The ethics of conviction
Marxism, ontology and religion

John Roberts

If the 'turn to ethics' has shaped much recent continental philosophy, the 'turn to religion' has not been far behind. The reappearance of various religious categories and concepts in recent political philosophy and philosophical ethics is unmistakable. Moreover, given that much of this writing emerges from the vicinity of Marx, if not directly from Marxism itself, this turn is certainly not to be mistaken for a simply reactionary move. Indeed, the opposite might be argued: the reinscription of various religious categories out of a philosophical ethics is part of a wider cultural commitment to renew, reinvoke, repossess Marxism as a revolutionary moral tradition, a tradition in which conscience and judgement play defining roles.

This moral repossession of Marxism, however, is not as one might presume solely Hegelian in spirit. On the contrary, the ethics of the 'other' in its current postmodernized forms is judged to be the very dissolution of the ethical, which is the basis on which moral law is rendered weak and submissible to social-democratic norms. On this view, ethics can only be made livable by breaking with the assimilative, communal act of identification.

It is no surprise, therefore, that it is in Kant, and in particular a version of Adorno's Kant, that the new politicized ethics has found its critical resources. In this corpus of writing (Alain Badiou, Roy Bhaskar, Antonio Negri, Slavoj Zizek) the turn to ethics as a turn to religious categories is broadly a renunciative move. That is, if we follow Adorno's loose distinction between a Kantian ethics of conviction of self-responsibility (Geisnnungsethik) and a Hegelian (tolerant) ethics of social responsibility (Verantwortungsethik), in which empirical conditions of the ethical act are taken into account, this writing closes down the ethical pathway to the 'other' on the neo-Kantian basis of the primacy of the subject's moral commitments.1 Moral duty is not to be separated from the demands of self-abnegation and self-violation. Bhaskar's views are somewhat different to Badiou's, Negri's and Zizek's on the politics of this position - which I will discuss later - but suffice it to say that all writers invoke or borrow from a secularized, Kantian, (early) Christianized tradition of the conscionable self whose judgements and will, in Kant's sense, exist in conflict with and contradistinction to empirical experience.
 
To link this secularized Christian tradition to Marxism, or to a reclaimed 'existential' Marxism, is of course, in turn, to link this tradition directly to the foundations of Enlightenment thinking itself. The secularized Christian themes of Badiou, Negri and Zizek, in particular, resituate philosophical ethics within the secularized Christianity of German idealism. Indeed, Kant's secularization of the paradox of Christian moral duty - one performs one's moral duty through the abandonment of one's duty - is the very foundation of modern European philosophy's transfiguration of the ethical self within the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Kant there is no separation between the moral law as duty and the operations of reason. Moral law is to be found in the principle of the will separate from the ends which can be brought about by such an action. Only an act which does not serve sensuous inclination and self-interest can be an act of the will: 'The moral worth of an action does not depend on the result expected from it.'2

Deconstruction has recently also drawn deeply from this Kantian well of the renunciative subject, allowing us to talk about deconstruction's own ethico-religious turn, even if Derrida rejects the metaphysics of the Christian legacy of Western philosophy: that being is able to exceed its representation in signification. Derrida, Badiou, Negri, Zizek and Bhaskar may share a concern with the conscionable, responsible subject, but Derrida's interest in the immanent risk of responsibility opening up the subject to the wager of the'to-come' is narrowly focused. In fact, we might place Derrida's 'religion beyond religion' within a weak Messianic tradition; Badiou's and Zizek's 'ethics of passion' within a strong Messianic tradition, and Bhaskar's and Negri's 'respiritualized' Marxism - with their somewhat different ethical commitments - within a tradition of ecumenical libertarianism.

The recent turn to ethics as a turn to 'religious categories' of responsibility, fidelity and passion, then, follows a discernible path (the recovery of the Enlightenment link between religious categories and philosophical reflection) which diverges into two main tendencies: a deconstructive commitment to wresting philosophy's occluded religious concepts from the hubris of a secularized Western philosophy in order to stage the continuity between philosophy and non-philosophy; and the reinvigoration of the revolutionary and diremptive passion of the religious subject. In some sense these two positions overlap and invade each other's territories. But what is at stake metaphysically in the latter certainly means that the two positions should not be confused. This distinction is made clear in two writers who fit neatly into this bifurcated secularized Christianized tradition: the Derridean Hent de Vries, and the Zizekian, Kierkegaardian Timothy Bewes. Their recent interventions into the field of a politicized ethics sum up what has come to be at stake in these two secularized religious positions. For De Vries - following Claude Lefort and Carl Schmitt - the theological-political is the always permanent horizon of philosophy that post-philosophy and philosophy as an underlabourer for science consistently forget, and therefore remains a residual, if non-metaphysical, presence. As he argues in Religion and Violence (2002), 'Philosophy É never really emancipated itself from the systematic limits - semantic and figural; rhetorical and imaginative - imposed upon it by religion.'3 For Bewes, in contrast, following Lucien Goldmann and Georg Luk‡cs, the utopian spirit of historical materialism survives in the tropes of transcendentalism: 'It is precisely in its 'transcendental' or 'Messianic' aspects, the affirmation of an other to what exists - in the name of which what exists or what has already existed, may be 'saved' - that Marxism retains its revolutionary and progressive potential.'4

Essentially, the return to religious categories out of the return to the ethics of conviction is a 'return to religion beyond religion' as the realm of the passionate act as the ground of responsibility. Ethics becomes a site of the passionate political judgement and decision.

Consequently, for these writers on either side of the metaphysical divide, before ethics enters the conventionalized, social-democratic site where 'human rights' and 'difference' are given their pluralist character, it is the archive and space of a less 'forgiving', less accommodating set of moral proscriptions and precepts: the Christian demands of sacrifice, unconditional love, faith, grace, fidelity, the miraculous, and the (non-pious) vows of poverty. In this respect the turn to religious categories as an underused political heritage is not based on any reinvocation of the religions of the Book, or the elaboration of the 'good life', but on a refiguring of the universal drama of human responsibility. The new writing proposes neither an unreflecting faith nor a new version of onto-theology. What the post-Platonic, post-pagan tradition of the interiorized, reflective, responsible self is seen to provide is the repoliticization of ethics under the religious imperative of the transcendental (Christianized) subject.

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