the church and postmodern culture: conversation

Korean Edition of "Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?"

2009-11-06T08:54:14-06:00

A Korean edition of Who's Afraid of Postmodernism? Taking Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucault to Church has just appeared from Sallim Books. As I noted upon the publication of the Chinese edition, it's fascinating to me that a very American book, on French philosophers, written by a Canadian, would find an audience in Asia. But if it can be of service, I'm grateful.

(It's also a little disconcerting when your work appears in a language and alphabet which is utterly inaccessible to the author, but I'm getting used to it. For instance, I just learned that The Devil Reads Derrida will be translated into Polish. Do they read chick lit in Poland?)

I was asked to write a Preface especially for this Korean edition. I've made the (pre-translation) English version of that Preface available on my website for those who might be interested. It provided an opportunity to clarify a couple of things for a more general audience.

Speculative Grace: Non-Sequential Theology

2009-11-04T16:27:04-06:00

I’ve been playing around lately with an alternative way of framing some of my ongoing speculations about the immanence of grace. The following approach relies on the (admittedly rough) distinction between a “sequential” approach to theology and a “non-sequential” approach to theology.

1. What is sequential theology?

A sequential theology is essentially mythological.

By "mythological" I have two things in mind:

(a) I have in mind the original meaning of the Greek word mythos as something like "story" or "narrative explanation.” In this sense, to say that a sequential theology is mythological is to say that it foregrounds the sequential narration of a series of events. Sequence = story.

In this sense of the word mythos, there is nothing inherently pejorative about a theology being mythological and nothing is implied about the truth or falsity of the events being narrated. We might say that, in general, Christian theology, to the extent that it favors history and narrative as a primary mode of theology, is a paradigmatically mythical religion.

(b) Sequential theology also tends to be mythological in that the scope of its temporal extension tends to be so vast that it exceeds the bounds of mortal experience. For instance, the Christian narrative tends to unfold the meaning of this present life on the basis of what came before and what will come after.

However, the events referenced (e.g., an Edenic paradise, judgment day, heaven/hell) are largely empty referents: they reference ways of living and being for which we have no presently dependable reference points. As a result, these narrative sequences tend to depend heavily on a series of symbolic or anticipatory references that are significantly lacking in presently available content.

In this sense, sequential theologies tend to be mythological in that they rely on references to what is not given. This is not to say that these references will remain empty, but it is to say that, for the moment at least, they are empty. Let's say: a theology that is grounded in what is not given is mythological.

2. What is non-sequential theology?

A non-sequential theology, then, is occupied with the immanent actuality of what is presently given (rather than with that given's place in the arc of a larger sequence, teleological or otherwise).

In this sense, it would differ from a sequential theology precisely in that it would be non-mythological. Rather than reading key theological ideas in terms of an overarching narrative headed toward some particular end, it would read them in light of the key features of our current lived experience of the world.

(Note: marking this difference in terms of mythology identifies certain strengths and weaknesses of each of the two forms of theology, but it is not in itself an argument that one or the other ought to be abandoned or prioritized.)

3. Sequential theologies, as sequential, tend to be biased in favor of works.

Or, we might say: sequential theologies, due to their temporal structures (both causal and teleological), tend to highlight the importance of works/projects. Further, even in their treatment of grace, sequential theologies will tend to read grace as a kind of supplement that is useful because it does the work that works cannot do. Here, even if “grace” is valorized and prioritized, it is not prioritized as such but only as a modulation of work.

The result is that, as part of a conditioned sequence headed toward some particular outcome, the unconditional aspect of grace will tend to get instrumentalized.

To this extent, sequential theologies often fail to treat grace as such. In order to treat grace as such, we may need to adopt a non-sequential perspective. (Compare, for instance, the way that Marion argues for the importance of a phenomenological approach to givenness.)

4. Sequential theologies tend toward metaphysics.

Let's give this definition of metaphysics. Metaphysics: a philosophical mythology.

Metaphysics tends to reduce what is given to what is not given. Metaphysics tends to instrumentalize what is given as only an aspect of something deeper, something bigger, something with a grander arc. This mythological reduction of what is given tends to impoverish the grace of what is given.

In this same vein, the metaphysical concepts par excellence (e.g., "substance" and "potential") are classically the key (but non-given!) supplements needed in order to get a sequential account to work: they facilitate our sequential story about how change is possible.

(More about the relation between the sequential and non-sequential in a coming post.)

The new German postmodern Christianity - beyond deconstruction

2009-10-25T15:52:55-05:00

The new German awakening

Unbeknownst to most of us who try to keep albreast of these things, Germany – the largest nation in the European Union, the site of the Protestant Reformation, and the historical homeland of modern theology itself – is stirring and awakening when it comes to what is distinctively Christian as well postmodern. The main reason this development is largely off our radar is because the German-speaking churches and the German universities have not exactly been pace-setters in the postmodernist movement over the past three decades. In addition, most of the blogging, publishing, and other forms of “conversation” is in German, which American academic read less and less (don’t we all speak English and French?)

But in Karlsruhe on the Rhine a few weeks ago Alan Hirsch, one of the most familiar faces of the global postmodern church movement, keynoted a the second annual Novavox conference that drew the largest ever audience from Protestant, Catholic, and the German “Free Churches” around Germany. So-called “emergent cohorts” have sprung up all over Germany in recent years, most notably in such cities as Marburg and Erlangen. As one Novavox conference attendee put it, “now I’ve got all the buzzwords and the concepts.”

When we say "postmodern" we don't tend to think of the Germans. Even though virtually all the streams of postmodern philosophy cascade directly down from the intellectual heights dominated by the great German philosophers Kant, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, it was the French "post-structuralists" who, starting in the 1960s and commandeered by Derrida and Deleuze, cleared and built out the vast terrain with which most of us in the academy and in the church are now familiar.

The word "postmodern" itself was minted by the French academic Jean-Francois Lyotard in the early 1980s in an effort to assess the changes in the culture, values, and education of the Francophone peoples in the wake of the social upheavals of the Vietnam era. But it was the "ontology" of Husserl and Heidegger, to which Derrida reacted during this early period,and which he sought to de-Teutonize in order to accomodate the new forms of cultural and social-psychological critique that had emerged with figures like figures like Louis Althusser, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Lacan and to re-invigorate the deeply embedded tradition of structural linguistics, invented by Ferdinand de Saussure, in France as central to philosophy.

Most of what we know as "deconstruction" had this largely linguistic, neo-Marxist, anti-phenomenological, a-theological origin. As a footnote it is highly ironic that what in the past decade has become known to theologians as "postmodernism" tends (with the exception perhaps of Žižek) tends to be highly idealistic, phenomenological, anti-linguistic, anti-psychological, and a-political.

The tables have been turned completely, and your typical reader of this blog would have little knowledge of, or interest in, the early French figures that pioneered the phenomenon. So much of the "theological turn" in philosophy, which has generated what we know as "Continental postmodern theology," is influenced largely by French thinkers such as Jean-Luc Marion and Jean-Luc Nancy, but the tradition of French phenomenology going back to Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Maritain, to whom these thinkers belong, has a solidly Germanic coloring and background, which the early "deconstructionists" thoroughly rejected.

While French ideas and trends have largely shaped postmodernism, the now vaguely defined "postmodern church" is almost strictly a product of the American evangelical identity crisis that surfaced in the mid-1990s. Trends in youth culture were the catalyst during this era, but it was the presumed "authority" of figures such as Derrida in challenging the authority of the kind of inerrantist fundamentalism that had overshadowed the evangelical agenda for a generation that drew interest from progressive-minded church leaders.

Of course, Derrida himself was always far more far complicated and opaque than he was understood to be as the would-be icon of the new, typically American anti-authoritarianism. Even those semi-academic types who helped make the master of deconstruction a household name among pastors as he had been earlier among humanities scholars barely realized that Derrida himself had emphasized repeatedly that deconstruction was not the same as critique and that it had much more to do with how we read texts while unlocking the signifying power of the seemingly unsignifiable in our thinking (e.g., God as the "not-God" of negative theology, the messianic or the unrepresentable that is "to come").

Postmodern Christianity and American anti-authoritarianism

It has been said wryly that since the American project started (not counting the Puritans) in the seventeenth century as the true revolution of the subject whose insignia were always the "axe and the Bible," the Bible became the true canon katholikon that was never ever really challenged, even after the Scopes Trial in the late 1920s. The axe was really not turned against the Bible in mainstream Protestantism until the late 1960s and against "fundamentalist" evangelicalism only at the end of the millennium.

