The white people came to our country, it is the natives' country [he was emphatic about it], took everything away from us--the land, the cattle--and made us work. We cannot move without a pass, have to pay taxes; and they have given us Jesus. (106)It seems there are two "faces" to Christianity. On the one hand, it sanctions the Africans' struggle for racial equality; on the other, it helps legitimize white oppression of blacks (such as pass laws and the appropriation of African land and resources). This contradiction is usually attributed to hypocrisy (see Comaroff). In Foucauldian terms, the Christian "truth" is merely an instrument of colonial power. In fact, this is the conclusion reached by one of the visitors at John and Maggie's residence in Johannesburg. "Because the priests are white people," the visitor observes, "when they talk to Christ they must take the white people's part." John agrees: "Just as the magistrates in the court take the white man's part" (109).
The savage would "willingly [become] subject to His Government" (Northcott 1969: vi) and to the cultural empire of European Protestantism. Over the long run, these gentle soldiers of God's Kingdom were to prove themselves every bit as effective, in making subjects, as were the stormtroops of colonialism. (Comaroff I, 200)When it comes to the subject of religion and colonialism, most critics, like the Comaroffs, focus on the interpenetration of "truth" and "power" in the colonial project and its aftermath. Their focus is hence often "the colonization of consciousness and the consciousness of colonization" (Comaroff I, xi).
"We used to talk a lot about Christians. Even now we do. We don't think a lot of Christians. We don't believe in Jesus. We used to pray in olden times to our native god, and to the midzimu, for rain. It always helped. Now we pray to Jesus and rain never comes. We have no corn, no land, nothing. We all hate the Christians; they talk, talk, and nothing comes to us from it. I am only waiting to go home and learn how to pray to our god and will never pray to Jesus, and won't be a Christian any more. I became a Christian when I was quite small. I was still stupid. My mother was a Christian and also my second father, and all the children were baptized. My children were not baptized and never will be. My father also does not believe any more in Christianity. He became a native doctor. The Christian priests are even so bad [he probably meant stupid] that they are against native doctors and native medicines. When a missionary comes to our houses at home, they chase him away. Nobody wants to talk to them. In the kraals nobody wants to be a Christian any more. Why should they be? [And here he became rather agitated.] The white people came to our country, it is the natives' country [he was emphatic about it], took everything away from us--the land, the cattle--and made us work. We cannot move without a pass, have to pay taxes; and they have given us Jesus. We don't want him. . . ." (Sachs 106)For John, Christianity is a religion of abstract and empty talk. Instead of responding to the needs of the Africans, the white man's religion leads blacks into further destitution. Jesus, unlike the midzimu (ancestral spirit), never responds to the Africans' supplication for rain. Instead of offering them help when they are faced with illness and disasters, the Christian priests attack the native doctors and medicines which provide the main source of healing for the Africans. Christianity is even implicated in the white oppression of the blacks in such phenomena as pass laws, tax collection, and the white man's seizure of the Africans' land and other resources.
The ancestral rainpots of the chief might have stored the essence of his ritual potency, and rainmakers might have known how to release that essence in order to activate the clouds. But their power was said to work only when the community was in a state of moral rectitude, a state of "coolness" (tsididi). Any breach of proper relations among humans, or between them and the nonhuman realm, might pollute this order, generating heat and drying up the rain. The ritual expert was the mediator between the living and the potent dead. He "made" the rain only insofar as he ensured that the condition of the social world met the requirements of ancestral beneficence--in particular, by removing the pollution that closed up the heavens. (I, 210; my italics)The rainmaking ritual is crucial to reasserting communal values and ethical bonds which include both the living and the dead. The dead, far from being forgotten, play a major role in the physical, moral, and spiritual well-being of the community. The presence of the dead is strongly felt as they oversee the direct and immediate relationship between the moral and physical well-being of the community. They punish any breach of propriety or ethics by refusing rain to the living. The ethical and the physical, the dead and the living, exist in strict continuity with each other. This heavy emphasis on kinship, ethics, and communal life is a far cry from Christ, who taught that all ethical bonds--both the family, natural ethical life, and politics, public ethical life--are superseded by the duty owed to the Kingdom of Heaven. To a youth who wishes to delay the duties of discipleship until he has buried his father, Christ says, "Follow me; and let the dead bury their dead. . . . He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me" (Matthew 8: 21-22 and 10: 37).
