Capitalism as Religion

Benjamin and Agamben on Christianity's most monstrous parasite

The title of Benjamin’s fragment Capitalism as Religion (Kapitalismus als Religion, 1921) is to be understood absolutely literally — the very first words of the fragment are ‘one can behold in capitalism a religion’ (CR, 259). And so, Benjamin himself emphasises that he is not simply reiterating Weber’s famous genealogy of capitalism as a secularised mutation of Protestant, Calvinist Christianity, or, more specifically, its gruelling regime of asceticism and discipline. Benjamin’s crucial point, rather, is that capitalism is a directly and essentially religious formation. Indeed, for him, the world-historical rupture introduced by capitalism, having ‘developed’, fattened over centuries in the bowels of Christianity as a whole (not merely its Germanic incarnation), coincides with the rise of a new holy order (CR, 260). The religiously structured economic system of capitalism thus overthrew the religion whose body, whose veins, it emptied. Which is to say, the most monstrous parasite in the history of the world is capitalism (CR, 260). The Christian faith, having shrivelled into a pale carcass because of the parasitical growth of capitalism within it, is no longer adequate to soothing the ‘worries, anguish and disquiet’ of humanity (CR, 259). Capitalism took over — absorbed into itself — Christianity’s psycho-social function of addressing this suffering, of drying the tears of the man tortured and tormented by his birth and his world.

Benjamin posits that the capitalist religion has three fundamental pillars. The first of these is that capitalism is a pure cult — potentially ‘the most extreme and absolute' to have ever existed (CR, 259). This religion has no harbingers of divine prophecy, nor does it have any holy books to impose a ‘dogma’ (CR, 260). Resultantly, capitalism is realised — that is, attains its ultimate meaning — only in its specific ‘practices’ (CR, 259-60). These rituals include frenzied speculation on and manipulation of global stock markets, buying and selling of anesthesising commodities, and investment as the firm’s slithering into some new opportunity for exploitation and plunder. But the pure cult of capitalism is also perpetual — this is the second pillar of this religion. Every single day is a religious holiday; there is no escape — not even for the most fleeting moment — from the whole ‘sacred pomp’ of the rituals in which the capitalist religion is exhausted (CR, 259). Buried in this splendour, our ‘worship’ has no end — the principle of modern subjectivity, the abjection in which we are constituted, is infinite prostration (CR, 259).

The third pillar of the capitalist religion is that it ceaselessly ‘hammers’ guilt into the subjects it fabricates (CR, 259). Benjamin (somewhat elusively) suggests that this function is derivative of a certain strata of humanity ‘grasping’ capitalism as it engorged itself upon the entrails of Christianity (CR, 259). Capitalism was this class' vehicle to universalise its guilt, to drill it into everyone. This ‘tremendous movement’ conquers God Himself — after the Heavens above were torn open, He was dragged down to the Earth. God is not a festering corpse, as Nietzsche’s madman proclaimed; instead, He is forcibly ‘drawn into the fate’ of capitalism’s guilty man, violently transfigured into the mighty, unquestionable judge of this man’s guilt (CR, 259-60). As Löwy remarks, this great historical movement is articulated in the bourgeois propagandist’s familiar declaration that poverty — the emaciation of the toiling masses, or the guilt that banishes them from grace — is simply the ‘will of the Market’ (HM17, 65). I would further add that the brute fact that our God is now the Market is reflected in the whole bombast of electoral politics in the imperial core’s celebrated ‘liberal democracies’. Here, the bourgeois, 'mainstream' political party sells itself to the public (as if a commodity to be consumed) on its supposed credentials to ensure that the Market, what is called ‘the economy', is made or kept healthy — the ultimate autonomy of this health-unto-death to decide our fate, our guilt, is left essentially unquestioned.

