Abstract
Dwelling in a place one can call home is not only a basic human right but also a profound longing – the desire for connection, protection, and rest, a place to experience sabbath. Yet, does such a place exist? It certainly exists in longing, dreams, and hopes, as Freud suggested in Civilisation and Its Discontents. Home, or Heimat, is a place of longing, marked by the sense of loss – paradise lost – or by the dream of arriving there in a future, eschatological kingdom or kin-dom, a realm for kindred spirits to dwell in harmony. Home is thus either the place lost or the place to come. This longing has been filled in various ways by ideologies and religions, each promising either a return to a lost paradise or the coming of a future realm of peace and well-being. Yet, what is rarely asked in these visions is why humanity is united by this sense of loss that gives rise to longing. Throughout history, powerful groups have sought to fill this longing with meaning, sometimes even claiming universality for their vision. However, the only true universal seems to be the lack itself – the Unheimlichkeit of being, the homelessness of being. Can only a human be homeless, or can a place itself be homeless? Can the very place of being be something that is lacking? If so, how does this shape the art of dwelling, making it a fragile art – not against lack and brokenness, but with them?
Intradisciplinary and/or interdisciplinary implications: The public is a space of alienation, where identity is not the focus, but encountering oneself in our nakedness, which is vital for universal equality and non-moralistic solidarity. This article advocates for unheimlich, or public theology, addressing homelessness in relation to community theologies.
Keywords: home; homelessness; void; Deus Absconditus; deconstruction; Lacan; Derrida; Freud; unheimlich.
Introduction
‘Home’ is a loaded concept within religion and spirituality, politics and culture, and likewise within psychology. On the one hand, the word ‘home’ conjures up images of comfort, security, intimacy and hospitality, to mention only a few of the emotions and thoughts that come to mind, thereby giving expression to the intuitions and feelings that present themselves with this word ‘home’. For others, it is a fearsome, confining and restrictive place, a place of unfreedom, and for far too many, a traumatic place of domestic violence and abuse. That said, one cannot deny that the common-sense view of home would certainly be something positive and good, something one could even argue is perceived as a universal good in the sense that seemingly every person and even some animals long for a place ‘to call home’, which would certainly be something positive and good. It is a longing for a place of belonging. Why do sentient creatures, specifically humans, have this longing to belong? Even those who dwell in the most elaborate homes cannot allay this longing. This longing seems to persist, irrespective of the wonderful homes in which some are privileged enough to dwell. ‘Thank goodness!’ The capitalists would exclaim: where would the capitalist and capitalism be if this longing were not so insistently persistent?
Home and homelessness: An intimate dialectic
Perhaps the explanation for such persistent insistence is already found in the word itself, or at least in German and its negation. The negation of heimat is not only heimatlosigkeit but also unheimlich [the uncanny]. Indeed, there is something uncanny (unheimlich) about the persistent insistence of heimatlosigkeit in heimat (homelessness within one’s home). Firstly, a rather literal sense, is the strange (uncanny) fact that the longing for belonging persists with every instantiation of an actual home, irrespective of how homely it is, thereby making it universally un-homely by default. Secondly, there is something spooky about this persistence, perhaps something of Jacques Derrida’s (1994) hauntology. Something haunts this concept; something disturbs it and denies the homely peace that the word seems to promise. One could conclude that one is never at home within one’s home or that the unhomely [unheimlich] is what is most at home in the concept of home. There is homelessness in every home, as each home is haunted by its homelessness. I will seek to unpack this homelessness [diese unheimlichkeit], which exists in every home, in three steps. Firstly, the homeless self, secondly, homeless matter and, lastly, a homeless God, before seeking to unpack the possible relevance of these different forms of homelessness in every conceptualisation of home in a neoliberal, Western-influenced world.
The homeless self
Why this persistent, insistent longing for belonging? Why do humans long for homes?