But the result of this anti-authoritarian and anti-fundamentalist revolution, or "reformation", even in the churches, was a pure rootless and largely contentless subjectivity that could be sustained only by endless variations (including "spiritual" versions) of the old Romantic idea of limitless freedom and the inexhaustible possibilities of "personal liberation" and lifestyle choices, which back in the 1980s were dubbed "New Age;
American postmodern Christianity, while it seeks nowadays to be "socially engaged" and "missional-minded" in current parlance, has always been a form of "me-Christianity," a sophisticated Christian-tinted personal experientialism.

That is not to say the old evanagelism was not that much different. 'Seeker-sensitive" megachurches followed the same pattern with a different appeal to a different generation. But if the "missional turn" in American postmodern Christianity is ever really going to happen in substance more than in rhetoric, there will have to be a serious prophetic challenge to the kind of cultural DNA church structures in this country that forever configure the Gospel as a form of personal self-enrichment, not so much in terms of wealth but in terms of distinctive Christian cultural or intellectual "experiences."

In the American and (to a lesser extent) the British scenes, where postmodern Christianity as we know it has both its roots and its contours, there is a significant disconnect between theology, philosophy, and Christian praxis. Pastoral types, with the exception perhaps of those who read this blog, don’t pay that much attention to serious philosophical trends and ideas, and when they do often become involved in The Conversation, they make the familiar point that they are doing so for their own self-improvement and are frustrated by the utter lack of interest in these topics on the part of the Christian communities – even the most hip – that they work with.

I’ve lost count of how many inquiries I, as a professor of religious studies at a major university in this country with a significant PhD program in philosophy and theology, have received even in the past decade from “burned out” pastors who are tired of ministering and “just want to study and teach exciting ideas like you do.”

In the more distant past theological revolutions in the American church have more often than not been imported from Germany. That was true not only in the nineteenth, but also throughout the twentieth century. Since the 1970s, however, the flow of philosophical and theological products for import has been coming from France and the UK (the Germans at one time gave us “neo-orthodoxy”; then the Brits invented “radical orthodoxy”). But it was always the genius of German theology that it could be theoretical and practical at the same time (look at what happened to neo-Kantianism up until the First World War).

However, in recent years most of the postmodernist agitation in the churches of Germany, which is still statistically the most “religious” EU nation, if one does not count the cultural Catholicism of Italy and Spain, has come from American groups who want to “evangelize” those neo-pagan Europeans. The Novavox conference itself was co-sponsored bv a California-based “missions” organization. American groups often try to persuade the Germans to adopt their own version of fad-driven, practical, pop theological approaches for the primary purpose of “planting and growing” churches, but the results are not very effective. Germans prefer their Christianity heavier and stronger than we do, like their beer.

From deconstruction to "globopomo"

When it comes to current philosophy, however, Germans are not all that interested in “deconstructing”. The well-known, early putdown of Derrida and Derrideans by Jürgen Habermas during the 1980s left long-term marks, even though the two philosophers eventually became good friends and collaborators. But there is another key underlying condition – a Grundzustand, as the Germans would say – that explains this reluctance. Hitler and the Holocaust essentially deconstructed the entirety of the German conceptual landscape. The postwar German theological preoccupation has been the task of coming to grips with its monstrous, recent political and cultural past. Germans never really needed to “postmodernize” in the loose sense of having to problematize modernist progressivism and rationality, because history did it for them.

But this now more-than-half-century of self-doubt, self-pity, and endless national self-reflection is coming to an end. Germans are looking outward and pondering what one scholar privately referred to me as a “new global Christian thinking” that is radically and globally engaged at the same time it is disengaged from all parochial, cultural, and identity-obsessed forms of purely “critical” postmodernism. There are no German Derridas yet on the scene, though the so-called “public philosopher” Peter Sloterdijk, who himself is based in Karlsruhe, late in his career is starting to gain a certain European notoriety for his own distinctive take on postmodernity, globalization, and the current world financial crisis.

Sloterdijk in his own way is challenging Germans, and his readers outside Germany, to think beyond the kind of self-referential postmodernism that through new media fosters a hypersubjectivity and esthetic inwardness that effectively cancels the earlier globalist thrust of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism toward a unified sense of humanity. Today’s apparent new “cosmopolitanism” is one in name only, he insists, because it is constituted primarily by the intricate and patchwork parochialisms that together make up what he dubs das Weltinnenraum (the “world private space”), which global consumer capitalism has seeded, “malignantly” perhaps, in religion, ethics, the arts, and philosophy.

Sloterdijk’s theory of a “mediated” cosmopolitanism, which like Gilles Deleuze’s earlier theory of nomadology represents an effort to map all concepts and signifying processes in terms of spatial relationships and spatial flux, confronts the runaway differentialism of postmodern thinking along with the very hypersubjectivity that in age of collapsing global consumerism may be on the verge of extinction.

Since late last summer I have been in conversation with a German academic, who is also a pastor, in Marburg named Tobias (“Toby”) Faix, who can be considered one of the leading lights of the indigenous German-speaking “new wave” of Continental Christian postmodernism. We have only exchanged a few thoughtful emails, but I have been tracking down and reading his blog posts, essays, and books, all published in German, which are both extensive and provocative.

Whether he has read or been influenced by Sloterdijk is immaterial, because Faix has much of the same take on the global as the latter, albeit from a Christian theological perspective. Faix is currently Dozent or Lecturer in Practical Theology and Sociology at the Marburg Bibelseminar, a state-accredited professional school for pastors that corresponds to the American version of the theological seminary, as well as director of Empirica, a research institute specializing in youth culture and religion.

In his institute’s most recently published volume entitled Zeitgeist 2: Postmoderne Heimatkunde (“Zeitgeist 2: Postmodern Local History”, Francke, 2009), Faix and his co-contributors asks the question where the postmodern Christian can find a sense of place with which to identify themselves, a site of particularity, a Heimat or “homeland.”

Contrary to the consumer-based “identity politics” or “identity religion” that has been the hallmark of global consumerism, the authors argue in different ways and with differing rhetorics that our only “homeland” is the world and its openeness, what in The Creation of the World, or Globalization Nancy terms “the world of singularities, without their plurality constructed as a unitotality.”

Instead of seeking a “private space” of singularity as a point of retreat in our radically “disenclosed” world, as Nancy would say, the Christian finds his or her singular, or heimatlich, identification in the world-historical purpose of God through missional service both in our immediate communities and abroad. That is the kind of Christian postmodernism that I have written about in my own book in this series entitled GloboChrist (Baker Academic, 2008), a Christianity that is not only "postmodern" per se, but "globopomo."

Challenging comfortable Christian "identity theology"

In his most recent email describing the pastoral situation in Germany, Faix notes that the recession of the past year, which has produced massive unemployment in Germany as elsewhere, has generated a crisis for the comfortable “postmodern pluralism” of Western nations, including Germany itself, whose complexion has been altered irremediably by immigration and the democratic mingling of peoples and cultures. Suddenly the presence of economic stress everywhere, not just among the marginalized but among the once well-established middle class, reveals the “otherness” of the other in our midst rather than as a piece of a pretty pastiche of society’s “diverse” elements.

The crisis, according to Faix, has also exposed the the white middle classiness of the church, even that part of the church which is theoretically conscious of the need to serve the other. This kind of “social change brings with it [the need for serious] theological change,” Faix writes in his email, a change that may have “painful” (schmerzlich) side effects.

The pain of the new world disorder we are facing today will force sweeping theological change throughout the theological spectrum of the West, even the postmodern sectors of it. As it has been said, there is no gain without pain, and of course no change without pain either.

If Faix’s typically German practical-theoretical vision for the current need to re-invent theology, the country that has experienced much historical pain – unlike America – may be the place where it will begin to happen.

Note: photos above are those of Peter Sloterdijk and Tobias Faix, respectively.

Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part II

2009-10-21T17:27:46-05:00

In "Racial Reconciliation in the Flesh of Jesus: Part I," I ended with a quote from Peter Goodwin Heltzel's Jesus and Justice: Evangelicals, Race, and American Politics: "[Dr. Martin Luther] King's Christology," according to Heltzel, "emphasizes Jesus as a redemptive sufferer who suffers with the oppressed and as a prophet who challenges sin both in the human heart and in social structures" (63). Here in Part II, I wish to use this statement as a launching point for investigating the way(s) in which Christology may be the lens through which we can investigate racial reconciliation. In A Testament of Hope, King claims that "the cross is the eternal expression of the length to which God will go in order to restore broken community. The resurrection is a symbol of God's triumph over all the forces that seek to block community" (20). While I do not share King's theory of atonement, I do think that he is on to something regarding reconciliation. (And, certainly "community" is a much contested term as well.) Jesus' own life should be understood as the paradigm for how one engages with and within a community.

I wish to make several points in this regard. First, one should not attempt to relativize Jesus to fit a particular context other than the one to which he belonged, i.e., 1st c. Palestine. If Christology is the key, then one should compare particulars to Jesus, not vice-versa. Second, this first comment needs some nuance for which I will turn to Graham Ward:

First, Christological enquiry is a profoundly hermeneutical one--no appeal can be made to immediate knowledge of God....We have no access to how Christ views and knows things. We only have access to interpretations of the way Christ views and knows things; interpretations which may participate in God's grace, but which we cannot claim to be so inspired without scandal. Secondly, the focus of this hermeneutical inquiry is the nexus of relations in which the historical, social and cultural engage with the divine. Every statement about Christ cannot be reduced to, but is, nevertheless, a statement about ourselves and the times and cultures we inhabit. Thirdly, the enquiry itself is governed by the time and circumstances within which it takes place. For to speak of operations is to speak of what has been observed in the past but always in the present....Hence... the engagement of Christ with culture and the enquiry is to engender Christ; to enter the engagement is to foster the economy whereby God is made known to us. To do Christology is to inscribe Christ into the times and cultures we inhabit. It is therefore an operation of redemption undertaken in obedience to witness by faith, in grace. (Christ and Culture [2005], 1-2)

At first glance, it may appear that these two points stand in contradiction. However, the conclusion to be draw here is that (1) Jesus cannot be relativized, (2) the interpretations of Jesus can be made to fit particulars, and (3) Christology is the key to Anthropology.

A. What is it about humanness that Jesus takes upon himself? Capax divinitas: the capacity to divinity is built in to being human.

B.How can the finite mediate the infinite? The incarnation itself is an event, an operation; to be Christ is to be actively in operation.

C.We further the effects of Christ in the world. Our own furthering of these effects is to continue the event/operation of Christ. In other words, the study of Christology is a moment of Christology.

So, how do these claims relate to racial reconciliation? Let us look at Ephesians 2:13-16:

But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have become near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace, he who made both one and broke down the dividing wall of enmity, through his flesh, abolishing the law with its commandments and legal claims, that he might create in himself one new person in place of the two, thus establishing peace, and might reconcile both with God, in one body, through the cross, putting that enmity to death by it (NAB).

Heltzel also points to this particular verse. He explains that the invocation of this Pauline Christology in the context of racial reconciliation unveils the Jewish flesh of Jesus as the very site in which the Jew and the Gentile are reconciled. The reconciliation between the Jew and the Gentile in the early church period becomes the theological basis for the reconciliation of black and white in the Americas. For white evangelicals to listen and learn from black evangelicals about racial justice entailed a deeper transformation of evangelical theology. Christologically this meant that Jesus would not longer be viewed primarily as divine, but also as a fully human, earthly prophet whose ministry crossed "racial boundaries" and whose death and resurrection is the site of redemption for people of all races and ethnic groups (141).

Vanity: a position of last resort (2)

2009-10-20T07:34:08-05:00

In my last post, I proposed that vanity constituted the last intentional position or posture human being can take in seeking the divine. From the perspective of vanity, humanity moves from its easy habitation of the possible and into the difficulty of dwelling in openness to “something else,” i.e. that which is impossible, divine advent. I offered a preliminary definition of vanity drawing from Ecclesiastes: a disappointment of the autarkic self that results in separation from and indifference to the world. From this distance emerges the potential to readdress the identity of the human self. I would like to explore vanity further in this regard in the context of Jesus’ teachings in Matthew 6.

In Matthew 6:25-36, Jesus challenges the definition of life as we know it. “That is why I am telling you not to worry about your life and what you are to eat, nor about your body and what you are to wear. Surely life is more than food, and the body more than clothing!”^[1] In this passage, Jesus is rejecting a definition of human life that is coextensive with the procurement of necessities and he is suggesting that life may be “more than” this kind of appropriation. Immediately, the question of limitation arises: What is restricting my access to “more”? The answer is worry. Jesus is rejecting a life in which the self is entangled in worldly anxiety. Jesus indicates that human life is potentially more than securing existence through the appropriation of objects.

In this passage, worry should not be confused with a mere pessimistic feeling. Rather, worry is the occupation of anxious provision. Humanity is held hostage by the seeming need to get ahead, make good, be productive. In a way that recalls Ecclesiastes, Jesus remarks that the life of worry is essentially futile, not able “to add a single cubit.” Additionally, he directly opposes anxious provision to the “kingdom of God and his justice.” When we read this selection with the verse directly before it, the dichotomy between the kingdom of God and the life of worry becomes more pronounced; it is impossible to serve both God and mammon. While some translations and traditions prefer a limited definition of mammon (money, riches, excessive wealth), the grammatical connections between the passages suggest a meaning for mammon that includes food, drink, and clothes. In this way, we discover that Jesus is calling into question the life of appropriation, not just of amenities, but of necessities as well.

By criticizing worry in connection to the acquisition of necessities, Jesus seems to be in danger of dispensing with all possibility of providing for life. However, Jesus indicates in verse 6:33, “Set your hearts on [God’s] kingdom first, and on God’s saving justice, and all these other things will be given to you as well.” The necessities are not the essential problem, but the worried manner in which they are acquired. We can further clarify his meaning by appealing to another “life” passage in the Gospel of Matthew. In Chapter 16, the apostle Peter has just admitted that Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah. Jesus recognizes this title and begins to reinterpret its signification. He describes a messiah that will be handed over to be killed. Anyone who would follow him as a disciple must also take up his or her cross. Jesus says, “Anyone who wants to save his life will lose it; but anyone who loses his life for my sake will find it. What, then, will anyone gain by winning the whole world and forfeiting his life? Or what can anyone offer in exchange for his life?” The criticism in Matthew 16:25-26 is against the impulse to “save life.” By “saving life” Jesus is not describing a rescue from illness or accident; he is not admonishing the lifeguard or the doctor. Rather, Jesus’ condemnation falls again on worried appropriation, specifically the impulse to snatch up life as a possession. In other words, he is criticizing the human identity which secures certainty in worried appropriation, i.e. the autarkic self. The autarkic self is an identity that is based on self-sufficiency, in this case, the ability to possess and manipulate objects in the world. The worried or autarkic self mistakes adequate provision for life itself and the security of provision for a “world” without worry. In this way, Jesus equates “winning the whole world” with “forfeiting life.”

Just as Jesus is not advocating the full scale forfeiture of human life, neither is he counseling that the world as such be repudiated. With vivid pictures of birds and flowers, Jesus carefully appeals in Matthew 6 to nature’s beauty and its value as cared for by God. Jesus makes another distinction along the fault line of worry; he juxtaposes the world viewed as a series of appropriations with the world as creation. To that point, the beauty of the flowers is held against their transience. In “the wild flowers growing in the field which are there today and thrown into the furnace tomorrow,” Jesus employs the standard, scriptural image of vanity. Acquisition cannot form the basis of security, because in the end it cannot correct mortality. However, the ephemerally of the world is held against God’s vigil over it. The world derives its value from its being the subject of God’s care. The anxious self opposes this very quality, preferring the illusory certainty of appropriation to the recognition of God as caregiver over creation.

However, Jesus holds out the possibility of “finding” life. Jesus’ message in this passage includes the possibility of a life apart from the domination of anxiety in openness to the impossibility of God. If the impossibility of advent is in opposition to the bid for a “world,” then it must be predicated by a relief from worry. Worry is countered, not by repudiation of the world as such, but by an understanding of the world’s essential transience and especially a realization of the futility of pursuing certainty through acquisition, e.g., vanity. When the world is colored by vanity, appropriation looses its ability to guarantee certainty. In turn, the perspective of vanity grants a distance from and indifference to the world that potentially allows humanity to gain a new perspective on life itself and opens the impossibility of divine advent.

[1] New Jerusalem Bible (New York, NY: Doubleday, 1998).

