7. Paul

Chapter Seven ("Paul"): A renewed sense of "radical" materialism has become the test of one's politics today, but like other historical returns the first time it occurs, such as in the work of Walter Benjamin, it is a tragedy but today, in the work of Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, and Alain Badiou, it is a farce. They are all currently involved in repeating Benjamin's performance in his "Theses on the Philosophy of History" in which he identified, using the language of Saint Paul, a "weak messianic power" in the discourse of historical materialism that more so than any positive and reliable knowledge of inequality, such as provided by Marx's labor theory of value, is what truly makes it radical. The argument that Marx's "scientific socialism" is secretly a form of the very "ethical" or "utopian socialism" that he and Engles never failed to critique for serving to normalize the contradictions of capitalism would seem to call into question the supposed "radicality" of Benjamin's messianic materialism. And yet, it is precisely Benjamin's messianic interpretation of materialism to which Agamben, Badiou, and Žižek have all recently turned for addressing the inequalities of capitalism. But, there can be no social change without the positive and reliable knowledge of what makes class inequality. What the messianic materialism amounts to in the end, I argue, is the counsel to find happiness in the midst of bare survival and, as in the re-newed faith of Paul, it represents therefore a therapeutic retreat in cultural theory of learning to live with capitalism rather than a means to overcome it.

Keywords: Walter Benjamin; Slavoj Žižek, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou; Saint Paul; Christianity; messianism; religion; Marxism.