200
PARTISAN REVIEW
Capital,
Marx finds an analogy for the mystifications of the commodity
world in the "mist-filled regions" of the religious life. There is enough
of Marx and the Enlightenment in Barthes for us to assume that when
he speaks of demystification, he is addressing himself to the very
conditions of criticism itself.
I do not mean to suggest that criticism can-or should be–
translated exclusively into demystification. Criticism may also be both
pious and illuminating, as in the characterization of Biblical style in
the opening chapter of
Mimesis
in which Erich Auerbach, with an
eloquence expressive of piety, explains the necessity for the empty
spaces between the spare facts of the story of Abraham's intended
sacrifice of Isaac. To fill the spaces between with descriptions of
landscape or with psychological motivation would divert the reader
from the goal of Abraham's journey: the reencounter with God on
Mount Moriah. Auerbach's pious interpretation is of course
criticism-and criticism of a very high order. What it shares with
demystification is authority, the confidence that the critic is in posses–
sion of the truth, whether it be the truth of the text, or to quote a recent
Marxist demystifier, "those conditions of its making (inscribed in its
very letter) about which it is necessarily silent."
In
this perspective,
demystification takes on the appearance of an unexpectedly archaic
activity, archaic, that is, in its confident hierarchical conception of
reality. To be able to evaporate illusion
a
in favor of reality
b
is to
engage in an unearned exercise of privilege.
For Marx demystification did not seem to depend on privilege,
because he operated on the philosopher's assumption that one must
strip the veil of appearances in order to arrive at truth. He could
penetrate the false pretensions of commodities to an "existence as
independent beings endowed with life, [which entered] into relations
with one another and the human race," because he was confident that
behind the illusion the real value of the product was ascertainable: the
labor expended in its production. And it is not simply the truth or the
conviction of truth that Marx possessed. The reality to which the truth
corresponded was substantial and filled with promise.
In
an early
attack on the critical criticism of the young Hegelians who seemed to
have anticipated modern ' nihilism, Marx writes:
Oiticism has plucked the imaginary flowers from the chains not so
that man may bear chains without any imagination or comfort, but
so that he may throwaway the chains and pluck the living flowers.
The criticism of religion disillusions man so that he may think, act,
and fashion his own reality as a disillusioned man comes to his
senses; so that he may revolve around himself as his real sun.
