ABSTRACT
Latin American liberationists insist that theological reflection carefully attend to the contours of contemporary reality. Accordingly, I begin this account of Christianity as a font of resistance to capitalism with an analysis of contemporary capitalism. Specifically, the principal task of this chapter is to display contemporary capitalism as a discipline of desire. This display proceeds in several steps. First, I introduce contemporary capitalism by taking up Franz Hinkelammert’s analysis of “savage capitalism.” Hinkelammert’s work is useful insofar as it serves as a salutary introduction both to the Latin American liberationists, who are the primary foil for my argument, and to several themes that will occupy center stage throughout this work. Moreover, given that the benevolence of capitalism has attained the status of a veritable truism today, Hinkelammert’s unflinchingly critical (and some might be tempted to add, unnuanced) appraisal of capitalism serves as a poignant reminder that capitalism’s triumph has not been achieved without a certain cost being borne by those whom Fukuyama dismisses as still “mired in history.”1 Second, I engage the work of Gilles Deleuze on capitalism and desire. Deleuze’s work suggests the victory of savage capitalism is not simply economic; it is, more insidiously, ontological. Capitalism, Deleuze argues, extends its dominion over humanity not merely through the extraction of labor and production of wealth, but by capturing and distorting the constitutive human power, desire. Moreover, Deleuze’s analysis implicates the state-form in the capitalist capture of desire, which brings us to Michel Foucault and his work on “governmentality.” This complements Deleuze’s account and completes the display of contemporary capitalism as a discipline of desire by showing that the state-form encompasses much more than that ensemble of institutions called “the state,” that it encompasses a whole host of “technologies of desire”: technologies present in the social, cultural, and religious as well as political and economic registers that shape and form desire in particular ways. Finally, I conclude by briefly suggesting why even as we learn from Deleuze and Foucault, we must look beyond them if there is to be any hope of desire escaping capitalist discipline and attaining its true end.