The [Christian] subjectivity which has come to understand its infinite worth has thereby abandoned all distinctions of authority, power, position and even of race; before God all men are equal. It is in the negation of infinite sorrow that love is found, and there, too, is found the possibility and the root of truly universal right, of the realization of freedom. (Religion III, 105/II, 303; translation adopted from Rose 115)This abstract morality, in other words, should make it possible for the Africans to contest colonialism. This is why the "calm and dignified" speaker at the meeting of African elites makes his appeal for justice in Christian language: "God did not measure out the heart and brain according to the color of a man's skin . . . all men--blacks as well as whites--are equal before God" (161-62). [7] How, then, does the same abstract moral system used to contest colonialism also make possible the justification of this enterprise? According to the same speaker in Black Anger, this inconsistency is simply a product of the lies and hypocrisy of the white politicians who manipulate Christianity at their convenience in the interest of their domination:
The white politicians are telling lies, they are hypocrites when they talk of civilization. . . . God did not measure out the heart and brain according to the color of a man's skin. I don't think the white people really believe in the inherent inferiority of our race. That statement is but a salve to the white conscience. For consider: the same white people teach us that all men--blacks as well as whites--are equal before God, when they want us to become Christians. It is only when we want more money, better work, better opportunities that our black skin becomes such a hindrance to us. (161-62)In my view, however, the fact that politicians can manipulate Christian doctrines to support their cause at their own convenience has to do with a potential for contradictions internal to the abstract moral system of Christianity in the first place. By separating the City of God from the City of Man, by opposing the kingdom of heaven to the kingdom on earth--evident in Christ's admonition "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's"--Christianity abstracts itself from both just and unjust polities, and as such makes itself susceptible to the manipulations of both.[8] It leaves itself wide open to conflicting interpretations and political manipulation precisely because "subjectivity, as God and as man, has no determination in it" (Rose 116). By abstracting itself from concrete ethical and political circumstances, Christian doctrine has justified both the evil and the just acts committed in its name.[9]
[Abstract] virtue . . . is conquered by the "way of the world" because its purpose is, in fact, the abstract, unreal essence, and because its action as regards reality rests on distinctions which are purely nominal. It wanted to consist in bringing the good into actual existence by the sacrifice of individuality, but the side of reality is itself nothing else but the side of individuality. (Phenomenology 233)In its attempt to carry out its vocation, the Church finds itself re-formed by the preconditions of its own power--that is, by the power of the state (Rose 164). Which is to say, the Church becomes re-formed by the ethical and political state of affairs which it fails to acknowledge. The paradoxical consequence of this bad faith is that it necessarily recreates and reaffirms the very state of affairs which it seeks to transform.[10] In the process of establishing itself as an outside, otherworldly authority on the inside of the state, the abstract moral system of the Church, far from having the power to reform the social order, ends up being "re-formed" or, better yet, "de-formed" by the specific content of the political order (Rose 164). Interestingly enough, Hegel uses the term "inversion" to describe this false "reconciliation" between the "alien spirit" (the Church) and the world. This "reconciliation" is itself the result of the unity of a misrepresenting consciousness and a lawless world:
It is this absolute and universal inversion and alienation of the actual world and of thought; it is pure culture. What is learnt in this world is that neither the actuality of power and wealth, nor their specific Notions, "good" and "bad," or the consciousness of "good" and "bad" (the noble and the ignoble consciousness), possess truth; on the contrary, all these moments become inverted, one changing into the other, and each is the opposite of itself. . . . The thoughts of these two essences, of "good" and "bad," are similarly inverted in this movement; what is characterized as good is bad, and vice versa [my italics]. (Phenomenology, 316-17/385)
From a formal standpoint, everything is outwardly the reverse of what it is for itself. . . . The honest individual takes each moment to be an abiding essentiality, and is the uneducated thoughtlessness of not knowing that it is equally doing the reverse. (Phenomenology, 317/385; my italics)
The white people came to our country, it is the natives' country [he was emphatic about it], took everything away from us--the land, the cattle--and made us work. We cannot move without a pass, have to pay taxes; and they have given us Jesus. We don't want him. (106)John's association of the missionaries with the loss of land and the imposition of the pass law is by no means merely arbitrary. Since Christianity valorizes the Kingdom of Heaven at the expense of the kingdom on earth, any land not associated with the Christian God is not considered sacred, and is grouped with other worldly goods that can be bought and sold in the market. This contrasts markedly with the African worldview, in which land is sacred and communal--and individual ownership or sale of land is unknown. The Christian redefinition of land as secular, as individual property rather than the very embodiment of the community itself, lays the legal and conceptual groundwork for the alienation of land from the natives and its acquisition by the colonizer.
