Anglicanism

Listening to a talk on famous philosophers' deaths by Simon Critchley this afternoon helped crystallise a thought.
Simon was unwilling to engage the question of modern disciplinarity as shaping what professionalised academic philosophy is. Yet once one thinks about that, it seems to me, his rather romantic, quasi-religious interest in philosophers' ars moriendi begins to reveal its full nostalgia.
At least the talk clarified the degree to which I am committed to the centrality of institutions both analytically and socially. This is probably a conservative commitment since it stands against liberalism and anarchism and the whole anti-state thematic. Paine was wrong radically to divide society from government in the first pages of Common Sense, since society is in fact always governmentally incorporated.
At the same time, I am also committed to historicism, which largely accounts for my beef with most contemporary 'theory' whose founding gesture is the banishment of history.
But the history of some institutions is not simply history: it is also tradition.
It is at the intersection between time and insitutionality that Anglicanism becomes fascinating. As a tradition; as a framework nestled inside both civil society and government, but with supernatural edges.
I am not a Christian, however.
So I'm interested in the articulation between the history/traditions/liturgies of the Anglican institution (the visible Church) and its credal aspects (the invisible Church (an interesting concept)) in so far as these intersect with secular and in particular literary culture and its temporalities, and especially as they, brought together, can operate as a model for an impossible unity and stability. For the socializing of the transcendent.
To take this thought into Anglicanism without believing, which is very tempting, is to play out the logics of a Straussian double truth.

Rewards

In the end, and despite a long history of schism and controversy concerning soteriology, Christianity turns on its promise of salvation: the reward of eternal life.
What happens to ethical thought when this doctrine of reward in the afterlife lose its credibility?
We can then secularize reward: utilitarianism proposes a this-worldly reward-based schema, as do all those politico-ethical programs which call upon a notion of historical progress (e.g. marxism). All of these share the structure of Christian thought. (That's true, however much I dislike the implications of this thought.)
Or we can jettison reward. For the most part this means that sanctioned end-directed activity must be performed for its own sake (i.e. Kantianism) or for ends which cannot be construed as rewards, usually because they are merely expressive, that is, they express something of value.
Two particular such expressive ethics have had wide circulation: one based on authenticity (Heidegger), the other based on style (Nietzsche).
The first of these, the turn to authenticity, tends towards nostalgia, deploring historical fragmentation or loss (a nostalgia which is also embedded in Christianity of course).
And so: within this array, Nietzsche offers the most stringently secular way.

Spoilation of the contemplatives

One historical precedent for the destruction of the pure humanities under academic managerialism and national neo-liberalism would be the National Assembly's dissolution of the monastries in the first months of the French Revolution under the widely shared belief that the so-called 'contemplatives' (as against the parish cures) were parasitical on the nation.

Murderous capitalism: Schmitt, Ranciere, Agamben, Derrida

The basic structure of Ranciere and Agamben's thought is Schmittian. This is not because they are politically on the same side as Schmitt of course but 1) because they both want to avoid historicism, 2) because they both have given up on the notions of capitalism and class struggle as key analytic categories and, yet for all that, 3) because they both wish to assert the primacy of the political over the cultural so as not to promote false consensus. In Schmitt the political is the master signifier of social existence for the reason that we live in a world where others—our enemies— wish to murder us (as Leo Strauss makes clear in his essay on The Concept of the Political), and politics are the means by which we resist death in that form. But for Ranciere and Agamben the figure who stands outside the community and around whom, hence, the political turns is an excluded victim. Homo sacer for Agamben and "the part that has no part" for Ranciere.
With that inversion everything changes, since in effect we are led back to the old social logics which connect politics to inclusion, compassion and benevolence but without any use of or for the concepts of inclusion, compassion and benevolence. The absence of channels to reach out to the excluded in postmarxist thought, is all the more strongly felt because, at least in its strongest forms (Badiou) it has also given up the concepts of difference, which lie at the heart of post-structuralism.
It is true that Derridean difference can be regarded as an allegorizing expression of a sense that violence between groups is no longer the motor of history (i.e. of the 'end of history' or the triumph of capital) just because that difference is not to be parsed as otherness or enemity but as what is neither the same nor the other (or both the same and the other: it amounts to the same thing.) But what is excommunicated or persecuted or put to death can never be just the other in a truly political sense, about that Schmitt was right.
What all these theories lack is an understanding of capitalism as murderous, or to put this more accurately and gently, that capitalism does not at all allay the species capacity for collective murder.

The state, the workers and the history of theory

Reading Polyani's remarks on how the trajectories of working class history differ in Britain from those in the continent, it is hard not to escape the sense that we have to look to the history of relations between the working class and the state for one set of conditions of possibility for the emergence of French theory in the sixties. According to The Great Transformation , those relations were especially different in the UK and in France. In the former the unions and non-political associations produced the labour party, in the latter the political system was able to incorporate working class movement from the very beginning. This is another way of thinking about the 'corporate' nature of the English working class so key to the old Anderson-Nairn thesis. But it matters in relation to the left Leavism that had such an impact on the literary academy right through until 1968, since that movement (especially in Raymond Williams) begins by affirming the ordinary life of the working class and then thinking about ways in which it can, ideologically and ethically, be protected from the culture of consumer capitalism. In France, the state always set itself the task of protecting the people from the ravages of the market and did so in rhetorics and practices of universal rationality which left no room for public working class corporatism, and underpinned the prestige of the philosopher and theorist

Famines Communism Slaughter

In judging Mao and Stalin's crimes—the numbers of people their policies condemned to death and misery—it is relevant to ask: what would have happened had the capitalist market been unleashed onto Chinese and Russian agrarian society at that time instead of state socialism? That's basically what happened in India in the nineteenth century, and it's thought tens of millions starved to death there.