Taylor on Habermas on Religion and Secularity

2009-10-19T11:49:25-05:00

While Habermas and critical theory don't get as much play here as they ought, readers will want to check out Charles Taylor's post on Jürgen Habermas over at The Immanent Frame.

This is in anticipation of an upcoming dialogue about "The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere" hosted by the Institute for Public Knowledge at NYU, October 22. The dialogue will bring together Taylor and Habermas with Judith Butler and Cornel West. (Have I mentioned how much I wish I lived in New York City?)

Forthcoming Symposium on Merold Westphal's Whose Community? Which Interpretation

2009-10-19T03:51:21-05:00

In the months of November and December we will be hosting a symposium here on the Church and Postmodern Culture blog to engage Merold Westphal's latest book--and the latest book in the Church and Postmodern Culture series along with Graham Ward's The Politics of Discipleship: Becoming Postmaterial Citizens. Westphal's book is entitled Whose Community? Which Interpretation: Philosophical Hermeneutics for the Church, and touches on the following issues:

In this volume, renowned philosopher Merold Westphal introduces current philosophical thinking related to interpreting the Bible. Recognizing that no theology is completely free of philosophical "contamination," he engages and mines contemporary hermeneutical theory in service of the church. After providing a historical overview of contemporary theories of interpretation, Westphal addresses postmodern hermeneutical theory, arguing that the relativity embraced there is not the same as the relativism in which "anything goes." Rather, Westphal encourages us to embrace the proliferation of interpretations based on different perspectives as a way to get at the richness of the biblical text.

Here is the schedule of engagements with the book:

November 14: Carl Raschke, Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Denver
ch. 01. Hermeneutics 101: No Interpretation Needed?
ch. 02. Hermeneutics 102: A Little Historical Background
November 21: Jim Chapman, Th.M. student at Duke University
ch. 03. Against Romantic Hermeneutics: Away from Psychologism
ch. 04. Objectivism and Authorial Privilege
November 30: Andrew Talbot, PhD student at the University of Nottingham
ch. 05. Revoking Authorial Privilege
ch. 06. Rehabilitating Tradition
December 7: Cynthia R. Nielsen, PhD student at the University of Dallas
ch. 07. On Not Clinging to the Prejudice against Prejudice
ch. 08. Art as the Site of Truth beyond Method
December 14: Christina Smerick, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Greenville College
ch. 09. Performance, Application, Conversation
ch. 10. Conversation and the Liberal-Communitarian Debate
December 21: Father Robert Coates, SSC, Vicar of St Augustine's at Bexhill-on-Sea, England
ch. 11. The Church as Conversation
ch. 12. Transcendence, Revelation, and Community

Please read along and join us in the conversation starting November 14th! If you don't already have the book yet, an excerpt containing the preface and first chapter may be obtained here on the Baker Academic website.

Speculative Grace: "God" as Audience

2009-10-16T15:11:02-05:00

I. The Passage

I turned to philosophy after stumbling across Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death my junior year at BYU. I've never been able to set the book aside.

The fourth chapter has always mattered most to me. In this chapter, Derrida reflects at length on the Sermon on the Mount. In part, I love this book because it gave to me (for the first time?) the Sermon on the Mount as a question to be borne - and this is a gift indeed.

One passage in particular interests me today:

Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms, do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.
(Matthew 6:1-4)

Of the multitude of things that might be said of these verses, I'm interested here in a general problem that we might refer to as "the problem of audience."

II. The Advice

The (apparent?) problem with these verses is the variability of its advice about how one ought to relate to the presence or absence of an audience.

Is the problem here addressed by Jesus (1) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience of men, or (2) the problem of doing an action for the sake of being recognized by an audience period (even if that audience is God)?

The passage's basic advice is to act without regard for the regard of one's audience. Or, act in such a way that your course of action is not influenced by your perceived reflection of that action on your own life and character. Don't act in order to be seen. "Glory" is a name for one's being affirmatively seen. Avoid glory.

This is good advice, but there's just one tiny problem: it runs against the grain of my own deepest desires.

What impulse is Jesus' prohibition meant to countermand?

It is, I believe, meant to countermand my deep impulse to double every one of my actions. It is meant to oppose my impulse to not only do something or think something but to double that doing or thinking by registering it with an audience (exhibit A: this post ;). I don't just want to think thoughts, I want other people to know that I've been thinking thoughts. I don't just want to do work and develop competencies, I want other people to know that I've been doing work and developing competencies!

III. The Problem

One problem: doubling every action requires an immense amount of energy. It's hard work!

A deeper problem: doubling every action tends to make the work itself of only secondary importance. The work itself comes to be done only for the sake of some other end (i.e., the end of being seen). Which is to say: the work itself becomes unimportant in and of itself. It is a chore to be done on the way to something else. And chores, we all know, are miserable. In this sense, doubling one's actions as a performance for an audience is a sure fire way to make even the most pleasant of tasks miserable.

Why go to all this trouble? My "self" demands it. In fact, my "self" depends (almost?) entirely on the registered response of the audience. Unless registered through the loop of an audience's feedback, my "self" doesn't show up.

But I love my "self," I need my "self," I have a fantastic story I've been constructing for years about this guy (much of it patterned on sports-movie cliche's about underdogs winning the day against all odds, etc.).

But I can tell that people are suspicious about the accuracy of this story I've been peddling and it worries me. In particular, I can tell that I am more than a little suspicious about the accuracy of this story!

The anxiety keeps me awake at night: I've got to successfully fabricate a certain series of events and have an audience register those events in order to pull this thing off. Otherwise, "I" threaten to dissolve away like so many fingerprints being Windexed off my three year-old's rear-door passenger window. (This image is relatively apt: life is like a window and my sense of "self" depends on those damn fingerprints leaving their residue as a kind of a phantom double. In other words, my sense of self depends on making sure to leave the window dirty! Then I can say: "Look at the dirt on the window! 'I' exist!" But Jesus says: "Do your work and stop leaving fingerprints!")

My "self' is this story I'm telling myself about myself and everything depends not just on manipulating this story to go along as I'd like but on getting someone to listen to the story and believe it . . . because then I just might believe it too.

IV. Shortage of Appropriate Audiences

The basic problem here: audiences are in short supply. In fact, most everything I do on a daily basis lacks an adequate audience. Why aren't people paying attention to me? Can't they tell I'm working (in order to be seen) here? Can't they tell my "self" depends on them noticing?

This brings us back to the (only apparent?) variability of Jesus' advice about one's relation to an audience.

Fortunately (and this is a major relief!) I am never without an audience. In fact, I couldn't ask for a better, more meticulously attentive audience: God. He even knows my thoughts and intentions. Nothing gets by this audience. With my knowledge that God is watching, I need never stop performing.

And, as a matter of fact, I almost never do.

Alone in my office at school, the performance (and the doubled effort of that performance) continues. Alone in my car, the show must go on. Alone in my living room at 4:30 AM, I smile knowing that God sees the fact that, while all those other crazy (inadequate!) people are still sleeping, I've once more proven that my self/story is better than their's - and I'm pleased to know that at least God has taken appropriate note of it.

V. Insidious?

It is more and more clear to me that this is, in fact, the basic role that "God" plays in my psychic economy. God is my uber-dependable audience. I'm counting on the fact that he's keeping track and will ultimately vindicate the story I've been telling myself about myself. He sees my "heart" even when I'm a screw-up (thus knowing I'm not really a screw-up). He hears my petitions for things to turn out the way that I'd like ("Dear God, the story is supposed to go like this . . ."). And when things don't turn out that way I know that he (at the very least) has taken those petitions under serious advisement. He sees all the things about "me" that no one else has been keeping track of and knows the "truth" about "me" (i.e., my "story"!).

I can't speak for how this works (or doesn't) for anyone else. And I'm not claiming to. But all of this (increasingly) strikes me as deeply insidious.

I'm tired of the show. I'm tired of performing. I'm tired of this endless work of fabrication, the endless pandering for votes. I want to work and think - not work to be seen working or think to be seen thinking. I want to lay down the burden that is my vanity.

What if no one is watching? What if there is no pan-galactic mirror? What if God is not an uber-audience? What if there is no super-duper, heavenly safety net for my ego?

What if there is just the work? Just the thinking? Just the loving? Just this?

Could I even bear this thought? Could I even bear the idea that my fingerprints don't do anything but smudge up my own view?