Freud, in his Civilisation and its Discontent (2010), as well as in The Future of an Illusion (1948:325–380), dismissed this longing as infantile. In his writing, he does not refer to home, as he refers to an oceanic feeling – in other words, the feeling of being connected and belonging – or even longing for the return to the mother’s womb. The mature response to such infantile longing should be to grow up and accept the fact that, as humans, we are thrown (expelled) into a rather cold and inhospitable world. We exist outside ourselves in an external, public world. As mature beings, we should deal with that ‘fact’. We are never with ourselves; we are never at home but always outside ourselves, homeless in public and social spaces. Thus, one can reduce this longing to a pre-oedipal stage of the imaginary (see Melanie Klein in Westerink 2012:37–38; 125–126). I would like to critically engage with the idea that it is only a primal longing and not just dismiss it as infantile. There is something besides the longing for a return to the womb – a return to the believed primal and eternal perfect home of complete belonging, connection and integration – where full appropriation of oneself is possible. Even in this primal imaginary home, there is something that disturbs the homeliness of this fantasy: the fiction of complete belonging. There is something in this presumed homely longing that seems to drive the child towards the father (if we can for this moment remain within the metaphor of the Oedipus Complex, and thereby I am not saying anything about mothers or fathers and/or their gender, but referring purely to functions, and whoever or whatever gender fulfils these functions is, at the moment, not the topic). In other words, in this primal imagined lost home, the womb fantasy, there is something that disturbs the peace and tranquillity of fully belonging, complete connection, integration, inclusion and appropriation of oneself. Even in this pre-oedipal stage, this longing for belonging is haunted; that is, this image is disturbed not only by an insistent persistence but also by something dark, evil and even hateful. Paradise lost is perhaps not all that perfect but a disturbed and disturbing place. Therefore, this primal longing for home is revealed to be a place of both love and fear, which seems to commingle with the fictive place of belonging. It is as if this longing for belonging harbours something threatening. It is the threat of being devoured and, thereby, destroyed as an individual. To be devoured in one’s home is to be too integrated, in the sense that one loses one’s identity and/or particularity. To become one with the ocean sounds mystically wonderful until one realises that being an undefined droplet in a wave destroys being a unique droplet. Being oneself is compromised in oneness and wholeness, understood as a primal longing for belonging. Jacques Lacan interprets this threatening element in connection with the death drive because the complete and utter fusion with the mother would indeed be the death of the particular (Lacan 1984:35). This fear of being devoured by the mother (staying with the metaphor) drives one to identify with the father (see Boothby 2001:174; Westerink 2012:32). In Lacan’s view, the father stands for the symbolic order (Nom and Non-du-Père). It is both this Nom and the name of the father that contains this devouring threat, thereby protecting the particular from being devoured by the Thing (Lacan 1992:211–213): the m/Other. On the other hand, the ‘saving’ father is not only adored; towards him, one likewise has rather mixed feelings: emotions of both hate and love. Firstly, adoration, because he seems to have what one desires: the mother’s attention, but this is already mixed with a feeling of jealous hatred. For example, Freud’s primal father of the horde was murdered by his sons because the father was believed to have it all. Secondly, adoration, because he offers a saving grace not only from the devouring threat but also offers the promise (verheißung) of meaning to allay the confusion of not understanding what the m/Other wants from one: the father’s language protects one from the incomprehensibility of the Other’s desire. The adored father offers language, culture and civilisation – the symbolic frame – in which the self can become a desiring identity by expressing its desire, whereby it can seek to make sense of its desire, but likewise the desire of the other. By accepting this detour into language and/or culture (civilisation), the self believes it has found its symbolic identity (see Westerink 2012:30) and thereby believes that it has found a place (home) in the symbolic world, which in turn seems to promise [Verheißung] a sense of belonging: a land of milk and honey. Language, the symbolic, offers not only a saving grace from the incomprehensible and possibly devouring m/Other but also offers an identity and a separated self with the possibility of a particular symbolic identity. Conversely, hatred, as the father, is a direct competition for the mother’s attention and love (see Westerink 2012:66). Yet this love–hate relationship is somehow sufficient to accept language (the symbolic order or the discourse of the Other) as both a way to express one’s longing (desire) and to become a socially (mis)recognised entity: a separated and divided self.
The primal imagined lost home is replaced with the imagined future home, the eschatological symbolic home promised by language: eine Verheißung [a promise]. Traditionally, religion has been inspired by both sides of this longing. The longing for the primal lost paradise with the longing to return, and the longing for the eschatologically promised home, a home that inspires hope and is the drive behind prayer and song. Believers are interpreted as people on a sojourn between these two homes. However, both arche and telos are haunted and deeply disturbed.
The promised home, or das Land der Verheißung, is misrecognised or homeless because this symbolic identity can never be sufficient. ‘No longer can a person possess that which he ultimately wants, and of equal importance, he is only capable of expressing himself imperfectly in the “discourse of the Other”’ (Westerink 2012:69). However, at least one has something to protect one from the devouring presence of the maternal ocean, and one has the promise of identity and belonging – die Verheißung eines gelobten Landes [a place to call one’s own – home].
This is not an event of the past but a constant dynamic in which human subjects find themselves. I refer to the subject rather than to the ego. The ego might be the result of this dynamic as a particular identity within the imaginary and symbolic world: a Dasein thrown into a world carried out by a particular language (see Heidegger 1971:200ff). In a certain sense, egos with their symbolic identities can be interpreted as a defence mechanism or protection from the battle of this dynamic, which is clear in the school of ego-psychologies. These fragile egos and their vulnerable identities are constantly in need of ego-psychology and safe spaces to help stabilise and protect the fragile ego. In the end, they are never anything else but defence mechanisms (symptoms) against the threatening Thing: the m/Other. Thus, this home, offered by a symbolic identity, is always haunted. There are two homes: the primary home, the womb, which is haunted by hatred and incomprehensible desire, and the symbolic home of language, which presents itself as a fortress against the incomprehensible desires. However, this ‘mighty’ fortress is fragile and incomplete and always missing the point, never reaching the object of desire: a home or promised land.
Thus, the self is homeless in origin and destination, haunted by an eternal dream of a home lost or a home to come – a home prayed for in song and lament.
