How the Critique of Heaven Confines the Critique of the

Earth
Mohamad Amer Meziane

Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences, Volume 29, Number 2,
December 2020, pp. 217-245 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/782714

[ Access provided at 22 Feb 2021 05:18 GMT from CNRS BiblioSHS ]

How the Critique of Heaven Confines
the Critique of the Earth
mohamad amer meziane

All the prominent concepts of the critique of capitalism are socialized

anthropological concepts. They are not secularized theological con-
cepts, as Carl Schmitt would famously have it, but effects of how the
concept of religion was constructed by Western anthropological rea-
son. In making this argument, this essay shows how some concepts
of social critique presuppose the universal existence of religion as a
reality that would be invented by humanity. Marxism must define
religion as alienation and humanity as an act of disalienation to crit-
icize domination and call for the negation of the negation of the
human and the world. Alienation presupposes that there is a human
subject becoming other by projecting the self into an alien reality that
is either God or capital, and emancipation presupposes a struggle
against this alienation. Hence the classical Trinitarian scheme, in
which our language is still caught: the subject who is alienated is
emancipated through disalienation.
In such a conceptual framework, the critique of religion can ap-
pear only as the condition of all critique. Through this sentence

qui parle Vol. 29, No. 2, December 2020

doi 10.1215/10418385-8742972 © 2020 Editorial Board, Qui Parle
218 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

Marx expresses the very condition of Marxian discourse itself, thus

acknowledging that the critique of capitalism depends on a human-
ization of God by usages of the concept of religion. Marxian criti-
cism depends on an anthropology of Christianity that Feuerbach sur-
reptitiously posited as a critique of all religions. An anthropological
discourse on religion establishes society both as an object of science
and as a site of secular emancipation. It makes possible a series of
analogies between the social and the religious as well as between
the commodity and the fetish.
This essay examines the effects of the anthropology of religion on
the critique of capital. What remains of the concepts of alienation or
fetishism if they are bound up in an anthropology of religion that has
long been critiqued?1 If religion ceases to refer to an anthropological
essence and is recognized as a European colonial concept, then what
happens to the critique of capital? What Marx considers the condi-
tion for critique seems to be the unthought of Western Marxism, the
element it is structurally incapable of critiquing. Without a critical
analysis of how the concept of religion is constructed and how reli-
gion is thus described as a human invention, Marxism cannot know
itself. If Marx is a “critic of the critique of religion,”2 this gesture must
apply to Marx as well as to Marxism itself. It is therefore impossible
to maintain the critique of capital as it stands while refusing the cri-
tique of religion that lies at its foundation.
The reversal on which this critical essay depends implies that
Marx himself could not see something crucial: the religion he likened
to opium is in fact secularity or, more precisely, an effect of the sec-
ular state itself. Marxist atheism is the religious phenomenon of this
incapacity. Hence the materialist critique of religion as an effect of
secular causes can only be the critique of a modern phenomenon,
the consequence of the critique of the state and capital and not its
condition. In other words, the critique of heaven is what makes
Marxism indebted to philosophical idealism to the extent that it crit-
icizes religion in general. If a materialist analysis presupposes that
religions are effects of secular formations, then the critique of the sec-
ularity of both the state and capital has to be presupposed before
religions can be critiqued as phenomena and not, ideologically, as
causes. The primacy of a critique of secularity over the critique of
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 219

religion therefore becomes a precondition of its materialism. The

European critique of religion is precisely what makes Marxism ideo-
logical, thus confining the critique of the earth.
I argue that the critique of heaven is a crucial site of empire on
which the entire Marxian structure depends and of which the pri-
macy of class over race is an effect. A nonaligned episteme, a gesture
that would refuse both capitalism and Marxism as two sides of a
Eurocentric coloniality, requires a careful destruction of the latter
by exposing how its contradictions originate in Marx. One stake
of this gesture is to assert that political theologies cannot be thought
of as solutions after the critique of secularism. Instead of simply lib-
erating Marxism from its atheism in the name of a liberal principle of
religious diversity, the essay argues that the theological language of
the young Marx can be seen as an effect of his practical atheism. The
oppositions between secularism and political theology, between
atheism and theologies of liberation, are therefore dubious. For
this reason, this essay refuses to translate the critique of commodity
fetishism into a Christian theological language by simply asserting
that capitalism is idolatry without questioning both the assumptions
and the limitations of the Marxian critique.
By interrogating the concept of fetishism, as it is specifically used
by Marxists, to describe the structure of capital analogically, this es-
say critiques how capitalism is constantly scrutinized as a religion by
secular Marxists and refuses the usage of this analogy. This kind of
analogical reasoning presupposes that religion is the model for what
makes capitalism problematic, thus reducing secular violence to a
theological problem. Hence it implies that any liberation from the
domination of capital must be seen as the continuation of a struggle
against religion itself, thus rendering Marxism incapable of analyz-
ing the secularity of capital as well as its distinctively modern and
Christian religious effects. The analogy between religion and capital-
ism can thus be seen as a product of colonial knowledge that is rarely
recognized as such. But beyond a simple criticism of coloniality, the
aim of the essay is to ask the following question: What kind of avoid-
ance is the Marxist critique of capital capable of authorizing when it
subsumes the domination of capital under a secular concept of reli-
gion as alienation, thus submitting the critique of the earth to the
220 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

critique of heaven? What elements of profane domination of the cap-

italist and racist system are made invisible when this kind of analogy
confines critique?
I argue that the messianic dimensions of Marxism are the effects
of the humanization of God through the concept of religion. An
anthropology of religion allows Marx to critique capitalism but
also to convert the Gospel to communist revolution, producing a ser-
ies of inextricably prophetic and journalistic effects.3 The critique of
religion has attributed to itself a prophetic way of making promises.
After becoming revolutionary, critique refers to a form of violence, a
weapon exercised in the name of subjects assigned to their own suf-
fering and to coincide with their ontological nothingness. It is an
anthropology of religious misery that determines the election of a peo-
ple of the excluded, a class called to the universal by a revolution of
slaves. Hence the critique of religion can be translated into a new form
of theology that can easily be asserted against liberal secularism.
Because readers might criticize the political implications of my
argument and worry that it might dissolve the legitimacy of lan-
guages of liberation and of ongoing decolonial struggles, I must in-
sist on one central assertion that structures this article: for us to lib-
erate ourselves on earth, the earth must be liberated from the burden
of carrying our desires of heaven. This argument is both antitheolog-
ical and antisecular, because it argues that the erasures of transcen-
dence in favor of claims of radical immanence make these erasures
theological. In other words, Marxist appropriations of messianic
time are the effects of a bet that proceeds from the critique of reli-
gion. Marx’s radical secular socialism assumes that religion is the
phenomenon of a present absence, the anticipation of a world to
come, a dehumanization of humanity that must be abolished. The
profane lack that religion manifests is a future liberation, a worldli-
ness to come that begins “now” or that has “already begun.” The
horizons of messianic longing are linked to a form of practical athe-
ism that Derrida’s deconstruction does not deconstruct to the extent
that it recognizes these horizons as both its limit and its condition.4
To the extent that Marx’s prophetic effects are the phenomenon of
his practical atheism, Marxism should not be seen as a religion or as
a trace of a Judeo-Christian religious origin. Marxism is only one
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 221

