Raoul Vaneigem The Resistance to Christianity

Translator’s Introduction

It’s unfortunate that the author of this remarkable book, Raoul Vaneigem, did
not take the time to write a concise and easily understandable “Foreword.” Instead,
as the reader will see, he dashed off something that only a few people — those
who have already had the good fortune to read The Movement of the Free Spirit,
which covers some of the same ground — would be able to fully understand. In
addition, this chaotic, confusing and cavalier “Foreword” discusses the events and
possibilities of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, while the book itself
covers a period that, with the exception of the last section of the last chapter,
ends with the Eighteenth Century (1793, to be exact). As a result, it is possible
that very few readers will move beyond the “Foreword” and try to read the many
chapters that follow it. And, of course, that would be a great shame.
Indeed, the “Foreword” to this book is so inadequate to the task at hand that
we considered either supplementing it or replacing it entirely with the two short
texts that introduce the English translation of The Movement of the Free Spirit (New
York: Zone Books, 1994). But we decided against such interventions: Vaneigem
certainly had his reasons for writing such a text. As he explains in the first chapter
of The Movement of the Free Spirit,
As he analyzed the reproduction and self-destruction of commodities Marx
never asked himself how far his personal behavior obeyed economic reflexes.
His critique is the product of an intellectualism that reproduces the power
of the mind over the body; it is the work of a lasting influence of God on the
material world.
Vaneigem also detects “intellectualism” — that is, a lack of traces of his own
“personal behavior” and the “lasting influence of God” — in his own work. He
writes in the “Introduction” to The Movement of the Free Spirit that
This stubborn determination not to let anything take precedence over the will
to live, to reject at whatever cost even the most imperative calls of survival,
first took shape in my books The Revolution of Everyday Life and The Book of
Pleasures. The latter was needed to clarify and correct the former, to remove
the intellectual cast that won it high esteem from people incapable of putting
its lessons into practice but who, instead, used them as a consoling alibi for
their own premature aging.
And so, to counter the “intellectualist” cast and reception of The Movement of the
Free Spirit, Vaneigem saddled The Resistance to Christianity with a “Foreword” that
would discourage certain (many?) readers from misusing it or even reading it in
the first place. This certainly explains the curious last sentence in his “Foreword”:
“If it is, finally, necessary to furnish an excuse for a style of writing in which one
hardly finds the care that I give to the books that are not too far removed from
the line of my life, I would like simply to say that each matter has been given
the treatment that it suggests.” Fortunately for us, this is as far as the parallelism
between the two sets of books goes. While The Revolution of Everyday Life (written
between 1963 and 1965, and published in 1967) is an excellent book, The Book of
Pleasures (1979) is a piece of crap; but both The Movement of the Free Spirit and
The Resistance to Christianity are superb, indeed, much better than The Revolution
of Everyday Life.
Let there be no mistake: The Resistance to Christianity is a scholarly work, even
more so than The Movement of the Free Spirit. In his “defense” of “the cursory
character” of The Movement of the Free Spirit, Vaneigem refers to “the sheer number
of texts that had to be uncovered and translated.” But if its predecessor was
“cursory” or incomplete (it is in fact neither), then The Resistance to Christianity is
exhaustive, even definitive. Not only does it incorporate the ground covered by its
predecessor — that is, the resistance to Christianity (the “heresies”) of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance — but it also extends this ground in both directions:
forward into the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, and all the way back
to the Seventh Century B.C.E. Like its predecessor, The Resistance to Christianity
demonstrates an astonishing erudition: trained in Latin as a student, its author
also calls upon works written in English, Italian, Dutch, German and, of course,
French.
Vaneigem’s motivations for reiterating the (best parts of the) material contained
in The Movement of the Free Spirit were two-fold: he couldn’t very well get to the
Enlightenment without going through the Renaissance; and he couldn’t simply
refer his readers to The Movement of the Free Spirit, because — at least in its French
version — the book wasn’t reprinted by its original publisher after the first edition,
which was hardcover only and appears to have been quite limited. Indeed, Frenchlanguage
readers had to wait until 2005 for the book to be reprinted. (Thanks to a
1998 reprint as a paperback, the English translation has never gone out of print.)
* * *
Born on 21 March 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, Raoul Vaneigem is best known
for being a member of the Situationist International (the “SI”), which he joined in
1961. An unusual grouping of European radical artists, filmmakers and writers,
the SI was founded in 1957 and dissolved in 1972. Between those years, the
group reinvented the theory of proletarian revolution and propagated it through
a journal called Internationale Situationniste, several books and a great many
scandalous provocations. The SI was deeply involved in the protests, riots and
occupations that nearly toppled the French government in May-June 1968.