This Lacanian psychoanalytic insight, encouraging one to embrace this lostness, namely that the subject is divided, haunted and in a desert between two impossible homes, links up with the mystical tradition of the Middle Ages in, for example, Margherita Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, as well as with modern mystics like Simone Weil. These ideas are echoed in the works of Nishitani and the Kyoto School of Philosophy. He writes (Nishitani 1982):
The idea of man as person […] Is without doubt the highest concept of man yet to appear […] Person is an appearance with nothing at all behind it to make an appearance. That is to say, ‘nothing at all’ is what is behind a person; complete nothingness, not one single thing, occupies the position behind person. (p. 149; see also Boothby 2023:171)
Thus, an important distinction must be made between the self and the ego. ‘Self is not self (self is non-ego), therefore it is self’ (Nishitani 1982:106). The subject (self), as distinct from the symbolic identity of the ego, is singular in the sense that the subject’s battle between home and homelessness is uniquely singular.
The subject is and remains alienated – homeless in origin and homeless in this world into which language has thrown them.
The homeless material reality
What if this is not only true – if it is true that is – for subjects, for the self, but also for matter (material reality)? I suggest that matter and material reality suffer from the same Oedipus dynamic as the human self but will use different terms to explain this. Here one would not use the Oedipus myth but rather quantum field theory as developed by Nils Bohr and brought into conversation with the humanities and specifically gender studies by the physicist Karen Barad (2007) and/or the science of philosophy, or non-philosophy as developed by François Laruelle (2013:130–132), where he unpacks the rules and procedures for doing non-philosophy as a way of understanding our philosophical, religious and scientific interpretations, or fictions concerning reality (see also Meylahn 2021:210–211). In other words, matter, that is, the material reality that appears in the carried-out world, is just as fragile, volatile and homeless, that is, alienated, as the self and the ego. Barad (2012:13) refers to the infinite possibilities of virtual particles which are not in the void but of the void (Barad 2017):
Virtual particles do not traffic in a metaphysics of presence. They do not exist in space or time. They are ghostly non/existences that teeter on the edge of the infinitely fine blade between being and non-being. Admittedly, virtuality is difficult to grasp. Indeed, this is its very nature. (p. 54)
This teetering between being and non-being, with the ghostly non/existence of matter, makes matter not exactly at home with itself. Thus, matter is as disturbed as the self by being haunted by the infinite possibilities of its being. This brings a whole new dimension to the concept of creatio ex nihilo (Barad 2017:54). Mjaaland (2015:70), in reference to the Hidden God in Luther, uses similar grammar regarding God. It seems that there is a connection, at least in our grammar, when thinking and reflecting on the self, matter and God. A grammar that witnesses différance (see Derrida 1997) or an inner contradiction. Mjaaland speaks of divine necessity with regard to the past and present, just as in Niels Bohr’s understanding of what remains of scientific objectivity (see Barad 2007:320f), but both seem to agree on the impossible possibilities of the future which remain infinitely open. In other words, there is an element1 of determination and even necessity regarding the past and present; however, regarding the future, there is complete openness to infinite possibilities. Both matter and God are necessary and possible. This reminds one of Ockham’s distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata and the question of whether God or nature (material reality) can be said to act and/or be reliable without simultaneously saying that it is acting out of necessity (see Westerink 2012:40).
At present, the focus is on material reality. I shall return to God. We, as observing scientifically-minded humans, are the Other of matter. Our observing desire instils in matter, or at least projects onto matter, the desire to be differentiated and consequently identified as an identifiable object – that is, as something objective (see the interpretation of the Call in Meylahn 2021). We, with our entangled apparatuses of observation, allow matter to matter. These apparatuses of observation function like the Law of the Father concerning the symbolic identity of individuals. Individuals learn to express themselves in language (the Law of the Father) and thereby receive the promise of being identifiable as an individual. In this case, the apparatus of observation is the Law of the Father that allows matter to ‘objectively’ matter – to be identified and differentiated. However, these apparatuses of observation are not neutral; they are deeply entangled with the disciplinary frameworks of science and conditioned by economics, funding politics, gender relations, geography, and broader socioeconomic contexts. Everything in the context of observation plays a role as it takes place in the world. In a sense, one can conclude that matter is as homeless in the world, or rather as alienated, as the self is alienated and homeless.
The homeless God
Marius Mjaaland, in his 2015 book, The Hidden God: Luther, Philosophy and Political Theology, argues that Luther’s threefold use of the concept Deus absconditus has relevance to our understanding of common sense and the general coherence of our views of the world, namely, of reality. In Luther’s argument with Erasmus in Erasmus’ Diatribe de libero arbitrio (1524) and Luther’s De servo arbitrio (1525), Luther develops his third understanding of Deus absconditus. His first understanding of Deus absconditus was developed in his Lectures on the Psalms (1513/15), where he followed Pseudo-Dionysius’ view of negative theology with some adaptation (Mjaaland 2015:91). In the Heidelberg Disputation, Deus absconditus ceases to be merely an abstract philosophical-theological notion and becomes incarnate as an immanent transcendental within the concrete realities of suffering and politics – a subversive challenge to human power, strength, and wisdom (Mjaaland 2015:91–92). The body of struggle becomes the visible site of the invisible Deus absconditus.
