technical images and linear text

Possibly the finest statement of overtly ‘political’ philosophy of the twentieth century is to be found in Bakunin’s God and State. I recently finished a paper on Derrida, Deleuze and onto-theology (by way of some Heidegger and Nietzsche), and at one point I went looking for a quote from the text which I had long enjoyed: “even if God did exist, mankind would have to destroy him.” I found it, spent some more time reading, and found nearly every salient element of what I had just been thinking while writing my own text already written within Bakunin’s. His inversion of Voltaire’s tongue-in-cheek maxim leads into a compelling realist argument against dogmatism, idealism, and absolute obedience of any kind. Even if we must recognize the perversely metaphysical, messianic quality of an orthodox Marxism, the sheer hubris and impatience of the ‘Social Revolutionary’ – only very slightly removed from that of the religious prophet – we ought to stand in awe of this incredible work. We might even read Bakunin’s anarchism as a specular precursor of sorts (after Marx and Nietzsche) to Deleuze’s ‘nomad thought’ and his idea of ‘crowned anarchy.’ Bakunin might have been loath to accept any suggestion of a ‘crown,’ but his text affirms nevertheless the necessity for an atheistic philosophy which cultivates a thought of immanence, and the necessarily political dimensions of such an ideology.

Here are three of my favourite paragraphs, some of the most relevant to that which we might now – naive bourgeois idealists such as we have all become – call ‘political philosophy.’ (I would argue that its implications must necessarily go far beyond this narrowly-focused field and into ontology and epistemology, not to mention a certain peculiar sort of deconstructive ‘psychoanalysis;’ I’ll set those implications aside for the moment.)
“Idealists of all schools, aristocrats and bourgeois, theologians and metaphysicians, politicians and moralists, religionists, philosophers, or poets, not forgetting the liberal economists – unbounded worshippers of the ideal, as we know – are much offended when told that man, with his magnificent intelligence, his sublime ideas, and his boundless aspirations, is, like all else existing in the world, nothing but matter, only a product of vile matter.

We may answer that the matter of which materialists speak, matter spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive, matter chemically or organically determined and manifested by the properties or forces, mechanical, physical, animal, and intelligent, which necessarily belong to it – that this matter has nothing in common with the vile matter of the idealists. The latter, a product of their false abstraction, is indeed a stupid, inanimate, immobile thing, incapable of giving birth to the smallest product, a caput mortuum, an ugly fancy in contrast to the beautiful fancy which they call God; as the opposite of this supreme being, matter, their matter, stripped by that constitutes its real nature, necessarily represents supreme nothingness. They have taken away intelligence, life, all its determining qualities, active relations or forces, motion itself, without which matter would not even have weight, leaving it nothing but impenetrability and absolute immobility in space; they have attributed all these natural forces, properties, and manifestations to the imaginary being created by their abstract fancy; then, interchanging rôles, they have called this product of their imagination, this phantom, this God who is nothing, “supreme Being” and, as a necessary consequence, have declared that the real being, matter, the world, is nothing. After which they gravely tell us that this matter is incapable of producing anything, not even of setting itself in motion, and consequently must have been created by their God.

….

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, goodness, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave. Incapable of finding justice, truth, and eternal life by his own effort, he can attain them only through a divine revelation. But whoever says revelation says revealers, messiahs, prophets, priests, and legislators inspired by God himself; and these, once recognized as the representatives of divinity on earth, as the holy instructors of humanity, chosen by God himself to direct it in the path of salvation, necessarily exercise absolute power. All men owe them passive and unlimited obedience; for against the divine reason there is no human reason, and against the justice of God no terrestrial justice holds… With all due respect, then, to the metaphysicians and religious idealists, philosophers, politicians, or poets: The idea of God implies the abdication of human reason and justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.”

Read the whole text here.