What if there is no place to go? No prize to win? No audience to impress? Could I get up tomorrow and do what I do anyway? Could I work and think nonetheless? Would I collapse in a worthless heap of nihilism? Or would I finally be able to stand-up and act, free from the dead-weight of that dopple-ganger known as "me"?

VI. Alternate Reading?

I wonder if we might read the second half of Jesus' admonition in the following way: the key is to work in such a way that not even your own left hand serves as an audience for what your right hand is doing. In short, the key is to work in such a way that the work is itself grace rather than work.

The promise that follows (that God will see in secret and reward us openly) may, then, do something other than function as "audience-insurance" for the temporarily absent minded.

Rather, if our left hand doesn't even know what our right hand did, how could we know that God knows what our right hand did? The chain has already been broken. The left hand did not itself (as that fail-safe auto-audience!) force the action to be doubled as a performance.

What then of the promise of "open" reward? What if the reward is the opening of the action itself: completed, performed, accomplished as itself and for its own sake without the burden of its own vanity.

If so, then the reward is already (openly) given. There was no doubling of the action in a performance that could cause the action itself to be "hidden" behind the screen of the narrative that "I" am.

And if this is so, then the promised "reward" for acting in this way would not be a kind of additional supplement unveiled as the result of successfully accomplishing a truly secret action.

Rather, the reward would be my failure to veil the action behind the screen of its doubled performance.

The Liturgical Turn: Public Display of Worship

2009-10-14T11:38:00-05:00

It’s easy to become overly connected to place. It seems better to stay in Egypt instead of making the journey to the Promise Land because there’s a desert in between. It’s easier because it’s comfortable, familiar, and controlled. None of which are necessarily bad per se, but they can and most often do lead to complacency, which results in a liturgical solipsism that leaving one closed off to otherness.

I’m speaking from experience. Recently my church moved from a comfortable little chapel to the local YMCA. Before, we gathered for worshiped in a comfortable, familiar, and controlled place, but now we’re in a place where it is anything but familiar. We have an hour’s worth of set up to do before the service and need to have everything out of the gym before noon. The move itself was a planned move on the part of us in leadership in order in to move us from the edges of society closer to the heart of community happenings.

Reflecting on the fact that we now worship in a community gymnasium is pretty exciting to me because it’s a great way to be missional and to let certain aspects of the nature of worship flourish which have a tendency to be forgotten.

Let me explain it this way (please forgive the possible stream-of-consciousness thought that may follow). Sometimes, like the woman at the well, it’s easy to get hung up on where we worship (although important) and miss why we worship and what we’re actually doing when we worship.

Alexander Schmemann, in For The Life of the World, wrote that “it is only in worship that [humanity] has the source and the possibility of that knowledge which is communion, and of that communion which fulfills itself as true knowledge: knowledge of God and therefore knowledge of the world – communion with God and therefore communion with all that exists” (p. 120). Worship, according to Schmemann, is our essential relationship with the rest of humanity and shows the world to be essentially “sacramental” insofar as it expresses God’s “revelation, presence, and power.” In other words, the world in essence is an “epiphany of God” and is expressed as such through worship.

Because worship shows the world to be sacramental, we therefore need things of the world in our worship. Schmemann writes, “We need water and oil, bread and wine in order to be in communion with God and to know Him. Yet conversely … it is this communion with God by means of ‘matter’ that reveals the true meaning of ‘matter,’ i.e. of the world itself.” (p.121). In the liturgical act material things receive their true nature and destiny. For example, it is in baptism that water fulfills its proper function.

The Lutheran liturgical theologian, Gordon Lathrop, has a similar discussion of the use of “things” in worship. In his book, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, he notes that there are certain things that are needed in order to have a church. People, he states, are the primary objects, because the church is essentially an assembly, but not an assembly for assembly’s sake. He writes, “People gather around something, they gather to do something” (p. 87). What they gather to do is to enact the faith, read the scriptures, and receive the sacraments. The tradition suggests that to ‘have church’ there must be water, bread and wine. However, simply having these is not enough, they must be set in motion, used, and made to do something specific. In a little longer passage he explains,“People do not gather at water only, but at a bath, and a bath interpreted by words and by other things set next to the bathing … People do not gather to a book, but to that book opened, read, and turned into current address to this assembly. Nor do they gather to bread and wine or cup and plate, but to a meal, to the prayer and the sharing of food that make up common eating.” (p. 89).

Lathrop intentionally uses terms like bath and meal instead of Eucharist and baptism. He believes that these terms show that these are things set out in order to fulfill humanity’s needs. Humans need cleanliness and they need food. They also need relationship and this is why Lathrop prefers the term “things”. He tells us that things are not simply static objects that exist in an independent, self-sustaining manner. Instead he draws on an Old Norse understanding of the term that defines things as “objects in relationships” (p. 90). In this way people, objects, and words are all “things” because they all need others in order to simply be and they rightly become things when they are put to motion.

Lathrop also suggests that in the meeting (i.e. church), these things also awaken our imaginations by proposing to us that the world has a center. That is, Christ is our center and he forces us to imagine a world in which there is peace and not chaos. This is important insofar as it directs our attention outward. We come to the central things of the worship and they refocus us out to the world.

The central things of bread and wine suggest to the worshippers the fact of locality and community. These things are made from things grown from the earth which are then harvested and made into something life sustaining. There is a mystery here in that nobody caused the grains to grow. Therefore, the very existence of the grains comes not from human will, but from elsewhere, from God. Lathrop suggests that the bread is made in order to be shared. Because of this, bread can invoke hope for a peaceful and ordered world. It therefore points outward to the rest of the world in which people die because of lack of bread and gives hope, that when used within the meeting and blessed to become a sacrament of Christ, that one day it will be eaten at a feast in which in which all will be fed abundantly.

Wine, in this way, as a part of that same blessing, suggests both feast and community. Wine must be shared. If hoarded and possessed as a commodity it only leads to drunkenness, which is a misuse of the drink. However when properly shared, it brings joy to all and gives the community a sense of transcendence. Lathrop explains that wine does more than just quench our thirst. He writes, “The slight inebriation it causes can moderate our inhibitions, enable our communal speech, and encourage our shared joy. It has come to be associated with a spirit of festivity; the psalmist calls it ‘wine to gladden the human heart’ (Ps. 104:15). But then we have a symbol of near-intoxication that suggests transcendence and communal hopes for a larger feast than this festival can contain.” (p. 92). Actually, I think he overstates the case, but I really like that quote!

The setting in motion of bread and wine is the space of the Eucharist. Insofar as they are used for this purpose, their created destinies are brought to their proper telos. The water, when blessed and used in baptism brings about the sacramental potential of the water. It communicates God’s grace and places the person into the Body of Christ (church). In the same way, the bread and wine, when blessed communicates the body and blood of Christ to the one who is already the Body of Christ. The feast makes community.

In the liturgy people use things and in the use of those things they are brought to their fulfillment as sacraments of God’s grace and revelation. This brings me to, Aiden Kavanagh, who, following Schmemann, says, in his important book On Liturgical Theology that this is what happens when God “recreates the World not by making new things but by making all things new.” (p. 50). In fact this is the task of the Church and what, he believes, ultimately happens in liturgy.

Kavanagh has this great discussion in which he suggests that before modernity, cities used to be places of “transactions with ultimate reality.” They were places were ideas were formed and arts were made. With the coming of secularization, the city became profaned because it was no longer seen in reference to the world. The church he suggests offers a different view of humanity, the world, and the city. Kavanagh suggests that the Church, because of its liturgy is the “central workshop of the human City, a City which under grace has already begun to mutate by fits and starts into the City-of-God-in-the-making, the focal point of the world made new in Christ Jesus.” (p. 42). In other words, it is both the Church and the world that have been redeemed by Christ. The church’s task is that of reconciliation, which God did through Christ between Him and the created world. Thus, Kavanagh criticizes the Church for moving beyond the center of the city where it can no longer witness to this reconciliation. This is a thoroughly modern thing to do.