However, in his argument with Erasmus, Luther’s view of Deus absconditus becomes interesting for our purposes (see Mjaaland 2015:92ff). Mjaaland (2015) argues:
[B]ut also to the general philosophical question of sense and coherence: Is the ultimate source of being reasonable and at least to a certain extent predictable? Is the world in which we live governed by a higher principle of reason and goodness, or do we have to cope with arbitrariness and injustice as the basic conditions of life? (p. 93)
This idea is echoed by Westerink (2012:64) when he argues following Lacan’s interpretation of Luther (Westerink 2012):
This is the point at which Luther’s conceptions of the abyss and hiddenness coincide: God is not there – he gave his Word as a substitute since he is himself essentially lost, out of sight. (p. 64)
We could say that God is essentially homeless and that God is not with Godself but dislocated. This links up with the longing for belonging (Westerink 2012):
In this sense then a compelling desire to know the will and majesty of God, compulsively questioning his motives, can be understood as a compelling desire for a lost object and consequently, a refusal to accept this loss. (p. 65)
This movement of turning away from the devouring entanglement with the m/Other towards the symbolic-cultural world of the father has certain similarities with Luther’s interpretation of the sola scriptura principle in Reformation thought. Sola scriptura can be interpreted as a turn to scripture to escape the abyss, which is the Deus absconditus.2
If the subject is homeless, matter is homeless, then at least God should be home and an eternal resting place as the last refuge. God has certainly become the last loving and all-inclusive refuge in some liberal theological circles; however, how biblical and theological is such an all-welcoming and all-inclusive divine safe space or home? If God – as home – is the destiny of the human heart, and even if this God is conceived as an all-encompassing and perfectly just dwelling for all, genuine contemplation of such a promised home as humanity’s destination must lead one back to God ad fontes. However, irrespective of origin or destination, paradise lost, or Verheißung prayed for, the heart of desire is haunted by homelessness and is therefore unheimlich. God (Deus absconditus) is alienated from the God of revelation in the world, according to Westerink’s (2012:62) Lacanian interpretation of Luther’s The Bondage of the Will.
God is the end and beginning of desire and longing. Longing for an all-inclusive home is contradictory and haunted, and thus one is confronted with Deus absconditus. In a sense, one can argue that the revelation of God as a loving, gracious God in the cross of Christ is the terminus ad quem of faith’s movement and the hoped destiny of imagined and symbolic desire, yet the Deus absconditus remains and seemingly will always remain the terminus a quo (see Westerink 2012:55). Just as the beginning and destination of the self and matter.
Relevance
What is the relevance of this argument to the present study? We can follow Eberhard Jüngel, who in his book, God as the Mystery of the World (1983) (Gott als Geheimnis der Welt), argues that the Deus absconditus has no relevance to our lives and that Christians should focus on the revealed God in Christ through scripture. Jüngel, in reference to Karl Barth, argues that the absolutely hidden God must be excluded from every theoretical discourse on theology (Mjaaland 2015:135). To this end, Jüngel distinguished between the absolute hiddenness of God and the precise hiddenness of God in the cross. We can take Jüngel’s advice and ignore all three forms of alienation and homelessness by focusing on Dasein in the world: focusing on our language, rhetoric and ideology in the house of being (Heidegger 1971:192). In a certain sense, this would follow Jüngel’s advice, namely to focus on the revealed, focus on the symbolic, focus on the home that we are thrown into: the house of being, which is language – the symbolic – and tinker with the symbolic in the hope of making it more inclusive, maybe even more just, and ignore that which contradicts and disturbs all our attempts.
The danger of ignoring this inherent homelessness or alienation is that one unknowingly condones and promotes capitalism and the privatisation of public space.
Richard Boothby argues that the first and only God in history that is devoid of hatred (no Deus absconditus), in other words, a god who does not instil fear, is the capitalist god of money.3 In other words, there is a close connection between such a theological view of God (a God without hatred, a God without fear) and a home without alienation and capitalism. It is also interesting that, in liberal theology, God is often reduced to a purely loving and all-inclusive parent or divine safe space. What do we lose when we lose homelessness? What do we lose when we think we can overcome this alienation? What do we lose when we lose hatred (fear) mixed with love at the heart of our being?
Regarding God, the argument is that the world needs an alienated God, as it opens the reading of the world, ourselves and scriptures. One needs an alienated self (homeless self) because only in this alienated sense is one a singular subject with agency, in contrast to the particular (alienated) symbolic identity. This difference, this inner homelessness or alienation, is what Sigmund Freud calls the unconscious, and the existence of the unconscious is vital as it places a barrier and distance between the subject and its situation, as well as between the subject and itself (see McGowan 2024:4). In this distance, this différance, the possibility of freedom and transformation is opened. I can only counter and respond to the theme of the conference home: the Unheimlich.