The land was revered in ritual, it held the bodies of the tribal ancestors, it was the concentration of the tribe itself, the thing that gave it life and substance and security and identity. It could not be owned individually. It was held by the tribe collectively and vested in the chief, who could allocate its use but not its title. (20)Land is sacred for the Africans precisely because it is closely related to, instead of being the opposite of, "worldly concerns" such as livelihood and ethical ties. Even the dead are tied to the land and communal life instead of being transported to the Other World. The subsistence economy among the natives creates an intense, lifelong passion for land, because "land means security" (Sparks 20). This form of economy and the need to stay close together for survival also produce a strong communal spirit--a communal bond sanctified and secured by the land itself.
When people die, they become midzimu, and continue to live in the places in which they lived in the flesh. They actually continue to live, only in a different way, and are in constant and intimate contact with the living. The dead and the living form a chain which must not be broken. (107)In other words, the idea of "departing from this world" is foreign to the Africans, even when they die. By ritualistically reaffirming the tribe's bonds to the land, African religions provide solace and security not only to those about to die. They also guarantee the living the continuous blessings of their elders. John Chavafambira, for example, continues to benefit from the support and guardianship of his parents after their death. Wulf Sachs reports:
Father and mother, though dead, remained accessible to him [John] whenever he was in need of them. They were as omniscient as God, but in a concrete and tangible form. The midzimu even lived in their former huts in the kraal, according to John's conception. (21)Although dead, John's parents remain in his vicinity, since they "even [live] in their former huts in the kraal." This contrasts dramatically with both the Western concept of the dead as "irretrievably gone," and God (the Father) the only Protector of humankind presiding in the kingdom of Heaven which is absolutely divided from the human world, and whose face no human being can see.
To leave the soil from which they had sprung, where the stones, the trees and the flowers, the very blades of grass, spoke to each one of his life, his childhood games, his loves, his work! To tear them away would be to leave a bleeding wound on them and in their land; to rend a man from the land on which his ancestors had lived and in which his parents were buried was to commit a crime screaming to heaven for vengeance. (253)Already lacking a spirit of acquisitiveness due to their subsistence economy (Sparks 20), the Africans are further demoralized by this cruel displacement. As Sachs puts it, "Life in the kraal became paralyzed. The land were left untended. Why till fields that at any moment they might be ordered to leave?" (253).
