ABSTRACT
In the effort to display the clash of capitalism and Christianity as one of discordant technologies of desire, thus far I have argued that contemporary capitalism is best understood as an ensemble of technologies of desire that exercises dominion over humanity and disciplines desire through the exercise of what Foucault called “governmentality,” and that any effort to resist capitalism that fails to recognize capitalism as such a discipline of desire is futile. Hence, if it is to fund resistance to capitalism, Christianity must shed its (modern) identity as an apolitical custodian of abstract values and preferential options and assume its proper place in the temporal realm as the true politics, the exemplary form of human community. This is to say, the Christian community, in its sacraments and orders, its discipleship and prayer, must be retrieved as (no less than capitalism and its state-form) an ensemble of technologies of desire that can properly be characterized as a therapy of desire. Furthermore, the nature of the therapy enacted by Christianity to counter capitalist discipline is not adequately described as justice in the classic sense of suum cuique and its modern variant, “rights.” For such justice is incapable of liberating desire from savage capitalism’s discipline. At best, it may curb capitalism’s most egregious abuses; at worst, it only intensifies the terror that plagues this world. Moreover, such justice does not faithfully reflect the way God acts in history to redeem humanity from sin. It was suggested that Christ’s atonement for sin marks the ascendancy of grace over justice understood as suum cuique. Christ’s work is the inauguration of a different economy for dealing with the sin of injustice, of a peculiar technology for healing desire of the wounds inflicted by capitalist discipline, namely, the refusal to cease suffering that is forgiveness.1