The guilt which cascades from the religion of capitalism, of the Market, inexorably turns into despair, a terrible rotting in the dark pit of our being — or what we today call 'mental illness'. This is because ‘capitalism is a blaming, rather than a repenting cult’ — the guilty subject it organises has absolutely no way to absolve himself; there are no rituals to wash away his sins, to restore to him some glimmer of hope for salvation and paradise (CR, 259). Benjamin, perhaps surprisingly, asserts that Nietzsche, Freud and Marx are all complicit in capitalism’s drowning of humanity in its crashing waves of despair. The whole ‘ethos’ defined by the lonely voyage of the Nietzschean overman, der Übermensch, through the ‘house of despair’ that is the Earth is the ‘first’ recognition and fulfilment of the capitalist religion (CR, 260). The discourse of Freudian psychoanalysis is also, for Benjamin, ‘thoroughly capitalistic’ — there is a structural ‘analogy’ or parallel between ‘the hell of the unconscious’, as the localisation of the sinful impulses that succumb to censorship and repression, and the formative guilt of the capitalist subject (CR, 260).

But even the great revolutionary Marx, like Nietzsche and Freud, was pressed into the high ‘priesthood of capital’ (CR, 260). Benjamin’s proposal is that Marx imagines the transformation of the capitalist world into socialism through an accrual of ‘compound interest’, which is itself a function of blame, guilt (CR, 260). Here, it appears that Benjamin is (somewhat cryptically) recasting Marx’s famous thesis that capitalism dialectically contains or creates the conditions for its own overcoming — socialism from the constant crises of the capitalist system, the birth of a proletarian class to dig capitalism’s grave. Ultimately, by turning Marx, Nietzsche and Freud into priests of capitalism, Benjamin suggests that the social order under this name dominates so completely that even its most violent, incisive critics are still pious. For Benjamin, then, the profound political risk that inheres in the supposed atheism of radical social critique is undeclared worship of the capitalist religion that it seeks to liquidate and transcend.¹

In Profanations, Agamben pushes Benjamin’s analysis of capitalism as religion in a new direction — one that points towards a politics of subversion, an escape from the blaming cult. The primordial operation of all religion, Agamben says, is to confer upon certain ‘things, places, animals or people […] sacred names’, and thereby wrench them from ‘the free use and commerce of men’ — to establish them as the exclusive ‘belongings’ of the gods (P, 73-74). Things are isolated beyond the mortal universe, the realm of the profane, through ‘meticulous’ sacrificial rituals (P, 74). Agamben’s striking example of the reversal of sacrifice is playing with a ball: such a game imitates, duplicates, the battling of gods for the sun (P, 75). As form, the game is an ‘entirely inappropriate use (or, rather, reuse) of the sacred’ — it is a taking back of something that religion has separated from us, a conquest of a divine ‘space of power’ by mere mortals (P, 75, 77). But this reversal of sacrifice is not the restoration of some metaphysically pure, ‘uncontaminated use’ that preceded the separation enforced by religious power (P, 85). Play is liberation precisely as the creative discovery of an entirely ‘new possible use’ (P, 85). Profanation is thus, for Agamben, radically distinct from the essentially ‘repressive’ process of secularising disenchantment — it is, in fact, the ‘reverse political operation’ (P, 77). To secularise is to simply move and therefore inscribe anew the ‘aura’, the power, of the divine, of the religious; on this point, Agamben refers to Schmitt's famous genealogical profile of the supreme power of the sovereign to decide upon the state of exception as a secular rearticulation of the transcendence of God (P, 77). By contrast, to profane is to ‘return to common use’, in a totally unprecedented way, what power had greedily ‘seized’ as its own — and thereby extinguish this domination (P, 77).

