The Rupture of Desire: An Interview with China Miéville on Aesthetics, Marxism, and Apophasis

Abstract

China Miéville is a writer whose awards and recognitions include a fellowship in the Royal Society of Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship for fiction, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and more. In 2001 he received a PhD in International Law from London School of Economics. Miéville has long since been active on the intellectual and political Left. He is a founder and editor of Salvage, a journal of revolutionary arts and letters, and an essayist who has written widely on Marxism, art, and politics. His most recent book is A Spectre, Haunting, a work of non-fiction which expounds on the Communist Manifesto. Neal Spadafora: Many people take this religious dimension of Marxism to be a critique, and oftentimes just an outright dismissal, of Marxism; indeed, it is a critique from people on the Left and the Right! Nonetheless, the idea that Marxism sublated Christianity and took some bad aspects of Christianity, namely, trying to immanentize the eschaton, is debated by Marxists. Moreover, if you study Cold War Christianity and its relation to United States foreign policy, you find abundant references to Marx as a leader of a religion with its own sins, sacred texts, and, of course, its own eschaton. Similarly, Enzo Traverso’s Revolution, discusses how Trotsky was so frustrated, owing to his own anti-clerical wishes, that [Vladimir] Lenin’s body was embalmed. As you know, embalmment was imagined as a religious exercise that clashed with Trotsky’s atheism. Now, you take this quasi-religious structure of Marxism to have some positive attributes and aspects. In A Spectre, Haunting you look at workers who requested that they do not be buried Bible in hand, but with the Communist Manifesto in hand. Again, this is a religious practice and I want to hear why you appreciate that. And, perhaps, offer a response to those who say Marxism should be something entirely other than a religion. China Miéville: Well, I suppose there is, broadly speaking, a thin and a thick version of my answer. And the thin version is one of which I think is hardly going to be news to the readers of the journal. One of the things that’s become very prominent in the last few years is the notion that many of our political categories are, indeed, theological categories. And you can invert those terms as well. But the point is, there is no hard line between one and the other. Now, I have an argument with the way this is often formulated – again, I don’t want to overstate that there are certainly exceptions – but this is