Excerpted, with modifications, from The Transcendence of Desire: A Theology of Political Agency (Palgrave, 2023). Used by permission.
Progressive Christianity tends to make frequent appeals to justice. Justice is associated with the prophetic. In the wake of liberation theology, we are called by our faith to denounce injustice and announce the coming commonwealth of God. For more than a generation, we’ve been told that justice is the more public and responsible conception than Christian love—as Cornel West once reputedly put it, “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
But justice is also a contested term. Does it have to do with fairness, as philosopher John Rawls taught? Or ought we resist such liberal conceptions in favor of biblical notions of divine “righteousness?” Perhaps a virtue-oriented approach to justice tethered to a particular narrative community will clarify the importance of its appeal?
Stanley Hauerwas claimed that “justice” is a bad idea. The point could be nuanced, but socialists have, or ought to have, their own reservations about the adequacy of the idea of justice for an emancipatory politics. It is too easily co-opted by liberal attempts to soften (and thereby to justify) modern capitalism. In Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign, for example, liberals in Nevada objected to Sanders’ endorsement of “Medicare for All,” arguing that it would set aside the gains in private insurance coverage won at the bargaining table by union leaders. Even though Medicare for All would be an obvious gain for workers and would have gone a long way toward de-commodifying workers’ health care, union leaders balked at what they perceived to be a violation of the right to choose private insurance. In other words, Medicare for All was an “injustice” that risked destroying a regime of private insurance they had helped to shape and reform. “Justice” tends to accept the terms of capitalism — including especially the commodity form itself — and then, only secondarily, ask how commodities ought to be distributed.
In a similar vein, justice is excessively rationalistic — ignoring entirely the affective dimension of political motivation and placing too much faith in the efficacy of legal disputation. Despite the contemporary appeal of the concept of justice in Christian left circles, it produces a politics that is insufficiently radical because it is unable to break through the ideological consensus that supports modern capitalism.
We believe that a more radical socialist politics calls for a return to love. And this is salutary for Christians who wish to offer resources and motivation for political struggle, because love happens to be the characteristic form the prophetic takes for a Christian theological account of politics.
But two problems arise. First, what do we mean by love? Love is so often sentimentalized in modern cultures. Surely, a socialist politics of love can’t be the “love” that circulates through the various iterations of The Bachelor! This kind of consideration is what recommends justice as the norm for politics in the first place. Second, and worse, when held up as a norm, love can promote a kind of self-renunciation which is, at best, apolitical if not anti-political and self-defeating. How can we recoup love for politics under these conditions?
Let us focus on the problem of self-renunciation. For the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niehbur, the politics of love was a politically necessary “madness.” Love, which he described as agapic, compels its bearer to seek not its own welfare but the welfare of others, even when such seeking comes at a great cost to self. Such love demands the impossible, and by that very demand it underscores the weakness and the brokenness of the human condition.
It’s an inspiring vision, but Niebuhr understood that the point of radical politics is to inculcate a practical attitude that sustains perseverance in the struggle for a better world. For Niebuhr, love is not just an indifference to social conditions that goes its own way, gets itself crucified, and succeeds only by remaining true to itself in the face of loss. Rather, it is a kind of indifference that intervenes: an indifference that makes a difference by virtue of its relentlessness even in the face of repeated failure. Its refusal to acquiesce to social conditions is grounded in an insistence on advancing a divine vision of harmony.
But such a vision, especially within the fractures of class society, can only appear delusional and self-destructive. “It is a valuable illusion for the moment,” writes Niebuhr. But the “illusion is dangerous because it encourages terrible fanaticisms.” This “sublime madness” pursues an impossible course at great cost to self. For Niebuhr, the embrace of this impossibility — this illusion — is required to motivate political actors to break through the resistances and the defenses of a pervasive capitalist order.
