Vivek Dhareshwar

Abstract

Although Marx’s critique of capitalism, especially his theory of fetishism, requires experiential knowledge (my term for “spirituality”), his framework does not leave any conceptual room for such knowledge. The idea that spirituality is (perhaps the better) part of religion is a deeply held assumption of secular Western thought. Only in Michel Foucault’s late lectures do we find a Western thinker realizing that what opposed spirituality, and subsequently suppressed it, is not science but religion. This essay reconstructs Foucault’s reasons for making that startling claim and then explores how Marx’s early insight into the secularization of European culture can be deepened with the help of Foucault’s genealogical analysis of the disappearance of spiritual knowledge in the West. Equipped with a framework to understand the secularization of Western culture in a radically different way, the essay then tackles the question of reformulating Marx’s theory of reification with the resources provided by experiential knowledge (spirituality).

Key Words

Experiential Knowledge, Michel Foucault, Karl Marx, Secularization, Spirituality

From: Rethinking Marxism 2016 28 (3-4) (Special issue: Marxism and spirituality)

Editor: Wang Yi