form of a neobiblical literary hegemony that extends to both the lib-

eral and the militant languages deployed in Western public spaces.
This anthropobiblical exclusivity is irreducible to a Christian essence
or origin but was formulated through a secular anthropology of
Christianity that reduces God to the divinity of the human. It is insep-
arable from how religion, as a concept, has been racialized.
The Euro-Christian inventions of Africa and the Orient have been
used to reveal the alleged secret of religion so that enlightened reason
could attack the church through theories of natural religion.5 In the
eighteenth century early European ethnologists started to reduce
African traditions to a supposedly primitive stage and natural figure
of religion. The missionary concept of fetishism thus enabled the
concept of natural religion. Fetishism became the first act of a drama
by which European philosophy narrated the fiction of a human
invention of the gods. The idea of a human invention of God has
presupposed the invention of Africa as the land of the natural and
the primitive. Christians had to assert that the African fetish and
the indigenous idol are made into gods before God himself could
be assassinated by European philosophy.6 The death of God, his sac-
rifice, is the underside of the missionary invention of religion as a
universal sign of the native’s humanity and convertibility. It is the ef-
fect of an anticlerical subversion of the missionary concept of idola-
try that attributes a humanity to natives to the extent that they are
seen as having a religion that authorizes their conversion to Chris-
tianity. The narrative of people inventing their gods on which phil-
osophical atheism depends results from this subversion of Bartolomé
de Las Casas and is therefore inseparable from colonial anthropol-
ogy and the Christian mission itself. Within this narrative, non-
Western religions were racialized as Semitic religions of submission
to the overwhelming transcendence of a legislating God.7 While
Judaism was defined as the egoistic religion of a jealous God, Islam
became its fanatical universalization.
Christianity, within this narrative, became the religion of moder-
nity, the only way God and human could be allied, reconciled. As
Judaism was integrated in a biblical culture of alliance, Islam came
to embody the only religion of God’s transcendence whose unicity is
seen as incompatible with any mediation between God and human.
222 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

Christianity thus became the religion of modernity, the last religion

of God before the religion of humanity to the extent that colonial
reasoning made this conversion of Christians to worldliness possi-
ble. Hence the formation of a neobiblical complex: when Islam actu-
ally becomes the only religion that refuses mediation between God
and human, when it becomes the last of the “Semites.” The obvious
Christian dimension of this language should not lead us to obscure
something else: namely, that what matters are the modes of exclusion
that this language enacts rather than its theological nature. Analyz-
ing how a linguistic machine actually functions is different from
unmasking its theological essence behind its alleged secularity. The
racialization of religions whitened Christianity and led to its Feuer-
bachian anthropology. The hatred of the other human was then
attributed to the essence of faith as opposed to love.
If there is no longer a continuation of the critique of religion by the
critique of capital—if one posits a gap between the critique of heaven
and the critique of the earth—then revolution ceases to be the Gospel
within the prophecy of class or race struggle. In Marx’s formulation,
if the critique of religion is devoid of its anthropological foundation,
the critique of capital is also devoid of its condition and its ground.
But if one dissolves the Feuerbachian anthropology of religion and
maintains the necessary critique of capital and state violence as they
engender race, the critique of the earth would then destabilize the
critique of heaven. The critique of religion would not be over. It
would, as it were, never have begun. If the critique of capitalism be-
comes the condition of all critique, the critique of the earth becomes
the condition of heaven’s critique. Marxism would then be reversed,
and the critique of the earth would become the condition of all cri-
tique. It would become earthly critique: the critique of the earth lib-
erated from the burden of its dependency on the critique of heaven. It
would be earthly to the extent that it would be devoid of any prees-
tablished foundation in a Christian-colonial anthropology of reli-
gion or antireligion, thus “decolonizing” the critique of capital.
The critique of liberal secularism inspired by the works of Talal
Asad and Saba Mahmood has not, in my view, been able to fully ana-
lyze the mode of reasoning—“the critique of heaven”—that still per-
meates the critique of liberalism and of the secular state. Marx’s
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 223

socialism is premised on a critique of the secular state and of

Christianity as the origin and the essence of liberalism. The idea of
secularizing secularism by overcoming the modern state, a project
enunciated by Marx in “On the Jewish Question” and recently re-
formulated by Étienne Balibar, is the very matrix of how revolution-
ary communism is invented through the analysis of the proletariat in
the “Einleitung” of 1844. While anthropologists have been focusing
on political secularism, this essay analyzes how the critique of heav-
en limits and confines critique per se. Hence secular reason refers not
to the discursive attempt to legitimize the secularity of institutions, as
is often thought, but to the set of discourses that claim to take reli-
gions as their object. The political implications of these discourses
are multiple and go far beyond the doctrine of secularism as a privat-
ization of religion based on the modern idea of belief. Once one
starts from the premise that the object “religion” is not self-evident
and that it has been constituted through colonialism, the discourses
that assert that humans make religion and that decide with certainty
what they should be or how they should be treated can themselves
become objects of critical examination. To the extent that the cri-
tique of heaven has a history and must be taken as an object of crit-
ical inquiry, Marxism is a key moment, and to some extent a rupture,
in the history of the certainty according to which humans invent God
because of their alleged need of religion. Marxism indeed asserts
with the most absolute certainty that religion is a human invention,
that its function is to enslave people by encircling them in a world of
illusions. To the extent that God is seen as the mere effect of social
alienation, the death of God can be predicted as soon as the advent of
socialism can be predicted. This deeply superstitious or religious ef-
fect in Marxism is a product of its “scientific” atheism and not of the
stubborn nature of religious dogmatism and of the alleged persis-
tence of the theological under the mask of secular politics. The sec-
ularist idea according to which religions are mere beliefs that should
remain private is only one liberal formation among the modern dis-
courses on what religion is, both critical and approving of its alleged
spirit. Nevertheless, while the idea of privatizing religion is only one
doctrine that the secularity of reason produces, the critique of pri-
vate belief has remained at the center of anthropological critiques of
secularism. The imperative of secularization on which the possibility
224 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

