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Born on 21 March 1934 in Lessines, Belgium, Raoul Vaneigem is best known for being a member of the Situationist International (the “SI”), which he joined in 1961. An unusual grouping of European radical artists, filmmakers and writers, the SI was founded in 1957 and dissolved in 1972. Between those years, the group reinvented the theory of proletarian revolution and propagated it through a journal called Internationale Situationniste, several books and a great many scandalous provocations. The SI was deeply involved in the protests, riots and occupations that nearly toppled the French government in May-June 1968.

Given this pedigree, one might be surprised that Vaneigem has been so interested in Judeo-Christianity, even if his interest is focused upon the beliefs and practices that have been categorized, denounced and forbidden as “heretical.” Is not heresy simply the “negative” twin of orthodoxy? Were not the situationists dedicated to the abolition of religion as well as the abolition of capitalism and the State? The answer to both questions is “Yes.” But in much the same way that his fellow situationist, Guy Debord (author of the anti-spectacular book The Society of the Spectacle), has made several films, Raoul Vaneigem has written several books on the subject of heresy. Unfortunately, few of them have been translated into English.

For Vaneigem, religious values and behaviors — guilt, self-hatred, fear of pleasure, the hope for a future heaven on earth and, above all, the contempt for the body and for the earth — persist (even) among those who consider themselves to be atheists and anarchists. They persist, not only in their political ideologies (which are often informed by the notions and practices of hard work, self-sacrifice and intellectual and moral superiority), but also in their psychological states (often imbued with weariness, resignation, self-contempt and a sense of impotence). Just like “the others” — the capitalists, the bureaucrats employed by the State and the “religious nuts” — atheists and anarchists all-too-often neglect or abuse their personal health, their capacities for (sexual) pleasure and the roles that women play in their organizations and actions.

And yet The Resistance to Christianity is not a pep talk or a self-help manual. It is a very serious historical (albeit subjective) investigation into the rise and fall of Judeo-Christianity. In his “Introduction” to The Movement of the Free Spirit, Vaneigem says,

I want to challenge those who dehumanize history, seeing it as fated and fatal: hence my wish to pay homage to those who refused to give in to the idea that history moves toward some inevitable outcome. I want also to seek out signs of life, behind the edifices of religious and ideological obscurantism, and in so doing I hope to dispense once and for all with the cherished but no less dubious notion of a Christian Middle Ages.

Substitute “Western civilization” for “Middle Ages” and you will have an idea of what Vaneigem is up to in The Resistance to Christianity.

In this incredibly ambitious project, Vaneigem both relies heavily upon and disagrees with a number of “traditional” historians, but especially Norman Cohn, the author of The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Messianism in Medieval and Reformation Europe and its Bearing on Modern Totalitarian Movements. Originally published in 1957, and revised and reprinted in 1961, this pioneering and exceptionally influential work claims that,

Although it would be a gross over-simplification to identify the [Medieval] world of chiliastic exaltation with the world of social unrest, there were many times when needy and discontented masses were captured by some millennial prophet. And when that happened movements were apt to arise which, though relatively small and short-lived, can be seen in retrospect to bear a startling resemblance to the great totalitarian movements of our own day [...] The time seems ripe for an examination of those remote foreshadowings of present conditions. If such an inquiry can throw no appreciable light on the workings of established totalitarian states, it might, and I think it does, throw considerable light on the sociology and psychology of totalitarian movements in their revolutionary heyday.

As Greil Marcus has noted in Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20^th Century, the situationists “would carefully plunder” Cohn’s book, which was published in France in 1962 under the title Fanatiques de l’Apocalypse. But the situationists saw the validity of Cohn’s hypothesis only when it was inverted. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord points out that,

The great European peasant revolts were likewise a response to history — a history that was wresting the peasantry from the patriarchal slumber thitherto guaranteed by the feudal order. This was the moment when a millenarian utopianism aspiring to build heaven on earth brought back to the forefront an idea that had been at the origin of semi-historical religion, when the early Christian communities, like the Judaic messianism from which they sprang, responded to the troubles and misfortunes of their time by announcing the imminent realization of God’s Kingdom, and so added an element of disquiet and subversion to ancient society [...] So, contrary to what Norman Cohn believes he has demonstrated in The Pursuit of the Millennium, modern revolutionary hopes are not an irrational sequel to the religious passion of millenarianism. The exact opposite is true: millenarianism, the expression of a revolutionary class struggle speaking the language of religion for the last time, was already a modern revolutionary tendency, lacking only the consciousness of being historical and nothing more. The millenarians were doomed to defeat because they could not recognize revolution as their own handiwork. The fact that they made their action conditional upon an external sign of God’s will was a translation onto the level of thought of the tendency of insurgent peasants to follow outside leaders.

