TO COME TO END
WITH GOD’S GHOST
After
the Second World War, in the whole of the economically developed
countries, the religion, and particularly Roman Catholicism, had had to
fold back its secular claims to direct the life of men in their
interiority, their sexuality, their social and moral existence. A large
portion of humanity thus collected the fruit of the long antichristian
fights of the XVIIIth century initiated by the middle-class and
pursued with even more strength by the labour movement, and whose
laicization of society and relegation of the religion to the private
sphere remained one of the most invaluable heritages. We breathed an
all the more salubrious air as the ancestral messianic current which
had crossed the Christian religion had completely deserted the churches
and, giving up the transcendence, had irrigated the whole of the
utopian currents of the years 1960, so much hated today by the bearers
of the dominating order. In addition, the device of enrolment of the
imaginary which had been during more than one millennium the monopoly
of Christianity was largely exceeded in its means and its methods by
the spectacle society which was gaining advance. To some extend the
spectacle, which is not other than the profane realization of the
religion, took great care not to complete its work of going beyond the
religious: rather than removing religion, it preserved it as historical
drama among its repertoire. It is this drama which it brings back on
stage today.
With the fall of the
Eastern Stalinist bureaucracy and the collapse of revolutionary
ideologies, which had so much served to maintain the balance of the
social system, capitalism found itself facing itself, in the cul-de-sac
of its own success. The more it unifies the Earth thanks to the
exaggerated penetration of the goods, in addition of the false
necessary divisions to divert of its project to confront directly those
that it exploits and of which it devastates the existence. Admittedly,
these divisions, it does not create them up, and it is not necessary to
theorize the plot to explain this process; it is its own historical
movement – straight down to its course errors which consisted in
reinforcing radical Islamism to weaken the Soviet state capitalism -
which uses and amplifies preexistent racial, ethical, sexual, religious
and social divisions. This is the reason why one attends today the
artificial wakeup of old historically dated antagonisms, between a
Christendom and an Islam which preserved of their old power only the
ideological core of the religion and some fixed rituals ensuring a more
or less great trapping of the spirits and bodies, especially where the
religious can take cover of the secular arm. Some believe in
discovering a clash of civilizations (whereas there is none more today
on Earth than the same barbaric cruelty of the hamburger and cell
phone); the others, representatives of a frustrated Moslem bourgeoisie
which would like to eat its share of the capitalist pie, believe in a
remake of the crusades. To this grim foolery adds up moreover the
reactivated confrontation between Western democracy and totalitarianism
which had made run the system for more than one half-century. Let us
add however that by underlining all these false oppositions, we do not
trace an abusive sign of equivalence between daily and significant
situations incomparable: just as in the time of the cold war, it was
preferable for all, proletarians included, to live in the defined free
world rather than in the defined communist world, it would prove to be
of a particularly bad faith not to admit that we live, in an Islamic
society, even more badly than everywhere else, even if not a woman, an
homosexual or a heathen, simply by the fact that one must conform to
the scandalous prohibitions and regulations of public morals.
However, in this most
tragic of reenactment, the same situations authorize the same resort to
nauseous tactical alliances: just like in the era of the triumphing
Stalinism signing, against what one already called liberalism,
appalling agreements such as the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact between
Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany, today such alliances of that
character are born between the patented critics of a wrongfully
restated ultra liberalism and the worst Islamist regime or
organizations. What is at play in these bargainings is still the
abandon of any moral scruple for the benefit of the worst of
confusions. Thus let us spit on the inept Chavez who does not hesitate
to support the Ahmadinejad criminal all at ones taking himself for the
executor of the wills of God; let us spit on these European leftists
who, confusing, as is their habit, the oppressed population and its
alienated representation, granting their laughable support for the
ultrareactionaries of Hamas; let us spit on these English trotskists
who co-join in with the green fascists at local elections; let us spit
on all those, which under pretext of fighting against the imperialism,
would not feel on their skin all that is repugnant and unworthy to lend
a hand with any bearers of religious dogmatism.
Our atheism is not a
philosophical or logical standpoint. It is, like the atheism of Sade,
the tonality of a way of life, the sensitive fluid in which we can
breathe and in which our imaginary can enjoy its powers. The atheism of
the positivists and other anticlericals who accumulate the evidence of
the inexistence of God appear to us like the badly detached fruit of a
monotheism tree transformed on its end into mere ideology of the
transcendence. Our atheism is rather the solar and merry atheism of
solar Cyrenaics or Lucrèce and, on the significant level,
expresses the position of universal immanence which one finds among all
animists peoples, for which the sacred is not other than the feeling of
the presence of nature. This is why the idea of a single omnipotent god
appears so ridiculous to us and so tedious. And we can’t forget that
this god created upon the worst image of the man — an old somewhat characterial male —
was always used to justify the mental misery of the anthropocentrism
and its voracious seizure on the wonder of the world. Should the
imagination, by chance always carried towards excesses of poetic
invention, be satisfied by such a sad silhouette drawn up at the
horizon of its questionings?
The alleged return of
the religious that the spectacle does not cease re-sifting us will not
change anything to a fundamental data: God is dead, definitively dead,
already more than one century ago; he was replaced by the religion of
the Capital, whose money is the prophet. Prophet who, as one sees it in
China today, all the more unchains passions that it does not have to
embarrass of a concurrent religious transcendence. But for the
subjected people for a long time by monotheism, whatever it is, the
phantom of God still lurks, like an empty belly which fills of the
illusory response to all frustrations, rancours and oppressions that
never cease generating the Economy and the class which withdraws the
benefit from them. And, like a unrelentless threat, this ghost weighs
on collective imaginary, of which it pollutes the language, confiscates
the hopes and ties the forays. To get rid of this threat, it is to risk
the only adventure which is worth, that of freedom. Thus let us affirm
once again the poetic language’ intrinsically blasphematory,
antireligious, and consequently liberator character, and our visceral
disrespect to any submission to the false divine.
Group of Paris of the Surrealist Group