He could not stay in my home; the law prohibited any African to remain on the premises of a white man unless registered as a domestic servant. (276)[16]In fact, as Sparks points out, the Land Act has much to do with entrapping the blacks as virtual slaves for the whites. It was by "prohibit[ing] the further purchase of land by blacks, put[ting] a stop to the tenant and sharecropping systems," thereby removing the natives' "foothold of independence" that the Land Act succeeded in pouring "nearly a million blacks back into the captive labour pool" (Sparks 141):
The Land Act had created a landless peasantry and forced it to become a captive labor force; a complex set of pass laws had prohibited the blacks from moving about to selling their labour on a free market and classified those who were unemployed as vagrants; the Master and Servants Act had made the breach of a labour contract a criminal offence; and the Mines and Works Act prevented blacks from doing skilled work in the mines. Together this body of laws had set up the framework for a system of exploitative racial capitalism, much of it put in place by previous administrations which the English had supported. (Sparks 191)This is to say, the Land Act not only reassigns the Africans a new physical space. It also "reterritorializes" them to a new social space. From being chiefs or members of their tribal communities, they move to the station of black slaves serving white men. This reallocation process is made possible by the displacement of the blacks from their local attachment to "universal humanity." The injustice of this racial inequality can be glossed over by re-presenting and re-coding inequality on earth as spiritual equality of all in front of God. This is indeed one way how the abstract "spiritual freedom and equality" of Christianity is vulnerable to the exploitation of the colonial state. This ideological re-coding process, however, is reversed and de-coded by black writers such as Frantz Fanon, who exposes the racial inequality behind Christianity's "spiritual equality." In "The Woman of Color and the White Man," Fanon tells a story which illustrates how the complex of racial-social hierarchy can be reimported back to a Heaven which theoretically has erased all inequalities:
One day St. Peter saw three men arrive at the gate of heaven: a white man, a mulatto, and a Negro.Fanon demystifies the supposedly equal right of all races to enter the Kingdom of Heaven by revealing how social hierarchy is smuggled back into God's kingdom along racial lines. Just as the Land Act allows black men "to drift into the towns where they could stay only if they were going to serve the white men's needs" (Sparks 137), Fanon's black man is allowed into Heaven only because he is there to carry luggage for the white man and the mulatto. In fact, the "Negro" should feel grateful just for being made the white man's valet. Had it not been for his obligation to follow his master and carry his luggage, even after his death, he would never have had the chance of setting his foot in the Kingdom of Heaven.
"What do you want?" he asked the white man. "Money."
"And you?" he asked the mulatto.
"Fame."
St. Peter turned then to the Negro, who said with a wide smile: "I'm just carrying these gentlemen's bags." (49)
Every African man must be in possession of a pass. Without it he cannot look for work, travel, move from kraal to town or appear on the streets between the hours of 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. The police have the right to demand a pass from any African and it is an offense to refuse to produce it. In Transvaal an African man must on various occasions carry, in all, eleven passes issued by the authorities, who have discretionary powers to refuse an African the required pass.Note that any native's refusal to produce a pass to the police is construed as a criminal offence. The word "refusal," however, is misleading. Later in the book, we find that a native's mere negligence with his passes constitutes sufficient grounds for his/her arrest and prosecution. John, for example, is arrested for walking on the streets at eleven p.m. without a special pass:The eleven passes are: A pass that entitles the African to travel, enter, or live in the province. A pass from the employer that has to be registered with the police every month. A pass from the owner of his kraal-land. A permit to enter an urban area. A permit to seek work. A service contract. A permit to live in specific parts of the town. A visitor's permit if the African is on a visit to his parents or relatives. A lodger's permit if he hires a room. And, finally, the curfew pass, given by the employer, that entitles the African to appear on the streets between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m. (96; my italics)
He realized that he was in Eloff Street, the main artery of the town. Beside him was drawn up a yellow van, netted as if for the transport of poultry. Without ceremony or explanation, he was bustled into this dreaded "pick-up van," used for collecting Africans who were drunk or were without passes or specials that would entitle them to be in the streets after nine at night, or any undesirable Africans likely to be a menace to the white community.Natives who neglect their place redefined for them by their white masters are immediately transformed by their masters' law into a "criminal." The power of the white colonial state, the helplessness of the black natives, and the "proper place" of the blacks, are ritualistically reaffirmed in a most dramatic manner at the moment of accusation. The accused finds himself/herself wrenched from his/her "African" sense of life, his/her "stereotyped" identity as a black being immediately intensified from a "born" sinner to a "born" criminal, from the damned to the condemned. Any slight negligence gets instantaneously transformed, first into criminal behavior, and then into a "reconfirmation" of criminality as a racial identity. The construction of the native individual as a criminal is inseparable from the construction of the criminal both doctrinally and culturally as a racialized person.Only at the police station did John realize his crime. He had been in the streets at eleven p.m. without a special pass; and for the next thirty-six hours he was imprisoned in a cell with many others as unfortunate as himself. (135)
That fell away, but the attitude behind it remained--the belief that the black person should know his place, that he did not really belong in the city and was there only to serve the white person's needs, that every black person was potentially available to do the white's bidding. (142)The seriousness of the South African government in enforcing this kind of "slave morality" through their racial geography is evident from the miserable fate of those blacks who either out of negligence or ignorance demonstrate that they do not "know [their] place." John Chavafambira, for example, is haunted from time to time by dreadful memories of "a young native boy beaten by his employer, a garage foreman, or a native woman thrown off the pavements because she did not give way quickly enough to a European, the continuous interference of the police, and the prisoners who were escorted daily from the court to the jail" (76). Through his mistress Edith, he discovers that this master/slave geography is more extensive and inescapable than he thought. Edith tells John that the color bar "was applied not only in respect to work, but even in pleasure":
One who was not white could not ride in a tram, nor enter a tearoom or restaurant, nor travel in a decent coach in the train, nor visit the theater or movies--save for the few dirty, tumbledown movies, vermin-infested and uncomfortable, that were open "for natives only." (78)These, as Edith explains to John, are part of "the evil of transition from the kraal to the town"--of the transition from the Africans' traditional tribal religion and custom to Western religion and law (78).