Home, homelessness, alienation
In the past and present, Marxists, feminists, gender activists and many social justice activists have varied in their respective passions for overcoming one or other form of alienation (homelessness) and overcoming non-belonging. Overcoming alienation was one of the main themes of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (see McGowan 2024). Axel Honneth, in his Foreword to Jaeggi’s (2014:vii) book Alienation, places her book squarely into this very tradition. However, Honneth and Jaeggi are also aware that with structuralism and post-structuralism, and the consequent demise of the subject, the concept of alienation has lost its usefulness in the contemporary context. One can only be alienated if there is something substantial and essential from which one can be alienated. If one questions the existence of such a substantial and essential subject, the concept of alienation loses its relevance. However, because the concept of alienation is integral to critical theory, just as it plays a critical role in all the different struggles for emancipation and, therefore, in all the colours and shades of arguments concerning social justice, Jaeggi (2014) in her book wants to rehabilitate the concept. In her attempt to redefine the concept of alienation, she described it as a relation of relationlessness. Neuhouser, in his Translator’s Introduction to her book, argues that it is not that there is no relation between the self and itself or between the self and the world, but a deficient relation – a lack of proper connection (Jaeggi 2014):
More precisely, alienation is said to consist of a distorted relation to oneself and to one’s world that can be characterized as the failure to adequately appropriate oneself or the world, to make oneself or the world one’s own. (p. xii)
In the context of our theme, one could argue that disconnection is a failure to be at home with oneself and in one’s world – the failure to belong. Thus, for Jaeggi, alienation is a matter of inadequate appropriation.
Jaeggi (2014:xxiii) divides her argument into three main parts: the relation of relationlessness; living one’s life as an alien life; and alienation as a disturbed appropriation of self and world. With these three central arguments, one can probably provide a very good description of homelessness itself.
For Jaeggi, the overcoming of alienation ‘does not mean returning to an undifferentiated state of oneness with oneself and the world; it too is a relation: a relation of appropriation’ (Jaeggi 2014:1). Rather, she interprets alienation ‘as an impairment of acts of appropriation (or as a deficient praxis of appropriation)’ (Jaeggi 2014:36). This is problematic, as the alienated world presents itself to individuals as (Jaeggi 2014):
[I]nsignificant and meaningless, as rigidified or impoverished, as a world that is not one’s own, which is to say, a world in which one is not ‘at home’ and over which one can have no influence. (p. 3)
For her, the individual must make the world her own, namely, a world with which she can identify and in which the I can act in a self-determined and autonomous manner (see Jaeggi 2014:23). Thus, for Jaeggi (Jaeggi 2014):
[A]ppropriation is a particular mode of seizing possession. Someone who appropriates something places their mark on it and inserts their own ends and qualities into it. This means that sometimes we must still make something that we already possess our own. (p. 38)
Jaeggi’s views and her brand of overcoming alienation via appropriation focus on a typically modern and bourgeoisie subject, which is also clear in the examples she uses.
Nancy Fraser, in conversation with Axel Honneth’s ideas of overcoming alienation via recognition, writes (Fraser 2003):
This relation is deemed constitutive for subjectivity; one becomes an individual subject only in virtue of recognizing, and being recognized by, another subject. Thus, ‘recognition’ implies the Hegelian thesis, often deemed at odds with liberal individualism, that social relations are prior to individuals and intersubjectivity is prior to subjectivity. (p. 10)
In this quote, Fraser responds to Honneth’s focus on recognition in their interpretation of the politics of difference. Fraser argues that Honneth’s recognition is important, but it requires the classic leftist struggle for redistribution, and that these two should be considered together. Fraser and Jaeggi (2018) seek to overcome alienation by addressing certain injustices within a capitalist society. The focus in all these contemporary interpretations of alienation still views the main objective of their theory as overcoming alienation in whatever form it appears. They still firmly believe that alienation must be overcome. In a sense, these various attempts to overcome alienation, which is believed to be caused by capitalism, play into the very drive of capitalism, which thrives in all systems that seek to overcome capitalism’s apparent, inherent alienation and injustice.
Capitalism has made the desire for justice its drive. Fraser and Jaeggi, in trying to understand the demise of the Critique of Capitalism in the post-Cold War world, discovered that liberalism, neoliberalism and critical theory had merged (Fraser & Jaeggi 2018):
Today, those two camps have drifted so close as to be barely distinguishable, making it hard to say where liberalism stops and critical theory begins. Perhaps the best one can say is that (so-called) critical theory has become the left wing of liberalism. (p. 6)
Similarly, one could argue that liberal theology has drifted closer to liberation theology. Everything has merged into an all-inclusive loving god without any alienation; this promise or Verheißung in its secular form is central, and it is this Verheißung that drives capitalism. One needs to appreciate that Jaeggi and Honneth are critical of the current systems.
In such a world, dominated by the religion of money and capitalism, it becomes a world solely of appropriation (making one’s own) and recognition; in other words, to be recognised by one’s lust (desire) embodied in a symbolic identity. In this process, both the alienating elements – the m/Other falls away and the Father, as all that now counts, is to be recognised by the other, are reduced to a mirror – a competitive mirror, but a mirror all the same.
Jaeggi and Fraser agree with Todd McGowan that subjectivity comes into existence through a process of alienation, a process that separates the subject from their symbolic identity. Yet, McGowan argues, ‘As a subject, no one can become identical with the symbolic identity because the subject relates to this identity from a distance’ (McGowan 2024:10). Therefore, for McGowan, contrary to Jaeggi, Fraser and Honneth, there is nothing to recognise or appropriate, because these symbolic identities are a flight from subjectivity (McGowan 2024:11). On the contrary, McGowan argues that it is exactly this alienated subjectivity that enables one to act beyond the strict confines of the world, and thus brings about the possibility of freedom, which is not the ideological freedom of late capitalist ideology. When seeking to appropriate one’s symbolic identity, this is done through acts of repeated identification and repeated appropriation, as this identity needs to be performed and owned; but no one belongs to the symbolic structure that houses them, which cannot be made one’s own, as Jaeggi suggests. This lack of immediate self-identity produces the unconscious, which is always outside the subject’s conscious control (see McGowan 2024:17).