Given this pedigree, one might be surprised that Vaneigem has been so interested
in Judeo-Christianity, even if his interest is focused upon the beliefs and
practices that have been categorized, denounced and forbidden as “heretical.” Is
not heresy simply the “negative” twin of orthodoxy? Were not the situationists
dedicated to the abolition of religion as well as the abolition of capitalism and the
State? The answer to both questions is “Yes.” But in much the same way that his
fellow situationist, Guy Debord (author of the anti-spectacular book The Society of
the Spectacle), has made several films, Raoul Vaneigem has written several books
on the subject of heresy. Unfortunately, few of them have been translated into
English.
For Vaneigem, religious values and behaviors — guilt, self-hatred, fear of pleasure,
the hope for a future heaven on earth and, above all, the contempt for the
body and for the earth — persist (even) among those who consider themselves
to be atheists and anarchists. They persist, not only in their political ideologies
(which are often informed by the notions and practices of hard work, self-sacrifice
and intellectual and moral superiority), but also in their psychological states
(often imbued with weariness, resignation, self-contempt and a sense of impotence).
Just like “the others” — the capitalists, the bureaucrats employed by the
State and the “religious nuts” — atheists and anarchists all-too-often neglect or
abuse their personal health, their capacities for (sexual) pleasure and the roles
that women play in their organizations and actions.
And yet The Resistance to Christianity is not a pep talk or a self-help manual. It
is a very serious historical (albeit subjective) investigation into the rise and fall
of Judeo-Christianity. In his “Introduction” to The Movement of the Free Spirit,
Vaneigem says,
I want to challenge those who dehumanize history, seeing it as fated and
fatal: hence my wish to pay homage to those who refused to give in to the
idea that history moves toward some inevitable outcome. I want also to seek
out signs of life, behind the edifices of religious and ideological obscurantism,
and in so doing I hope to dispense once and for all with the cherished but
no less dubious notion of a Christian Middle Ages.
Substitute “Western civilization” for “Middle Ages” and you will have an idea
of what Vaneigem is up to in The Resistance to Christianity.
In this incredibly ambitious project, Vaneigem both relies heavily upon and
disagrees with a number of “traditional” historians, but especially Norman Cohn,
the author of The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval
and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements. Originally
published in 1957, and revised and reprinted in 1961, this pioneering and
exceptionally influential work claims that,
Although it would be a gross over-simplification to identify the [Medieval]
world of chiliastic exaltation with the world of social unrest, there were
many times when needy and discontented masses were captured by some
millennial prophet. And when that happened movements were apt to arise
which, though relatively small and short-lived, can be seen in retrospect
to bear a startling resemblance to the great totalitarian movements of our
own day [ . . . ] The time seems ripe for an examination of those remote
foreshadowings of present conditions. If such an enquiry can throw no
appreciable light on the workings of established totalitarian states, it might,
and I think it does, throw considerable light on the sociology and psychology
of totalitarian movements in their revolutionary heyday.
As Greil Marcus has noted in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century,
the situationists “would carefully plunder” Cohn’s book, which was published in
France in 1962 under the title Fanatiques de l’Apocalypse. But the situationists
saw the validity of Cohn’s hypothesis only when it was inverted. In The Society
of the Spectacle, Guy Debord points out that,
The great European peasant revolts were likewise a response to history — a history
that was wresting the peasantry from the patriarchal slumber thitherto
guaranteed by the feudal order. This was the moment when a millenarian
utopianism aspiring to build heaven on earth brought back to the forefront
an idea that had been at the origin of semi-historical religion, when the early
Christian communities, like the Judaic messianism from which they sprang,
responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by announcing the
imminent realization of God’s Kingdom, and so added an element of disquiet
and subversion to ancient society [ . . . ] So, contrary to what Norman
Cohn believes he has demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium, modern
revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of
millenarianism. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism, the expression
of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the
last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking only the
consciousness of being historical and nothing more. The millenarians were
doomed to defeat because they could not recognize revolution as their own
handiwork. The fact that they made their action conditional upon an external
sign of God’s will was a translation onto the level of thought of the tendency
of insurgent peasants to follow outside leaders.
Though he generally accredits this analysis, Vaneigem’s position in The Resistance
to Christianity is somewhat more nuanced. As he states in Chapter 33, “The
great revolutionary movements gave to millenarianism a more ideological than
religious form — nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of
irrational and Joachimite faith in Nazi millenarianism, that is, in the antithesis of
the projects of a classless society or an ecological paradise, both carried to consciousness
by the successive waves of the economy.” On the other hand — unlike
Cohn and Debord — Vaneigem does not see a general consistency or uniformity
in millenarianism. In his “Introduction” to The Movement of the Spirit, he says,
“The partisans of the Free Spirit were divided on one fundamental issue.”
