In capitalism one has to realize a religion, e.g. capitalism serves
essentially to satisfy the same kind of sorrows, misery, unrest, which formerly
the so called religions provided with an answer … […]
We cannot pull the net, we are standing in, but later on there will be a
view of it.
But there are three features, that are even now about to be realized
concerning this religious structure of capitalism. For the first capitalism is
a plain cult religion, maybe the most radical which has ever been. Everything
in it has meaning only immediately referring to cult; it knows no special
dogmatics, no theology. The utilitarianism (“everything for the happiness of
the most”) gains its religious color under this point of view.
With this gaining of concreteness there is connection to a second
feature of capitalism: the permanent duration of the cult […] there is no
weekday, no day, that wouldn’t be a holiday in the dreadful meaning of
unfolding of all sacred pomp, the utterly strain of the worshipper.
This cult is, for the third, running into debt. Capitalism is probably
the first case of a non-expiative but indebtive cult. In here this religious
system is standing in the collapse of an immense movement.
An immense sense of guilt, which
has no notion how to de-expiate, grasps for cult, not to expiate in it, but to
let it become universal, to hammer it into consciousness and finally and above
all to include God himself into this debt to at last have him being interested
in the expiation of the debt.
[…]
It is in the essence of this religious movement, which is capitalism, to
endure until the end, until the finally entire indebtedness of God, the reached
world condition of desperation, which is just still hoped for.
The historical outrageous of capitalism is lying in this, that religion
is no longer the reformation of being but its smashing. The extension of
desperation into a religious world condition out of which the salvation is to
expect. Gods transcendence has fallen. But he is not dead; he is embedded in
human fate.
This passage of the human planet through the house of desperation in the
perfect isolation of its orbit is the ethos that is determining Nietzsche. This
human being is the “Übermensch” (Superman), the very first beginning to meet
capitalistic religion by realization.
The fourth feature is, that its God has to be concealed, may not be
articulated until reaching the zenith of his indebtedness. The cult is
celebrated in front of an unmatured deity. Every imagination, every concept on
her hurts the secret of her maturity [ …]
The concept of the “Übermensch” transfers the apocalyptic “jump” not
into turning back, expiation, purification, penance, but into the apparent
constantly, but in the last space of time bursting intermittent increase. […] The Übermensch is that historical human
that has without turning back arrived by growing through heaven.
This blasting of heaven by increased humanity, which is and remains
religious […] indebtedness …
Capitalism is a religion of naked cult, without dogma. Capitalism has
parasitically emerged […] on Christianity in the occident in such a way, that
finally its history in essence is the history of its parasite, the capitalism.
(Walter Benjamin, Ges.
Schriften, VI, S. 100, Frankfurt/M., 1991)