The self-sacrificial dimensions of Niebuhr’s conception of love have spawned a veritable industry of critique. Feminists have rightly criticized accounts of love, like Niebuhr’s, that stress the need to break with pride and yield power to the other. For women, and for others whom societies seek to discipline into postures of deference and dependence, this is not only disastrous advice, but it reflects a deep misunderstanding of women’s agency in history that, often, seeks interdependence rather than submission. Feminist criticism thus discovered a contradiction in Niebuhr between an account of the human capacity for transcendent love and renunciation. What makes the critique so powerful is that this logic appears often throughout Christian tradition, especially in the West. It is visible with special urgency in Niebuhr.
But we need to ask whether it is only agape, with its self-disregard and its tendency toward renunciation, that operates like this? Many of us today are likely suspicious of the subtle distinctions between agape and eros developed by twentieth-century theologians, seeing in them a veiled puritanism that refuses to acknowledge the goodness of desire and fails to see how different forms of love easily mingle in actual human life. Moreover, is it only agape that is capable of issuing judgment on the status quo and opening us toward a different future? It seems to us that this would be a strange position to take. As impressive as the passion of self-sacrifice may be, at least in some cases (i.e., those not involving self-hatred, acquiescence to abuse, etc.), surely passionate attachments, erotic connections, various investments of libido, have a way of breaking through boundaries and placing the strictures of common sense radically in question, too. In fact, for us today, it is much easier to see the revolutionary character of desire than of sacrifice.
Love need not be confined to acts of self-renunciation, nor should it even be construed primarily so. Instead, we need to return to the roots of love in desire (eros). And, on the other hand, the erotic need not be consigned to reproducing natural patterns. Eros is an expression of, and aims at, freedom, the creation of the new. Love-as-eros seeks out connection and mutual satisfaction. And, potentially, it gives birth.
To begin to make this link requires some examples. But to portray the capacity of love as a transcendent desirous force that can shatter and recompose the social order is inevitably to plunge into the mythical or fictive dimension. One such fictive example lying near the root of the Western imaginary, even if it has been distorted by rationalizing interpretations, is Sophocles’ Antigone. In the play, Antigone wishes to bury her dead brother, Polyneices. The trouble is that her brother died in an attempted insurrection against their uncle Creon, who took power after the reign of their father, Oedipus. Creon dishonors Polyneices by declaring him an enemy of the state and making it illegal to bury his body, and Antigone defies Creon’s law and twice (ritually) buries her brother, citing her responsibility to the gods, who demand that the dead be buried. In the end, Antigone is sentenced to a “living death” by being buried with her brother.
In the usual modern interpretation of Antigone, epitomized by G.W.F. Hegel, the tragedy here is a clash between authorities: the family and the state. Hegel’s interpretation reflects a preoccupation with the differentiation of spheres characteristic of a still-emerging modern society. The question seems to be not only where to locate authority, but how to adjudicate between the moral claims exerted by distinct social realms. More recently, Martha Nussbaum follows a similar path, though located more rigorously in the world of the ancient Greeks. For Nussbaum, the question is one of fragile goods: how to acknowledge properly the goods pertinent to the polis, on the one hand, and the family (and the gods), on the other? On either reading, the tragedy of Antigone is the inability to reconcile two conflicting sets of claims.
But what is left out in both of these readings is Antigone’s subjectivity. For both Hegel and Nussbaum, it is the situation that makes the tragic genre, and, in this case, Antigone is its victim. It is as if she were merely a cipher for the clash of contradictory social authorities, a case study in a perennial political problem to be sorted out more rationally than she does, if possible. But what of Antigone’s passion – and the power it enables her to wield? She doesn’t falter over an impossible choice. Instead, her decision to bury her brother – or rather, her relentlessness in deciding to do so throughout the play – drives the plot.
Jacques Lacan offered a breakthrough reading when he characterized Antigone as the one in the play who “refuses to give up on her desire,” forcing each of the other principal characters into a reactive posture. The insistent desire here, we believe, is love — specifically, love for her brother. Although Antigone’s defiance of Creon results in a sacrifice, it cannot be confined to the logic of sacrifice. It was passion for the honor of her brother — a desire that, unlike the serenity of agape, presses relentlessly and urgently for satisfaction. Judith Butler goes further, arguing that Antigone’s insistence on burying an enemy of the state in defiance of Creon’s proclamation upends traditional patriarchal gender roles as well as the socially accepted boundaries of passion. From society’s point of view, Antigone’s love for her brother is excessive and worrying. And perhaps it should be. Antigone’s passion, her refusal to give up on her desire, upset and created turmoil in the polis. Eros staged a political intervention, breathing the spirit of transcendence, giving voice to prophetic denunciation of a regime and announcing the possibility of different orders of gender, state, and family.
