David Capener

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stk ˙ 3 ˙ 2018 | 195the germ of anarcho-atheistic-syndicalismDavid Capener is a doctoral student in architecture philosophy and urban theory at the Dublin Institute of Technology.  david.capener@mydit.ieGod is a construct of the imagination that relativizes our understanding of the world  The god you profess to worship is the god you are  Gun-God; homophobe-God; left-God; right-God; Trump-God; money-God – repeat to fade  Yet the banal platitude echoes: God is dead  God is not dead for he (yes, “he”) never was  Lest we forget Paul Tillich’s (1886–1965) oft repeated phrase that it is as atheistic to say that God exists as it is to say that he does not  God does not exist; nor is he dead  He is as alive as the imaginations of those who keep his image alive  God is not dead; he is a ghost, haunting the world that his followers have constructed in his name  F  LeRon Shults is correct in his assertion, following Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995), that Christianity harbours the germ of a tranquil atheism – although what one means by tranquil is unclear  Is there such a thing as a tranquil atheism? No more or less than there is the possibility of a tranquil theism  What is tranquil about theism? It is nothing but anguish, a painful scar of nothingness activated as Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991) once wrote 1 Likewise the many atheisms are no different – nothingness activated  The atheisms at the core of Christianity, as Ernst Bloch (1885–1977) perhaps more adequately showed, are anything but tranquil 2 They are tempestuous; its believers (yes, 1  Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, London 2002, 239 2  Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, London 2009, 220 The Germ of Anarcho-Atheistic-Syndicalism Harbouring within ChristianityA Response to F. LeRon ShultsDAVID CAPENER196 | stk ˙ 3 ˙ 2018 david capener“believers,” for there is no place of non-faith, just faith of different kinds) cut adrift in its open seas  For Bloch there is only one thing that believers of atheism have and that is the search for a handhold and the feeling that one may find it  It is this searching, this feeling, that is the antidote to the many disappointments of atheism  But this is no place for those who still walk the Damascus road believing that they might see a light and hear a voice  They, writes Bloch, need ready-cooked food from on high  Bloch knows; this is no tranquil atheism, it is less than being in the good safe hands of an imaginary father, but it is more than any prescribed (and therefore false) handhold can provide, and it has a far higher view of man  It is better, too, than any of those ready-made, pre-flavoured foods that only go to ruin one’s real appetite – the appetite for more  The question that Shults’s paper leaves me with is this: what might the (un)tranquil atheism harbouring within Christianity do? What might it actualize? As Marx would ask: how does it make philosophy material? Or Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1930–1992): how might it inscribe itself geophilosophically on the plane of immanence? I propose that one possibility for the actualization of an (un)tranquil atheism is itself harboured within Christianity and what I consider to be a more ac-curate reading of Shults’s misreading of 1 Cor  11:17–32, namely the counter empire impulse of the pre-Constantinian Christian community – an anar-cho-atheistic-syndicalism  Shults’s reading of the text as the Christians’ “failure to detect the real presence of a judgmental supernatural agent who was returning soon” fails to recognize the germ of radical anarcho-atheistic-syndicalism present in the early anti-Caesar rituals of the early Christian community  “For when you are eating,” writes the author(s) of the text, “some of you go ahead with your own private suppers  As a result, one person remains hungry and another gets drunk ”3 Amongst the many exclusive tables of the Roman Empire – only open to the rich and wealthy, and generally male – a new egalitarian table was to form the centre of the Christian community  This new table was to be a profound critique of the top-down, economic system of the Roman Empire that perpetuated social inequalities  Those who turned up early, to eat, drink, and consume, leaving nothing for those who were actually in need were bringing an ethical judgment upon themselves  At the core of this early Christian ritual was an immanent materiality – an ethical impulse for the least among them  The question then, for atheists, theists, and agnostics alike is this: amongst the many tables of late-integrated-capitalism and the multitude of inequalities that it perpetuates, what tables are we setting?3  1 Cor  11:21 stk ˙ 3 ˙ 2018 | 197the germ of anarcho-atheistic-syndicalismOur age needs a thought that strips away the intricate simulacra of clarity that infests modern philosophy and religious reflection  The clarion call is this: “wake up from your enlightenment coma; realize that the demon was Descartes all along ” For to think the thought pregnant with anarcho-atheis-tic-syndicalism is to stumble; not upwards; not in transcendent figments of wild other-worldly imagination – fairy tales; Unicorns and gods  To think like this (to act like this) is to stumble onto the surface, to fall over, and with dirt in our hands remember – we are always someone, saying something, about something, from somewhere  There is no thinking a thought outside of thinking itself  We are here, and here matters  Thinking must matter now or it does not matter at all  This is anarcho-atheistic-syndicalism, tranquil or not This is an immanent endeavour, its direction not toward a detached transcendent realm, constructed in the imaginations of those who lay claim to special insight or revelation; those content on partying like its 1399  The subject matter of this kind of thinking is now – it is here  Nothing can slip through the net of this enquiry  There is no gap between a sacred and sec-ular realm  There are realms intricately folded into each other – a weaving together of possibility, promise, disappointment, and hope  This is what it means to think in the presence of an absence of a god who never was  To think like this is to realize that the surface of the ordinary world looks differ-ent in the context of unrestricted questioning  The hands of those who en-quire like this are dirty  Their thinking is one that exploits the strategic de-racination of ordinariness, that begins in the middle of experience  This task does not begin and it does not end – it is and it insists  God is a construct of the imagination that relativizes our understanding of the world  May we walk the Damascus road and realize that there is no light and there is no voice, just the dust beneath our feet – a luminous immanence  p

The Germ of Anarcho-Atheistic-Syndicalism Harbouring within Christianity

https://journals.lub.lu.se/STK/article/download/19580/17711

The Germ of Anarcho-Atheistic-Syndicalism Harbouring within Christianity

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