McGowan argues that capitalism ‘takes an ideological hold of people so tightly not because it alienates them but because it promises a cure for their alienation’ (McGowan 2024:73). Capitalism offers a commodity; in this case, the commodity of a symbolic identity, which can be appropriated and made one’s own, in the belief that alienation, as a relation of relationlessness, is thereby not overcome but appropriated. Louis Althusser (1994), in his essay, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, argues for the power of interpellation. The individual must be hailed and interpellated into believing that this is who they are. Boothby (2023:185ff) develops Althusser’s interpretation of the interpellative power of money: it is no longer a Big Other, an articulated master signifier, but money4 that interpellates the individual.
Likewise, this symbolic identity promises the appropriating subject a place in the world, a place that can be made one’s own, and a world that one can identify with and call one’s own, as Jaeggi argues. It promises a home, identity, and appropriated ownness; but it only promises this, as it is a promise that it can never deliver.
Earlier in the article, I have argued for the separated, homeless and alienated self in relation to the world into which they are thrown and in which they take on a symbolic identity, maybe even appropriate a symbolic identity, as well as the subsequent relationship towards the world. In the introductory section, the focus was on this alienated self and its alienated relationship with the world, as well as alienated matter and its relation to the world. Finally, the focus was on Deus absconditus as an important aspect of understanding the self, world and theology. Fisher (2013) develops the idea of capitalist realism, where capitalism is presented as the only possible world without any alternatives. If this is the world in which one is thrown, and if one follows Jüngel’s argument and does not focus on the Deus absconditus, nor on alienation, but only on overcoming alienation, which is appropriated not by the self, but by capitalism itself, then one is truly in a world without alternatives. However, my argument is that liberating alternatives are possible by embracing alienation and/or homelessness.
In such a capitalist world, without alternatives, capitalism and liberalism promise individuals to cure alienation in Jaeggi’s interpretation in the form of self-determination and autonomy. ‘This is the key to capitalism’s structure and to its attraction for even those who don’t benefit materially from it’ (McGowan 2024:73). McGowan argues for an alternative: not overcoming alienation, but rather embracing alienation, just as Mjaaland (2015) argues that the absolutely hidden God should not be ignored, or as Barad argues that the alienated virtual potential matter should not be ignored, and that herein lies the potential for freedom, radical equality, solidarity and creativity.
McGowan, Mjaaland, Lacan, Westerink, Laruelle and Barad seem to agree that there are tremendous potential and freedom in an alienated and homeless self, in homeless matter and in an alienated or self-divided God. As McGowan (2024) writes:
Theoretically, following the thinking of Karl Marx, leftists imagine political activity as a fight against alienation. From almost every perspective, people view alienation as a problem that must be surmounted […] But this verdict on alienation misses its emancipatory quality. (p. 1)
McGowan (2024) continues and argues:
Far from being something to rue or to escape, the fact of alienation is the condition of possibility for what makes our existence worth enduring – freedom equality, solidarity, and our capacity for transcending our situation. (p. 2)
It is exactly the failure to be what one supposedly is, or is supposed to be; it is the failure of the material world to be what it is supposed to be; it is the failure of God to be what God is supposed to be that makes a radical break from the original, current, predominant situation possible (see McGowan 2024:3–4). It is the alienation of these three which has the potential to break open what Fisher calls capitalist realism without alternatives.
‘Without this internal distance, one could not emerge as a subject with the ability to relate to itself. An initial split generates and defines subjectivity’ (McGowan 2024:4). The ego is the one that is continuously striving to find a possible cure for alienation in a symbolic identity, yet the free-acting subject is only to be found in the embrace of alienation:
The commodity form causes us to conceptualize our possibilities without any limits. As structured by the commodity form, the only acceptable boundary is the subjectivity of the other, never an intrinsic limitation within our own subjectivity. But this idea of subjectivity is profoundly misleading. When we view subjectivity as intrinsically unlimited, or as limited only by someone else, we interpret every external barrier that we encounter as an encroachment on our own possibilities. As a result, our existence seems always to be under assault from all sides and never able to realize itself fully. (McGowan 2024:76)
If we view subjectivity in this autonomous, self-realising sense of appropriation, of taking ownership of one’s symbolic identity and taking or making one’s place in the world, the other is always a threat to be overcome. One is a threat to appropriation and/or ownership; the other is competition, a threat to my autonomy; and the other is an enemy.
The other thwarts self and world, remaining an enduring enemy
To embrace the possibilities of justice, we must abandon the ideas of home and dwelling
Every oppressive act and structure can be linked to an attempt to avoid confronting fundamental alienation (McGowan 2024:69). ‘The promise of an unalienated future leads to the widespread acceptance of a system that produces massive inequalities, social isolation, and an assault on freedom’ (McGowan 2024:77). ‘There is no capitalist universe in which one can accept alienation as a fact of existence’ (McGowan 2024:77).