You know. Our host took me to the servants' quarters outside, to a dirty, foul-smelling latrine. On our way there we had to pass a similar place in the house. It was clean, well kept, not like the other. (Sachs 223)Tembu ends this episode by addressing Sachs, who prides himself as a "white"[17] liberal eager to help the Africans: "I ask you, Doctor: What are we to think?" (223).
Swartyard was a triangular area of about a thousand square yards where stood a hundred or more ramshackle rooms, built of corrugated iron and thin wooden planks. The rooms were built in three or four rows, with very little space between, and intersected by three narrow alleyways. Two huge garbage bins, serving the whole yard and constantly overflowing, flanked the narrow entrance. From them an unbearable stench permeated the whole place. There were six latrines, in a shocking state of neglect and disrepair, and totally inadequate for the five hundred souls that used them. The children did not bother to use them, as the alleyways inside and the pavement outside showed. In dry weather the yard was littered with refuse; in the rains the place was a quagmire. Repeated requests by the inhabitants themselves, and by the health inspector, that the area be cemented remained unheeded. In the whole yard there was one solitary tap of running water. (117)John's residence in Blacktown is in no better condition. In addition to being extremely unsanitary and dilapidated, the ghetto is surrounded by a spiked fence and patrolled by black guards to ensure the seclusion of this native Hell from the outside world:
Everything looked especially dreary on the Sunday morning in September 1940 when, summoned by John, I came to Blacktown. I had just come through the noisome stench of sewerage farms that adjoined the location. The stench was still in my nostrils when I was stopped at the high gates to Blacktown, and my entry permit was demanded by the uniformed black guards who stood there. No one--black or white--who did not live inside those spike iron fences could enter Blacktown. . . .In the dust and wind of that Sunday morning the dirty rows of brick houses, scattered in colorless uniformity along streets that bore no names, looked forlorn. The small square windows looked like the expressionless eyes children draw. Nothing to break the monotony; not a shop window, a building, a blade of grass. No pavements, no gardens. Broken taps leaked and made great ruts in the sandy streets. No one cared to repair them. (295)
In the first few years of the war, all the unemployed--black and white--were swallowed up by the army and the war industries, and there began an exodus from the kraal and Native Reserves of countless Africans seeking the fabulous new prosperity rumored to be awaiting them in the cities. They came, they found work, they earned wages, but there was nowhere to put their heads, no shelter for their children and their few miserable possessions. (Sachs 311)The blacks are deprived of their most basic securities in life. The net result of this forced housing shortage is that blacks are left without means to gain independence from their white masters. Without shelter for their children, there is not even much hope for future generations. Sachs goes on to describe the callousness of the government's reaction to the natives' situation:
The Locations were already overcrowded beyond all possibility of absorbing any newcomers. The factories had no compounds, as did the gold mines, where they [the native workers] could live. The government made no move to house the tremendous new population, much as it needed the labor. They let it go at hoping that somehow, somewhere, these thousands would squeeze themselves into the elastic limbo of the locations. Blacktown, soon overwhelmed by the influx, could hold no more. (311-12)Even in the face of this emergency, government regulations, "which had always forbidden blacks to build houses for themselves, were not relaxed" (312). Finally, "the need of the homeless was too great, too urgent. They could not wait until the ponderous machinery of government would begin to move, but took things into their own hands":
Overnight, a mushroom growth of beaverboard, straw, packing cases and canvas shelters sprang up in the empty fields bordering on Blacktown. This was what came to be known as Shantytown. (312)Much as the abstract Kingdom of Heaven remains insensitive to human sufferings on earth, the colonial government also abstracts itself from, and remains indifferent to, the pain their policies inflict on the natives. In the end, the ocean of human misery overflows both the abstract Christian rhetoric of the unimportance of life on earth and the inhumane colonial regulations and rules: the natives "[take] things into their own hands" and bring forth their own little "kingdom" on earth--Shantytown.