of Marxism depends is the effect of a mode of reasoning that posits

this world as the only reality. The injunction to make heaven real on
earth—secularization as an order—can thus be enunciated by theo-
ries of immanence.
This essay does not assert that, as discursive formations of the
modern state, secularism and religious freedom were exported and
globally imposed by the Christian West. This criticism was to some
extent made by Marx himself as he was criticizing the Christian and
bourgeois nature of human rights encoded within religious freedom.
The critique of the liberal state is a critique of their institution and
also of the separation between the realms of political and civil soci-
ety. It is this separation, so Marx argues, that engenders the necessity
of religions in liberal societies because secularism is limited to state
secularism. In other words, this essay deploys not another critique of
secularism but an analysis of Marxian reason. It argues that most
critiques of secularism have remained at the level of the young
Marx himself by critiquing the liberal state and how human rights
and religious freedom are part of a bourgeois-Christian hegemony.
In other words, the critique of political secularism is still indebted to
the critique of heaven and to the secularity of Marxian reason.
This essay therefore destabilizes both the critique of secularism
and the Marxist critique of capitalism. While it refuses any simple
rehabilitation of Marx against either postcolonial or decolonial
theory, it also questions how a faithfulness to the languages of decol-
onization requires that one engage with how Third World revolution-
aries always thought of themselves both with and against Marx, as
Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth testifies, among other texts.
While agreeing with the classical criticism of Marx according to
which the violence of race and slavery has been marginalized and
reduced to Eurocentric economic perspectives based on class by
white socialists, this essay does not reduce the imperialism of Marx-
ism to this gesture of marginalization.
The conclusion of this essay asserts that the possibility of analyz-
ing religion as ideology, a crucial aspect of the Marxist critique
of heaven, can be seen as an effect of capital. A non-Marxist cri-
tique of capital should therefore begin by analyzing secularization
as an imperial order that determines both the emergence and the
mutations of capital and by redefining this order as a condition of
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 225

capital’s “primitive accumulation,” an analysis to which Marx him-

self was indebted. Coloniality as well as the formation of the modern
state could thus be seen as the writing processes of these “letters of
blood” from which what we now call “religions” emerge.
This essay does not dismiss Marxism or revolution. Rather, it at-
tempts to dissolve the hegemony of a critical language that Europe
has imposed to describe the very problems of the world created by its
coloniality and the globalization of capital.

How Religion Begins in Liberal America

The only model of separation of church and state that existed when
Marx wrote “On the Jewish Question” was liberal: the United States
of America. The American example functions to refute Bruno Bauer
by affirming that the secularization of politics is not the seculariza-
tion of society. Marx shows that the secularization of the state does
not imply the secularization of individuals or the decline or social
death of religions. On the contrary, America is the country that
has fully secularized the state and “the country par excellence of reli-
giosity.”8 The secularization of the state and the religiosity of society
are two sides of the same profane and modern reality. Beyond a mere
compatibility between religion in civil society and the secularization
of politics, the intensification of religion is in fact the other side of the
secularization of politics. It is the manifestation, in the social world,
of the separation of the state and society. From then on Marx could
seek the means for a secularization of the society he then identified
with its humanization.
The case of North America is not a normative model in “On the
Jewish Question.” Because the state is separated from religion, polit-
ical emancipation is complete. It is therefore an exemplary case that
makes it possible to define both what political and civic emancipa-
tion is and, above all, where it must end. The young Marx’s reflec-
tion therefore focuses on the limit of this civic emancipation. While
defending the institution of citizenship and equality before the
law against Bauer, he also criticizes its limits. Determining whether
political emancipation implies the liquidation of religions requires
questioning the North American case. The answer given by Marx is
that the privatization of religion is not its liquidation, that abolishing
226 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

the political privilege of a religion is not the same as abolishing reli-

gion in general. On the contrary, the political emancipation of the
state does not imply the social death of religions but infuses religions
with a new life. The pluralism of confessions therefore intensifies
religious life. Marx thus refutes Bauer because his sociology of reli-
gion and secularism dissociates the secularization of the state from
the secularization of society.

A Marxian Contradiction
The shift that leads Marx to become a revolutionary is rooted here:
the emancipated human who appears only when religions disappear
must be a social production since alienation is itself a social produc-
tion. The project of secularizing the society and democratizing
democracy therefore has to be the result of a social disalienation
of humanity. Marx’s bet therefore depends on a concept of society
that is defined as the site of humanity’s realization and that corre-
sponds to what Feuerbach calls love in opposition to faith.9 The
Marxist concept of international association that qualifies the dicta-
torship of the proletariat can be seen as the socialization of the Feuer-
bachian praise of love.
I argue that the kind of theoretical shift that Marxism inaugurates
stems from a contradiction that Marx will never resolve but that
inhabits all his work. The religious anthropology inherited from
Feuerbach enters into permanent tension with the Marxian sociol-
ogy of religious liberalism. On the one hand, Marx speaks well of
religion in general, but he analyzes it only through its modern con-
dition, which in reality proceeds from the secularization of the state.
This is a consequence of the historical implications of the very con-
cept of civil society as the space in which modern religion is author-
ized to flourish, both privately and publicly, outside the realm of
the state. On the other hand, Marx defines the contemporary phe-
nomenon of privatized and individualized religion as an intensifica-
tion of the essence of religion because he dehistoricizes secularization
through his anthropology.
The sociology of the liberal religion is the presupposition of pro-
fane critique. The critique of secularization is therefore an unac-
knowledged condition of Marx’s critique of religion. The presence
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 227

of religion in modern civil society is a reflection because it “is the

presence of a lack.” This lack will become the site of the messianic,
the announcement of an imminent future whose specter is already
haunting us. It is therefore the divide of the profane and the religious
that determines the making of messianic effects in the Marxian text.
The “source of this lack can only be found in the essence of the state”
because the secularization of the state manifests the essence of poli-
tics by separating it from religion.10
Marx’s demonstration is twofold. It is indeed this flourishing and
widespread presence of depoliticized religions in American democ-
racy and not religion in general that is the presence of a lack. If
the opposite were true, Marx’s deduction would be either false or
incomprehensible. Only the modern form of religion is made possi-
ble by the separation of the state and religions. If Marx were really
talking about religion in general, one would have to assume that reli-
gion is not a manifestation of the limitations of the modern state and
that it precedes its institution. Marx’s demonstration in “On the Jew-
ish Question” can therefore be read as a description of how religion
is produced in modern liberal societies. So Marx criticizes religion in
its North American form. Otherwise he could not deduce the pres-
ence of religion from the limited nature of the secular state. This limit
is nothing more than the secularization of politics: the effect of the
division between the state and civil society that makes religion, aso-
cial society, and bourgeois inhumanity correspond to the life of the
human as a subject of rights. This equivalence between religion and
the bourgeoisie therefore presupposes that only the individualized
norm of religion in Western democracies can really be considered
the presence of a lack.
Marx’s argument should therefore be restated as follows: the
source of the proliferation of religion in a liberal and secularized
democracy can be deduced not from the essence of religion itself
but from the secularity of the liberal and democratic state founded
on human rights and citizenship. The Hegelian teleology that re-
mains in the Marxian concept of secularization leads Marx to assert
that the limitation of the secularization of the state is the cause of the
modern existence of religions. This is why religion can be defined not
as a cause but only as an effect of secular limitations. Marx thus
228 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

