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The ‘Subject’ and the ‘Self’: A Note on Barker's Cartesianism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Denys Turner
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Extract

The argument / have with Barker is by now played out, at any rate over “Can a Christian be a Marxist?” (New Blackfriars, June 1975). From the start I knew that that article had its shortcomings. But it is, essentially, corrigible. I think I know what I wanted to say in it, though I acknowledge that what I wrote did not always say it. Barker, however, has a habit of regarding what I write as just a very extended parapraxis, all the surface deficiencies being but symptoms of the fact that what I want to say is, literally, unspeakable. The very fact that I should want to put down these deficiencies of formulation to subjective conditions of production would itself be symptomatic of the degree to which I am held in thrall by the ideology which is the true author of what I wrote— the ideology according to which “subjects” (e.g. Denys Turner) are the authors of, among other things, texts. All this would be by the way were it not that, in Barker’s view, it is its captivation by the ideology of “the subject” which is the chief ideological element in Christianity and the chief reason why Marxist science cannot debate Christianity. For the ideological nature of Christianity makes it the (potential) object of Marxist science, not a discourse it can debate with on equal but different terms.

I have no objection in principle to this apparently high-handed procedure, analogous as it is to the Freudian habit of giving Freudian explanations of the critics of Freudian theory. After all I myself argued (“Marxism, Christianity and Morality”, New Blackfriars, April 1977, p. 191), that the mark of any science is its capacity not merely to explain what ideology fails to explain but also to explain why ideology cannot explain what it fails to explain.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 59 , Issue 694 , March 1978 , pp. 133 - 141
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

1 The reference is to Terry Eagleton's article, “Marx, Freud and Morality”, New Black friars, January 1977, p. 21, but Barker is evidently in sympathy.

2 “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy, pp.

3 Althusser is explicit: “Much theoretical work is needed to deal with all the forms of this empiricism sublimated in the ‘theory of knowledge’ which dominates Western philosophy, to break with its problematic (cogito) and object–and all their variations“.–”Marx's Immense Theoretical Revolution” in Reading Capital.

4 I argue that mine exist and that the category of “the subject” is crucial in an understanding of praxis. Barker argues that his are ideological. I argue that it is not particularly ideological, but rather more simply just false, outside of special literary and philosophical contexts, to say that his exist, even in the sense that agents understand themselves or others to be subjects in the Cartesian mode. Besides, Barker does not provide a single consideration, let alone argument to show that subjects in my sense are either ideological or non‐existent.

5 Contrary to what Barker supposes, it is no necessary consequence of the constrast between “true” and “false” needs that somehow “underlying” false appearance there should exist a level of perceptible‐in‐principle occurrent true needs. In ideology, true needs exist only in their false form. To contrast them with true needs is to point to what could be perceived as man's true needs in whatever is the historically realisable alternative of capitalism, i.e. socialism.