Plenty of ink has been spilt criticizing suburban ecclesiology and I really don’t intended to follow that discussion here. But I do think that Kavanagh is right to suggest that the church was never meant to be abstracted from the center of the city. Kavanagh shows that in its earliest stages, Christian liturgy began in the earliest hours of the day and carried on throughout the day, throughout the entire city. It never stayed in one place, showing that the liturgy was for everyone. It was a full public liturgy that was meant to show that the church in its liturgy “manifested in its deepest nature in the human civitas as the presence, the embodiment in the world of the World to come, of the Kingdom, of the new and final age. It was the church of Jesus Christ being most overtly itself before God in the world on humanity’s human stage.” (p.57). Kavanagh calls this the church doing the world. That is, the church enacting the redeemed world, which doesn’t stay to itself, but shows the world that it too has been redeemed and therefore calls it to worship its creator and redeemer which it does not yet worship.

Although worship can happen anywhere, worship in a public gymnasium seems to be a great to live into the words of these guys; bringing the sacred into the common, or better yet, setting the common in motion to manifest the sacred.

CFP: Society for Continenal Philosophy and Theology 2010

2009-10-13T06:03:48-05:00

THE POLITICS OF PEACE

April 16-17, 2010

Messiah College, Grantham, PA

Keynote speakers:

Catherine Keller (Drew University)

William T. Cavanaugh (University of St. Thomas)

CALL FOR PAPERS

SCPT's 2010 conference will focus on PEACE. We invite papers that examine the many dimensions of peace from social, political, religious, scientific, theological, and philosophical points of view. We also seek papers dealing with complementary topics such as justice, reconciliation, forgiveness, and peace-making, and that deal with the practical aspects of the above topics. SCPT is an organization that seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology, through the study of phenomenology, deconstruction, feminism, Radical Orthodoxy, and other related fields.

Only complete papers with a maximum of 3,000 words will be accepted. Papers should be prepared for blind review and sent to peacestudies@messiah.edu.

DEADLINE: FREBRUARY 8, 2010

The Society for Continental Philosophy and Theology seeks to promote inquiry at the intersection of philosophy and theology. For more information about SCPT, visit http://www.scptonline.org.

CFP: Wesleyan Philosophical Society

2009-10-12T09:04:48-05:00

Call for Papers, 2010 Meeting of the

Wesleyan Philosophical Society
Gift and Economy:
Ethics, Hospitality and the Market

Location: Azusa Pacific University, Azusa CA
Conference Date: March 4, 2010
Proposals Due Date: October 23, 2009

Politics and economics have their moorings in various perspectives on the morality of exchange. This conference seeks reflections on the possibility of a “gift,” and the relationship between ethics and economy.

First Vice-President Eric Severson and the Wesleyan Philosophical Society (WPS) now issue a Call for Papers for the 2010 annual conference. The conference will be held March 4, 2010 on the beautiful campus of Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California. The WPS encourages submission of multi-disciplined papers including, but not limited to, the appearance of the conference themes in film, media and literature, art, politics, bio-ethics, gender studies, anthropology and sociology. We will consider submissions on other subjects as well, but priority will be given to those dealing with the selected theme.

Is a “gift” truly possible, or is all giving bound by the economy of exchange?
How does one speak of responsibility in the context of politics and economics?
What is “friendship”? Can love, friendship and community transcend exchange?
How does the study of history, or the philosophy of history, influence contemporary reflections on the morality of the market?
How does the power of economy undermine attention to the plight of the environment?
How does “grace” (or love, or compassion, or responsibility) relate to economy? Does “grace” interrupt economy, contribute to the function of economy, or operate in some other fashion?
What are the philosophical relationships between violence, war and economy?
How can ethical philosophy be attuned to those who are oppressed by economic forces? What sort of political philosophy best addresses the humanitarian perils of the market?
How might philosophy and ethics address or critique the current global economic crisis?
How are moral reflections on the economy influenced by gender bias, homophobia, racism, colonialism and nationalism?
John Wesley struggled thoughtfully on behalf of the poor in an economy rife with greed and injustice. How might his reflections on money, economics and grace assist our contemporary reflections?

Please submit proposals of 250 words or less, the title of the abstract, along with name, position, and institutional affiliation (if applicable) to Brint Montgomery at Brint@snu.edu by October 23, 2009. The proposal should be sent as an email attachment in Microsoft Word format. Each proposal will undergo a double-blind peer review process.

The society will meet in conjunction with the Society of the Study of Psychology and Wesleyan Theology (SSPWT). Please check the WPS website updates for exact hotel and meeting site information at: http://wps.snu.edu. The Wesleyan Theological Society will be holding its annual meeting at Azusa Pacific University, March 4-6, 2010.

Speculative Grace: On Caputo on Zizek/Milbank

2009-10-10T11:50:45-05:00

In my previous post on "The Frustration of Desire," I argued that God's grace should not be understood as that miraculous supplement which solves the problem of desire by satisfying it.

I think that this same (mis)understanding of grace plays a crucial part in John Caputo's recent (and incisive!) review of Slavoj Zizek and John Milbank's exchange in The Monstrosity of Christ. (Thanks to Jaime and Jack for bringing the review to my attention).

In reviewing Caputo's review, I'll argue three basic points:

(1) Caputo is clear that Milbank (mis)understands grace as that which solves the problem of desire by satisfying it.

(2) Caputo's account of Zizek's take on grace misreads, in part, Zizek's position as basically remaining (though negatively) within the same logic of "grace as satisfaction."

(3) Nonetheless, the basic problem with the positions staked out by Zizek and Milbank is that their ontologies are simply too thin. In other words, their account of what is given (and, in particular, the grace of what is actually given) is too thin.

I. Milbank & Satisfaction

The first point is the simplest. If disagreement arises, it is likely to focus not on my (and, I think, Caputo's) judgment that Milbank understands God as a supernatural supplement that saves the material world from it's own poverty, but with my judgment that such an understanding of grace is undesirable.

As Caputo puts it (note: all the following citations are from Caputo's review):

In the place of Hegel’s broken promise, Milbank would put an ontology of primordial peace and reconciliation, "the (unreachable and untraceable) prelapsarian golden age," made possible only by means of a metaphysics of analogy.

Here, the given world is understood as a lapsed, impoverished world. The key to saving this world, to restoring it to its satisfying prelapsarian unity, is to supplement that poverty with the grace of God, because "the material world in itself, apart from God, is nothing at all." The world, in order to avoid being worthless, must be seen "as a created share and reflection of the goodness and glory of God."

In short, if we find this lapsed world un-satisfactory (and surely we do!), then the only solution (save being resigned to nihilistic dissatisfaction) is for God to offer himself as the world's own satisfaction.

According to Caputo:

For Zizek, Milbank’s ontology of peace is so much fantasy – does Milbank think that there really was a prelapsarian age? – an unchecked exercise in what Lacan calls the imaginary, or of Nietzsche’s observation that the power of an idea to comfort us is no guarantee of its truth.

Zizek's response isn't far from Caputo's own assessment of Milbank's position, Caputo's primary charge being that Milbank's metaphysics is conveniently constructed in such a way as to "insure that matter does not have the last word, that there is room in matter to triumph over death, to enter a domain where the bite of space and time and corruptible flesh have been vanquished."

However, to take the ambiguous "bite" out of this world - out of space, time, matter, and finitude - is to gloss over the bite of resistance that marks this given world as the solid, real, and complex grace that it actually is. Indeed, as I've argued before, we might more properly understand grace itself as the bite of this world's resistance. (And, if there is a world to come, we might rather pray that it, like this one, continues to have bite!)

But for Milbank, having cast this lapsed world as unable to satisfy - and, moreover, having cast his lot with the judgment that it ought to satisfy - there is nothing left to do but read both God and his gospel as the metaphysical keys to just such a kingdom of satisfaction and completion.

II. Zizek & Satisfaction?

This second point is more difficult. In the main, Caputo's reading of Zizek is comprehensive and insightful. Nonetheless, it wavers on a detail that seems of crucial importance to me.

Caputo notes that, unlike Milbank, Zizek does not offer the promise of any divine supplement come to save us from our dissatisfaction with the world. Rather, as in psychoanalysis,

the treatment is over when the patient realizes there is no ‘Big Other’ (God or Man, Nation or Party, Father or Big Brother, Lacan’s symbolic order or what Derrida called the ‘transcendental signifier’).

Caputo then points out that in Zizek's version of the Hegelian dialectic

the negation of the negation leaves us with a deeper negation, not with an affirmation. It is not that the spirit is first whole, then wounded, then healed; rather such healing as is available to it comes by getting rid of the idea of being whole to begin with. The antithesis is already the synthesis.

This assessment hits, I think, the mark. Zizek doesn't aim to show that (a la Milbank) we live in a lapsed world that was once whole. Rather, he aims to unveil as fantasy the idea that the world ever was or ever could be a satisfying whole.