reverses the Feuerbachian subversion of Hegel by formulating the

horizon of a dissolution of religions through the disappearance of
the state. His method transforms theological questions into secular
questions. The formulation of this methodology is also the statement
of a promise: that secularization is yet to come, that a secularization
of secularism in its political form through its socialization is possible.
“We thus explain the religious bias of the free citizen by his secular
bias. We do not affirm that its religious limitation must be abolished
for its secular limits to be abolished. We affirm that it abolishes its
religious limitation as soon as it abolishes its secular limit” (JF, 352).
The communist promise is premised on this deduction. If seculariza-
tion is deployed beyond the state and its limitations, then religion
will finally be abolished, asserts Marx. To liberate humans from reli-
gion requires not a separation of the state and the church but their
mutual abolition. The concept that structures Marx’s deduction is
the concept of limit. What requires the existence of religion in the
structure of the secular state, in the political form of secularization,
is the limitation of politics as such. The essence of the state corre-
sponds to this border, and it is this limit that religion manifests.
The essence of the state can be deciphered at the edge of politics,
namely, where the social begins. Religion, according to Marx, is
both the effect and the symptom of the incompleteness of modernity
and secularization. It is the phenomenon of a state that still tran-
scends society. Religion thus persists because the political emancipa-
tion of the citizen is not yet the emancipation of the human. The
political dimension of emancipation gives religion its full power. It
is only because the critique of religion is a critique of political moder-
nity that the critique of heaven is, in embryo, the critique of the earth.
Therefore religion should appear, in principle, if not as the prod-
uct of state secularism, then at least as its underside in Marx’s dem-
onstration. Religion cannot be reduced to mere archaism because it
is a social formation inseparable from the secularization of the state,
a process that North America once thought of as a paradigm of lib-
eralism and its most advanced figure rather than an exception. Yet,
at the same time, the individualized religion of the moderns corre-
sponds, according to Marx, to the very essence of early Christianity
and of religion in general. Marx targets the state in its modern liberal
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 229

form as the limit from which religion stems, thus arguing that the
secular state realizes the ahistorical essence of politics as such.
Marx asserts that only a liberalized religion believes that it is purely
religious: an ideological illusion that modern religious minds and
young Hegelian atheists seem to share.11 What about the young
Marx himself?

The Nonexistence of the World or the Opium of the Negative

Opening the introduction to the Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of
Right,” Marx intends to pursue the anthropological criticism of reli-
gion. Marx adheres to its foundational principle, “Man makes reli-
gion,” and introduces his own criticism by asserting that man is in
fact “the world of man,” a set of social relations.12 The Feuerbachian
concept of reversal is then attributed to the world itself and no longer
to religion. Religion is therefore defined as the “inverted conscious-
ness” of a world which is already inverted.13 Religious consciousness
does not reverse the world and is therefore not a false consciousness,
since it reflects a preexisting inversion. Religion as such does not
alienate humanity but expresses an alienation that preexists religion.
If, as Feuerbach actually argues, religion negates the world and the
human heart is the real essence of religion, it is because religion stems
from a world devoid of a heart, argues Marx.
Asserting that religion is the opium of the people means, first, that
one attributes the reality of an illusory happiness to religion and, sec-
ond, that one defines the means to practically overcome religion. The
humanity of human subjects making religion is not exactly lost, ar-
gues Marx, because it does not yet exist. The inversion of the in-
verted world is a spectral future. Indeed, if human reality manifests
itself negatively in its present inhumanity, the existence of humanity
and the world implies a promise. The nonexistence of the human
world implies the negation of its negation. The criticism of religion
calls for a philosophy of history that humanizes Hegelian negativity
through the Feuerbachian theory of reversal. The universalization
of class struggle is a secondary element compared to the very struc-
ture of the Hegelian concepts that allow Marx to describe the
embodiment of universal exclusion in the proletariat. This elective
230 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

incarnation is a discursive effect of Marx’s redefinition of the concept

of religion.
Religion expresses the real misery of this inverted world, and it is a
universal reality. When Marx claims that religion is an illusory form
of consciousness, he is not addressing religious people but criticizing
young Hegelian atheism. The religious self speaks for all because the
alienation of all seems to be expressed through the religion of some
(EL, 378). Religion metabolizes the failure of modern society to
actually enact the project that modern revolutions promised:
namely, to create a world that would eventually be human. Religion
expresses the nonexistence of the human world of which Marx af-
firms that religion is the effect. In other words, the world that reli-
gion demands against the reversed world it reflects is a world to
come: it is secular worldliness or the real world eventually found.
The concept of the world allows the criticism of religion, but it is
this very criticism that makes the concept of “the world” enunciable.
Socialism fulfills its promises only by posing that the world does not
exist because it is reversed.
Religion, Marx explains, operates through reflexive logic. It is the
consciousness of a still inhuman human world. The misery to which
Marx refers is indeed a generic misery: it is the universality of the
separation of humans from humanity, whose reality, for Marx,
must be social. Poverty is not simply material. It is the generic ab-
sence of humankind, which will be real only through an association
of humans. Marx substitutes the requirement of a new social orga-
nization for the Feuerbachian praise of love against faith. This is why
religious misery expresses profane misery. The religious person is
therefore no more miserable than the person without religion. While
the faithful tries to escape this misery through illusion, the modern
atheist cannot be seen, from Marx’s point of view, as less miserable.
If religion expresses the misery of all and atheism itself cannot, it is
because it expresses a social misery that both the atheist and the
faithful share as members of the same world. Modern religion, there-
fore, is the opium of the people, and not the spirit of the people, be-
cause it does not unify citizens. To the extent that the modern secular
world is itself a world of division, its spirit can only be the expression
of disunity. The formula of the opium of the people refers to an
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 231

artificial paradise by which an impossible reconciliation on earth is

achieved through illusionary heavenly paths. Reconciliation on earth
is therefore deferred.