"Where are we to live? In 1913 they passed the Land Act, by which they drove us from the land, our natural dwelling place. Now they have passed the Urban Area Act, and tell us to get out of the towns and go back to the land we do not possess. We stand between the devil and the deep sea. What are we to do? Where are we to go?" (Sachs 160)The speaker talks about being trapped "between the devil and the deep sea." It is evident that Hell is not what the speaker would choose for an abode. But the Christian valorization of "the abode in Heaven" makes it impossible to answer the question "What are we to do? Where are we to go?" by diverting people's attention from the real suffering of those who have been deprived of a human abode on earth. The Christian "utopia" or "no-place" desensitizes people toward the plight of those who have been totally dis-placed. In reality, the natives have been so completely alienated from their own soil by the Land Act that over the course of the following sixty years they are gradually transformed into "foreigners" in their homeland:
The stunning oxymoron "foreign native" found its way into South Africa's political vocabulary and over the next sixty years the concept was to grow and fructify into an attempt to turn all blacks into de jure as well as de facto foreigners by denationalizing them and making them citizens of independent "homelands." "The goal," declared Cornelius Mulder, cabinet minister in charge of black affairs in 1976, "is that eventually there will be no black South Africans." (Sparks 136-37)
"You say the white people want to help us. Who will believe it? Who will believe the white devils? Tembu was right. The devil is not black; the devil is white like all of you. The white people want to suck our blood, and throw us away. You say they want to help us, but I say they want to get rid of us! Well, let them give us back our land, then we will gladly go away, live by ourselves, away from you all. We don't want white devils." (168)Significantly, John, following Tembu, says that the devil is not black but white. It is the white man who has created Hell for the black humanity. The "white devils" claim that "they want to help us [the blacks], but I say they want to get rid of us"--just like the missionaries "who had given a new religion, but had helped to take away the land" (189).
A person cannot detach himself from the religion of his group, for to do so is to be severed from his roots, his foundation, his context of security, his kinships and the entire group of those who make him aware of his own existence. (3; my italics)To be displaced from one of these corporate elements is, in Mbiti's words, to be "out of the whole picture"(3). To be removed from one's tribal community and religion amounts to an "excommunication from the entire life of society" (Mbiti 3). It means being cut off from the source of one's life, security, and identity. When the Church displaces the Africans from their tribal religion and community to the abstract Kingdom of Heaven, it causes no less social disruption and psychological trauma than the colonial government does when it advances in its settlement and dispossesses the tribes of their land.
"Yes, that is right," John remarked. "The same happens to me in my church. I pray, I think of my midzimu, and the faces change even if I don't close my eyes. The woman with the child turns into my mother, Nesta." (Sachs 107)It is clear that the "Universal Mother" cannot exist for the natives unless they tie her to their own mothers. By translating the Universal Mother back into specific human mothers, the natives reestablish within the supposedly universal religion the local community ties that allow them to maintain their sense of identity.
