Ellul on Praxis

It's a joyous exercise in sternness to revisit the works of Jacques Ellul. Against the his brash and bold ironical objectivising investigations into sociology and through the passionately disorienting explorations within theology, he stands firm as the grumpy mad of the continentalist school, the indignant schoolboy who refuses to accept the dutiful smudging of sloppy thought by way of turning it inside outside through his razor-sharp perception of such-and-such an assertion from authority towards some particular end or other—and often by cloaking it in such a way that the opportunistic interpreter would launch at it like with vampiric lustfulness, only to discover the ironic misdirection that awaited them like a punchline. In that sense, he did carry the mantle that S. K. had laid down in death better than any other interpreter then or since.

And this, of course, was most brutally realised against those “left-facing” theologians and philosophers, the intellectuals of France's heady academic heights, who had, through their intellectualising and nit-picking, lazily picked up enough of the great theories to fulfill their desires and cast away the rest with a flick of the wrist—not realising that the carcass of the beast is there to provide support to the structure, not merely deliver the meat to the one who consumes.

As was so often the case with Ellul’s curious and almost schizophrenic oeuvre, the short piece that has most recently grabbed my attention was one that first rose up in defence of Karl Marx against the consumptive habits of the intellectually desperate, shortly before turning back against the German to both critique from within and through him. In this way, we discover a way to act Christianly by way of abusing both the liberal opportunist and the Marxist theorist—much as Paul had abused his Greek interlocutors in antiquity.

“Irony differs from humour in calling for collective support. While irony can make fun of the world, humour makes fun, privately, of what will save it.”1

Marxian Praxis

If you have spent any amount of time amongst Marxists, anarchists, or social democrats2, you will doubtless have heard those most ready to raise their voices about the swell of the crowd float this word around with great impunity: praxis. After the first or second time, when one can be forgiven for mistaking this rhetoric for the radicalism of the great theorists of history, this term might become ...