The Revolution or the Humanization of Christ: An Anthropology

of Suffering
Religion stems from what Marx calls the world of the human,
namely, society. While religion expresses historical variations, Marx
nevertheless seeks to define an essence of religion per se beyond
these variations. This contradiction defines the Marxian concept of
religion. Religion, in its Marxian valence, expresses nothing more
than the absence of a secular world. Its nonexistence is insepara-
ble from its spectral imminence. The essential elements of religion,
as constructed by Marx, are suffering and protest against this suffer-
ing. Two affects therefore reflect social alienation and call for the rev-
olutionary solution: suffering and anger, which will itself call for
the necessity of shame to become a revolutionary power. These affec-
tive features of religion refer to how religion can act within a social
dynamic.
The concept of religion thus refers to human misery. Feuerbach
had grasped the suffering heart of religion expressed in the Passion
of Christ. Christ, he claimed, thus crystallized all human misery.14
Suffering could become the human truth of the religion that Christ’s
suffering reveals but that theology denies. The anthropology of
Christianity is the secular secret of the Marxian unveiling of social
mysteries. Protest refers to the founding act of Protestantism. There-
fore, if Marx probably calls to mind the memory of the peasants’ rev-
olution and Thomas Müntzer, it is because he reappropriates the
meaning of the Reformation as a historical event along lines that fol-
low the Feuerbachian reform of philosophy.15 Philosophy carries out
reform; revolution carries out reform by carrying out philosophy; it
appropriates what it abolishes. Marx therefore reappropriates reli-
gious protest to translate it into revolution only through a deter-
mined anthropology. Religious protest becomes a protest against
suffering and therefore against its own religious form. Religion as
protest is thus made to protest against itself in the Marxian text.
232 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

The staging of religious suffering leads Marx to establish a theater

in which religion can only desire its own death.
Religion expresses the nonexistence of the inverted world in the
unconsciousness of its practical scruple. This is why Marx affirms,
with and against Feuerbach, that religion has a theoretical function
in action that philosophy did not have before its revolutionary devel-
opment. As an unconscious consciousness of self and the world, reli-
gion is the reflection through which philosophy initiates criticism of
the world to become practical. Religion must therefore be translated
into a sign of the failure of the world if philosophy is to transform
the world. If religion manages to guess obscurely that it supports
itself from its suffering, it will then protest against its misery but
also against the misery of all. From then on, the conscious illusion
will turn against the real illusion. Religion and its criticism come to-
gether in a manifesto that serves as a revolutionary profession of
unfaithfulness.
Religious criticism of the world is only a protest. As an attempt to
fill the gap of which it is an expression, religion exists to the very
extent that it is unfulfilled and incomplete. It lives as much as it is
doomed to death and must be completed and abolished by the rad-
ical secularity of socialism. Precisely because it tries to distance itself
from an unworthy world, because it refuses to live in the misery of an
unbearable world, Marx’s religion can be reduced to a simple antic-
ipation of the coming revolution. From an empathy toward the so-
cial suffering of the religious, Marx deduced the need for their relief:
only a revolution could abolish religion from within by fulfilling its
promises. To abolish illusory happiness presupposes the practical
achievement of real happiness. A simple denial of God’s existence
is as futile as it is powerless, for only a revolutionary overthrow of
the overthrown world can overcome suffering and religion. Revolu-
tion is therefore the truth of religion protesting against itself but also
of theoretical atheism.
Any theoretical criticism of religious misery must become practi-
cal and demand the “real” eradication of everyone’s misery. Atheism
demands that humans liberate themselves from an illusion, but this
requirement makes no sense if it does not require the suppression of
the world that makes this illusion necessary and vital. The project of
merely abolishing religion in an inhuman world equals a desire to
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 233

suppress the only breathable air in a world where people suffocate

without making this very world more breathable. The truth of athe-
ist certainty is therefore the revolutionary act, because an atheism
that would simply abolish religious illusions is impossible. To re-
move an artificial paradise implies fighting for the advent of a para-
dise on earth. Feuerbach’s atheism is therefore reduced to the revo-
lutionary demand; God’s reduction to human being is reduced to
socialism through the promise of radical secularization.

The Invention of the Proletariat: Strategic Prophecies

and Biblical Translations
The critique of religion requires an earthly paradise. If religious
heaven is the negation of the world, what it aims for as otherworld-
liness must become earthly for religion to be abolished in this world
(EL, 378). Practical atheism is another name for communism.
Marx’s socialism can be described as post-atheism. It refers to the
moment of God’s oblivion by the advent of a subject that Marx de-
scribes, before Fanon, as the new and total human. The birth of this
subject resembles a second childhood.16 Hence the criticism of the
afterlife must give rise to the statement of the truth of this world’s
immanence (EL, 378). Religion can be sublated only by realizing
on earth what it demands from heaven. In this way, Marx delays
the exit from religion: he conjugates God’s death to the future
through a spectral time by which a new human must come into
being.17 Its messianic moment is the other side of an order: to abolish
religion by making the revolution the dissolution of the “divine” in
the immanence of the world.
The statement of this order is based on a specific use of the con-
cept of religion. It is because he places dehumanization at the foun-
dation of religion that Marx is able to reclaim his power as a revo-
lutionary spring. Marx’s pseudoprophetic language is therefore
conscious: it is a strategic prophecy. His “liberation theology” is
the other side of his practical atheism. The strategic use of the bibli-
cal language was already theorized by the young Marx. “To the
State that gives the Bible as its charter and Christianity as its supreme
rule, the words of Holy Scripture must be objected to,” writes Marx,
234 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

“for Scripture is holy even in its words” (JF, 359). The biblical lan-
guage is not an unconscious residue of his discourse but a power that
Marx mobilizes as a theologico-literary weapon. He transformed the
revolution against the capitalist state into a trial abolishing the law
that oppresses humans in order to achieve that state on earth. Rev-
olution thus becomes a secularization, a birth.
This pseudotheology of revolutionary liberation is therefore a sty-
listic effect of secularization as an order and injunction to become
secular. We can claim that Marxism is a theology of secularization—
not a secularization of theology. The Gospel is rewritten and be-
comes the immanent language of immanence of a revolutionary
community: “the oppression of the oppressors” is translated into
the expropriation of the expropriators; “the last shall be the first” is
translated into the dialectical language of that nothing which becomes
everything. Hence Marx’s usage of “the negation of the negation,” a
Hegelian language that remains bound to the terms of a theology of
secularization.18
The Marxian concept of religion makes this conversion from mes-
sianic time to revolution possible. The proletariat, beyond its incar-
nation by the working class, is the abolition of this lack that the
faithful express against their will. Revolutionary subjectivity will
therefore depend on an intensification of anger at the spectacle of
one’s own suffering under the effect of a shame felt in the face of
one’s indignity. Proletarian messianism and the conversion of nega-
tivity into a revolutionary force thus stem from the critique of reli-
gion in that they depend on Marx’s anthropological concept of reli-
gion. The revolutionary order is a call for secularization that
strategically translates itself into prophecy. It is practical atheism
that transforms the Marxist language into a prophetic irony and
Marxism into a strategic messianism.
To Christianity, which has become the “spirit of difference” and
modern separation, Marx opposes not the old “religion of commu-
nion” but a form of communion that abolishes all religions. By re-
generating communion against capital and its religions, he wants to
deprive it of its religious form: not to secularize it through the mod-
ern state but to socialize it through a dictatorship of the proletariat
that the Manifesto describes as an association. The keystone of
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 235

Marxism is therefore that people must associate themselves with

each other so that God can be forgotten. This oblivion is the secret
of Marx’s prophecy.

