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AbstractThis article reconsiders Marx's thinking on religion in light of current preoccupations with the encroachment of religious practices and beliefs into political life. It argues that Marx formulates a critique of the anticlerical and Enlightenment-critique of religion, in which he subsumes the secular repudiation of spiritual authority and religious transcendence into a broader analysis of the 'real abstractions' that dominate our social existence. The tools forged by Marx in his engagement with critiques of religious authority allow him to discern the 'religious' and 'transcendent' dimension of state and capital, and may contribute to a contemporary investigation into the links between capitalism as a religion of everyday life and what Mike Davis has called the current 'reenchantment of catastrophic modernity'.

The essay seeks to evaluate the pertinence of the inquiry laid out in Il Regno e la Gloria to a radical critique of contemporary politics and economics, in particular its relationship to a Marxian communism, which Agamben appears to consider incapable of a truly radical or total critique of the status quo. To do this, the paper is divided into three sections. In the first part the question of what is meant by the "theological genealogy of the economy and government", as announced by the book's subtitle, is elaborated. This involves subjecting to scrutiny Agamben's reliance on a certain understanding of secularization, of the kind that permits him to declare that modernity merely brings to completion the Christian 'economy' of providence, or indeed that Marx's notion of praxis 'basically is only the secularization of the theological conception of the being of creatures as divine operation'. The paper tries to show that Agamben's work relies on a type of historical substantialism that clashes with his claim to be engaging in a genealogy. In the second part Agamben's suggestions about the genealogical thread running from Trinitarian oikonomia all the way to Smith's invisible hand, and implicitly all the way up to the present, are contrasted to understandings of the (modem) economy which, being premised on the limitlessness of monetary accumulation, transcends any absorption by a theological genealogy. In the third and final part certain aspects of Agamben's archaeological excavations -- in particular his delineation of the economic-theological notion of administration -- are examined, and the question is posed whether they might permit a deconstruction of the Marxist reference to communism as the withering away of the state and the shift towards an 'administration of things'. Adapted from the source document.

AbstractWhat is the relationship between materialism and partisanship today? Starting with an outline of the elements of Lenin's understanding of the partisan character of truth, this intervention outlines some of the challenges posed to a Marxist understanding of partisanship by the influential positions of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt, as well as by the recent turn to vitalism and complexity in social theory. On the basis of the confrontation between a Leninist conception of materialist partisanship and its contemporary challengers, the article considers Alain Badiou's recent attempt to revive a 'materialist dialectic' in order to think through the present conditions for formulating a partisan and universalist conception of political truth that would not collapse into mere partiality or outright dogmatism.

Focusing especially on Science and the Modern World, this article explores Whitehead's understanding of the social contexts and repercussions of mathematical and scientific abstraction. It investigates his remarks on the need to offset pernicious practices of abstraction in the context of a renewed concern with the link between conceptuality and materiality in social theory. Whitehead's inquiry into the problematic legacy of Galileo and scientific materialism is then contrasted with a different diagnosis of the abstractive maladies of modern society, the one put forward under the Marxist rubric of `real abstraction'. While both stances allow us to explore the social repercussions of abstractive practices, it is argued that an understanding of the practically abstract character of capitalism permits us to identify the limits of Whitehead's pedagogical wish to reform our culture of abstraction.

The decisive inquiry into the volatile link between philosophy, revolution, and the 'radical' is arguably Marx's 'A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: An Introduction', written in 1843. We can still find all these themes introduced by Marx at work 80 years later in an emblematic and instructive confrontation between Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch. Where Lukács presents the proletariat as the practical and epistemological 'Archimedean point' capable of unhinging the capitalist totality, Bloch reveals in a subjective metahistory of a utopian kernel whose drive and directionality – despite all of the changes in instruments, organisations, and motivating ideologies – remains invariant from the Taborites to the Bolsheviks. To borrow Lukács's formulation, we are thus confronted with two potent, and alternative ways, to politically and conceptually grasp the statement that man 'both is and at the same time is not', or, in Blochian terms, both is and is not-yet. This antinomy signified by the names and texts of Lukács and Bloch is visible in the insistence of contemporary radical thought on the enigmas of philosophical anthropology, the political repercussions of messianism, and the possibility of a rational and partisan subjectivity.