The Figure of the Pagan: Varro and Hermes contra Augustine in the Theater of Postmodern A/theology

In his introduction to the English translation of Pierre Klossowski’s Living Currency, Daniel W. Smith contends that “Klossowski’s theology has little to do with Christianity - it is non-Christian and even anti-Christian.” Yet, while granting the importance of Klossowski’s theological training, Smith argues “Klossowski has completely renewed theology by reviving heterodox modes of thought that were closed off by monotheism and Christian orthodoxy” (p. 11). I aim to interrogate this disavowal of the Christian character of Klossowski’s idolatrous recuperation of a “figurative” theology of pagan “theatrics”, as well as Jean-François Lyotard’s appropriation of the same. To do so, I will take up the Surrealists’ critique of Klossowski articulated in their 1951 missal “Back to Your Kennels, Yelpers of God!” The Surrealists saw Klossowski’s artistic program as consonant with those Catholics who “[use] all protestations of atheism in general, and the surrealist protestation in particular, with an apologetic aim” (p. 153). In their view, Klossowski was guilty of evacuating atheism of its revolutionary potential. This is because, according to Klossowski’s logic “atheism does not exist, it is only a revolt of the creature, an extreme manifestation of his resentment towards the condition, as much carnal as spiritual, inflicted on him by the creator” (p. 153). Far from having very little to do with Christianity, the Surrealists suggest, Klossowski’s anti-Christian renewal of theatrical theology and pagan idolatry may have everything to do with it.

Klossowski acknowledges the theological concerns which drive his work in “Protase et Apodase,” a brief methodological statement he composed for the 1970 volume of l’Arc published to celebrate his oeuvre. Klossowski explains that his interest in pathology and perversion was heavily conditioned by his conviction that “the spectacular products of madness and the religious life” could potentially “triumph over the tyranny of common sense derived from the vulgar milieu under which their producers suffered” (p. 9). Klossowski relates that this “obsessional” aspect of his character led him to examine how the instruments of the imagination propel conceptual labor, and to articulate these through a theory of the simulacrum and its relationship to fantasy derived from Augustine’s summary of Varro’s account of pagan theatrical theology in his City of God (p. 10). This led Klossowski in his The Laws of Hospitality, Diana at Her Bath, and The Baphomet to depict how “propositions are only demonstrated by concealing the mute persistence of figures” (p. 10) and develop a “science of stereotypes” where the simulacra that drive desire are reified in the domain of everyday communication into an ordinary style that forecloses full affective expression (p. 19).

The theory of simulacra taken from Varro’s theatrical theology thus grounds a literary and critical account of the de-libidinization of everyday life, as well as a counter-erotics and counter-poetics that aims to resist and subvert the semiotics of common sense. For this reason, Klossowski’s theory of simulacra and his science of stereotypes are tied to his Nietzschean attempt to affirm life through a figurative practice of “willful error as formulated in “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody.” The perpetual struggle between the Dionysian and the Apollonian theorized by Nietzsche, reconfigured as a conflict between the pagan idolatry of the Roman stage as described by Varro and the “demonic” Neoplatonism of Augustinian idealism, becomes in Klossowski the privileged site for a conception of the dissolution of identity by way of a phantasmal multiplicity. Simulacra are consequently not only the products of the drive that sustain imagination and conceptualization. They are also the instruments necessary for an experimental undoing of the self through the repeated embodiment of the various, partial images of one’s identity which emerge in fantasy.

In the 1970s Klossowski’s anti-Christian heretical theology of pagan theatrics was appropriated and re-deployed by Jean-François Lyotard to forward his libertarian socialist critique of the Freudo-Marxism that sustained much of the global revolutionary fervor of the 1960s. Through a recuperation of Varro against Augustine (and the medieval Victorines), Lyotard outlines in his Libidinal Economy how an impulsive and affective figurality opposes the theoretical abstractions and “semiotic nihilism” that sustains the totalitarian will to power and critical pessimism of Freudian and Marxist politics. Later, in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard drew on both pragmatic philosophy and communication theory to re-articulate Klossowski’s account of parodic polytheism as Wittgensteinian language games whose “performativity” is opposed to the logical rigors and stereotypes of positivism. The figurative multiplication of phantasmal simulacra that undoes the self prefigures the libidinal process whereby micro-narratives undermine the stability and majesty of modernist grand narratives. This “new paganism” ultimately affirms life against those political forces which deny it. However, Lyotard is at pains also to demonstrate that revolution itself is undesirable, since the grand narratives and theoretical abstractions which guarantee it as a political practice reproduce the imperialist eschatology of Christendom he views as central to bureaucratic and soviet capitalism.

However, as The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages (eds. Andrew Cole and D. Vance Smith), Bruce Holsinger’s Premodern Condition, and Françoise Meltzer’s For Fear of the Fire have shown, much poststructuralist theory produced during the mid-20th century cannot be adequately understood without a consideration of the medievalist and political theological concerns that structure it. Recent work on the history of Catholic theology and philosophy in 20th-century Europe, such as that by Sarah Shortall, Edward Baring, and Jon Kirwan, also tends to bare out the Surrealist critique: namely, that the anti-Christianity typical of modernist and postmodernist figures like Klossowski and Lyotard reproduces, and was reproduced through, the theology and social doctrine of the Catholic avant-garde. Taking this into account, I argue Klossowski and Lyotard’s a/theology of pagan theatrics does not so much reject Christianity as rely upon the Christian medieval fantasy of the sensuous pagan, conflated with the figure of the Saracen, produced by the Gothic “idol theory” described by Michael Camille and Sarah Salih. My critique contends that the recuperation of pagan libido is predicated on the denial of Muslim reason, reinscribing a vision of the Middle Ages as fundamentally Graeco-Latinate and Platonic-Augustinian rather than as Graeco-Arabic and Aristotelico-Islamicate.