Reddit Reddit reviews Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx

We found 2 Reddit comments about Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.

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Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx
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2 Reddit comments about Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx:

u/deicidium · 8 pointsr/communism

It's not so much a return to religion as it is the evolution and adaptation of Marx and Feuerbach to today's left. Additional analysis and review is always beneficial, though it's clearly not the religious analysis of its forefathers. In my mind, religion in communist thought can be broken into three basic streams:

  • Marx/Feuerbach's religion. Emancipation from illusory and psychological oppression is a prerequisite for our emancipation from real oppression:

    > Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    AND

    > My only wish is to transform friends of God into friends of man,
    > believers into thinkers, devotees of prayer into devotees of work,
    > candidates for the hereafter into students of the world, Christians
    > who, by their own procession and admission, are "half animal, half
    > angel" into persons, into whole persons.

  • Zizek's interpretation: Religion, devoid of the supernatural, is essentially communist in that most religions tend toward peace/equality.

  • Eagleton's interpretation: Communism is only possible through religious thought. Left to the devices of man, corruption is rampant. (Insert anti-Stalin remarks here.)

    Basically what I'm saying is that the new analyses of religion in communist thought exist to add more options so as not to exclude the religious and agnostic.

    NOTE -- I don't know why I wrote anything after this point. It's basically a book/theme review. I spent time on it, so I left it here. Maybe someone will enjoy it.

    Eagleton's flops around quite a bit. Literary Theory spends the majority of its time bashing postmodernism but his later After Theory narrows the argument to defining absolutes (the human body) and a need for an objective morality that sounds an awful lot like humanism. As far as contributing to communist studies, I don't consider Eagleton an authority on the subject. For example, Why Marx was Right makes no rational or coherent economic arguments for communism. His communism is a result of his faith, not the other way around. Obviously there's a strong moral argument to be made for communism but if that argument is to be made from any other standpoint than humanism I would count it as counterproductive.

    As for Zizek, he's clearly not religious and enjoys adapting the Marx/Feuerbach analyses to (post)modern thought. He's sort of the anti-Eagleton in that regard. His work on religion in particular ranges from interesting to absolutely fantastic.

    From The Puppet and the Dwarf:

    > It is possible today to redeem this core of Christianity only in the
    > gesture of abandoning the shell of its institutional organization (and
    > even more so, of its specific religious experience). The gap here is
    > irreducible: either one drops the religious form, or one maintains the
    > form but lose the essence. This is the ultimate heroic gesture that
    > awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice
    > itself -- like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.

    Zizek's analysis of religion isn't always directly from a communist standpoint, though Freud/Lacan are acceptable substitutes in a pinch.

    As for Vattimo, I've yet to read Hermeneutic Communism even though I've had it sitting around for a while. His previous work on religion has been very solid. That being said, if you're not one for postmodernism it really isn't something you'll enjoy.

    BONUS: If you're interested in reading any of the material listed by these authors, please PM me. I have PDF/MOBI copies available. If I don't have it, I'll help you find it.

    I'll post a comment in reply to this one with links to all the files I upload as not to have duplicates.
u/TheBaconMenace · 7 pointsr/communism

Thanks for the response. I'll give a sparce reading list, as I find it pretty extensive.

Zizek: