Political Unconscious of the Christian Right
Fredric Jameson and Louis Althusser
Fredric Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative As A Socially symbolic Act (1981) explores Marxist Louis Athusser’s theory of how narrative persuades us to believe religious myth is the ultimate truth. Jameson writes that his book will argue the priority of the political interpretation of literary texts. It conceives of the political perspective not as some supplementary method, not as an optimal auxiliary to other interpretive methods current today—the psychoanalytic or the myth-critical, the stylistic, the ethical, the structural—but rather as the absolute horizon of all reading and all interpretation. This he posits is evidently a much more extreme position than the modest claim, surely acceptable to everyone, the certain text have social and historical—sometimes even political—resonance.
There is in other words a synchronic version that of status of an individual “period” in which everything becomes so seamlessly interrelated that we confront either a total system or an idealistic “concept” of a period; and a diachronic one, in which history is seen in some “leaner” way as the succession of such periods, stages, or moments. Stories—narrative representations—of the historical sequence in which such individual periods take their place and from which they derive their significance appeal on several levels.
The fullest form of what Louis Althusser calls “expressive causality” (and of what he calls “historicism”) will thus prove to be a vast interpretive allegory in which a sequence of historical events or texts and artifacts is rewritten in terms of some deeper, underlying, and more “fundamental” narrative, of a hidden master narrative which is the allegorical key or figurative content of the first sequence of empirical materials. The kind of allegorical master narrative would then include providential histories.
The medieval system may perhaps most conveniently be approached through its practical function in late antiquity, its ideological mission as a strategy for assimilating the Old Testament to the New, for rewiring the Jewish textual and cultural heritage in a form usable for Gentiles. The originality of the new allegorical system may be judged by its insistence on preserving the literality of the original text: it is not here a matter of dissolving them into mere symbolism, as a rationalistic Hellenism did when, confronted with the archaic and polytheistic letter of the Homeric epic, it rewrote the latter in terms of the struggle of the physical elements with one another, or the battle of vices and virtues.
On the contrary, the Old Testament is here taken as historical fact. At the same time, its availability as a system of figure, above and beyond this literal historical reference, is grounded in the conception of history itself as God’s book, which we may study and gloss for signs and traces of the prophetic message the Author is supposed to have inscribed within it.
So it is that the life of Christ, the text of the New Testament, which comes as the fulfillment of the hidden prophecies and annunciatory signs of the Old, constitutes a second, properly allegorical level, in terms of which the latter may be rewritings and over-writings which are generated as so many levels and as so many supplementary interpretations. So the interpretation of a particular Old Testament passage in terms of the life of Christ—a familiar, even hackneyed, illustration is the rewriting of the bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt as the decent of Christ into hell after his death on the cross—comes less as a technique for closing the text off and for repressing aleatory or aberrant readings and senses, than as a mechanism for preparing such a text for further ideological investment, if we take the term ideology here in Athusser’s sense as a representational structure which allows the individual subject to conceive or imagine his or her lived relationship to transpersonal realities such as the social structure or the collective logic of History.
Ali Soufan - Former FBI Agent and Interrogator
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A Muslim and an Arabic-speaker, Ali Soufan became the FBI's lead investigator on al-Qaeda, before and after the 9/11 attacks.
Mr Soufan says the attacks could have been prevented, had some key intelligence been shared.
In his own work for the FBI, he pursued and interrogated some of al-Qaeda's top people.
Now he's gone public with the story of his fight against Islamist militants, and his struggle within the American intelligence community.
Indeed he says he's been a marked man - not from al-Qaeda, so much as the CIA.
9/11: Ten years on
Features, analysis and comment on the 10th anniversary of the attacks that struck America on 11 September 2001
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In the present instance, the movement is from a particular collective history—that of the people of Israel, or in other words a history culturally alien to the Mediterranean and Germanic clientele of early Christianity—to the destiny of a particular individual: the early Christianity—to the destiny of a particular individual: the transindividual dimensions of the first narrative are then drastically “reduced” to the second, purely biographical narrative, the life of “reduced” to the second, purely biographical narrative, the life of Christ—to the repressive simplification the Freudian family triangle bring to the lived richness of daily life.
The bondage of the people of Israel in Egypt can be rewritten as the thralldom of the believer-to-be to sin and to the preoccupations of this world (“the fleshpots of Egypt”): a bondage from which personal conversion will release him or her (an event figured doubly as the deliverance from Egypt and the resurrection of Christ).
The text then undergoes its ultimate rewriting in terms of the destiny of the human race as a whole, Egypt then coming to prefigure that long purgatorial suffering of earthly history from which the second coming of Christ and the Last Judgment come as the final release. The historical or collective dimension is thus attained once again, by way of the detour of the sacrifice of Christ and the drama of the individual believer; but from the story of a particular earthly people it has been transformed into universal history and the destiny of humankind as a whole—precisely the functional and ideological transformation which the system of the four leas of narrative was designed to achieve in the first place.
Moreover, the stress on the dialogical then allows us to reread or rewrite the hegemonic forms [such as the Bible] themselves; they also can be grasped as a process of reappropriation and neutralization, the cooptation and class transformation, the cultural universalization, of forms which originally expressed the situation of “popular,” subordinate, or domemenations to an enfeebled and asphyxiating “high culture.”
Just so, in our own time, the vernacular and it’s still vital sources of production (as in black language) are re-appropriated by the exhausted and media-standardized speech of a hegemonic middle class. In the aesthetic realm, indeed, the process of cultural “universalization” (which implies the repression of the oppositional voice, and the illusion that there is only one genuine “culture”) is the specific form taken by what can be called the process of legitimation in the realm of ideology and conceptual systems.