In other words, Zizek aims to show that the world never was and never could be without bite.

However, I disagree in part with Caputo's later account of the effects of this unveiling. For instance, Caputo later describes Zizek's position as an unveiling of

the impossibility of a deep and fulfilling Jouissance and its replacement by the endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have.

I agree with the first part of this statement: Zizek shows the impossibility of solving the problem of desire through the satisfaction of that desire.

But I think that Zizek, and the psychoanalytic tradition he is drawing upon, offer a slightly different solution than one that, as a result, condemns us to an "endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have." In fact, in my view, the mainspring of Lacan's philosophical (and even theological) contribution depends on the fact that therapy does not simply aim to replace the debunked Big Other with a hopeless search for what we now realize we cannot have.

What does Lacan propose?

Note Caputo's characterization of Zizek's position in the following passage:

It is like, almost exactly like, I would say, a patient who resolves to sustain a belief in the narrative the psychoanalyst is constructing, regardless of whether it is true, because believing the analyst is the only way out of this hole.

Granted that I have never myself participated in analysis, I believe this description misses the essential "twist" that Lacanian analysis means to therapeutically deploy.

First, in Lacanian analysis (unlike in many more traditional forms of psychoanalysis or psychotherapy) the analyst doesn't speak, doesn't actively construct an interpretation of the analysand's speech for the analysand. In fact, the role of the analyst is to relentlessly relate to the analysand in such a way as to perpetually throw the analysand back upon their own responsibility both to speak their desire and to interpret the meaning of their own speech.

To what end? The aim is not to fashion some workable supplement or substitute fiction as a way of compensating for the analysand's loss of the Big Other. Rather, the goal is to relate the analysand to their own desire as something other than an object to be satisfied and dispensed with, as something whose "bite" ought to be valued and received as such and in its own right as the gift that it is.

This, for me, is the key point.

I don't think that Zizek's project (unlike Milbank's) remains simply locked into the logic of satisfaction. That is, I don't believe that the difference between Milbank and Zizek is the difference between the hope of satisfying our desires via a divine supplement and a hopeless (eyes-closed-again-now-and-humming-very-loud) attempt to satisfy our impossible desires anyhow. On the contrary, I think that Zizek's position marks a decisive (though inadequate) advance over Milbank's position insofar as psychoanalysis breaks with the logic of satisfaction and proposes that we receive the work (and bite!) of desire as itself the gift we must receive and be faithful to.

III. Thin, Too Thin

Caputo, however, is right that Zizek's position nonetheless leaves something to be desired. And he's right to argue that Zizek and Milbank are inadequate in precisely parallel ways. Having more clearly separated out a decisive difference between Zizek and Milbank, I propose that we might summarize their mutual weakness in the same way: their ontologies are simply too, too thin.

For both Zizek and Milbank, the world seems a relatively barren, impoverished place. In both, the world seems to be too poor a thing to receive as grace itself. Why? Because both misidentify the location of the Real and, as a result, leave aside so much of what has actually, already been given.

We might frame their shared problem in terms of what Quentin Meillassoux calls "correlationism." Both Milbank and Zizek view ontology as essentially dependent on a "correlation" of the whole of what is given with just one particular aspect of what is given.

(One ought to hear in the term "correlation" all of the phenomenological resonances that the world entails; in many ways, because it depends entirely on the correlation of subject/object, phenomenology may be the clearest - though certainly not the only - example of what Meillassoux has in mind with the term.)

For Milbank, the whole of the "material" world is essentially dependent on its correlation with the mind and will God. Matter is "nothing" if it is not ontologically correlated with God. The rest of what is given has no standing of its own. All must pass through the reducing valve of the world's correlation with God. Whatever doesn't fit through is left aside and whatever does fit through is shown as too poor a thing to be given as itself, by itself, or for itself. Someone else, something else, must authorize it's grace. Something additional must rubber-stamp it's givenness.

(And it would be entirely appropriate here to bring into play the whole machinery of Jean-Luc Marion's own massive, persuasive, and deeply Christian critique of every phenomenological choke-point of correlativity.)

For Milbank, Caputo explains,

to embrace materialism materialistically is to embrace matter in itself, and this is nothing but nihilism. For the material world in itself, apart from God, is nothing at all.

Uncorrelated, the world is a poor, thin gruel that cannot possibly sustain life and love. The world, if it gives itself as itself, opens only the door to nihilism.

Zizek, though he works to unveil that the world is not supplemented by an uber-correlation with God nonetheless presents an ontology that is fundamentally correlative - and fundamentally thin as a result.

For Zizek, the world is entirely overwritten with and constituted by its (co)relation to the Symbolic order. There are cracks in this Symbolic order (to be sure), but the Real that shines through these cracks is nothing but void. It is only in this "thin" sense that Zizek, having decentered God as the locus of the Real, is a "realist."

[His] realism springs from his Lacanian notion of the Real, of the deep cut in our hides, the profound trauma by which we are constituted, the impossibility of a deep and fulfilling Jouissance and its replacement by the endless and futile search for precisely what we cannot have.

Correlated with and overwritten by the Symbolic, the world is given in such a way that it inevitably shows its Lack as the Real. Or, again, as Caputo says:

Zizek is not a realist in the epistemological sense; far from it. What matters for him is our ability to sustain our fantasies, to act as if we have a grip on things.

This, then, is the key for Zizek: the question of our "grip" (and lack thereof!) on things.

Caputo does point out, early on in the review, that for Zizek this correlation is not "purely subjective." Rather than depending on an individual subject's correlation with the world,

Zizek offers the notion of a contingent multitude that organizes itself and self-mediates, engendering and positing its own immanent necessity. It retroactively posits its own essence or presuppositions. . . . The result is that there is neither a mere assemblage of atomic individuals, as in liberal individualism, nor an absolute Mega-Spirit . . . what they both lack is the auto-organizing or auto-emergent collectivity, which is a necessity recognized after the fact.

In this sense, Zizek's position is admirably sophisticated because it recognizes the ability of the multitude to self-organize, self-mediate, and self-posit as an emergent collectivity.

But this, in the end, simply amounts to a more sophisticated description of the Symbolic order. Though it is no longer subjective at the level of the individual, it remains subjective at the level of the collective.

Everything that is given must pass through the reducing valve of its subjective correlation with the Symbolic. Though this valve is wider than the individual subject, the valve remains only as wide as collective subjectivities. The non-human, if not overwritten by the symbolic, is given only as void.

In this respect, Caputo's critique of Zizek retains its force. Zizek's ontology is too bleak, too reductive, too thin. Even if the aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to bring us into a novel relation with our own desires that does not treat those desires as something that ought to be satisfied and overcome, the Lacanian ontology he deploys, so dominated by the Symbolic and the subjective, remains so thin that it gives the impression that we are left, in the absence of God, with nothing but a spectral materialism and the fantasies fabricated by our analysts.

When our grip on the world loosens or slips, Zizek leaves us with the impression that the world itself lacks sufficient life, reality, and richness to hold us in its Real and irresistable grip.

About this, he's wrong. And in this respect, he's failed to see the grace that this world is.

The world (these worlds!) do not depend on their correlation with a single locus of Reality, whether God or the Symbolic.

The Real is the bite of this world's (these worlds!) own complex, self-organizing, and un-masterable unfolding.

IV. Deconstruction

From its inception, the aim of deconstruction has been to loosen our grip on the world.

Its critics cry foul: "If you loosen our grip on the world - or, better, if you show that no one thing has a privileged handle on the world (e.g., God, the transcendental subject, etc.) - then we will be left with nothing! Nihilism will be unavoidable!"

No.

Deconstruction - having loosened our grip on the world, having shown that we've always already lacked the grip on the world that we've pretended to have - reveals that the world itself has more than sufficient bite to keep a grip on us.

And it is here, in this being gripped - in a multitude of ways and by a multitude of people and things, human and nonhuman, material and immaterial, brief and enduring - that we are confronted with grace itself: the grace of being bitten, being gripped, being pulled and needed and devoured both by that which exceeds us and that which composes us.

The weakness of deconstruction is its fundamentally critical pose. The work at hand is to move beyond critique to a positive, profligate articulation of the world that does not begin and end with a single, dominant correlation.

In this respect, fidelity to Grace itself may be prompting us to step outside of that uber-correlative ontology that is Theism.

