Contenu du sommaire : Religions

While the initial thrust of Marxist theories tended to be to redirect religion to its social reference, thus fracturing the theologico-political kernel, Stalinist Marxism eventually elevated Marxist doctrine to a status of secular religion. The dissolution of this moment of sacralization entails the emergence of a problematics of secularism, implying the opposition between religions of power and the « impolitical » effects of religions.

The article shows religious anthropology to be the blind spot in Marxism. It thus explains how Communist « atheism » and Liberation « theologies » are merely two faces of the same Biblical hegemony defining the discourses of liberation struggles. Having analyzed how the reciprocity between the construction of the concepts of religion and of alienation has constrained the critique of capitalism and of the State, it concludes that the emergence of a renovated terrestrial critique would ensue from the collapse of the anthropological foundations which until now have underpinned it.

A generalized violence seems to be consubstantial to globalization. The question facing us is that of the qualification of the nexus of determinants responsible for the regression of the political, beneath the forms which had constituted the historicity of previous centuries. This requires a revision of the presumption that the « critique of religion » amounts to an unquestionable fait accompli of Marxian theory. Such a revision is a precondition for the confrontation with a regime which operates through the constitution of bodies as both symbolic and productive, subject to a dual expropriation.

The article deals with the socio-political and cultural context in which liberation theology is currently developing. Analysing the relation to Marxism of certain liberation theologians, (Leonardo Boff, Enrique Dussel, Franz Hinkelammert), the intention is to highlight the place Marxism now occupies in this current of thought.

The election of Pope Francis (Bergoglio) represents an unexpected change in the orientation of the Church. The article takes as proof of this Bergoglio's « ecological » encyclical Laudato Si, a denunciation of the current « system of commercial relations and property relations which are structurally perverse », here accused of being responsible for social inequalities and the ecological crisis.

Should we understand Islamism as a religious form of nationalism ? According to Asad, Islamism and nationalism have in common their preoccupation with the modern State. However they display their profound divergence once we envisage the modalities though which such a preoccupation is worked out. Islamism derives from a translation of the tradition, thus reinvested in a situation dominated by the modern State and by the politicization of the social spheres which it regulates. It thus comes into competition with Marxism on the terrain of anti-statist discourse.

Historical materialism alone can ground a radical refutation of all essentialisms, including that of « Orientalism », pace Edward Said's ill-informed critique of Marx. The political perspective of Marx and Engels on religion remains relevant today. However the Marxist tradition is weak in the field of the sociology of religion. Other contributions, including Durkheim's concept of anomie, must be drawn upon, in order to understand the religious resurgence that has occurred alongside the neoliberal turn. Whereas early Christianity easily lends itself to a leftist interpretation, Islamic theology, especially in its ultraorthodox version propagated by the Saudi kingdom, fosters a fundamentalist interpretation. It is perilous for Marxists to venture onto the ground of Islamic exegesis, instead of abiding by the separation between the political and religion.

The concept of Aufhebung, which Marx took from Hegel and which he revised, is an egregious problem in translation. Lucien Sève questions the principle according to which it should systematically be translated as « abolition », a procedure that is currently general. He pleads for the recourse, in a significant number of cases, to « dépassement », a position which Patrick Theuret castigates as amounting to semantic and political revisionism. Based on a close scrutiny of the question from the evidence in Grundrisse, Lucien Sève demonstrates that a translation of the term by dépassement is in many instances a requirement rooted in Marx's text. In semantic terms, it is not the case that dépassement leads to amnesia regarding « the work of the negative ». Politically, the reduction of the Marxian conception of the revolution to an abolition amounts to a profound mutilation. The question is, to a acute degree, a current issue, at a time when the patent obsolescence of capitalism calls not for an old-style revolution but for a new kind of dépassement.

The development of the private sector and of market regulation in Cuba over the last ten years calls into question the project of socialist construction, still advocated by the government. However the unavoidable competition between the « socialist » State sector and the commercial and capitalist private sector potentially annihilates this project. The hypothesis of a peaceful coexistence between the two is indeed illusory. The aim of the article is to highlight the modifications required in economic policies in this new context and to underline the importance of apprehending the productive private sector as a temporary tool which, by way of the alienation of a portion of its surplus product, allows for the development of the socialist sector.

The paper explores a parallel between two founding innovations in contemporary epistemes, those of Marx and Saussure. It notes the isomorphism between the concepts of use value and signifier. After a brief examination of the place of the term « use value » in the Marxist tradition, it goes on to examine use value as a body, rather than in terms of need or of utility function. Through the comprehension of the concept of use value by way of the prism of the category of signifier, a series of questions, pertaining to the notion of the arbitrary, to the indivisible, to the play of what is unfixed, can be tested. We thus observe that the two concepts function as denominations for the successive moments of a given activity : the links in a chain. It can thus be argued that signifying chains play a fundamental role, as a repetition automatism, in social reproduction.

Standard exegetical opinion usually portrays Freud as an entrenched pessimist and a critic of communism. However in 1918, Freud did in fact call for the emergence of a popular psychoanalysis, the institutional conditions of whose mission were to be overseen by the State. In the sequence of socialist revolutions that was to unfold, a number of private polyclinics thus saw the day, in line with this approach. However it was in the country of soviets that Freud's wish achieved its most comprehensive fulfillment, with the establishment of a State Institute of Psychoanalysis, to which was associated a children's home. The support lent by Freud to the highly politicized analytical practices of the time, including those in communist Russia, along with the relative oblivion into which the historiography of this episode has lapsed, leave room for a critical reevaluation of the Freudian heritage and its transmission, regarding its relation to the political.

Before 1968, only one, highly critical, book had been published about Marcuse. Even the leaders of the student movement seemed to know nothing about his thought. However publication of the French translation of One-Dimensional Man, at the peak of the « events », although purely coincidental, revealed the existence of an intense underground reception of Marcuse, by at least two generations within influential intellectual and publishing circles and in the Trotskyite movement.

The aim of the article is to apprehend certain aspects of the reception of Gramsci in France, a reception located within the political and the academic field, due to his position as a classic author in the social sciences and also as a political figure. The reception furthermore took place in an intellectual context in which other thinkers, among them Pierre Bourdieu, were, on certain topics, formulating ideas close to those of Gramsci. The central argument in the article is that over the past three decades Gramsci, Bourdieu and cultural studies have come to form a « constellation » of authors and theories, one it is worthwhile for us to conceive of jointly, in the French context. The article concludes with some considerations on the recent renewal of Gramscian studies in France.