THE ISRAEL LOBBY & THE RIGHT WING CHRISTIAN MOVEMENT~PARTNERS IN DESTROYING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY
John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt that an important group of gentiles—The Christian Zionists, a subset of the broader politically oriented Christian Right are part of the Israel lobby. Prominent members of this constituency include religious figures such as the late Jerry Falwell, Gary Bauer, Pat Robertson, and John Hagee, as well as politicians like former House Majority Leaders Tom DeLay (RTX) and Richard Armey (R-TX), and Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Although support for Israel is not their only concern, a number of Christian evangelical have become increasingly visible and vocal in their support for the Jewish state, and they have recently formed an array of organizations to advance the commitment within the political system. In a sense, the Christian Zionists can be thought of as an important “junior partner” to the various pro-Israel groups in the American Jewish community.
The origins of Christian Zionism lie in the theology of dispensationalism, an approach to biblical interpretation that emerged in nineteenth-century England, largely through the efforts of Anglican ministers Louis Way and John Nelson Darby. Dispensationalism is a form of premillennialism, which asserts that the world will experience a period of worsening tribulations until Christ returns. Like many other Christians, dispensationalists believe that Christ’s return is foretold in Old and New Testament prophecy, and that the return of the Jews to Palestine is a key event in the preordained process that will lead to the second coming. The theology of Darby, Way, and their followers influenced a number of prominent English politicians and may have made British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour more receptive to the idea of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine.
Dispensationalist theology was popularized in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a number of Protestant theologians, including the evangelist Dwight Moody (founder of Chicago’s Moody bible Institute), C. I. Schofield, and William E. Blackstone. Recent poplar expressions include Hal Lindsey’ Late Great Planet Earth and Timothy LaHaye’s Left Behind series, a fictional account of Armageddon whose combined sales reportedly total more than fifty million copies.
The founding of the state of Israel in 1948 gave new life to the dispensationalist movement, but the Six-Day War in 1967, which its leaders saw as a “miracle of God,” was even more important for its emergence as a political force. Dispensationalists interpreted Israel’s seizure of all of Jerusalem and the West Bank (which, like Israel’s Likud party, they refer to as Judea and Samaria) as the fulfillment of Old and New Testament prophecy, and these “signs” encouraged them and other Christian evangelicals to begin working to ensure that the United States was on the “right side” as the Bible’s blueprint for the end-times unfolded.
According to Timothy Weber, former president of the Memphis Theological Seminary, Before the Six Day War, dispensationalists were content to sit in the bleachers of history, explain the End-Time game on the field below. But after the expansion of Israel into the West Bank and Gaza, they began to get down on the field and be sure the teams lined up right, becoming involved in political, financial, and religious ways they never had before. Their efforts were part of the broader rise of the so-called Christian Right (not all of whom are strongly committed to Israel) and were clearly aided by the growing political prominence of the evangelical movement.
Given the Christian Zionists’ support for an expansionist Israel, it is not surprising that Israeli hard-liners have been eager to make common cause with them, especially given the growing opposition to the occupation within mainline Christian churches. As Colin Shindler observes, “A symbiotic relationship thus came into existence after 1977 that served both the ideologies of Israeli Right and the Christian Right. Menachem Begin’s Likud government actively courted evangelicals in this period giving Falwell a private jet in 1979 and making him in 1980 the only gentile ever to receive the coveted Jabotinsky Medal for “outstanding achievement” (including authors Leon Uris and Elie Wiesel). (136)
Reports in the media give the criticism that the people occupying Wall Street have no center. However, the do but they so far are horrified about what their conclusions as to a single voice is coming to.
Hitler gave anti-Semitism a bad name and there is widespread reluctance on the part of even the most severe critics of the Jews to accept this label, a spade in no longer called a spade but an agriculture implement. (20)
The big push to tighten voting laws across the country, and its politics. Charges of a war on voting.
Don Huntrods, of Van Meter, Iowa, emerges from a voting booth after casting his ballot, in Lee Township, Iowa, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004. (AP)
Democracy means get out the vote. But a new wave of state legislation across the country is making it harder to vote. Tightening up in many ways. Making voter registration more difficult. Reducing early voting days. Demanding voter ID. Proof of citizenship.
Backers say it’s all to clean up American voting. Critics say that’s a ruse. That voter fraud problems in this country are miniscule. That it’s really a Republican drive to push away voters they don’t want at the polls. A “war on voting.”
This hour On Point: the wave of new restrictions on American voting.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests
Ari Berman, a contributing writer for The Nation and author of Herding Donkeys: The Fight to Rebuild the Democratic Party and Reshape American Politics. His article, for the September 15th issue of Rolling Stone, was The GOP War on Voting.
Jason Torchinsky, Partner at the private lawfirm Holtzman Vogel. Former Counsel to the Civil Rights Division at the U.S. Department of Justice; Deputy general counsel to the 2004 Bush-Cheney campaign and Inaugural Committee.
Elisabeth MacNamara, National president of the League of Women Voters.
Jamin Raskin, Democratic State Senator from Maryland, he’s author of “Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People.”
From Tom’s Reading List
Rolling Stone “As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots. “What has happened this year is the most significant setback to voting rights in this country in a century,” says Judith Browne-Dianis, who monitors barriers to voting as co-director of the Advancement Project, a civil rights organization based in Washington, D.C.”
Talking Points Memo “Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) will chair a hearing next week examining the rash of voter ID laws passed by state legislatures this year amidst concerns that such laws could suppress Democratic turnout across the country.”
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