Opium as Dialectics of Religion: Metaphor, Expression and Protest

Abstract

This is the premise of a Marxian analysis of religion: “Religion…is the opium of the people”. But what does it mean to equate religion with opium? For most twenty-first century readers, opium means something quite simple and obvious, and the comparison between the two terms seems perfectly literal. Opium is a drug that kills pain, distorts reality, and an artificial source of solace to which some poor souls can become addicted; so also religion. Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the ‘true’ or literal meaning of a word is one “to which one has become accustomed due to frequent use… a metaphor…whose metaphorical nature has been forgotten” (1995:72). Through the “interminable repetition” of the phrase in Marxian analyses of religion (O’Toole 1984:68), “opium of the people” has lost its metaphorical sense. Even when readers of “Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction” encounter the text as a dialectical analysis of religion, their understanding is governed– and loses its dialectical force– by a literal and presentist reading of this central metaphor. In what is quite possibly the greatest work of Marxist literary theory, Frederic Jameson argues that ...texts come before us as the always-already-read; we apprehend [them] through sedimented layers of previous interpretations, or—if the text is brand-new—