And then there is the question of the lingua Adamica. Ulysses (much of it untranslatable) is as much about the English language as it is about Ulysses. The chapter devoted to Stephen’s conception and subsequent gestation is also a history of English literature, while Bloom the father is also Shakespeare, or perhaps the ghost of Hamlet’s father. The Bible of universal homelessness is an ardent, ambivalent, and mostly unheeded tribute to a bounded speech community. “Our young Irish bards, John Eglinton censured, have yet to create a figure which the world will set beside Saxon Shakespeare’s Hamlet, though I admire him, as old Ben did, on this side of idolatry” (U9:43). Perhaps they have created them by now, and have become such figures themselves, but there is little doubt that they have no choice but to inhabit the world fathered and measured by Shakespeare. Hamlet may have had to make some room, but the idolaters of Pushkin and Cervantes only shrugged.
Nationalism—the great reward of the Apollonian odyssey and the nemesis of Jewish emancipation—was not the only modern religion. There were two more, both largely Jewish in their origins: Marxism and Freudianism. Both competed with nationalism on its own turf by offering to overcome the loneliness of the new Mercurian world (and by extension human unhappiness); both countered nationalism’s quaint tribalism with a modern (scientific) path to wholeness; both equaled nationalism in being capable of legitimizing modern states (socialism in one case and welfare capitalism in the other); and both seemed to eclipse nationalism by being able to determine the precise source of evil in the world and guarantee a redemption that was both specific and universal.
In Marxism, the original sin is in the historical division of labor, which leads to the alienation of labor, the enslavement of human beings by their own creations, and the fall of man into false consciousness, injustice, and degradation. The fall itself ensures salvation, however, for History, in its inexorable unfolding, creates a social class that, by virtue of its utter dehumanization and existential loneliness, is destined to redeem humanity by arriving at full self-realization. Proletarian free will and historical predestination (liberty and necessity) will merge in the act of an apocalyptic revolt against History in order to produce communism, a state in which there is no alienation of labor and thus no “contradictions,” no injustice, and no Time. This is collective salvation, in that the reconciliation with the world is achieved by the whole of humanity on Judgment Day, but it is also strikingly modern because it results from technological progress and has been prophesied scientifically. The omnivorous monster of modernity releases its victims by devouring itself.
Freudianism locates the original sin within the individual by postulating a demonic, elusive, self-generating, and inextinguishable “unconscious.” Salvation, or making the world whole again, amounts to individual self-knowledge, or the overcoming of the alienation between ego and libido and the achievement of inner peace (“mental unity”). This cannot be accomplished by “maladjusted” people themselves, because they are, by definition, possessed by the demon of the unconscious. Only professionally trained experts in touch with their own selves can tame (not exorcise!) the unruly unconscious, and only willing patients ready to open their hearts to their analysts can be healed. The séance itself combines features of both Christian confession and medical intervention but differs from them radically (possibly in the direction of greater efficacy) in that the sinner/patient is assumed to possess neither free will nor reason. “The modern malaise” is just that—a sickness that can be treated. Indeed, both the sickness and the treatment are perfect icons of the modern condition: the afflicted party is a lone individual, and the healer is a licensed professional hired by the sufferer (in what is the only certifiably rational act on his part). The result is individual, market-regulated, this-worldly redemption.59
Both Marxism and Freudianism were organized religions, with their own churches and sacred texts, and both Marx and Freud were true messiahs insofar as they stood outside time and could not be justified in terms of their own teachings. Marx knew History before History could know itself, and Freud—Buddha-like—was the only human to have achieved spontaneous self-knowledge (through a heroic act of self-healing that made all future healing possible). Both Marxism and Freudianism addressed the modern predicament by dealing with eternity; both combined the language of science with a promise of deliverance; and both spawned coherent all-purpose ideologies that claimed access to the hidden springs of human behavior. One foresaw and welcomed the violent suicide of universal Mercurianism; the other taught how to adjust to it (because there was nothing else one could do). Neither one survived in Central Europe, where they were born: one went east to become the official religion of a cosmopolitan state that replaced the most obstinate ancien régime in Europe; the other moved to the United States to reinforce democratic citizenship with a much-needed new prop. Liberalism had always made use of nationalism to give some life, color, and communal legitimacy to its Enlightenment premise; in America, where nationwide tribal metaphors could not rely on theories of biological descent, Freudianism came in very handy indeed. Besides trying to reconcile individual egoisms with a common interest by means of formal checks and balances, the state undertook, increasingly, to cure individual souls. This was not a new development (as Foucault tried to show, in too many words), but it gained a great deal of support from the psychoanalytic revolution. The Explicitly Therapeutic State—one that dispensed spiritual welfare along with material entitlements—was born at about the same time as its two ugly cousins: Hitler’s Volksgemeinschaft and Stalin’s “fundamentally” socialist state free from “class antagonism.”
One of the main reasons why Marxism and Freudianism could compete with nationalism was that they, too, endorsed universal Mercurianism even as they condemned it. Freud stood Nietzsche on his head by suggesting the possibility of a well-functioning society of well-adjusted supermen: individuals who, with some help from Freud and friends, could defeat their own strangeness by taking charge of it. It was not a society of slaves or even of Weber’s “specialists without spirit”: it was a world of “freedom as perceived necessity.” As for Marx, not only was communism the only natural offspring, conceived in sin and born in suffering, of capitalism’s Prometheus Unbound; it was the ultimate bourgeois wish fulfillment—Nietzsche’s and Weber’s worst nightmare, the spirit of capitalism without capitalism. It was industriousness as a way of life, eternal work for its own sake. What Marx stood on its head was the traditional Apollonian concept of punishment and reward. Paradise became a place of ceaseless, spontaneous, unforced labor.60
Like nationalism (and, indeed, Christianity, which combined the Old and New Testaments), Marxism and Freudianism were greatly strengthened by the creative power of a moral and aesthetic dualism. Marxist regimes could speak the language of prelapsarian nostalgia, romantic rebellion, and eternal life, while also insisting on rigid materialism and economic determinism. In the same way, the Western postindustrial states could draw on Freudian concepts to prescribe—in varying proportions—both civilization and its discontents. On the one hand, instincts were all-powerful and unrelenting (a bad thing because we are their prisoners, or a good thing because to know them is to master them and perhaps to enjoy the consequences). On the other hand, the possibility of treatment suggested the hope for a cure (a good thing because a rational individual could talk his way out of unhappiness, or a bad thing because licensed bureaucrats might mold our souls to fit a soulless civilization). Freudianism never became the official religion of any state, but Freud’s revelation of the true causes of human wretchedness did much to help the actually existing “welfare state” defeat its transcendentally inclined socialist nemesis.