"I am also a Christian," the stranger said. "I belong to the Apostolic Church. But my midzimu are angry with me because I don't kill any goats to them, and the minister talks of hell where I will go if I remain a heathen. I want so much to know what is this heaven and what is this hell." (Sachs 107)On the other hand, he is plagued by this new cosmology of Heaven and Hell that Christianity has substituted for his tribal world. His anxiety is further aggravated by his inability to understand the Hell destined for him by Christianity should he persist in being a heathen sinner:
"They say if you make a sin you go to hell," the stranger interrupted again. "I would like to know what it is, hell." His face was stubborn and dull. Fear of hell seemed to have drained all life out of him. (Sachs 107)In addition to the "horror stories" of Hell told by the missionaries, the speaker also suffers from misgivings created by Christianity's displacement of "truth" into the After-World. This displacement removes the foundations of the Africans' sense of "reality." The grounds of their ontology as well as their epistemology disappear as a result, and with it the concrete ethical frame through which they perceive themselves and the world. This in itself is sufficient to cause psychological and even mental problems. The fact that the Other World cannot be tested against any external, empirical referent further exacerbates tendencies to dreams and delusions. When John and Sachs visit the asylum, the patients who make references to religion all suffer from Christian "visions."
" . . . My father wants to poison me. I have been fifteen years in this hospital and every night God and judges standing in the sky force me to sleep with my mother." (Sachs 186)Sachs, of course, takes this to be yet another proof of the "universality" of the Oedipus Complex (186-87, 170-74). What escapes his notice, however, is the fact that the Christian God intervenes from the Other World ("the sky") commanding the patient to violate his ethical ties with his mother in this world. The patient's hallucination, in other words, can well be caused by Christianity's violent displacement of the natives from the ethical world to the Other World. The heavy priority Christianity places on the duties to the Other World means these commands have to be obeyed even if this entails violating ethics, as in the case of Christ's admonishment to the youth who wishes to delay the duties of discipleship until he has buried his father: "He that loveth father and mother more than me is not worthy of me." Read as a case of ethics being sacrificed to the commands from the Other World, what the patient is suffering from is anything but a pathological sexual desire for his mother. Rather, he is being held captive by "a purely formal imperative: obey, because you must!" (Zizek, Sublime 82). In Lacanian terms, he is seized by a disembodied voice ("Kant with Sade" 60-81)[20] which commands him to obey orders and do his "duties." Which is to say, he is reduced by this "Voice Over" to being a mere "executioner of the will-to-jouissance of the Other" (MacCannell 82). To borrow Zizek's formulation, the patient becomes a "pure function" of the will of the "big Other" from the "Other World" (see Zizek, "Limits").
Speech . . . is defined as the symbolic pact, the social contract that divides us from each other as mutual aggressors: "Speech is always a pact, an agreement, people get on with one another, they agree--this is yours, this is mine, this is this, that is that," writes Lacan. The signifier determines the unconscious relation of the subject to enjoyment (jouissance). Voice is already object a; the embodiment or bearer of a "principle behind the law." It took shape in Lacan's discourse as one of the four fundamental object a (gaze, voice, breast, feces) around which the fantasy that structures drive circulates. (69-70)Christianity's emphasis on the Other World at the expense of this world amounts to disembodying the voice from the "symbolic pact." As the patient is being displaced by Christianity from his tribal world to the Other World, he is also being displaced from his "social contract." Lacking an ethical framework, the patient is foreclosed from the symbolic order. His hallucination, in other words, shares a cause similar to Judge Schreber's.