Driven by their will to follow nature, some identified with God and the
ordinariness if his tyranny, using force, violence, constraint and seduction
to secure the right to gratify their whims and passions. Others refused to
countenance such a union between a despotic God and a denatured nature, a
union whose exploitation found perfect expression in the myth of a divinity
at once pitiful and pitiless. Instead they saw the refinement of their desires
and the quest for a ubiquitous and sovereign amorous pleasure as a way
of replacing the spiritualized animal and its labor of adaptation with an
authentic human species capable of creating the conditions favorable to its
own harmonious development.
All through The Resistance to Christianity, Vaneigem will highlight this division
or disagreement among the so-called heretics. It is in fact the central theme of
the book: “Yes” to Simon of Samaria and Marguerite Porete; “no” to the Cathars
and Thomas Munzter.
Once this division has been drawn, and its significance has been recognized,
the reader might fully understand the peculiar character of “modern life.” Over the
course of human history, have we not overcome all of the obstacles to freedom and
happiness on earth that have been erected by the economy? Have we not ceased
to be ruled and made miserable by the gods, God, the Church, kings and princes,
dictators and political ideologies of all stripes? Yes, indeed — but we remain
constrained by the economy itself, that is to say, by work and the commodity, by
the production and consumption of pollution.
It is significant that Vaneigem doesn’t remind his readers of the phrase NEVER
WORK, which Guy Debord scratched into a wall on the Rue de Seine in Paris in
1953 and which was a decade later cited by the Situationist International as the
“preliminary program for the situationist movement.” Instead he offers (in The
Movement of the Free Spirit) the following “good watchword”: “The minimum of
survival in the service of a maximum of life.” The latter appears to be much less
radical and memorable than the former, and perhaps this will comfort those who
believe that Debord was right when he said that, after his departure from the SI
in 1970, Vaneigem demonstrated the “impossibility of keeping quiet,” a quality
that “strictly co-exists with a total impossibility of speaking” (letter to Gianfranco
Sanguinetti dated 13 August 1973). Though we do not wish to choose sides, it
is also quite clear that Vaneigem had Debord, among others, in mind when he
stated (once again in The Movement of the Free Spirit):
What started as a revolution against misery turned into a miserably failed
revolution, all because of a reluctance to be anything for oneself; and this
failure still condemns even the most vociferous seekers of emancipation and
happiness to the gall of impotence in which they acquiesce. Anyone who
has the intelligence to comprehend the world but not enough to learn how
to live, or who takes his self-hatred out on others, blaming and judging so
as not to be blamed and judged himself, is, deep inside, no different from the
priest.
In this context, it is interesting to note that, unlike Vaneigem’s “watchword,”
Debord’s slogan is phrased as a command, if not a “commandment” along the
lines of “Thou shalt not work.” It certainly would not have reduced this quality if
Debord had written NEVER WORK, AND LIVE ACCORDING TO YOUR TRUE
DESIRES. The Marx-like “intellectualism,” the “lasting influence of God,” would
still remain.
* * *
To conclude, a few technical notes are necessary. The French text includes both
footnotes and endnotes: the former, which are generally reserved for commentary
(there are a few exceptions), are marked by asterisks; the latter, which are always
reserved for the attribution of source materials and quotations, are marked by
Arabic numerals. Wherever possible, we have incorporated the footnotes into the
main body of the text within parentheses (thus) and have removed the asterisks.
When this hasn’t been possible, we have retained the asterisks and placed the
footnotes, not at the bottom of the page, where they originally appeared, but
immediately following the paragraph that contains them.
As the reader will see, we have taken the liberty of occasionally offering our
own endnotes. We have done so when Vaneigem used an English expression
in the original; when he has not translated into French a word, phrase or title
that is in a language that we speak or can look up in a dictionary (German and
Latin, respectively); when he has referred to someone or something that might be
obscure to his readers in the English-speaking world; and when the reader might
be interested in following certain connections that we have made.
When necessary, we have supplied within brackets [thus] words that the author
failed to include. If we relished a certain play on words, did not choose
a literal rendering of a word or phrase, or doubted the accuracy of our rendering,
we supplied the original French in italics and within brackets [ainsi]. When
the author’s sentences have contained a great many sub-clauses, we have used
parentheses (like this) for the sake of clarity and to avoid confusion. But when
parentheses appear in quotations taken from the works of other writers, they
have almost always been supplied by Vaneigem himself, and not by us.

NOT BORED!
New York City
March 2007

   Raoul Vaneigem the Resistance to Christianity the Heresies at the Origins of the 18th Century by Walter Simonetti