The Sacralization of Time: Contemporary Affinities between Crisis and Fascism

163 Pages·2020·1.617 MB·English

by  João Nunes de Almeida

RADICAL THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
The Sacralization of Time
Contemporary Affinities between
Crisis and Fascism
João Nunes de Almeida
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
Series Editors
Michael Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA
Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
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driving and arising from these intersections is the focus of this series.
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João Nunes de Almeida
The Sacralization
of Time
Contemporary Affinities between Crisis and Fascism
João Nunes de Almeida
Lancaster, UK
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
ISBN 978-3-030-46542-1 ISBN 978-3-030-46543-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46543-8
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A
cknowledgements
Firstly, I would like to deeply thank Bülent Diken for all his academic
insights when the main ideas of this book were taking shape. Bülent con-
tinues to be a source of intellectual inspiration on my work.
Undoubtedly, this book could not have been finished without the
unconditional support of my family, Gabriela, Júlio, Paula and Sofia. I
simply cannot be grateful enough to them.
I am also deeply grateful to my friend Diana Stypinska, with whom I
had the privilege to lively and enthusiastically discuss every single idea of
this book. Her constant encouragement throughout the entire writing
process was, and remains, an unforgettable and incredibly generous
gesture.
The precious comradeship, patience and compassion of Carmen Ríos
García, Daniel Lacerda, Daniel Martin, Ian Bryan, Joanne Wood,
Kamonchanok Sanmuang, Liciana Lacerda, Macarena Rioseco, Miriam
Meissner, Nader Talebi, Oliver Simpson and Vittorio Tantucci were vital
to persevere with this project.
I would also like to thank my friends Catarina Leal, Cátia Domingues,
Davide Freitas, Inês Melo, Mara Sé, Mariana Goes, Rosa Félix and Rui
Duarte, who always had their doors open whenever I returned to Lisbon.
v
c
ontents
1 Introduction 1
Book Outline 5
Researching on Crisis: Challenges, Paradoxes and Ambulant
Realities 8
Crisis and Fascism in Contemporary Portugal 13
References 23
2 Theology of Crisis 27
Introduction 27
Debt, Angels and Violence 29
Spinozan God as Capital 38
References 41
3 Politics of Crisis 43
Introduction 43
Politics as Freedom, Civil War and the Micro- politics of Desire 44
Deterring the Suicidal State: Fascism and Logistics 55
The Liberal Sacred Spaces of Politics 59
References 64
4 Language of Crisis 67
Introduction 67
The Fascist Temporality of Crisis: Salvation and Restrain of
Disorders 71
vii
viii CONTENTS
2011 Bailout and the Sovereign Debt Crisis 78
Creditors and Debtors in the Press 83
Rationalities of Crisis 86
References 89
5 Experience of Crisis 93
Introduction 93
The In-Between Temporality of Crisis 97
People, Population and the Exhausted 104
References 115
6 Refusal of Crisis 119
Introduction 119
The Refusal of Chronos 121
Praxis and Ontology of Crisis Refusal 126
Community Without Utopia 133
References 139
7 Conclusion 143
References 151
Index 153
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Writing on crisis is writing without a narrative. Crises are often signposts
for writing narratives but writing exclusively about crisis as such is a hard
task. One can write and read about modernity thanks to revolutionary
crises but it is particularly difficult to write about time in a revolutionary
crisis. When writing about crisis offers crystal-clear narratives of certainty,
writing of crisis is usually missing. As soon as we start investigating a crisis
event, the very borders of the disciplines that we are familiar with seem
insufficient to grasp at least a part of what happens in crisis. Researching
crisis thus requires not only interdisciplinary work but also openness to
creatively problematizing the very epistemological boundaries that guide
our investigations.
This book reflects the pursuit of embracing rather than denying the
uncertainty of crisis. It started from a particular interest in discourses of
exception and the impacts of the 2007 financial crisis in Portugal. However,
it became evident along the years that this research could not rely in one
single episteme, let alone a case study. Moreover, mere procedural empiri-
cism could not even do justice to that case study. The more one writes
about crisis, the more one sees relations between phenomena and con-
cepts that are constantly effaced by the idle talk on crisis. Thirteen years
ago, when the 2007 financial crisis was discursively announced in the
media, an army of liberal economists were ready to explain it to the igno-
rant masses that were too dull to understand the wonders of the capitalist
system. As it always happens with liberal civil disobedience, it is just a
© The Author(s) 2020 1
J. Nunes de Almeida, The Sacralization of Time, Radical Theologies
and Philosophies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46543-8_1
2 J. NUNES DE ALMEIDA
question of time until that same system gets reformed. So, in these times
of financialization, the system had to be reformed by critical economists
(See Lapavitsas 2012). However, no major reform of capitalism has been
achieved so far. Critical social sciences risk falling into the reformism of
“crisis prevention” (Toscano 2014: 1026).
The explanations of crisis offered by these critical economists thus
seemed to have missed the very crude experience of sacrifice that was
being demanded from the sinful humans. In countries such as Portugal
that experience of sacrifice was suffocating not only because of the gener-
alized impoverishment of the population but also due to the ascetic prac-
tices imposed on the ones who lived in the sin of living above their
needs—the debtors (see Stimilli 2017). Thus, debt collection became the
disciplinary exercise of a social totality. Marxian-oriented research (see
Mattick 2011; Varoufakis 2011; Seymour 2014), for instance, was impor-
tant to demystify discourses of debt during the financial crisis but it hardly
touched on the critique of capitalism as a critique of religion (which Marx
himself did). Moreover, this form of reasoning is still marginal in the anal-
ysis of the 2007 financial crisis. Capitalism and religion continue to appear
as two unrelated phenomena, religion being too off-topic to the all too
serious political economic analyses. Nevertheless, genealogical work about
the 2007 financial crisis as a debt crisis started to make its way to the pub-
lic sphere and academia and the analysis of capitalism as religion regained
its relevance again (see Lazzarato 2012; Graeber 2011; Stimilli 2017).
Interestingly enough, canonical works in social sciences could never dis-
pense with such an elective affinity between those domains (see Weber
1992; Löwy 1992). This book thus grounds itself in the elective affinity
between capitalism and religion, understanding capitalism not as a secular-
ized form of religion but as religion itself. In other words, the present
investigation privileges Benjamin’s fragment Capitalism as Religion
(Benjamin 1997) rather than Weber’s Protestant Ethic of Capitalism
(Weber 1992) and sociology of religion in general. This means that the
sacralization of capital rather than the secularization of religion will meth-
odologically guide this book (see Diken 2016).
While exploring relations between capitalism and religion in the light of
the 2007 crisis, the response of Portugal’s governments during the crisis
led me to an increasing problematization of the potential relations between
crisis and forms of authoritarianism. Writing on crisis is a hard task but it
gives a privileged insight to long forgotten or effaced analogies between
not so pleasant ideas. If something became visible during the debt crisis, it