Revolution and Revelation: Joan of Arc—A Saint for our Time?

Abstract

With the breakdown of contemporary philosophy that sunders philosophy from praxis, it becomes increasingly clear that we must seek new ways of relating materialism and idealism. This essay examines how a Marxist notion of revolution and materialism can relate to religious forms of revelation in such a way as to provide new models for a political theology that is not wedded to either the institutional church or the nation-state. I show that the firm dichotomy that separates materialism from idealism is itself unable to stabilize this separation, and I argue for an intertwining model of materialism and idealism through an analysis of a Marxist notion of revolution and a theological notion of revelation. In the end, I show that a certain theological structure can account for the intertwining of both idealism and materialism without resorting to either idealist or materialist models and presuppositions. I explore the example of Charles Péguy's “Joan of Arc,” a revolutionary figure who acts on revelation.

Keywords:

• Materialism
• Idealism
• Marxism
• Revolution
• Revelation
• Joan of Arc
• Theology

Acknowledgements

An ancestral version of this paper was originally delivered at the “Marxism and the World Stage” conference, held 7 November 2004 at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. I want to thank Ken Surin and Roland Boer for reading through this paper and making some helpful suggestions.

Notes

¹Of course, while communication technologies are in one sense uniting differences, there is a great danger that this unification trend could turn out to be too monolithic in its economic and political formation.

²I want to thank Alain Badiou for this reference (see Badiou 2003, 39).

³See Peter Sedgewick's Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts (2002).

⁴For an example of this resistance/dominance paradigm, see Hardt and Negri (2005, 54).