Ontologies of the Modern Fetish: The Anthropological

Assumptions of Value Theory
The concept of commodity fetishism implies a return to the Feuerba-
chian theory of religion precisely because Marx no longer mobilizes
the concept of ideology in Capital. The criticism of commodity
fetishism is founded on an ontological statement: it is in the imma-
nence of its form that the secret of the commodity resides (Kapital I,
85–86). The commodity form reflects the social reality of the ex-
change value. Through this analysis Marx probably deploys his ulti-
mate critique of the theory of the objective mind, which, in Hegel’s
system, refers to the mode of existence of divine freedom in the insti-
tution of the modern state and its law. The social reality is no longer
the institution of freedom, as it is in Hegel’s theory of modern ethical
life (Sittlichkeit) as the objective spirit: it is the commodity. The
Hegelian concept of liberty, the reality that appears in the sensible
world while being irreducible to its individual manifestations, is
no longer spiritual. It is value.
The Marxian social ontology should also be read as the rewriting
of a Feuerbachian text: the chapter titled “The Contradiction in the
Existence of God.” Feuerbach critiques the theological affirmation of
divine existence as asserting a “sensitive non-sensitive existence.”19
This statement describes a contradiction that is supposed to be inher-
ent in religion. It claims that every prayer implies the existence of God
as a sensitive existence but represses it immediately while positing it as
suprasensible. Feuerbach places this contradiction, which is intrinsic
to theology, at the very heart of Hegelianism, and he resolves it by
reducing God to humanity.
Contrary to Feuerbach, Marx affirms that this contradiction is
really at work in the immanence of the commodity form. Through
the concept of fetishism, Marx’s critical theory of value socializes the
anthropological criticism of God’s existence. As the Hegelian divine
becomes value itself, the criticism of God’s existence becomes the
236 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

criticism of value. The anthropology of religion makes it possible to

translate Hegel’s logic into a critical ontology of capital. Hegel’s the-
ory of objective spirit becomes an ontology of social things by reduc-
ing the spirit to an objectification of human work posited as the real
subject. The commodity thus obliterates the objectification of hu-
man work and conceals its very condition. It is therefore fetishistic
to the extent that it corresponds to a process of real obliteration and
coincides ontologically with this process.
This ontology is critical only because it ultimately assumes that
the truest reality remains work that is alienated. The Feuerbachian
theory of alienation is the beating heart of the criticism of capital:
human labor is the reality exploited by capitalism but constantly ob-
scured by the commodities it produces. The reality of humanity is
then inseparable from the reality of work. Hegel’s logic can thus be-
come the language of reality’s reversal by capital. It describes the real
overthrow of the producer of wealth and surplus value. The com-
modity appears by hiding the process of reification from which it
emerges. Obliteration is a transcendental condition of its dual reality
as both manifestation and veiling. The act of revealing what cannot
appear in the commodity form is a critique of phenomenological
conditions of impossibility. It is noteworthy that the first metaphor
used by Marx to describe these conditions is optical. The commodity
form is not “a physical relationship between physical things.” The
“value relationship of work products” is independent of its physical
nature and the resulting material relationships (Kapital I, 85–86). It
is therefore necessary for Marx to explain this process of real
empowerment while returning it to the reality from which it is em-
powered. Critique refers to the act of revealing the nontransparency
of work to itself, of making the workers’ society aware of its own
foundation. It uses Feuerbach’s anthropology of religion to construct
a paradigm by which the critique of commodity fetishism becomes
possible. Marx thus finds a second analogy in the act of revealing the
work lying under the commodity itself. He understands the shadow
that prevents transparency to oneself by describing “the nebulous
zones of the religious world.” In this world, the products of the hu-
man brain seem to be autonomous figures, endowed with a life of
their own, maintaining relationships with each other and with hu-
mans. This is how it is in the world of trading in the products of
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 237

the human hand. I call it fetishism, fetishism that adheres to labor

products as soon as they are produced as commodities and is there-
fore inseparable from market production (Kapital I, 85–86).
Because Marx defines emancipation as a reflection of one’s
humanity through one’s products, as this self-transparency that He-
gel calls the spirit, he can criticize capital as darkness and obscurity.
Without assuming an anthropology of religion, the Marxian criti-
cism of fetishism is therefore impossible. Yet, without this critique
of capitalist fetishism, the explanation of religion in secular terms re-
mains unfounded. Social criticism is therefore, as it stands, logically
circular and lacks any foundation. To really abandon the ahistorical,
liberal, and abstract category of “human labor,” as value criticism and
Moishe Postone demand,20 therefore implies, as I will now show,
questioning the analysis of commodification in terms of fetishism.

Marx, Empire, and the Fetish

By using the concept of fetishism analogically, Marxist critics run

the risk of defining commodity fetishism as the particular case of
a universal fetishism that would stem from a fetishist essence of “reli-
gion.” In the Christian-colonial writings about Africa since the fif-
teenth century and in Charles de Brosses’s writings as well, fetishism
has been erected as a religious and anthropological constant, of
which capital was a late form. It would then be necessary to demon-
strate the universality of this anthropology, which most theorists of
fetishism do not do. This form of Marxism must then recognize that
it reasoned in the same way as colonial ethnological writings on the
“primitive religion of nature.” Reducing religions to the ideological
effects of the commodity form implies asking a crucial question. This
reduction is possible only for modern and individualized forms of
religion that are homogeneous to capitalism. Therefore, what distin-
guishes a capitalist religion from a “pre-capitalist” religion?
Precapitalist religions are based, Marx writes, “either on the
immaturity of the individual man who has not detached himself
from the umbilical cord of the natural generic bonds he has with oth-
ers, or on immediate relationships of domination and servitude”
(Kapital I, 86). The sharing that Marx mobilizes is the one that
differentiates “primitive” religion from the “fanatic” submission
238 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