According to Agamben, Christianity — through the pronouncements of its emperors, popes and theologians — distinguished itself from pure paganism by locating the distinction between sacred and profane, divine and mortal, in a single place: the human being. This absolutely novel assertion of the 'unambiguous' and ‘simultaneous presence of two natures’ in man was a strategy to mitigate the extreme peril introduced by the sacrificial nailing of God Himself to the cross (P, 79). This strategic cunning rescued Christianity's vast machinery of sacrifice, its whole apparatus of power, from a catastrophic malfunction. Now, Agamben posits that the capitalist religion — as the parasite which, as Benjamin identified, feasted upon the viscera of the Christian faith — extends the imposition of an internal division, an inner rupture, to literally everything under the emptied sky, the silent, unseeing stars. In the 'extreme phase of capitalism', all that remains is 'a single, multiform, ceaseless process of separation' — a process which has actually exceeded, or has become indifferent to, the sacred and the profane as conceptual categories (P, 81-82).

Human language, sexuality and work are all internally ruptured — not to mention the whole natural world struggling to sustain us, whose once lively sounds have become gasps of death. The decisive manifestation of this universal process is the commodity so marvellously analysed by Marx (even if he was, per Benjamin, unwittingly in solidarity with the religion of capitalism). Commodification fractures its object into use-value and exchange-value, transforming it into an 'ungraspable fetish' (P, 81). Precisely as the fetishised instance of this extreme internal rupture, the commodity is a ruthless conspiracy to defy human use — it can only ever be idiotically consumed, or (equivalently) ‘given over' to spectacular, pornographic ‘exhibition’ that fundamentally excludes any genuine ‘dwelling’ and ‘experiencing’ (P, 82, 84, 88). Here, for Agamben, is the essential core of the ‘capitalist religion’, where it is ‘founded’ (P, 85). The sinister political consequence of all this is that the religious formation of capitalism, by purging the world of the possibility of using, forbids the subversive reuse in which the playful politics of profanation consists, the inventive ‘return’ of what the capitalist religion has mercilessly commodified to the ‘free use of men’ (P, 73).

Accordingly, Agamben defines the supreme 'political task' as 'the profanation of the unprofanable' — that is, liberating ourselves from the chains of the capitalist religion, this unending nightmare, by recovering the sheer possibility of profaning play, of inventing entirely new uses that are beyond consumption (P, 92). I think that the child Nietzsche speaks of in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is helpful here. For Nietzsche, the child represents the culmination of a great 'metamorphosis of the spirit' (TSZ, 54). He comes only after the kneeling camel whose hump carries the crushing 'weight' of existing values and, then, the bloodthirsty, 'preying' lion who violently steals for himself the 'right' to new ones (TSZ, 54-55). The Nietzschean child is nothing less than 'innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes' — a heroic will to spontaneously create, out of its own freedom, a whole new ‘world', a new horizon (TSZ, 55). It is hard not to believe that Nietzsche chose the character of the child to visualise the highest stage of the spirit precisely because he was impressed by childhood games, play. Playing children, indifferent to the cruel judgement of adults frozen in their alienated and desolate world of capital, imaginatively fabricate something new and unexpected out of their toys, even simple sticks and stones — and do so in unspoiled serenity, perfect innocence. To me, the capitalist religion can be understood, in a not unimportant sense, as the mortification of this child — the creation of a ‘sensible’, ‘realistic’ adult subject that, haunted by the guilt of ‘insufficient’ productivity or success, brutally exploits and optimises himself in submission to the chaotic whims of the Market, abandoning the 'immaturity' of childhood, this exuberant playfulness. What would it mean, I want to ask, to realise a childlike freedom to toy with the commodity? And to coordinate this playful reuse with the revolutionary seriousness beaten into us by an adulthood at the altar of capitalism? Here I see a crucial prospect for developing Agamben and Benjamin’s reflections on capitalism as religion — and a chance for liberation from this subjective (and material) desolation. After all, as Nietzsche says, there is a child ‘concealed’ in us — and he ‘wants to play’ (TSZ, 92).

1. To say nothing of the ‘atheism’ whose shallow self-consciousness is the simple non-belief in the existence of God.