Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 219
and Negri’s idea of Empire. Contemporary, liberal society, to them is best characterized
as an Empire. Its scope is global and not bound to nation states. The crucial difference,
however, between historical empires and our current liberal Empire is that the
former were disciplined by external force, whereas the latter, our consumer society is
disciplined purely through spontaneous, affective identification of citizens with the Empire.
217 Vattimo agrees with the diagnosis of contemporary Western culture as an autodisciplined
Empire. But he rejects the idea that this Empire can produce out of itself
an emancipated, just society. According to Vattimo this is an impossibility. He speaks
of an ‘. . . alte Sehnsucht nach der schönen Moralität, nach einer schönen Gesellschaft
und Hegemonie.’ 218 As Vattimo sees it, the social theory of Hardt and Negri is too much
caught up with the need to establish here and now, a utopian hegemony. His own sympathies
remain with a more relativistic and plural society. All we can achieve in terms
of a just, non-Utopian society is a balance between ‘. . . nicht allzu unterschiedlichen
und tragfähigen Kräften’, which enables a society which allows its members to live out
specific identities, without enmity. This live and let live approach, with a minimalization
of the role of the state, better suits Vattimo’s philosophy of weakening. So it is fair
to say that – with his preference for socialism and communism – Vattimo has made a
significant shift. Vattimo is quite aware of this as he writes on his relation to the school
of ‘pensiero debole’. His initial aversion against left wing idealism had its context in the
violent degeneration of the left in 1968. Now, after the rise of global capitalism, Vattimo
is willing to reconsider some of his earlier ideas. As a matter of fact it is possible that the
initial, postmodern thinking of Vattimo was quite supportive towards the capitalist society
that he now repudiates. The spontaneous, frivolous, avant-garde society Vattimo
had in mind when he wrote The Transparent Society typically delegates everything to the
free association of citizens. In fact there is neither a law nor a binding ethic, as Vattimo
saw caritas – love – and the avoidance of suffering as sufficient guidelines for social behavior.
The irony is that Negri and Hardt in 1994 already criticized him on exactly this
point. They spoke of such an arrangement as an avoidance of politics. 219 The minimalization
of politics as pursued by the postmodern ideal of plurality and tolerance, even
caritas, fits remarkably well with the desires for a (neo)liberal consumer society and
unbridled competition. The idea of a maximization of the public realm and a minimal
state, which applies to both Rorty and Vattimo, 220 results in a remarkable paradox. This
paradox is that the increasing horizontalization of power in postmodernism heightens
the need for an absolute arbiter, who guards over the equality of all parties in the public
realm. Thus relativism in a sense breeds dictatorship, as “the social state takes away any
social dialectic that might constitute an actual civil society,” resulting in the autonomy
of the political from the social. 221 Vattimo’s view of the role of information technology
and mass media has drastically changed with his shift to communism. In The Transparent
Society, he saw the emergence of an information society as genuine liberation.
Now he has changed his mind about it, as he has realized that information technology
217 Vattimo, Kommunist, 24.
218 Vattimo, Kommunist, 26.
219 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus. A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 237.
220 A significant difference it seems to me between explicit postmodern liberalism and Vattimo’s idea
of a transparent society is that, for Vattimo, social life ought to be governed by a substantial value; love. For
Rorty, however, the only guideline is a negative criterion, the absence of suffering.
221 Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 268–9.