to the one God. The concept of fetishism bears the trace of this evo-
lutionism on which the criticism of religion is based. Fetishism is not
a theological concept but a key concept of colonial ethnology that
belongs to the history of Africa’s subjugation by Europe. “The reli-
gion of fetishism,” writes an enlightened source from Marx, “is
considered very old” and “generally widespread in Africa.”21 The
anthropology of religion that Marx mobilized through the concept
of fetishism allowed him to match the primitive stage of religion to
the primitive stage of human history. Fetishism is therefore a key
concept in the criticism of religions and Marxism simply because
its main function is to reveal the human essence of religion through
the staging of its original moment. This concept is not only racial; it
makes it possible to affirm that humans make religion, that men and
women are the inventors of the gods. The concept of fetishism helps
demonstrate that God is the objectification of a human who is still
infantilized, and therefore that humanity remains unfulfilled under
the domination of capital.
The rationalist use of ethnological concepts such as fetishism to
critique capitalist modernity bears the trace of colonial anthropolo-
gies. It can mean that the modern ones are still “primitive” or that
they are also “primitive,” or even that they are the only true “primi-
tive” ones. These critical uses, however opposed they may be, were
born from the bowels of the colony. Replacing the concept of fetishism
with that of idolatry allows us to give criticism of capitalism a theo-
logical supplement without resolving its dialectical contradictions.
This is not to say, however, that the Marxist critique of capital is
imperialist. Marx is imperial insofar as he opposes colonialism in the
name of a revolutionary conquest of humanity made possible by the
colonial dissolution of traditions.22 Part of an imperial heritage, both
Saint-Simonian and Hegelian, actually supports how Marx criticizes
colonial violence but not the civilizing mission. Marx’s prophecies
are imperial when they assert that imperialism prepares for revolution
by dissolving traditions and feudalism. It is on this modern prophetic
language and not simply on colonial orientalism that the imperial
assumptions of Marxist criticism of colonialism rest. The traces of
evolutionary anthropology are the basis for an imperial commu-
nism seized as this conquest and recovery of self-transparency that
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 239

can make religions disappear. If human work appears and is orga-

nized as such, the conquest of infinite freedom will dissolve religion
through the worker’s association with the worker and the rational-
ization of their relationship with nature.

The Religion of Substitutes

If Marx defines precapitalist religion as a natural religion or a reli-
gion of servitude, how does he define capitalist religion? Commercial
abstraction corresponds to a specific form of religion. Commodity
fetishism is therefore not the religion of capital. The religion of cap-
ital is an abstract and disembodied religion, a cult of the person, and
the spirit of capitalism is that logic of religious abstraction that ex-
tends beyond the limits of Christianity. The Enlightenment, which
posits the existence of natural religion beyond the various religious
institutions, thus appears as forms of religion that are appropriate to
the social relations that capitalism deploys (Kapital I, 87–88).
The individual and private religiosity that the young Marx
grasped as a phenomenon of the limits of the democratic state is de-
duced from capital and the commodity form. The religion of the mod-
ern corresponds to the process of abstraction that allows the product
of work to appear as a relationship between objects.23 Market uni-
versalism manifests itself as the substitutability of concrete work
through the mediation of abstract work. Modern religions then
establish the worship of an abstract humanity by internalizing mar-
ket universalism.
It is therefore impossible to assert, as Marx and Marxism do, that
religion is the foundation or the model of this abstraction, because it
fails to understand how the state and capital transform religious life
and practice dynamically instead of presupposing that modern
religions—or rather, Protestant Christianity, according to Marx—
are essentially abstract. In other words, real abstraction, the process
by which capital not only appears but actually tends to become and
act as an autonomous reality, notably as a commodity, must be seen
as both a secular and a religious process characteristic of “moder-
nity.” It cannot be analyzed, as Marx suggests, through an analogy
with religion or simply as ideology, for that matter, because this
analogy prevents us from examining how religions are dynamically
240 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

transformed by the expansion of capital. Hence, instead of reassert-

ing that capital is Christian or that capital is a religion, one needs to
analyze the religious effects of capital and how it transforms forms of
life, both secular and religious. My tentative argument is that classi-
cal analogies between the fetish and the commodity, religion and
capital, all presuppose a static definition of religion and prevent us
from understanding the theological and anthropological dimensions
of the state as well as of capital.

Marx’s Failed Act

Marx must construct this hypothesis to describe the process of trans-
formation of religious traditions through their internalization of real
abstraction. Capitalism cannot produce religions and cannot explain
their existence as such. It can only transform forms of life and reli-
gious traditions into simple “religions,” thus abstracting their dis-
course by separating them from the conditions of their actual incor-
poration. It is therefore the compatibility between the faithful and
the liberal democratic order that Marx should be critiquing, one
might argue, and not religious alienation itself. Under the reign of
capital, religions must become as many echoes of the abstract substi-
tutability of humans; they must make this abstraction resonate
in their doctrines. Obedience to such an order is in fact assumed
by the development of capital. How, then, does capitalism produce
the appropriate religious effects? This question remains unanswered
in Marx and unanswerable in the context of Marxism.
The young Marx, of course, critiqued Christianity when he
claimed that it was realized through American democracy by making
the asociality of the individual human the ultimate sovereign (JF,
360). But this does not resolve the problem to the extent that it does
not tell us how Christianity became a capitalist religion. In other
words, if one argues that capitalism is Christianity, then Marxism
has no possibility of explaining how religions—plural—stem from
or are transformed by the capitalist order. Marx asserts that, in
democracy, “Christianity does not even require that one profess
Christianity but that one has religion in general, any religion” (JF,
361). But could Christianity become the model of a democratic
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 241

religion only by becoming the norm for the adequacy of any religious
tradition to an abstract model of religion in general? My tentative
answer is that colonialism is the crux of this transformation of Chris-
tianity into a religion of capital.
The production of the concept of “religion in general” is therefore
a decisive element in the process of capitalist abstraction. The con-
cept of religion contributes to the formation of two liberal ideologies
stemming from the humanity-religion dipole that lies at the heart of
the declaration of human rights. The first ideology is none other than
the idea of a humanity of people; the second ideology affirms that
humans make religion, that religion is the reflection of society.
Marx remained indebted to the second ideological formation despite
his theory of the human as a set of social relations. The critique of the
capitalist religious order should therefore evacuate the anthropology
of religion on which Marxism itself is founded. The apparent reduc-
ibility of religion to ideology through the obliteration of its practices
is an effect of how capitalism and the modern state are deployed. The
reduction of religion to ideology should therefore be defined as ideo-
logical, as an effect of the secularity of capital. Hence what Marx
sketches without actually deploying is a critical theory of seculariza-
tion not only as an imperial order but as a crucial condition of the
primitive accumulation of capital.
......................................................
mohamad amer meziane is a postdoctoral research fellow at the
Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and a part-time lecturer
at Columbia University. He is also affiliated with Columbia’s Institute
of African Studies and is a member of the editorial board of the
journal Multitudes. His first book, Des empires sous la terre, is
forthcoming.

