Прогрессивный журнал Генезис
is thus an authentic ethical act. It would be totally wrong to say that she rejects the false god and that, in an authentically Christian version of the film, the true Christ should appear at the end, proclaim her a true believer precisely because she rejected to declare that she loves the false god. (Along the lines from the New Testament in which Christ explains that whenever there is love between his followers, he will be there — god should not be loved, he is love.) The true temptation to be resisted is thus to declare our love for a god who doesn’t deserve it even if he is real. For a vulgar materialist, all this cannot but appear as a pseudo-topic, an empty mental experiment; however, for a true materialist, it is only in this way that we really renounce god — by way of renouncing him not only insofar as he doesn’t really exist, but even if he is real. In short, the true formula of atheism is not «god doesn’t exist» but “god not only doesn’t exist, he is also stupid, indifferent and maybe outright evil” — if we do not destroy the very fiction of god from within, it is easy for this fiction to prolong its hold over us in the form of disavowal («I know there is no god, but he is nonetheless a noble and uplifting illusion»). So what does the idea that god has to die in itself also, not just for us, effectively amount to? Already for decades, a classic joke is circulating among Lacanian psychoanalysts: a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man; however, when he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately comes back very trembling of scare — there is a chicken outside the door and that he is afraid that it would eat him. «Dear fellow», says his doctor, «you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man». «Of course I know that», replies the patient, «but does the chicken know it?» Therein resides the true stake of psychoanalytic treatment: it is not enough to convince the patient about the unconscious truth of his symptoms, the Unconscious itself must be brought to assume this truth. And does exactly the same not hold for the Marxian commodity fetishism? Here is the very beginning of the famous subdivision 4 of the Chapter 1 of Capital, on «The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret»: «A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties» 4 . These lines should surprise us, since they turn around the standard procedure of demystifying a theological myth, of reducing it to its terrestrial base: Marx does not claim, in the usual way of Enlightenment critique, that the critical analysis should demonstrate how what appears a mysterious theological entity emerged out of the «ordinary» real-life process; he claims, on the contrary, that the task of the critical analysis is to unearth the «metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties» in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object. In other words, when a critical Marxist encounters a bourgeois subject immersed in commodity fetishism, the Marxist’s reproach to him is not «The commodity may seem to you to be a magical object endowed with special powers, but it really is just a reified expression of relations between people». The actual Marxist’s reproach is, rather, «You may think that the commodity appears to you as a simple embodiment of social relations (that, for example, money is just a kind of voucher entitling you to a part of the social product), but this is not how things really seem to you— in your social reality, by means of your participation in social exchange, you bear witness to the uncanny fact that a commodity really appears to you as Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books 1990, p. 163. 4 8
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