We admit the delusion in this. From our perspective, however, delusion is a necessary ingredient in political agency. For a more recent example, we appeal once again to Niebuhr — or, rather, not to Niebuhr and his break from the Socialist Party and his long-time friend: Norman Thomas.
Reflecting on Thomas’ eightieth birthday in 1965, Niebuhr characterized Thomas’ life as “a monument to the value of complete courage.” True to the cold warrior posture of his later years, he writes that the “socialist faith” of Thomas “proved irrelevant to the American scene” (i.e, delusional) even as he admits that the prominence of socialist agitators like Thomas and others involved in labor struggles “symbolize the fact that the organization of unorganized American workers changed the social and moral climate of American industry.” This view of political agency is not far removed from his view held thirty-three years earlier in Moral Man and Immoral Society. There, he characterizes “sublime madness” as a necessary illusion: illusory because it indulges in a divine vision that breaks too radically with current social and political arrangements to be wholly practical; necessary because the hold of those in power is too strong to be broken without mass mobilization fueled by the collective imagination of unrealized possibilities. Of course, the danger of fanaticism always lurks in such mobilizations. But it is no more serious, Niebuhr argues, than relying on “rational tinkering” that is founded on the even more illusory conceit of liberalism’s faith in moral markets and democratic parliaments. Beside the passion of prophecy, we need to make use of our rational capacities, but “one can only hope,” he writes, “that reason will not destroy [sublime madness] before its work is done.”
But when is such work done? When, in other words, can we relax the tension of the prophetic and curb its madness? The temptation is always to give up too early. A criticism of Niebuhr could be developed along these lines and is at least implicit here. Love, especially if we construe it as desire, militates against this premature foreclosure. And it may be that we have here stumbled onto a weakness of Niebuhr that has something to with his social position: namely his pessimism and resignation regarding racial inequality. This pessimism can be found among Black critics of American society. Such pessimism is not resignation. From this we may venture a generalization: those who are on the losing end of social inequities are less likely to give up on their desire (even if, in many cases, it becomes fugitive from the political sphere, taking refuge in art, religion, etc.). They are more likely to interpret that desire as reflective of and resonant with the desire of God. We thus believe that our best guides tend to be those who are in the midst of a struggle that impinges on their own fate.
James Cone mines a number of examples of Black desire for freedom from white supremacy, for example. These originate in the earliest forms of resistance in slave quarters, to the claims of humanity and of divine favor in the spirituals and the blues, to the slogan “Black is beautiful” of the 1960s and 70s. In these, no empirical disconfirmation or gloomy assessment of present political circumstances were able to deter desire nor curtail the emancipatory aim of love. Cornel West picked upon these themes in Prophesy Deliverance! and developed them in a much more explicitly political direction, tracking the involvement of Black radicals borne alone with these prophetic hopes in several traditions of social protest and socialist agitation. They desired a better life for all.
A politics of desire need not restrict itself to the narrow confines of advocacy for particular identities, even if they bear the brunt of the injustices of a society. Our reasons to avoid narrow versions of “identity politics” are both practical and prophetic. Practically, the only power we have to change dominant power structures is the power of majorities. Effective political action must therefore learn how to construct and mobilize political majorities with shared concerns. Prophetically, we are compelled to press beyond narrowly conceived identities because love for the common resists the imposition and policing of rigid boundaries. Following this prophetic tradition, West and Söelle help us envision what forms an emancipatory political desire might look like on a mass scale, connected with and yet distinct from the interests engendered by identity. Accordingly, for both, class conflict is central, and their interpretations of Christian faith and the political agency it supports are connected with the interests of the vast majority, the demos as a whole.
