does not imply an invocation of

eternal Law (on the basis of which Badiou excoriates political Islam),

but instead emphasises the necessity of forgetting, how forgetting

inevitably opens the possibility of the new.

Shariati’s programme is thus radically different to the invocation of

the primordial ideal community by obscurantist political Islamists. For

Shariati, Mohammed’s daughter Fatima is simply “a model, an ideal

example, a heroine” (Shariati 1996: 79) because “in spite of the little

Muslims know about her, they accept Fatima, her majesty and power, with

their whole hearts” (ibid: 84). Shariati’s method is the same as he

describes for the prophet himself, who “preserved the form, the

container of a custom which had deep roots in society, one which people

had gotten used to from generation to generation ... but he changed the

contents, the spirit, the direction and the practical application of

customs in a revolutionary, decisive and immediatemanner” (ibid: 104).

In other words, like Paul he enacted a ‘universal singularity.’ But for

Shariati the degeneration of monotheism (universalism) to polytheism is

an experience iterated throughout history, preceding and following from

Moses, Christ and Mohammed, among others. Universalism can have no

specific historical foundation as such because it rather is the act of

becoming.

Conclusion (Religion at the Gates)

We have seen in this second part of the essay that the most strident

Communist defences of the Christian legacy, by Alain Badiou and Slavoj

Žižek, have a conception of Islam markedly similar to that of Hegel’s.

Their Islam fails the test of the universal: it fits neither into a

teleological unfolding of world spirit (according to Žižek); nor, for

Badiou scholar Peter Hallward, does it appropriately slot into the

conception of a militant ‘truth procedure’ in the same way that Paul’s

production of the Christian faith can. However, by taking these overly

abstract denunciations of Islam and grounding them in the concrete split

of the Sunni and Shia, even if we have not conclusively managed to

insert Islam into Hegelian teleology, or decisively proved it as a

Badiouian event (if such a thing is even possible), we have at least

dislodged some of the pre-suppositions which allows Christian

essentialism to assert itself. Similarly, in our analysis of the

philosophies of Ayatollah Morteza Motahhari and Ali Shariati, and their

relationship to Shia Islam, we have seen how there was an originality in

their utilisation of the religion for a radical, revolutionary programme

that cannot be perceived through the usual lens of the obscurantism of

such Islamists as Sayyid Qutb or Osama bin Laden. Both Motahhari and

Shariati aimed at a universal, revolutionary event, forcing them to

fundamentally reconstruct the meaning of Shia Islam from its tradition

ofressentiment. Yet only Shariati’s conception truly managed the radical

rupture within the religion, unencumbered by Motahhari’s need to

maintain his break within the constraints of the Shia juridical

hermeneutic circle.

Is it possible, then, in the light of the analysis we have conducted

here, to maintain the thesis of Paul as the founder of universalism? We

have pointed to the inconsistencies this gives rise too; inconsistencies

that even Badiou (2003) alludes to in his conclusion, when after 107

pages of attempting to demonstrate Paul’s foundation, he announces in

his conclusion to St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism that the

claim is “excessive,” but only because it is “already present in this or

that theorem of Archimedes” or “in certain political practices of the

Greeks.” Slavoj Žižek, however, fails at any point to deliver any

caution against his own temerity and pushes not only the significance of

Paul, but also the ontological significance of the Christ event; using

it as a standard with which to negate all other religions.

The consequences of this theological turn are not necessarily

disastrous. Still, the valorization of Paul and Christianity raises the

possibility of a troubling culturalist hypothesis for the failure in the

humanity of non-Catholic ‘Third World’ Communist movements in the

20^(th) century: an implication already picked up upon in Dayan

Jayatilleka’s (2007) explanation for the collapse of the global,

revolutionary movement. Without substantive philosophical and historical

engagement with Islam, which is after all setting the global scene of

anti-systemic ‘resistance’ to Western hegemony, the exclusivist regard

for Christian universalism ends up looking perilously close to a leftist

variant of Samuel Huntington’s Clash of the Civilizations (1997) thesis.

This considered, we might ask what purpose this theological turn serves?