What might such ontologies look like? Among the multitude of possibilities, one might begin with notions like this.

Searle (Still) on Derrida (Seriously?)

2009-09-26T21:51:13-05:00

Why is it that so many otherwise sober, careful philosophers seem to kiss their brains goodbye when it comes to Jacques Derrida?

Well, I can partly understand this. If you've cut your teeth reading Frege and Russell, then grew your hair out reading Quine, and then watched your hair fall out while reading Davidson and Tarski, then I'll concede that brief forays into the sprawling, experimental corpus of Jacques Derrida will feel like a psychadelic kaleidoscope in the lexical family of Jabberwocky. In other words, I can see how, in a way, Derrida kind of asked for it.

But on the other hand, is it really asking so much for them to carefully read a few of Derrida's own rather "sober" texts? (I'm not asking Alvin Plantinga to give me a charitable reading of Glas. I'm asking philosophers of language to slow down and actually attend to Derrida's argument.) Or, at least, could they refrain from making ridiculously mistaken claims about them--and, in particular, refrain from repeating them 25 years later!?

John Searle has made a regular habit of this. The latest installment can be found in Searle's recent review in the New York Review of Books. The claim comes as an aside in his critique of "social constructivism." Teaming up with the book under review, the burden of Searle's article is to preserve the objectivity of facts against the claims of social constructivists who think even the "facts" are "constructed." Searle thinks there are bad arguments for this (from Putnam and Rorty), and then there are "truly dreadful arguments" from "authors" such as Jacques Derrida (don't miss that slight). The latter don't even deserve refutation, Searle claims; they're a lost cause. We'll never be able to convince such slippery ideologues that reality is "objective," that facts are "out there."

But does anyone else find it ironic, then, when Searle can make a claim like this about Derrida's texts?

"He argues, for example, that there is no tenable distinction between writing and speech."

I'll grant that matters are complicated here (as I've tried to explain elsewhere). Certainly the burden of Derrida's early work is to contest traditional, naive ways of distinguishing "writing" and "speech" (e.g., that speech is somehow "immediate" while writing is characterized by "mediation"). But that is not the same as trying to show that "there is no tenable distinction" between the two (as in the laughable interpretation of Derrida which thinks he's claiming that people wrote with utensils before they learned to talk!). And nowhere in Derrida's corpus does he try to simply obliterate "any" distinction between the two. Those are the facts of the matter. Only a selective constructivist like Searle could tell himself otherwise.

Caputo on Milbank and Zizek

2009-09-25T07:11:15-05:00

"Church and Postmodern Culture" author John Caputo has provided an extensive review of The Monstrosity of Christ for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The long, generous review essay ultimately (and not surprisingly) ends with questions like the following:

As I do not think that matter is ultimately the matter at issue for Milbank, or that Christ is the issue for Žižek, I am also overwhelmed by a compelling sense of how uncompelling is either view. What exactly is the compelling need we are under to agree with either one of these positions or to choose between them? Why do we have to love either one of these monsters? Why do we need the notion that at the metaphysical base of things there lies either a primordial peace or a primordial violence -- or a primordial anything, at least one that we could ever get our hands on? Why do the multiple repetitions of which our lives are woven need to be cast either as a downbeat and futile search that will be always frustrated or as underwritten by an uplifting metaphysics of participation? Why inscribe either absolute contradiction or absolute peace at the heart of things instead of ambience and ambiguity? Why chaos instead of the unsteady chaosmotic process of unprogrammed becoming? Why not see life as a joyful but risky business that may turn out well or badly, a repetition forwards in which I produce what I am repeating, in which I invent what I am discovering, but in which I am divested of any assurances about what lies up ahead -- let alone deep down at the metaphysical base of things? Žižek's notion of the contingency of necessity is close to this insight, but he insists on treating the Deep Trauma like some Metaphysical Meteor that cratered downtown Ljubljana. Is this not just the search for a transcendental signifier all over again? Why do we have to believe that something deep is out there but alas it is lost and we are hopelessly searching for it? That is repetition as reproduction. Why not rather say that by searching for it, it is there, produced by the repetition? The repetition is generative, engendering, positing something not merely as a dream but by the dream, the active dreaming of the dream, the dreaming up, which gathers momentum as we dream, repeat, desire, pray and weep, over the coming of something whose coming we are engendering, or is being engendered, as the very structure of desire. Dreaming is the pharmakon, a risky supplement, a joy that flows through our veins that is liable to poison us if we are not careful. Nothing is lost from which we have been traumatically cut off. This is just desire desiring, what desire does, how it works, its happy work, and if desire is a fault, it is a happy fault.

Why not adopt the post-metaphysical idea that gives up searching for all such primordial underlying somethings or other?

I'm not convinced that metaphysics and Jesus are as antithetical as Caputo goes on to suggest, nor am I sure that theology is as marginal and distrusted as he claims in his conclusion. (Impressions here no doubt depend on the circles in which one runs; but I think it would be hard to be a regular reader of the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, or even the New York Times and suggest that theology is some quaint backwater pursuit. I'd think if we sampled those pages 30 years ago, that claim would have been more true.) But in any case, despite quibbles, Caputo's review repays a read.

And we could wish that more scholars of Caputo's stature would take the time to review the work of their peers. As I've noted elsewhere, I think book reviews are a crucial aspect of scholarly discourse and we abandon such labor at our parallel. Unfortunately, the culture of scholarly reviewing seems to leave this important work to graduate students and emerging scholars, for whom a published review is a kind of early, "mini-publication" for a CV. As scholars become established, they don't "have" to do such work any more. But a different sort of "ought" suggests they should. I'm grateful for Jack taking the time to do such work. May his tribe increase.

Read the rest of Caputo's review at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Speculative Grace: The Frustration of Desire

2009-09-18T12:01:46-05:00

More speculating this week on how tightly a proper understanding of grace is or ought to be tied to a theistic conception of God.

1. It is commonplace to associate our need for grace with the problem of desire. This, I think, is entirely correct. We won't properly understand the one without the other.

2. However, it is also commonplace to frame our need for grace in terms of a tension between the frustration of our desires and the fulfillment of our desires. Here, the problem is understood to be the ways in which the fulfillment of our desires is perpetually frustrated. Often, we're unable to get what we want. And - even worse! - we discover that when we're lucky enough to get exactly what we want, it still didn't lead to the satisfaction of desire. Not only is not getting what we want frustrating, getting what we want is also deeply frustrating!

3. When the human problem is understood to be the frustration of desire, then grace is understood as an answer to the problem of desire because it offers us access to the one object that can in fact permanently and completely fulfill our desires: God.

4. God, as ontological Alpha and Omega, as theistic exception to the way in which everything else exists, can permanently and completely satisfy desire. God's grace solves the problem of desire by ending it. What role do the classically theistic characteristics of God (omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, etc.) play in this version of the drama? They play the crucial role of guaranteeing that something can permanently and completely satisfy desire.

5. The typical grace/works debate unfolds within this framework. To be saved, desire must be fulfilled. The only question, then, is how to acquire the fulfillment of that desire. Is satisfaction given as a free gift (i.e., as a grace) or must we work our fingers to the bone to acquire it? When framed in relation to the issue of fulfillment, the grace/works debate is a deadend.

6. I would submit that this version of the problem and solution may not be very good gospel.

7. Rather, I would propose that our need for grace is related to the problem of desire in an entirely different way. Grace has neither to do with the fulfillment of desire nor the frustration of desire. Grace has to do with our wrongly relating to desire in terms of its fulfillment/frustration.

8. Sin: wrongly relating to desire in terms of its fulfillment/frustration.

9. In these terms, grace should be understood as working orthogonally in relation to the fulfillment/frustration of desire.

10. How does grace save us in relation to the problem of desire? Rather than giving us access to an object of uber-satisfaction, grace is what gives us desire itself. To be saved is to receive the perpetuation of desire itself as being the grace that saves us from the problem of frustration/fulfillment.

11. Rather than refusing the grace of desire, salvation unfolds when we accept the perpetuation of desire and the work that this perpetuation entails.

12. What is the grace that saves? Receiving the gift of endless work that the perpetuation of desire bestows. Here, grace/works produce no aporia.

13. But shouldn't I try to eat, protect my family, succeed in my business, etc.? Yes, but not as a way of permanently and completely satisfying your desires! Rather, pursue those desires as a way of receiving and sanctifying them as such!