Notes
1. Asad, “Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Category”;
Asad, Formations of the Secular. I refer here to the famous analysis of
the construction of religion as a universal anthropological category.
Arguably, these texts can be seen as the foundations of the recent cri-
tique of secularism as well as of the anthropology of religion, though
the field is burgeoning and global in scope.
242 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

2. Toscano, “Beyond Abstraction.”

3. See Picon, Les saint-simoniens, 82–83. Indeed, the nineteenth century
in Europe turned prophecy into a style of activism as a result of the
media development of the press and publicist writing. The European
socialists literally practiced their irreligion in the press. By becoming
prophets, they made themselves known. A media obsession and stra-
tegic use of the media were at the heart of their prophetic effects.
4. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 266–67.
5. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, 44–50. In chapter 3 Mudimbe specif-
ically analyzes the Christian and missionary dimensions of Africa’s
colonial invention as the “Dark Continent” until Placide Tempels’s
Bantu Philosophy (1945). What interests me in this paragraph is the
interaction between colonial anthropology in Africa and critiques of
religion and Christianity in Europe.
6. Hegel, Philosophy of Religion, 234–35: “Negroes have an endless
multitude of divine images which they make into their god or ‘fet-
ishes.’”
7. Anidjar, Semites. The book argues that the Semite is a racial category
produced by nineteenth-century Orientalism and that included both
Arabs and Jews before Semite came to refer to Jews in particular.
8. Marx, “Zur Judenfrage,” 352 (hereafter cited as JF).
9. See Berner, “Le chemin vers la vérité et la liberté,” 119. Marx’s letter to
Feuerbach of August 11, 1844, testifies that the Feuerbachian concept
of a divine humanity realized through love conceived of as the rela-
tionship between the self and the other is precisely what Marx trans-
forms into socialism.
10. Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right.”
11. Marx and Engels, Deutsche Ideologie, 19.
12. Balibar, “The Messianic Moment in Marx.”
13. Marx, “Einleitung,” 378 (hereafter cited as EL).
14. Feuerbach, Das Wesen, 1:6.
15. See Büttgen, “La sécularisation de la folie”; Büttgen, “Religion et
philosophie en Allemagne.”
16. Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 49.
17. Derrida, Spectres de Marx, 60.
18. Marx, Kapital I, 791.
19. Feuerbach, Das Wesen, 2:21.
20. Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Postone’s book has
been a source of inspiration for a movement now called value criticism
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 243

or Wertkritik. The main figure of this movement is Robert Kurz, author

of The Substance of Capital. The key idea of Wertkritik is, against
Althusser and reductions of capital to an economic mode of produc-
tion, that commodity fetishism is what remains at the center of Marx’s
analysis of capital. The assumption is also that one could distinguish
the critical and political aspects of Marx’s analysis that refer to class
struggle. Hence this movement tends to depoliticize Marx by actually
describing capitalism as a totality to which there is no alternative.
Although I disagree with this movement, despite some interesting
contributions to the critique of the financialization of capital, my point
is that the theoretical paradigm to which it is indebted presupposes
analogies between religion and capitalism and is premised on abstract
uses of the word fetishism as a universal concept.
21. De Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 25. On de Brosses, see Can-
guilhem, “Histoire des religions”; Balibar, “Notes sur l’origine et
l’usage du terme ‘monothéisme’”; and Morris and Leonard, Returns of
Fetishism.
22. Marx and Engels, On Colonialism, 84: “England has to fulfill a double
mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating, the annihi-
lation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations
of Western society in Asia.” My emphasis.
23. See Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 186–216. Abstract
social time allows the measurement of exchange value that is the
product not of a specific form of work but only of human work defined
as an abstraction.

References

Anidjar, Gil. Semites: Race, Religion, Literature. Stanford, CA: Stanford

University Press, 2008.
Asad, Talal. “The Construction of Religion as an Anthropological Cate-
gory.” In Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power
in Christianity and Islam, 27–40. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993.
Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity.
Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.
Balibar, Étienne. “The Messianic Moment in Marx.” In Citizen-Subject:
Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology, translated by Steven
Miller, 143–54. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017.
244 qui parle december 2020 vol. 29 no. 2

Balibar, Étienne. “Notes sur l’origine et l’usage du terme ‘monothéisme.’”

Critique, nos. 704–5 (2006): 19–45.
Berner, Christian. “Le chemin vers la vérité et la liberté: Notes sur L’Essence
de la foi selon Luther de Feuerbach.” Revue germanique international,
no. 8 (2008): 113–27.
Büttgen, Philippe. “La sécularisation de la folie: Marxisme et protestan-
tisme vers 1848.” In Modernité et sécularisation, edited by Michaël
Foëssel, Jean-François Kervégan, and Myriam Revault d’Allones,
123–43. Paris: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique Editions,
2007.
Büttgen, Philippe. “Religion et philosophie en Allemagne: Le droit de la
confession.” Études germaniques 280, no. 4 (2015): 659–70.
Canguilhem, Georges. “Histoire des religions et histoire des sciences dans la
théorie du fétichisme chez Auguste Comte.” In Études d’histoire et de
philosophie des sciences, 81–98. Paris: Vrin, 2002.
de Brosses, Charles. Du culte des dieux fétiches. Paris, 1760.
Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Galilée, 1993.
Feuerbach, Ludwig. Das Wesen des Christentums. 2 vols. Stuttgart: Re-
clam, 1994.
Hegel, G. W. F. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Peter C.
Hodgson, translated by R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart,
with H. S. Harris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
Kurz, Robert. The Substance of Capital. London: Chronos, 2016.
Marx, Karl. Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” edited by Joseph
O’Malley, translated by Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970.
Marx, Karl. Das Kapital I. Vol. 23 of Marx-Engels Werke. Berlin: Dietz,
1968.
Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, translated by
Martin Milligan. Moscow: Progress, 1959.
Marx, Karl. “Einleitung.” In vol. 1 of Marx-Engels Werke, 378–91. Berlin:
Dietz, 1970.
Marx, Karl. “Zur Judenfrage.” In vol. 1 of Marx-Engels Werke, 347–77.
Berlin: Dietz, 1970.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. “Deutsche Ideologie.” In vol. 3 of Marx-
Engels Werke, 9–532. Berlin: Dietz, 1978.
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. On Colonialism. Moscow: Foreign Lan-
guages Publication House, 1969.
 Amer Meziane: The Critique of Heaven 245

Morris, Rosalind, and Daniel Leonard. The Returns of Fetishism: Charles

de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017.
Mudimbe, V. Y. The Invention of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1988.
Picon, Antoine. Les saint-simoniens: Raison, imaginaire, utopie. Paris:
Belin, 2002.
Postone, Moishe. Time, Labor, and Social Domination. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993.
Toscano, Alberto. “Beyond Abstraction: Marx and the Critique of the
Critique of Religion.” Historical Materialism 18, no. 1 (2010): 3–29.