Why should Badiou, Žižek et al feel the need to be encumber themselves

with theosophy? As an intellectual exercise revisting the theological

matter upon which ancient and modern civilization was born is

undoubtedly part of coming to terms with the historicity of our politics

and epistemology. But surely if Communism is to have any meaning in the

future — if the global emancipatory struggle against capitalism is to be

reborn — then the ability to act ‘as if’ we exist on a bedrock of

absolute possibility and relate through a transcendent universalism (not

one grounded in a specific historical and religious procedure) is what

will allow us to realize this future.

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[1] The transformation of the forces of the left into Islamists is a

phenomenon that has been evident in many cases in the Middle East: from

the Iranian Revolution — in regard to the Mujahideen and Tudeh Party —

to the Islamisation of the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in Turkey, to

name just a few examples. It is commonly acknowledged that many Islamic

movements grew out of dissatisfaction with the ‘socialist’ Arab

nationalist regimes; that is, the loci of militancy shifted from

previously secular ideologies to Islamic ideologies, even when they are

fighting the same cause of oppression e.g. the PLO’s secession of

militancy to Hamas.

[2] Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) is a very obvious example of this

shift. Alain Badiou has made this shift implicit in all his most recent

work since Being and Event (2005); first published in French in 1986.

And you could even say that Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian

Revolution arose from his belief that a new sort of communist subject

was being born before his eyes: the ‘Collective Will’ as he put it.

[3] Marx’s expulsion of Bakunin is just one instance among many of the

suppression of anarchism as both a formal manifesto and as a tendency

within Communist organisations. See Robertson (2003) for an analysis of

this specific incident.

[4] It is Slavoj Zizek’s unorthodox open Hegelianism that requires us to

make the distinction. Where different interpretations of Hegel have had

their various followers, such as Alexandre Kojeve’s influential reading

upon the Anglo-American academy — most famously upon Francis Fukuyama —

and Jean Hippolite’s upon 20^(th) century French thought, all have

basically adhered to the fundamental Hegelian proposition that the

Notion unfolds in history and that the Whole is a closed system, i.e. we

can reach the ‘end of history.’ Žižek, on the other hand, has

consistently propounded a variant of Hegelianism that remains open. No

end can be reached and there is no resolution in the Absolute. Žižek has

been criticised by many for his loose Lacanian interpretation of Hegel,

for example see Widder (2002: 158), and has been defended by some based

on the inadequacy of defences of the ‘real Hegel’, see Gunkel (2008),

but there have been remarkably few attempts, to my knowledge, to deduce

if Žižek’s Hegelianism is an ontologically consistent rethink of the

system.

[5] Strictly speaking for Badiou the only history that exists is the

truth procedure of events. There is no history beyond the event, or

in-between events, yet not conditioned, by an event. As he describes it:

“If one admits that for there to be historicity evental sites are

necessary, then the following observation can be made: history can be

naturalized, but nature cannot be historicized” (2005: 176). The key

word is ‘if,’ because it is not clear at all that historicity is

dependent on evental sites, or at least under any more generally

functional definition or explanatory framework that can deduce

historical causation (or meaning) in the absence of radical ruptures

from the status quo. For instance, in the case of the arbitrary decision

making of sovereign powers that can and has had epochal significance.

[6] A scholar of Islamic or Middle Eastern Studies will notice a rather

erratic transliteration of Farsi and Arabic words and names into English

in this article. This is because the sources cited in this piece use a

multitude of different transliterations and owing to the fact that this

author is not a scholar trained specifically within the field, adopting

and rigorously following any one system would be needlessly time

consuming and considered only of great consequence for a specialist.

Since the aim of this article is to break down the barriers between

contemporary continental philosophy and Islamic studies it is hoped that

the arguments will suffice; even if technical conventions are sometimes

flouted. This author has at least attempted to be consistent in his use

of individual transliterated words and names throughout and for the sake

of consistency has removed inter-syllabic marks, e.g. Shi’a becomes Shia

etc.

[7] For more on the falsity of these distinctions and ambiguous

differentiation between the left and the Islamists in Iran see my review

essays of Ali Rahnema’s biography of Ali Shariati (Coombs 2008) and of

Maziar Behrooz’s history of the left in Iran (Coombs 2008). Hamid Dabshi

also notes in a very interesting passage: “In the Kablistic tradition,

the Tudeh Party had its share of sacred numbers, the first and most

essential of which was “Fifty-Three,” the number of original Marxists

who planted seeds that would later grow into the Tudeh Party” (2006:

15).

