What if we began to view leftist revolutionary
thought as inextricably tied up with the problem of religious conversion?
After all, a convert to revolutionary positions is far different than
the merely philosophical conversionary model of Plato and St.
Augustine, which is a cognitive level conversion. For Plato, conversion is when
the individual develops a newfound commitment to a different regime of sense;
conversion means that the individual sees the light of truth in a different
way. This is, in fact, not enough for leftist conversion. Revolutionary
conversion must not only abandon the world as it is, it demands a two-part
commitment: that one take up the spiritual re-setting of their life along the
direction of the revolution (this we find in traditional religious conversion),
and secondly, one must commit to revolutionizing the material and social
relations of the world (this we do not find in traditional religious conversion
and is the most important addition of leftist philosophy to the phenomenon of
conversion). This latter commitment gives conversion an ontological
affectivity, i.e. converting entails a complete break with an individuals
previous life when one becomes a revolutionary and a material mutation then
follows.
We can therefore perform a re-reading of
leftist ethico-political thought along the question of conversion into the
revolutionary imperative. In this re-reading, leftist ethicists that fail to
develop a theory of conversion fail precisely in that their theory fails
to meet the demands of the revolution. Sartre is one example of such a
failure. In his late turn to Marxism, Sartre said that true morality consists
of a permanent conversion into revolutionary action, thereby punting on what it
in fact means to convert. One must lead a life of constant conversion. In this
position, Sartre effectively suspended the question of politics and
morals, where to convert is to enter into a space in which the ethical
imperative itself becomes eligible to be re-formatted along the creation of a
new revolutionary subject. We find something like this in Lukács’ ethics as
well.
In the recent work on St. Paul which was begun
with the deconstructive master Jacob Taubes in the early 1990’s, followed then
by Derrida and extended by Agamben, Zizek and Badiou — we are presented
with a theory of Paul’s conversion that set the grounds for a genealogy of
secular leftist conversion. In other words, these texts argue in different ways
that St. Paul gave leftist thought a new form of universality, and the means by
which a new theory of the ‘all’, beyond the limited confines of Jewish chosenness,
functioned. But is this in fact an accurate genealogical claim?
In Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life, a
philosophical self-help tomb — he strongly argues that these readings of Paul,
what he terms as ‘neo-Jacobin readings’, are in fact false. I won’t provide a
book review of Sloterdijk’s text because Nina Power already gave a good
summary of the book here. Rather, I want to look at his theory of conversion,
particularly of how he reads conversion as a seminal aspect of leftist and
post-Marxist thought.
Sloterdijk is tempted to agree with the
conservative Heideggerian historian-philosopher Oswald Spengler, who argued
that conversion does not exist. Spengler maintained there are only
re-occupations of vacant positions in the fixed structure of a culture’s field
of options. Conversion should therefore be re-designated as metanoia, a Greek term
that means ‘a change of heart’, where the individual seeks out a new trainer
and adopts a new vertical regime which entails a different Big
Other. Sloterdijk argues that true conversions involve secessions from
life, where the individual engages in an ascetic acrobatics — thus conversions
happen all over the place in modernity but they are metanoetic shifts into a
new regime of symbolic immunology. Thus, he argues, St. Paul’s conversion was
not something that presented a new form of universality to the world of his
time, it was an individual shift at the level of Jewish zealotry to a newfound
Apostolic devotion. Since Paul already had relations with Christians for some
time prior to his experience on the Road to Damascus, when he was overwhelmed
with the light he called out to his Lord, using the very language of the Christians,
before he had even accepted the Christ as his savior. This subtle point allows
Sloterdijk to show that all religious conversion is plain and simple metanoia,
which is given its first basis in Plato’s cave allegory, where conversion
is,
“meant to lead from the corrupt sensible world
to the incorruptible world of the spirit. To carry it out a change of sight
from the dark to the light is required, a change that cannot take place
‘without turning the whole body’” (299).
The idea of conversion entailing a coincidence
with the revolution of material and social relations would come about, in an
interesting way, only after the scientific development of anesthetics.
Anesthetics, for the first time, allowed man to enter into willfull states
of un-consciousness – which was soon modified into a new form of bourgeois
asceticism that turned against life and against asceticism itself in the form
of laughing gas and opiates. Socialist and communist thought would
eventually propose a model of conversion based on the necessity of man to
develop a new awareness of what Sloterdijk calls the ‘vertical axis’. The
vertical axis in modernity is steadily in decline and this creates a spiritual
crisis — leftist thought thus enters into the fray to re-claim the vertical but
devoid of the transcendent God. In an ingenious conservative reading of
the October Revolution, Sloterdijk indictes the Soviet philosophers as the
first ‘saints devoid of conscience’ which he argues is the most significant
contribution of the Leninist moment to moral history.
With Sloterdijk’s periodization of conversion,
he argues that metanoia changed after 1968 to something more concerned with
bringing the commonplace back — to a horizontal re-adjustment from a sick and
violent prior period obsessed with the secular vertical. Post 68, according to
Sloterdijk, metanoia is no longer compelling at the level of revolutionary
temptation — this is, incidentally a central part of Badiou’s philosophical
fidelity thesis for which St. Paul provides the model. There is today a
realization that “one does not save oneself by changing the world” to quote
Godard’s 1982 film, Passion.
What we lack is a desire for the passionate conversion that would ontologically
affect the world — this itself helps explain why the question of St. Paul has
returned to captivate leftist philosophical thought.
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