There is a theoretical question at stake as well. Given that there is a tendency among the privileged and the apathetic to give up on the prophetic too soon, we may still ask: has the prophetic ever done its work? If we follow the two-fold logic of political agency that we are trying to isolate and, especially, if we adopt a certain realism about the prospects of historical fulfillment, (what Antonio Gramsci called a “pessimism of the intellect” to be paired with an “optimism of the will”) it’s hard to see how it could be.
The danger of “fanaticism” is not that it continually opens history to radical transformation: it is that it regards the transformations of its recent past as definitive once and for all, and thus betrays its initial, revolutionary aims by the demonic fury of self-preservation. A classic example of this is the policy of “socialism in one country” adopted in Stalinist Russia. Under the influence of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union, communist parties everywhere, including in the U.S., were committed to preserving and strengthening the Soviet Union as the cradle and protector of socialism.
The problem that we are getting at is, of course, the classic problem of reform and revolution. Does the achievement of concrete reforms, even large and important ones, warrant ceasing the struggle or shifting toward defense of what has already been achieved?
Andre Gorz argued for what he called “non-reformist reforms.” According to Gorz, any reform worth pursuing is not merely an end in itself, but also opens a possibility for further agitation and further reforms. Reforms should thus be aimed at increasing the power of workers, oppressed people, etc., to agitate for their common interests rather than achieving ends which would tend to justify lessening tensions and accepting the new status quo. By way of contrast, we are reminded here of Edmund Burke’s appeal to French revolutionaries in the late eighteenth century: let revolution be the “parent of settlement, not the nursery of future revolutions.” Whatever settlements might be reached in the polis, love’s work continues to unsettle them and to call us toward forms of social life that are more inclusive and more intensely and thoroughly egalitarian.
Closer to our own point of view is Marx’s concept, later expanded by Trotsky, of “permanent revolution.” It is best to understand this term, however, not as pressing on toward a specific end (such as the dictatorship of the proletariat) of democratic struggle, but, much more radically, as pressing on toward greater, more inclusive and expansive, democracy without end. Although addressed to theological rather than directly political matters, something like this is implied by H. Richard Niebuhr’s comments at the end of his 1941 classic, The Meaning of Revelation. For Niebuhr, the transcendent operation of grace within the church’s ongoing story calls for continual re-examination of its life and renewal of its commitment. Permanent revolution means that the current arrangement of power is subject to further transformation. The work of the revolution is never complete.
We must emphasize that the capacity for transcendence, the sublime madness of prophecy, is perhaps best represented by collectives rather than by extraordinary figures. Today, although we have our own spectacular figures (we may think of charismatic young leaders in the U.S. Congress, for example), what makes them spectacular is less their insights and political skill than the way they have exposed a hunger for equality across a relatively wide, multigenerational spectrum of people in the U.S. and far beyond, and the way they have facilitated the organization of people in struggles for worker power, climate sanity, and immigrant rights. Sublime madness is borne not alone by these sometimes carefully calculating politicians, but also by striking teachers in “red” states who will not be deterred by union leaders whose aim is to cut deals with those in power, and by activists in the Movement for Black Lives who will not accept the inaction and careerism of established Black politicians, by a contemporary environmental movement that will not accept piecemeal solutions and compromises with fossil fuel, and by the queer liberation movement in its joyful expression of Pride that embodies a refusal to conform to a stubborn heteronormativity that still deeply structures our society and that is, in fact, resurgent today. Within each of these movements, there is what Eric Blanc calls a “militant minority” that pushes the organization toward a more radical disruption of the balance of power, but they would not succeed were it not for the susceptibility of the masses to the transcendent, for the capacity to imagine, and in some ways to enact, another world.
This, we are contending, is the work of love.
David True is Interim Pastor at Poplar Tent Presbyterian Church, an editor at Political Theology, and the co-editor of Paradoxical Virtue: Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Tradition (Routledge 2020) and the editor of Prophecy in a Secular Age (Pickwick Publications 2021).
Tom James pastor of First Presbyterian Church, Dearborn, MI.
Image Credit Line: Robert John Thorton, The Superb Lily, c. 1807. Public Domain Image Archive. Common Domain.