"Christ came to me last night," he [Barolow] proclaimed in his monotonous singsong voice. "He told me that I was chosen to punish all the white people."Like the previous patient, Barolow encounters God as a Voice of command. Barolow's "mission" to "punish all the white people," like the other patient's "duty" to commit incest, is not "pathological" (in the Kantian and Lacanian sense). In both cases, the patient is only acting as the executioner of the Other's will-to-jouissance (Lacan, "Kant with Sade" 59). Far from being motivated by earthly or personal interests, both patients find themselves called on to sacrifice their own will without asking the meaning of the acts they are commanded to execute. Their visions and actions do not make any sense--they look crazy--precisely because this senselessness is built into the nature of the Drive that is commanding an ob-scene jouissance--a jouissance smuggled in through the back door after the "sadist executioner" has renounced his/her own enjoyment. Slavoj Zizek describes the Voice's injunction-to-jouissance as follows:He glanced furtively at John, then looked away, plucking nervously at his clothing. Still without looking at John, except with an occasional sly glance, he went on to say that he was a saint. Everyone else had committed great crimes. With a sudden entirely irrelevant and disconcerting smile, he assured John that he was Satan, too. Satan was his dead mother. This place was Sodom and Gomorrha; a place of judgment. He was God and Satan. He was their son. (Sachs 185)
In other words, renounce enjoyment, sacrifice yourself and do not ask about the meaning of it--the value of the sacrifice lies in its very meaninglessness; true sacrifice is for its own end; you must find positive fulfillment in the sacrifice itself, not in its instrumental value; it is this renunciation, this giving up of enjoyment itself, which produces a certain surplus-enjoyment.It is this objet petit a that MacCannell has in mind when she observes that "Kant founded ethics on a nonpathological basis--and unwittingly empowered the Thing (das Ding)" (72). Similarly, lurking in the pure, disembodied, non-worldly voice of the Christian God is precisely this object petit a that is "present as cause in and of all Drive" (MacCannell 72).This surplus produced through renunciation is the Lacanian objet petit a, the embodiment of surplus-enjoyment. (82)
John remarked to me [Sachs]: "The Christian religion muddles some native brains. I hear so much silly talk when these people think they are God, Jesus Christ, or Satan. But I have not heard a single one imagine himself to be Mwari or a midzimu. (Sachs 185)The Africans' own religions do not cause the same kind of pathology precisely because they are grounded in a specific social framework that "[divides] us from each other as mutual aggressors" and "[works] the distance between object and other" (MacCannell 69-70). The Africans thus suffer from a double trauma when being removed from their native religions to Christianity. In addition to being plagued by the "sadistic superego" of the new religion, they have to suffer the shock of being forbidden contact with their midzimu.
We don't believe in Jesus. We used to pray in olden times to our native god, and to the midzimu, for rain. It always helped. Now we pray to Jesus and rain never comes. We have no corn, no land, nothing. We all hate the Christians; they talk, talk, and nothing comes to us from it. . . . The white people came to our country, it is the natives' country [he was emphatic about it], took everything away from us--the land, the cattle--and made us work. We cannot move without a pass, have to pay taxes; and they have given us Jesus. (106-7)John's speech amounts to denouncing Christianity as a false religion: Christianity lies to the Africans, so that when Christianity replaces their midzimu with Jesus, "rain never comes." Christians are empty talkers; they "talk, talk, and nothing comes to us from it." They even help cheat and rob the Africans of their land and give them nothing in return but an empty idol, Jesus Christ, who either does not or cannot listen to the Africans' sufferings and pleadings.
"The white people say the devil is black, but we have no devils in our religion. To us, the devil appears to have a white skin." The audience applauded, and John looked pleased. One speaker dealt with the iniquity of the poll tax, by which all native men had to pay a pound a year from their meager earnings, apart from other indirect taxes paid in common with all citizens. Unemployed men, who could not pay, were hounded out of their rooms & thrown into prison. . . . A funeral procession had been held up by the police and the mourners arrested for not paying their toll tax, the corpse being left in charge of a woman. (Sachs 159-60)It is precisely this "excess" which the universal incorporates into itself as it becomes positivized as "an effective system of concepts" that concerns Etienne Balibar when he warns of the relationship between universalism and racism:
[A]s soon as universalism ceases to be a mere word, a would-be philosophy, and becomes an effective system of concepts, it necessarily incorporates in its very center its opposite, I would even say its extreme opposite. The logos itself is not to be defined without being conditioned by an anthropological and ontological hierarchy. (197)This excessive jouissance, according to Zizek, is the "radical, absolute Particularity" as it hides within the "Universal"--the "radical, absolute Evil" that inhabits the "Supreme Good":
This is the Hegelian logic of "reconciliation" between the Universal and the Particular. The most radical, absolute Particularity is indeed that of the Universal itself as far as it has a negative rapport of exclusion towards the Particular: in other words, in as much as it opposes itself to the Particular and excludes the wealth of its concrete content. And this is how one should also take the Lacanian thesis according to which Good is only the mask of radical, absolute Evil, the mask of "indecent obsession" by das Ding, the atrocious-obscene thing. (98)The moment when the universal is established as the universal law marks the birth of the "outlaw"--"a certain reality of violence which coincides with the act itself of the establishment of the law" (Zizek 95).