The bloodthirsty vampires tie human intestines around their head and neck to suck their blood. It is believed that rakshasas perform a ritual dance with the new victim’s intestines after filling their stomach with blood. In the Capital Marx calls capital “vampire”. It is not a metaphor, but the rigorous formulation of the relation of capital, labour and work; as a matter of fact the life of the worker itself is swallowed up and made objective. It becomes an objective dragon which drain and suck the blood of every labourer. In Feuerbach’s critique of religion, it objectifies its Essence. The essence produced by our consciousness is projected out as an object to the world. While Marx understands the individual as a product of the representation of consciousness, Feuerbach does not begin from the supremacy of consciousness. The subjectivity is restored to itself. Subjectivity constitutes the basis and the single theme of conceptual development. Religion objectifies and alienates man from his subjectivity. Such alienation happens with private property and capital. Wealth becomes a preoccupation of man alienating himself from his work.
Marx’s thought confront us with this profound question: What is life? This is the question that distances Marx’s atheism from that of Feuerbach: For Marx any critique – either of history, capital, economy, or alienation – places the individual against the background of life, and this is the central point of all other critiques, including the critique of religion. Life “critiques” religion by obliging it to discover. Marx’s ingenious invention is the finding of subjectivity, human consciousness not as consciousness of interpreting the world as such. Marx was fully aware that human consciousness was mired in greed and egoism. Life itself of the worker is swallowed up and made objective. Religion has not come out as reduction or alienation. In fact, religion in itself contains the principle of its resolution of the issue at stake. Life can be understood as the reason of the praxis of life; the acting that is the basis of any possible social change. We can act without having an intuition of our action, without looking at it, without making it an object for ourselves, according to a phenomenological way, which is different from the view of the objective world in which the beings and the visible objects appear. Being is nothing that can be presented as an object, there is nothing objective or sensuous about it; it is in a radical – in a radically new sense – “subjective”. Life and the praxis is this lived tension of an existence caught up in the ordeal of its act of pushing, pulling, lifting or grasping. Finally, life is the power of growing, and that growth is the movement of life that is realized out in life in virtue of what it is – in its own subjectivity one needs to think about the truth, not outside of life but in life itself.
Where is a self-revelation of this sort achieved? In Life, as its essence, since Life is nothing other than that which reveals itself – not something that might have an added property of self-revealing, but the very fact of self-revealing as such. Everywhere that something like a self-revelation is produced there is Life. Everywhere there is Life, this self-revelation is produced. Where therefore does this Life find its essence?
The Essence of Manifestation was identified in the fact that its possibility lies in the self-revelation of the affectivity of life as the capacity of feeling oneself– and therefore in the revelation of the self and not of and in a horizon different from the self (the world), with the resulting coincidence and unity of the true and the Truth. Likewise, in the texts at the basis of Christianity, the Truth that does not differ from what it makes true.
God is that pure Revelation which reveals nothing other than itself. God reveals Himself. Christianity is nothing other, truly, than the awe-inspiring and meticulous theory of the givenness of God’s self-revelation shared with man. The central theme of ‘I am the Truth’ is the immanence of the Life of each living thing. We still have to determine how this happens, and if religion allows, again, an understanding of this. The central theme of ‘I am the Truth’ is the immanence of the Life of each living thing. We still have to determine how this happens and if religion allows, again, an understanding of this. Life that lies in the living flesh finds its life in religion before religion turns into a cult or precept. Reciprocally, since the flesh is the flesh of the First Living and of every living being, life becomes the essence of religion; such religion does not alienate man from himself, but rather gives him back to Life.