[8] Khomeini frames all his writings as a reaction to the conspiring,

omnipotent ‘West’; even the claim to the difference of Islamic

jurisprudence from secular legal structures. In Islamic Government he

argues: “What we are suffering from currently is that consequence of

that misleading propaganda whose perpetrators got what they wanted and

which has required us to exert a large effort to prove that Islam

contains principles and rules for the formation of government”

(Khomeini: 1979: 14). Khomeini’s ressentiment follows a structure all

too familiar to what Nietzsche needled as the ‘slave mentality’ in

theGenealogy of Morality. Unable to affect a positive, constitutive

force in its own right the slave can only demonise the master and turn

against the positive force of life itself. Yet, as a revolutionary

leader Khomeini excelled in tapping into constitutive anomie in society

and turning the slave mentality into an active political force. The

orchestration of the 40-day cycles of mourning to rally protestors to

was not just an effective mobilisation technique but also induced what

Giorgio Agamben (2005) also describes as the structure of messianic time

in Christian eschatology. As Dabashi puts it: “During such recollections

of historical memories, there occurs, as it were, a contraction of time,

a bridging of the chronological gap. Ahistoricity means nothing” (2006:

421). Without ever explicitly stating it, Khomeini drew upon a deeply

messianic expectation of redemption expected to be brought about by the

return of the twelfth Imam, who in contrast to earlier Imams who were

passive and peaceful ... would be the one with the sword.” And

furthermore: “The appearance of the Mahdi Qa’im will be preceded by

terrible signs” giving way to a state in which “Under the Mahdi’s rule

there will be paradise on earth.” And following the death of Mahdi:

“Shiite authors speculate that the resurrection of the dead and the Last

Judgement will follow directly” (Halm 1991: 37–38). The forty-day cycles

clearly anticipate and induce the experience of messianic time, with

Khomeini’s absence in exile and his philosophy of the grand jurist

(philosopher-king) clearly striking parallels with the occulted 12^(th)

Imam. The use of mourning cycles to induce a state of exception, where

non-law and law are indistinguishable, has also been tracked back by

Agamben to an institution of Roman law called the iustium. As he draws

from the findings of a work by H.S.Versel, Agamben proposes “an analogy

between the phenomenology of mourning — as attested to in the most

diverse places by anthropological research — and periods of political

crisis, in which social institutions and rules seems [sic] suddenly to

dissolve” (2005b: 65). This is just one more example to help dissolve

the sense of the absolute alterity of Shia Islam and its rituals, which

Foucault, for one, seemingly fell under the spell of during his

reportage for the Corriera della Serra.

[9] It is important to mention this relationship between Motahhari and

Ali Shariati early on to make clear some of their similar allegiances

and also the political significance of their later rivalry. This rivalry

culminated in followers of Shariati, in the breakaway Mujahideen

organisation, the Furquan, murdering Motahhari after the fall of the

Shah.

[10] In the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Marx’s answer: “Men make

their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not

make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances

existing already, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 1963: 15)

is a compromise of ideological significance. Of course, it is impossible

for anyone to actually live their lives believing at every moment their

choices are predestined. Even if the intellectual position of

predestination is not strictly irrefutable, the fact that we need to

operate ‘as if’ we have free will makes the question more significantly

that of affecting a tendency amongst those who hold the opposing

position: i.e. those that believe in predestination are more likely to

be apathetic about changing the world.

[11] Shariati first undermines the position of traditionalist notions of

veiling and oppressing women as deficient and proceeds to also undermine

the modernist, Europeanised female role model as equally deficient. He

then argues that the image of Western women in the Muslim world stops

very short of reality. Veering from the ressentimentand cultural

essentialism of the standard portrayal of Western women in Muslim

countries as hypersexual sirens, he argues there is a very real truth to

the liberation of women in the West and extols the countless examples of

women who have realised this freedom in intellectual and political

pursuits. But he goes on to argue that within the Western tradition the

dichotomy between freedom and societal belonging is also oppressive. The

choice of freedom which creates these exemplary role models is also an

oppressive freedom from the social point of view of a woman in society:

premised on an individualistic breaking away from a hierarchical social

bond which results in loneliness and women’s objectification.