Though he generally accredits this analysis, Vaneigem’s position in The Resistance to Christianity is somewhat more nuanced. As he states in Chapter 33, “The great revolutionary movements gave to millenarianism a more ideological than religious form — nevertheless, it would be a mistake to underestimate the role of irrational and Joachimite faith in Nazi millenarianism, that is, in the antithesis of the projects of a classless society or an ecological paradise, both carried to consciousness by the successive waves of the economy.” On the other hand — unlike Cohn and Debord — Vaneigem does not see a general consistency or uniformity in millenarianism. In his “Introduction” to The Movement of the Spirit, he says, “The partisans of the Free Spirit were divided on one fundamental issue.”

Driven by their will to follow nature, some identified with God and the ordinariness if his tyranny, using force, violence, constraint and seduction to secure the right to gratify their whims and passions. Others refused to countenance such a union between a despotic God and a denatured nature, a union whose exploitation found perfect expression in the myth of a divinity at once pitiful and pitiless. Instead they saw the refinement of their desires and the quest for a ubiquitous and sovereign amorous pleasure as a way of replacing the spiritualized animal and its labor of adaptation with an authentic human species capable of creating the conditions favorable to its own harmonious development.

All through The Resistance to Christianity, Vaneigem will highlight this division or disagreement among the so-called heretics. It is in fact the central theme of the book: “Yes” to Simon of Samaria and Marguerite Porete; “no” to the Cathars and Thomas Munzter.

Once this division has been drawn, and its significance has been recognized, the reader might fully understand the peculiar character of “modern life.” Over the course of human history, have we not overcome all of the obstacles to freedom and happiness on earth that have been erected by the economy? Have we not ceased to be ruled and made miserable by the gods, God, the Church, kings and princes, dictators and political ideologies of all stripes? Yes, indeed — but we remain constrained by the economy itself, that is to say, by work and the commodity, by the production and consumption of pollution.

It is significant that Vaneigem doesn’t remind his readers of the phrase NEVER WORK, which Guy Debord scratched into a wall on the Rue de Seine in Paris in 1953 and which was a decade later cited by the Situationist International as the “preliminary program for the situationist movement.” Instead he offers (in The Movement of the Free Spirit) the following “good watchword”: “The minimum of survival in the service of a maximum of life.” The latter appears to be much less radical and memorable than the former, and perhaps this will comfort those who believe that Debord was right when he said that, after his departure from the SI in 1970, Vaneigem demonstrated the “impossibility of keeping quiet,” a quality that “strictly co-exists with a total impossibility of speaking” (letter to Gianfranco Sanguinetti dated 13 August 1973). Though we do not wish to choose sides, it is also quite clear that Vaneigem had Debord, among others, in mind when he stated (once again in The Movement of the Free Spirit):

What started as a revolution against misery turned into a miserably failed revolution, all because of a reluctance to be anything for oneself; and this failure still condemns even the most vociferous seekers of emancipation and happiness to the gall of impotence in which they acquiesce. Anyone who has the intelligence to comprehend the world but not enough to learn how to live, or who takes his self-hatred out on others, blaming and judging so as not to be blamed and judged himself, is, deep inside, no different from the priest.

In this context, it is interesting to note that, unlike Vaneigem’s “watchword,” Debord’s slogan is phrased as a command, if not a “commandment” along the lines of “Thou shalt not work.” It certainly would not have reduced this quality if Debord had written NEVER WORK, AND LIVE ACCORDING TO YOUR TRUE DESIRES. The Marx-like “intellectualism,” the “lasting influence of God,” would still remain.