Religion and communism: Feuerbach,Marx and Bloch

Whilst Marx made scattered positive remarks about the details of communist society, he also made important negative indications. Religion features in this negativity: his critique of religion is withering, there is no mention of religious life in communism, and he is emphatic that religion will play no role in such a society. For Marx, one of the tangible freedoms of communism was freedom from religion. The critique of religion is fundamentally inscribed in the very genesis of Marx's thought, and Feuerbach is crucial to understanding Marx's strictures on religion. Yet Feuerbach also figures in Ernst Bloch's very positive approach to religion, which argues that communism involves the freedom to be religious, in the sense of opening up oneself and society to the gold-bearing seams of the religious experience. This essay explores how such different conceptions of the relationship between religion and communism both draw sustenance from Feuerbach.     

Marc Bloch: the identity of a historian

Several scholars have asserted that medieval Christians believed that Jewish men menstruated. Their arguments, made in support of a grander claim that Jews as a collectivity were gendered feminine in Christian thought, rest on numerous misreadings. Though such a belief did appear around 1500, prior references to a Jewish bloody flux derived from textual traditions that were not gendered. The rupturing of Judas's belly (Acts 1:18–19) inspired accounts of heretics and other betrayers of Christ dying with blood and/or guts coming out of their anuses. In the twelfth century this anal bleeding was exegetically linked to Jewish deicidal bloodguilt via the verse ‘may His blood be upon us and upon our children’ (Matt 27:25). In the thirteenth century this motif was rationalized using terms drawn from humoral medicine. Simultaneously, a new verse was adduced in support of the notion of supernatural anal bleeding: ‘He smote His enemies in their posteriors’ (Psalms 77:66). Monthly bleeding was first alleged in 1302, but only among the male descendants of the Jews who had accepted responsibility for the crucifixion. The earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding appeared in the 1503 account of the ritual murder trials held in Tymau in 1494.     

The politics of metaphysics: Adorno and Bloch on utopia and immortality

The hypothesis underlying this article is that any narrative of the emergence of modernity—as the one developed by Blumenberg, for example—that leaves behind the eschatological component is incomplete, since it removes from the tradition of modernity a great deal of the Protestant religious experience which shows deep obsession with the thought of the end of the world. Through a confrontation between Adorno and Bloch, the article argues that the notions of utopia and human liberation imply logically the idea of immortality.

For Adorno and Bloch the dream of immortality is the dream of matter; both of them believe that the act of human transcendence must cling on to the bodily stuff out of which we are made. Yet, whereas Bloch postulates the positive existence of a transcendent space, Adorno eschews any ontological commitment. The article argues in favour of Adorno's negative approach, showing that, after Auschwitz, what both philosophers take as the truth‐content of theology cannot be automatically transferred into dialectical materialism.     

The European Difference: Karl Heinz Bohrer's Critique of the European Project

Literary critic and essayist Karl Heinz Bohrer offers a Eurosceptic perspective on the German commitment to a united Europe. This article is a reconstruction of Bohrer's argument. It identifies two distinct critiques. The first is a somewhat prosaic observation that the differences between the national traditions of Europe are simply too great for a united Europe to be viable. The other is a more complex reflection on “European decadence”: Europeans lack the will that is required to project power, and power is a precondition for cultural achievements. Protestantism—the “Protestant mind”—plays a central role in this second critique. The two critiques are connected through Bohrer's conception of the nation-state as an entity that integrates in an agonistic way legal and cultural power.