Alienation constitutes humans as political beings (see McGowan 2024:27). As Frantz Fanon writes in Black Skin, White Masks (Fanon 2008):
I have not right to put down roots. I have not the right to admit the slightest patch of being into my existence. I have not the right to become mired by the determinations of the past. (pp. 204–205)
Abjuring any form of place is the basis for revolutionary action (see McGowan 2024:43).
What does this imply for homeless communities? Should we praise them, or should we declare them blessed as Jesus does in the Sermon on the Mount? No, it is not a glorification of the homeless. However, homelessness is not an isolated problem to be solved; it is not a question of a lack of hospitality but the inherent contradiction of the worlds in which we dwell – the poor we will always have with us.
How can homelessness be addressed? One does not address homelessness with slave morality to instil guilt in landowners in the hope of creating more inclusive and hospitable societies, which would, in the end, be a variation of Nietzschean ressentiment. I would propose a more radical way, namely, a way of being messianic in Walter Benjamin’s sense (see Benjamin 2005). Messianism that explodes the world in which we dwell reveals our inherent homelessness. Those who thought they were invited and home-dwellers would be uninvited and even expelled, to paraphrase the parables. Is this not what one is currently witnessing geopolitically with the West and its norms-based order? The hypocrisy of the West is exposed and expelled by a growing international community or is exposed to international law. Is this a messianic moment?
Mysticism as a way to embrace alienation
In this section, I will turn to mystical theology, as it was in Luther’s Psalm interpretation that he first used the term Deus absconditus, but in relation to the negative theological tradition of the mystics, who had a powerful influence on Luther.
In his book City of God, Augustine distinguishes between the City of God and the City of Humanity. The former can never be fully known as long as we are residents of the latter (Hollywood 2016):
What this means concretely is that Christians stand in a critical relationship to the temporal realm from the perspective of hope given in things as yet only dimly known, not from the standpoint of fully present and authoritative knowledge. (p. 9)
It is exactly the negative theology of the mystics, or the Deus absconditus, the alienated God, the alienated self, the alienated matter, or the homeless God that opens these possibilities for the future.
Religion seems to be on both sides of this divide – either seeking to provide safe symbolic spaces or flourishing communities in which identities can be formed and thus homes, but these homes are haunted by their inherent contradictions. Homes providing identities are also the homes that articulate the expectations and norms of those identities, which can never be fulfilled, thereby never providing what is promised, but the exact opposite: the destruction of life. By promising life yet resulting in death, as with the law, Paul’s argument in Romans 7 exposes the tragic paradox of that which promises much but delivers only death.
J.Z. Smith used the term ‘locative’5 to describe this affirming and repeating function of religion to stabilise and affirm the basic order of the world. This is probably the dominant interpretation of the function of religion in Western societies, particularly considering the conversation between Habermas and Ratzinger, as well as Hans Joas’ interpretation of the role and function of Christianity. Religion plays a locative role. Religion has its symbolic, Name of the Father, role to play in imagining a home for Dasein, but that is only one aspect of religion.
Roberts points out that Smith also offers another account of religion, distinguishing between a locative vision of religion and a utopian one; I would say, a messianic one.
This division is also found in the different interpretations of religion by Freud and Lacan: Freud’s critique of religion, together with the other masters of suspicion, was to critique this civilising role of religion, while Lacan acknowledges the disruptive and problematising role of religion (Westerink 2012:4, see also Boothby 2023:9–22). This could be brought into conversation with the priestly and prophetic roles in the Bible or between state theology (church) and prophetic theology, as expressed in the 1985 South African Kairos document.
This reminds one of Gadamer and Habermas’s critique of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction, arguing that consensus is needed (see Mjaaland 2007:11). Consensus is found in conversation with the symbolic, the cultural and the civilised, as the autonomous, mature, enlightened selves, through communicative action and activism, come to a civilised consensus as to what is good and just for the world; however, Derrida argues that such processes, such ideals, such concepts, such symbolisations and such imaginaries are haunted by something that disturbs them, not from the outside but from their innermost being, their inherent contradictions: a death drive. As these concepts – justice, home, self, God, matter and reality – are homeless in themselves, they are disturbed and haunted; they are unheimlich. Freud echoes this thought; it is the unconscious that disturbs, disrupts, or, as McGowan (2024) articulates it:
We typically think of the unconscious as the site of unfreedom. When we act unconsciously, we don’t deliberate on a course of action and experience the act of choosing it. But freedom is not the result of conscious deliberation. It is the ability to interrupt the path of determination that would otherwise govern our existence. This is precisely what the unconscious does. (p. 5)
The good, the civil, and the decent that we seek through consensus we fail to do; yet the evil we do not seek, we end up doing—to paraphrase Romans 7.
To cite Roberts once again, in reference to Smith (Hollywood 2016):
The second vision emphasizes rebellion against and freedom from the established order. Smith calls it a ‘utopian’ vision of the world: where the locative vision focuses on place, the utopian affirms the value of being in no place. Both, he claims are ‘coeval existential possibilities’. (p. 10)
Smith saw religion as offering homelessness and a nomadic life in the desert.
