CRACK CAPITALISM

socialist 'realists'. Lenin's answer to the problem was to break the
subject in two: on the one hand, the worker limited to a structural
trade-union consciousness, on the other, the revolutionary as
hero bringing true consciousness to the workers. The problem
with this solution is that it implies an authoritarian relation
between leaders and masses and simply displaces the problem
of the beautiful soul to the leaders: how do the leaders acquire
true consciousness?
Who or what, then, is this shadowy figure? And is it one figure
(working class, say) or many (workers, women, gays, blacks,
indigenous)?
There is a problem here with language. We do not really
have a name for the shadowy figure (or figures) behind the
character mask. To call it 'the working class' is confusing simply
because the term makes no distinction between the identitarian
character mask (a definable working class) and the shadowy
anti-identitarian figure behind it. The same could be said for
any other character mask one chooses - women, gays, blacks,
and so on. To name is to identify and what concerns us here is
that which goes against and beyond identity. The movement of
anti-identity is necessarily a revolution without name.JO To talk
about it, we need some sort of name, but it has be a name that
suggests its own inadequacy. Adorno speaks of the movement of
non-identity, Bloch of the Not Yet: both are negative concepts,
restless concepts that point against-and-beyond.
The difficulty of naming has always been present in religion, as
Bloch points out. God, as creator, is unknowable and, properly,
unnameable, a hidden, latent God, Deus absconditus. If we say
there is no god, there are two possibilities. Either we say that,
if there is no god, there is also no unknowable, unnameable:
everything can be identified, everything can be given a name. But
then we do away with creation and put in its place a positivist,
structuralist and ultimately recursive world. This is the measured,
finite world of abstract labour, the world of definitions and
classifications. The alternative is to say that if there is no god,
then we are the only creators, we are the ones who push all the
time against-and-beyond that which is, we are the drive against
identity, the force of anti-identity and therefore unknowable,
unnameable. The anthropologisation of religion, the replacement
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