From Christ to the Bourgeoisie

Abstract

In this early article (one of his first, written when he was twenty-one), Deleuze responds to the Romantic fear of losing “interiority” — the fear that the technological world will gut a person like a chicken and deprive them of any interior life. Many of the political examples, metaphysical concepts and affective descriptions that are cited and mostly criticized by Deleuze are traceable to the central figure in French philosophy at that time, Jean-Paul Sartre, and to Jacques Maritain as the chief proponents of dividing human life into the exterior and interior. The article criticizes the claims of Sartre’s existentialist philosophy to atheistic, materialist and humanist selfsufficiency and reconstructs the genealogy of the division between the exterior and interior. It should properly be traced back to the Gospel — to the Christian revelation of the exterior world and our interior connection with it. Deleuze finds examples of the secularization of this division in politics and science, in public and private life, in jaywalking and in the willingness to fight for the fatherland, in the bourgeois love of interpreting everything and of wearing a bowler hat. It has been suggested that bourgeois nature is a naturalized spiritual life, and the State is a naturalized Spirit. A person can no longer merely be an atheist — even in becoming an atheist they will nevertheless remain Christian by maintaining the opposition between the private individual and the State. To recreate one lost unity or another, mankind will require the figure of Christ, the Leader who offers friendship.