We need to consider a faith that can engage with disorder, incongruity and excess. It is not a matter of rejecting one order for another or about revising past orders; in this sense, it is neither locative nor utopian but rather a relativisation of all (see Holywood 2016:10). Homelessness of All.
From private to public space
Capitalism, the world into which one is thrown, wants to privatise everything because it is only in the public that one can be alienated and can be homeless. Habermas (1989) also pleaded for the upkeep of the public sphere, but he saw it mainly from the perspective of the bourgeoisie as a space for contestation and critical debate in coffee shops. However, these are privileged spaces, such as coffee houses and salons. Those who enter these spaces enter them as well-adjusted private individuals, with their private symbolic identity engaging in public debate with other private symbolic and well-adjusted and enlightened autonomous identities – in spaces where their shared opinions have equal weight in an egalitarian communicative praxis.
I would plead for a more radical or fundamental interpretation of the public realm rather than an ideal one. ‘Every time an alienated subject encounters another, a public world emerges’ (McGowan 2024:110). In other words, the public is a space of alienation in both senses.
It is not coffee shops and salons that are the sites of the public, but the public bus, the public park and the public bench – as these are the places where one encounters the other as alienated, without the protection of symbolic identity. This needs to be contrasted with the idea of community, but not as either/or, as both are necessary. Humans are alienated and cannot exist in communities. However, the question is where one invests theologically, philosophically and politically. If one invests in a community, one fails to recognise the universality of alienation. A community promises belonging and a home; thus, the community is contrasted with the public, yet these two relate to each other in a dialectic. The public begins where a community fails to fully constitute itself (McGowan 2024:112–113). Communities form in response to alienation as a cure for alienation, but fail in their attempt (McGowan 2024):
Communities promise respite from the burden of subjectivity by giving subjects a symbolic position with which to identify. Every symbolic identity depends on some community that authorizes and supports it. Without a community behind it, an identity would be meaningless. Identity exists through the recognition that the community gives it. (p. 113)
It is in the community that one can appropriate one’s symbolic identity, but it cannot deliver what it promises.
Thus, the public is a space in which identity recedes into the background, and alienation comes to the fore. It is on the public bus, where I cannot rely on my symbolic identity, but I must encounter the other and myself in our respective alienation – our nakedness. The public is, in the true sense, vital (life-giving) because it is the space not only of the universal but also of radical non-ideological equality and the possibility of true non-moralistic solidarity.
In this article, with the theme ‘Home’, I plead for unheimlich, namely the public, and thus for public theology in the most alienated sense of that concept. I plead for a public theology of homelessness in dialectic relation to the many community theologies of home.
Acknowledgements
Competing interests
The author declares that no financial or personal relationships inappropriately influenced the writing of this article.
Author’s contribution
J-A.M. is the sole author of this research article.
Ethical considerations
This article followed all ethical standards for research without direct contact with human or animal subjects.
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This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
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Footnotes
1. The past is always open to reinterpretation.
2. Scripture functions here in the same manner as what Lacan calls the symbolic order, indicating the cultural realm of language in which the person expresses his desires symbolically through inter-subjective relations. In his role as castrator/frustrate, the father initiates this order, which, says Lacan, can be characterised in terms of two key notions: law and desire (Westerink 2012:68).
3. ‘If money acts as a new god, it is the first god in history that is not regarded with fear. Relation with every other God came at the price of sacrifice, obedience, and courage in faith. Even the god of love propounded by Jesus aroused the fear of living up to the extraordinary demand of unrestrainedly loving even one’s enemy. Yet the only fear relevant to money is the fear of being without it. Money is an object not of fear but of unlimited, covetous desire. Like all gods, money is an incarnation of something unknown, but in the case of money, as with no other god, the void of the unknown is completely colonized by lust’ (Boothby 2023:189).
4. ‘The answer is that the ideological constellation of freedom, equality, and individualism is in fact undergirded and reinforced by a powerful form of interpellation, though in a form very different from the one imagined in Althusser’s example. On this point, we have to say that Althusser misses his train. The interpellating agency of modern society is the ubiquitous power of money. Money is the force that interpellates subjects, though, unlike Althusser’s example, it does so anonymously, precisely by not directly addressing them. There is no need to call or hail subjects to assume their responsibility in obeisance to an Ultimate Subject. On the contrary, money interpellates all of us, soliciting us all as an aggregate of supposedly free and independent individuals in the capitalist marketplace, which appears less as a prison house of obedience than a wonderland of earthly delights. This interpellation into freedom is all the more effective as it tends to conceal from those it interpellates the wretched unfreedom that is in fact their lot’ (Boothby 2023:187–188).
5. ‘Yet despite all of the evidence to the contrary, the position persists, even within the study of religion, that religion is inherently uncritical, authoritarian and ideological. This is the primary assumption of those who insist that the study of religion purify itself of all theological remnants and that it be rigorously social scientific or historical. In an extremely helpful intervention, Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism, Tyler Roberts makes the cogent point that these arguments depend on a notion of religion as locative. Roberts borrows the term from J. Z. Smith, who uses it to describe Mircea Eliade’s understanding of religion as affirming and repeating the basic order of the world, firmly locating or placing people by repressing the creativity of chaos, denying change, and stressing “dwelling within a limited world”’ (Hollywood 2016:9).
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